I was just profiled in the Hampton Roads Writers newsletter by Penny Hutson.   Here's the piece:

Author Spotlight*

*(A members-only perk)

Dr. Nigel Sellars By Penny Hutson

Author, history professor, and former journalist, Dr. Nigel Sellars, was born in Birmingham, England but emigrated as a child with his family to Quebec and then to Oklahoma in the United States at the age of nine. He spent most of his life there. In fact, much of his historical works are about the state of Oklahoma. His article “Almost Helpless in the Wake of the Storm” is about the 1918-1919 Spanish flu epidemic in Oklahoma. That piece won him an award as the best article in The Chronicles of Oklahoma for 2004. A prolific and diverse writer, Dr. Sellars’ work includes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, short stories, book reviews, articles, and various other pieces. He’s always loved history and writing and successfully melded the two into a satisfying lifelong career. As a reporter he won several awards, including sharing an Associate Press/Oklahoma News Editors award for covering the infamous Edmond Post Office mass shooting, from which the term “going postal” originated. Although he eventually left the field of journalism to become a professor of history, he firmly agrees with the famous Ben Bradlee of the Washinton Post, who is known for referring to journalism as “the first rough draft of history.” So far in his career, Dr. Sellars published a total of seven books, including three novels, a short story collection, and two self-published ones on Smashwords titled Stacy and the Monkey King, a children’s book written for his late niece, and a humorous fake biography chapbook titled Edgar Rice Krispies: Mangler of Adventure. His historical monograph titled Oil, Wheat & Wobblies was published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Although he hasn’t published any fiction lately, his banner year happened in 2020 with several pieces, such as “Terminal Eyes,” published in Amazing Short Stories; “A Dark Desire,” published in Sirens Call, Fall/Halloween 2020; “And Now the News,” in 365 Tomorrows online; and “In the Z Unit,” in the Indiana Horror Review - just to name a few. He’s currently working on several exciting projects, including a true crime work titled Poisonous, in the fashion of Erik Larsen’s Devil in the White City, a novel titled Elfhunter, and a few science fiction novels. His completed horror story, “Prairie Gods,” is set in a small Nebraska town were Dr. Sellar’s family lived for a year under less than pleasant circumstances. The town in the story is plagued by prehistoric and Native American monsters and an evil brotherhood trying to revive the Old Ones. Sounds delightfully creepy and intriguing. His advice for writers attempting publication for the first time is this: “Never give up. Keep plugging away. Write, and keep writing. Don’t wait for inspiration. Writing is hard work, but the results are rewarding.” Thank you, Dr. Sellars for being an active participant in HRW and at our yearly conferences as an author and instructor. We look forward to reading your next piece.

 It's been three & a half years since my last post.  I'm still writing, but struggling, too.  I have several manuscripts essentially completed, but needing editing and revision.  For some reason I am afraid to contact agents about these works, perhaps fearing that they are not good enough.  Also, I retired from teaching, retired in many ways being a term similar to "waiting for death," like being in airport waiting for a flight you hope will be endlessly delayed or even cancelled.

So, why do I write?

Because I am a profoundly lonely person who lives a life of quiet desperation.  I have almost no real friends, people who are glad to see me, people who call me up to go get coffee or a beer. That’s been the case most of my life.I’ve been lonely most fo my life and I’m also terrible at making friends—I’m extremely clumsy socially and often humiliate myself spectacularly.

I can say I’ve been isolated literally and emotionally most off my life.   I really can’t say why, other than those folks who told me I’m intimidating or thought I was aloof. 

Friends call you out of the blue just hear your voice. Friends care that you seem lost and directionless.

My high school friend Jan Nice once told me that I intimidate people.  I’ve since had someone else say the same thing.  I have trouble believing that. I honestly do not know how I do that. I feel, instead, rejected or abandoned. Another acquaintance from high has since told me she (and undoubtedly others) thought I was aloof and uninterested in social tings.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

I’ve never been aloof in my mind, but I can say I’m basically lacking in self-esteem, I’m painfully shy in small situations, and I worry how people will respond to me, even fearing rejection.

In my writing, I can have the competent person I long to be doing things.

People can point that I should proud of my accomplishments, my books, my professorship, my musical skills.  Maybe.  But it does little to wipe away the sense of being invisible.

