Taking Off (10 page)

“Go to New Mexico. Take the book with you. Translate it as you go. See what you find.”

“But I don't even really know what I'm looking for.”

“‘Seek till ye find, and ye'll never loss yer labour.'”

“Well—if it gets me to the Land of Enchantment—I'll do it—but it feels like a wild-goose chase.”

“Now why in the world do we use that expression, apparently attributing to wild geese an aimlessness that surely isn't evident from their methodical migrations?”

Chapter 20

A Father-and-Son Conspiracy

MY MOTHER was easy to please; that is, I could please her easily. All I had to do was do something—and almost anything would do. She was ready to approve very nearly anything I did. She always expected the result to be something that would enhance my reputation and my résumé and make the world see my merits at last, which put her in marked contrast to my father, who, it seemed to me, expected most of my undertakings to turn into the sort of black mark that one did not want on one's permanent record.

“Peter's going to learn welding,” my mother announced at dinner, flushed with the rosy prospects that this presented.

“Is that right?” said my father.

“I've already started,” I said. “I got a free welding instruction book. I've been reading it.”

“I always wanted to learn welding,” my father said, and as he said it a wistfulness came into his voice that, to the best of my recollection, I had never heard before.

“Really?”

“Yeah. In my day, a guy who could weld, really weld, was sure to be popular.”

“Is that true, Mom?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember one boy in particular, Darren—”

“Darren,” growled my father, evidently feeling the pain of an old wound. “What kind of guy is named Darren?”

“A guy who could weld,” said my mother with a directness that made my father grunt and bend to his American chop suey. “Darren Smith. He had the most amazing hands,” she recalled, extending her own and examining them. “They were large and sinewy.”

“Darren Smith, ‘a mighty man was he, with large and sinewy hands,'” I quoted.

“That's right,” she said. “How did you know?”

“Just a guess,” I said.

“His hands were so strong—and yet so fine—and in a way delicate—like the hands of a pianist.”

I risked a sidelong glance at my father. He seemed angry. I might have said to myself that he seemed angry, as usual. I might have taken some cheap pleasure in the discomfiture that my mother's memory of Darren the welder had caused him. However, something—who can say what?—made me see him differently. Instead of anger, I saw disappointment. I saw that he really had wanted to learn welding. He had wanted to be popular. He might have wished, now, that some woman who had once been a girl when he was a boy might be recalling his capable hands.

“I'll lend you the free welding instruction book, if you like,” I said.

He grunted.

“It's never too late,” I added with the wisdom of fourteen.

Having said it, I immediately regretted what I'd said, realized that it was presumptuous of the son to counsel the father, and feared that I'd be belittled for it, but my father began to nod his head, slowly, then turned to me, and, with a smile that would have been invisible beside Spike's but lit our little dining room with unusual fluorescence, said, “You're right. Thanks. I'd like to take a look at it.”

Obviously there would never be a better time for me to announce that I'd been accepted at the Faustroll Institute.

“I've got exciting news,” I said.

“
More
exciting news?” said my mother.

“Much more exciting,” I said. “I've been accepted at the Faustroll Institute for Promising High School Students.”

“Oh, my goodness!”

“Promising?” asked my father.

“Yes. Showing promise. Likely to do remarkable things. That's me. I've got promise. It's official. The Faustroll admissions committee has decided that I show promise. I'm in.”

I put the forgeries on the table. When I had met with Matthew and Marvin and first seen what they had produced, I had been more than impressed. The package seemed solid enough, full enough, and well enough executed to fool anyone. Now, when it actually had to fool my father, I was suddenly not so sure.

“Oh, Peter. This is wonderful,” said my mother. “I can't wait to tell the neighbors.”

“It's in New Mexico,” I added, by the way, “and I'm thinking of flying out there—”

“Flying!”

“—after I build an aerocycle.”

My father, nobody's fool after all, looked at me for a long moment, and then we exchanged two things we had never exchanged before: one wink and one grin.

