The Possible Assignment Is Accomplished

My brother regularly flies supplies to an outpost in northern
Canada for the convenience of a climatologist who is living
alone there to study the weather. I myself am an experienced
explorer, and, at my request, my brother agrees to take me
along with him on his next trip. We arrive at the camp. My
brother asks the climatologist if I may stay with him for two
weeks, until my brother makes his next trip. The climatologist
is not enthusiastic but out of politeness is forced to agree.
After my brother leaves, it takes two or three days to break
down this man's strange reserve.
I have heard that there is a tremendous bear roaming the
woods in the vicinity of the camp and, as a hunter, I am eager
to have a crack at it. I tell the climatologist this and gather
from the peculiar manner in which he receives the request that
a suspicion of just such a reason for my visiting him had
caused his original coldness toward me. It seems to me that
the climatologist somehow identifies with the bear and wants
to protect it from harm.
But I press him, and finally he agrees to go out with me on
a hunt for the beast. After several days searching during
which I suspect he has purposely led me away from the bear,
we finally come on the animal. Immediately I train my rifle
°n it, but its immensity and grandeur make me hold fire. I
turn to the climatologist to find that he has taken a bead on
me. I wait for him to shoot. He does, but over my head. And
his shot brings down the bear who had spotted us and was
lunging toward me. Later, the climatologist explains that he
had been so repelled by the "hunter" in me that he was willing
to shoot me rather than see me destroy the last living link the
contemporary world had with prehistoric times. His feeling
of kinship with mankind had reasserted itself at the last
moment and saved me.
It's criminal to take the guts out of what was a fine adventure
tale by outlining it in this manner, but it is a perfect
example of a plot-type which, in one sense, contradicts
the " impossible-assignment" stories and, in another, parallels
them. In this tale of the adventurer-hunter no attempt
was made to make the shooting of the bear seem a
superhuman feat. The difficulties of the hunt were first
established and in the course of the story elaborated after
an unforeseeable fashion, but the writer desisted from
playing the how-could-it-possibly-be-done game with his
reader. The hero himself took on the assignment with
complete conviction that his efforts would be successful;
he was not responding to an exterior or interior pressure,
but to an urge. He accepted the job wholeheartedly.
As was pointed out, the writer of the impossible-assign'
ment piece relies entirely for effect on the sleight-of-han d
virtuosity similar to that used by the theatrical escape artist .
Every apparent method of accomplishing the stunt is
blocked, and then only either amazing luck or ingenuity
saves the day. In these possible-assignment stories a unique
but t
horoughly feasible problem is set for the hero. The
dangers or difficulties accumulate as the story progresses,
and the emphasis is laid not on the fact of the solution
alone but on the nature of the progressively confounding
barriers to the solution which arise. The movement of the
story is not an unraveling process, as with the "impossibleassignment
" pieces. And, in particular, it should be remembered
that the dangers or difficulties which the hero
meets in prosecuting whatever job he has undertaken grow
increasingly more intense right up to the very close. As
soon as the hero passes through the most severe crisis, the
story should end. In the story of the young amateur
hunter, this crisis is, of course, the sudden addition of the
climatologist as a threat to the hero's life.
There recently appeared in one of the slicks an interesting
story about a young engaged couple who hired a small boat
to do some deep-sea diving. The young man had served as a
diver with the Navy during the war and on many occasions
had explained the various techniques of diving to his fiancee.
With this precaution, the young man goes down while the
girl remains on the boat to tend the lines. In poking around
the hull of a sunken ship, the hero inextricably catches his ai
r-line on a ragged edge of rusty plating. His situation looks ho
peless. If he cuts his tangled air-line and rises to the surface
the girl won't be able to unscrew the headpiece in time to
keep him from suffocating. He decides that the best thing
would be for the girl to cut him loose and go back to p ort rather than engage in a vain attempt to save him and en,
danger her own life while doing so. She pleads with him over
the diving telephone to let her try. Finally she convinces him;
he rises to the surface; and with some ingenious technique she
manages to release the headpiece in time.
