FROM THE CRITICAL EDITION.
A History of the Remarkable Voyage Lately Undertaken On Board the Celebrated Leviathan.
Written by Sir John ——,[1] from his own journals.
The First Day: Our Departure, and My First Encounter with the Duke.
We set sail from the greenish[2] coasts of home on the last day of spring in the year ——, and I do truthfully believe the whole country had turned out to see our departure;—though whether in delight at the new thing we were attempting or in eagerness to be rid of us I cannot say.[3] There was certainly feasting and drunkenness enough on both sides of the affair, among those of us who went and those who stayed. I myself refused most of the wine[4] that flowed so prodigiously, so that I might retain enough of my senses to enjoy the sight of our mighty Leviathan[5] drifting away from the shore for the first time.
That nothing like our expedition has ever been attempted, and that nothing like it will ever be attempted again: of these two things I am equally sure.[6] For the common sense[7] of the scribblers and the talkers at court is that we failed. Yet of that I am not entirely certain. I suppose the memory of our ignominious return is fresher in most minds than the memory of our departure. But our departure was glorious. In all our thousands of years of history, no human eye[8] had ever beheld such a spectacle. We were doing a thing that our wisest heads had told us could never be done; and if we did not make it to the end of our journey, remember that it was the beginning that was said to be impossible.
When at last the gigantic signal flags unfurled and gave the command, and two thousand giant oars, worked in perfect unison by the most ingenious contrivance, began to beat the water with a mighty roar, the cheer that erupted from six thousand throats on our floating city was nearly deafening.[9] Yet it was not so loud that we could not hear the even greater cheer from the land. And when, after perhaps a quarter-hour of rowing, the great sails began to billow, we could still hear the cheering from the coast. Bank after bank of sails unfurled, all brilliantly colored according to their functions, so that the hardy[10] seamen charged with maintaining them could find their way in the forest of canvas.[11] There were red[12] sails, yellow sails, blue sails, and white sails, thousands of them, and as they caught the wind our Leviathan surged forward with a majestic deliberateness that well became her. The cheering on the coast continued, but from us there was only awed silence.[13]
I must have stood silently admiring the spectacle for a good half hour. I might have stood longer, but[14] a carriage arrived with a summons for me to speak with the Duke. One does not refuse the Duke’s invitation, of course, so I immediately boarded the carriage.[15]
[1] The identity of the author, though hidden behind a modest dash, is of course to well known to need any explanation.
[2] E. G. Athelstan chides the author for lack of patriotism, insisting that the coasts of home are simply green and ought straightforwardly to be called green.
[3] It is to be regretted that scientific opinion polls, which might have shed some light on this question, had not yet become as common as they are today.
[4] The fermented juice of Vitis vinifera, the common cultivated grape. Sometimes said to have an intoxicating effect when consumed in quantity.
[5] The choice of a Biblical name for the vessel appears to have aroused some controversy. See, e.g., E. G. Athelstan, Who the H— Do They Think They Are?
[6] I. E. Godwin argues persuasively that this statement is in error, citing numerous accounts of other voyages made in ships of various sorts.
[7] Meant in the Vichian meaning, rather than in any other meaning that might have occurred to you.
[8] Athelstan asks several rather sneering questions about canine, avian, and reptilian eyes, the substance of which need not be repeated here.
[9] Godwin points out that there are no medical records from the voyage indicating an unusual number of auditory complaints, and accuses Sir John of exaggeration.
[10] Meaning that they survive the winter and continue to grow for multiple seasons, as opposed to annual seamen.
[11] Godwin objects that a “forest of canvas” is a botanical impossibility. Williburton emends it to “flourish of canvas.”
[12] Another account of the voyage gives the color of these sails as carmine; research so far has not been able to reconcile the discrepancy.
[13] Williburton emends this to odd silence. Parchefleur reads pawed silence, and believes the allusion is to the silent footsteps of a cat or other feline creature.
[14] Godwin cautions against taking this conjunction too literally.
[15] This very carriage is still preserved in the Museum of Preserved Carriages in Dumpcester.
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From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
S is for the Social Worker,
Grim and worried,
Flustered, flurried,
Solving problems left and right,
Staying up to work all night—
Who dares call the Social Worker
Lazy slob or idle shirker?
Bring your problems to this man:
He will solve them if he can.
Griping, grumbling,
Shambling, stumbling—
Frankly, if the truth were known,
He has problems of his own.
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THE BOY’S BOOK OF CRAFTS AND HANDY-WORKS.
No. 349.—An Interplanetary Shuttle.
ON SUMMER NIGHTS my friend Ned and I used to spend hours lying out in the grass and gazing up into the impenetrable mysteries of the sky. How often we wondered what other strange creatures might be staring back at us from those illimitable vastnesses! Perhaps, at that very moment, some squat but jolly Jovian was looking into his own night sky, wondering what strange creatures might inhabit the planets closer to the sun. And so we would dream and speculate far into the evening, until at last my mother would come out and warn us to get into the house right away before we were abducted by possums. My mother’s greatest fear was that I should be abducted by possums, ever since she had lost my elder sister that way. It was always my own mother who came out to get us; I cannot recall Ned’s having a mother.
