A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  Keith took a deep drag on his cigarette. “My people will be coming for me very soon,” he said. “I got a message off to them when I crashed. If they could have only got here sooner, this whole mess would never have happened.”

  “That’s Greek to me, son. I had hoped you might be able to make more sense in person than you did at the United Nations.”

  Keith flushed. “Look,” he said. “There’s nothing complicated about it, really. You just don’t have the picture yet. You’ll have to toss out all your preconceived notions to begin with.”

  “Haven’t got any,” Coles assured him.

  “Here’s the first thing, then. There is no galactic civilization. I’m not the representative of anything.”

  Coles blew a small cloud of smoke at the ceiling and said nothing.

  Keith talked fast, anxious to get it all out. “I landed in Los Angeles by accident; you know that. I’d hoped to come down in the Arizona desert, where no one would see me and I could go about my business in peace. But, dammit, I was spotted right away, and from then on I never had a chance. I had strict instructions about what to do if I was discovered by the natives—that is, by the citizens of Earth—”

  “Just a second.” Coles crushed out his cigar. “I thought you said there wasn’t any galactic civilization.”

  “There is a civilization out there, sure, if you want to call it that,” Keith said impatiently. “But not that kind of a civilization. There are hundreds of thousands of inhabited worlds in this galaxy alone. Don’t you see what that means, just in terms of your own science?”

  “Well, the notion did pop into my cerebrum that the communications problem would be a tough nut to crack. I admit I did wonder a little about this mammoth civilization of yours. I couldn’t quite figure how it could work.”

  “It doesn’t work. There’s some contact between us, but not a lot. Why, one whole planet couldn’t hold the government officials for a set-up like that! There isn’t any uniform government. War isn’t very popular except for would-be suicides, so each of us goes pretty much our own way. The plain fact is—excuse me, Dr. Coles—that we don’t really give a hoot in hell about the planet Earth. The last time one of us visited you, so far as I know, was in 974 A.D,. and I expect it’ll be a few more centuries before anyone comes again.”

  “Ummm.” Dr. Coles prepared another cigar and stuck it in his mouth. “I believe your speech mentioned the hand of friendship clasping ours across the great sea of space—”

  “I’m sorry.” Keith flushed again. “I did have to say all that hokum, but it wasn’t my idea.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, frankly. I’d hate to think that our friends out in the stars would be as tedious as all that.”

  “All I did was to be agreeable!” Keith shifted on his chair and rubbed his eyes. “Our instructions are very explicit on that point: if you get found out in a primitive culture, play along with them and stay out of trouble. If they think you’re a god, be a god. If they think you’re a fraud, be a fraud. You know—when in Rome, and all that. I tried to be what I was expected to be, that’s all.”

  Coles smiled a little. “Once we found out you were a spaceman you were cooked, hey?”

  “Exactly! I not only was a spaceman but I had to be their kind of a spaceman. They couldn’t even consider any other kind. I never had a chance—it got to the point where I was either the emissary from a benevolent super-civilization peopled by fatherly geniuses or I was some kind of monster come to destroy the Earth! What could I do? I didn’t want to cause any trouble, and I didn’t want to go to jail. What would you have done?”

  Coles shrugged and lit his cigar.

  “I haven’t handled things very well,” Keith said nervously. “I’ve botched it all. It was rough learning English from radio broadcasts—you can imagine—and now everything is ruined.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning, young man. What the devil are you anyhow? An anthropologist from the stars doing an ethnological study of poor, primitive Earth?”

  “No.” Keith got to his feet and paced the floor. “I mentioned a previous visit by a student in 974? Well, I wanted to follow it up. I’m studying the vowel-shift from Old English to the present. We’d predicted a shift of the long vowels upward and into diphthongal types. I’m happy to say I’ve been able to confirm this, at least roughly.”

  Coles put down his cigar. “You’re a linguist, then?”