Since I’ve retired, no one in my  former department has bothered to contact me, to check on me or invite me to any departmental events. It’s as if I’ve ceased to exist.

I’ve also lost my passion.  I love history and doing historical research, but now I find my field is under assault by ignorant assholes who don’t want to hear bad thins abut their country or their “race.”  This unfortunately is a world-wide phenomenon and it’s made me feel that there is no hope for the future, that imbeciles will try to run things and drive us to collapse.  Makes feel like it’s almost pointless to deal with truthful history because too many people are too stupid to accept reality.  

Basically, however, I really don’t know how to make friends. I don’t know how to compliment people without sounding like I have ulterior motives—which I don’t but can’t explain what I really mean.  That’s part of a self-destructive streak that has sabotaged me than I care to to recall.  It’s cost me a couple of jobs and probably has cost me potential friends.

My only real friend (other than my late first wife, Vicki Brown and my wife Nancy), I suppose, was Vicki Redick.  We’d always talk on the phone and had lots of shared memories.  We dated a while but circumstances always got in the way.  I genuinely grieved after she died. 

Her death still bothers me. I knew we had a mutual attraction, but I nearly lost it emotionally when I learned after her death that she had told a friend in Nashville that I was the love of her life.  It was shattering to learn that.  She was someone I could  talk with, feel comfortable with, enjoy watching movies with and she was a fabulous kisser. Neither of us had the guts to tell the other what our true feelings were.

Vicki R., as I’ve written elsewhere, also suffered a bilateral stroke a few years before her death and wasn’t found for about ten or eleven days until the postman  through her front window spotted her crawling around her living room.  She had been able to feed her dogs, but not control her own bowels, something I knew likely embarrassed her profoundly.  I left her with a right hand permanently curled in a ‘hook.’ Oddly, that forced her to use her left hand and may have helped her recover as she later told me she’d was a natural left-hander who’d been forced to learn to use her right hand, a barbaric practice I hoped had long disappeared. BTW, I’m left handed, too.  I learned Vicki’s stroke while I was in a bad depression myself, and this only made things worse.

With Vicki R., we shared enough with each other that I learned her version of me quite well. I explain my version of her in a number of stories I’ve written in which she is a major character, if not the protagonist.  The novel I’ve just completed the first draft o, has a lot of my feelings toward her in it. I guess I wanted to make her immortal—something I know will never happen for me.

Surprisingly, many of my real friends have been women, most of who approached me.  My first real friend was Karen Trollope, who lived down the street from me in Isle Perrot, Quebec. Her folks were from South Africa, if I recall correctly.  Sh introduced me to the Hardy Boys mysteries and we do make believe as th characters.  She also was a writer, and could write good stories even in third grade. I think she inspired me to write s well.  I do not not what ever happened to her, but I’d love to think she became a successful writer.  Our relationship ended when my family packed up and moved to Oklahoma. I guess I still wonder what might have been, but Karen certainly made me love strong, intelligent women.

I’ve had a couple of male friends I guess were close friends. One was a friend from school and the Boy Scouts (something, which like many things in my life, I eventually bailed on and quit). Another two were fellow drama students with whom I’ve kept in touch, but rarely see. One is a successful film actor and the other became a college prof, just like me. One of the women in the group still contacts me, but I know she’s busy with the bar she runs and the other have her own life, too. [Both of them took me for car rides in high school, but I was too naive and stupid to realize they were trying to seduce me.  I love them both and did eventually sleep with one of them and I included both of them in my newest novel..

My college friends are almost all too far away to talk to, although they are always welcome to call me. Just hearing a friend’s voice would be welcome.  My friend Lisa Alkana has her own issues. She suffers from MS, as cruel a disease as ever I’ve known, but she’s one of my favorite people in the entire world and, like Vicki Redick, I think events got in the way of things between us.  I love Lisa’s love for and knowledge of old movies.  And she’s the basis for a character in the novel I wrote about my old but now mentally disturbed friend Bill Mansker. He always loved Robert Ehinlein’s work, so I wrote what I hope is a Heinleinesque novel for him, which I need to edit & revise.

[Sidenote: I have somehow known several people who have MS, probably more than most people ever know in lifetime.  One was my shrink back in Norman, and the others were friends or classmates of the spouses of professors. All had a connection to Norman, which may or may not be significant in someway. I don’t know.]

