Many science fiction short stories begin with an idea about a gimmick: an invention, a problem, an exotic new background. Then the writer works out the characters and plot to showcase the idea. Thus we get a steady succession of what are called “gimmick stories”: brilliant protagonist runs into impossible problem and solves it with brilliant invention or deduction or improvisation or whatnot. Gimmick stories can be fun to read, but they seldom leave a lasting impression. They are like eating popcorn: It tastes good at the time, but there’s very little lasting value.

There have been so many gimmick stories in science fiction that both readers and editors have become very critical of them. Unless the story has a truly surprising twist to it, the science fiction audience will probably figure out the ending well ahead of time, and thus the story’s suspense value is ruined.

The stories that last, the stories that really stay in the readers’ minds, are usually stories that have a strong interplay between a very sympathetically drawn protagonist and a powerful, overwhelming problem. The writer’s task is to make the reader care about the protagonist. Tie him to a chair and put a bomb at his feet; then make certain that the bomb’s clock ticks loudly.

 

GIVING STRENGTH TO YOUR PLOTS

For me, as a writer, the best way to build a good plot is to begin with a strong, sympathetic protagonist and put him into action against a similarly strong antagonist.

Strong, in this context, does not necessarily mean the jutting jaw, steely eyes and bulging muscles of the typical old-time pulp magazine hero. In a novelette called “The Dueling Machine” (which I later expanded into a novel), my protagonist was a gangling, bumbling young man who could barely walk across a room without getting into trouble. His antagonist was an equally young man who had athletic and martial arts skills. But the protagonist had strengths that the antagonist lacked, chiefly sincerity, honesty, and a dogged, stubborn kind of heroism that could take a lot of punishment without admitting defeat.

As Kipling pointed out in his Ballad of East and West:

 

    But there is neither East nor West,

    Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

    When two strong men stand face to face, tho’

    they come from the ends of the earth.

 

If you can place two strong characters “face to face,” in conflict with each other, they will build the plot of the story for you. All you need to do is give them something to struggle over and a background in which to carry on the conflict. It might be a chess tournament, as in Fritz Leiber’s “The Sixty-Four Square Madhouse”; or a struggle between a lone individual and a lock-step conformist society, as in Harlan Ellison’s ” ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”; or the brutality of war, as in Joe Haldeman’s novel, The Forever War.

In a short story there is very little room or time for a deeply probing psychological analysis of the characters, or a gradual building up of plot and conflict. Particularly in a science fiction short story, where so much effort must be spent on making the background understandable and believable, the writer must open the story with that noisy time bomb.

Most new writers do not understand that, although once in a while a newcomer hits that particular nail squarely. Scott W. Schumack accomplished it quite nicely in his first published work, “Persephone and Hades.” Here are the opening lines of his story:

 

This is the way legends are born.

Twenty-three hours out of twenty-four Carver hunted her. He crept silently through the labyrinthine corridors and artificial caverns of the Necropolis, armed, wary of ambush, and above all, hating her.

 

In those few lines, the writer has established the protagonist, the antagonist, the background setting and a conflict. More than that. He has dangled what is called the “narrative hook” in front of the reader’s eyes, and the reader bites on it immediately. We want to know more: who, why, where, when, how? The time bomb is ticking loud and clear in those first two paragraphs. We know it is going to explode, and we want to find out what is happening.

 

NURTURING PLOT SURPRISES

Every plot needs a few surprising twists and turns, of course. But even here it is best to let the characters themselves surprise you, the writer. If you have developed a set of interesting characters, people who are alive in your mind, you will find that they start to do surprising things as you write their story. They will take over their own destinies and stubbornly resist your efforts to bend them to a preconceived plot. The antagonist that you wanted to put in jail will squeeze out of your trap. The protagonist whom you thought would go off in one direction will suddenly decide to do something completely different.

Let them! As long as the characters are working on the conflict-problem that they started the story with, let them do things their own way. But when they drop the original problem and begin working on something new, then you have a serious flaw in the story. Either the problem you started to write about is not working well, or you’ve gotten off the track of the story completely. Then you must decide whether to scrap what you have written and return to the original story line or scrap the original idea and let the characters go their own way.

Next to the opening of a short story, the ending is the most critical section. The ending must at the same time surprise your readers and convince them of its inevitable logic. A good short story ends like a good joke: with a snap that surprises and delights. But the ending must also be consistent with the main body of the story. You cannot have the titanically powerful villain, who has the hero at his mercy, suddenly drop dead of a gratuitous heart attack. Neither can you have the heroine abruptly decide that the world is too much for her and commit suicide.

Many new writers work very hard to pull a surprise ending out of their stories. Surprises are fine, but only when they are consistent with the rest of the story. I think that O. Henry has ruined many a promising young writer, because they read his “twist" endings in school and spend the rest of their writing careers trying to emulate him. Their careers are usually short, unless they outgrow the temptation to write surprise endings.

Surprises are fine at the end of a story, but surprise endings are dangerous. To explain: O. Henry’s stories were written around the final punch line. Take away the ending and there is no real story. O. Henry did it masterfully, but it is essentially a gimmick, a trick that has very limited uses. New writers should plot their stories around main characters and their conflicts, not around a trick ending. Otherwise, they produce an essentially dull, uninspired piece of work that depends entirely on the whopper at the very end.

 

 

BUILDING STORY FLOW

Some writers like to make fairly detailed outlines of their stories, so that they know almost exactly what is going to happen, scene by scene. This makes some sense for longer works such as novels, where the plot can get quite complicated. We will discuss outlining for novels in chapter fifteen. But for the short story, outlines can sometimes be a hindrance rather than a help.

If the story is to flow out of the conflict between the two major characters (or the protagonist’s conflict with the environment), a detailed outline might just strangle the characters’ freedom of action. If the writer forces the characters to move from scene to scene and speak the dialogue necessary for each scene exactly as outlined, the end effect is generally a very wooden story.

Short stories usually do not have that many scenes, nor such complicated plots, that elaborate outlining is necessary. Certainly the writer must be exact about the background details of the story, especially science fictional elements when the story is set elsewhere from the here-and-now. And the protagonist’s inner conflict must be nailed down firmly in the writer’s mind before the first words are set on paper. But more often than not, a detailed outline of the plot stultifies the story. If you know your characters and their conflicts, you should let them write the story for you. Only if you find yourself drifting hopelessly at sea should you make a detailed outline for plotting purposes.

In writing stories of any length, the most important thing to keep in mind is show, don’t tell. It is so important that I will say it again:

Show, don’t tell.

This is especially true in the short story.

The moment you break the flow of the story’s action to explain things to the reader, you run the risk of losing the reader. All of a sudden, instead of being in the story, living the role of the protagonist, the reader is listening to you lecturing. No matter how important the information you want to get across, readers are immediately reminded that they are reading, rather than living in the story. It is a risk that you should never run if you can avoid it. Never give the reader an opportunity to look up from the page.

If you find it necessary to explain the eighteen-century-long history of the Terran Confederation, find some way to have the characters do it for you. And not by having them discuss it! Putting dull lectures into dialogue form does not stop them from being dull lectures. If the story absolutely will not work without all that background history, you must personify the information in a character, and have that character’s actions show the readers what you want them to learn.

In ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, all that background information can be chopped out of the story with no loss at all. The reader generally does not need or want long treatises of background information. The writer must know this information, because it will shape the actions of the story’s characters. But in most cases, the story can get along perfectly well without the lecture, and the reader will be much happier without it.

If you are in doubt about this point, take a story you have written that has a large amount of background explanation in it, and remove the explanations. See for yourself if the story does not move more swiftly and keep your interest better. Of course, some of the characters’ actions and motivations may be unexplained; but you should be able to find a way to explain them through action, rather than lecturing.

An important rule of thumb when it comes to imparting background information is never to allow the characters to tell each other anything that they already know. It is always tempting to explain things to the reader by using this technique, but it is always a mistake.

 

“Why John,” he said, “you remember how the expedition team got across Endless Swamp, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” John replied, chuckling softly. “They glued their snowshoes together to make a raft, and then..."

 

If you feel it absolutely necessary to get that particular point across to the reader, do it through action. Without even raising the question of the Endless Swamp Exploration Team, have John glance at a battered set of glued-together snowshoes hanging on the wall of his host’s den. And even then, don’t do it at all unless you are going to use those glued-together snowshoes later in the story. Like all background information, if it does not contribute to the story, throw it out.

Good writers are good plotters, although they seldom let a preconceived plot take such complete command of a story that it stiffens the characters and forces them into artificial situations. Mark Twain, one of the best writers America has produced, penned a marvelous essay about writing titled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” It is funny, pointed, and contains more good advice about writing than any other sixteen pages in the English language.

Two important points that Twain raises about story construction are “that a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. [And] . . . that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale and shall help to develop it.”

In other words, a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. It is distressingly true that many, many slushpile stories lack such organization. They wander aimlessly, with no clear-cut purpose or conflict to give them shape and meaning. If you set your time bomb to go off at the end of the story and start it ticking on the first page, then almost inevitably the story will record your protagonist’s attempts to prevent the explosion from destroying his life.

All the scenes and events in a short story must play a vital role. You do not have time or room to spend the first few pages describing the heroine’s family background or the geological forces on the newly discovered planet Whatsit. Start the clock ticking! Delete every scene and every line of dialogue or description that does not contain a tick of the time bomb’s clock in it! Be ruthless with your own prose. It is painful, well I know. But it is necessary.

