“Researching a Novel…or Just the Facts, Ma’am”

Nobody writes a novel without doing some kind of research.  It can be detailed and extensive or barebones, but if you want to be taken seriously, you’d better get your facts straight.

Currently I’m into researching, planning and outlining for my next sf novel The Farpool: Marauders of Seome.  I’ve got electronic and real folders for character bios and backgrounds, book covers, Earth circa 22^nd century, Uman-Coethi conflict and U-boat details, plus a variety of additional files and notes.  At this moment, I’m developing background and bios for major characters ( but not all of them). 

The great question for any storyteller or novelist is how much research is enough?  How much detail is enough?  There is a term—verisimilitude—that writers sometimes use. It means ‘resemblance to the truth.’  No storyteller tells a story with all possible details.  He’d be writing or reciting an encyclopedia instead of a story.  The storyteller chooses details selectively to enhance the story and give it a flavor of being real.  You should include just enough detail to transport your reader into your imaginary world and ground him there, believing that all this could in fact have happened.

Which means that you do enough research to provide enough detail to achieve verisimilitude.  In practical terms, that means you have to do a bit more research than you ultimately might use.  As an author, writing about how a character feels or might react to a situation, I want to be able to pick and choose details to explain, illustrate or dramatize the situation in such a way as to put the reader right there in the character’s shoes.  Little details can matter, especially if a reader has some experience with the subject matter.  When I wrote The Farpool, I used the term valsalva maneuver to describe something that scuba divers do to clear their ears and sinuses when experiencing pressure changes.  The concept was relevant to the story and I had to use it accurately to maintain verisimilitude.  I had to research it to know what I was talking about.  And I’m sure some of my readers are well familiar with this technique and would have bitten their lips in anguish or firebombed my house if I had used the term incorrectly.  I should add that I’ve never scuba dived a day in my life. 

Ernest Hemingway once said all writers should have a built-in bullshit detector.  Why?  Because all readers have a built-in bullshit detector.  What about science fiction stories, where the writer is taking us to worlds and times and alien cultures that have never existed anywhere outside the writer’s imagination?  Here again, the details have to read true, sound true and feel true.  And they have to be internally consistent.  Often, the littlest detail—what someone ate for dinner last night, how they dressed for descending into that cave, what it felt like when they landed on the icy surface of Europa—if done right, can connect with the reader in just the right way and they’ll find themselves saying: “Yeah…I can believe it would happen like that!”

Author Tom Young, writer of many well-regarded military thrillers, writes in Writer’s Digest some tips to follow when researching a story:

1. Write what you know (personal experience has a value all its own)
2. You can do research on the cheap (that’s why we have Wikipedia and libraries)
3. You can find anything on YouTube
4. You can find things anywhere.  Keep pen and notepad nearby during all walking hours.
5. Use all your senses
6. You can leave things out.
    
   I particularly like Young’s advice about number 7 above.  To quote:
    
   “If you do thorough research, you’ll find more material than you need, and no reader likes a data dump. In my own writing, I could bore you to death with the details of aircraft and weapons. But a very good creative writing professor once advised me to let the reader “overhear” the tech talk. Say, if my character punches off a HARM missile that might sound authentic and pretty scary. But scary would turn to dull if I stopped the action to tell you that HARM stands for High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile, which homes in on anti-aircraft missile radars. Who cares? The damn thing goes boom.”
    
   In other words, a little bit of detail can go a long way if it’s chosen properly and used correctly. But it’s still necessary.  You still have to do the research to dig out that little nugget and save it for the right moment in the story.
    
   Researching is ultimately about being prepared, ready to write the story with the flair and power that will grab the reader and pull them into your imaginary world and strand them there for the duration.  The best stories, the most memorable stories, have memorable characters and memorable settings and details. 
    
   Anyone remember the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
    
   The next post to The Word Shed will come on April 3, 2017.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.
    

 

 

“Update on The Farpool: Marauders of Seome”

This post is an update on my next Farpool novel.  You see the title above.  It’s a sequel to the original The Farpool, published in June 2016 at Smashwords.com and available at fine ebook retailers everywhere.

I have a general plot outline but my days are now filled with the task of fleshing this outline out into a document I call Chapter and Scene Details.  This involves taking each piece of action in my notes and constructing a series of scenes and a chapter, explaining (to myself) what is supposed to happen, where the action takes places and who’s involved…and why.  It involves some fairly intense thinking and imagining.  Outlining is hard but it helps me in writing later. 

