said.
“Maybe it’s not an adventure after all.” Rodney was disappointed that this was such a relief.
“Don’t give up so easily, Rodney. With adventures, you have to expect the unexpected. That’s something else that makes an adventure.”
“I suppose.”
“If you have time, call me and your mother when something happens. You have the number?”
“If I have time?”
“Adventures sometimes come swiftly. You’ll call?”
“Sure, Dad. If I have time.”
“That’s great. Anything else?”
They spoke for a few minutes more. Rodney asked Mr. Congruent to pass along his regards to his mom, and they hung up.
Rodney sat by the phone waiting to feel different. He felt a little nauseous, but that was probably because he’d eaten too many cherries. Nothing else. He was just some kid sitting next to a telephone with a square yellow sticker on his forehead. Rodney went lack upstairs and started his math homework. When fifteen minutes had gone by, Rodney figured he’d given the adventure his best shot. Besides, the skin under the sticker was itching. He lifted his hand to pull the sticker off.
“Yow!” he cried. Rodney’d expected the sticker to just about fall off in his hand. But it didn’t. Rodney pulled gently but firmly. The sticker stuck to his forehead as if it were a scab or something. He pulled harder. Nothing. He pulled hard enough to make his forehead hurt, but the sticker wouldn’t come away.
Rodney rushed to the bathroom. He rubbed soap all over the sticker, then baby oil. Nothing would loosen it. He looked at himself in the mirror, breathing hard from excitement and from the exertion of trying to pull off the sticker.
Whoever sent these stickers had had their reasons. It could still be poisoning him, or twining through his nervous system, or who knew what? Rodney thought of calling his parents but decided not to. His father had given this adventure to him. It was up to Rodney to figure out what to do about it. Even if it killed him.
CHAPTER THREE
UNDER RODNEY’S HAT
Rodney tugged gently at the sticker while he finished his math homework. Entire minutes went by when he didn’t even think about the sticker. It became just something to play with, like a callous or a hangnail. But at other moments he wondered when the sticker would begin to act, and what strange symptom he would notice first.
He wondered while he took his kazoo out of its case and plugged it in. He wondered while he set up his music stand and unfolded the music from the haircutting scene from Pastrami’s Samson and Delilah. He wondered while he hummed the first notes at the top of the page into his kazoo. His wonder suddenly turned to horror.
Experimentally, he hummed into his kazoo again. At first, because the sounds he was making were so awful, he feared he’d forgotten how to hum. Then he decided that the sounds themselves were not awful. They were the same as always.
But now, unaccountably, in a matter of hours, his taste in music had changed. He hummed a few more notes into his kazoo, and the sound—which earlier that day had been so soothing—now put his teeth on edge. Itchy things crawled over his body.
He tried to remain calm but was not successful. Giving up the kazoo in order to have an adventure was not ever what he’d had in mind. Competing with his parents was silly, anyway. He didn’t need to have an adventure just because they’d both had one. Of course, the yellow sticker didn’t seem to be giving him a choice.
He frowned. And then with determination, Rodney began to hum into his instrument again. He concentrated on the music, but that didn’t keep his skin from itching. He felt himself getting angry. By the time he’d finished the page, he was ready to tear phone books in half with his teeth.
Had the sticker changed his feelings only about kazoo music, or was it music in general? Rodney turned on the radio. A woman was singing a commercial about how everybody needed a credit card. The tune was trivial and the message insulting, but neither of them made Rodney itch. He turned off the radio and opened the “Latvian Sailor’s Dance.” The moment he began to play, jackhammers began pulverizing an old sidewalk inside his brain.
He sat in his chair sweating and breathing hard, the kazoo a dead weight in his hands. As far as he was concerned, the sound of a kazoo was now fingernails on a slate, cats howling, and the whine of a dentist’s drill all rolled into one. Rodney had never heard of a poison that made you hate kazoo music. There had to be more to it. Rodney would have to quit the orchestra. A yellow sticker did not seem like much to get in exchange.
Hoping to distract himself from the blackness closing in, Rodney put his kazoo away and went downstairs to watch TV.
* * * * * * *
By the time he had brushed his teeth, Rodney felt normal again. He studied the sticker in the bathroom mirror. It was the enemy. There had to be some way to defeat it. Maybe surgery was the only answer. Maybe electrolysis would work. The ads in the back of comic books said that electrolysis removed unwanted hair painlessly. Hair, stickers, what could be the difference? Rodney had no idea what electrolysis was, but he suspected it hurt more than the ads admitted.
He crawled into bed, stared at the blank ceiling for a moment, and decided he was being a goof. He switched on the light, got out of bed, and tried his kazoo once more. The vibration seemed to be shaking his brain loose. He got back into bed and turned out the light. He lay there for a while and was not even aware when he drifted into a dream.
In the dream Rodney had long slender hands covered with downy fur. If he crossed his eyes, he could see that his nose ended in a stubby snout. None of this bothered him; it all seemed normal. That all this weird stuff seemed normal should have bothered him, but this was a dream and it didn’t. Rodney’s dream personality seemed a lot like the personality he had while he was awake. He had a job to do, something a little vague—dreamlike—and he watched out for himself, but he was basically a good person who had no desire to hurt anybody.
Still, some things in the dream did upset him. He was far from home and had been roving for a long time, searching for something evil. In the dream the evil thing was a dirty brown blob that writhed and pulsated. It frightened Rodney even as it fascinated him. The evil thing had something to do with his job. Memories of adventures involving strange machines and stranger creatures did not excite him, but the longing to complete the job colored everything else like a thin gray fog.
Across the room, which seemed to be made of metal, was a creature three times his size. The creature looked like a bear that was wearing a utility belt around his middle and a small stool over his head as if it were a space helmet. The legs hung front and back and the rungs of the stool rested on the creature’s shoulders. He and the bear seemed to be having a spirited discussion.
Whoever or whatever Rodney was, he liked and trusted the bear, though he thought the bear was kind of a goof with no serious goals or ideas. Like an uncle who showed up with presents from Outer Mongolia, bought everybody the biggest ice cream sodas they’d ever seen, stayed up all night eating cheese puffs and watching Marx Brothers movies on TV, and then went away, leaving your head swimming.
The bear turned around and adjusted one of the controls that covered the wall.
Then, as is sometimes the case in dreams, Rodney was suddenly somewhere else without quite knowing how he’d gotten there. He was outside under a black sky strewn with stars, walking across a field that extended as far as he could see. Huge alien machines stood at intervals on the field. The one nearest him had a sign floating in front of it. He thought he ought to be able to read the words on the sign, but he couldn’t. That bothered him more than the fact that he was some animal and that he was consorting with bears who used tools. But it didn’t bother him as much as what needed to be done with the evil thing.
After that the dream broke up into swirling alien machines and alien faces. One of the alien faces seemed to glow.