Even in a novel, be wary of excursions from the main line that leads directly to that time bomb’s explosion. Side trips are possible in a novel, perhaps even desirable, but they should be short and they should support the main plot line. More about that in chapter sixteen.

 

STORY MOVEMENT

As the plot develops, the story must move. That is, it must progress from the beginning, through the middle, to the end. In order for the story to move forward, the protagonist must learn things, grow and change. The reader must discover something new and, one hopes, something delightfully interesting or fiendishly frightening on every page.

Many new writers (and even some old hands, alas) confuse motion with movement. They whiz the protagonist out of his office, down a conveyer-belt slidewalk, into a jet helicopter, out to the spaceport, onto a shuttle rocket, and from there to the space station and finally to the antagonist’s antigravity-driven starship ― all in the name of movement. But if nothing is happening except a recitation of various modes of transportation, the story is not moving at all!

The characters can run breathlessly in circles page after page while the story stands still. The reader watches, bemused, as doors open and slam, engines roar, seatbelts get fastened―and nothing happens. If there is too much of this in a story, the reader will put it down and go off to the medicine chest for some Dramamine. Just as physical action is not necessarily conflict, physical motion is not necessarily movement.

A story moves forward when the protagonist (and consequently the reader) makes a new discovery. All the rest is busywork, no matter how much physical action or movement a writer includes in a story.

A good writer convinces the reader that the protagonist had a rich and busy life before the story began and will continue to do so after the last page of the story has been finished. In other words, the plot should be arranged so that the reader gets the feeling that this character is really alive; her life did not begin on page one and end on page last. She encompasses much more than merely the events of this one short story. Perhaps we shall meet her again, someday.

Of course, if the protagonist dies at the end of the story, the reader cannot expect to find him again. But there should be some character who will live on after the story’s end, mourning for the protagonist. This provides a sense of continuity, which is a subtle but extremely powerful method for convincing the reader that the story is true.

 

 

A PLOT CHECKLIST

To recapitulate the points of this chapter:

 

1. Plant a time bomb on the first page― in the first paragraph, if possible.

2. Each story involves a race against time. That time bomb is set to explode at the climax of the story; its ticking should be heard on every page.

3. Every scene must further the plot. Especially in a short story, if a scene does not help move the story forward, take it out.

4. There should be surprises in the story every few pages. New complications and new problems should arise as the story progresses, moving the plot along on a chain of interlinked promises.

5. Show, don’t tell!

6. The characters’ actions should move the story from its beginning to its end. Characters must be active, not passive. The protagonist must change.

7. The story ends when the time bomb goes off (or is prevented from going off). The ending must answer satisfactorily the major problems raised in the story’s beginning.

8. Surprise endings are good only when the reader is truly surprised; even then they must be logically consistent with the rest of the story.

 

Chapter Thirteen

 

Plot in Science Fiction

 

The Shining Ones

A Complete Short Story

 

 

 

 

Johnny Donato lay flat on his belly in the scraggly grass and watched the strangers' ship carefully.

It was resting on the floor of the desert, shining and shimmering in the bright New Mexico sunlight. The ship was huge and round like a golden ball, like the sun itself. It

touched the ground as lightly as a helium-filled balloon. In fact, Johnny wasn't sure that it really did touch the ground at all.

He squinted his eyes, but he still couldn't tell if the ship was really in contact with the sandy desert flatland. It cast no shadow, and it seemed to glow from some energies hidden inside itself. Again, it reminded Johnny of the sun.

But these people didn't come from anywhere near our sun, Johnny knew. They come from a world of a different star.

He pictured in his mind how small and dim the stars look at night. Then he glanced at the powerful glare of the sun. How far away the stars must be! And these strangers have traveled all that distance to come here. To Earth. To New Mexico. To this spot in the desert.

Johnny knew he should feel excited. Or maybe scared. But all he felt right now was curious. And hot. The sun was beating down on the rocky ledge where he lay watching, baking his bare arms and legs. He was used to the desert sun. It never bothered him.

But today something was burning inside Johnny. At first he thought it might be the sickness. Sometimes it made him feel hot and weak. But no, that wasn't it. He had the sickness, there was nothing anyone could do about that. But it didn't make him feel this way.

This thing inside him was something he had never felt before. Maybe it was the same kind of thing that made his father yell in fury, ever since he had been laid off from his job. Anger was part of it, and maybe shame, too. But there was something else, something Johnny couldn’t put a name to.

So he lay there flat on his belly, wondering about himself and the strange ship from the stars. He waited patiently, like his Apache friends would, while the sun climbed higher in the bright blue sky and the day grew hotter and hotter.

The ship had landed three days earlier. Landed was really the wrong word. It had touched down as gently as a cloud drifts against the tops of the mountains. Sergeant Warner had seen it. He just happened to be driving down the main highway in his State Police cruiser when the ship appeared. He nearly drove into the roadside culvert, staring at the ship instead of watching his driving.

Before the sun went down that day, hundreds of Army trucks and tanks had poured down the highway, swirling up clouds of dust that could be seen even from Johnny’s house in Albuquerque, miles away. They surrounded the strange ship and let no one come near it.

Johnny could see them now, a ring of steel and guns. Soldiers paced slowly between the tanks, with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. Pretending that he was an Apache warrior, Johnny thought about how foolish the Army was to make the young soldiers walk around in the heat instead of allowing them to sit in the shade. He knew that the soldiers were sweating and grumbling and cursing the heat. As if that would make it cooler. They even wore their steel helmets; a good way to fry their brains.

Each day since the ship had landed, exactly when the sun was highest in the sky, three strangers would step out of the ship. At least, that’s what the people were saying back in town. The newspapers carried no word of the strangers, except front-page complaints that the Army wouldn’t let news reporters or television camera crews anywhere near the starship.

The three strangers came out of their ship each day, for a few minutes. Johnny wanted to talk to them. Maybe―just maybe― they could cure his sickness. All the doctors he had ever seen just shook their heads and said that nothing could be done. Johnny would never live to be a full-grown man. But these strangers, if they really came from another world, a distant star, they might know how to cure a disease that no doctor on Earth could cure.

Johnny could feel his heart racing as he thought about it. He forced himself to stay calm. Before you can get cured, he told himself, you’ve got to talk to the strangers. And before you can do that, you’ve got to sneak past all those soldiers.

A smear of dust on the highway caught his eye. It was a State Police car, heading toward the Army camp. Sergeant Warner, most likely. Johnny figured that his mother had realized by now he had run away, and had called the police to find him. So he had another problem: avoid getting found by the police.

He turned back to look at the ship again. Suddenly his breath caught in his throat. The three strangers were standing in front of the ship. Without opening a hatch, without any motion at all. They were just there, as suddenly as the blink of an eye.

They were tall and slim and graceful, dressed in simple-looking coveralls that seemed to glow, just like their ship.

And they cast no shadows!

 

2

The strangers stood there for several minutes. A half-dozen people went out toward them, two in Army uniforms, the others in civilian clothes. After a few minutes the strangers disappeared. Just like that. Gone. The six men seemed just as stunned as Johnny felt. They milled around for a few moments, as if trying to figure out where the strangers had gone to. Then they slowly walked back toward the trucks and tanks and other soldiers.

Johnny pushed himself back down from the edge of the hill he was on. He sat up, safely out of view of the soldiers and police, and checked his supplies. A canteen full of water, a leather sack that held two quickly made sandwiches, and a couple of oranges. He felt inside the sack to see if there was anything else. Nothing except the wadded-up remains of the plastic wrap that had been around the other two sandwiches he had eaten earlier. The only other thing he had brought with him was a blanket to keep himself warm during the chill desert night.

There wasn’t much shade, and the sun was getting really fierce. Johnny got to his feet and walked slowly to a clump of bushes that surrounded a stunted dead tree. He sat down and leaned his back against the shady side of the tree trunk.

For a moment he thought about his parents.

His mother was probably worried sick by now. Johnny often got up early and left the house before she was awake, but he always made sure to be back by lunchtime. His father would be angry. But he was always angry nowadays― most of the time it was about losing his job. But Johnny knew that what was really bugging his father was Johnny’s own sickness.

Johnny remembered Dr. Pemberton’s round red face, which was normally so cheerful. But Dr. Pemberton shook his head grimly when he told Johnny’s father:

“It’s foolish for you to spend what little money you have, John. Leukemia is incurable. You could send the boy to one of the research centers, and they’ll try out some of the new treatments on him. But it won’t help him. There is no cure.

Johnny hadn’t been supposed to hear that. The door between the examination room where he was sitting and Dr. Pemberton’s office had been open only a crack. It was enough for his keen ears, though.

Johnny’s father sounded stunned. “But.., he looks fine. And he says he feels okay.”

“I know.” Dr. Pemberton’s voice sounded as heavy as his roundly overweight body. “The brutal truth, however, is that he has less than a year to live. The disease is very advanced. Luckily, for most of the time he’ll feel fine. But towards the end “

“These research centers,” Johnny’s father said, his voice starting to crack. “The scientists are always coming up with new vaccines .

Johnny had never heard his father sound like that: like a little boy who had been caught stealing or something, and was begging for a chance to escape getting punished.