“I always wanted to learn welding,” my father said.… “In my day, a guy who could weld, really weld, was sure to be popular.”

Chapter 21

Employing the Power of Experimental Thinking, I Prepare to Weld

A finite universe is unimaginable, inconceivable. An infinite universe is unimaginable, inconceivable. Doubtless the universe is neither finite nor infinite, since the finite and the infinite are only man's ways of thinking about it; in any case, that finiteness and infiniteness should only be ways of thinking and speaking is also something inconceivable, unimaginable. We cannot take a single step beyond our own impotence; outside those walls, I feel sick and giddy. If the wall is no longer there, the gulf opens at my feet and I am seized with dizziness.

Eugene Ionesco,
Fragments of a Journal

THE FREE WELDING INSTRUCTION BOOK was actually something less than a book, barely a booklet, but in the space of its few pages it managed to be extremely discouraging. Welding, I discovered as I read, could not be accomplished with the tools and equipment I already had or with supplies I might find around the house. Knowledge, skill, and large, sinewy hands were not sufficient to the craft of welding—not that I had large, sinewy hands, but had I had them, they would not have been enough. Equipment was required: tanks, torches, an eyeshield, gases, gloves, and a cart to lug all the gear from place to place. All of this equipment, the book announced every time a piece of it was mentioned, could be purchased from Dædalus Welding, and there was a handy order form in the back of the book.

I couldn't afford any of the equipment or supplies, and I doubted that my father could afford any of it either, so I began to fear for my prospects as a welder and, welding being apparently prerequisite to the construction of an aerocycle, my prospects as an aviator, a sojourner in the Land of Enchantment, and student of the Faustroll Institute. However, hope has always come as easily to me as despair, so, by reading the book carefully and thoroughly and by performing the welding exercises in my mind, as thought experiments, I prepared myself for the unlikely but not impossible event of my coming into some welding equipment through the agency of some sponsor, mentor, or angel as yet unmet.

Permit me an aside on thought experiments.

According to the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
thought experiments are “devices of the imagination,” employed when “a real experiment … is impossible for physical, technological, or just plain practical reasons.” The author of the encyclopedia article, James R. Brown of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, asserts that the “main point” of interest about thought experiments for a philosopher “is that we seem able to get a grip on nature just by thinking.… We visualize some situation; we carry out an operation; we see what happens.”

Among the famous thought experiments that he cites are Maxwell's demon, Schrödinger's cat, and, “one of the most beautiful early examples,” Lucretius's lance. My copy of Lucretius's
De Rerum Natura,
in W. H. D. Rouse's translation, being ready to hand, I am able to insert here the relevant passage:

The universe then is not limited along any of its paths; for if so it ought to have an extremity. Again, clearly nothing can have an extremity unless there be something beyond to bound it, so that something can be seen, beyond which our sense can follow the object no further. Now since we must confess that there is nothing beyond the sum of things, it has no extremity, and therefore it is without end or limit. Nor does it matter in which of its quarters you stand: so true is it that, whatever place anyone occupies, he leaves the whole equally infinite in every direction.

Besides, if all the existing space be granted for the moment to be finite, suppose someone proceeded to the very extremest edge and cast a flying lance, do you prefer that the lance forcibly thrown goes whither it was sent and flies afar, or do you think that anything can hinder and obstruct it? For you must confess and accept one of the two; but each of them shuts you off from all escape, and compels you to own that the universe stretches without end. For whether there is something to hinder and keep it from going whither it is sent and from fixing itself at its mark, or whether it passes out, that was no boundary whence it was sped. In this way I shall go after you, and wherever you place your extremest edge, I shall ask what at last happens to the lance. The effect will be that no boundary can exist anywhere and the possibility of flight will ever put off escape.