The story is successful not so much because of original
treatment or superior handling but because of the writer's
vivid description of death by suffocation. That doesn't
seem very much to make a story from, and it isn't. But it
was enough to differentiate this story from the thousands
of other similar stories editors receive. Every dangerousassignment
story contains descriptions of the hero's reactions
to the dangers he meets with. The more genuine
and original the writer can make these reactions seem, the
more excitment he lends to his story, the more he will be
able to make the reader thrill to the danger. A lion leaping
out of the bush, the muzzle of a blue-steel automatic, the
rattle of a poisonous snake are, unfortunately, old, old
hat, and the terror of the hero in the face of such dangers
won't be much newer. But with this diving story the
writer had the rare opportunity of describing the hero's
tortured imaginings of what suffocation would be like.
Suffocation isn't entirely unique to the slicks, but it is
different enough to be very effective. Also, it brings to
every reader's conscious mind his own deep fear of suffocation.
Everyone has experienced, at one time or anoth er,
danger from suffocation, great heights, hideous insects,
speeding autos—and everyone carries about a vestige of the
fear these dangers inspired. On the other hand, few
readers can react with the same emotional sympathy to
such dangers as attend warfare, stunt-flying, big-game
hunting, etc. In the case of this story about diving, it's
doubtful that it would have sold without its vivid descriptions
of suffocation, although the descriptions were not
particularly essential to the plot. The majority of slick
stories have no more nourishment than a glass of water.
If they manage to be good fun, they do well. If the writer,
by any means, can make the reader's heart beat fast, he
most likely has a salable story.
The story about the possible assignment which is merely
interesting and not dangerous covers a multitude of sins
and virtues.
As an example, a high-school teacher is putting on a Lincoln's
birthday program in the school assembly hall. The
guest speaker he had lined up is unavailable at the last
moment. He must find a substitute immediately. Luckily, he
hears that the grandmother of one of his students, a Negro
boy, saw Lincoln when she was a child and knows many
original anecdotes about the great man. He induces the quaint
old lady to appear. Originally, he feared she might be subject
to stage fright, but she turns out so talkative, so full of stories,
that the teacher physically has to take the microphone away
from her. Eventually, the teacher discovers that the old lady
is considerably younger than she claimed to be, that she never
saw Lincoln, and that all her fascinating stories were her nw ll
inventions. That difficulty is solved platitudinously, and the
story ends with light and love shooting off in all directions .
Or, consider this one.
I'm riding in a Pullman berth one night having a good
deal of difficulty going to sleep. As I listen to the clickety.
clack of the wheels, I imagine they are forming themselves into
Morse code groupings. It reminds me of a boyhood friend
who knew Morse code. The more I listen to the wheels the
more certain I am that someone is trying to communicate with
me. Sure enough, it is the same friend from my childhood.
He has been dead for ten years, he says, and he needs help.
He wants me to turn up some money he had hidden just
before his death and give it to his widow who is now in bad
straits. He vows he won't let me rest until I do this for him.
After many mistakes and much time spent, I finally locate the
money which is in the form of old, outsized bills long out of
use. I manage to find the wife and after considerable arguing
convince her that the money I am offering her has really
been sent at the direction of her dead husband. On my way
home to resume a normal life at last, I hear over my car
radio that the widow has been picked up for possession of
marked money from an almost forgotten robbery of many
years past. Then I hear the familiar click in the wheels of
my car. It's my dead boyhood friend, come back for the last
time to thank me and to explain that he had to repay his
widow for a certain mean turn she had done him before his
death.
This story and the one about the Lincoln program are
no
more extreme than most pieces dealing with the merely
interesting assignments. The story-form does not lend
itself especially either to adventure or sentiment. In consequence,
the details must usually be highly original.
category:plot lines