It was on one such evening, not so long ago in cosmological terms, that we first conceived the idea of making the trip ourselves, so that we might see firsthand those strange worlds with which we had filled our imaginations. We especially desired to see Mars, which a diligent perusal of certain pulp novels had convinced us must be host to a wide variety of interesting forms of life, many of them not much different from animals on earth but for such relatively small details as the number of legs or heads.
As was usually the case with us, once the idea had occurred to us we wasted no time in getting to work on it. It was too late in the evening for us to begin the construction of any sort of space capsule, but we had already begun making a sort of inventory of the materials we might need. It was clear to us that all the materials would of necessity be things we could readily find in the vicinity, as we were next to penniless. Ned had his paper route, but his unfortunate sarsaparilla habit swallowed nearly all his earnings; and my mind being of a more philosophical and abstract bent, I had no interest in gainful employment.
Fortunately the Limpets, our neighbors, had a large Dodge van that they were not using, or at least not very much; and, as they kept the keys on a hook by the back door, there would be no difficulty in obtaining them. This would make the main body of our vessel: it had plenty of room to store supplies, and the seats were comfortable enough for a long journey. It would, of course, be necessary to make it airtight, but we saw no difficulty there that could not be overcome with a bit of duct tape. Our air supply could be provided in the form of plastic bags, inflated by an electric fan and tied shut, to be pierced by a pin when we felt the need for more oxygen. Ned mentioned that we should take my little Brownie camera and a few rolls of 127 film, and I readily agreed.
We awoke early the next morning and set to work directly after breakfast. A little astronomical research informed us that Mars was at that moment more than two hundred million miles away, which was a considerable distance in those days. This distance posed us a bit of a challenge, as we had never seen the Limpets’ van do any better than thirty-five miles per hour even on the open highway. Since my mother would never consent to our being out later than suppertime, the speed of our vessel would have to be considerably improved.
In certain speculative journals, Ned had read of a kind of propulsion that worked by “warping” the “fabric” of space, much as bending a two-dimensional sheet of paper in three dimensions can bring the ends into close proximity without changing the two-dimensional distance between them. So much of the theory was obvious from even a cursory glance at Euclid, but the greater difficulty remained: by what means might we accomplish this “warping” in such a way as to send our vehicle hurtling through interplanetary space at a suitably high velocity?
We racked our brains for an answer, and finally realized that we had seen the answer at work on numerous occasions. Heat is the universal warper, so to speak. A little heat would warp thin plastic; a little more heat would warp old sound recordings beyond recognition, and a great deal of heat could warp even iron or steel. We had no doubt that, given a high enough temperature, we should be able to warp space itself, which was but the necessary next step in the series. We therefore gutted the engine compartment of the Dodge and filled it with dry pine logs, pine being a wood that burns intensely with a very high heat.
And so we were off to Mars, or so we thought. As it happened, we had considerably miscalculated the heat created by our engine-compartment fire. The pine burned so hot that space was apparently warped far beyond what we had intended; we shot far past Mars and indeed far beyond the limits of our solar system, arriving at last on an unnamed planet which Ned (by the flip of a coin) had the honor of naming after himself. Here we spent a pleasant afternoon riding on the exceedingly tame eight-legged, two-headed horses with which the planet Ned is singularly blessed. We met many other interesting creatures as well, and Ned (the sly dog) made quite an impression on one of the local princesses. But I shall not tell more, for I should not like to ruin the sport for any boys who might like to undertake their own journey to the planet Ned and see the sights for themselves. On our return, the pictures I took with my Brownie were published in the rotogravure section of our local newspaper, and for a while Ned and I were minor celebrities in our little town. All in all, we considered it a successful expedition, even if we did not reach our intended destination.
DR. BOLI’S ALLEGORICAL BESTIARY.
No. 10.—The Northern Mockingbird.
MOCKINGBIRDS ARE MEMBERS of the thrasher family, but none of their relatives will speak to them, and they have stopped going to family reunions. The plumage of the Northern Mockingbird is grey above and somewhat less grey below. Having no striking colors with which to allure the opposite sex, the mockingbird must rely on its talent—always a dubious advantage at best in such an endeavor, for mockingbirds as for human beings. Having no creative faculty of its own, the mockingbird simply mimics the songs of other more talented species. This practice has led to numerous lawsuits alleging copyright infringement; but in spite of consistent findings for the plaintiffs, the lack of a common currency or other means of exchange in the avian world has prevented the judgments against the mockingbirds from ever being enforced, and it appears that the mockingbird will ever remain an incorrigible plagiarist. Such open defiance of the legal system only intensifies the distaste with which the other bird species regard the mockingbirds. For their part, the mockingbirds tend to regard the other species as irredeemable squares. Mockingbirds seldom gather in large flocks, but they do form small gangs, and may be found tagging mailboxes, breaking windshields, and committing other minor acts of mischief when they think they can get away with it. In the laboratory, mockingbirds with intellectual pretensions have displayed a marked preference for the art of Andy Warhol, although this preference can be corrected by standard behavior-modification techniques.
The mockingbird signifies the virtue of using both lanes to merge point.
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From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
R for the Rainmaker, scanning the sky
To see whether any dark clouds have come by—
Completely convinced that his work’s not in vain, yet
To tell you the truth, he still hasn’t made rain yet.
