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

"That's right," he said. "You didn't."

But I kept the handbook, and he never asked for it back.

5

Farmers in the Midwest need good land for their work to prosper, so do gypsy fliers. They have to be close to their customers. They must find fields a block from town, fields planted in grass,

or hay or oats or wheat cut grass-short; no cows nearby to eat the fabric from their planes; alongside a road for cars; a gate in the fence for people; fields lined so that an airplane doesn't have to fly low over any house any here; smooth enough their machines aren't jolted to pieces rolling 50 mph over the ground; long enough to get in and out safely in the hot calm days of summer; and permission from the owner to fly there for a day.

I thought of this as we flew north through Saturday morning, the messiah and me, the green and gold of the land pulling softly by, a thousand feet below. Donald Shimoda's Travel Air floated noisily off my right wing , bouncing sunlight all directions off its mirror paints. A lovely airplane, I thought, but too big for real hard-time barnstorming. It does carry two passengers at a time, but it also weighs twice as much as a Fleet, and so needs much more field to get off the ground and back on. I owned a Travel Air once, but traded it finally for the Fleet, which can get into tiny fields, fields the size you're a lot more likely to find close to town. I could work a 500-foot field with the Fleet, where the Travel Air took 1000, 1300 feet. You tie yourself to this guy, I thought, and you tie yourself to the limits of his airplane.

And sure enough, the moment I thought that, I spotted a neat little cow pasture by the town going past below. It was a standard 1320-foot-farm-field cut in half, the other half sold to the town for a baseball diamond.

Knowing Shimoda's plane couldn't land there, I kicked my little flying machine up on her left wing, nose up, power to idle, and sank like a safe toward the ball park. We touched in the grass just beyond the left-field fence and rolled to a stop with room to spare. I just wanted to show off a little, show him what a Fleet can do, properly flown. A burst of throttle swung me around for take off again, but when I turned to go, there was the Travel Air all set up on final approach to land. Tail down, right wing up, it looked like some glorious graceful condor turning to land on a broom-straw.

He was low and slow, so that the hair on my neck prickled. I was about to see a crash. A Travel Air, you want to hold at least 60 mph over the fence to land, slower than that with an airplane that stalls at 50 and you are going to wrap it up in a ball. But what I saw was this gold and snow biplane stop in the air, instead. Well, I don't mean stop, but it was flying no more than 30 mph, an airplane that stalls at 50, mind you, stop in the air and sort of sigh three-point onto the grass. He used half, maybe three-quarters the space I had used to land the Fleet.

I just sat in the cockpit and looked, while he taxied alongside and shut down. When I turned off my engine, still staring at him dumbly, he called "Nice field, you found! Close enough to town, hey?"

Our first customers, two boys on a Honda motorcycle, were already turning in to see what was going on.

"What do you mean, close to town?" I shouted over the engine noise still in my ears.

"Well, it's half a block away!"

"No, not that! WHAT WAS THAT LANDING ? In the Travel Air! How did you land here?"

He winked at me. "Magic!"

"No, Don. .. really! I saw the way you landed!"

He could see that I was shocked and more than a bit frightened.

"Richard, do you want to know the answer to floating wrenches in the air and healing all sickness and turning water into wine and walking on the waves and landing Travel Airs on a hundred feet of grass ? Do you want to know the answer to all these miracles ?"

I felt as though he had turned a laser on me. "I want to know how you landed here . . ."

"Listen!" he called across the gulf between us. "This world? And everything in it ? Illusions, Richard! Ever bit of it illusions! Do you understand that ?" There was no wink, no smile; as though he was suddenly furious with me for not knowing long ago.

The motorcycle stopped by the tail of his airplane; the boys looked eager to fly.

"Yeah," was all I could think to say. "Roger on the illusions." Then they were on him for a ride and it was up to me to find the owner of the field before he found us and ask permission to fly out of his cow pasture.

The only way to describe the take offs and landings the Travel Air made that day is to tell you that it looked like a fake Travel Air. As if the plane were really an E-2 Cub, or a helicopter dressed in a Travel Air costume. Somehow it was a lot easier for me to accept a nine-sixteenths end-wrench floating weightless than to be calm watching that airplane of his lift off the ground with passengers aboard at 30 mph. It is one thing to believe in levitation when you see it, it is another thing entirely to believe in miracles.

I kept thinking about what he had said so fiercely. Illusions. Someone had said that before. . . when I was a kid, learning magic-magicians say that! They carefully tell us, "Look, this is not a miracle you are about to see; this is not really magic. What it is, is an effect, it is the illusion of magic." Then they pull a chandelier from a walnut and change an elephant into a tennis racket. .

In a burst of insight, I pulled the Messiah's Handbook from my pocket and opened it. Two sentences stood alone on the page.

There is

no such thing as a problem

without a gift for you

in its hands.

You seek problems