How do I come up with this stuff?  Basically, by asking questions.  I know what has preceded this chapter.  I know what my general outline says about where I should be going.  So I ask myself: what should happen next?  What would this character do next?  How would others respond?  That’s how I flesh things out…by putting myself right in the middle of the action and describing what I see in my mind’s eye.  It’s fun and rewarding but it can be exhausting as well. 

Here’s an excerpt from one of my newly concocted outlines…

Chapter 2:

(November 21, 1942)

Two German U- boats (U-115 and U86) are attacking an American convoy off the North Carolina coast.  A freighter and a tanker are torpedoed and sink.  Oil, flames and dying crewmen are floundering in the cold Atlantic waters.  The Ponkti lifeships and their mission teams observe what happens and are intrigued with the underwater technology of the Germans.  They observe the U-boats and follow them during the attack, then follow one as it returns to a U-boat pen at Bremen, on the German North Sea coast.

 

The Ponkti resolve to find a way of meeting with the operators of these strange metal craft.  Several Ponkti, wearing lifesuits, simply walk up out of the water at a U-boat pen and accost technicians working on a U-boat in harbor.  The dockworkers are startled and afraid.  Shots are fired, but the lifesuits are armored and the Ponkti are able to render the Tailless unconscious with blinders and sound suppressors (that give off deafening sound bursts that can render an enemy unconscious).  German marines are summoned  but one man, staff officer Fregattenkapitan Werner von Kleist, happens to be nearby, compiling a report on the U-boat mission for the OKM in Berlin.  He is more intrigued than afraid.  When one of the Ponkti (the Germans call them ‘Froschmann’…‘Frogmen’) hands Kleist an echopod, Kleist eventually understands what it is for, that these are intelligent beings and that they want to talk, to communicate, through the translator.  Kleist waves off the German marines (the Seebataillon)(also Marine-Stross-trupp-Abteilung) and huddles with other base officers in a machine shop off the pier.   There is a standoff outside, Ponkti vs. the marines. 

 

This process takes some hours, but eventually a meeting is organized around the waters of the U-boat pen…in a bunker just built to store munitions and explosives, but not yet being used. 

 

Needless to say, this can be laborious and tedious.  I try to do one of these chapters every day, working on the details after writing 3+ pages for Episode 22 of my serial Nanotroopers. 

Once I’ve taken my chapter details to the presumed end of my outline, what’s my next step?   Look for holes in the plot.  Obvious inconsistencies.  Duplications.  Would this person really do that, based on what I know about them?  Or based on what has gone before.

Writing a sequel has both advantages and disadvantages.  I have a ready- made imaginary world at hand, already thought up and thoroughly researched and accessible in the Appendix of The Farpool.  The disadvantage is I can’t veer off too far from what has already been written and published and expect readers to believe it.  So there are both constraints on what I can do and props to help me do it.  The art of writing lies in finding a middle way and making it work for the reader. 

The end result, if I do all this properly and with appropriate attention to detail, to story flow, to motivations and believability, is I will have something called Chapter and Scene Details and I’ll be ready to write the first draft.  When I’ve done this right, that first draft becomes much easier to write and in many cases, almost writes itself.  In fact, if I do the Details the way I should, I can often lift text right from the Details and use it in the story.

A little upfront work goes a long way toward helping this writer get the job done.  And, if the story wants to veer off as I write it (which happens), I’m not afraid to do that either, knowing where I am ultimately going to wind up by following my detailed outline.

My current plan, if all goes well, is to begin the first draft of The Farpool: Marauders of Seome on or about April 20…Earth Day.  Except we won’t be spending all our time on Earth….

The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 27.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

“Writing Fiction Today…the Long Game or the Short Game?”

It’s an old question for every storyteller: does my story fit best in a short form or a long form, like a novel?  I’ve written and published both and they both have their own upsides and downsides.  Novels take longer and require a substantial investment of time and effort.  Short stories take less time, but don’t give you the room to explore subplots, or develop characters as you might want.

Let’s see what others think.

Writer’s Digest gives us five areas to consider when making this decision.