Among the many fascinating things about that passage is the image at the end of it of Lucretius harrassing his reader, his opponent in the argument over whether the universe has a limit, driving him to the extremity, that is to say, to whatever, wherever, the reader has presumed the extremity to be, and annoying him so persistently with his badgering and yammering that the reader is urged or forced to flee ever farther, and the fact that the reader can keep fleeing Lucretius is the refutation of the reader's argument that there is a boundary beyond which he cannot go, the border of a land that none of us may ever enter. Is it only me, or do you also hear a plaintive moan under the triumphant tone of that ending sentence? “I'm right! Fly, fly, fly as far as you can possibly fly, but you can never escape. There is no way out of here, reader, none. I wish there were, but there is not. There is no escape.”

Lucretius's thought experiment was popular in my set when I was a boy. I don't mean to suggest that any of us had read Lucretius or had the slightest idea who Lucretius was or that any of us had ever thought his way to the distant reaches of space with an argumentative companion and watched while the unnamed someone who had accompanied him cast a flying lance; I mean only that we rode third-class on the same train of thought. On nights when we lay in someone's back yard looking at the stars and exploring the limits of our little minds, we asked ourselves and one another, again and again, what was at the end of the universe. Every time we asked we concluded, as Lucretius had when he was out in his back yard with the argumentative lancer, that there was no end.

“You ever ask yourself what's at the end of the universe?” someone would ask, even if the question had been asked not so long ago, on another night.

“Yeah.”

“I mean, what could be there? A brick wall?”

“Search me.”

“Because if there's a brick wall, then what's on the other side of the wall? You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

We would continue in this manner until we were at our wits' end, though we never reached the universe's. The little philosopher in these exchanges may not have been doing a very good job of playing Lucretius, but I suspect that the respondent was a lot like the lance-caster, and together they were working their way toward the age of reason.

It is not difficult to gain some faint idea of the immensity of space in which this and all the other worlds are suspended, if we follow a progression of ideas. When we think of the size or dimensions of a room, our ideas limit themselves to the walls, and there they stop. But when our eye, or our imagination, darts into space, that is, when it looks upward into what we call the open air, we cannot conceive any walls or boundaries it can have; and if for the sake of resting our ideas, we suppose a boundary, the question immediately renews itself, and asks, what is beyond that next boundary? and in the same manner, what is beyond the next boundary? and so on, till the fatigued imagination returns and says, there is no end.

Thomas Paine,
The Age of Reason, Part One

Chapter 22

To Hell with Welding

WELDING seemed to stand in my way like a schoolyard bully blocking the water fountain, and I will admit that for a time I thought of abandoning the entire project and resigning myself to spending the summer in Babbington, but my friend Raskol salvaged my hopes and dreams by making welding not only unnecessary but useless.

One day he found me studying
Impractical Craftsman
during study hall (engaged, I thought then and think now, in an activity entirely appropriate for study hall, but one that was forbidden, since
study
was constrained to mean “doing work assigned in a course taught at Babbington High School,” and if one was found to be engaged in any other pursuit—writing a love letter, reading a magazine, trying to calculate the size of the universe, or making mechanical drawings of a single-seat airplane—then the product and any attendant supplies or materials were subject to confiscation and, theoretically at least, destruction). I was studying the drawings of the aerocycle and sketching its structural skeleton. I had known that this sketching would be necessary, since the article did not include a plan for the skeleton, and I had expected it to be tedious and annoying, but it was turning out to be fascinating and puzzling. From the pictures in the article, I was trying to make working plans, translating the pictures, neither of which showed the craft with its skin off, into the type of three-view drawing we had been taught to make in shop class, where our drawings were limited to much simpler projects, such as, in my case, a wrought-iron armature to hold a plaque that read
LEROY
, which when it was finished I nailed with pride to one of the pillars that supported the roof over the front porch of the family home, and a wooden box that held and hid the cardboard box that Sneezles tissues were packed in, still allowing them to pop up one at a time when the projecting tissue was tugged, which my mother had installed in the bathroom, on the back of the toilet, on top of the tank.