Read Online Camouflage by Joe Haldeman - Free Book Online Page A

dense as plutonium—and that's if it were the same stuff through and through! What if the goddamned thing's hollow? What's the shell made of?"
    "Neutronium," Russ said. "Degenerate matter. That's my guess, if it's hollow."
    "Baloney-um is what we called it in school," Jack said. "Make up the properties first; find the element later."
    Colleen rolled in a cart with various glasses and bottles. "Gentlemen?" The NASA man stuck to tea, Russ took white wine, Jack a double Bloody Mary.
    "So what does your dynamic dozen propose?" Jack asked as the woman left the room.
    He leaned forward. "Isolation. More profound than extreme bio-hazard. The environment the military uses in developing..."
    "Nanoweapons," Russ supplied. "Of course we're not actually developing them. Just learning how to defend ourselves against them, if somebody else does."
    "Well, it's not just the military. Everybody developing nanotech uses similar safeguards to keep the little things isolated.
    "We'd cover the lab building your crew is finishing now with an outside layer, sort of an exoskeleton. Basically a seamless metal room almost the same size as the lab. To enter, you have to go through an airlock. The atmospheric pressure inside is slightly lower than outside. The airlock's also a changing room; nobody ever wears street clothes into the work area."
    "I don't think our people would enjoy working under those constraints," Russ said. "Feels like government interference."
    "You could also see it as taking advantage of the government. We give you the functional equivalent of lunar isolation—air and water recycled, power sources independent of the outside."
    "Plus getting back all the capital we've put in, to date?" Jack said, looking at Russ.
    "That's right," Nesbitt said. Russ nodded almost imperceptibly.
    Jack squeezed some more lime into his Bloody Mary. "I guess we'll look into your contract. Have our lawyers look into it. Maybe make a counteroffer."
    "Fair enough." Nesbitt stood. "I'll go up and fetch it. I think you'll find it clear and complete."
    What they wouldn't find was a little detail about the "independent power source": As a public health measure for the planet, its plutonium load could be command-detonated from Washington, turning the whole island into radioactive slag.

    -15-

    Amherst, Massachusetts, February 1941

    The changeling could have avoided the draft by simulating any number of maladies or deficiencies; one out of three American men were rejected. Like a lot of men, for various reasons, he avoided it by joining the Marines.
    The Corps was not enthusiastic about recruits like Jimmy Berry, no matter how good they would look on a recruiting poster. He was tall, strong, handsome, healthy, and obviously from a rich family. He was probably lying about not having gone to college, to get out of being assigned to Officer Candidate School. He would be hard to break, which would make it that much harder to break the other shitbirds. And they had to be broken before they could be built anew as Marines.
    They called him Pretty Boy and Richie Rich. But he was a little more of a problem than they'd anticipated. On their way to their first day in barracks, a big drill sergeant called him out of ranks—"You march like a fuckin' girl"—and made him do fifty push-ups, which he did without breaking a sweat. Then the sergeant sat on his back and said, "Fifty more." He did these with no obvious effort.
    So the first night, the drill sergeant organized a "blanket party" for the annoying shitbird. He got three more big sergeants and three big corporals to throw a blanket over the sleeping Jimmy and beat some respect into him.
    It was two in the morning and the changeling, mentally playing the piano with four hands, heard the seven tiptoeing down the aisle of the barracks, but dismissed the sound as unimportant. Nothing here could hurt it.
    But when the blanket suddenly was wrapped tightly around it and someone struck it with a club, it did fight back for