1. Duration of the story.  Normally, a short story takes places in a shorter, concentrated period of time.  My sf short story The Better Angels (part of the Colliding Galaxies collection) occurs over just a few days.  A novel may span years in actual story time. 
2. Number of characters.  You’d better keep a short story down to a few characters.  In the story mentioned above, there are five characters.  But my novel Final Victory literally has a cast of hundreds.  In this novel, I also employed a story frame technique…a story inside a larger story.  You can’t do that in short fiction because you don’t have room or time.  In writing novels, like The Farpool, I have found it advisable to develop character backgrounds and bios just so I can keep things straight.  If Joe has blond hair in chapter 1, he’d better not have red hair in chapter 9, without good reason.
3. Plots and Subplots.  In a novel, plots and subplots can quickly become a management issue, requiring the writer to juggle a lot of balls at the same time.  The way I do this is to outline in some detail and keep outlining until I’m sure I’ve covered everything.  I also group scenes into chapters in a table format, then  re-outline again.  For me, I can’t do too much outlining.   You don’t need to do this in shorter works, though I usually do a shorter version of this.  Maybe just a few paragraphs per scene, with some connecting ideas to draw the scenes together.  As Writer’s Digest suggests, having more characters makes more plot and more action easier to develop.  Conversely, having the time or space constraint of a short story forces you to make every word count and choose only those scenes and words that advance the story.  It’s great discipline but it isn’t easy...for me, at least.
4. Themes.  I can’t do a better explanation of this than Writer’s Digest, so take a look:

“…when I got the assignment to write this piece, I’d been rereading Anton Chekhov’s short stories. My copy, a sublime little clothbound volume issued by the Modern Library in 1932, features marginalia written by previous owners. In the blank half-page after “Grief,” a story about a bereaved hackney driver and his callously abusive passengers, someone wrote, “Second-lowest man has one job in life: to keep the lowest man down.”

Now that is an incisive reading of the story. One vest-pocket-sized tale was all the great Chekhov needed to pierce our hearts with that truth. Just like Chekhov, in a short story you should be trying to get at one or two poignant aspects of being human. In a novel, you can create characters, let them loose, follow them and see what they do. If you feel your story will be more a journey than a statement, you may be leaning toward a novel.”

1. Commitment.  A short story might take a few days or a few weeks.  A novel could take a year.  It’s a substantial investment of time and energy.  For me, often the story or the characters will tell me what they want.  Sometimes a story just feels like a novel, with the abundant room to explore themes, subplots, character details, etc.  Other times, it feels like something shorter. 
    
   I have found that my particular talents tend toward the longer form.  I feel most comfortable telling stories that give me space to move around, knock things down, explore characters and put them in revealing situations.  Even when I try hard to write a story at a shorter length, it feels like a straitjacket.  It just takes my storytelling motor time and space to warm up. 
    
   Having said that, I will have to admit that developing and writing my serial Nanotroopers was done, in part, to try out the discipline of doing 15-20,000 word stories to a strict schedule.  Could I maintain the pace and tell the stories over the year plus it’s taken to get to the final episode, which will be uploaded March 31?  Time will tell on that. 
    
   The short game or the long game is an individual writer decision.  There’s no right or wrong here.  You really have to rely on your instincts and how the story idea feels to you as it gets fleshed out.  And don’t be afraid to change your thinking half way through.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 20.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.
    

“Excerpt from Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin”

In about six weeks, I will be publishing my latest story in the Tales of the Quantum Corps.  You see the title above.  This will be the seventh installment of this series and is intended to be the final installment, in which everything is wrapped up and all will be revealed.  Look for it at Smashwords and other fine ebook retailers in the middle of April.

Below is an excerpt from this story.  I expect to provide a few more excerpts in the coming weeks….

Excerpt:

Prologue

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

Samuel Johnson

Ford’s Creek, Colorado

March 20, 2155

2345 hours U.T.

The problem with being a swarm being, Johnny Winger figured, was that you couldn’t taste  hot dogs being grilled on a campfire.  And that sucked. 

He really didn’t know how he had gotten here.  He had a memory—did swarm beings even have memories?—there had been an endless field of waving, undulating plants, like a corn field, only it wasn’t corn.  When he looked closer, he could see that the corn was actually composed of trillions of tiny bots, a whole field of bots.  A whole planet of bots.  When he walked through the field, the bot-plants parted like corn stalks, but little poofs of them drifted up and he soon saw he had a rooster tail of dust behind them, identifying the path he had taken through the field.

Then he had come to a small lake, barely a hundred meters across.  There was a small white wooden footbridge across the center of the lake.  And, not unexpectedly, he saw a small whirlpool churning alongside of the bridge piling, right in the middle of a lake.

What else was there to do but jump into the whirlpool?  If this was a dream, that was the logical thing to do, wasn’t it?  So he jumped…

And wound up here.  ‘Here’ was actually a place of strong, good-feeling memories.  ‘Here’ was one of the good places.