  

Vicki Redick, though, is the first one I’ve really made a character in my fiction.  The love I’ve just finished, tentatively titled “Nebraska Gothic” has her as the female protagonist and  love interest .  She’s also one tough kick-ass lady, who drinks, smokes, and can handle firearms and is a crack shot and loves sex. Which Vicki, in reality, in many ways was. (I love tough, strong women—I suppose that means I’m a bit of a submissive.)

I could talk to her about anything, especially our shared experiences and acquaintances (esp. Bill)  and our frustrations with our parents, esp. our mothers. She could me her troubles, I’d listen.  In fact, in the years before her death, I think I did most of the listening. We both had issues with Bill and his wife—which I’ve written of elsewhere—and I think we were each others emotional support.  I regret not being able to be with her when she was dying.  I could’ve done more, but I confess I don’t know what that would be.

* * *

Now all I have to do is finish what I’ve started.  I confess, though, that deep done I might have an irrational fear that if I do finish something, that would be the finish of me, too.  I hope the universe is not done with me. I know I’m not done with me yet.

So, there you have it.  I write, therefore, to create a world where I am in control, where my characters do the things  I wish I could do, where I have friends whom I cannot alienate, whom I cannot offend, who will always be there. I tell stories to make sense of the world.  I have been honored for my writing.  I really don’t know of any other reason, emotionally, why I write, except maybe to be loved and respected and generate some empathy for a solitary, lonely being.

Addendum:

Lately, I’ve lost some people I’ve called friends, although maybe they’re only just close acquaintances.

I recently lost three female acquaintances who meant a lot to me. Mary Kay Jackson was funny, smart, cuddly, lovable, hilarious and just plan fun. Her death back in October shocked me.  It was unexpected, as was that Ann (A. E.) Silas.  She  died in November, although I didn’t learn of it until a couple of days ago. was a classmate and another writer who impressed the hell out of me. (I briefly dated her sister, a wonderful lady herself.) Yet somewhere along the line Ann, like my friend Cathy Ball, stopped producing, I don’t know why. It could’ve been writer’s block or perhaps an inability to finish (a trait I share) or simply she was too perfectionist—another trait I can identify with.

Barbie Beck’s death was a real shock.  She was the younger sister of my friend Cathy Ball, who died from cancer a few years ago, and I didn’t know Cathy was ill until someone told me she was in hospice.  Cathy’s husband Jim Brassel had died of cancer just a few months earlier, and she’d been nursing him up until his death, neglecting her own health at the time until it was too late.

Barbie was about ten years younger than Cathy and was always friendly and nice to me. She died of a massive stroke and she was only 58.  I would never have guessed she’d suffer a stroke, but I suppose you never know.  Stephanie Baker, another friend from Norman and part of the fandom group there, died in her mid-40s after a series of strokes.

Barbie was a writer, like her sister, and had published a couple of novels under her own “Brass Crab” imprint— Brass from Brassell and Crab from Cathy’s initials.  Barbie had planned, I knew, to publish some of Cathy’s short stories under the Brass Crab imprint, but I don’t think she ever got that far.

What upsets me are though is that all these women—and other now dead friends—are part of my own life narrative and had perspectives and observations about me that are now no longer available to anyone, not even me.  What ever impressions I made on them, good or bad, are now lost to eternity.  So part of the portrait of me is now forever unavailable, even to me.  All I can is use them as the basis of characters in stories and hope that I will have done them justice.

  

 

I'm not a person who says much about himself, but sometimes you just have to share something that changed you. 

This month makes twenty-five years since my first wife Vicki Brown took her own life in a hotel room in Bangkok.  We’d been divorced about three years or so at that point.  She tried suicide about three times before, include one where I had to drive to Tulsa to get her.  She gone to the Double Tree there and took Valium and alcohol but she survived.  This last time, however, no one was there to save her.

She was an amazing woman and what she had done in her life as remarkable—like making the trip on the Hippie Trail from Istanbul across Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan to India and Nepal.  She sat on the top of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which the Taliban vandals blew up.  That alone would have devastated her. She was a practicing Buddhist who knew the Dali Llama.  She spoke several languages and even learned Chinese to translate Buddhist works into English. 

