Taking Off (5 page)

*   *   *

WHAT MY FATHER DID NOT REALIZE, and I did not realize, either, was that some of the projects in
IC
were impossible to build. Though the magazine emphasized projects that one could, presumably, actually build, it also featured in every issue visionary articles about things that were not buildable yet but might be buildable someday. There was a tension between the here-and-now projects, which had a crudeness about them that made them achievable by the craftsman or hobbyist working in the basement or garage or back yard, and the sleek, seamless devices that were forever just on the horizon, someday to be ours in our bright future of swift transportation, gleaming gadgetry, and easy communication. The visionary articles carried with them an inherent frustration. Always there was at some point, toward the end, after the reader had become convinced that the holographic teleportation device described in the article would probably require no more than an afternoon's work, the almost casual mention of technical lets and hindrances to its realization, mere details that would “doubtless soon be solved” but stood in the way of attaining the vision now. “In other words, Faithful Reader,” the article quietly cautioned between its lines, “don't bother trying to build one of these holographic teleportation devices in your garage, because it won't work. You'll run up against a wall of ignorance. We couldn't even do it here at
IC,
in our world-famous Projects Development and Testing Laboratory.” In another magazine, articles of this you-couldn't-build-it-in-a-million-years-sucker sort would not have included cutaway drawings, wiring diagrams, and accounts of the assembly of the device that could not be built, but in
IC
they did. I now think that the zest for building, for making manifest what the imagination had conjured in the mind, was so strong at
IC
that the illustrators, writers, and editors who worked there found that they could not prevent themselves from drawing pictures of the device and writing about its construction as if it had been built. They had, I suspect now, in an example of mass delusion, already convinced themselves that the thing
had
been built, that they had built it. This device that they had imagined
ought
to work, surely
would
work someday, and if that was so, as they believed it surely was, then one ought to be able to build it this way: Step 1 …

I suppose that most readers of
Impractical Craftsman
were adept at distinguishing between the two types of article. My father was not. Neither was I.

My friend Rodney Lodkochnikov, known as Raskolnikov or Raskol, was, in marked contrast, very good at distinguishing between the practicable, the doable, and the visionary, the as-yet undoable. When I showed him the article about the personal hovercraft and confessed to him that it was the flying machine of my daydreams, he took the magazine, glanced at the article and the accompanying drawings, and said, “This is great, but it's not the sort of thing you could build.”

“I wasn't thinking of—” I began to protest.

“Yes, you were,” he said, accurately.

Chapter 9

The Example of Dædalus and Icarus

THE THINKING at
Impractical Craftsman
was exactly the sort of thinking that got Dædalus and Icarus off the ground and into trouble.

In the words of Charles Mills Gayley, Dædalus was “a famous artificer.” Gayley's
Classic Myths,
first published in 1893, was, along with
Ancient Myths for Modern Youth,
required reading in Mrs. Fendreffer's class, a class that was a rite of passage for all freshmen at Babbington High during my years there. Both texts sit on the bookshelf above my desk today.

The story of Dædalus's life is full of curiosities. This is how that story appeared in
Ancient Myths for Modern Youth:

We may as well acknowledge from the start that none of the characters in this drama is particularly admirable. The major players are King Minos of Crete; his queen, Pasiphaë; the god Neptune; Dædalus, a craftsman, tinkerer, putterer, and inventor, the original of the type; and a beautiful bull.

The bull was bullish. King Minos was boastful, vain, and cruel. Pasiphaë was disrespectful of the gods and apparently driven by lustful thoughts. Neptune was, like the other gods, exceedingly jealous and apt to be vengeful. Dædalus, though he was a clever artificer, was also a murderer; he was so envious of rival artificers that when his nephew, Perdix, invented a saw—modeling it on the shape of a fish skeleton—Dædalus pushed him off a tower to his death.

King Minos often boasted that he was a favorite of the gods, that they listened with particular favor to his prayers, and that, therefore, he could obtain virtually anything he wanted by petitioning the appropriate god. Perhaps, down the long corridor of time, you seem to hear the snorts and snickers of skeptics in the king's audience when he made these assertions; apparently, Minos heard them, too. To silence them, Minos went into his act, calling upon Neptune in his prayers, beseeching the god to send him a bull, which he promised to sacrifice to Neptune as soon as the Cretan skeptics had been silenced.

