Camouflage

preference, none. Then it worked back through middle school and grade school records, which were mostly routine stuff. Her fourth-grade teacher noted that she did her work “with ease and dispatch,” a compliment she had given to about half the class. She skipped fifth grade, making it possible for her to finish college the year her parents died.
    It was not quite dawn when the changeling turned back into linear linoleum and slid down a corridor to a location that wasn’t covered by the cameras, a stairwell that led to a musty basement. It took its janitor form, remembered from Berkeley, and waited until ten to walk upstairs and pass through the crowd, out onto the street.
    It turned back into the tourist in a public library rest room stall, and used the library computer system to outline Sharon Valida’s academic career at the University of Hawaii, a more reasonable destination for an ambitious girl than the community college on Maui. She would study business with a concentration in oceanography—in fact, she would take an introductory oceanography course from herself, as the charismatic professor Jimmy Coleridge. The changeling used its intimate knowledge of the university’s academic and bureaucratic structure to give Sharon a respectable-but-not-brilliant four years of study. Inserting the paper and computer records verifying her existence there would be even easier than the past night’s work in Maui.
    (The changeling had not just dropped everything when it changed from Professor Coleridge into Rae Archer. The timing had been perfect; the Sky and Telescope ad appearing right at the end of the term. So the professor turned inhis grades and told everyone he was taking the summer off for a diving vacation in Polynesia, which was not completely a lie.)
    There was one thing left to do before going back to Honolulu. The changeling went to a mall and bought a recent wardrobe for Sharon, and then went back to the Crossed Palms and spent a painful half hour changing into her. She rented another room for the night and went back to the Vital Statistics office at four thirty, a half hour before closing.
    “May I help you?” The woman at the window, about forty, had a bright fixed stare as if she’d been caffeine-loading to stay awake till five, and seemed less than sincere in her desire to help.
    “I can’t find my birth certificate,” the changeling said. “I need a certified copy to get a passport.”
    “Photo ID,” the woman said, and the changeling handed over the fresh, though worn, driver’s license.
    The woman sat down at a console and typed in Valida’s name. She stared at the screen, cleared it, and typed it in again. “This says you died in ’91.”
    “What, died? ”
    “One year old.” She looked up suspiciously.
    “Well, duh. I didn’t.”
    “Wait here a moment.” She hustled off in the direction of the room where the changeling had spent the night.
    She came back shaking her head. “Computer error,” she said, and deleted the record with a couple of strokes. Wordlessly, she made a copy of the birth certificate and notarized it. She went down the hall to have another clerk witness it. The changeling walked out with its new existence certified.
    I n a way, it was simpler for Sharon to get a college degree than it had been to go through grades 1 to 12, since thechangeling could work from inside. It changed its retinal pattern to match that of Professor Jimmy Coleridge, to get into his front door, and took a cab from the Honolulu airport to his apartment off the Manoa campus.
    The changeling didn’t think anyone saw Sharon entering the apartment, but if they did, it wouldn’t be that uncommon a sight.
    The next morning, it took a half hour to change back into Jimmy, who fortunately didn’t weigh much more than Sharon. It put on teaching clothes and walked over to Coleridge’s office at the School of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology.
    The departmental secretary was surprised to see him. “Back from Samoa already? I thought you were gone till August!”
    “Just for a couple of days. I’ve got an open ticket on Polynesian Airways. Thought I’d catch up on some stuff and get a few decent meals.”
    “What do they eat in Samoa? Each other?”
    “Just for variety. Usually McDonald’s.”
    “What about the space alien? Were you there?”
    “Yeah—they think it’s some Hollywood stunt.”
    “I hope they’re wrong. That would be so maze.”
    “Would be.” There was a double