But she was also a bipolar, with schizoid affect.  She heard voices in her head, and sadly she listened to them.  She had, however, been doing great while we were married, but first my father, who adored her, died, then her father, and finally her mother died. That left me her own anchor in the world and the voices came to control her and she cut the anchor chain.  I loved her passionately, but I finally couldn’t live with her anymore.  

After we divorced I suspected one day i would get a phone call from either her sister or her brother-in-law.  When it came, I wasn’t surprised, really.  I miss her, I really do, and she had an impact on my life that was profound.  I often think of her, but this month, so long after the fact, has made me sad for her. 

In every life there someone who so alters you, so moves you, so encourages you that you are forever in their debt.  I have no idea where my life would be if we hadn’t divorced and she hadn’t died.  I just know it wouldn’t be where I am now, which, oddly, is rather close to what I had imagined I would be when I was in high school.  Had I not met her, been loved so much by her, and then lost her, I would never have matured and grown and found who is was.  So, I’m sad and a little wistful and so joyful that I was ever so loved (and thanks to my lovely Nancy, I’m still so loved.)  So, I’ll raise a glass to my beloved Vicki and thank her her gifts to me and shed tears for what happened to one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known and I feel so humbled that she loved me and I loved her.  Sometimes you just can’t live happily ever after, but I still have the memories.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been working on s novel about Vicki.  It’s really a modern, magic realism, urban fantasy work because that’s how I can tell her story and have other understand it.  It always gives me a little distance so I can remember the warmth of her without being maudlin.  I have a rough draft completed.  Now I just need to find that space where I can roll her story so she can live forever.

Why robots don't care about working class culture, or any culture for that matter.

Boy, it seems like I only write a post once a year. But sometimes, that's about i can find that motivates to address issues like the one I'm including here.  I posted it on Facebook, to accompany an article about how American miners will soon find themselves replaced by robots and robot driven vehicles.    The article is here: Hey, miners, robots don't give a shit about your working class culture

Robots, after all, don't demand higher wages, time off, or health insurance.And they don't complain, either.  One time capital coast, occasional maintenance, and who cares about wages?  They can all be turned into profits and increase investors dividends.  It'a not immigrants who are stole jobs, it's robots.

I’m a labor historian by training, but I'm also a long-time science fiction fan.  Where we're heading is just another example of what is called de-skilling or de-qualification. My own scholarly writings have discussed this, especially how the combine-harvester ended the need for harvest workers in the Wheat Belt.

It’s not new, really.  Since the industrial revolution, machines have replaced people.  But the profits always go to the owners, who just toss people aside like detritus.

I've also expected robots to do a lot of jobs.  But in the science fiction future, this was to allow people to do other, more human, more creative things.  A chance to actually play, enjoy leisure.
Instead, people are just becoming another thruway, like paper towels, toilet paper, styrofoam coffee cups. And now conservatives want to destroy the meagre social safety net that at least gave what have become disposable people a chance to live in dignity and reasonable health in retirement .  Perhaps things will only change when robots begin to replace executives, businessmen, and, dare I say, politicians?  It's never a problem until it's in your backyard and it affects you.

We will soon have a future in which food rots because no one has a job or can earn money to buy food.  Manufactured goods will stack up because there is no one able to buy them. People will sit on their haunches all day waiting for something, anything, to happen, while all around them inventories of unsold, items will form toward to the sky.  Those who place their faith in a “free” market will soon learn robots don’t buy your products and the invisible hand is a cruel god.  And we fail to understand how we need to retrain and re-educate people for the future.  Instead, too many people are expecting the old factories to reopen, the old jobs to return, but that will never be. Because robots. Robots driving trucks, robots mining coal, robots building cars.  Hell, robots pumping gasoline, trimming trees, running leaf blowers across rich peoples' lawns.

Sadly, I fear our future is going to resemble North Korea’s present (find a book called “Nothing to Envy,” a BBC Prize winning book about life in North Korea.)  There a bizarre economic system that even the most hardened communist would find difficulty in explaining, has simply left everyone unemployed, on the verge of starvation, and essentially living sa pointless existence.