“You can send him to a research center,” Dr. Pemberton said, slowly. “They’ll use him to learn more about the disease. But there’s no cure in sight, John. Not this year. Or next. And that’s all the time he has.”

And then Johnny heard something he had never heard before in his whole life: His father was crying.

They didn’t tell him.

He rode back home with his father, and the next morning his mother looked as if she had been crying all night. But they never said a word to him about it. And he never told them that he knew.

Maybe it would have been different if he had a brother or sister to talk to. And he couldn’t tell the kids at school, or his friends around the neighborhood. What do you say?

“Hey there, Nicko...  I’m going to die around Christmas sometime.”

No. Johnny kept silent, like the Apache he often dreamed he was. He played less and less with his friends, spent more and more of his time alone.

And then the ship came.

It had to mean something. A ship from another star doesn’t just plop down practically in your back yard by accident.

Why did the strangers come to Earth?

No one knew. And Johnny didn’t really care. All he wanted was a chance to talk to them, to get them to cure him. Maybe―who knew?―maybe they were here to find him and cure him!

He dozed off, sitting there against the tree. The heat was sizzling, there was no breeze at all, and nothing for Johnny to do until darkness. With his mind buzzing and jumbling a million thoughts together, his eyes drooped shut and he fell asleep.

“Johnny Donato!”

The voice was like a crack of thunder. Johnny snapped awake, so surprised that he didn’t even think of being scared.

“Johnny Donato! This is Sergeant Warner. We know you’re around here, so come out from wherever you’re hiding.”

Johnny flopped over on his stomach and peered around. He was pretty well hidden by the bushes that surrounded the tree. Looking carefully in all directions, he couldn’t see Sergeant Warner or anyone else.

“Johnny Donato!” the voice repeated. “This is Sergeant Warner..."

Only now the voice seemed to be coming from farther away. Johnny realized that the State Police sergeant was speaking into an electric bullhorn.

Very slowly, Johnny crawled on his belly up to the top of the little hill. He made certain to stay low and keep in the scraggly grass.

Off to his right a few hundred yards was Sergeant Warner, slowly walking across the hot sandy ground. His hat was pushed back on his head, pools of sweat stained his shirt. He held the bullhorn up to his mouth, so that Johnny couldn’t really see his face at all. The sergeant’s mirror-shiny sunglasses hid the top half of his face.

Moving still farther away, the sergeant yelled into his bullhorn, “Now listen, Johnny. Your mother’s scared half out of her mind. And your father doesn’t even know you’ve run away ―he’s still downtown, hasn’t come home yet. You come out now, you hear? It’s hot out here, and I’m getting mighty unhappy about you.

Johnny almost laughed out loud. What are you going to do, kill me?

“Dammit, Johnny, I know you’re around here! Now, do I have to call in other cars and the helicopter, just to find one stubborn boy?”

Helicopters! Johnny frowned. He had no doubts that he could hide from a dozen police cars and the men in them. But helicopters were something else.

He crawled back to the bushes and the dead tree and started scooping up loose sand with his bare hands. Pretty soon he was puffing and sweaty. But finally he had a shallow trench that was long enough to lie in.

He got into the trench and pulled his food pouch and canteen in with him. Then he spread the blanket over himself. By sitting up and leaning forward, he could reach a few small stones. He put them on the lower corners of the blanket to anchor them down. Then he lay down and pulled the blanket over him.

The blanket was brown and probably wouldn’t be spotted from a helicopter. Lying there under it, staring at the fuzzy brightness two inches over his nose, Johnny told himself he was an Apache hiding out from the Army.

It was almost true.

It got very hot in Johnny’s hideout. Time seemed to drag endlessly. The air became stifling; Johnny could hardly breathe. Once he thought he heard the drone of a helicopter, but it was far off in the distance. Maybe it was just his imagination.

He drifted off to sleep again.

Voices woke him up once more. More than one voice this time, and he didn’t recognize who was talking. But they were very close by― they weren’t using a bullhorn or calling out to him.

“Are you really sure he’s out here?”

“Where else would a runaway kid go? His mother says he hasn’t talked about anything but that weirdo ship for the past three days.”

“Well, it’s a big desert. We’re never going to find him standing around here jabbering.”

“I got an idea.” The voices started to get fainter, as if the men were walking away.

“Yeah? What is it?”

Johnny stayed very still and strained his ears to hear them.

“Those Army guys got all sorts of fancy electronic stuff. Why don’t we use them instead of walking around here frying our brains?”

“They had some of that stuff on the helicopter, didn’t they?”

The voices were getting fainter and fainter.

“Yeah ― but instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack, we ought to play it smart.”

“What do you mean?”

Johnny wanted to sit up, to hear them better. But he didn’t dare move.

“Why not set up the Army’s fancy stuff and point it at the ship? That’s where the kid wants to go. Instead of searching the whole damned desert for him..

“I get it!” the other voice said. “Make the ship the bait in a mousetrap. ~

“Right. That’s the way to get him.”

They both laughed.

And Johnny, lying quite still in his hideaway, began to know how a starving mouse must feel.

 

3

After a long, hot, sweaty time Johnny couldn’t hear any more voices or helicopter engines. And as he stared tiredly at the blanket over him, it seemed that the daylight was growing dimmer.

Must be close to sundown, he thought.

Despite his worked-up nerves, he fell asleep again. By the time he woke up, it was dark.

He sat up and let the blanket fall off to one side of his dugout shelter. Already it was getting cold.

But Johnny smiled.

If they’re going to have all their sensors looking in toward the ship, he told himself, that means nobody’s out here. It ought to be easy to get into the Army camp and hide there. Maybe I can find someplace warm. And food!

But another part of his mind asked, And what then? How are you going to get from there to the ship and the strangers?

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” Johnny whispered to himself.

Clutching the blanket around his shoulders for warmth in the chilly desert night wind, Johnny crept up to the top of the hill once more.

The Army tanks and trucks were still out there. A few tents had been set up, and there were lights strung out everywhere. It almost looked like a shopping center decorated for the Christmas season, there were so many lights and people milling around.

But the lights were glaring white, not the many colors of the holidays. And the people were soldiers. And the decorations were guns, cannon, radar antennas, lasers― all pointed inward at the strangers’ ship.

The ship itself was what made everything look like Christmas, Johnny decided. It stood in the middle of everything, glowing and golden like a cheerful tree ornament.

Johnny stared at it for a long time. Then he found his gaze floating upward, to the stars. In the clear cold night of the desert, the stars gleamed and winked like thousands of jewels: red, blue, white. The hazy swarm of the Milky Way swung across the sky. Johnny knew there were billions of stars in the heavens, hundreds of billions, so many stars that they were uncountable.

“That ship came from one of them,” he whispered to himself. “Which one?”

The wind moaned and sent a shiver of cold through him, despite his blanket.

Slowly, quietly, carefully, he got up and started walking down the hill toward the Army camp. He stayed in the shadows, away from the lights, and circled around the trucks and tanks. He was looking for an opening, a dark place where there was no one sitting around or standing guard, a place where he could slip in and maybe hide inside one of the trucks.

I wonder what the inside of a tank is like? he asked himself. Then he shook his head, as if to drive away such childish thoughts. He was an Apache warrior, he told himself, sneaking up on the Army camp.

He got close enough to hear soldiers talking and laughing among themselves. But still he stayed Out in the darkness. He ignored the wind and cold, just pulled the blanket more tightly over his thin shoulders as he circled the camp. Off beyond the trucks, he could catch the warm yellow glow of the strangers’ ship. It looked inviting and friendly.

And then there was an opening! A slice of shadow that cut between pools of light. Johnny froze in his tracks and examined the spot carefully, squatting down on his heels to make himself as small and undetectable as possible.

There were four tents set up in a row, with their backs facing Johnny. On one side of them was a group of parked trucks and jeeps. Metal poles with lights on them brightened that area. On the other side of the tents were some big trailer vans, with all sorts of antennas poking out of their roofs. That area was well lit too.

But the narrow lanes between the tents were dark with shadow. And Johnny could see no one around them. There were no lights showing from inside the tents, either.

Johnny hesitated only a moment or two. Then he quickly stepped up to the rear of one of the tents, poked his head around its corner and found no one in sight. So he ducked into the lane between the tents.

Flattening himself against the tent’s vinyl wall, Johnny listened for sounds of danger. Nothing except the distant rush of the wind and the pounding of his own heart. It was dark where he was standing. The area seemed to be deserted.

He stayed there for what seemed like hours. His mind was saying that this was a safe place to hide. But his stomach was telling him that there might be some food inside the tents.

Yeah, and there might be some people inside there, too, Johnny thought.

His stomach won the argument. Johnny crept around toward the front of the tent. This area was still pretty well lit from the lamps over by the trucks and vans. Peeking around the tent’s corner, Johnny could see plenty of soldiers sitting in front of the parking areas on the ground alongside their vehicles, eating food that steamed and somehow looked delicious, even from this distance. Johnny sniffed at the night air and thought he caught a trace of something filled with meat and bubbling juices.

Licking his lips, he slipped around the front of the tent and ducked inside.

It was dark, but enough light filtered through from the outside for Johnny to see that the tent was really a workroom of some sort. Two long tables ran the length of the tent. There were papers stacked at one end of one table, with a metal weight holding them in place. All sorts of instruments and gadgets were sitting on the tables: microscopes, cameras, something that looked sort of like a computer, other things that Johnny couldn’t figure out at all.

