A Star Above It and Other Stories Read online

  A STAR ABOVE IT AND OTHER STORIES

  Chad Oliver

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Introduction: Chad Oliver (Howard Waldrop)

  Blood’s a Rover

  The Land of Lost Content

  The Ant and the Eye

  Artifact

  Any More At Home Like You?

  Rewrite Man

  The Edge of Forever

  The Boy Next Door

  A Star Above It

  The Mother of Necessity

  Night

  Technical Advisor

  Between the Thunder and the Sun

  The One That Got Away

  Transfusion

  Guardian Spirit

  The Gift

  To Whom It May Concern

  A Stick for Harry Eddington

  Old Four-Eyes

  Website

  Also by Chad Oliver

  Acknowledgments

  First Appearances

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION: CHAD OLIVER

  The guy’s been gone ten years now, and it’s still hard to write about him.

  Symmes Chadwick Oliver was born on March 28, 1928, in Cincinnati, the son and grandson of doctors; his mother had been a nurse when she met his father.

  He grew up in Cincinnati (Ledgewood, to be precise; more later). He did all the usual kid stuff, baseball, bicycling, reading. He was a flyfisherperson from the time he could hold a rod. He saw the first reissue of King Kong; after that he watched the tree outside his window every night for the sign of the big ape’s approach.

  Then when he was twelve he was hit with rheumatic fever. Gone were bicycles, flyrods, baseball bats. There was Chad in his bed for a year, watching other kids fish, wreck their bikes and miss skinners. What was left to him was reading and listening to jazz records.

  What he read, besides books, was mostly the air-war pulps: Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds; G-8 and His Battle Aces. He wrote letters to the editors; he got back letters from Robert O. Erisman that ended “Clear Skies and Tailwinds”.

  One day by mistake, he was brought, along with the usual air-combat stuff, one of the old encyclopedia-sized Amazing Stories. Chad leafed through it, came across Edmond Hamilton’s “Treasure on Thunder Moon”, read it and pronounced it “the greatest piece of literature ever written!”

  Out of bed jumps Chad (rheumatic fever be damned!), gets on his bike, hotfoots it to the nearest newsstand and buys up everything that looks like Amazing.

  Soon the letter columns of the SF magazines were full of things signed “Chad Oliver, the Loony Lad of Ledgewood.”

  By and by Chad was out of bed for good; by and by the US was sucked into the vortex of the last World Unpleasantness by Pearl Harbor.

  Chad’s father got a commission in the Army. They pulled up their Ohio roots and found themselves in Crystal City, Texas.

  Chad lived in the Crystal City complex, which was one-half German-Italian POW camp, and one-half Japanese-American relocation camp, where his father was the doctor. “At the German-Italian POW camp the machine guns pointed in,” said Chad once. “At the Japanese portion, the guns pointed out, in case some farmer decided to get a little rough justice for what was happening on Guadalcanal or in the Solomons.”

  He went to Crystal City High School, and as he said, “Football saved my scrawny ass.” He went in as S.C. Oliver, 96 lb. weakling; out comes Chad, the Boy Who Walks Like A Mountain. He liked it so much that when the camp was closed and his father restationed in Corpus Christi, he rented a room in town and finished out his senior year of gridiron glory.

  Unlike everyone else in town, who went to Texas A&M, Chad entered UT, where he majored in English.

  The war was over; he and his father, in search of bigger and better trout, crossed over Slumgullion Pass in the summer of 1946, and in Lake City, Colorado, stopped at the little falls in front of the grocery store on the Lake Fork of the Gunnison. There was a guy fishing there with a cane pole and some worms. They asked him if he knew where a good place to fish would be. The guy reached down and pulled up a stringer with two seven-pound cutthroats on it. “This is as good as any,” the guy said.

  Chad and his father looked at each other, and said, like Dean Jagger in the movie, “This is the Place.”

  Meanwhile Chad lucked out and got a succession of brilliant profs, including some in his anthropology electives. That didn’t stop him and Garvin Berry from publishing the first SF fanzine in Texas, The Moon Puddle, in 1948, where they used such pseudonyms as L. Sprague de Willy.

  Along about 1950 Chad took off for UCLA to get his graduate degrees in English and anthropology. His life was changing in big ways. He sold his first story (more later); he met other writers in LA, and he met BeJe.

  They were married, in Forrest J Ackerman’s living room, on November 1, 1952 (they wanted to get married on Halloween, but Chad had classes that day …). Ray Bradbury was best man. You can’t get any more fannish than that.

  Life for Chad became a blur of writing, teaching, fishing, and eventually, field work among the Kamba of East Africa, in the late 1950s and early sixties. He also returned to UT to teach.

  As if that weren’t enough, he did a jazz radio show four hours a week as the Masked DJ, or whatever he was called.