Now that is because of  economic magical thinking.  We’ll end up doing the same by replacing people with machines.   I think more and more people will end up standing outside the employment offices, looking for day jobs—maybe picking up litter or going through landfills looking useable material,

Ever wonder why there’s some many dystopian novels?  Most usually involve also sorts of disasters like wars, climate change, floods, social collapse.  None of them, as far as I know, deal with a dystopian that just results naturally from automation and robotics.  Oh, yeah, there’s The Terminator and the War with the Machines, but I don’t think that’s what will happen. We and our machines won’t battle each other.  Instead the machines will just keep working away, making things, mining things, driving things, load and unloading things, even though no one is around to buy those things, because we’ll be extinct as a species, our bodies buried under temples of unsold products, temples that will grow higher and higher until the machines break down and there is no one to repair them.  There won’t be any Apocalypse with spirits and beings in the sky fighting for “Good and Evil.” Instead, I fear the end will be the last viable gear finally breaking from metal fatigue and the last machine suddenly stopping, and all will be silence—for eternity.

Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but one of the curse of being a historian is seeing a bad idea when it comes around again.  I hope 2017 will prove me wrong, but I’m laying any bets on it.  2016 has just been too horrifying to contemplate things getting anything but worse.

And as a labor historian, I fear robots will make my specialty a quaint antique one, and sadly, sooner rather than later.  Hell, there's already robots programmed to write sports stories.  Who's to say what profession vanishes next?  Not even janitors are safe anymore.

[I just discover this post had been a draft for over a year.  It's actually from October, or maybe November, of 2014.  I should've post this earlier, but now is as good any time.  And please check out the post for the collective novel for my friend Bill Mansker.]

Been a year since I post on my blog.  That's partly because of bizarre circumstances.  I lost my password to Google Mail, and when I changed it to be get back in, the email was sent to the very Google mail account I couldn't get into.  So I spent time doing other things.  Not until I realized I had my old Firefox program on my laptop was I able to get back into it.  Store password and all.
So now I can work on my blog again.
In the Interim I was working the revisions to my novel The Gonaymne Weapon, which is forthcoming from Montag Press.  I struggled with the revisions, but once I got into making the changes, things began to move rather smoothly.  My editor, Mara Hodges, made some great suggestions and I confess they came out really well.  A fine more minor suggestions to be dealt with, and it should prove a great read.
I've also been working on two other novels and some non-fiction.  One of the novels, which I'm calling Nirvana Express, is something I've been struggling with for a long time.  It's a novelization of my late first wife's life, with a strong fantasy element thread running through it.  It was really the only way for me to make it work.  My first wife told me also sorts of stories about her life, which I happen to know are true.

So let me tell you about her.  Her name was Vicki Sue Brown, and she eight years older than me (Among my other peccadillos, I've had a thing for older women, but now those older women are my age.)
As it happened, she'd been the teen-age mistress of an older, well-know music producer.  She was the daughter of a the president of the National Conference of Christian and Jews.  Her dad was a Texas farm boy who managed to overcome a hardscrabble life to go to college and eventually earn a doctorate in divinity studies.  He taught at Drake and at the Institute for Religious Studies at OU in the late 1930s.  The Institute was accused of communist sympathies.  He met my first wife’s mom in Norman, She was the daughter of a local dry goods store owner.

Vicki had been an editor with a literary magazine at the University of Oklahoma, where we  both went to school and where we met.  Later she was an editor for the University of Oklahoma Press.

Hell, my own life, I realized seems like a novel.

At one point, however, she began having auditory hallucinations the she was supposed to return to India for some of spiritual bless. 

Rocky was hardly the word for it.  She tried to killed herself, twice, and, fortunately, her mom was still alive then.  The death of her mother, however sent her over the edge.  One I came home from work and found she wasn’t there.  It was at work the next day that a hotel in Tulsa called me to say my wife and been found unconscious in one of their rooms.  She’d tried to overdose on pills and booze.  The hotel staff found her and got her to the hospital.  I had to drive the 120 miles to get her. 

I moved out and into my own house and resumed my relationship with nancy, who later became my wife.  During that period, I’d worked at jobs, including being the editor of a semi-weekly news paper in a suburb if Oklahoma City,  I managed to survive until

I'm not really a Xmas person.  Thirty-one years ago I spent my last Christmas with my father.  I knew it was going to b his last.  He had been ill for so long with heart and liver issues as well as diabetes.  We had already had several scares and would have several more before he died in the spring of 1984.  I have now lived longer without my father being alive than with him.  Since that Xmas, I've never really enjoyed the holiday season.  It didn't help that I was apparently developing Seasonal Affective Disorder, with which I still suffer.  A year later, a few days before Xmas, my first wife lost her father.  He died on our wedding anniversary. Her mother died within the next year.  I lost my mom in 2004.  My first wife and I were divorced in 1989, and she--who was very bipolar--committed suicide in 1992.  Her sister, with whom I was close, died in 2011. Nancy and I have celebrated 25 Xmas season and we'll celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary on Jan. 1.  I don't know where the time went. Nor does anyone, I suppose.  Days like this make me realize my life is a minor soap opera, and Xmas is the annual low point.  But soon it will be spring.

