Camouflage

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 inIowa 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 café, 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 throughto 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