  Eventually there were two kinder, Kim (a she) and Glenn (a he). In the fullness of time he became a grandad.

  Inevitably, Chad became chairman of the anthropology department at UT. He immediately made two rules: that the chairmanship would become a rotating one, so he wouldn’t be stuck in the job forever; and, that the chairman had to teach the 300-student Intro to Anthro course. (“You meet every student who’s going to be in the department for the next four years; you don’t get rusty just teaching graduate seminars.”) Non-majors always packed the place the day Chad ran through all the primate distress calls, from gibbon to human. (“Man, the ape that walks like a chicken,” as he used to say.)

&n
bsp; He also worked to set up and refine Plan II Studies, whereby all the bright kids (as Chad had been) could skip most of the crap. He won, eventually, every teaching award UT had to give. He probably influenced the lives of 20-30,000 students; people would come back to college 15 years later, wander into his office like it was a public convenience, and tell him he’d changed their lives.

  When he wasn’t in Africa, or teaching and writing (his other specialty was the Plains Indians—more later), or dealing with the Headaches of Academe, he was trying to make a viable trout fishery of the Guadalupe River in Texas, the southernmost place they can live in the U.S., and fighting with the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority over minimum flows. He served as President of the Texas Chapter of Trout Unlimited a few times; for his pretty much damn thankless efforts they gave him their Conservation Award in the early ’90s.

  Also by and by Chad had three bouts each with two entirely separate kinds of cancer. He was a tough guy—he probably had eighteen good months in the last eight years of his life. He kept on doing everything—teaching (except for the last six months), writing and fishing—right up until the end.

  He passed away, ironically enough, on Isaak Walton’s birthday, August 9th, 1993. He had turned 65 in March; it should have been his year of retirement from UT.

  You have here, in these two volumes, Chad the Writer. He had been sending off stories since he was 14. One day (more later) one didn’t come back. Then another didn’t, and another and another, and so it went.

  He wrote his first novel (at 24), Mists of Dawn, for the Winston SF juvenile series, a time-travel story of Neanderthals and those pesky Cro-Magnons (us). Then came Shadows in the Sun in 1954, in which a transposed Crystal City is found to be full of aliens. The Winds of Time came out in 1957. (“What ever happened to that handsome devil in the author photo on the back of that book?” I once asked him. “They killed him and replaced him with me,” Chad said.) Then came Unearthly Neighbors (1960), The Shores of Another Sea (1971) and Giants in the Dust (1976). Those were the SF novels.

  Chad plugged away for years in SF, getting all the prestige he could eat, but damned little else. Eventually he sat down and wrote about his second love, Westerns, and he got awards out the old wazoo. The Wolf Is My Brother (1967) won the Western Writers of America SPUR award (it really is a pair of spurs). Broken Eagle (1989), the Little Bighorn novel he’d researched for 25 years, won the Western Heritage Society Award as Best Novel (and at the awards ceremony both BeJe and Chad danced with James Garner, another honoree). He didn’t live to see his third Western, The Cannibal Owl (1993,) in print. (He had 18 pages left to do when he was told he had to go in for yet another operation. “Ten, and I would have done it that night,” he said. “Eighteen was too much.” A week after he got out of the hospital, he sat down and finished the book in two days and mailed it off.)

  Those are his novels.

  Chad had only two collections published in his lifetime: Another Kind (1955) and The Edge of Forever (1971).

  Chad sold his first story, “The Boy Next Door,” to F&SF in 1950 (although his second sale, “The Land of Lost Content”, was published first, in Super Science Stories). He hit the ground running and never looked back, publishing stories nearly every year of his 43-year career. There was just plain a burst of sales twice in his career: early in the Fifties, another in the late 80s and early ’90s. Some of those last ones got him Nebula nominations.

  Running through his bibliography are many titles from A. E. Housman’s poems, an early literary love of Chad’s: “The Land of Lost Content”, “Between the Thunder and the Sun”. When Harlan Ellison wanted to title his sequel to “A Boy and His Dog,” “Blood’s a Rover”, he wrote to Chad as a matter of courtesy to ask if it were okay, as Chad had used that title on a story in 1952. “Why are you asking me?” Chad wrote back. “Why aren’t you asking the Housman estate? That’s who I stole it from …”

  From the subject matter of his novels—either dealing directly with anthropology, or with contacts between cultures and aliens—Chad was thought by some to deal almost exclusively with these themes. You’ll find in these two volumes the depth and breadth of the things he was interested in, from the jazz-world of “Didn’t He Ramble?” to the Twilight Zone-type story (seven years before the TV show premiered) of “Transformer”, a story that should stay in print, all the time, somewhere, forever.

  What you have here is forty-something years of the man and the writer, alpha to omega, absolute first to last. Besides everything else he did, it’s a body of work anyone would be proud of.