This is the page that I hope will become a collectively written novel featuring my friend Bill Mansker as the hero.  Bill was rescued from five months of being homeless after he left a psychiatric treatment center in Colton, California.  Lots of Bill's friends displayed tremendous concern about Bill, so his being found (living among a homeless group only a mile or so from the hospital) is significant.

Bill, like me, has long been a science fiction fan, and I thought after his ordeal he needed to have a story about him, which includes bits of his real life, to show him just how much his friends worried about him.

This is meant to be that novel.  People may add to the story using the comment section and as it grows, I post the entirety of the novel as part of the main part of my blog.  There do, however , have to be some ground rules so we're all operating in roughly the same universe, and here they are:

Notes for Bill’s story.

1. The tower is based on one recently patented by Thoth Industries in Canada.  It is twenty kilometers high with a land structure at the top of the tower.  From the top shuttles can fly in the upper atmosphere and reach low earth orbit.

2. Bill’s home planet is called Silluria.  It’s an Earth-like planet in the midst of a terrible ice age.  It orbits a star about 15 light years away.

3. Siluria’s enemies are called the Suvique, and their leader is referred to as the Bey.

4. The weapons the Sillurians and the Suvique both use are personal railguns that fire semi-molten projectiles.  Their ships have larger versions of these weapons, in addition to laser and alpha beam weapons.

5. At the moment, the Sillurian forces are roughly organized like the Byzantine Empire, so the ranks (like Strategos) should reflect this.  If you don’t know these terms, you should check this website: <http://strolen.com/viewing/Byzantine_Military_Ranks>

6.  On Silluria, Bill is addressed as Nelglib Rexnam, his given name.

7. His Sillurian wife is a Dejah Thoris-type, but he constantly thinks about Patty. (As you might expect, he decides at the end to return to Patty on Earth.  Earth is, after all, paradise in the galaxy.)

8.  Everything else is fair game: space opera, sword and laser, etc.  You may create any aliens you want.  You may name a character after yourself, but try to restrict yourself to a last name. 

So, to get everyone started, here's the first chapter, written by yours truly.  Copyright will remain with each writer, but I hope to perhaps put this up on Kindle and direct the royalties to a charity that helps the homeless in California.

Chapter One

As the sun rose each morning, its rays struck the towering structure of the space elevator.  The elevator’s immense, long shadow fell across the length of the space center’s campus.  Part of the shadow fell across a small copse of pine trees on the south side of the complex.  The copse of trees itself filled a corner of the grounds of a regional hospital compound.  A colony of transients, mostly alcoholics, drug addicts, and psychiatric patients lived there.  The psychiatric patients, most of whom were also alcoholics or substance abusers, had either walked away from the hospital or had been released too early or by mistake.  With nowhere else to go or because relatives did not know they were missing, the homeless stayed close to the hospital.  There, social workers gave them foiled wrapped sandwiches and packets of fruit or candy.  The transients traded the packets among themselves for cigarettes and booze, which some of the younger homeless people had either shoplifted or had other folks buy for them.  Others were know to hang around taverns and clubs and pour the tail-end drops of booze from discarded bottles until they could fill another bottle or two full.  The result usually didn’t taste that good, but it was alcohol, and their bodies demanded it.

Sometimes the homeless would stand outside the fences and stare up at the elevator tower, which extended straight up twenty kilometers into the sky.  Many of them homeless had once worked at that complex, riding the elevators into the heavens and then down again.  Those who had worked at the very top of the structure, braving the winds and thin air to refuel and repair the shuttles that carried passengers are cargo into orbit, they were often the ones who had been confined to the psychiatric ward of the hospital, broken by the extreme conditions and the vertigo inducing heights, by the horrifying thought of plunging, screaming, earthward from twenty kilometers to be smashed to bloody pieces of meat and bone on the unforgiving surface. 

