A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  That was all there was to the story.

  In the paper that John had rescued from his hedge, there was no trace of the bathing beauty story. Instead, there was a perfectly innocuous item about fishing on Lake Travis, which was a few miles outside the city limits. The story had no business on the front page, and had been padded with several fillers because it wasn’t long enough. The headline was: TRAVIS BASS STILL TAKING LURES.

  The story read:

  Austin, Sept. 5 (Spl.). Local anglers will be glad to learn that the bass in Lake Travis are still hitting fairly well on lures, Mr. Harold X. Rogers announced today. Mr. Rogers stated that several parties had taken boats out from his dock in the morning and afternoon hours, and each boat had returned with three or four bass and several perch.

  “The recent spraying to eliminate parasite fish has not harmed the game fishing,” Mr. Rogers said. “I can see the bass jumping out there all day long, and this is really one of the prettiest seasons of the year for lake fishing.”

  One of the bass weighed in at three pounds, and several others were also nice ones. The perch were small.

  The duckbilled platypus is a mammal but it lays eggs like a chicken. It lives in Australia.

  The biggest man ever to play football in the United States was Jasper “Moose” McGill, who weighed 450 pounds.

  “Well?” asked John.

  “I don’t get it,” said Barbara.

  “Neither do I. But I’m going to, understand?”

  Barbara sighed. “We’re going to have fish tonight. I hope you don’t mind.”

  John didn’t answer her. He got up and rummaged through his desk in the bedroom until he found a partly empty scrapbook. (The first twelve pages were taken up with stamps, a hobby he had abandoned.) He got some scissors and glue and went back to the papers on the living room floor.

  “There’s something funny going on around here,” he announced, and began to snip away with a vengeance.

  Outside, the wind shifted around to the north, and it began to grow cold.

  “Now look,” he said, after the fish had been transformed into bones and they were drinking their first cup of after-dinner coffee. “We’re intelligent people, and we should be able to figure this thing out.”

  Barbara, who was not terribly interested, smiled brightly. She was a tall, leggy blonde with friendly blue eyes and a sweet smile that had been known to melt ice cubes at twenty paces. The smile, however, had no perceptible effect on John.

  “Someone or something is messing with our newspaper,” he said, lighting a cigarette and puffing on it with his I-smoke-but-it’s-just-a-habit-I-don’t-really-enjoy manner. “You agree with that?”

  “Something? What do you mean by that?”

  John waved his cigarette. “How do I know? I’m just trying to include all the possibilities.”

  “Well.” Barbara looked over her shoulder nervously. The wind had died away to a whisper, and it was quiet outside. You could close your eyes and imagine you were all alone in the world….

  “OK,” John went on, frowning. “We agree. Next question: Why? If you yank a story about a bathing beauty out of someone’s paper and substitute a story about bass fishing, what are you up to?”

  Barbara moaned inwardly. Why not just call the paper? she thought. But no, that would be the last thing Johnny would ever do. She felt a warm glow. She loved her man, and wouldn’t change him for the world. Still—

  “Maybe it’s some fishing fanatic,” she suggested lamely. “He’s starting a private campaign to keep girls out of the water because they spoil the fishing.”

  John gave her a look of polite contempt. “Let’s make the question more general. If you take any story out of a man’s paper and put in another one, what are you up to?”

  Barbara drained her coffee and waited.

  John ground out his cigarette. “That’s right,” he said, as though she had said something. “There are only two basic possibilities. Either you are hiding something from him, cutting out a story you don’t want him to read, or else you are trying to tell him something—inserting a story you do want him to read. Now, which is it?”

  “Well,” Barbara said, determined to play along, “maybe he’s trying to keep all the sexy stories away from you. Doesn’t want to arouse your libido or something.”

  John considered this quite seriously. “Maybe,” he said. He smiled a secret smile. “But let’s take it from still another angle.”

  He’ll forget all about it in a week, she thought. But what a week! “Why me?” John demanded. “Why single me out? What’s so unusual about me?”

  “You’re different, dear.”

  “Everyone’s different, one way or another. I’m nobody important. I run a little computer, but there’s nothing secret about it. I’m twenty-six years old, I’ve never been in any trouble, I don’t have access to any classified information. I fiddled around with psychology in college before I got tired of running rats through mazes. Why me?”

  “The Naval Reserve? Radar?”

  “Hmmmm. Could be. But I’m not really any expert. It just doesn’t figure.”

  Barbara poured some more coffee and stacked the dishes in the sink. Suppose there’s really something to it. Suppose something’s AFTER my Johnny. She shivered.

  “Have you ever heard of Charles Fort?” John asked suddenly.

  “No. Where is it?”

  John muttered something under his breath. “This isn’t solving the problem. There’s just one thing to do.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’ll keep on getting two copies of the evening paper every night. I’ll save them and analyze the differences between them. If this means anything, some pattern is bound to emerge sooner or later. And don’t say anything about this to anyone, honey.”

  “I won’t,” she assured him sincerely. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to listen to the radio tonight. See if they’re censoring that, too.” He paused. “Lucky we don’t have a TV set. That would really complicate matters.”

