There was also the matter of where to put them. American Samoa was dismally crowded. New Zealand and Australia were virtually closed, having absorbed more than 100,000 Samoans over the past century—and that emigration of course siphoned off the ones who wanted to leave the traditional lifestyle.

The other islands in the group were mostly impenetrable jungle or volcanic waste. Savai’i had 60,000 people crowded into a necklace of towns along the inhabitable coast, and didn’t want more.

Besides, most Samoans were deeply religious and somewhat fatalistic. If God chose to take them, He would. And it would be disrespectful to the point of sacrilege to leave their homes, with generations of ancestors buried in the front yards. Pollsters said that even if the United States completely paid for relocation, they’d only move about 20 percent of the population.

Samoans pointed out that it would be a lot simpler to move the artifact. The land didn’t belong to Poseidon, let alone to the U.S. government; it was leased. The family that owned the land could evict them.

Jack applied his skills as a negotiator to that aspect of the problem. He had a meeting with the local village elders, the fono, and pointed out that evicting them, while a defensible act, had its negative side. It would be, in effect, capitulating to U.S. nuclear might. It would be a breach of agreement—an agreement that involved far more money and prestige than the village had ever known—and some would see that as a humiliation. Besides, if they cooperated, Jack would, in gratitude, renovate both schools and build a new church.

He never mentioned Poseidon. The deal had been with him.

It wound up costing the renovation of two more churches and the sponsorship of a celebratory feast. But honor won the day.

(The fact that the Samoan national government wanted the village to evict Poseidon had worked to Jack’s advantage. The primacy of village law was written into the constitution, and there was no question that in matters of real estate—a touchy subject on the finite island—village law trumped the feds. The elders took pleasure in reaffirming this principle.)

The rebuilding was profound. The dome over the experimental area, besides providing environmental isolation, was to serve as a double blast confinement volume, a dome of titanium inside a dome of steel. Jack and Russ and Jan united in opposing the extra expense and complication. If the artifact decided to explode, the domes might as well be made of cardboard.

The government, still under the aegis of NASA but with much more money and clout than the agency possessed, agreed that they were probably right. The double dome was a just-in-case precaution.

Also “just in case” were the manacles that supposedly held the artifact down, attached to arm-thick cables that were deeply anchored in bedrock. They had calculated the amount of force it had taken to lift the artifact off its cradle; the manacles could hold down four to six times as much. No one who had seen the airy effortless grace with which the artifact had floated up would bet on the cables.

It was Jan’s turn to run the show. Having scalded and frozen and zapped the thing, with no result other than disaster—maybe now it was time to talk to it.

Berkeley, California, 1948

College was harder the second time around. Oceanography had been a natural pursuit for the changeling; English and literature were not, especially in the advanced classes mandated by Stuart’s performance in high school. The changeling ground through one semester and changed its major to anthropology.

Anthro was a natural, too, since it had been objectively studying the human race for sixteen accelerated years. The only problem was limiting its class responses and papers to perceptions appropriate to a bright but unworldly lad from Iowa—who had never been in an insane asylum or boot camp, and had only read about Bataan in the newspapers.

The changeling changed. It would never be human, but it was human enough for something like empathy with its professors. They were trying to understand, and teach about, the human condition—but were themselves trapped in human bodies; stuck in human culture like ancient insects in amber.

The changeling had an advantage there. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. It began to suspect it wasn’t even from Earth.

A few months before it had come up out of the sea onto California soil for the second time, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold had seen a formation of flying discs weaving through the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. People on the ground reported seeing them, too.

Then there was a lot of excitement over one of them crashing outside Roswell, New Mexico, though the Army Air Force investigators said it was just a weather balloon. Belief in the “flying saucer” explanation persisted, though.

During the changeling’s first year at Berkeley, an Air National Guard pilot crashed while trying to intercept an Unidentified Flying Object, as they had come to be called. The Air Force (as it had come to be called) established Project Sign to investigate UFOs.

The changeling followed press reports avidly. As it turned out, though Project Sign’s report rejected the idea of extraterrestrial origin, saying UFOs were misinterpretations of natural phenomena, an earlier top-secret “Estimate of the Situation” apparently thought otherwise. But that would stay top secret for a long time. Project Sign was changed to Project Grudge, and when it was terminated at the end of 1949, the Air Force explicitly denied the possibility of extraterrestrial origin, adding mass hysteria and “war nerves” to the natural-phenomenon explanation, and also said that many of the reports were cynical frauds by publicity-seekers or the hallucinations of psychologically disturbed people.

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.