Camouflage

—24—

The changeling enjoyed swimming for a few years as a great white shark—it had had that form for a thousand times as long as the human one.

For reasons it didn’t understand, it circled for hours over the deep Tonga Trench, and dove as far as it could in comfort. But it was used to having its animal bodies do things out of obscure impulse, and after awhile moved on. When it got within a few hundred yards of the California coast, it dropped most of its mass and became a bottle-nosed dolphin.

At two in the morning, it swam into a protected cove, shallow enough to be safe from serious predators, and spent a painful hour turning back into a human being.

It used the familiar Jimmy template, but made itself a little shorter and gave itself dark hair with a touch of gray. It darkened its skin and created black pants and a black sweater—burglar gear.

It had to steal some money and information.

The lay of the land was similar to what it had faced the first time it had been human; it crossed a short beach and climbed some rocks to find a winding coastal road. It headed north at an easy lope.

Four times it hid from approaching headlights. After a few miles it came upon an isolated service station with a cottage out back.

Perfect for its petty theft. It could make dollar bills as easily as it made clothing, out of its own substance, but it didn’t know whether currency might have changed, whether you still needed ration books— whether there might be some completely new wartime system. They might be using Japanese yen, if the war was over.

The placards in the service station window were in English, and none of them exhorted you to join the services—one did have an American eagle with the instruction to buy U.S. savings bonds, but not war bonds. Maybe the war was over and the Japanese hadn’t won.

The door was locked, but it was a simple one. It turned a forefinger into a living skeleton key, and felt its way through the tumblers in less than a minute.

It wished for moonlight. Even with irises totally dilated, there was little detail.

One wall was shelves full of automobile supplies. It opened a quart of oil and drank it for energy and the interesting flavor, altering its metabolism for a few minutes to something it had used a few hundred thousand years before, lying alongside the vent of an undersea volcano.

It found a box of wooden matches and sucked the end off one, for the phosphorus, and then lit one, with a flare of light and a delicious sting of sulfur dioxide. It saw two things it needed: a 1947 World Almanac and a cash register.

After stuffing the almanac in its belt, it lit another match and studied the machine. Pushing down on the no sale key produced a loud chime, and the cash drawer slid out with a metallic hiss.

It studied a twenty-dollar bill in the match light. No obvious differences. American currency had changed in size three years before the changeling had become Jimmy, and people had still been complaining about it.

It gave a cursory check to the ten, five, and one, and put them back into the till. Then the lights went on with a loud snap.

An old white man stood in the doorway with a double- barrelled shotgun. “Finally,” he said in a squeaking, trembling voice. “I finally got your ass.”

Evidently someone had been robbing him. “I haven’t—” the changeling started to say, but then there was a loud explosion and it couldn’t finish the sentence, for lack of a mouth.

It ducked, and the second shot went high. Sensible of the impossibility it was creating by not falling down dead, it rushed past the man while he was fumbling to reload, forming a large temporary eye out of the gore of its face, and started sprinting down the road.

The old man fired two more shots into the darkness, but the changeling was out of range.

Once around the first bend, the changeling went off the road and sat in the darkness, working on an appearance less incriminating. Elderly farming woman, Caucasian with a deep tan. Faded seersucker dress.

In the moonless overcast night, the changeling moved swiftly inland. A few farm dogs howled at its passing. As the gray dawn approached, it hid in an abandoned truck in a wooded area outside of Grover City.

It made itself a purse and filled it with tens and twenties, and at dawn walked into town and sat on a bench outside the train station, reading the almanac.

There was a center section full of grainy black-and-white photographs, giving a history of World War II. There was even a picture of the Bataan Death March. Jimmy’s was not among the drawn faces, the wasted bodies.

The Nazi death camps. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. D-Day and Midway and Stalingrad.

The nature of the world was fundamentally different. More interesting.

A boy pedaled up to the station on a squeaky bike, pulling a red wagon full of newspapers. The changeling tried to buy one, but of course the boy couldn’t change a ten.