  Barbara turned to the dishes.

  John got a notebook and pencil and switched the radio on. The radio was on the kitchen table, where they could listen to it at breakfast time, and it was somewhat temperamental. However, it came on in fine style tonight.

  “… and scientists continue to urge attention to this problem in the aftermath of the political campaign,” the radio blared. “The radioactive fallout from the hydrogen bomb tests constitutes a grave genetic hazard to future generations, and scientists stress the fact that …”

  John scribbled away diligently.

  Barbara washed off the dishes with a ragged sponge, being as quiet as she could. And, somehow, she was unable to shake off a queer feeling of unease, almost of fear.

  There was something funny going on.

  If someone’s after my Johnny …

  She broke a plate when she was drying it, which was something she hadn’t done in years.

  Two weeks passed. The crisp green of September gave way before the slippery yellow of October.

  John had established these facts to his own satisfaction:

  One, someone (or something) was definitely and systematically altering the front page of his newspaper.

  Two, discreet questions revealed that none of his friends were having similar problems.

  Three, the interference did not extend to other media of communications. His radio was okay.

  Four, there was no discernible pattern to the thing. The stories cut out of his paper were minor items, usually of the human interest type, but that was their only common thread. The new stories, his stories, were trivial to the point of incredibility.

  Then, on the fourth of October, as he was pasting the usual two clippings in his scrapbook, he hit the jackpot.

  “Look at this!” he hollered triumphantly.

  “I don’t see anything,” Barbara said, puzzled.

  “Look again. Don’t you see?”

  Dutifully, B
arbara read the two stories again.

  The first story, the one in the paper that John had surreptitiously bought in a crosstown supermarket, carried the headline: WOLF IN MAN’S CLOTHING JAILED. The story related the curious predatory adventures of one David Elmer Toney, who had been hunting for deer in the Texas hill-country in the vicinity of Kerrville. Mr. Toney had not had much luck when he happened upon a neatly fenced-in field that was snow-white with grazing sheep. Mr. Toney felt an itch in his trigger finger, and he let fly with his rifle. The dauntless marksman downed sixteen sheep before he was disarmed by an apoplectic rancher. “I don’t know what came over me,” Mr. Toney was quoted as saying. “I guess I just don’t like sheep.”

  There was a photograph of Mr. Toney; he looked reasonably normal.

  The second story, from the paper that John was now thinking of as his own special edition, was headlined: AUSTIN MAN LIKES JELLYBEANS.

  The story read:

  Austin, Oct. 4 (Spl.). Texans may eat beef every day, and some of them may even enjoy a friendly beer or two, but Mr. Harold X. Rogers of Austin practically lives on jellybeans. “I don’t know just what it is about them,” Mr. Rogers stated, “but I really go for jellybeans. Most days I just skip other foods so I can eat more jellybeans.”

  According to Rogers, this habit dates back to his childhood, when he used to carry a sack of jellybeans in his saddlebags while working cattle on his father’s West Texas ranch. “Jellybeans don’t make you short-winded like cigarettes do,” he observed, “and it was hard to roll those old cigarettes in the dust and wind.”

  Mr. Rogers is convinced that jellybeans are an excellent source of high-energy food, but he confesses that he really eats them “just for the fun of it.” He estimates that he consumes five pounds daily.

  The wombat never eats its young alive, scientists say.

  Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock was a German poet.

  John eyed his wife’s face expectantly. Then, noting its vacant expression, he threw up his hands in despair. “The name, honey! The name!”

  “Klopstock?”

  “Not Klopstock! Rogers. Harold X. Rogers!”

  “So who is Harold X. Rogers?”

  “I don’t know. But look here.” John flipped back through the pages of the scrapbook until he found the first clipping, the one about bass fishing on Lake Travis. “See? Same name: Harold X. Rogers. That time he was operating a boat dock on the lake, and now he’s eating jellybeans.”

  “Maybe that means something significant to you, dear, but—”

  “It’s the first sign of a pattern, that’s why it’s important. No other name has repeated itself in any of these stories. This is the first instance of a commonality. Suppose this Rogers, whoever he is, is trying to communicate with me …”

  “Then why not put his name in all the stories?”

  John frowned. “Good point,” he muttered, glancing at his wife in mild surprise. “Well, look at it this way. He doesn’t want to make it too easy.”

  “Why?”

  “How do I know? Maybe it’s a contest of some kind, or a game, or a test. The real question now is: who is Harold X. Rogers?”

  Barbara sighed. “Before you think of something devious, why not try the phone book?”

  John snapped his fingers and charged out into the hall. He snatched up the telephone book, flipped it open, and ran his finger down a column. “Rogers, Rogers,” he said. “Lots of them. Ah!”

  “Find it?”

  “Yeah. Harold X. Rogers. Address on Sixth Street—some kind of business address, probably. Greenwood 2-5059.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t call him, Johnny. I mean, wait until we can find out something …”

  “Nonsense!” said John, hot on the trail. “This is D-Day, H-Hour.”

  He dialed the number, listened a moment, and hung up the receiver.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Busy.”