It was the old fishing camp and cabin at Ford’s Creek, Colorado.  It had to be ’35, maybe ’36.  His Dad, Jamison Winger, had often brought him here for long weekends in the summer and fall.  Trout and bass and all that cold running water that burbled down out of the Rockies made Ford’s Creek a special place.

He knew this place.

Now he was inside the cabin.  It was late, well after midnight.  He was supposed to be in bed, in the top bunk, of course, with his brother Brad and neighbor Archie below.  There were others in the bedroom too, but he didn’t know them and they were sound asleep anyway. 

Somehow, like a well-rehearsed routine, he knew what he was going to do before he even did it.  Trains ran on tracks and memories followed tracks too. 

Johnny shimmied quietly down the ladder from the top bunk and padded across the hard wooden floor to the bedroom door.  He cracked it open, crept out into a darkened hall and made his way toward the living room up front.  There were voices there and some laughing and chuckling.  Cards were being dealt.  It was the grownups and their poker game again.

Johnny stopped at the end of the hall and peered around the corner.

A fire guttered in the chimney, mostly smoke, but no one paid any attention.  A small rickety table was set up next to the fire.  Chairs had been pushed aside to make room for the table.  There were cans and paper sacks strewn across the floor.

Someone burped real loud and Johnny had to stifle his own laugh.

Grownups, really--

Five men were playing poker around the table.  One was his Dad, tall, fringe of gray hair around a mostly bald top, red flannel shirt not tucked in, his weathered, rough hands fanning out the cards to study his draw.  There were others too: Hugh, Roy and Todd.

The fifth man sat with his back to Johnny.  The low lights and the flickering flames of the fire cast deep shadows across a broad set of shoulders.  He never turned around, and Johnny took to calling him the Shadow Man.  He didn’t know the Shadow Man’s real name.

“Come on, Roy, you in or out?”

Roy was stocky, white-haired, ruddy-faced, in fact he had a pig’s face, Johnny had always thought.  His lips tightened and he slapped a few cards down on the table. 

“Yeah, I’m in.  I’ll see your five and raise you five.”

Todd tossed a few chips into a growing pile.  “I’ll call.”

Johnny’s Dad did the same, but added, with a mischievous wink, “I’ll see your five and raise you twenty.”  He tossed a handful of chips in the pile, which had now become a small hill.

The Shadow Man said nothing at first.  Then, with no words, he tossed his own chips in, all of them.  In a low, almost inaudible voice, he said, “See…and raise fifty.”

That raised eyebrows around the table.  It even gave Johnny a chill.  Not what the Shadow Man said but the way he said it…like a hiss, almost, like a snarl.  The Shadow Man talked like Johnny figured a talking grizzly bear would talk: guttural, menacing, hoarse and deep.

Who was this Shadow Man? Johnny wondered.

Then, almost as if he were answering Johnny’s question, the Shadow Man spoke again, just like a grizzly bear playing cards.

“I never bet less than the house.”  It was a kind of an explanation.  The Shadow Man must have had a winning hand; he’d bet everything on that hand.  More raised eyebrows. 

“Sure, whatever you say,” muttered Roy.  He didn’t look up, but continued fiddling with his own cards.

Johnny had about a million questions.  Was this fishing camp real?  Did I actually jump into a lake on a planet of bots?  Am I dreaming?

“You’re not dreaming,” the Shadow Man bent forward, toward Jamison Winger.  “I saw the look on your face.  You’re wondering how any hand could be that good.  My hand is that good.”

No one argued with the Shadow Man and the game went on.  As he hung by the corner of the hallway door, Johnny tried to take in everything he saw.  He knew it all had some kind of meaning. 

He’d been deconstructed, he remembered that.  Doc III had done the honors, disassembling him into atoms and molecules, just before the Keeper in that cave on Europa had consumed him…or what was left of him.  Now he was an angel, a para-human swarm being just like all those weirdos who followed the Assimilationists. 

And he remembered that Doc III had tried to maintain his original identity and memory in a small nondescript file called Configuration Buffer Status Check…a place the Central Entity would hopefully never think to look. 

Slowly, piece by piece, even as he watched his Dad play a poker game with Roy, Todd, Hugh and the Shadow Man, the memory of who he was and what he had to do came back.  

Thanks, Doc.  The little assembler had managed to save enough of his memory to figure all this out….

