Robert Sheckley - The Day the Aliens Came

VIP免费
2024-11-23 0 0 72.48KB 6 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
The Day The Aliens Came
Robert Sheckley.
One day a man came to my door. He didn't quite look like a man, although he did
walk on two feet. There was something wrong with his face. It looked as though it had
been melted in an oven and then hastily frozen. I later learned that this expression was
quite common among the group of aliens called Synesters, and was considered by them
a look of especial beauty. The Melted Look, they called it, and it was often featured in
their beauty contests. “I hear you're a writer,” he said.
I said that was so. Why lie about a thing like that?
“Isn't that a bit of luck,” he said. “I'm a story buyer.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“Have you got any stories you want to sell?” He was very direct. I decided to be
similarly so.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“OK,” he said. “I'm sure glad of that. This is a strange city for me. Strange planet, too,
come to think of it. But it's the city aspect that's most unsettling. Different customs, all
that sort of thing. As soon as I got here, I said to myself, “Traveling's great, but where
am I going to find someone to sell me stories?”
“It's a problem,” I admitted.
“Well,” he said, “let's get right to it because there's a lot to do. I'd like to begin with a
ten thousand word novelette.”
“You've as good as got it,” I told him. “When do you want it?”
“I need it by then end of the week.”
“What are we talking about in terms of money, if you'll excuse the expression?”
“I'll pay you a thousand dollars for a ten thousand word novelette. I was told that was
standard pay for a writer in this part of Earth. This is Earth, isn't it?”
“It's Earth, and your thousand dollars is acceptable. Just tell me what I'm supposed to
write about.”
“I'll leave that up to you. After all, you're the writer.”
“Damn right I am,” I said. “so you don't care what it's about?”
“Not in the slightest. After all, I'm not going to read it.”
“Makes sense, “ I said. “Why should you care?” I didn't want to pursue that line of
inquiry any further. I assumed that someone was going to read it. That's what usually
happens with novelettes.
“What rights are you buying?” I asked, since it's important to be professional about
these matters.
“First and second Synestrian,” he said. “And of course I retain Synestrian movie rights
although I'll pay you fifty percent of the net if I get a film sale.”
“Is that likely?” I asked.
“Hard to say,” he said. “As far we're concerned, Earth is new literary territory.”
“In that case, let's make my cut sixty-forty.”
“I won't argue,” he said. “Not this time. Later you may find me very tough.
Who knows what I'll be like? For me this is a whole new frankfurter.” I let that pass.
An occasional lapse in English doesn't make an alien an ignoramus.
I got my story done in a week and brought it in to the Synester's office in the old MGM
building on Broadway. I handed him the story and he waved me to a seat while he read
it.
“It's pretty good,” he said after a while. “I like it pretty well.”
“Oh, good,” I said.
“But I want some changes.”
“Oh,” I said. “What specifically did you have in mind?”
“Well,” the Synester said, “this character you have in here, Alice.”
“Yes, Alice,” I said, though I couldn't quite remember writing an Alice into the story.
Could he be referring to Alsace, the province in France? I decided not to question him.
№sense appearing dumb on my own story.
Robert Sheckley - The Day the Aliens Came.pdf

共6页,预览1页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：6 页 大小：72.48KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-11-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

高考理综 人际关系 力的合成 配电装置 动力学连接体 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 6
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注