Most of the changeling’s anthropology professors went along with the mass-hysteria/war-nerves explanation, but many of the students felt otherwise. They thought it was a government cover- up.
There were plenty of books and magazines to support that point of view, but the changeling found them unconvincing, even though it was pretty sure there was at least one being from another planet on Earth. By the time Project Blue Book supplanted Project Grudge, the changeling was looking elsewhere.
It searched both legend and science for shape-changers; for people suspected of being immortal, invulnerable. There was a lot more legend than science, all of it conveniently buried in history and hearsay.
It slipped away from Berkeley during vacation periods to search down and interview some suspects: two men who shed their skin every year, like snakes, and a woman who claimed to shed bones, just sliding them out through her skin. The woman was a fraud and the two men were apparently humans, but dermatalogical freaks. One of them had carefully peeled off a hand, outside in, over the course of weeks; he let the changeling put it on like a glove.
All human. But the changeling itself had instinctively hidden its true nature from the beginning, and had so far been successful. Others would probably do the same.
It briefly considered running ads in big-city newspapers—“Are you fundamentally different from the rest of humanity?”—but knew enough about human nature to predict the kind of response it would get.
It didn’t think about the possibility of someone like the chameleon, who might track down the ad’s creator with murderous intent. But then it didn’t think it could die.
—27—
The chameleon also took an interest in UFOs; unlike the changeling, it moved in on the source of information.
It had spent thousands of years in armies, and in fact had been a Nazi in World War II. The Korean War was kind of unappealing, but the chameleon knew enough about military red tape that it was only a matter of patience to make itself an E4 clerk on the Pentagon staff, Airman (a title only a month old) Fourth Class Patrick Lucas. Once there, it listened to scuttlebutt and managed to move itself into Project Blue Book.
Once there, it gave itself a promotion in an irregular way, which it had done before: when a new bachelor officer was assigned to the project, the chameleon studied his personnel file, befriended him the first day, got him alone in his apartment, and killed him.
In the bathtub it performed a rough-and-ready autopsy, thorough enough to ensure that the officer was indeed human— because something like the chameleon, if such existed, might also be drawn to Blue Book.
It wrote a suicide note for Airman Lucas, and at two in the morning traded uniforms and dogtags with the officer. Drained of blood, the officer looked like a pale, passed-out drunk. The chameleon carried his body quickly to its car, and drove to the end of a dirt road outside of Vienna, Virginia. It saturated the body and the front seat with gasoline, tossed in a match, and changed its appearance, almost instantly, to match the officer’s. Then it ran through the woods back to civilization.
The short newspaper article only said that the body had been burned beyond recognition, but the car was registered to a Pentagon clerk. Investigators that morning found the suicide note, and the case was closed. Coworkers shook their heads; he always had been a loner.
The new lieutenant seemed to be a loner, too, and once the theory that he was a plant from the CIA was whispered around, people pretty much did leave him alone.
The chameleon-lieutenant’s function for several months was to winnow through UFO reports, to find the 10 percent or so that warranted some follow-up. It ordered calendars back to 1948, and with the aid of an ephemeris, marked off the evenings and mornings when the planet Venus was particularly bright. That saved a lot of time.
It knew about Projects Sign and Grudge, and was not surprised to get the feeling that Blue Book was less interested in scientific evaluation of UFO reports than in public relations, mostly debunking. Some people saw evidence of a conspiracy there, but the chameleon just saw the conservative military mind at work. Project Blue Book was basically one officer and a few low-ranking clerks, with a couple of dozen other people, military and civilian, poking their noses in every now and then.
It seemed to spend as much time dealing with the press and politicians as with UFOs. Whenever there was a slow news day, reporters would show up or phone, in search of copy. Politicians would demand to know why nothing had been done about some sightings in their districts.
With a typically military instinct for putting the right man in the right job, they put the chameleon in charge of the phone. Of course, it had had thousands of years’ experience in dealing with people. But tact had never been its usual weapon of choice.
The chameleon observed its fellow investigators as keenly as it did the pilots and police and farmers who had reported the phenomena, reasoning that if there were something else like it in the world, it might gravitate to Fort Belvoir. But its counterpart was on the other coast, involved in the same pursuit in its own way, having given up on flying saucers.
After another year, the chameleon did, too. One day, instead of reporting for duty, it drove on into Washington and bought a wardrobe of work clothes from used-clothing stores, and by the time its superiors realized one of their investigators had gone AWOL, it was working on a dairy farm in western Maryland.
—28—
The idea of signaling alien intelligence with a message that didn’t depend on language went back to 1820: the mathematical genius Carl Friedrich Gauss suggested clearing an immense section of Siberian forest, and then planting wheat in three squares that would diagram the Pythagorean theorem. An observer on Mars would be able to see it with a small telescope.
There were other schemes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, involving mirrors reflecting sunlight, huge fires demonstrating geometrical shapes, or cities blinking their lights on and off.
Around 1960, Mars no longer a compelling target, Frank Drake and others suggested an elaboration of this “Morse code” approach that would be visible from interstellar distances, using radio telescopes as transmitters rather than antennas, sending out a tight beam of digital information. The reasonable assumption was that any civilization advanced enough to receive the message would be able to understand binary arithmetic. So they sent, in essence, a series of dots and dashes that said “1 + 1=2,” and went on from there.
The idea was to establish a matrix, a rectangle of boxes that would make an understandable picture if you made some of the boxes (corresponding to “1”) black and left the others (corresponding to “0”) white— like a crossword puzzle before it’s filled out.
For it to make sense, you had to know the dimensions of the rectangle. The easiest way to do it would be to broadcast the information one line at a time, with pauses between the lines. Then a longer pause, and repeat the same thing over, for verification.