None of it was food.

Frowning, Johnny went back to the tent’s entrance. His stomach was growling now, complaining about being empty too long.

He pushed the tent flap back half an inch and peered outside. A group of men were walking in his direction. Four of them. One wore a soldier’s uniform and had a big pistol strapped to his hip. The others wore ordinary clothes: slacks, windbreakers, jackets. One of them was smoking a pipe, or rather, he was waving it in his hand as he talked, swinging the pipe back and forth and pointing its stem at the glowing ship, then back at the other three men.

Johnny knew that if he stepped outside the tent now they would see him as clearly as anything.

Then he realized that the situation was even worse. They were heading straight for this tent!

 

4

There wasn’t any time to be scared. Johnny let the tent flap drop back into place and dived under one of the tables. No place else to hide.

He crawled into the farthest corner of the tent, under the table, and huddled there with his knees pulled up tight against his nose and the blanket wrapped around him.

Sure enough, the voices marched straight up to the tent and the lights flicked on.

“You’d better get some sleep, Ed. No sense staying up all night again.”

“Yeah, I will. Just want to go over the tapes from this afternoon one more time.

“Might as well go to sleep, for all the good that’s going to do you.

“I know. Well... see you tomorrow.”

“G’night.”

From underneath the table, Johnny saw a pair of desert-booted feet walk into the tent. The man, whoever it was, wore striped slacks. He wasn’t a soldier or a policeman, and that let Johnny breathe a little easier.

He won’t notice me under here, Johnny thought. I’ll just wait until he leaves and...

“You can come out of there now,” the man’s voice said.

Johnny froze. He didn’t even breathe.

The man squatted down and grinned at Johnny. “Come on, kid. I’m not going to hurt you. I ran away from home a few times myself.”

Feeling helpless, Johnny crawled out from under the table. He stood up slowly, feeling stiff and achy all of a sudden.

The man looked him over. “When’s the last time you ate?”

“Around noontime.”

Johnny watched the man’s face. He had stopped grinning, and there were tight lines around his mouth and eyes that came from worry. Or maybe anger. He wasn’t as big as Johnny’s father, but he was solidly built. His hair was dark and long, almost down to his shoulders. His eyes were deep brown, almost black, and burning with some inner fire.

‘‘You must be hungry.

Johnny nodded.

“If I go out to the cook van and get you some food, will you still be here when I come back?”

The thought of food reminded Johnny how hungry he really was. His stomach felt hollow.

“How do I know you won’t bring back the State Troopers?” he asked.

The man shrugged. “How do I know you’ll stay here and wait for me to come back?”

Johnny said nothing.

“Look kid,” the man said, more gently, “I’m not going to hurt you. Sooner or later you’re going to have to go home, but if you want to eat and maybe talk, then we can do that. I won’t tell anybody you’re here.”

Johnny wanted to believe him. The man wasn’t smiling; he seemed very serious about the whole thing.

“You’ve got to start trusting somebody, sooner or later,” he said.

“Yeah ...“ Johnny’s voice didn’t sound very sure about it, even to himself.

“My name’s Gene Beldone.” He put his hand out.

Johnny reached for it. “I’m Johnny Donato,” he said. Gene’s grip was strong.

“Okay, Johnny.” Gene smiled wide. “You wait here and I’ll get you some food.”

Gene came back in five minutes with an Army type of plastic tray heaped with hot, steaming food. And a mug of cold milk to wash it down. There were no chairs in the tent, but Gene pushed aside some of the instruments and helped Johnny to clamber up on the table.

For several minutes Johnny concentrated on eating. Gene went to the other table and fiddled around with what looked like a tape recorder.

“Did you really run away from home?” Johnny asked at last.

Gene looked up from his work. “Sure did. More than once. I know how it feels.”

“Yeah.”

“But..." Gene walked over to stand beside Johnny. “You know you’ll have to go back home again, don’t you?”

“I guess so.

“Your parents are probably worried. I thought I heard one of the State Troopers say that you were ill?”

Johnny nodded.

“Want to talk about it?”

Johnny turned his attention back to the tray of food. “No.”

Gene gave a little one-shouldered shrug. “Okay. As long as you don’t need any medicine right away, or anything like that.”

Looking up again, Johnny asked, “Are you a scientist?”

“Sort of. I’m a linguist.”

“Huh?”

“I study languages. The Army came and got me out of the university so I could help them understand the language the aliens speak.”

“Aliens?”

“The men from the ship.”

“Oh. Aliens―that’s what you call them?”

“Right.”

“Can you understand what they’re saying?”

Gene grinned again, but this time it wasn’t a happy expression. “Can’t understand anything,” he said.

“Nothing?” Johnny felt suddenly alarmed. “Why not?”

“Because the aliens haven’t said anything to us.”

“Huh?”

With a shake of his head, Gene said, “They just come out every day at high noon, stand there for a few minutes while we talk at them, and then pop back into their ship. I don’t think they’re listening to us at all. In fact, I don’t think they’re even looking at us. It’s like they don’t even know we’re here!”

 

5

Gene let Johnny listen to the tapes of their attempts to talk to the aliens.

With the big padded stereo earphones clamped to his head, Johnny could hear the Army officers speaking, and another man that Gene said was a scientist from Washington. He could hear the wind, and a soft whistling sound, like the steady note of a telephone that’s been left off the hook for too long. But no sounds at all from the aliens. No words of any kind, in any language.

Gene helped take the earphones off Johnny’s head.

“They haven’t said anything at all?”

“Nothing,” Gene answered, clicking off the tape recorder. “The only sound to come from them is that sort of whistling thing―and that’s coming from the ship. Some of the Army engineers think it’s a power generator of some sort.”

“Then we can’t talk with them,” Johnny suddenly felt very tired and defeated.

“We can talk to them,” Gene said, “but I’m not even certain that they hear us. It’s . . . it’s pretty weird. They seem to look right through us― as if we’re pictures hanging on a wall.”

“Or rocks or grass or something.”

“Right!” Gene looked impressed. “Like we’re a part of the scenery, nothing special, nothing you’d want to talk to.”

Something in Johnny was churning, trying to break loose. He felt tears forming in his eyes. “Then how can I tell them. .

“Tell them what?” Gene asked.

Johnny fought down his feelings. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

Gene came over and put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “So you’re going to tough it out, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

Smiling, Gene answered, “Listen, kid. Nobody runs away from home and sneaks into an Army camp just for fun. At first I thought you were just curious about the aliens. But now ... looks to me as if you’ve got something pretty big on your mind.”

Johnny didn’t reply, but―strangely―he felt safe with this man. He wasn’t afraid of him anymore.

“So stay quiet,” Gene went on. “It’s your problem, whatever it is, and you’ve got a right to tell me to keep my nose out of it.”

“You’re going to tell the State Troopers I’m here?”

Instead of answering, Gene leaned against the table’s edge and said, “Listen. When I was just about your age I ran away from home for the first time. That was in Cleveland. It was winter and there was a lot of snow. Damned cold, too. Now, you’d think that whatever made me leave home and freeze my backside in the snow for two days and nights―you’d think it was something pretty important, wouldn’t you?”

“Wasn’t it?”

Gene laughed out loud. “I don’t know! I can’t for the life of me remember what it was! It was awfully important to me then, of course. But now it’s nothing, nowhere.”

Johnny wanted to laugh with him, but he couldn’t. “My problem’s different.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Gene said. But he was still smiling.

“I’m going to be dead before the year’s over,” Johnny said.

Gene’s smile vanished. “What?”

Johnny told him the whole story. Gene asked several questions, looked doubtful for a while, but at last simply stood there looking very grave.

“That is tough,” he said, at last.

“So I thought maybe the strangers―the aliens, that is―might do something, maybe cure it...” Johnny’s voice trailed off.

“I see,” Gene said. And there was real pain in his voice. “And we can’t even get them to notice us, let alone talk with us.”

“I guess it’s hopeless then.”

Gene suddenly straightened up. “No. Why should we give up? There must be something we can do!”

“Like what?” Johnny asked.

Gene rubbed a hand across his chin. It was dark with stubbly beard. “Well... maybe they do understand us and just don’t care. Maybe they’re just here sightseeing, or doing some scientific exploring. Maybe they think of us like we think of animals in a zoo, or cows in a field.”

“But we’re not animals!” Johnny said.

“Yeah? Imagine how we must seem to them.” Gene began to pace down the length of the table. “They’ve traveled across lightyears―billions on billions of miles―to get here. Their ship, their brains, their minds must be thousands of years ahead of our own. We’re probably no more interesting to them than apes in a zoo.”

“Then why..."

“Wait a minute,” Gene said. “Maybe they’re not interested in us―but so far they’ve only seen adults, men, soldiers mostly. Suppose we show them a child, you, and make it clear to them that you’re going to die.”

“How are you going to get that across to them?”

“I don’t know,” Gene admitted. “Maybe they don’t even understand what death is. Maybe they’re so far ahead of us that they live for thousands of years―or they might even be immortal!”

Then he turned to look back at Johnny. “But I’ve had the feeling ever since the first time we tried to talk to them that they understand every word we say. They just don’t care.”

“And you think they’ll care about me?”

“It’s worth a try. Nothing else we’ve done has worked. Maybe this will.”

 

6

Gene took Johnny to a tent that had cots and warm Army blankets.

