Read Ebook: Stories from the Old Attic by Harris Robert A Robert Alan

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Ebook has 696 lines and 31560 words, and 14 pages

"And what is a bird?" someone asked. And so the traveler began to explain about flight and what an airplane was and how it flew from one place to another. The room became very quiet, and the expressions on the faces of everyone present darkened.

"Does he expect us to believe this?" one man whispered to another.

"Well, you know what liars travelers are," someone else added. Finally the host spoke up, slightly embarrassed and slightly indignant.

"If this is your idea of a joke," he began, but was interrupted by the surprised traveler.

"Why, it's no joke at all. People fly all the time."

"I am sorry that you so much underestimate the intelligence and learning of your audience," said a professor across the table. "That a person could enter some metal device--like a car with fins--and rise into the air, and be sustained there, and move forward, why that clearly violates everything we know about the law of gravity and the laws of physics. If we have learned anything from a thousand years of study of the natural world, it is that an object heavier than air must return immediately to earth when it is tossed into the sky."

"Hear, hear," two or three people muttered.

"Now, if you perhaps mean that these 'airplanes,' as you call them, are somehow flung into the air for a short distance and then fall to the ground, well, then perhaps that would be possible." The professor looked expectantly and a bit condescendingly at the traveler, hoping that the man would take this face-saving opportunity.

"No, no. You don't understand," said the traveler. "The airplanes have powerful motors and the craft rise into the air, and they stay up as long as they want, as long as the fuel holds out." There were several audible "hmmphs" around the room.

"Tell us then," said another scholar, in a saccharine voice, "how this device works. What makes it fly?"

"Well, I don't know exactly how it works. It has something to do with air flowing over the wings."

"You don't know--you cannot explain--how it works, this device that runs counter to everything we know about the natural world, yet you believe in it anyway."

"Believe in it?" asked the traveler, a bit confused by this turn of phrase. "Of course I 'believe in it.' I fly on one all the time at home."

"And how do you control its motions?" a man asked, without removing his pipe. The audience was clearly beginning to patronize the traveler, and he was growing a little irritated.

"Oh, I don't control it. There's a pilot for that."

"I see," the pipe smoker said. "So this airplane contains both you and the pilot. You're telling us that perhaps four or five hundred pounds of dead weight can travel through the air as long as it wants."

"As long as the fuel holds out," added one of the hmmphers, with amusement.

"And all the time sneering at the law of gravity and laughing science in the face," someone else noted.

"Well, actually, the planes are much larger than that," said the traveler. "Many of them hold two or three hundred people and weigh, my, I don't know--many thousands of pounds."

"I think we have heard enough," the now-fully-embarrassed and half-angered host said. "It was amusing for awhile, but it's time to put an end to this nonsense."

"It is not nonsense," the traveler protested. "It is the truth."

"Then you really believe this madman's drivel you've been feeding us?" the host asked, rather hotly.

"Of course. How can I not believe it? I see it and live it every day. And here," he added, remembering something, "I even have a photograph."

"Obviously faked," said the host, dismissing it after a glance.

"Who invited this charlatan?" someone asked of no one in particular.

"I thought science had put an end to all this miraculous event stuff long ago," said another man, rising from his chair and preparing to leave.

"Well, let's not pursue this pointless discussion," the host said. "Our guest apparently knows nothing of science, and is impervious to logic and to the considered opinion of the best minds of our nation. There's nothing left to do but adjourn." The meeting began to break up, and the traveler was putting on his coat when the man with the pipe made one last attempt to reason with him.

"We are all scientists here, all educated men. All of us agree that it is impossible for a heavier-than-air device to fly on its own through the air. Don't you see that? This is against the laws of nature--it violates the law of gravity."

"Well," said the traveler, "perhaps there is another law, or perhaps there is a higher law than the law of gravity, which, when it is understood, will explain how planes can fly."

"That's just what I'd expect a religious fanatic to say," said a man who had been listening in. "Science can jump into the trash as far as you religious types are concerned."

