Stories From The Old Attic | Page 5

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