Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (Illusions 1)

Throngs and masses and crowds of people, torrents of humanity

pouring against one man in the middle of them all. Then the people became an ocean that would drown the man, but in stead of drowning he walked over the ocean, whistling, and disappeared. The ocean of water changed to an ocean of grass. A white-and-gold Travel Air 4000 came down to land on the grass and the pilot got

out of the cockpit and put up a cloth sign: "fly $3 fly".

It was three o'clock in the morning when I woke from the dream, remembering it all and for some reason happy for it. I opened my eyes to see in the moonlight that big Travel Air parked alongside the

Fleet. Shimoda sat on his bed roll as he

had when first I met him, leaning back against the left wheel of his airplane It wasn't that I saw him clearly, I just knew he was there.

"Hi Richard," he said quietly in the dark. "Does that tell you what's going on?"

"Does what tell me?" I said foggily. I was still remembering and didn't think to be surprised that he'd be awake.

"Your dream. The guy and the crowds and the airplane," he said patiently. "You were curious about me, so now you know, OK? There were news stories: Donald Shimoda, the one they were beginning to call the Mechanic Messiah, the American Avatar, who disappeared one day in front of twenty-five thousand eye-witnesses?"

I did remember that, had read it on a small-town Ohio newspaper rack, because it was on the front page.

"Donald Shimoda?"

"At your service," he said. "Now you know, so you don't have to puzzle me out anymore. Go back to sleep."

I thought about that for a long time before I slept.

"Are you allowed . . . I didn't think . . .you get a job like that, the Messiah, you're supposed to save the world, aren't you? I didn't know the Messiah could just turn

in his keys like that and quit." I sat high on the top cowling of the Fleet and considered my strange friend. ''Toss me a nine-sixteenths, would you please, Don?"

He hunted in the toolbag and pitched the wrench up to me. As with the other tools that morning, the one he threw slowed and stopped within a foot of me, floating weightless, turning lazy in midair. The moment I touched it, though, it went heavy in my hand, an everyday chrome-vanadium aircraft end-wrench. Well, not quite everyday. Ever since a cheap seven-eighths broke in my hand. I've bought the best tools a man can have . . . this one happened to be a Snap-On, which as any mechanic knows is not your everyday wrench. Might as well be made of gold, the price of the thing, but it's a joy in the hand and you know it will never break, no matter what you do with it.

"Of course you can quit! Quit anything you want, if you change your mind about doing it. You can quit breathing if you want to." He floated a Phillips screwdriver for his own amusement. "So I quit being the Messiah and if I sound a little defensive, it's maybe because I am still a little defensive. Better that than keeping the job and hating it. A good messiah hates nothing and is free to walk any path he wants to walk. Well, that's true for everybody, of course. We're all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it."

I worked at tightening the cylinder base nuts on the Kinner engine. A good power plant, the old B-5, but these nuts want to loosen themselves every hundred flying hours or so, and it's wise to stay one jump ahead. Sure enough, the first one I put the wrench to went a quarter turn tighter, and I was glad for my wisdom to check them all this morning, before flying any more customers.

"Well yes Don, but it seems as if Messiahing would be different from other jobs you know? Jesus going back to hammering nails for a living? Maybe it just sounds odd."

He considered that, trying to see my point "I don't see your point. Strange thing about that is he didn't quit when they first started calling him Savior. Instead at that piece of bad news, he tried logic: 'OK, I'm the son of God, but so are we all; I'm the savior, but so are you! The works that I do, you can do!' Anybody in their right mind understands that."

It was hot, up on the cowling, but it didn't feel like work. The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. Satisfying, to know that I was keeping the cylinders from flying off the engine. "Say you want another wrench " he said.

"I do not want another wrench. And I happen to be so spiritually advanced that I consider these tricks of yours mere party games, Shimoda, of a moderately evolved soul. Or maybe a beginning hypnotist."

"A hypnotist! Boy, are you ever getting warm! But better hypnotist than Messiah. What a dull job! Why didn't I know it was going to be a dull job?"

"You did," I said wisely. He just laughed.

"Did you ever consider, Don, that it might not be so easy to quit, after all? That you might not just settle right down to the life of a normal human being?"

He didn't laugh at that. "You're right, of course," he said, and ran his fingers through his black hair. "Stay in any one place too long, more than a day or two, and people knew I was something strange. Brush against my sleeve, you're healed of terminal cancer, and before the week's out there I'm back in the middle of a crowd again. This airplane keeps me moving, and nobody knows where I came from or where I'm going next, which suits me pretty well."

"You are gonna have a tougher time than you think, Don."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, the whole motion of our time is from the material toward the spiritual . . . slow as it is, it's still a pretty huge motion. I don't think the world is gonna let you alone."

"It's not me they want, it's the miracles! And those I can teach to somebody else; let him be the Messiah. I won't tell him it's a dull job. And besides,' There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away from.'" I slid from the cowling down to the hay and began tightening the cylinder nuts on number three and four cylinders. Not all of them were loose, but some were. "You are quoting Snoopy the Dog, I believe?"