Camouflage

—10—

The Berrys had to admit that Jimmy was unmanageable, and quietly had him committed to St. Anthony’s, a private insane asylum.

It was a valuable change of venue. The drugs the changeling was compelled to take by mouth or injection were metabolically insignificant. The shock treatments, where they wrapped you in wet sheets and splashed you with buckets of ice water, were gently stimulating to a creature who could live on Mercury or Pluto.

But the changeling was surrounded by extremes of human behavior, in both the patients and their attendants, that it would never have seen at the mansion. It learned more in its first week than it had in months of cossetted coddling.

The guards were brutal and stupid. If the changeling did anything outside of a certain range of behaviors, they would wrap it in a strait-jacket and throw it in the rubber room.

It came to understand coercion and confinement. It could have slipped out of the straitjacket, prefiguring Plasticman, and kicked down the door like Superman. But there would be no education in that. It submitted to beatings and rapes—rich pretty boy who can’t tell on you. It learned something like sympathy for Dutch, though pain was just input to it, and humiliation was not yet in its emotional range.

It listened to the other patients when they had social time together. That it responded in monosyllables, sometimes bizarre, went unnoticed. In fact, it was getting a slow, and somewhat skewed, version of the learning process that a human child would go through. It “grew up” by observation and assimilation.

A large part of the puzzle was human linguistics, and the ultimately related problem of mimicking human thought processes. It took two years, but by the time “Jimmy” was twenty, no one was beating or raping him. He was moved into a clean, quiet part of St. Anthony’s, and after awhile was allowed to have visitors.

His parents were so glad to see him acting “normal” that they overlooked the fact that he didn’t act like Jimmy at all. He was released into their care.

The changeling had assimilated a wide range of behaviors, and a fairly sophisticated sense of which was appropriate at which time. To the Berrys, their son had become quiet and dignified and perhaps a little shy, which was a real advance over the brutal sodomist they’d tendered to St. Anthony’s.

The changeling played piano for hours at a time, and it also spent a long time just watching the sea. It knew it was being observed and evaluated, this time by amateurs, and could deliver a nuanced performance.

It had learned how to simulate the behavior of a teenager who had been troubled, but now was on the road to recovery. It had seen that that was the only way to get out of St. Anthony’s and move on to the next stage of development.

This was the most complex creature it had ever imitated. Its successes gave it a pleasure like joy.