This book has been a long time coming.

In late February 1975, I met a young man who just recently had moved to Texas from New York, where he had lived until that time.  He was a fellow high-school student and, as I was then, a ravenous Star Trek fan.

We hit it off immediately.

His name was Daniel John Cheney.  We instantly became inseparable, as close as brothers, sharing our thoughts and our lives as teenage friends will.  We often shared private things, fears and beliefs and uncertainties, each of us finding encouragement in the support of the other.  Dan, who now lived with an uncle and his household, had been Christian just a short time – but his faith, though young, was rooted in a solid understanding of what he believed.  Unlike him, I had strayed from the faith, doubting it all due to the simple fact that no one I knew had answers to my questions concerning the solidity of the faith.

Dan Cheney, August 1975

How do I know it’s for real?  How do I even know there was a Jesus Christ?  How do I know He was God?  Why should I trust the Bible at all?

No one had answered me, and I wasn’t going to buy into it all simply “because you’re supposed to.”  I had attended church as a child, but the rebellion and questioning nature of the teenage years demanded solid answers.  None were forthcoming, and secular science seemed to have plenty to offer.

So I quit.  I considered myself an agnostic, and God had little if any place in my daily life.

Then came Dan.  He was the first person I had ever known who was Christian and could tell me why.  He knew how to share his faith with me, knew when to bring it up and when not to.  If he did not know offhand the answer to a question, we would look for it within the Bible and/or the many apologistic books he had gathered.  He had a remarkable sense for when to open up and when not to push – amazing for a kid in his late teens, and exactly what I needed.  Having begun to get answers, I considered myself a ‘theist’ at that point, believing there was a God but uncertain which form He took or which theology was the correct one.  I know now that I was Christian even then, that the salvation I had received earlier in my life was still in force, an eternal blessing from a Savior Who walked with me even when I did not walk with Him.  Slowly, I came back to Christ, still with much to learn but with a well-founded measure of faith that would continue to grow.

Dan enjoyed writing fiction, generally stories that reflected both his enjoyment of adventure/science fiction/fantasy and his love for Christ.  That is not usually an easy mix.  He had a wonderful imagination, and peopled his stories with colorful characters and vivid locales.  Some of his stories dealt with existing film or television properties, while others were wholly original.  I illustrated a few of them and had story input on others.

One tale entitled “The Open Door,” a sixteen-page creative writing assignment written in 1974, dealt with a college student named T.G. Shass, who found himself inexplicably and involuntarily flashing back and forth between times and places.  Though brief, some of the imagery contained in those pages was memorable, as was the main character. 

That class assignment later grew into the incomplete, handwritten draft of a longer story, one which Dan asked me to read that summer.  Renamed The Noron Event, it was only a few dozen pages long at that point and written in the first person.  I read it, and at his request I also added notes and suggestions of my own.  The project quickly became a collaboration.

In late 1975, my family left Texas and moved to Charleston, South Carolina and the Naval base there.  Dan, in the meantime, went on to college in Sherman, Texas.  We kept in touch by mail and by telephone, writing and sharing and trying our best to minimize the thousand or so miles between us.  Slowly, work on the story continued, almost entirely in the form of telephone discussions.  In late 1976, Dan took the still-incomplete Noron to the school paper there in Sherman, offering it for serialization, hoping to see it in print.  Unfortunately, it did not meet their needs and remained unpublished.

In early 1977, I returned to Texas and took an apartment there after graduating from high school.  Dan, having moved back to New York, was attending Cornell University, something he had always wanted to do.  Later, as the summer of 1978 approached, Dan called me and said he really wanted us to get together and finish The Noron Event.  School was almost out for the semester, and he suggested we spend the summer months writing.  I agreed at once.  I looked forward to sitting down once again in the same room as my collaborator, the two of us huddled over his well-worn manual typewriter – I really miss that old machine – pounding the great American novel into existence with our ever-present one-pound bag of M&Ms close at hand.

So, as I happily awaited his arrival, Dan arranged to carpool south with a few other students who were to be dropped off at homes along the way.  They took turns driving on the several-day trip, traveling around-the-clock to save time and expenses.

On Tuesday, May 23, sometime between midnight and four a.m., on a two-lane stretch of Ohio highway, there was an accident.  Only the driver survived, but with no memory of the wreck.  Dan, mercifully, had been asleep in the back seat.  Those who died, died instantly.

I was devastated.  I even felt responsible, telling myself that he would not have died had he not chosen to come see me.  In those first few days following the accident, I dreamed that he lived still, that the reports of his death had been mistaken – but upon awaking each morning I knew it was not so.

A few days after his death, on the day he was to have arrived, I received an insured parcel.  It was wrapped in the brown paper of a grocery sack, a style of packaging that in recent years had become quite familiar to me. 

It was from Dan.  Judging from the postmark, I knew he had mailed it just before leaving New York.  Breathlessly, I opened the package. 

It was The Noron Event.  

The entirety of the story (as it existed at that time) – the original and only copy of the story – was there, along with all of our notes and a brief, quickly handwritten cover letter.  In that letter, Dan stated that there were many things in Noron he wanted rewritten or deleted.  I would never know specifically what those things were.  He also said he wanted us to revise the tale – to take it in another direction, while maintaining the same basic story concept – and told me to feel free to make any changes I thought would make it better.

There I sat, reading and re-reading his unexpectedly final words to me, which had been written upon a simple sheet of notebook paper.  The importance of the words was magnified simply because they were his last.  I knew at that moment that the best and truest way to honor the memory of my dear friend was to finish the book we had started, since he had wished so greatly and for so long to see it completed and ultimately published.  What I did not know was whether I could do it alone.

Yet, I vowed that day that I would do so.

I learned later that his typewriter and the other stories he had written had been in the trunk of the car in which he had died.  I never saw them again.  Why he chose to risk mailing Noron instead of simply bringing it with him, along with his other things, I didn’t understand.

I still don’t.

But had he carried the story with him, rather than trusting the postal service to deliver it instead, it would have died with him on that dark Ohio highway, that night so long ago.  This novel would never have been written.

Years passed.  I made several abortive attempts at finishing the book, but kept stumbling over the many things in our original, unfinished version that simply did not work dramatically.  I reluctantly came to realize – as had Dan, apparently – that most of the storyline would have to be replaced with new and more cohesive elements of plot and theme, with many added characters.  I practically had to begin again.  My writing skills were not yet what they needed to be in order to overcome these obstacles, nor had I gained the life experience and theological insight necessary for the telling of such a tale.

Yet, I believed in my heart that Noron had survived for a reason.  The story rested in a desk drawer off and on for many years, waiting patiently to be finished – waiting to become what it was meant to be when it alone, of all the work we had shared, was left in my hands.

As time went on, I married.  My wife and I welcomed a son, whom we named Daniel.  As my writing improved, I gained a literary agent, and doors were opened to me.  In 1986, my work first was bought by a major publisher, and over the next decade I went on to write and illustrate several other books, in other genres. 

I knew the time had come to pick up the manuscript again.

It has taken more than two decades, but I hope I finally have forged The Noron Event – since retitled The Last Guardian – into what it was meant to be.  Very little of the original story remains, but hopefully in writing this novel I have retained the heart and essence of its innovator.

Maranatha, Dan.  I hope you like what I’ve done with the story.  I have missed you, and I’ve missed working with you – and the next time we meet, I look forward to sitting down and talking about the book.  The M&Ms are on me.

Shane Johnson
November, 1999