“You get some sleep; you must be tired,” he said. “I’ll let the State Police know you’re okay.”

Johnny could feel himself falling asleep, even though he was only standing next to one of the cots.

“Do you want to talk to your parents? We can set up a radiophone..."

“Later,” Johnny said. “As long as they know I’m okay ― I don’t want to hassle with them until after we’ve talked to the aliens.”

Gene nodded and left the tent. Johnny sat on the cot, kicked off his boots, and was asleep by the time he had stretched out and pulled the blanket up to his chin.

 

Gene brought him breakfast on a tray the next morning. But as soon as Johnny had finished eating and pulled his boots back on, Gene led him out to one of the big vans.

“General Hackett isn’t too sure he likes our idea,” Gene said as they walked up to the tan-colored van. It was like a civilian camper, only much bigger. Two soldiers stood guard by its main door, with rifles slung over their shoulders. It was already hot and bright on the desert, even though the sun had hardly climbed above the distant mountains.

The alien starship still hung in the middle of the camp circle, glowing warmly and barely touching the ground. For a wild instant, Johnny thought of it as a bright beach ball being balanced on a seal’s nose.

Inside, the van’s air conditioning was turned up so high that it made Johnny shiver.

But General Hackett was sweating. He sat squeezed behind a table, a heavy, fat-cheeked man with a black little cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth. It was not lit, but Johnny could smell its sour odor. Sitting around the little table in the van s main compartment were Sergeant Warner of the State Police, several civilians, and two other Army officers, both colonels.

There were two open chairs. Johnny and Gene slid into them. “I don’t like it,” General Hackett said, shaking his head. “The whole world’s going nuts over these weirdos, every blasted newspaper and TV man in the country’s trying to break into this camp, and we’ve got to take a little kid out there to do our job for us? I don’t like it.”

Sergeant Warner looked as if he wanted to say something, but he satisfied himself with a stern glare in Johnny’s direction.

Gene said, “We’ve got nothing to lose. All our efforts of the past three days have amounted to zero results. Maybe the sight of a youngster will stir them.”

One of the civilians shook his head. A colonel banged his fist on the table and said, “By god, a couple rounds of artillery will stir them! Put a few shots close to ‘em―make ‘em know we mean business!”

“And run the risk of having them destroy everything in sight?” asked one of the civilians, his voice sharp as the whine of an angry hornet.

“This isn’t some idiot movie,” the colonel snapped.

“Precisely,” said the civilian. “If we anger them, there’s no telling how much damage they could do. Do you have any idea of how much energy they must be able to control in that ship?”

“One little ship? Three people?”

“That one little ship,” the scientist answered, “has crossed distances billions of times greater than our biggest rockets. And there might be more than one ship, as well.”

“NORAD hasn’t picked up any other ships in orbit around Earth,” the other colonel said.

“None of our radars have detected this ship,” the scientist said, pointing in the general direction of the glowing starship. “The radars just don’t get any signal from it at all!”

General Hackett took the cigar from his mouth. “All right, all right. There’s no sense firing at them unless we get some clear indication that they’re dangerous.”

He turned to Gene. “You really think the kid will get them interested enough to talk to us?”

Gene shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

“You don’t think it will be dangerous?” the general asked. “Bringing him right up close to them like that?”

“If they want to be dangerous,” Gene said, “I’ll bet they can hurt anyone they want to, anywhere on Earth.”

There was a long silence.

Finally General Hackett said, “Okay―let the kid talk to them.”

Sergeant Warner insisted that Johnny’s parents had to agree to the idea, and Johnny wound up spending most of the morning talking on the radio-phone in the sergeant’s State Police cruiser. Gene talked to them too, and explained what they planned to do.

It took a long time to calm his parents down. His mother cried and said she was so worried. His father tried to sound angry about Johnny’s running away. But he really sounded relieved that his son was all right. After hours of talking, they finally agreed to let Johnny face the aliens.

But when Johnny at last handed the phone back to Sergeant Warner, he felt lower than a scorpion.

“I really scared them,” he told Gene as they walked back to the tents.

“Guess you did.”

“But they wouldn’t have let me go if I’d stayed home and asked them. They would’ve said no.”

Gene shrugged.

Then Johnny noticed that his shadow had shrunk to practically nothing. He turned and squinted up at the sky. The sun was almost at zenith. It was almost high noon.

“Less than two minutes to noon,” Gene said, looking at his wristwatch. “Let’s get moving. I want to be out there where they can see you when they appear.”

They turned and started walking out toward the aliens’ ship. Past the trucks and jeeps and vans that were parked in neat rows. Past the tanks, huge and heavy, with the snouts of their long cannon pointed straight at the ship. Past the ranks of soldiers who were standing in neat files, guns cleaned and ready for action.

General Hackett and other people from the morning conference were sitting in an open-topped car. A corporal was at the wheel, staring straight at the ship.

Johnny and Gene walked out alone, past everyone and everything, out into the wide cleared space at the center of the camp.

With every step he took, Johnny felt more alone. It was as if he were an astronaut out on a spacewalk―floating away from his ship, out of contact, no way to get back. Even though it was hot, bright daylight, he could feel the stars looking down at him―one tiny, lonely, scared boy facing the unknown.

Gene grinned at him as they neared the ship. “I’ve done this four times now, and it gets spookier every time. My knees are shaking.”

Johnny admitted, “Me too.”

And then they were there! The three strangers, the aliens, standing about ten yards in front of Johnny and Gene.

It was spooky.

The aliens simply stood there, looking relaxed and pleasant. But they seemed to be looking right through Johnny and Gene. As if they weren’t there at all.

Johnny studied the three of them very carefully. They looked completely human. Tall and handsome as movie stars, with broad shoulders and strong, square-jawed faces. The three of them looked enough alike to be brothers. They wore simple, silvery coveralls that shimmered in the sunlight.

They looked at each other as if they were going to speak. But they said nothing. The only sound Johnny could hear was that high-pitched kind of whistling noise that he had heard on tape the night before. Even the wind seemed to have died down, this close to the alien ship.

Johnny glanced up at Gene, and out of the corner of his eye, the three aliens seemed to shimmer and waver, as if he were seeing them through a wavy heat haze.

A chill raced along Johnny’s spine.

When he looked straight at the aliens, they seemed real and solid, just like ordinary humans except for their glittery uniforms.

But when he turned his head and saw them only out of the corner of his eye, the aliens shimmered and sizzled. Suddenly Johnny remembered a day in school when they showed movies. His seat had been up close to the screen, and off to one side. He couldn’t make out what the picture on the screen was, but he could watch the light shimmering and glittering on the screen.

They’re not real!

Johnny suddenly understood that what they were all seeing was a picture, an image of some sort. Not real people at all.

And that, his mind was racing, means that the aliens really don’t look like us at all!

 

7

“This is one of our children,” Gene was saying to the aliens.

 “He is not fully grown, as you can see. He has a disease that will..."

Johnny stopped listening to Gene. He stared at the aliens. They seemed so real when you looked straight at them. Turning his head toward Gene once more, he again saw that the aliens sparkled and shimmered. Like a movie picture.

Without thinking about it any further, Johnny suddenly sprang toward the aliens. Two running steps covered the distance, and he threw himself right off his feet at the three glittering strangers.

He sailed straight through them, and landed sprawled on his hands and knees on the other side of them.

“Johnny!”

Turning to sit on the dusty ground, Johnny saw that the aliens―or really, the images of them―were still standing there as if nothing had happened. Gene’s face was shocked, mouth open, eyes wide.

Then the images of the aliens winked out. They just disappeared.

Johnny got to his feet.

“What did you do?” Gene asked, hurrying over to grab Johnny by the arm as he got to his feet.

“They’re not real!” Johnny shouted with excitement. “They’re just pictures... they don’t really look like us. They’re still inside the ship!”

“Wait, slow down,” Gene said. “The aliens we’ve been seeing are images? Holograms, maybe. Yeah, that could explain..

Looking past Gene’s shoulder, Johnny could see a dozen soldiers hustling toward them. General Hackett was standing in his car and waving his arms madly.

Everything was happening so fast! But there was one thing that Johnny was sure of. The aliens―the real aliens, not the pretty pictures they were showing the Earthmen―the real aliens were still inside of their ship. They had never come out.

Then another thought struck Johnny. What if the ship itself was a picture, too? How could he ever talk to the star visitors, get them to listen to him, help him?

Johnny had to know. Once General Hackett’s soldiers got to him, he would never get another chance to speak with the aliens.

With a grit of his teeth, Johnny pulled his arm away from Gene, spun around, and raced toward the alien starship.

“Hey!” Gene yelled. “Johnny! No!”

The globe of the ship gleamed warmly in the sun. It almost seemed to pulsate, to throb like a living, beating heart. A heart made of gold, not flesh and muscle.

Johnny ran straight to the ship and, with his arms stretched out in front of him, he jumped at it. His eyes squeezed shut at the moment before he would hit the ship’s shining hull.

Everything went black.

Johnny felt nothing. His feet left the ground, but there was no shock of hitting solid metal, no sense of jumping or falling or even floating. Nothing at all.

He tried to open his eyes, and found that he couldn’t. He couldn’t move his arms or legs. He couldn’t even feel his heart beating.

I’m dead!

 

8

Slowly a golden light filtered into Johnny’s awareness. It was like lying out in the desert sun with your eyes closed; the light glowed behind his closed eyelids.