Neptune delivered; the bull appeared. However, because the gods like to work in mysterious ways, it was no ordinary bull. It was an extraordinarily beautiful bull. (We may find the notion that a bull might be “extraordinarily beautiful” a bit hard to swallow in our enlightened times, but the Cretans seem to have had no trouble with it.) Minos was dumbstruck by the bull's beauty; so was Pasiphaë, as we shall see. Under the influence of the bull's beauty, Minos reneged on his deal with Neptune; he refused to sacrifice the animal. Neptune was not happy with this turn of events. Gods, as a rule, like obedience. They go for groveling and abasement. When promised a sacrifice, they expect a sacrifice. Minos's impudence did not sit well with Neptune, who determined to make Minos pay dearly for it. With a god's ingenuity, he infected the beautiful bull with a kind of madness, inducing in it a violent fury that made it intractable and unpredictable, like the crazy people one encounters in small towns, characters who may be quaint in their way but are subject to irrational outbursts of violence and are best avoided.

The bull was not the only earthly agent of Neptune's wrath. He infected Pasiphaë with a kind of madness, too, but a madness different from the bull's; in her case, it was an irresistible passion for the bull. We shall have more to say about this later.

Minos needed help. He called on Hercules, the ubiquitous hero of ancient myth, archetype of all the heroes you find in your comic books. Hercules caught the rampaging bull, subdued it, and took it away to Greece, riding it there, the myth tells us, through the waves. (That bit about riding the bull through the waves is a detail that, like so many of the details, large and small, we are asked to accept in these old myths, doesn't seem likely.)

However, Hercules's ridding Crete of the rampaging bull did not end Minos's troubles. During its time in Crete, the bull had managed to sire a child, and now that child, the Minotaur (that is, “Minos's bull”), was causing no end of trouble. The Minotaur was a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man. It went about terrorizing the people of Crete as its father had, but did an even better job of it.

Again, Minos needed help. He turned to Dædalus, that famous artificer. Minos had long admired Dædalus's skills, but he had become less than fond of the man after Dædalus had abetted the love of Pasiphaë for the Minotaur's father, that extraordinarily beautiful bull that Neptune had sent in devious fulfillment of Minos's imprecations. In his hour of need, Minos seemed to set aside his animosity toward Dædalus, and the great artificer constructed for him a labyrinth, with passages and turnings winding in and about like the river Mæander. In this labyrinth he enclosed the Minotaur, which could not find its way out. Minos found that the labyrinth was also a fine place to imprison miscreants and foes, who became feed for the Minotaur that roamed the twisting passageways. In addition, after Dædalus had completed the labyrinth, Minos imprisoned Dædalus and his son, Icarus, there, for Minos's animosity toward Dædalus had never really waned and he hoped that imprisonment in the labyrinth would mean the end of Dædalus and his issue.

However, crafty Dædalus fashioned wings from feathers and wax so that he and Icarus could fly out of the labyrinth. Before they took to the air, Dædalus instructed Icarus in the use of the wings and the safety rules of the art of human flight as they were then understood. “Fly neither too high nor too low,” he counseled his son, “but keep to the middle way.” Well, you know how youngsters are: headstrong. Icarus took off, and in the manner of daredevil youth since time immemorial he soon scoffed at his father's advice, flouted his warnings, and stretched his wings. He flew too high, too near the sun, and the heat melted the wax that held the feathers in place. Without feathers, he was no longer a flyboy, merely a boy, and boys cannot stay airborne for long. Icarus fell into the sea and drowned. Let this be a lesson to you.

*   *   *

SOMETHING SEEMED TO BE MISSING from this story. The bull's child, the Minotaur, seemed to pop into it from nowhere, sired but unborn. The bull was the father, clearly, but who was the Minotaur's mother? The hints pointed to Pasiphaë. Could that be? Just imagine the storms raging in the teenage brains of Mrs. Fendreffer's charges upon hearing the phrase “abetted the love of Pasiphaë” for the extraordinarily beautiful bull. What on earth did that mean? We were young people eager for knowledge—or at least we were eager for knowledge in certain areas. Could a woman fall in love with a bull? Could a woman—ah—make love with a bull? How, precisely, would one abet such a love?