“You look like a nice boy,” it said in what it hoped was a convincing little-old-lady voice. “You can bring me the change later.”

He was a nice boy, in fact, though his face mirrored an obvious internal conflict. He refused the money and gave her a paper. “You just fold her back up after you finish; put her on this here stack by the station door.”

It was the seventh of April, 1948. A British and a Russian plane had collided over Berlin, which was evidently split up among the countries that had defeated Germany. Arabs attacked three Jewish areas of Palestine. The House approved the establishment of a U.S. Air Force, and pledged a billion dollars to Latin America to fight communism. Airplane manufacturer Glenn L. Martin predicted that within months America would have bacteriological weapons, guided missiles, and a “radioactive cloud” much more deadly than the atomic bomb.

So the war wasn’t really over. It had just entered a new phase. The changeling would stay out of this one.

An obvious game plan would be to go back to college. April was not too late to apply, but there was the problem of high school transcripts, letters of recommendation—the problem of establishing an actual identity with a verifiable past.

As soon as it defined the problem, the solution was obvious.

Four people had gathered. They didn’t bother the old farm lady. A train approached, northbound. The changeling folded the paper carefully and replaced it on top of the pile, under the nickels people had left.

As the northbound train approached, the little old lady asked the four whether it was the train to San Francisco. They confirmed that it was, and she got on board.

The conductor changed her twenty with pursed lips but no comment. It continued to read the almanac, storing up information about how the world had changed while it swam around for six years.

Of course the war had changed the world’s map, while leaving whole cities, and even countries, in ruins. The United States had been spared, and now seemed to be leading a coalition of “free” countries versus communist ones. Atomic bombs, supersonic jets, guided missiles, electronic brains, the transistor, and the zoot suit. Al Capone was dead and the changeling’s namesake Joe Louis was still champ, which the changeling found gratifying.

At the San Francisco station, it picked up a copy of a women’s magazine and stayed in a stall in the ladies’ room for about ten minutes, then emerged as a woman of about twenty, dressed like a college student—two-tone loafers, bobby sox, plaid skirt (that had taken some effort), and a white blouse. It assimilated a chromed toilet-paper holder and recycled it as costume jewelry.

It took the bus to Berkeley and wandered around the campus all day, eavesdropping on people and getting the lay of the land. It tarried for quite a while in the Admissions office. College student was an obvious choice of occupation, but which major? It remembered all it had learned about oceanography, but of course would have to hide most of that, starting over. Physics or astronomy might be useful, and interesting, but if it were to track down others of its kind, anthropology or psychology— abnormal psychology—would be more useful.

Of course it had time for all of them.

It studied the posture, demeanor, and uniform of a janitor, and as darkness fell, let itself into an empty classroom and changed. There were still a few students hanging around in the halls, but a balding fifty-year-old man with a broom was invisible to them.

Around midnight, the changeling slipped into the Admissions office and locked the door. It moved swiftly and quietly, the room adequately lit, to its eyes, from the dim dappled light that filtered through a tree from a streetlight at the end of the block.

There were about fifty return letters from prospective students in the in-box of the young woman the changeling had earlier identified as the most junior secretary. It read through forty of the letters before finding exactly what it needed.

Stuart Tanner, a boy from North Liberty, Iowa, had sent in a letter thanking them for his acceptance, but saying that Princeton had offered him a scholarship, which of course he couldn’t pass up. The changeling found his file in the “Acceptance” drawer and memorized it. He had an almost perfect academic record. No athletics other than swimming team, which was good. The photo was black-and-white, but he was a pale Nordic boy, blond and blue-eyed. The changeling took his face and noted that he’d have to assimilate about twenty pounds.

After making sure there was no one else on the floor, the changeling typed a letter of acceptance, noting that he was driving out to California immediately, for a summer job, so please change his address to General Delivery in Berkeley. It switched the letters and slipped out the door, a new man.

