Camouflage

social organization, but had forgotten all of that millennia ago. On Earth, it had lived as a colony of individual creatures in the dark hot depths; it had lived as a simple mat of protoplasm before that. It had lived in schools of fish, briefly, but most of its recent experience, tens of thousands of years, had been as a lone predator.
    It had seen that predation was modified in these creatures; they were at the top of the food chain, but animal food had long since been killed by the time they consumedit. It naturally tried to understand the way society was organized in those terms: food was killed in some hidden or distant location, and prepared and distributed by means of mysterious processes.
    The family unit was organized around food presentation and consumption, though it had other functions. The changeling recognized protection and training of the young from its aquatic associations, but was ignorant about sex and mating—when another large predator approached, it had always interpreted that as aggression, and attacked. Its kind hadn’t reproduced in millions of years; that anachronism had gone the way of death. It didn’t know the facts of life.
    At least one woman was more than willing to provide lessons.
    When it knew it would be alone for a period, the changeling practiced changing its appearance, using the people it observed as models. Changing its facial features was not too difficult; cartilage and subcutaneous fat could be moved around in a few minutes, a relatively painless process. Changing the underlying skull was a painful business that took eight or ten minutes.
    Changing the whole body shape took an hour of painful concentration, and was complicated if the body had significantly more or less mass than Jimmy. For less mass, it could remove an arm or a leg, and redistribute mass accordingly. The extra part would die unless there was a reason to keep it alive, but that was immaterial; it still provided the right raw materials to reconstruct Jimmy.
    Making a larger body required taking on flesh; not easy to do. The changeling assimilated Ronnie, the family’s old German shepherd, in order to take the form of Jimmy’s overweight father. Of course Ronnie was dead when he was reconstituted; the changeling left the body outside Jimmy’s door, and the family just assumed it had gone there to say good-bye, how sweet.
    The changeling had seen Mr. Berry in a bathing suit, so about 90 percent of its simulation was accurate. The other 10 percent might have made Mrs. Berry faint.
    Similarly, the changeling could, in the dark privacy of Jimmy’s bedroom, discard an arm and most of a leg and make itself a piece of flesh that had a shape similar to that of the nurse Deborah, at least the form she apparently had under her uniform, severely corseted. But it had no more detail than a department store dummy. The times being what they were, it could have had free rein of the house and not found any representation of a nude female.
    It was still months away from being able to simulate anything like social graces, but to satisfy this particular desire, no grace was needed. Precisely at 7:30, Deborah brought in the breakfast tray.
    “Please take off your clothes,” it said, “and put them on the dresser.”
    Deborah may or may not have recognized the doctor’s voice. She managed not to drop the tray. “Jimmy! Don’t be silly!”
    “Please,” Jimmy said, smiling, as she positioned the lap tray. “I would like that very much.”
    “So would I,” she whispered, and glanced back to see that the door was almost shut. “How about tonight? After dark?”
    “I can see in the dark,” it said in her whisper, husky. She slid her hand into his pajamas, and when she touched the penis an unused circuit closed, and it enlarged and rose with literally inhuman speed.
    “Oh my God,” she said. “Midnight?”
    “Midnight,” it repeated. “Oh my God.”
    Her smile was a cross between openmouthed astonishment and a leer. “You’re strange, Jimmy.” She backed out of the room, mouthing “midnight,” and closed the door quietly.
    The changeling noted this new erect state and experimented with it, and the unexpected result suddenly clarified a whole class of mammalian behavior it had witnessed with porpoise, dolphin, and killer whale.
    T he music teacher came for his twice-weekly visit, and was stupified by the sudden change in Jimmy’s ability. The boy had been a mystery from the start: before the accident, he