by Jack Bickham
been stupid!
She mentally shook herself. No matter how dumb she had been to forget to watch her step, it was done and she was in this mess and what now?
Her arms and legs had taken a beating, hitting against rock and wood as she fell. Her head still had a ringing sound in it. Using the flashlight to examine herself, she saw numerous bright cuts and scratches, but nothing that seemed too serious.
She hugged herself, but couldn't stop the shivering. It was much colder at this lower level. Panic pounded on the door of her mind, wanting to take over.
Just try to be calm and rational, she told herself, and think.
All right:
She couldn't climb out from here. She was stuck, but good. Should she look for another escape route, or sit tight in hopes someone would find her before dehydration or exposure took her out permanently?
No one knew where she was —which was her own fault. But wouldn't they start looking for her in another hour or two, and spot her Jeep from the road?
With a new sinking sensation, she knew the answer to that. She had parked beyond the maintenance sheds to let the sun shine through the windshield and keep the vehicle warm while she was away from it. But when it was parked behind the sheds, it was invisible from the road above.
Panic knocked again. Remembering what she had discovered on the upper level, she shuddered. / have got to get out of here and report this.
How was she going to do that?
She couldn't climb out. How, then?
Fighting to stay calm, she thought back to the old charts. There had been some ventilation shafts marked on them. Could a person climb out through one of them?
This level extended more than a mile in both directions, she remembered. It was intersected here and there by natural fissures, cracks and caverns. She remembered someone saying that some of those natural faultlines reached the surface, too.
So what was she to do? Bumble back into the bowels of the mountain, hoping for a lucky break?
It wasn't quite that bad, she told herself. This was Level 2. She knew there was a Level 3, and at that point she remembered the chart showing another vertical shaft. She also remembered that Level 3 had been started only a few hundred yards to the south.
Which way was south? She shone the flashlight left and right, into the tunnels extending in both directions off the seepage pool into which she had plunged. To her left, the flashlight beam stopped less than twenty feet away, shining on rubble that filled
the tunnel in that direction. Swinging her beam to the other end of the shaft, she saw an uneven carpet of fallen rock splinters and some support timbers leaning at spooky angles. But the tunnel in that direction appeared to be intact.
So she didn't have to strain her brain trying to figure out which way to go, she thought with dismay. There was only one direction open to her.
The little-girl part of her started to yammer and bawl. I don't wanna go, I'm too scared!
She gasped for air, fighting to regain control of her feelings. How long could she last down here in this cold darkness? Long enough to be found alive? Could she sit tight and count on that} She thought of Luke —momentarily yearned for him. But then her mind conjured another image: Butt Peabody. Would Luke know what to do? She doubted it. Would Butt? Yes. Somehow Butt would know.
But Butt wasn't here. If she was going to get out of this mess any time soon, she had to do it on her own. And something told her she couldn't just sit and wait.
Getting shakily to her feet, she eased her way around the black seepage pool that had cushioned her fall and scared her halfwitted at the same time. Beyond it, her flashlight lit up the first few yards of blackness that filled the only mineshaft open to her. She limped into it.
Commentary
In a chapter some pages earlier in this story, the character Johnnie Baker had sought to discover whether someone had broken into an old mine shaft. The scene question — "Will Johnnie discover signs of a break-in ?"—was answered "Yes, but!" as she discovered a hidden body, but then fell through booby-trapped planks covering a vertical shaft into which she plunged. This scene-ending disaster also ended a chapter, after which there was a change of viewpoint to other characters in other trouble of their own.
This segment marks the return of viewpoint to Johnnie; no story time has elapsed since she fell through the broken planks.
Lines 1-14. Continue the action of the disaster to make sure the reader remembers exactly where Johnnie was left at the earlier chapterending.
Line 15. Johnnie begins to react. Her sequel opens. The fact that she can't seem to stop shaking (Lines 21-22) shows emotional as well as physical shock.
Lines 21-30. These lines provide reader orientation to Johnnie's plight as Johnnie herself experiences the knowledge.
Lines 31-32. The thought portion of the sequel begins. Johnnie begins to analyze her data.
Lines 34-35. The statement about being stupid shows her reverting a moment to emotion —anger with herself. Emotion often tends to return like this in sequels after the character has begun to try to think. Here, you may wish to note that Johnnie is characterized by the nature of her emotion: She does not experience terror like many would; her emotion is tougher —irritation with herself.
Lines 44-45. Again emotion tries to take over, but Johnnie is tough.
Line 46. Here she lectures herself, in effect, to "get on with the thinking part of this sequel!"
Lines 48-50. In classic patterns, she begins reviewing her situation, and analyzing it.
Lines 60-61. Panic —emotion —tries to return, but again she beats it
back.
Lines 61-62. She moves to a new general decision —to get out —and immediately goes on to trying to come up with a plan to achieve this broad goal.
Lines 64-89. All aspects of her plight —and possible new goaloriented actions —are analyzed.
Lines 90-91. Still again, fear tries to paralyze her.
