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.
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