Read Online Camouflage by Joe Haldeman - Free Book Online

encountered: lots of women and great food and, in exchange for a battle every now and then, sleep late in the morning and hunt for game with spears, which he enjoyed. He did that for several hundred years, still keeping an eye out for Christ or another relative, probably white.
    But the first white people who showed up were bearing guns and chains. He could have resisted and conveniently “died,” but he’d heard about the New World and was curious.
    The ride over was about the worst thing he’d ever experienced—right up there with being boiled in oil or flayed to death. He lay in chains for weeks, stuffed in an airless hold with hundreds of others, many of whom died and lay rotting until someone got around to throwing them overboard.
    It was a real chore. He thought about just bursting his chains, at night, and diving into the sea. He’d done that before, in Phoenicia, and swam dozens of leagues to shore. But Africa, after a few days under sail, would be months of swimming, so he’d just be trading one agony for another.
    So he allowed himself to be carried to America, and in a way enjoyed being put up on the block—he was by far the healthiest specimen off the ship, since metabolism was irrelevant to him, other than as a source of pleasure. The Georgia man who bought him, though, was cruel. He liked to whip the new boys into submission, so at the first opportunity, the chameleon killed him, and then turned into a white man and walked away.
    That was an amusing time. His version of English was almost a thousand years old, so he had to masquerade as an idiot while he learned how to communicate. He walked north, again robbing and murdering for sustenance, when he knew he wouldn’t be caught.
    He kept moving north until he got to Boston, and settled in there for a few hundred years.

- 14 -
apia, samoa, 2020
    “ L ittle green men,” Halliburton said, staring at Nesbitt. “You’ve been reading the tabloids.”
    “The thing is at least a million years old,” Russell said.
    Nesbitt nodded. “But it’s obviously a made thing.”
    “Maybe not,” Russell said. “It could be the product of some exotic natural force.”
    “Assume not, though. If some intelligence made it a million or some millions of years ago . . . well, we can’t say anything about their motivation, but if they’re like humans at all, there’s a good chance the thing is inhabited in some sense.”
    “Still alive after a million years,” Halliburton said, stacking up two little egg salad sandwiches.
    “We’re still alive after more than a million years.”
    “Speak for yourself, spaceman.”
    “I mean humanity, since we evolved from Homo erectus. We’ve been traveling through space in a closed environment, growing from a few individuals to seven billion.”
    “It’s a point,” Russ said. “That thing is a closed environment, in spades.”
    “Your eight billion little green men are going to be tiny green men.”
    “Well, it’s probably not full of little hamsters in space suits,” Nesbitt said. “It may not be inhabited in the sense of carrying individuals. It could have some equivalent of sperm and eggs, or spores—or it could be basically information, like a von Neumann machine.”
    “Oh, yeah. I sort of remember that,” Russ said.
    “I don’t,” Halliburton said. “German?”
    “Hungarian, I think. It’s an early nanotech idea. You send little spaceships out to various stars. Each one is a machine, programmed to seek out materials and build two duplicates of itself, which would take off for two other stars.”
    “Yeah,” Russ said, “and after a few million years, every planet in the galaxy would have been visited by one of these machines. The fact that there obviously isn’t one on Earth is offered as proof that there’s no other space-faring life in this galaxy.”
    “That’s a stretch.”
    Russ shrugged. “Well, the galaxy is thousands of millions of years old. The logic is that the project would be