Most knew that the old tale, that you would be dead before you made impact, was simply a bald-face lie to sooth children and the stupidly ignorant.  They also were aware that no one, to their knowledge, had actually been blow off the tower.  It hardly mattered, however, because their own imaginations and fears and irrational phobias had worn down their sanity to a tissue thin membrane that could longer hold their minds together.

Yet even after all that, after their institutionalization and their treatment with psychotropic drugs and even surgeries, they hung onto both their fears and to the lofty structure that scraped the heavens and wrecked their minds.

That was true, however, for all but one man.  His name was William Glenn, although most people who knew him called him “Bill.” This man, who looked as emaciated as a concentration camp survivor, had barely turned sixty (although, in truth, for his kind, sixty was still comparatively young) He still possessed almost all the hair on his head, which was now grey and tied up in a ponytail.  He had never in his life been in a building higher than twenty stories, let alone a tower twenty kilometers into the heavens.  His friends thought he was quiet and a dreamer, with his dreams always up in the air, or even well off into space.  He was bright and intelligent, but those who knew him were often surprised at his naiveté and his odd lack of knowledge of even the simplest things.  He was also, however, a compassionate and caring friend, who had always been there when someone needed help.  Often, he had shared his last bite of food, his last cigarette, his last swig of booze with someone he thought was more desperately in need of it.  He had driven friends to the doctor when they were too ill to move, and had accompanied a friend when she had an abortion.  He had listened as friends opened their souls to him and told him the tales of their abusive lovers and mentors.

He would stand at the fence and stare up at the space elevator.  There was a wistful, longing expression on his face.  To others, as they watched him, his eyes were sad and lonely, his mouth open in a sorrowful way.  He was wanting something, or perhaps even remembering something he had lost and feared he could never regain.

“What do see when you look at the tower?” the other transients asked.  “What does it mean to you?”

“It is a way for me to go home,”

“Your home is not earth?” some asked.

“No,” he replied.

“Is your home in the sky? In heaven?” others asked.

“No, it is not in the sky,” he’d say.  “But the sky will help get me there.”

“Is it on another planet?” some wag would always inquire.

“Yes,” he would answer. “But it is not one you would know.  And while you can see its star, you do not know its real name either.”

 While a few individuals might laugh and dismiss his story, others asked him, “Why are you here?  Do you plan to invade us?”

“No,” he would say softly.  “I am here to recover, to recuperate, to have my sanity restored.  Yours is the sanctuary world.  Countless races envy you. Yours is the safe place in a hostile universe.  It is the utopia we all desire.  Even your pain and agony and the cruelties you endure is so much less than any place in the cosmos.  On some worlds, those who are religious believe that if you are pious and worthy, when you die you are reborn on Earth, where your soul is cleansed and healed.”

Then he would break down in tears, and the other homeless comforted him, an act of compassion virtually unheard of on any other world.

“Yours is a sacred place,” he’d sob.  “All other races have agreed to leave you alone, to only come here when someone must be treated in order to be cured and restored.  All races speak your name with awe and respect.  And, dare I say, with love.”

“Poor man.  Sad, crazy fellow,” the others would say.  “Such a fragile soul.  I hope someone can help him.”

They would caress his shoulders and hold his hands.   Some would say, “Bless you.”  Others asked, “How can I help?”

“Thank you,” he said through his tears.  “But others need you more than I do.  Take care of them when they appear among you, as you have done for me.”

Then the others would give him some food and something to drink and offer him a place to sleep in their camp, in their flimsy, but welcoming shelters.

  “Glenn?  Is there a William Glenn here?” he heard someone say one morning in autumn when the homeless came up to the hospital to seek food.

For a moment he hesitated to speak and identify himself.  Who wanted to know?

“William Glenn, your wife wants you to call her!”

He had a wife?  Yes, he remembered he did have a wife, and that she loved him very much.  But how could she be on Earth?  Surely she was back on their home world.

“I’m William Glenn,” he said, stepping forward.  He could see two California state troopers standing beside a hospital physician.

