Chapter 4. John’s flying lesson.
The next morning John woke up very early and felt like he was ready for action. He wondered when the flying class was scheduled for and regretted he did not ask the Adventurous for more details. John banged on the wall to Bradley’s room, but for a long time he was not getting any response. Finally, Bradley shouted from his bed, “Hi John, is that you?”
“Of course it’s me, let’s get going!”
“Going where?” Bradley shouted back. “There are no doors! And because there is nothing to do anyway, I’m going to take advantage of it and sleep in.”
John shrugged his shoulders, but did not say anything. True, there were no doors, but at least they could have started brainstorming the situation. Of course, he could also start on his own if Bradley wanted to sleep so much, but John’s brain worked better when he had a sounding board. He knew this little shortcoming about himself of often having good ideas but poor implementation. John started pacing back and forth in his room, muttering to himself, but that did not last for very long. The ceiling opened and the head of the Adventurous appeared in the hole.
The Adventurous said, “Good morning! “Ready for the day?”
“Where is the door?” John asked the Adventurous instead of any kind of greeting.
“The goal is to teach you to get around without any doors. The next time you leave this room will be by means of flying. So it is in your own interest to learn to fly fast.”
“Flying? I thought we were going to fly airplanes. If you’re talking about flying in this room, then I don’t know what you’re talking about,” John said, turning around and walking back to his bed.
In his mind, the Adventurous was behaving rudely by talking to him from the hole in the ceiling instead of generating a door and coming in. And on top of that, he made a crazy proposition to fly in this room. John sat down on his bed and turned his face away from the Adventurous.
The Adventurous did not seem to mind that John also behaved rudely and went on with his explanations, “Oh, that I will tell you. You are supposed to have the ‘orientation’, as the Chief likes to call it. So basically in our country everyone learns to fly. This is the first thing one learns before other lessons can begin. Passing the flying test is the prerequisite for starting on more sophisticated subjects. Remember how your friends disappeared out of sight yesterday? Well, there is a special skill that lets one do that, and you can learn that, too, after you master flying.”
“Flying what?” John interrupted, still looking the other way.
“Nothing… Just flying. We can start now if you wish.”
Only then did John turn his face to the Adventurous and saw that he stuck a long ladder into the hole in the ceiling. John wondered whether he brought it with him to begin with or produced it out thin air just now. The Adventurous lowered the ladder to the floor of the room, and John saw that it had a little board on top like the ones on the high dive at the swimming pools. The Adventurous jumped down through the hole in the ceiling and landed on that board.
“Watch me!” he shouted, excitement in his voice. “You do it this way: jump, straighten out your arms, balance, and arch your back a little bit…” And he jumped down. With his hands out, he slowly circled twice around the room as he was going down towards the floor. John froze in amazement.
“Now you try it,” the Adventurous offered, landing next to John’s bed where he was sitting.
“I don’t think this kind of thing will work for me,” John said cautiously, slowly recovering from his initial shock. “More likely, I will simply fall and hurt myself. Maybe, it’s better to learn to fly airplanes after all?” He raised his head and looked straight at the Adventurous.
“I don’t know what you are talking about. Why can’t you try flying? As far as I understand based on what you told us yesterday about the way you got into this country to begin with, you have a great potential for flying. You were already somewhat flying on the way here before you reached the entry tube.”
“That was not flying!” John objected vigorously. “We were just hanging in the air!”
“Well, was ‘just hanging in the air’ possible in your world?” the Adventurous inquired.
John admitted that of course it was not, but he was not in any control of the situation when it was happening yesterday. They just got into that wooden structure, opened the bags and were taken up into the air, nobody knows how. On the other hand, the Adventurous was suggesting that this time John was to actively commit an act of flying, and he was sure that gravity would pull him straight down.
“Come on, you simply have to try,” the Adventurous prompted John going back to the ladder. “I’ll show you again. Maybe you fall a couple times, but so what? As if you have never fallen doing other activities! It’s not that far to fall, anyway.”
“All right,” John agreed, standing up from his bed. “I’ll try. But for the first time I won’t climb to the top of this ladder.”
Since the Adventurous did not object, John felt encouraged and started climbing the ladder. He looked down every step to verify how far up he was and how far down he would be falling. Finally he stopped. He tried copying the Adventurous in all his gestures, preparing for the jump. Then he jumped, stuck out his hands and made a couple of bird-like motions. With that he hit the floor and landed awkwardly on his side.
“No way,” he said, standing up. “I don’t see how this is possible. All the laws of physics are against it. Of course, the same is true about the disappearances yesterday, but those did happen… I also have to admit, YOU did fly… Do you have different laws of physics in your land?”
For the first time John was frustrated for not having taken any science classes at school. He was avoiding them, thinking they would be too difficult and bring down his GPA. Anything he learned for his own projects was from his dad and had a very sporadic nature. But that stuff would be interesting and useful for situations like this. When he got back, John decided he would go to physics class, even if it meant getting a “C”, to learn the subject systematically and to be able to understand better what was happening in this strange world.
The Adventurous avoided answering John’s questions. John was not sure whether the Adventurous was hiding stuff from him on purpose or simply did not know the answers himself.
“Try again,” the Adventurous commanded. “Don’t tighten up and don’t wave your arms.”
John climbed the ladder again and jumped down. But this time he instinctively jumped with his feet down to have a more successful landing. Of course, he went straight down to the floor.
“Forget it,” he said to the Adventurous. “Let’s do something else. Don’t you have any rides around town?”
“We do, but you have to learn to fly to get out of this room,” the Adventurous reminded him. “I’ll leave the ladder here so you can practice. I’ll be back in the afternoon to check your progress and give further instruction.”
“Practice?..” John sat down back on his bed.
The Adventurous left the room by flying up to the hole in the ceiling and getting out through it. Then he closed the hole. John ran up to the ladder and climbed it as fast as he could to follow the Adventurous into the hole to escape from the room, but the hole disappeared when he almost reached it. John touched the ceiling, but it had even surface as if no hole was there before. John climbed down the stairs without attempting to fly and sat down on his bed again. This whole idea of practicing flying THIS WAY appeared crazy. On top of that being able to fly was the prerequisite for getting out of this room, which was a disaster. He could not even trick them into taking him out under a pretense that he was hungry, because apparently they did not have to eat in this country. And it was true for him, too, because he was not hungry for the whole day already. The future appeared very boring to John at this point. He banged on the wall to Bradley’s room.
“Hey, Bradley, what are you doing?” he shouted.
But there was no reply for very lon
g time, and John kept banging on the wall and shouting until Bradley finally showed some signs of life.
“C’mon John, as long as we are not going to school today, let me just sleep in…”
“Still sleeping?!!! Get up, there are such amazing things happening! ”John shouted impatiently.
“What things?” Bradley asked lazily. John heard some bangs and other noises, indicating that Bradley was getting out of bed. Then he heard Bradley’s steps as he was approaching the wall. John was happy because he did not have to shout so loudly anymore. John told Bradley what happened to him in the morning.
“I have this ladder in my room, and I’m supposed to practice flying,” he finished his story. “Hasn’t anybody come to you yet to teach you how to fly? Yesterday they promised us that all of us will be learning that… I wonder.”
“No, nobody came in yet,” Bradley responded. John heard some noises from Bradley’s room, and then Bradley reported, “Wait, here is the Tenacious.”
“Ok, talk to you later. When he leaves, bang on the wall.”
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The World of the Unknowns: The Discovery. Page 5