  Keith looked at the floor. “I had hoped to be. I’ll be honest with you, sir. I’m still a graduate student. I’m working on what you’d call a Ph.D. I came here to do a field study, but my notes are hopelessly incomplete. I’ll never be able to get another research grant—”

  Dr. George Alan Coles put his head in his hands and began to laugh. He had a big laugh for such a small man. He laughed so hard the tears streaked his glasses and he had to take them off. He had the best laugh he had had in years.

  “I guess this is all very amusing to you, sir,” Keith said. “But I’ve come to you for help. If you just want to laugh at me—”

  “Sorry, Keith.” Coles blew his nose, loudly. “I was laughing at us, not at you. We’ve built ourselves up for a huge anticlimax, and I must say it’s typical.”

  Keith sat down, somewhat mollified. “Can you help me? Will you help me? I’m ashamed to ask, but my whole lifework may depend on this thing. You just don’t know.”

  Coles smiled. “I do know, I’m afraid. I was a graduate student once myself. How much time do we have?”

  “Three days. If you can help me, just give me a hand this once—”

  “Easy does it.” Coles got to his feet and went over to a section of the metal bookcases that lined his walls. “Let’s see, Keith. I’ve got Bloomfield’s Language here; that’s got a lot of the data you’ll need in it. We’ll start with that. And I’ve got some more stuff at home that should come in handy.”

  Keith wiped his forehead, his eyes shining.

  He had learned many words in English, but somehow none of them seemed adequate to express his thanks.

  Three nights later it was clear and unseasonally warm. The two men drove up Bel-Air Road in Coles’s Chevrolet, turned out the lights, and parked on the bluff.

  Silently, they unloaded a crate of books and journals and started down the winding asphalt trail to the house where Frank Evans lived.

  “We’ll have to sneak along the back of their house,” Keith whispered. “If we can just get out past that patio we’ll be okay.”

  “Shouldn’t be difficult,” Coles panted, shifting the crate. “I don’t think they could hear a cobalt bomb with all that racket.”

  The hi-fi set was going full blast, as usual. Keith winced.

  They made it undetected, and proceeded along the dark path under the orange trees. They went fifty yards, until they could see the brush scar where Keith’s ship had crashed.

  Coles looked at his watch. “Five minutes, I figure,” he said.

  They sat on the crate, breathing hard.

  “Dr. Coles, I don’t know how to thank you,” Keith said quietly.

  “I’ve enjoyed knowing you, Keith. It isn’t every professor who can draw students from so far away.”

  Keith laughed. “Well, if they ever figure out how that ship of mine works, maybe you can send a student to me sometime.”

  “We’ll both be long dead by then, but it’s an intriguing idea anyhow.”

  Exactly on schedule, a large sphere, almost invisible in the night, settled into the hillside next to them, A panel hissed open and yellow light spilled out.

  “Good-by, sir.”

  “So long, Keith. Good luck to you.”

  The two men shook hands.

  Keith lifted the crate into the sphere and climbed in after it. He waved and the panel closed behind him. Soundlessly, the sphere lifted from the Earth, toward the ship that waited far above.

  Coles worked his way silently back along the path to the house, and up the asphalt trail to his car. He paused a moment, c
atching his breath. As Keith had done before him, he looked down on the great city glittering in the distance. Then he looked up. A blaze of stars burned in the sky, and they seemed closer now, and warmer.

  He smiled a little and drove back down the hill, into his city.

  REWRITE MAN

  “Your throat is full of frog,” Barbara Dodson informed her husband. “I can’t hear you.”

  John Dodson toyed briefly with the idea of correcting his wife’s phrase, but being an old married man—seven years now—he decided to ignore it. He waggled the newspaper on his lap and said: “There’s something funny about this paper.”

  “Pogo?” Barbara suggested, sipping her coffee.

  “You don’t follow me. I mean something is wrong with this paper.”

  “It’s not the best in the world,” Barbara agreed. “Those typos …”

  John frowned. “Look,” he said. “Haven’t you noticed that there’s never anything interesting on the front page like there used to be? Just the UN and Russia and politics and weather. It’s the same every night—they don’t change anything but the dateline.”