“Wait a minute, Mrs. Fendreffer.”

“Yes, Bill?”

“You mean Pasi-whosis was in love with a bull?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Fendreffer sighed, recognizing the opening wedge in a line of inquiry that she had endured every year for all of the thirty-nine that she had been teaching.

“Isn't that a little—” Bill, ordinarily forthcoming, hesitated and even seemed embarrassed.

“Yes?” prompted Mrs. Fendreffer.

“Perverted?” suggested Bill.

“Today I suppose we would call it a kind of bestiality,” Mrs. Fendreffer conceded, “but the ancients had standards different from ours.”

“Is that why you call it the golden age, because they were fornicating with bulls?” asked Rose O'Grady, known as Spike.

“I don't want to hear any language like that in my classroom.”

“Hey, I don't want to hear any stories about women—and married women at that—consorting with bulls—or any other animals for that matter—behind their husbands' backs,” said Bill.

“You don't object to their consorting with bulls if their husbands consent?” asked Spike.

“Even that would be pretty sick.”

“Mrs. Fendreffer, may I ask a serious question?” said Spike in a serious tone of voice.

“Please.”

“It says in the book that Dædalus ‘abetted the love of Pasiphaë for the Minotaur's father, that extraordinarily beautiful bull.'”

“‘Abetted the love of Pasiphaë for the Minotaur's father, that extraordinarily beautiful bull.' That is correct.”

“How?”

“What?”

“How did he abet the love of Pasiphaë for the bull?”

“That I do not know,” Mrs. Fendreffer claimed. “I have been teaching these myths for many years now, and I have consulted many sources for elucidation of their mysteries, but I have never found any commentator who explains just what we are to take
abet
to mean in this case.”

None of us knew, then, that Mrs. Fendreffer's ingorance was feigned, that it was a part of her teaching technique. For thirty-nine years she had been claiming not to know how Dædalus might have abetted the love of Pasiphaë for the Cretan bull and, thereby, she had been inspiring her students to go beyond the pages of
Ancient Myths for Modern Youth
and try to find the answer on their own.

Several of us did, that very afternoon. In a group, with Spike in the lead, we trooped to the school library. There, after half an hour's work, we found some additional information, but not enough. We walked to the Babbington Public Library, where, after another half hour's work, we found a bit more information, but still not enough. It was Spike who voiced our common frustration and suspicions to the librarian: “Hey,” she said to the woman behind the reference desk.

“Yes?”

“We're trying to answer a question about one of the Greek myths, and all the books we check don't give us the real inside dope.”

“Mm,” said the librarian.

“Are you hiding the good stuff somewhere?”

The librarian looked up from her work and over her glasses and down her nose at Spike. Slowly a smile formed on her face.

“Are you in Mrs. Fendreffer's class?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Spike. She seemed as surprised by the question as the rest of us were. “How did you know?”

“This happens every year,” the librarian said, and then a look of concern crossed her face. “Usually it's a little earlier in the school year, though,” she said. “Poor Mrs. Fendreffer must be slowing down.” With a sigh and a shake of her head she led us to a locked bookcase.

In that case was a book called
Antique Scandals: The Mischief Behind the Myths.
We took it to a table nearby and, huddled around it, sought what we wanted to know. We found it, some of it, and in the bargain learned a lesson about making inferences from an incomplete text, since some of the essential words had been hidden under thick black ink, there but obscured, the way the precise answer to a calculation on a slide rule is hidden by the very cursor that marks its location. Perhaps creating the opportunity to learn the lesson of inference was the point of blacking out the revelatory words, or perhaps Mrs. Fendreffer and her collaborators in the library merely wanted to conceal from us what they thought we were too young to know. Over the years I have decided to prefer to believe that they wanted us to learn something, not that they wanted us not to learn something.