Line 92. Lines such as this —showing the character's continuing awareness of strong emotion —but determination not to wallow helplessly—add realism to portrayal of the total response to a disaster; in real life, we seldom move quickly from emotion to pure logic; feelings keep recurring; thus we show such a pattern here.
Lines 93-101. Johnnie considers and rejects the most likely motives she could have for sitting tight —when sitting tight is the last thing the author wants her to do.
Lines 102-106. Having worked through her emotion, thought and decision-making processes, she starts toward her new goal with action — limping into the mineshaft in search of a way out.
APPENDIX 5
VARIATIONS IN THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF SCENE AND SEQUEL
This appendix contains one excerpt. Commentary follows.
Excerpt is from chapter 8 of Tiebreaker, by Jack M. Bickham. Tor Books, © 1989 by Jack M. Bickham. This sequel resumes reader contact with the character Partek after plot changes to several other viewpoints. When last seen, he was fleeing the town of Browning, Montana, after a narrow escape from capture.
l
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Swift Current, Saskatchewan The prairie of Saskatchewan looked like it extended a thousand miles.
In some directions it did.
Standing in front of his motel unit, Dominic Partek looked out over the low sprawl of the town of Swift Current, and watched faint cloud-shadows drift across the face of the naked grass hillocks. It was afternoon, hot.
Partek had to decide where next he would flee.
He delayed the decision by staring at the prairie, letting the sadness move through him.
The sadness was unrelated to the danger that choked him. He searched for a reason for it and found one: this barren country reminded him of the flatlands of Serbia around Surcin and Beograd.
He had imagined that nostalgia for his homeland was longsince behind him. But in his current predicament the landscape had brought it back.
/> Partek lit one Players off another and turned his gaze to the bug-encrusted front of his truck. He had driven hard and slept a long time. Now he had to decide his next step.
He faced the crudest kind of dilemma. If he went back, the punishment would be severe, possibly death. But if he reverted to his agonizing decision to defect to the West, he might be found and killed anyway; and certainly his family —so long thought
lost— would pay.
Whatever I do, he thought, there will be suffering.
He was sick of it —sick of suffering, of dilemmas, of uncertainty and loss . . . sick of himself.
He remembered his childhood in Surcin. His father had always been ill, had sometimes been drunk and violent. In those times he had beaten Dominic with a cold, terrifying fury. The boy had grown up with terror. Usually his mother had been able to intervene before the beating went too far. Sometimes Alexi Partek beat her, too, for intervening.
Dominic's mother, gaunt and haggard, had always held a fulltime job at a bearing factory. But she had always loved him, had held him and smiled at him when he did well, protected him as best she could. And sometimes in the evenings when his father was gone she had sung the old songs. Dominic had adored her, would have done anything for her.
So in school he worked very hard, and was a fine student. His father sneered at his accomplishments, saying they would not improve his chances in life.
Dominic was good in athletics, too, which his mother told him should be no surprise: his father, long ago, before his tragic injuries at Stalingrad, had been athletic too. His father, Dominic was told, had been a great hero at Stalingrad, and this was why he limped so, experienced such constant pain, was sometimes violently ill, did not have adequate lungs.
Alexi Partek was from the Ukraine, she told Dominic, and should have been compensated by the Russians for his heroism in the war against Hitler. That the Russians had discarded and ignored him after his great service was only another proof that the Russians were evil men.
Dominic's father had only one serious conversation with him during his growing-up. On that occasion, Alexi Partek told his son that he should not believe his mother's railings against the Soviet Union. It had been an honor to give up his health for the USSR, Alexi told his son, and if there was a reason now why he drank sometimes, and fell into fits of the blackest and most violent melancholy, it was because circumstances forced him to live here in Yugoslavia, Martina Partek's homeland, rather than in his beloved Ukraine. His wife, Alexi Partek said bitterly, understood nothing. She was govno. Everything about Yugoslavia was govno.
Disagreements of this sort were part of the fabric of Dominic's childhood. He worked hard to please his mother and to avoid his father's fists. He led his class through school.
In 1966, Dominic had graduated from high school and entered the Yugoslav army by conscription. It should have been a happy development with hope for the future, but at almost the same time something wonderful and something disastrous happened in the family. His mother, astonishingly, told him that she 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121
was pregnant. And his father, after a ghastly scene, ran away.
Sending her son off to the army, Martina Partek was pale but resolute.
"I will manage," she told him.
"Father will come back," Dominic told her.
"No." She was like ice-covered stone. He could sense her inner-trembling, but God, she was strong. He had always known she was strong, but in this moment her strength awed him. "He will not come back. But if he tried, he can never stay here again."
"Mother!"
"You are a man now," she told him with an eerie calm. "I will tell you this. Alexi has gone away because of this child in my belly. You heard the shouting, the threats and insults. We cannot feed another child, he says. We are too old, he says. But I tell you this, my son: one time, long ago, there was another child in my belly; Alexi shouted and raved, and I . . . had an end put to that pregnancy. Still sometimes at night, in my chair, I look up from my sewing, and there at the dark-night window I see the face of that child of mine I did not allow to be born. I will not lose this child. I will have this child and raise this child. I will do that. Alexi is gone because he could not confront another child. He will not come back to me because I have chosen this child over him."