  “Your coffee’s getting cold,” Barbara said, sensing that John was off on another inscrutable tangent.

  John gave her scant attention. He gripped the paper more firmly, as though determined to choke the truth out of it. “What’s become of all the flagpole-sitters and goldfish swallowers? Isn’t Marilyn doing anything these days? Aren’t there any more flying saucers? And what’s happened to all the sex criminals?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, dear,” Barbara said, somewhat demurely.

  Something scratched insistently at the door.

  “Here comes one now,” she said. “Let him in, will you?”

  John reached over, and by stretching heroically managed to open the door without quite getting up. Their dog, a house-filling German shepherd, padded in solemnly. He tracked garden-dirt with great precision across the living room rug, curled his bulk up at Barbara’s feet, and went to sleep with an air of relief.

  John started to swing the door shut.

  “Wait a minute,” Barbara said. “Someone’s coming.”

  John brightened. A car crunched up their driveway, stopped, and doors slammed. There were footsteps.

  A head with a large smile on it poked itself through the doorway. “Busy?” a familiar voice boomed.

  “Are you kidding?” John asked. “Come on in, Bill, and bring that woman of yours with you.”

  Bill Wineburg charged into the room, rubbing his hamlike hands together in anticipation. His wife, Sue, a tiny creature of fluff and honey, drifted along in his wake.

  Perhaps fifteen minutes were devoted to platitudes of assorted varieties, after which John and Bill settled down to continue their interminable bout of two-handed stud poker. The girls drank coffee, leafed through utopian home-decorating magazines, and chattered he-said-and-then-she-said girl talk.

  The dog, Brutus, twitched his ears contentedly.

  Along about eleven, just as the game was breaking up for the night, Sue said to Barbara: “Wasn’t that crazy about Claudette?”

  “Claudette?”

  “Claudette Cruchette—you know, the actress? The one with those perfectly enormous—”

  “I remember now. What about her?”

  “Didn’t you see it? She’s entered a convent. Isn’t that—”

  John spun around in his chair, knocking a pile of red chips to the floor. “Where did you hear about that, Sue?” he asked, pointing his index finger like a six-gun.

  Somewhat taken aback, Sue waved her tiny hands aimlessly. “In the paper, silly. Don’t you even read it any more?”

  John snatched up the crumpled paper, held it out to her. “This paper?”

  Sue glanced at the headline—IKE SAYS YES TO UN—and nodded. “What other one is there? It’s right there on the front page.”

  “Show me.”

  She took the paper curiously, and examined the front page. “That’s funny,” she said after a moment. “It doesn’t seem to be here.”

  “Maybe it was somewhere else in the paper,” Barbara suggested.

  Bill shook his head. “Nope. Right there on the front page. Saw it myself.”

  “There was a picture and everything,” Sue said. She thumbed rapidly through the rest of the paper. “I can’t understand it. You must have a later edition or something.”

  “There’s only one evening edition,” John said.

  “Someone’s censoring your paper, boy,” Bill laughed. “Cutting out all the sexy parts.”

  John was not amused.

  After Bill and Sue had left, he sat in his chair staring morosely at the paper. Barbara had to remind him twice what time he had to get up the next morning before he would listen to her.

  Before he went to bed, he took the paper, folded it carefully, and put it on the shelf in the closet.

  “There’s something fishy going on around here,” John said, switching off the table lamp by the bed.

  “Now, now,” said Barbara, kissing him goodnight. “I’m sure there’s some perfectly simple explanation.”

  “For instance?”

  Silence.

  John had a tough time getting to sleep, and his dreams were lulus.

  The next day was Dreary Thursday, only a slight improvement over Awful Monday, and John’s mind was not on his work. It was a slack period anyhow, with very little for the computer to chew on, and he was able to do his job without too much concentration.