"Not at all," said the traveler. "But your science is not perfect. You do not yet know everything about everything, what is possible and what is not possible."

"Go take your religion to a church and keep it away from serious people," the man concluded, stomping out of the room.

In the weeks that followed, the traveler was ridiculed and denounced in the newspapers, being called everything from a con artist to a prospective mental patient. As a result, the traveler was often left to himself, and so he pulled out his tiny portable television set and began to watch it. Just by chance, some visitors happened to come by and see the little box. They were very impressed and urged the traveler to market his invention for putting a movie inside such a small space.

In a few days, word had spread about this mini-movie and several scientists were convinced to come see it, together with some engineers representing the movie projector manufacturers of the nation.

They were sufficiently impressed as they watched a few scenes, but when the traveler changed channels, their enthusiasm turned to gaping astonishment. The traveler switched all around, showing them twenty channels in all. Such was the amazement and even incredulity of the engineers that they already began to suspect some kind of trick. The scientists looked confused.

"You certainly have a lot of films stored in that little box," one of the engineers said. "How do you get them all in there?"

"The pictures are not in the box," said the traveler. "They are all over in the air around us. This antenna brings them in and the set makes them visible." The engineers laughed while the scientists sneered, the latter now sorry they had allowed themselves to be talked into coming to hear this notorious nut.

"Come now," one of the scientists said. "Do you expect us to believe that there are pictures floating around us in the air--pictures we cannot see? And that twenty sets of these pictures are all present at once, scrambled together, just waiting for that little box to take them and sort them out? What do you take us for anyway--a bunch of gullible greenhorn fools?"

"And besides," continued an engineer, "how do these pictures get into the air in the first place? Where do they come from?"

"They're sent from a satellite in the sky," the traveler said, as all heads looked up. "You can't see it, of course. It's too high. But it's there."

"And of course you expect us to believe in something we can't see," said one of the scientists, with a touch of scorn.

"Believe it because of its effects--the results--the evidence of its existence," the traveler said. "If it weren't there, you would see no pictures."

"We know you're lying," another engineer said. "Even if there were a device in the sky, held up by a balloon or whatever, it couldn't send a signal down here without a wire. That would be against everything we know about electricity. And I don't see any wire."

"Well, it doesn't use a wire," said the traveler. "The signals are sent through the air. And the satellite isn't held up by a balloon; it stays up because it's high enough so that gravity doesn't pull it down."

"Now he's denying the law of gravity again," said one of the scientists. "Let's go. I've heard enough. Whatever he does to perform his little trick, he isn't telling us about it, so let's just leave."

"Yeah, let's get out of here," another scientist said. "Every time we catch him in an impossibility, he tells us the explanation is in the sky." Then turning to the traveler to say goodbye, he added, "We cannot believe something when the weight of scientific evidence is against it."

"But when the physical evidence is clearly before you," said the traveler, "how can you not believe, even if your theories cannot explain it?"

"Because such an event would be a miracle, and science has nothing to do with miracles."

"Then perhaps science is the poorer for it," said the traveler, sitting down to watch his television, which just then happened to be showing a dove flying silently across the sky.

A Fish Story

The bright sun and the gentle wind had made the little fish almost bold that summer day, enough so that they were swimming all over the pond, from their home in the reeds at one end to the rocky beach at the other. Or at least they swam very near to the rocky beach--as near as they dared--for all the older fish constantly warned them to stay away. Some of the dangers were clear enough, such as the wading birds who stepped into the shallow water, hoping to pluck out a little fish and swallow him right down, and the foxes, whose gigantic teeth were too awful even to think about. But there were other evils that were not so distinct. Hideous and unimaginable these were, with tales of fish swimming into the area and never to be heard from again, vague reports of sudden disappearances, and some hysterical tales, impossible to make sense of, of leaping shadows, wild splashings, worms flying through the water, and such like.

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