  If you haven’t made these word-journeys before, I, as the usual phrase goes, envy you. But I really do. Those of us reading him all along were always surprised by the guy. No matter what had happened before; the next one wasn’t going to be like that. There is the pastoral tone, as they say, all the way through. There’s an elegiac tone too, in some of them—not just in the later ones, though. Check out “King of the Hill”—that was in the middle, and pretty much says it all about us, i.e., homo sapiens—manlike but not so wise.

  Here’s Symmes Chadwick Oliver at his best.

  Or to those of us who miss him so much, plain ol’ wonderful Chad.

  Howard Waldrop

  Austin, Texas

  May 2003

  BLOOD’S A ROVER

  Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;

  Breath’s a ware that will not keep.

  Up, lad: when the journey’s over

  There’ll be time enough to sleep.

  —A. E. Housman

  I

  Night sifted through the city like flakes of soft black snow drifting down from the stars. It whispered along the tree-lined canyons between the clean shafts of white buildings and pressed darkly against windows filled with warm light. Conan Lang watched the illumination in his office increase subtly in adjusting to the growing darkness outside and then looked again at the directive he held in his hand.

  It still read the same way.

  “Another day, another world,” he said aloud. And then, paraphrasing: “The worlds are too much with us—”

  Conan Lang fired up his pipe and puffed carefully on it to get it going properly. Then he concentrated on blowing neat cloudy smoke rings that wobbled across the room and impaled themselves on the nose of the three-dimensional portrait of the President. It wasn’t that he had anything against President Austin, he assured himself. It was simply that Austin represented that nebulous being, Authority, and at the moment it happened that Authority was singularly unwelcome in the office of Conan Lang.

  He looked back at the directive. The wording was friendly and informal enough, but the meaning was clear:

  Headquarters, Gal. Administration.

  Office of Admiral Nelson White,

  Commander, Process Planning Division.

  15 April, 2701. Confidential.

  One Agent Conan Lang

  Applied Process Corps

  G.A. Department Seven

  Conan:

  We got another directive from the Buzzard yesterday. Seems that the powers that be have decided that a change in Sirius Ten is in order—a shift from Four to Five. You’re it. Make a prelim check and report to me at your convenience. Cheer up—maybe you’ll get another bag of medals out of it.

  Nelson.

  Conan Lang left the directive on his desk and got to his feet. He walked over to the window and looked out at the lights sprinkled over the city. There weren’t many. Most people were long ago home in the country, sitting around the living room, playing with the kids. He puffed slowly on his pipe.

  Another bag of medals. Nelson wasn’t kidding anybody—wasn’t even trying to, really. He knew how Conan felt because he felt the same way. They all did, sooner or later. It was fascinating at first, even fun, this tampering with the lives of other people. But the novelty wore off in a hurry—shriveled like flesh in acid under a million eyes of hate, a million talks with your soul at three in the morning, a million shattered lives. Su
re, it was necessary. You could always tell yourself that; that was the charm, the magic word that was supposed to make everything fine and dandy. Necessary—but for you, not for them. Or perhaps for them too, in the long run.

  Conan Lang returned to his desk and flipped on the intercom. “I want out,” he said. “The Administration Library, Division of Extraterrestrial Anthropology. I’d like to speak to Bailey if he’s there.”

  He had to wait thirty seconds.

  “Bailey here,” the intercom said.

  “This is Lang. What’ve you got on Sirius Ten?”

  “Just like that, huh? Hang on a second.”

  There was a short silence. Conan Lang smoked his pipe slowly and smiled as he visualized Bailey punching enough buttons to control a space fleet.

  “Let’s see,” Bailey’s voice came through the speaker. “We’ve got a good bit. There’s McAllister’s ‘Kinship Systems of Sirius Ten’; Jenkins’—that’s B. J. Jenkins, the one who worked with Holden—‘Sirius Ten Social Organization’; Bartheim’s ‘Economic Life of Sirius Ten’; Robert Patterson’s ‘Basic Personality Types of the Sirius Group’; ‘Preliminary and Supplementary Ethnological Surveys of the Galactic Advance Fleet’—the works.”

  Conan Lang sighed. “O.K.,” he said. “Shoot them out to my place, will you?”

  “Check—be there before you are. One thing more, Cone.”

  “Yes?”

  “Been reading a splendid eight-volume historical novel of the Twentieth Century. Hot stuff, I’ll tell you. You want me to send it along in case you run out of reading material?”

  “Very funny. See you around.”

  “So long.”

  Conan Lang switched off the intercom and destroyed the directive. He tapped out his pipe in the waster and left the office, locking the door behind him. The empty hallway was sterile and impersonal. It seemed dead at night, somehow, and it was difficult to believe that living, breathing human beings walked through it all day long. It was like a tunnel to nowhere. He had the odd feeling that there was nothing around it at all, just space and less than space—no building, no air, no city. Just a white antiseptic tunnel to nowhere.