He opened his eyes and found that he was indeed lying down, but not outdoors. Everything around him was golden and shining.

Johnny’s head was spinning. He was inside the alien ship, he knew that. But it was unlike any spacecraft he had seen or heard of. He could see no walls, no equipment, no instruments; only a golden glow, like being inside a star ― or maybe inside a cloud of shining gold.

Even the thing he was lying on, Johnny couldn’t really make out what it was. It felt soft and warm to his touch, but it wasn’t a bed or cot. He found that if he pressed his hands down hard enough, they would go into the golden glowing material a little way. Almost like pressing your fingers down into sand, except that this stuff was warm and soft.

He sat up. All that he could see was the misty glow, all around him.

“Hey, where are you?” Johnny called out. His voice sounded trembly, even though he was trying hard to stay calm. “I know you’re in here someplace!”

Two shining spheres appeared before him. They were so bright that it hurt Johnny’s eyes to look straight at them. They were like two tiny suns, about the size of basketballs, hovering in mid-air, shining brilliantly but giving off no heat at all.

“We are here.”

It was a sound Johnny could hear. Somewhere in the back of his mind, despite his fears, he was a little disappointed. He had been half-expecting to “hear” a telepathic voice in his mind.

“Where are you?”

“You are looking at us.” The voice was flat and unemotional. “We are the two shining globes that you see.”

“You?” Johnny squinted at the shining ones. “You’re the aliens?”

“This is our ship.”

Johnny’s heart started beating faster as he realized what was going on. He was inside the ship. And talking to the aliens!

“Why wouldn’t you talk with the other men?” he asked.

“Why should we? We are not here to speak with them.”

“What are you here for?”

The voice―Johnny couldn’t tell which of the shining ones it came from―hesitated for only a moment. Then it answered, “Our purpose is something you could not understand. You are not mentally equipped to grasp such concepts.”

A picture flashed into Johnny’s mind of a chimpanzee trying to figure out how a computer works. Did they plant that in my head? he wondered.

After a moment, Johnny said, “I came here to ask for your help..

“We are not here to help you,” said the voice.

And a second voice added, “Indeed, it would be very dangerous for us to interfere with the environment of your world. Dangerous to you and your kind.”

“But you don’t understand! I don’t want you to change anything, just―”

The shining one on the left seemed to bob up and down a little. “We do understand. We looked into your mind while you were unconscious. You want us to prolong your life span.”

“Yes!”

The other one said, “We cannot interfere with the normal life processes of your world. That would change the entire course of your history.”

“History?” Johnny felt puzzled. “What do you mean?”

The first sphere drifted a bit closer to Johnny, forcing him to shade his eyes with his hand. “You and your people have assumed that we are visitors from another star. In a sense, we are. But we are also travelers in time. We have come from millions of years in your future.”

“Future?” Johnny felt weak. “Millions of years?”

“And apparently we have missed our target time by at least a hundred thousand of your years.”

“Missed?” Johnny echoed.

“Yes,” said the first shining one. “We stopped here ― at this time and place ― to get our bearings. We were about to leave when you threw yourself into the ship’s defensive screen.”

The second shining one added, “Your action was entirely foolish. The screen would have killed you instantly. We never expected any of you to attack us in such an irrational manner.”

“I wasn’t attacking you,” Johnny said. “I just wanted to talk with you.”

“So we learned, once we brought you into our ship and revived you. Still, it was a foolish thing to do.”

“And now,” the second shining sphere said, “your fellow men have begun to attack us. They assume that you have been killed, and they have fired their weapons at us.”

“Oh no..

“Have no fear, little one.” The first sphere seemed almost amused. “Their primitive shells and rockets fall to the ground without exploding. We are completely safe.”

“But they might try an atomic bomb,” Johnny said.

“If they do, it will not explode. We are not here to hurt anyone, nor to allow anyone to hurt us.”

A new thought struck Johnny. “You said your screen would have killed me. And then you said you brought me inside the ship and revived me. Was.., was I dead?”

“Your heart had stopped beating,” said the first alien. “We also found a few other flaws in your body chemistry, which we corrected. But we took no steps to prolong your life span. You will live some eighty to one hundred years, just as the history of your times has shown us.”

Eighty to one hundred years! Johnny was thunderstruck. The other flaws in body chemistry that they fixed―they cured the leukemia!

Johnny was still staggered by the news, feeling as if he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, when the first of the shining ones said:

“We must leave now, and hopefully find the proper time and place that we are seeking. We will place you safely among your friends.”

“No! Wait! Take me with you! I want to go too!” Johnny surprised himself by shouting it, but he realized as he heard his own words that he really meant it. A trip through thousands of years of time, to who-knows-where!

“That is impossible, little one. Your time and place is here. Your own history shows that quite clearly."

“But you can’t just leave me here, after you’ve shown me so much! How can I be satisfied with just one world and time when everything’s open to you to travel to! I don’t want to be stuck here-and-now. I want to be like you!”

“You will be, little one. You will be. Once we were like you. In time your race will evolve into our type of creature ― able to roam through the universe of space and time, able to live directly from the energy of the stars.”

“But that’ll take millions of years.”

“Yes. But your first steps into space have already begun. Before your life ends, you will have visited a few of the stars nearest to your own world. And, in the fullness of time, your race will evolve into ours.”

“Maybe so,” Johnny said, feeling downcast.

The shining one somehow seemed to smile. “No, little one. There is no element of chance. Remember, we come from your future. It has already happened.”

Johnny blinked. “Already happened... you―you’re really from Earth! Aren’t you? You’re from the Earth of a million years from now! Is that it?”

“Good-bye grandsire,” said the shining ones together. And Johnny found himself sitting on the desert floor in the hot afternoon sunlight, a few yards in front of General Hackett’s command car.

“It’s the kid! He’s alive!”

Getting slowly to his feet as a hundred soldiers raced toward him, Johnny looked back toward the starship―the time ship.

It winked out. Disappeared. Without a sound or a stirring of the desert dust. One instant it was there, the next it was gone.

 

9

It was a week later that it really sank home in Johnny’s mind.

It had been a wild week. Army officers quizzing him, medical doctors trying to find some trace of the disease, news reporters and TV interviewers asking him a million questions, his mother and father both crying that he was all right and safe and cured ―a wild week.

Johnny’s school friends hung around the house and watched from outside while the Army and news people swarmed in and out. He waved to them, and they waved back, smiling, friendly. They understood. The whole story was splashed all over the papers and TV, even the part about the leukemia. The kids understood why Johnny had been so much of a loner the past few months.

The President telephoned and invited Johnny and his parents to Washington. Dr. Gene Beldone went along too, in a private Air Force twin-engine jet.

As Johnny watched the New Mexico desert give way to the rugged peaks of the Rockies, something that the shining ones had said finally hit home to him:

You will live some eighty to one hundred years, just as the history of your times has shown us.

“How would they know about me from the history of these times?” Johnny whispered to himself as he stared out the thick window of the plane. “That must mean that my name will be famous enough to get into the history books, or tapes, or whatever they’ll be using.”

Thinking about that for a long time, as the plane crossed the Rockies and flew arrow-straight over the green farmlands of the Midwest, Johnny remembered the other thing that the shining ones had told him:

Before your life ends, you will have visited a few of the stars nearest to your own world.

“When they said you,” Johnny whispered again, “I thought they meant us, the human race. But―maybe they really meant me! Me! I’m going to be an interstellar astronaut!”

For the first time, Johnny realized that the excitement in his life hadn’t ended. It was just beginning.

 

Chapter Fourteen

 

Plot in Science Fiction

Plot:  Practice

 

 

 

Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions ― what we do ― that we are happy or the reverse.... All human happiness and misery take the form of action.

―Aristotle

 

 

As noted in chapter twelve, the time bomb in “Fifteen Miles” is a countdown that will end with the success or failure of Kinsman’s efforts to save the priest, plus the success or failure of his efforts to keep his secret to himself. In “Sepulcher,” there are actually three time bombs: Elverda’s confrontation with the alien artwork (and her own approaching death), her realization that the corporate wars must be stopped, and her understanding of what the alien artwork truly is. “Crisis of the Month” was much simpler. The time bomb was the need to find a crisis, a need complicated by the protagonist’s temptations.

Each of these plots took a different form. In “Fifteen Miles,” where the lunar environment served as the antagonist, the plot followed Kinsman’s physical struggle to bring the injured priest back to safety. It was a physical struggle that mirrored his inner emotional turmoil.

The plot of “Sepulcher” can be thought of as an inside-out version of the plot for “Fifteen Miles.” Instead of a physical journey across harshly hostile terrain, the characters in “Sepulcher” are moving deeper and deeper inward ― both physically, into the heart of the asteroid, and emotionally, into their innermost cores.

“Crisis of the Month” has the simplest plot. The time bomb starts ticking on the first page. The CCC must find a crisis to feed to the news media. Two complications arise, both involving the protagonist, Tom James: He is being tempted by Mary Richards and he wants to advance his career. The plot is a simple straight line. When Tom resolves one of his problems, he resolves all of them.

The plot of “The Shining Ones” is also very simple, although the story is much longer than the others. It consists of a series of barriers that Johnny Donato must get through, each barrier being more difficult to penetrate than the one that preceded it.

