“This is not a discussion,” I said. “I will not risk your life on top of everything else.”
“But it’s fine to risk yours?” Irene said. Her face was nearly the color of her hair. “What if something happens to you? Where does that leave me?”
There were tears in her eyes now and I forced myself to look at her. I finally realized why she always begged to come along when I traveled, even though she pretended to hate it. She’d already lost her mother and every time I went away, she lost her father too. Suddenly, I doubted myself.
“Nothing is going to happen to me,” I forced myself to say.
Irene looked up and sniffed. “Promise me.”
I opened my mouth to promise her everything she wanted and more, but I couldn’t.
“You can’t, can you?”
“You just have to trust me,” I said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“How can you possibly know what you’re doing?”
She had me there. I sighed. “Listen, I’m not going until tomorrow morning. We’ll talk more then, okay?”
Her hug caught me by surprise. “I love you, Dad.”
It’d been a long time since she’d called me that. So why did I feel like such a monster?
“I love you too, Reenie.”
I sat in my study for a long time, staring at the covered recursion doors. What a selfish asshole I’d been. Pretending to know how she felt, but never being there for her. I’d traveled the world to save my wife, only to let my daughter slip away. Marie would be ashamed.
There was my answer. I couldn’t risk it—not with Irene to think of. I had sacrificed too much of our relationship already. I’d find my wife, but it would have to be another way.
Something was wrong.
I jolted awake with a gasp, entangled in the sheets. Moonlight flooded my room, bleaching everything bone white. A cool breeze blew in through the window, but otherwise the night was quiet. I tried to fall back asleep, but couldn’t shake the feeling of anxiety.
Pulling on jeans, I padded down the hall to Irene’s room. It was after midnight, but I swear the girl never slept. Still, I didn’t want to wake her if I didn’t have to. She’d just think I was a crazy parent. I knocked lightly and edged the door open, peering into the darkness.
“Irene?”
Panic seized me as I waited for my eyes to adjust and I flipped on the lights. Her bed was empty.
I tore through the first floor, struggling to breathe as I called for my daughter. She was gone. My heart caught in my throat and I felt my eyes drawn to the floor above me.
Please, God, no.
I scrambled up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time and burst into my study. I froze in horror.
“Oh, Irene. What have you done?”
The protective sheets had been torn from the opposing photos, revealing the mirrored doors beneath. Facing as they were, they created an endless hall in both directions.
I took a deep breath to calm myself, trying to slow the pounding of my heart. She couldn’t have been gone long. Yanking on my shoes, I inspected both doors. The one on the right still had a smudge from Irene’s fingers. I wet my lips, pressed my hand against the door and stepped through.
I had brought the apocalypse to paradise.
As I’d expected, the infinite recursion had created a path between worlds, a sort of slipstream that enabled me to jump from one to another in a single step. But something in that connection had destabilized the multiverse. The pocket worlds were collapsing.
The ground trembled, quakes rolling beneath my feet in increasingly powerful waves. Clouds twisted in the sky, bruise-colored serpents weaving through the air as electrostatic discharge arced between them.
I stepped forward and my surroundings blurred, shifting to the next world as I lurched forward. The sensation was similar to passing through a recursion door, but multiplied tenfold. Even after all the doors I’d traveled, the lurch was brutal. I blinked several times and shook my head.
The sky above fractured like glass, immense cracks spreading across the firmament. Shards broke away, shattering upon the ground and leaving behind an empty void.
I found Irene on the fifth step. She was outside the slipstream on her hands and knees, throwing up. For someone who had never experienced the lurch before, I was amazed she’d made it this far.
I left the slipstream and knelt beside her. Gravity was still intact, but I could feel a vacuum forming. The surroundings were unaffected, but the tug was unmistakable. The multiverse was reacting the only way it knew how: like the immune system, it was rejecting foreign objects. It was trying to pull us out.
The sun, an ominous shade of crimson, flickered in the broken sky like a dying light bulb. I put an arm around Irene, as much to comfort her as to keep her from drifting from our position.
“I’m . . . sorry,” she said, breathless like she’d run a marathon.
Something struck me: she could feel pain.
“I know,” I said, helping her to her feet. “This is my fault. I let my drive to find your mother interfere with being your father. I’m sorry, Reenie.”
She nodded weakly, wiping at her mouth.
“I have to take you back.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted.
The fierceness in her eyes made me proud, but I knew she couldn’t make it much farther in her condition.
“Please, Irene. Do this for me.”
Irene closed her eyes and, after a moment, she nodded. I let out a sigh of relief and helped her into the slipstream. Five steps and we were back in my study.
She stumbled woozily as I helped her to the couch, covering her in a blanket. I glanced over my shoulder at the still open slipstream.
“Go,” Irene said. “Bring Mom home.”
I hesitated, then nodded and kissed her on the forehead.