Johnny remembered being outside the Inuit village of Nanatuvik, in Alaska and seeing a man shuffling through the snow as he approached.  The man was short, dark-skinned, enveloped in a heavy qaspeq parka and hood, with bone necklaces rattling around his neck as he approached.  Another angel?  It was hard to tell.

The man spoke something, though Winger couldn’t hear over the whine of the wind.  He realized the man was Nanatuvik’s angakkuq, the shaman.  He was gesturing at something in the sky.

Winger looked back over his shoulder.  It was late afternoon, with the sun low, but already he could make out the shimmering veil of the aurora borealis hovering over the distant mountains. 

The angakkuq approached Winger and stopped, placing a hand on Winger’s shoulder.

“The peril of our existence lies in this fact: we eat souls.  Everything we eat has a soul.  All things have souls.  If we hunt and fail to show respect for the souls of our prey, the spirits will avenge themselves.  See in the sky…the Old Woman of the Sea is already disturbed.  In the days to come, we must be careful.”

With that, the shaman ambled off toward a nearby hill. 

Johnny Winger knew he had his work cut out for him.  Already he had enough intelligence about the Old Ones to make life difficult.  He just had to find a way to get it to UNIFORCE.

Mostly he hoped he could block the Central Entity from executing the Prime Key. 

Maybe, somehow, in ways he could now only dimly perceive, he could block the Prime Key himself.

That old shaman was right, he told himself.  He would have to be careful in the days and weeks ahead.

It was a new life he was living as an angel.  The rules were different here.  He’d have to watch his step.

He knew UNIFORCE needed every scrap he could give them if the Normals were to have any chance of resisting the Old Ones.  He hated himself for using that term but the truth was he was half angel, half-Normal himself, one foot in each world, pulled in two opposite directions at the same time.  He supposed that spies and saboteurs had always dealt with that.

But he had to remind himself of something his son Liam had once said.  “Being an angel is so cool.  You can be anything, you can go anywhere, you can’t die….”

Already he could feel the same pull Liam talked about.  But he had to resist.  He had to win this battle.  Not only was it a battle between Normals and angels, between humans and the Old Ones.

It was a battle with yourself.  That was the hardest part.  Somehow, he’d have to do what Liam and Dana and millions of others hadn’t been able to do.  Win that battle and save the small kernel of his own identity, his own memories that Doc III had managed to squirrel away in a small file somewhere in his config manager, to live another day.

The Normal part of him was just a few bytes at the end of that file.

But it was the only human part left.   And that was the part that had to survive. 

Now it had survived.  Doc III had seen to that.

Now it was time to get to work.   The Shadow Man had told him, in ways he couldn’t really explain, that he had an important mission to perform.

Chapter 1

Farside Observatory

Korolev Crater, the Moon

March 25, 2155

0100 hours U.T.

            Third-shift astronomers Nigel Course and Lilly Fong knew of no better word to describe what they were seeing than dread.  Pure, unaltered, rock-in-the-bottom-of-your-stomach dread.

Both were pulling late shift today…tonight…whatever the hell it was.  Tending the radars and telescopes of Farside Array, scanning sector after sector of the heavens for any little burp or fart worthy of an astronomer’s interest.   The High Freq array had just gone through a major tune-up last week and it was Course’s job to give her a complete shakedown for the next few days.

At the moment, she was boresighted to some distant gamma-ray sources somewhere in Pegasus…where exactly he’d forgotten.

While Fong peeled a banana and stifled a yawn, Course took one last look out the nearest porthole and begrudged the final wisps of daylight before Farside was fully enveloped in the nightfall.  At that same moment, he heard a beeping from his console and turned his attention back to the array controls.

What the hell…

Nigel Course looked over his boards, controlling the positioning of the great radars out on the crater floor and the optical and radio telescopes that accompanied them.  He quickly pinpointed the source of the beeping…Nodes 20 through 24…the south lateral array…was picking up some anomaly.

He massaged the controls and tried to focus the array better, get better resolution on the target.  SpaceGuard didn’t beep without reason. 

Only it wasn’t SpaceGuard.  It was Sentinel.  The outer solar system net.

A quick perusal made the hairs on the back of Nigel Course’s neck stand up.  The system displayed a list of likely targets, based on radar imaging and known ephemerides.  He scanned the list, mumbling the details to himself.

“ Hmmm….right ascension 22 degrees, 57 minutes, 28 seconds.  Declination 20 degrees, 46 minutes, 8 seconds---“ Just as he was about to consult the catalog, Sentinel threw up a starmap.

Lily Fong dropped her half-eaten banana.

“The Mother Swarm,” she murmured. 