I started, as with so many stories, with a protagonist, in this case, a twelve-year-old boy. What was his problem, the conflict that would drive him, the time bomb that would tick until the story’s climax?

It is unusual and unrealistic for a boy so young to have an implacable enemy who threatens his life. And make no mistake about it, stories in which the protagonist’s life is threatened are the strongest stories. So Johnny had to be threatened by an illness that would be fatal. Leukemia fit the requirement; it attacks young people, predominantly, and although it is almost always fatal, it does not incapacitate the victim until very near the end of its course. Therefore, Johnny could have the fatal disease but still get around and do the things he needed to do.

Once the time bomb has started ticking, it is necessary to show the reader some hope of reaching it in time to prevent the explosion. That hope became the alien ship, and Johnny’s stubborn belief that the aliens could ― and would ― cure him.

Now the writing task came to be setting up the barriers between Johnny and his one chance of being cured. As the story was being written, I was somewhat surprised to see the barriers rising like concentric ringwalls, each of them centered on the golden glowing ship and the aliens within it.

The first barrier had already been hurdled by Johnny before page one of the story. That was his parents. Johnny had already run away from home when the story opens. It was not necessary to show that, mainly because it would add nothing to the story’s progress. Besides, it gives the reader the feeling that Johnny’s life began before the story started; this helps to convince the reader that Johnny is really alive.

The desert itself is something of a barrier, but one that Johnny crosses rather easily. Then comes the State Police, first in the person of Sergeant Warner, then in a helicopter, and finally as a couple of searching officers. Johnny eludes them all. Next is the Army camp, drawn up in a circle around the aliens’ glowing ship. Johnny slips past the guards and gets inside the camp.

To allow Johnny to succeed even further by himself, without help, would have been stretching the reader’s credulity too far, I thought. Besides, there comes a point in a story where you need a second character to give depth and variety; you can’t have the protagonist talking to himself all the time, especially in a story that is going to be more than a few thousand words long.

So Gene Beldone enters the scene. He comes in first as another test for Johnny, another barrier, perhaps. But he quickly turns into a friend and ally. The next barrier is the general, and Gene helps Johnny to get past him.

Notice that by the time we meet the ultimate barrier, the aliens themselves, we have already planted the fact that they are uncommunicative. The aliens are here for their own purposes, not to help a sick human youngster. That should make the reader feel that perhaps Johnny’s labors so far have been all in vain. Neither the reader nor the protagonist should ever get the feeling everything will turn out all right. If the protagonist has to sweat out the solution to the story’s basic problem, the reader will sweat too. And not be bored.

 

PLANTING TECHNIQUES

This business of planting is an important part of good plotting. You cannot have important twists in a story suddenly pop up out of nowhere, with no preparation for them beforehand. The reader has got to be surprised, but not startled or puzzled by totally unexpected twists of events.

If the protagonist is being held at gunpoint by the antagonist and distracts his attention by knocking over a milk bottle, the writer should have planted that milk bottle in that place during an earlier scene, or at least earlier in the same scene. You cannot have the milk bottle suddenly appear just for the convenience of the hero. The reader will immediately conclude that the author is making life too easy for the protagonist.

There is another side to the technique of planting. If you have an ornate dueling pistol sitting on a character’s desk in an early scene of your story, it had better be fired sometime later. Otherwise, there is no purpose to it, but the reader will constantly be wondering what it was doing there and when it will appear again. Such a prop takes on the significance of another ticking time bomb, as far as the reader is concerned, and you dare not disappoint your reader. If the gun plays no part in the story, then get rid of it and don’t mention it. Do not clutter up a story ― especially a short story―with unneeded props and plants. You may think you are fascinating the readers with rich detail, but all you are doing is teasing them with promises that you have no intention of keeping.

In “The Shining Ones,” the aliens’ lack of communication with the humans was the ultimate barrier. Johnny gets past that by giving everything he has, including his very life, to break through to the aliens. He succeeds in doing so, only to be told that they will not help him.

But, like the prophecies of the three witches in Macbeth, the words that the aliens speak actually mean something very different from the meaning that Johnny at first attaches to them. In essence, this play on words becomes something of a barrier, too, and hides the fact of Johnny’s success until the dramatically opportune moment.

If the story had ended at this point, it would have seemed rather anticlimactic and dull: Boy has problem, boy works on problem, boy solves problem. Ho-hum. The reader expects something more, something to lift the tale out of the ordinary, something surprising or even exalting, over and beyond the bare solution to the original problem.

It was tempting to try to show much more about the aliens. But that was a dangerous step. For one thing, this is Johnny’s story, not theirs. For another, they are much more interesting if they’re kept somewhat mysterious. And, frankly, the third factor was that Johnny and the aliens worked out this problem pretty much for themselves. I found myself reading the manuscript as it came out of the typewriter, about as surprised as any reader can be.

We learn a little bit about the aliens, enough to startle us and make us eager for more. They are not really aliens, after all; they are our own descendants, from millions of years in the future, evolved as far beyond our present human form as we have evolved beyond the tree shrews who were our ancestors.

And it turns out that Johnny has not only been cured of his leukemia, but he has deduced that he will become an astronaut and undertake missions to other stars. His life will go on; he will become a famous historical figure. This is the ultimate reward for his courage and determination: not merely survival, but glory.

It may be that all these techniques and surprises were obvious to you as you read the story. If so, then the framework of the plot was not covered well enough by the action, characterizations and background. If the reader can see the machinery working behind each page, then the story can hardly be holding her interest. But if the reader turns over the final page, looks up and blinks with surprise that she is not still in the story, and returns to the real world with something of a jolt―then the writer has done a very good job, indeed.

 

REVIEW OF THE PLOT CHECKLIST

1. Plant a time bomb on the first page―in the first paragraph, if possible. In the first paragraph of “The Shining Ones” we see that a strange ship has landed in the desert. By the middle of the first page we know that Johnny is the protagonist of this story and that the ship may have come from the stars. By the end of the page we learn that Johnny has a serious illness, although it is not named as leukemia until later. The time bomb is ticking loudly and clearly from page 1 onward.

2. Each story involves a race against time. That time bomb is set to explode at the climax of the story; its ticking should be heard on every page. As Johnny struggles to get through the barriers between himself and the alien visitors, we learn that the aliens are uncommunicative, Johnny’s illness will be fatal, he has run away from home, and the State Police are searching for him. Each page adds a new level of difficulty for our struggling protagonist.

3. Every scene must further the plot. Especially in a short story, if a scene does not help move the story forward, take it out. Go through the story, scene by scene. Jot down the key piece of information that each scene gives you. Try to find a scene that does not further the plot.

4. There should be surprises in the story every few pages. New complications and new problems should arise as the story progresses, moving the plot along on a chain of interlinked promises. The interlinked promises (or problems) are obviously the barriers that lie between Johnny and his goal of being cured by the aliens. As the story progresses, those problems lead to surprises: Johnny evades detection by the police helicopter; Gene Beldone turns into an ally; Johnny discovers that the aliens are merely holographic images. Look for the other surprises in the story and try to remember how you felt when you first came across them.

5. Show, don’t tell! It is virtually impossible to write a story without giving the reader any background information at all. But pay particular attention to the flashback scene in the doctor’s office. I could have simply told the reader that Johnny has an incurable case of leukemia. Instead I inserted a scene that shows how Johnny ― and his father ― felt when they first heard the diagnosis. That is the difference between showing and telling. If a piece of information is important enough to be included in the story, it is probably important enough to warrant at least a brief scene to show it.

6. The characters’ actions should move the story from its beginning to its end. Characters must be active, not passive. The protagonist must change. Johnny is certainly active! He works hard, struggles to succeed, makes discoveries about the aliens and about himself. In the course of his story he changes from a frightened runaway facing death by leukemia to a lad on his way to the White House ― and the stars.

7. The story ends when the time bomb goes off (or is prevented from going off). The ending must answer satisfactorily the major problems raised in the story’s beginning. In “The Shining Ones” the protagonist is struggling to save his life. The time bomb is that deadly case of leukemia that threatens Johnny. He succeeds in preventing that time bomb from destroying him. And in doing so, he achieves much more than he ― or the reader ―dared hope for.

8. Surprise endings are good only when the reader is truly surprised; even then they must be logically consistent with the rest of the story. There is a surprise at the end of the story. Johnny is not merely cured, he will become an interstellar astronaut. The surprise is entirely consistent with the rest of the story, however, and therefore should be satisfying to the reader. Were you surprised? Were you satisfied?

While this chapter and chapter twelve have concentrated on plotting short fiction, in chapter sixteen some further aspects of plotting the novel are discussed.

 

Chapter Fifteen

 

Think Before You Write:

Preparing for the Novel

 

 

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.... The only obligation to which we in advance may hold a novel.., is that it be interesting.

―Henry James

 

 

At first glance, you might think that writing a novel is pretty much like writing a short story, only longer. Well, yes. And no. Everything we have discussed so far in this book― character, background, conflict and plot―applies to the writing of novels as much as to shorter fiction. (There are several classes of short fiction, loosely based on word length: the short-short story [no more than 2,000 words], the short story [generally up to 7,500 words], the novelette [20,000-25,000 words], and the novella, which in form is often a short novel.) Yet the novel is truly a different entity. It is not merely the novel’s greater length that makes it so different from shorter fiction. The novel is (or should be) deeper and more complex than the typical short story. This combination of greater length, psychological depth, and complexity of plot means that the writer must spend much more time on a novel than on a short story. The novel is fundamentally different not merely in length, but it is different in almost every aspect.