Stepping into the slipstream, I was instantly thrown to my back as another quake rocked the multiverse. A rift split the world, sending a snow-capped peak tumbling down the side of a mountain. Fighting off a wave of nausea, I pushed myself up and stepped again. I had to go farther, faster.
Every step was a gale force now, skin and muscle pressing against my bones. It felt like being hit by a tidal wave over and over again. My nose dripped and I wiped it away, hand coming back with a bright red smear.
I ignored it and pushed on, surveying the passing worlds in a glance. One hundred, three hundred, five hundred, the worlds whirred by like a slideshow on fast-forward. I’d know our world when I saw it. Wouldn’t I?
Dread twisted around my heart. The thing I feared most crept from its hiding place: what if our world was gone? What if the fire had destroyed not just the door, but the world itself? What if Marie . . . no. I gritted my teeth and forced the thoughts away. I’d traveled too long and too far to end like this.
I stopped suddenly, taking a step back. I almost didn’t recognize it. Quakes had devastated the majestic landscape and the vibrant azure sky was half missing, but it was our world. I’d finally found it.
I pulled myself from the slipstream and leapt into the chaos, screaming Marie’s name. A canyon-sized chunk of sky broke away, crashing upon the mountains and scattering to dust. As if on cue, the rain started, torrents pouring from the jigsaw sky wherever there was sky left to pour from.
Our world lacked a door, so the vacuum I sensed earlier was absent, yet I felt strangely pulled. I didn’t realize where I was running, until I was already there. The massive
waterfall still flowed, pounding down the mile-high cliff face. My head whipped back and forth, body barely in control as I scanned the clearing.
Then I saw her.
She lay in a heap by the lake, her bare feet in the sand as water lapped against them. Broken pieces of sky lay around her and a gash on her forehead trickled blood into her red hair. I ran to her side, taking her head in my arms.
“Marie—Marie!”
I pressed my ear to her chest. Thank God, a heartbeat.
Lightning forked to the ground in the distance and the rumble of thunder rattled the world. Gravity was failing, pebbles, shells and bits of broken sky lifting from the beach and floating around us. There wasn’t much time.
I picked Marie up, cradling her in my arms, and started back. Even in the dying gravity, my legs trembled, strangely weak. I wasn’t used to feeling pain here.
The world quaked and burned and fell to pieces around us, but I barely noticed. I had her back and we weren’t going to die now. We reached the slipstream and I took one last look back at paradise. Marie groaned and her eyes fluttered open.
Tears welled in my eyes as I watched her wake. She looked at me as if stirring from a dream, but a moment later recognition dawned in her eyes.
“Jonathan,” she said, smiling weakly. “What took you so long?”
“We’re going home, Marie.”
She closed her eyes and a tear slid down her cheek. “I’d like that.”
Getting back was an eternity.
Hundreds of steps felt like a hundred thousand. I clutched Marie to my chest, shielding her as best I could from the effects of lurch. The strain was enormous, but I forced my legs to move and my lungs to breathe. The slipstream crumbled around us, barely holding together.
And then eternity ended and we were in the study once more. I staggered as gravity reapplied itself, carefully lowering Marie to the floor. She took her sleeve—pristine even after all this time—and delicately wiped the blood from my nose.
Irene had fallen asleep on the couch waiting for us, but now she woke, rubbing her eyes.
“Dad?”
She sat bolt upright, throwing aside the blanket. For a moment, she seemed frozen. Like if she moved, the dream would dissolve around her. Then she broke free and ran full into our arms. No one said anything, but no one really needed to.
After a time, I pulled myself away. Irene sobbed quietly in her mother’s arms. Marie looked at me over her shoulder as reality continued to settle in. Her cheeks were streaked red as she smiled at me and mouthed the words: I love you.
I turned to the mirror door. Hairline fractures riddled the surface of the photo like spider webbing. I had to break the infinite recursion to end the devastation inside. I gathered up the blanket and moved to throw it over the photo.
“Leave it,” Marie said.
“The multiverse will be destroyed,” I said.
“I know,” Marie said, stepping over and resting a hand on my arm. “But by now, everyone’s been pulled out. The worlds are empty and should stay that way.”
She was right. Paradise was a wonderful dream, but we didn’t know what to do with it. The pocket worlds had been special to a lot of people, but too many more had abused them.
So why was it so hard to leave it behind?
Marie took my face in her hands and looked me in the eyes.
“Jonathan,” she said. “Let it go.”
I looked into her eyes, a cascading spectrum of green, like emeralds in shifting light, and realized that nothing else mattered. I had Marie, I had Irene and my family was whole again. I let the blanket drop and hugged my wife. I pressed my face into her shoulder and pushed my hands into her hair and, for the first time in two years, I cried.
Story Vitality
BY L. RON HUBBARD
Since its inception, the L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Contest has become the single most effective means for an aspiring author to break into the ranks of publishing professionals.