The doctor, whom William recognized as Dr.Redick, smiled.  Dr. Redick was a female physician whom most of the other inmates found was a caring, compassionate person.  She had a warm smile, emphasized by her beautiful lips.  Her eyes positively danced in accompaniment.  Some of the other patients, both male and female, had told him they found her husky, smoky voice sexy and alluring.  He couldn’t tell, although he thought it was friendly and considerate.

She handed William a cell phone. 

He raised it to his ear.  “Hello?” he said.

“Bill?  Is it really you?” a voice said.

“I suppose it is me.  I don’t know if I am anyone else,” he replied.  “And who are you?  I thought my wife was dead.”

“Bill, it’s Patty,” the voice said.  “Everyone who knows you thought it was you who was dead.”

The world seemed to have pulled out from under him.  He didn’t recall fainting, if he had fainted, but now he was staring into a clear, blue California sky.  He blinked, once, twice.

He could see massive arms and huge hands reaching down, grabbing his own arms and supporting his shoulders.  The two state troopers helped Bill to his feet.

“Are you okay?” one trooper asked.

Bill didn’t know what to say.  He had vague memories of encounters with cops, but they had not been pleasant.

“We’ll take you home,” the other trooper said.

Bill wanted to say “Thank you,” but his tongue seem paralyzed.  He mumbled consent.  The troopers led him to a patrol car and helped him inside.

The other homeless folks gathered around the car.  But they did nothing.  In fact, they seemed glad Bill had been found.

“Glad you’re going home,” one man said.

“Hope your home planet is okay and is as nice as Earth,” a woman said.

He shook his head.  “Nothing is as lovely as Earth.  You need to appreciate it and people more.”

The crowd of transients seemed to nod as one.  “We will, sir,” someone said.  “We will.”

He smiled, but inside he felt very sad.

Bill didn’t remember to drive to Patty’s house in Barstow.  All he knew was that he was in Colton one minute and in Barstow the next.  The troopers helped him from the car and led him to the door of a mobile home.  They knocked on the door.

A woman opened it.  Her face seemed tired and worried, riven with care and sadness.  When her eyes saw Bill, however, her eyes glistened and a smile broke out across her face.  She stepped forward and embraced him.  She began sobbing with joy.

Bill didn’t know how to respond.  His arms felt like lead and hung limply at his side.  He managed to get his right arm around her and tried to hug her.  Her sobs confused him.  What I am supposed to do, he asked himself, I’m supposed to kiss her head, aren’t I”

He puckered his lips and clumsily kissed her forehead.  His mouth was dry and there was a metallic taste on his tongue, but he could sense and even taste the joy and love being generated by her body.  He didn’t know what to do.

Patty released her hug and looked up at his face. 

The smile on her face and the tears from her eyes moved him.

“I love you,” she said.  “I don’t ever want to lose you again.”

“I…love…you, too,” he said, finding the words somehow strange, somehow odd to be coming from his mouth.

“Ma’am,” said one of the troopers. “You need to sign some forms, for out records.” The officer held out a metal clip board.

Patty released her grasp on Bill , took the clipboard from the trooper, and sign the papers.  “There.  I hope that’s all you need,” she said, thrusting the clipboard back at the officer.

The officer took back the clipboard.  He paused for a moment, as if thinking what to see.  ‘Thank you,” he said.  ‘I guess.”

As they stepped into Patty’s double-wide, Bill could see strange shapes sitting in two chairs by her dinner table.  The two figures seemed like dark specters to Bill.

One of the figures stood up, came around the table and stood in the light of the living room.

Bill gasped, sucking him breath.  The figure stood nearly two meters tall. 

The figure wore a black leather duster, leather gloves, and what appeared to be riding boots with silvery laces.  The figure also wore a dark grey fedora with a navy blue band around the crown.  The hat kept the figure's face hidden in dark shadows.  The figure's eyes were hidden behind glistening, silvery mirrorshades.  The lower part of the figure’s face seem oddly blue-white, which contrasted with almost pale maroon-colored lips.

Bill felt his heart racing.  He seemed to remember someone like this, but couldn’t remember when he had met this person before.  Just who was this person?

"Mrs Glenn," a deep, weirdly resonant voice said. 

Bill recognized that voice, a voice from the deepest depths of his memory

"It is time for us to go,  Strategos Rexnam,” the figure added.  “Your people need you.  It is a matter of life and death.”

A bone-chilling shiver ran down Bill’s spine.  He knew this was not good news.

Not good news at all.