Onas awoke to the warmth of sunlight on his face and animal noises some distance away. He was half hanging, half-lying, and almost upside down in a tree, about twenty feet up. He had no memory of how he had gotten there, but imagined it was painful. Trailing away from him up into the higher branches were several parallel lines of nanocord, and far above him in the forest canopy, the remnants of his gliderchute.

A drop of sweat formed at his chin and ran the length of his jaw toward his ear. His right cheek burned; that was not a good sign, and his right eye was half stuck shut. His right foot was tangled in the cord, and when he exerted himself to free his leg, an intense pain shot up his back and he nearly blacked out. It was coming back to him now...

Jess stopped typing and stared at his monitor, unsure where to go next. He took a deep breathe and tried once more. He reread his opening paragraphs out loud and quickly to immerse himself in the flow of the story again.

…and he nearly blacked out. It was coming back to him now…

A wall of silence appeared in his mind, the kind of overwhelming blankness that every writer hates. His Muse had nothing to give to his fingers. Damn! He made a fist with his right hand and slammed it on his desk. Bowing his head, he exhaled through pursed lips.

A glance at the system clock in the corner of his screen told him it was almost time to go. He stared out the vid-view on his cabin wall. The ship was passing over the vast open sea on this new world. In the distance, a thin sliver of darkness on the horizon told him they were coming up on the jungle below.

His reverie was abruptly broken by the ship’s intercom. “Jesse Maldive, report to Bay Seven!”

He sighed. Unable to come up with a realistic landing story, he resigned himself to experiencing the real thing first. With practiced hands, he closed the typing board, passed his hand over the infrared beam, and sealed it against prying eyes. There is nothing a writer hates worse than having someone read his unfinished drafts.

The walk to the bay, getting strapped into his padded seat, and the countdown went by in a blur to his mind. He hated to leave a story unfinished and it kept pulling on his attention.

“Are you ready, Jess?” asked Commander Dory on his left.

“Ah, yeah. I was just lost in thought there for a moment,” he replied into his helmet microphone.

“Well, I need you fully alert now.”

“Right.”

The bay doors opened and Dory moved the landing craft out into the vastness of open space.

This was one of Jess’s favorite times—the long descent through an alien atmosphere. Unfortunately, his vision was limited to what he could see on his monitor and for a long period, it was blank as the craft built up a heat buffer in front of it as the atmosphere bled off their orbital velocity. Although he could not see it, Jess knew from his readouts that the outside of the landing craft heated to a fiery white-hot.

He kept himself busy checking and rechecking all the onboard systems as the pilot, Commander Dory, focused on guiding them to a safe landing. During the descent, the increasing push of deceleration forced him farther back into his seat and Jess grinned like a little boy. Yes sir, this is the best part.

When their velocity reduced to that of a smooth horizontal glide, Jess relaxed and studied the image of the jungle below on his monitor.

The landing craft started vibrating. The shaking increased relentlessly, making it almost impossible to read the dials and screens.

“Jess! Any idea what’s wrong?” shouted Dory’s voice in Jess’s helmet.

But try as he might, he was unable to even read any of the system’s controls. It took all his effort just to keep a firm grip on the armrests. “No. I can’t get a readout.”

“I can’t slow us down. We must eject!”

Jess struggled to reach the lever as the Commander’s seat blasted upwards and the craft shook violently and spun in a circle. With a desperate last effort, he grabbed the red level and pulled. Pain slammed into his consciousness and blackness followed.

#

Portog pulled his tentacles back from the array of circular buttons on the panel. Not a bad start. He was sure his readers would enjoy his character Jess’s sense of descent and tension. One pair of twin eyestalks turned to check the image of the approaching planet.

And it was a beauty—with wide areas of gorgeous blue, totally unlike the pink clouds of his home world. The two yar-cycle of his journey to the source of the strong radio signals was coming to an end.

Portog’s mon-cycles of intense research on this bipedal species was about to pay off. After many yar-cycles of non-creativity, he was positive this trip would break this damned block of his creativity.

Immersing himself into the culture of this species was his most powerful stimulus for his Muse. Surely, this tome would be greeted with rave reviews back on Mular. For no one had ever experienced a species like this one. And no one had ever taken the bold step of being the first to visit one in over a millennium.

His own people were becoming far too stagnant. It was no wonder he found these black periods of non-creativity becoming all too frequent. The pressure on him to yield another tale of exploration beyond his cloud-covered home planet was horrendous. He was the last of a dying family of writers.

His joy was rudely interrupted with an overwhelmingly bright light and violent shock to his craft. In less than one sec-cycle, automatic systems blocked the light, but it took awhile before his vision cleared. In the meantime, he struggled to brace his large gelatinous body against the vibrations.

The shaking got worse and worse and he knew he’d have to activate his escape pod. One tentacle uncurled and wrapped its tip around the lever and pulled. Another bright flash of light and the vibrations stopped. Out of one pair of eyestalks, he saw his spaceship rush away from a side window. That was when he saw the laser beam from below that was focused on it.

Dozens of min-cycles later, when he had descended to a low enough altitude, he moved his left forelimb to the blue cover. Three tentacles slipped over its edge and embraced the lock. With a sharp jerk of his limb, he opened the glider control box. Another quick study of the fast approaching dark mass made it clear that it was now or it would be too late. His longest tentacle tapped on the red button.

With a lurch, his personal harness yanked him out of the escape pod. A blast of warm air forced him to close his eye slits to protect them from drying out. The ground was rushing up to meet him too fast!

His gliderchute slowed a little but still descended out of control…. He opened his eye slits to gauge the situation. The thought that the attack had damaged his gliderchute flashed in his mind just sec-cycles before individual clumps of green reached up to him.

Instinctively he held his breath and closed his eye slits again….

#

Greeg felt the energy dissipate from his protoform. Swirls of radiant colors revealed whorls of useless and conflicting magnetic fields on the surface of the star. For the fifth time, Greeg had failed to push any form into the mass of iron chips in the four dimensional matrix of his own magnetic vortex.

Unable to form anything like the sighs of Jess or any other character in his stories, Greeg sent a pulse of psi-beam out to the ether. With an immense scream of psi-energy, he fell victim once again to writer’s block.

If only he could finish it, for surely, such a tale would spread via the worm-hole at the center of his world and gain him wide fame in the Milky Way galaxy. For who would believe that intelligent beings could ever exist on those inhospitable, cold, low-gravity balls of rock that orbited the stellar home worlds.