Writing a novel is a long siege, and if you are not prepared to spend weeks, months, even years on the same work, you are not ready to write a novel.

In fact, most writers find fairly early in their careers that they are either novelists or short-story writers. It is not that the novelist can write only novels and finds it impossible to do anything shorter, or that the short-story writer never even attempts a novel. But the professional writers that I know find themselves much more comfortable on one side of that line than the other.

I myself am a novelist. I feel quite at home writing stories that take up five hundred manuscript pages or more. I write short fiction, too, occasionally; four of my shorter works are reprinted in this book. But for me, a short story is something I write rarely. I have no idea why. I began as a teenager by writing short stories, but by the time I was eighteen I was already working on my first novel, and I have spent most of my career writing novels ever since.

 

FINANCIAL REWARDS

When it comes to money, novels usually are a better investment of the writer’s time and effort.

A short story may sell for anything from a few dollars to a few thousand, depending on which magazine or anthology buys it. A novel will usually earn its author an advance from the publisher of at least several thousand dollars. (An advance is money paid by the publisher to the writer before the book is published. The writer usually receives part of the advance upon signing the contract with the publisher and the remainder when the manuscript is accepted by the editor. Recently, publishers have been breaking the advance into three or more parts, with the final payment coming when the book is actually published. Technically, advances are against royalties; the advanced money is subtracted from the book’s royalty income until the advance is cleared.)

Five-figure advances are commonplace. Well-established authors garner advances of hundreds of thousands, even millions!

Those very large advances are as rare as total eclipses of the sun, true enough. But even the more modest advances are usually far more than the best short-story sale will earn. Of course, it takes much longer to write a novel than a short story. But if the novel continues to sell it can earn royalties for years, while generally a short story can be sold only once. Even if a story is reprinted for an anthology, it earns only a fraction of what a novel would.

Based on a wage of dollars earned per hours spent writing, novels are probably much better earners than short stories. Remember that time is the only natural resource a writer possesses. It is important to make the best use of your time.

Having said all that, I must add that writers do not live on money alone. If you are more comfortable and more productive writing short stories, do not force yourself to try a novel merely because you think it will earn more for you. Be happy in your work! If you are a natural short-story writer, stay with it. Better to write good short stories than a bad novel, especially if your novel never gets published, and the time you put into it is lost.

 

 

THE LONG ROAD TO THE NOVEL

When someone asks me, “How long did it take you to write your latest book?” I am always at a loss for an answer.

What the questioner means, I am certain, is, How long did it take to put down all the words that comprise the novel? But the physical act of writing is not the whole job of creating a novel―pr a shorter work of fiction, either, for that matter. In most cases, the time spent actually putting the words on paper is the least amount of time spent on the project.

It may take months or years to type out the words of a full-length novel. Almost invariably, it takes the author much longer to arrive at the point where he can sit down and begin writing. Actually, the proper answer to “How long did it take you to write your book?” is this: “All my life.”

During World War II it took more than two years for the Allies to plan the D-Day invasion of Normandy. More than two years of planning, building up supplies, training men, preparing the detailed tactics―all for one single day’s battle.

Similarly, it takes months or years of thinking, planning, organizing, plotting, developing characters, researching the background, and bringing into focus all the other details of a novel before you are ready to begin writing. Even so, the first draft of a novel can be agonizing.

For me, that first draft is rather like meeting a group of strangers on a bare stage in an empty theater. I have a rough idea of what I want them to say and do, but as yet we have no script, no props, no sets. At some point, though, I begin to get familiar and comfortable with my characters, and they begin to move and act on their own. Then it is as if I am not actually writing the novel, the characters are writing it for me. My fingers move across the keyboard, and I read the story as it appears, just as surprised as any other reader would be.

But before I (or any writer) can get to that point, there is an enormous amount of thinking and planning to do.

The most obvious difference between a novel and shorter fiction is that the novel’s greater length allows ― indeed, demands ―greater depth and complexity. Where a short story generally illuminates a single incident, the novel can tell the tale of a whole lifetime, even several generations of lifetimes. The novelist can deal with a larger cast of characters and more intricate interactions among those characters. Because of this greater complexity, and because it usually takes months, if not years, to complete a novel, it is virtually impossible to carry the entire story in your head. You need notes, outlines, sketches and other aids. Like a good general preparing for a crucial battle, you must build up your logistical supplies, train your troops, scout the terrain, and plan your tactics with great care.

 

THE DESK BOOK

All the material that goes into your novel can be organized into a desk book. In years gone by I used a three-ring loose-leaf binder; now my desk book is a set of files in my computer. (Always back up every computer file. Protect yourself against losing your irreplaceable notes and drafts by backing up everything. As a grizzled newspaper veteran told me once, back in the days when we used typewriters, “Only an idiot doesn’t make carbon copies of his work.”)

The reason for the loose-leaf book was flexibility. I could insert new pages and shuffle pages around to suit whatever organization I wanted. The computer allows me to do this even more easily. But I still carry a pocket-sized notebook with me wherever I go, just in case an idea strikes me while I’m away from my computer. When I am going to be away from home for several days, often I bring a notebook computer with me, with the novel and all my notes in it.

While writers have individual ideas about what should go into the desk book, at a minimum your book should contain sections on characters, names, background information, lines and phrases, and a chart of character appearances.

Characters. This is where you put your character sketches, which can range from a simple emotion vs. emotion equation as we discussed in chapter two, to a full-blown biography that reaches back to grandparents or even beyond.

Physical descriptions are important. Everything from the color of the protagonist’s hair to her shoe size should be included here. What does your protagonist like for breakfast? What is her mother’s maiden name? Psychological understanding is even more important. Here in the character sketches you must describe the emotional conflicts that drive your major characters; you must write down each character’s strengths and weaknesses. Especially for the major characters of the novel, you should know everything there is to know, and you should write it all down in as much detail as possible.

Keep adding to the sketches as new ideas and fresh information come to mind. Even while you are writing the novel, add every new detail to the character sketches. Later in the novel you may need to know what Mary’s mother died of. It will be much easier to check your desk book notes than to go paging through the novel itself until you locate the scene where you mentioned the old lady’s demise.

Not all the information that you put into the sketches will get into the pages of your novel. Most of the details in the character sketches are important for you, the author, to know, but probably irrelevant or even boring to the reader. It is just as important to know what to leave out of a story as what to put in. But while you are in the early stages of collecting your thoughts and your notes, put down everything that occurs to you. Every blessed thing. You never know which trivial point will become crucially important to you six months downstream. And then keep on jotting down new information. Today’s note may be the backbone for chapter nineteen. Or just the right touch needed for the last page of the novel, for that matter.

Names. Not just the names of your major characters, not merely the names of all the characters in your plot outline. Write down every name you run across that sounds interesting to you. Some names will evoke a character in your mind. What does “Mitch Westover” suggest to you? Or “Bunny Wunderly”? Even if you do not use those characters in this novel, they may become valuable on a later project.

Especially if your novel is going to include foreigners or people of various nationalities, keep your eyes peeled for exotic names. The daily newspaper is a good source. Each news story from overseas has a treasure trove of foreign names in it. Write them all down in your desk book.

Include more than character names in the desk book. Family names are important. So are names of cities, rivers, mountains, hotels, songs, museums ― everything that goes into your novel will have a name. And since you do not know which will go into the story and which will be left out, err on the side of generosity. Be sensitive to names and put them down where you can find them when you need them.

Lines and Phrases. In this section of the desk book jot down quotations you may want to use, lines of dialogue that pop into your head, ideas for scenes, bits of description, etc.

When I first heard Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade, as a teenager, its second movement painted a vivid scene in my mind. Thirty-some years later I began work on a novel called Colony. I simply jotted down the word Scheherazade in my desk book. Not only did that music-inspired scene make up chapter two in its entirety, the scene gave me the backbone for the novel and for one of its three major characters, the daughter of a rich and powerful sheik who is secretly “Scheherazade,” the leader of a worldwide revolutionary movement.

Chart of Character Appearances. It takes a long time to write a novel. I know that some have been dashed off in a weekend, but we are talking now about your novel, a task that you are serious about, not a weekend’s piece of hack work.

Once you begin to write the novel, its very length and complexity may cause trouble for you. Over the weeks and months that you work at it, you may become lost in the twists of the plot or simply forget vital details. This can bog down your writing effort, or discourage you so badly you stop writing altogether.

One simple way to prevent this from happening is to draw up a chart of character appearances. The chart is simplicity itself:

Just write the chapter numbers across the top of the page and jot down the names of the characters down the left margin. As you work, add more chapters and more character names.

Now run vertical lines between the chapter numbers and horizontal lines between the character names. You have created a chart.

When a character appears in a chapter, put a star along that character’s line in the box beneath the number of the chapter. If the character is only mentioned in the chapter, use a dot or a check mark. If the character does not appear and is not mentioned, leave the box blank. If the character dies, put an X in the appropriate box.

This chart does several things for you. At a glance you can tell which of your characters are appearing the most; perhaps one you thought would be a minor character is popping up in almost every chapter. Time to start thinking about why that character seems to be taking on a larger role than you had first assigned. Perhaps several chapters go by without your protagonist making an appearance; time to think about just whose story you are telling.