Martina Partek's eyes looked far away, and her jaw set. "I do not think I will see Alexi's face at the window in the dark of night."
It had been a grim home-leaving, but once in the army training camp Dominic had put it behind him as best he could, and did what he always had done: fight to excel. Almost all of his pitiful monthly check was mailed back to Surcin. Months passed and he finished basic training and was selected for special code and cipher school near Sarajevo.
While he was in that school, word came that his father had died in Moscow. Dominic was granted five days' leave to attend to final arrangements. By the time he arrived in Moscow, he learned that his father's body had already been cremated, and the "estate" amounted to a cheap watch, a handful of unidentified pills, a few items of clothing, and unpaid rent in a cheap rooming house. Under "Identity" on the certificate of death, the inspectors had written "Veteran. Unemployed."
His leave time running out, Dominic returned to his new post. He wrote a long letter to his mother in Surcin, and enclosed a small extra amount of money, borrowed from another trainee. Two weeks later, this envelope was returned to him with the stamp on it: UNKNOWN.
Dominic remailed the letter, telling himself the return had been a bureaucratic mistake. It came back again. Badly alarmed, he sought emergency leave. He was told he had just had an emergency leave.
For three more weeks he stewed and waited for the leave that would come automatically at the conclusion of the first phase of his intelligence training. He considered going to Surcin without official leave, but such disobedience of orders would have been contrary to every fiber of his morality. So he waited, scared.
When he finally got to Surcin, he went at once to the tiny wood shack where he had grown up. He found another family there. Their name was Rishtek. They knew nothing about his mother. He talked to neighbors. They said Martina Partek had simply vanished, evidently taking her few possessions with her.
Frantic now, Dominic called on the militia. But they pointed out that his mother had taken her things with her, so foul play seemed highly unlikely. They agreed at last to file a report. Dominic, although young, was experienced enough to know what happened to reports when they were tossed into the maw of the bureaucracy.
His leave ran out. He used every moment available to search, but he didn't know where to search, or how. He spent his last day of leave walking up and down streets in Belgrade, thinking that somehow he would just look up, and by magic there she would be. He realized that he might as well be looking in some other city; he had chosen Belgrade for his blind wanderings only because it was nearest Surcin.
All through 1966, as he finished one school and was immediately sent to another, a haunted Dominic Partek wrote letters, filled out enquiry forms, bombarded the mail with questions. He was convinced that his mother would not have deserted him if she had been in control; he was sure something dreadful had happened to her.
What had happened to her? And to the child she had been carrying?
His letters and tracer forms came back stamped or scribbled on with the stupid monosyllables of drones and functionaries: NOTED. NAME ON FILE. NO RECORD. FORWARDED. RETURNED. NO ACTION. UNKNOWN. HELD PEND FORM 860. NO DOCUMENTS. Twice he got short leaves and rushed to Surcin or Belgrade again, but no one knew anything. Old friends shook their heads sadly and turned away. These things happened.
By the summer of 1968, Dominic's hopes had gone. He completed the last phase of intelligence school and was assigned as an attache in the Yugoslav embassy in Moscow. There he met a man named Kudirka, a Lithuanian who w
orked in the Soviet government. Their friendship became close, and on a brisk October evening, walking near the walls of the Kremlin, Kudirka bluntly asked Dominic if he had ever considered a career "with a major organization in the field."
"You must know I am attached to the UDBA," Dominic told
him.
"I have in mind our own organization," Kudirka replied.
"You mean the KGB?"
His friend smiled.
"You are a member of the KGB?" Dominic pressed, astonished.
"Please do not misunderstand me," Kudirka said. "I do not suggest that you should represent my organization against your own. Your loyalty is unquestioned and of great interest to us. No. What I suggest is an arrangement under which your files could be transferred to our offices on a permanent basis. You would become one of us. We have a great need for men of your loyalty, intelligence and integrity. We would provide additional training. Within two years' time, you would in all likelihood be an attache like myself at a Soviet embassy in another part of the world."
"But my government would never agree to such an arrangement!"
"It is not impossible," Kudirka told him.
"My tour of duty extends another two and one-half years."
"It is not a major impediment."
Then Kudirka told Partek what he would be paid, and how he would be trained. He spoke of advancement, world opportunities.
They were magic words. Partek had already begun to see the parochialism of the UDBA, and its limited role in the world. He was a good communist, and despite his suspicion of things Russian, considered the KGB a valiant and praiseworthy operation — the best on the planet.
And here was his chance to become part of it. He had no family to hold him back.
The decision was made. With amazing alacrity, the Yugoslav bureaucracy spat out the reams of necessary paperwork. Before Christmas, Partek reported to an officer in the great old stone headquarters building on Moscow's Dzerzhinsky Square.