Camouflage

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