The most direct thing to do would be to go to North Liberty and quietly kill Stuart Tanner, and bring his wallet full of identification back to Berkeley. But that wouldn’t be necessary. It would be sufficient to absorb enough of North Liberty to be able to pass for a native. Stuart grew up in Iowa City, so he’d have to check that out, too. An Iowa driver’s license would be easier to counterfeit than a twenty-dollar bill.

The changeling had seen enough killing in the Pacific to reserve it as a course of last resort.

The thought gave him pause. Until recently, killing a human had been no more complicated than eating or changing identity. He’d had no special feelings of mercy or compassion for his Japanese captors, at the time, but he did recognize having felt a special empathy with the other American soldiers during Bataan. Being a victim among victims may have done something.

Whatever it was, it was odd: something was changing the changeling. Something besides itself; something inside himself.

The change had been slow, actually. It started back in the asylum, when it came to understand the differences between individuals, and to prefer the company of one person over another. To like people.

Stuart Tanner had wanted to major in American literature. That would be an interesting challenge. Maybe the books, the novels, would help it understand what was happening to itself. “What is this thing called love?” the Dorsey song was always asking. Understanding friendship would be a start.

The changeling could read a book a day before September, and be ready for the literature major. It could minor in psychology and take an anthropology elective, that would grow into a second bachelor’s degree. Then graduate work, searching for creatures like itself.

It wandered through Berkeley until it found an all-night cafe, where it sat down with a course catalog it had taken from the office, and mapped this out. Then it scanned the rest of the almanac, appearing to be flipping through it, looking for something. At first light, it walked back to the train station and booked passage through to Davenport, Iowa, which appeared to be the closest stop to North Liberty.

With three hours to go before the train left, it bought a suitcase at a pawn shop and packed it with used clothing from Next-2-New. At a used book store, it bought two thick anthologies of American literature and a half-dozen tattered novels.

It wouldn’t do to be walking down the main street of North Liberty and run into Stuart Tanner or someone who knew him. In a stall in the busy men’s room at the train station, he changed his hair to black and skin, swarthy. He flattened his nose and made his blue eyes brown.

The changeling had reserved a private compartment on the train, since it was only money. At five till eleven it went aboard and settled in.

It took most of the Rocky Mountains to read through the Joe Lee Davis Anthology, and before it got to the Mississippi it had read one book each by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It had every word memorized, but knew from previous college experience that that wouldn’t do the trick. Jimmy had been able to write well enough, just barely, to get a degree in oceanography, but his grades in English had been unimpressive. That would have to change.

Among Stuart’s application materials was an eleven-page essay on why he wanted to major in American literature. The changeling had memorized not just the words, but also the handwriting. It copied the essay out twice, trying to understand why the writer had used this word rather than that; why it chose one sentence structure over another. Every time it finished a novel it wrote a few pages about it, trying to mimic Stuart’s style and vocabulary; a plot outline and analysis of the author’s intent, as it had done without great success in the required English and literature courses at UMass. By the time the train got to Davenport, it had worn its pencil to a nub, filling most of a thick tablet. The Mississippi looked interesting. Maybe someday it would turn into a huge catfish and explore it.

It waited out a thunderstorm, since that’s what a human would do, and then walked to the bus station. With a two-hour wait, it read two Iowa papers and reread, in its mind, The Sun Also Rises, which was clear but mysterious: why were these people so self- destructive? The war, it supposed; the previous one. Though it looked as if there might be just one World War, with breathing spaces for re-arming, that would last until somebody won.

The ride to Iowa City was interesting; the bus rumbling past mile after mile of constant green, farmland occasionally punctuated by wild prairie or forest. There were individual farmhouses with barns, always red, but no towns until they pulled into Iowa City.

The bus was going on to Cedar Rapids, but the driver directed him to the train station, the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Interurban Railway, which went up to North Liberty. The changeling walked through the university campus to get there, noting that students dressed about the same way they did in Berkeley. A little more casual, not as much obvious wealth. More pipe-smoking among the males, fewer women in slacks. Dresses to midcalf.

