The ride to Iowa City was interesting; the bus rumbling past mile after mile of constant green, farmland occasionally punctuated by wild prairie or forest. There were individual farmhouses with barns, always red, but no towns until they pulled into Iowa City.

The bus was going on to Cedar Rapids, but the driver directed him to the train station, the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Interurban Railway, which went up to North Liberty. The changeling walked through the university campus to get there, noting that students dressed about the same way they did in Berkeley. A little more casual, not as much obvious wealth. More pipe-smoking among the males, fewer women in slacks. Dresses to midcalf.

It had been listening carefully to conversations. There was a characteristic Iowa accent, but it had been more pronounced in the Davenport station. It would try to maneuver into a situation where it could overhear Stuart.

Stuart went to high school in Iowa City, the changeling knew from his records, so on a hunch it let two trolleys go by. Sure enough, when school was out, teenagers started arriving in groups of two and four.

Except Stuart, who walked alone, reading a book. He didn’t talk to any of the others, and they ignored him.

The changeling maneuvered close to the boy and studied him surreptitiously while appearing to read its own book. He was slim and muscular, with a delicate manner. The book he was so absorbed in was the twenty-year-old Coming of Age in Samoa, which the changeling had read as an undergraduate in 1939.

When the trolley came, the changeling got on behind Stuart and sat next to him. “Interesting book.”

Stuart looked up sharply. “You’ve read this?”

“My father had a copy of it,” the changeling improvised. “One of his textbooks in college.”

“He let you read it?”

“No… I put the dust jacket from another book around it. He never noticed.”

Stuart laughed. “My dad took it away from me. This one, I keep hidden when I’m home. But hell, I’m old enough.”

The changeling nodded vigorously. “They’re afraid you’ll get ideas.”

“As if that was bad.” He looked at the changeling. “You’re new?”

“Just passing through. Visiting relatives.”

“What, in Liberty?”

The changeling thought fast. North Liberty only had a few hundred people; Stuart would know most of them. “No, Cedar Rapids.”

“Where you from?”

“California. San Guillermo.”

Stuart looked introspective. “Always wanted to go there. I was accepted at Berkeley. Didn’t get a scholarship. Are you a student?”

“Taking some time off.” It checked its watch. “Anything to do in North Liberty? I have a couple hours to kill.”

“They would die,” Stuart said. “Ice cream parlor, really just a soda fountain. Go out and look at the quarry.”

“What do they mine?”

“Sandstone.” He laughed and jerked a thumb back at Iowa City. “Did all the sandstone for the Capitol Building there. Then they moved the capital to Des Moines.”

“And carelessly left the building behind,” the changeling said in an attempt at humor. The boy gave him an odd look and laughed.

“You could kill an hour with a soda. Or go on to Cedar Rapids and get an actual beer.”

“A soda sounds good. I like small towns.”

“You could see all of Liberty in about ten minutes.” They talked for awhile more, the changeling mostly listening or mining the memory of the day’s papers.

They both got off at North Liberty, along with a couple of dozen students. Almost everyone went down the main street. When they went into the ice cream shop, a girl behind them said in a soft singsong, “Stew-ie’s got a boy friend.”

He turned pink at that. “Stupid girl,” he muttered, as the screen door smacked shut behind them.

Interesting, the changeling thought. Could free-thinking Stuart be homosexual, attracted to the exotic out-of-towner? Dark and handsome, with a body almost a twin of Stuart’s, defender of Margaret Mead.

They sat at a small round marble table by an oscillating fan. The changeling looked at the bill of fare, a small two-sided card. “How ‘bout I buy us a banana split? I couldn’t eat a whole one.”

“I’ll split it with you.” He reached into his pocket.

“No, my treat. I’m researching the odd inhabitants of this island.”

He snorted. “Margaret Mead wouldn’t find much here.”

“Oh, I bet she would. Probably about as many people here as on her island.”

“Yeah, and we go around half-naked and screw anyone we want.” They both laughed at that.

The soda jerk, a young redhead with a face full of acne, was approaching with his pad. He gave them an uncertain smile. “Where’s that, Stu?”

He held up the book. “Samoa, Vince. We’re gonna go there soon as school’s out.”

Vince gave the changeling a funny look. “Sure you are. Where the hell is Samoa?”

“Middle o’ nowhere, in the Pacific.”

“They fight there?”

“Don’t know.” He raised eyebrows at the changeling.

“Don’t ask me.” The changeling had passed the island group as a great white shark, on its way to California, and hadn’t seen any naval presence. But the war still had a few years to go, then.

“So hi,” he said. “I’m Vince Smithers. You’re not from, uh…”

“Matt Baker,” the changeling said, and shook his hand. “San Guillermo, California.” This was interesting. The changeling had some difficulty reading subtle emotions, but jealousy isn’t subtle. “We’re gonna split a banana split, and I’ll take a Coke.”

He scribbled that down and looked at Stuart. “Vanilla Coke?” Stuart nodded and he went back to the fountain.

“You guys know each other?” the changeling said.

“Everybody knows everybody here. Vince and me used to go to school together, but his parents put him in a military academy. What was that shitty place, Vince?”

“God, I don’t want to say the name. I left to pursue a career in banana-split-ology. Much to my father’s delight.”

They continued in a kind of uneasy banter, the changeling watching with an anthropologist’s eye. They were less exotic to it than Polynesians, but no less interesting.

There was a conspiratorial edge to their exchange. They had done something forbidden together, something secret. Not necessarily sex, but that would be a good first guess. Did Stuart mean for his new companion to make that inference? The changeling’s only experience with homosexuality had been in the asylum, and there had been no social aspect to it; he had just been a receptacle for two of the guards. There had been a third, who only came to him once, and had been more interesting than the two brutes: he had quit after a couple of minutes and started weeping, and said how sorry he was, and evidently quit the job right after.

It was so much more complicated than it had to be, but the changeling had noted that this was true of every human biological function that wasn’t involuntary.

Vince brought the split and Stuart’s Coke. “You don’t want some vanilla in yours?” he said to the changeling.

A complexity. “Sure. I’ll try anything once.” Vince nodded grimly. It was an obvious turning point.

They divided the confection meticulously, and pursued it from opposite ends. Stuart told the changeling about his scholarship to Princeton.

“Nice campus. Major in anthropology?”

“No, English and American lit. You’ve been there?”

“Once, visiting relatives.” A semester, actually, studying invertebrate paleontology.

“You have relatives everywhere.”

“Big family.”

He made a face. “Mine are all in Iowa.” He said it as “Io-way,” with a downward inflection.

“You don’t plan to come back and raise a bunch of Iowans yourself?”

“No and double no. Not that I don’t like kids.” He speared a piece of banana. “I hate them.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“Thank God, no. The kids at school are bad enough.”

The changeling was absorbing all this avidly. They finished the split. “Well. Want to show me around fabulous North Liberty?”