Course’s fingers were flying around the keyboard.  “Lilly, we don’t know that.  We need to study this thing.  It’s an all-sector alarm, I’ve got returns on all bands.  Whatever the hell it is, it’s big.  Gi-normous, in fact.  A quarter of the sky, centered on 51 Pegasi, but not fifty light years away.  In fact, it’s right on our doorstep…or rather, Pluto’s doorstep or where Pluto used to be.”

“Anything on Doppler?”

Course finagled with more buttons.  “Bearing…toward the inner system.  Margin of error puts it within a cone approximately two astronomical units, centered…” he tapped more keys, “…centered on us or near us.”

Fong shuddered.  “It’s here.  Billions of kilometers away but it’s here.  Can we get some resolution on the thing?”

“We can try.”  For the next few minutes, the two astronomers worked together, manipulating the instruments that comprised the Sentinel net, a vast detection grid orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto, a world now gone forever, a grid designed and placed to alert UNISPACE to any threats coming from certain suspect bearings…like 51 Pegasi.  The design parameters never mentioned the Old Ones or little green men or extraterrestrial monsters from outer space by name, but no one was fooled. 

Sentinel was designed to do exactly what it seemed to have just done. 

After half an hour, Fong sat back in her chair.  Her face was pale, the blood had drained out when the Sentinel alarm had gone off.  A sheen of sweat beaded up on her forehead and drops fell to the keyboard.  She ignored them and looked wordlessly over at Course.

“You know what we have to do.”  It wasn’t a question.  “The protocol’s pretty clear when we get a Level One alert.”

Course ran down the results of the last scan, the one that made Fong so pale.  “I read the analysis this way, Lilly…just so we’re clear on the details in case questions come up.  After washing the raw data through ALBERT three times, do you concur that the detected anomaly…we’re calling it KB-1 for now…Kuiper Belt Object One…is a diffuse mass of small particle-sized objects with a thermal signature of a large swarm?”

Fong nodded silently, staring at the graphs and plots on her panel as if they were contaminated.  “I concur,” she whispered, weakly.  “It has to be the leading edge, Nigel.  That’s all it can be.  We studied and simulated this possibility for years, every which way we can.  Most of the runs converge on results very similar to, if not identical, to this.  ALBERT doesn’t lie.”

Course stood up and went over to a porthole, which gave onto a constricted view of the nearest arrays of the Submillimeter Interferometer, and a shadowy backdrop of Korolev crater’s steep craggy walls beyond.  A triangle of blazing sunlight still illuminated the upper rim, last gasp of the lunar day.

“I still don’t get it--“Course shook his head, turned back to the consoles.  “51 Pegasi’s been quiet for years…SpaceGuard’s never showed anything.  Now, all of a sudden, BLAM!  Energy spikes all over the place.  We should have seen something before…rising X-ray, rising gamma levels, something. Black holes don’t just appear out of nowhere.”

“ALBERT doesn’t say it’s a black hole, Nigel.  That’s just wishful thinking.”

Course shrugged, staring at the velocity scans superimposed on each other, silently willing the data to say something else, anything else.  “If it’s not a micro, then what is it?  What eats whole worlds?”

Fong pointed to the graphs on her display.  “That does.  There’s your answer.  ALBERT doesn’t care whether we like it or not.  Best match with the data from Sentinel.  Really, the only match.”

Course took a deep breath.  “I know, I know.  I’m just trying to make sure what we have is airtight.  Every time we’ve raised a flag, UNISPACE winds up hitting us over the head with it.  Gamma ray burster…dark matter cloud…Type II supernova…they’ve always got another explanation.  But this time—“

“I’m sending a NOTAP to Gateway.  The Watch Center needs to see this.  Maybe they’ll have some ideas.”

Course nodded.  “Do it.  I’ll set SenDef Three.  Sentinel Defense Condition Three.  That’ll wake everybody up at Station T and Station P…pretty much everybody from here to Saturn.”

The Notice of Astronomical Phenomena went out from Farside moments later.  It was like setting off a firecracker at a funeral.  In less than five minutes, the dense grid of comm links from Saturn to Mercury had erupted into a furor, buzzing and vibrating with questions, answers, expletives, exclamations, proclamations, bad jokes and nervous posts.

All Nigel Course and Lilly Fong could do now was wait…wait for the inevitable call from UNISPACE Headquarters in Paris.

 

So that’s an excerpt from the beginning of Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin.  Look for it in mid-April 2017.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 13, 2017.

See you then.

Phil B.