It had been listening carefully to conversations. There was a characteristic Iowa accent, but it had been more pronounced in the Davenport station. It would try to maneuver into a situation where it could overhear Stuart.

Stuart went to high school in Iowa City, the changeling knew from his records, so on a hunch it let two trolleys go by. Sure enough, when school was out, teenagers started arriving in groups of two and four.

Except Stuart, who walked alone, reading a book. He didn’t talk to any of the others, and they ignored him.

The changeling maneuvered close to the boy and studied him surreptitiously while appearing to read its own book. He was slim and muscular, with a delicate manner. The book he was so absorbed in was the twenty-year-old Coming of Age in Samoa, which the changeling had read as an undergraduate in 1939.

When the trolley came, the changeling got on behind Stuart and sat next to him. “Interesting book.”

Stuart looked up sharply. “You’ve read this?”

“My father had a copy of it,” the changeling improvised. “One of his textbooks in college.”

“He let you read it?”

“No … I put the dust jacket from another book around it. He never noticed.”

Stuart laughed. “My dad took it away from me. This one, I keep hidden when I’m home. But hell, I’m old enough.”

The changeling nodded vigorously. “They’re afraid you’ll get ideas.”

“As if that was bad.” He looked at the changeling. “You’re new?”

“Just passing through. Visiting relatives.”

“What, in Liberty?”

The changeling thought fast. North Liberty only had a few hundred people; Stuart would know most of them. “No, Cedar Rapids.”

“Where you from?”

“California. San Guillermo.”

Stuart looked introspective. “Always wanted to go there. I was accepted at Berkeley. Didn’t get a scholarship. Are you a student?”

“Taking some time off.” It checked its watch. “Anything to do in North Liberty? I have a couple hours to kill.”

“They would die,” Stuart said. “Ice cream parlor, really just a soda fountain. Go out and look at the quarry.”

“What do they mine?”

“Sandstone.” He laughed and jerked a thumb back at Iowa City. “Did all the sandstone for the Capitol Building there. Then they moved the capital to Des Moines.”

“And carelessly left the building behind,” the changeling said in an attempt at humor. The boy gave him an odd look and laughed.

“You could kill an hour with a soda. Or go on to Cedar Rapids and get an actual beer.”

“A soda sounds good. I like small towns.”

“You could see all of Liberty in about ten minutes.” They talked for awhile more, the changeling mostly listening or mining the memory of the day’s papers.

They both got off at North Liberty, along with a couple of dozen students. Almost everyone went down the main street. When they went into the ice cream shop, a girl behind them said in a soft singsong, “Stew-ie’s got a boy friend.”

He turned pink at that. “Stupid girl,” he muttered, as the screen door smacked shut behind them.

Interesting, the changeling thought. Could free-thinking Stuart be homosexual, attracted to the exotic out-of-towner? Dark and handsome, with a body almost a twin of Stuart’s, defender of Margaret Mead.

They sat at a small round marble table by an oscillating fan. The changeling looked at the bill of fare, a small two-sided card. “How ’bout I buy us a banana split? I couldn’t eat a whole one.”

“I’ll split it with you.” He reached into his pocket.

“No, my treat. I’m researching the odd inhabitants of this island.”

He snorted. “Margaret Mead wouldn’t find much here.”

“Oh, I bet she would. Probably about as many people here as on her island.”

“Yeah, and we go around half-naked and screw anyone we want.” They both laughed at that.

The soda jerk, a young redhead with a face full of acne, was approaching with his pad. He gave them an uncertain smile. “Where’s that, Stu?”

He held up the book. “Samoa, Vince. We’re gonna go there soon as school’s out.”

Vince gave the changeling a funny look. “Sure you are. Where the hell is Samoa?”

“Middle o’ nowhere, in the Pacific.”

“They fight there?”

“Don’t know.” He raised eyebrows at the changeling.

