Illusions Read Online Free

          "About this teacher you're looking for. . ."he said.
                 "I ain't looking for no teacher," I said "I am counting money! I can go a week on this,   I can be rained out cold for one solid week!"
                 He looked at me and smiled. "When you are done swimming in your money," he said, "would you mind passing my stew?""
     
     
           3
     
     
                 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