  He was by nature an imaginative man, much intrigued by some of the philosophical writings of India, and he was also a mathematician, forever concocting charming games with rules so intricate that no one else could ever fathom enough about them to give him a decent contest. Whenever his work was routine—he ran a small IBM machine for an insurance firm—he often let his mind roam on more interesting topics.

  Now that he actually seemed to be involved in something odd, he found it decidedly stimulating.

  He watched his associates closely, but saw nothing unusual. They were the same old gang they had always been. When he went out for lunch, he paused several times to lounge in doorways, eying the passing crowd to make certain he wasn’t being followed.

  Nobody followed him.

  His lunch was decidedly ordinary, if somewhat greasier than usual.

  Nothing happened in the afternoon.

  Another man might have shoved the whole business from his mind, but not John. A fact was a fact. Something was screwy about his paper, and he was fully prepared to wrestle with it the rest of his life if necessary.

  These things didn’t just happen.

  There was a reason for everything.

  Wasn’t there?

  He waited impatiently until five o’clock, and then hurried out of the building. It was a lovely September evening, crisp and cool, with the sun putting on a spectacular display of rose and purple as it drifted down below the tops of the big hotels. John walked up to the paper boy on the corner, stared at him suspiciously, and passed him by. He got his car out of the lot and deliberately drove in the opposite direction from his home. He tooled the car through heavy traffic out across the bridge into the south end of town. He picked the number five at random, and then proceeded until he came to the fifth drugstore, which was a good way out. He parked his car, went inside, and pulled the fifth newspaper out from under a pile by the cigarette counter. (There was only one evening newspaper in the town.) He tossed the man a nickel and went back to his car.

  He didn’t read the front page. He just took out his pen and wrote Drugstore on the upper right hand corner. The paper absorbed the ink, but it was legible.

  Then he went home.

  Brutus jumped up on him and tried to lick his face. He started to tell the dog to go fetch the paper, which he saw stuck in the hedge where the route man had thrown it, but changed his mind and retrieved it himself.

  Bru hung his head in dismay.

  John thumped his way into the ho
use, slamming the door behind him.

  Barbara stuck her head out of the kitchen. “Hi,” she said.

  John muttered something unintelligible. He ripped open his evening paper and spread the front page out on the floor. Then he opened up the copy he had picked up at the drugstore and spread that on the floor.

  “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Ummmmm.”

  John’s eyes flicked rapidly from one front page to the other. He saw it almost at once. He got up and pulled all the blinds and locked the door. He walked decisively into the spare bedroom and found a soft red pencil in his desk. He went back to the papers and outlined two stories, one in each edition. It wasn’t easy to draw on the rug, but the lines were clear enough.

  “Johnny, what’s the matter?”

  “Look at this, honey.”

  Barbara dried her hands on her apron and got down beside him.

  “Why, that’s just crazy,” she said after a moment.

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m going to call the paper right this minute. I’m—”

  “No. Don’t do that. Lets see if we can’t figure this thing out.”

  Barbara stared at the papers. “What is there to figure?”

  “As the man said, that is indeed the question.”

  There was nothing threatening about the two front pages, nothing sinister. It was just that there were two entirely different stories, one in the copy he had picked up at the drugstore, and another one in the copy be had gotten by subscription. Except for the one story, in the lower left hand corner of each paper, the front pages were identical.

  The paper that had Drugstore written on it featured a little yarn with a headline that read: MIAMI BATHING BEAUTY NIPPED BY SHARK. There was a cut of a well-stacked young brunette in a minimal bathing suit, smiling bravely at the carcass of a shark on a sandy beach. The story itself was nothing very sensational, and was probably brewed in the overactive mind of a press agent. The girl had been swimming, the story said, when she had been attacked by a shark. Handsome life guard Bruce Bartholomew, a veteran of the Pacific theater, had just happened to have his rifle handy, and had plugged the shark. (There was no photograph of Mr. Bartholomew.) The girl had stated that she would go on with her swimming, “because swimming means more to me than anything else in the world, and I know Mom and Dad are counting on me.”