“Don’t ask me.” The changeling had passed the island group as a great white shark, on its way to California, and hadn’t seen any naval presence. But the war still had a few years to go, then.

“So hi,” he said. “I’m Vince Smithers. You’re not from, uh…”

“Matt Baker,” the changeling said, and shook his hand. “San Guillermo, California.” This was interesting. The changeling had some difficulty reading subtle emotions, but jealousy isn’t subtle. “We’re gonna split a banana split, and I’ll take a Coke.”

He scribbled that down and looked at Stuart. “Vanilla Coke?” Stuart nodded and he went back to the fountain.

“You guys know each other?” the changeling said.

“Everybody knows everybody here. Vince and me used to go to school together, but his parents put him in a military academy. What was that shitty place, Vince?”

“God, I don’t want to say the name. I left to pursue a career in banana-split-ology. Much to my father’s delight.”

They continued in a kind of uneasy banter, the changeling watching with an anthropologist’s eye. They were less exotic to it than Polynesians, but no less interesting.

There was a conspiratorial edge to their exchange. They had done something forbidden together, something secret. Not necessarily sex, but that would be a good first guess. Did Stuart mean for his new companion to make that inference? The changeling’s only experience with homosexuality had been in the asylum, and there had been no social aspect to it; he had just been a receptacle for two of the guards. There had been a third, who only came to him once, and had been more interesting than the two brutes: he had quit after a couple of minutes and started weeping, and said how sorry he was, and evidently quit the job right after.

It was so much more complicated than it had to be, but the changeling had noted that this was true of every human biological function that wasn’t involuntary.

Vince brought the split and Stuart’s Coke. “You don’t want some vanilla in yours?” he said to the changeling.

A complexity. “Sure. I’ll try anything once.” Vince nodded grimly. It was an obvious turning point.

They divided the confection meticulously, and pursued it from opposite ends. Stuart told the changeling about his scholarship to Princeton.

“Nice campus. Major in anthropology?”

“No, English and American lit. You’ve been there?”

“Once, visiting relatives.” A semester, actually, studying invertebrate paleontology.

“You have relatives everywhere.”

“Big family.”

He made a face. “Mine are all in Iowa.” He said it as “Io-way,” with a downward inflection.

“You don’t plan to come back and raise a bunch of Iowans yourself?”

“No and double no. Not that I don’t like kids.” He speared a piece of banana. “I hate them.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“Thank God, no. The kids at school are bad enough.”

The changeling was absorbing all this avidly. They finished the split. “Well. Want to show me around fabulous North Liberty?”

“You got five minutes?” On the way out, the changeling gave Vince a dollar and airily waved off the change.

“Rolling in dough,” Stuart said.

“Best crap shooter in San Guillermo.”

“Bull shooter.” They both laughed.

It actually took about ten minutes. From the center of town, Stuart led him down West Cherry Street.

“This is my house,” he said. “Want to come in?”

“Sure. Meet your parents.”

Stuart looked at his eyes, exactly level. “They’re gone. They won’t be home till tomorrow.”

The changeling returned his gaze. “I don’t have to be in Cedar Rapids till tomorrow. Missed my train.”

The courting ritual was brief. Stuart raided his parents’ liquor cabinet and fixed them bourbons that were much too large and strong. Just fuel to the changeling, of course, but if Stuart had been older, it might have killed his sexual desire.

It didn’t, of course. He lurched up the stairs, dragging the changeling by the hand, into a bedroom that was not at all boyish. No models or posters, just hundreds of books in nailed-together bookcases.

The changeling had no idea of what the protocol was, still being ignorant of heterosexual protocol. So once in the bedroom it just did what Stuart did, one permutation after another. It narrowed the diameter of its penis for his comfort, remembering pain in the asylum.

Afterward, the boy slept in its arms, snoring drunkenly. It analyzed the genetic material he had left behind. He had a problem with cholesterol, and should take it easy on the banana splits. Also diabetes in his future. Maybe just as well he didn’t want to reproduce.