"No, no. You don't understand," said the traveler. "The airplanes have powerful motors and the craft rise into the air, and they stay up as long as they want, as long as the fuel holds out." There were several audible "hmmphs" around the room.
"Tell us then," said another scholar, in a saccharine voice, "how this device works. What makes it fly?"
"Well, I don't know exactly how it works. It has something to do with air flowing over the wings."
"You don't know—you cannot explain—how it works, this device that runs counter to everything we know about the natural world, yet you believe in it anyway."
"Believe in it?" asked the traveler, a bit confused by this turn of phrase. "Of course I 'believe in it.' I fly on one all the time at home."
"And how do you control its motions?" a man asked, without removing his pipe. The audience was clearly beginning to patronize the traveler, and he was growing a little irritated.
"Oh, I don't control it. There's a pilot for that."
"I see," the pipe smoker said. "So this airplane contains both you and the pilot. You're telling us that perhaps four or five hundred pounds of dead weight can travel through the air as long as it wants."
"As long as the fuel holds out," added one of the hmmphers, with amusement.
"And all the time sneering at the law of gravity and laughing science in the face," someone else noted.