The Contest, of course, was created by L. Ron Hubbard, one of America’s most accomplished writers of the twentieth century. He was a bestseller as a young man, with his stories gracing the covers of the hottest pulp magazines. Ron published nearly 250 works of fiction in all the popular genres of his day, including mystery, adventure, thriller, western, romance, horror and fantasy. Ultimately, he helped to usher in Science Fiction’s Golden Age with such genre-creating stories as Final Blackout, Fear and To the Stars.
His broad understanding of the field, along with his proven techniques for generating tales quickly and gracefully, made him one of the most qualified people in the world to launch the Writers of the Future.
He knew the rigors of a writer’s life and how the publishing industry worked. He also recognized the vital elements a tale needed to be publishable, from story ideas to research to that intangible known as suspense. He pondered the depths of story vitality, and addressed the importance of an author researching his topic deeply, so that he understood the intricacies of his tale.
That he published articles on these very topics in the popular writing magazines of the day—Writer’s Digest, Writer’s Review, The Author & Journalist—comes as no surprise. That these essays are as valuable today to the aspiring writer as they were when first written is self-evident to any professional. For this reason, his essays were chosen to form the backbone of the now-famous Writers of the Future writers’ workshop. Taught by Tim Powers and K. D. Wentworth, it is regarded by many past winners as the most valuable of the Contest’s awards.
It was Algis Budrys, editor, author and the Contest’s first Coordinating Judge, who noted, “You will almost certainly become a successful writer if you take L. Ron Hubbard’s writing precepts to heart and practice them.” He noted that when an editor picks up a story, the first things he or she looks for are (1) a clear and recognizable character (2) in a detailed setting (3) who is doing something interesting.
In “Story Vitality” L. Ron Hubbard smoothly illustrates some of the fundamental techniques of how to build a story by carefully selecting these three basic elements.
Story Vitality
It vaguely irritates me to hear that a pulp writer need not know anything about his scene, that he should have no preoccupation with accuracy, that a beginning action scene and plenty of fight are the only requisites.
Many moons ago I wrote a story called The Phantom Patrol. I wrote it with an old-timer’s remarks in mind. I said to myself, “M’boy, you’re writing tripe, why slave over it? Why go to all the trouble of researching the thing? Your readers won’t know the difference anyway.”
And so The Phantom Patrol cruised the markets, collected copious rejects.
When it at last came limping home, abashed and whipped, I gazed sternly at it. It would seem that it had all the things required for a good story. It had action, it had unusual situations, it had lots of thud and blunder. Why, then, didn’t it sell?
To understand the evolution of The Phantom Patrol, some of the plot is necessary. It concerns a Coast Guard boat, a dope runner and piracy.
The hero is a lieutenant, chasing a cargo of heroin. He gets cast ashore in the blow, his crew is all drowned, he wakes on the beach in the morning to discover that his vessel is still serviceable. But before he can board the boat, the dope runners shoot him down and steal the ship before his eyes.
He recovers from the wound, escapes to the C.G. base only to discover that he is tagged with the name of pirate. Unknown to him, the villains have taken his boat, have stopped liners in the name of the Coast Guard and have robbed them.
He has no way of proving his innocence, so he goes to jail, escapes,
returns and wipes out the dope runners.
Ah, yes, I know. That story has always been good. I felt it would sell, but I could think of no way to pep it up.
I threw it in the ashcan and rewrote it all the way through. It went out again—and came home, more battered than ever.
Certainly there was something wrong, but I didn’t have time to waste on it and I threw it in the files.
It might well have stayed there forever, had I not been faced with one of those sudden orders which leave you cold and trembling for want of a plot.
The second rewrite of The Phantom Patrol was ten thousand words. The order was for twenty thousand. And all I could find in the files was The Phantom Patrol. Something had to be done about it. I had a few days to spare and I decided that maybe the Coast Guard might be able to slip me some data which would lengthen it.
Then and there, I learned something. The scene of the yarn was laid in the Gulf and Louisiana. In my rambles I seem to have missed both places. The theme was the Coast Guard and, outside of watching some of the C.G. boats, I knew little or nothing about the outfit.
But hadn’t an old-timer said that accurate data was unnecessary? Why did I have to go to all this trouble?
It happened at the moment that I was writing aviation articles for about twenty-five bucks a throw. The price of the twenty-thousand worder was to be two hundred and fifty dollars.
Thinking about that, I reasoned that maybe I ought to spend a little time on the latter, if I always spent a day on an aviation article.
With the bare thought that maybe I could get some data for stretching purposes, I hied myself down to the city and looked around. A Coast Guard tug was tied to the dock.
Summoning up my nerve, I walked up the plank and rapped on the commanding officer’s door. He was engaged in changing his uniform, but he bade me enter.
I sat down on a transom and plied him with a few questions. He informed me with some heat that lieutenants were never in charge of seventy-five-foot patrol boats. Only chief petty officers captained them.
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