  He waited five minutes, pacing the floor with Brutus padding along behind him, and tried again. “Still busy.”

  He kept on trying until after midnight, but the number was always busy.

  “Just one thing to do,” he announced.

  “Now, Johnny, you’re not going down there in the middle of the night, Harold X. Rogers or no Harold X. Rogers!”

  John hesitated, then nodded. “Of course not, honey. I’ll drop in on him tomorrow during my lunch hour—it’s only a few blocks from where I work.”

  Barbara knew that wild horses couldn’t keep her husband away from there the next day, so she just crossed her fingers. “You will be careful, won’t you?”

  “Sure, baby. I can take care of myself.”

  Brutus eyed his master dubiously.

  Nobody slept much that night, and it seemed that dawn would never come.

  For John Dodson, the next morning passed with all the rapidity of a turtle plodding across a field of glue. He worked impatiently, glancing at his watch every few minutes. And he thought: It’s amazing how deep a rut we all get into. Even when something like this turns up, we still check in at work and save adventure for our lunch hour!

  He felt no fear, not even a vague uneasiness. After all, what was there to be afraid of? His sole emotion was eagerness, like a kid on Christmas morning.

  John was always attracted to the unusual and the romantic. As a boy, the finding of an arrow point or an old rusty spur had been enough to set him off on day-long fantasies. Growing up, he had discovered, involved a certain hardening of the mental arteries, and it was a genuine thrill, it was exhilarating, to be actually mixed up in something different.

  Bring on your flying saucer pilots and your men from Mars! Bring on your sinister gang of murderers! Anything to put a bit of spice into living!

  Of course, he wasn’t really expecting anything of the sort. When he had been younger, he had sought out all the haunted houses for miles around and explored them thoroughly, but the last thing he had figured on running into was a genuine certified ghost.

  Well, who was Harold X. Rogers then, and what did he want?

  John inclined toward the notion that the whole deal was a test of some sort, perhaps part of a contest. Probably tied in somehow with TV; maybe they would give him fifty thousand dollars in nickels and then he could quit his job and go uranium hunting in Utah….

  A buzzer sounded.

  Noon.

  Time for lunch.

  Food was a million miles away from John’s mind, for once. He grabbed his topcoat and hurried outside. It was a chilly gray day, with a faint drizzle of rain in the air.

  Four blocks down Congress, then five blocks to the left along Sixth Street—

  There.

  An old, dirty stone building, three stories high, sandwiched in between a noisy beer hall and a cut-rate men’s clothing store. He paused a moment, sizing the place up. Jukebox music spilled out of the beer parlor into the wet street:

  “Oh I had a gal in San Antone

  “She was rustled by another;

  “Now all I do is set and moan

  “She’s run off with my bro-ther, …

  Shivering a little, John stepped inside the doorway and pushed open the reluctant door. He found himself in a dingy hall, with a flight of wooden stairs leading up to the second floor. He mounted the stairs, half expecting them to collapse under his weight, and at the second floor landing he came to another door.

  It was an ordinary wooden door, and it had a button in the panel to the right. Underneath the button a small white card was stuck to the wood with a thumbtack. The card read: HAROLD X. ROGERS.

  John felt an unreasonable surge of triumph.

  He held his breath and listened, but the place was silent as a tomb. The only sound came from the bar next door, where the cowpoke was still lamenting his sibling’s perfidy.

  He pressed the button.

  There was no ring or buzz that he could hear, but a yellow bar of light suddenly appeared under the door. He thought he heard a swelling hum, like an activated dyn
amo, but it passed quickly.

  “Come in!” an excited voice called.

  John opened the door and stepped inside. He was in a large, rather barren room. The only substantial piece of furniture in the place was an ancient roll-top desk. Behind the desk stood a short, balding, red-faced man. The man was built on the rotund principle, and had obviously been eating something besides jellybeans.

  “Are you Rogers? Harold X. Rogers?”

  The man stared at him, the enthusiastic welcome light dying out in his eyes and being replaced by a look of disappointment that he tried heroically to hide.

  “I am Rogers,” he said in a careful, precise voice. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Dodson.”

  There was no response from Rogers.

  “John Dodson.”

  The fat man sat down in a swivel chair behind the desk. He made no attempt to shake hands.

  “I figured out your little deal in the paper,” John continued doggedly.

  “Oh,” the man said, “that!” He waved a plump, well-manicured hand airily, as though the matter was of no consequence whatsoever.

  “Yes, that.” John was beginning to get annoyed. “‘Don’t you think I’m entitled to some sort of an explanation?”

  “Not necessarily.” Mr. Rogers folded his hands and leaned back in his chair. He was trying hard to give an impression of boredom, and he might have succeeded except that his hands were trembling violently….

  John frowned. There was no way he could force the man to talk. He toyed with the idea of threatening some sort of legal action, but Rogers had promised nothing, there was no obvious intent to defraud—

  “Ummmm,” said Mr. Rogers, trying to sound casual. “You—er—worked it all out for yourself, is that right?”

  John nodded.

  “No—ummmm—help from anyone, is that correct?” The man’s diction was still oddly precise, as though he were speaking a foreign language.