Takeoff! Read Free

talent. I have genius or nothing.” The thing about Kelly is that he has both.
    His talent lies in his ability to use any and every artistic medium that exists. His genius lies in the way he uses them. And that genius shows through every medium.
    Let me give you an imaginative example-what Albert Einstein called a “thought experiment.”
    I am fond of churches as works of art; I am a church buff, among other things, and I go absolutely ape over the Gothic style. The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe really turn me on, and if I were going to build a church, it would be in that style. Suppose I had enough money to build the church of my dreams. It would take many tens of millions of dollars today.
    With that vast sum in my pocket, I would go to Frank Kelly Freas and say: “Kelly, build me that church. Hire engineers, hire architects, hire artisans of any kind you need. Money is no object, but build me that church.”
    He could do it; you damn well betcha he could. The spires, the gargoyles, the statues, the stained glass windows-all. And when he was through (assuming a lifespan of some three centuries), it would be the most beautiful church in all Christendom. That is his talent.
    And those who know his genius would take one look at it and say, in no irreverent tone: “My God! That’s a Frank Kelly Freas Church!”
    Selah.

GENTLEMEN: PLEASE NOTE
    By Randall Garrett

    This might be considered an “alternate history” story, and in a way, I suppose it is. But not in the sense that, say, the Lord Darcy stories are. This is a takeoff, not on history, but on the way certain self-important know-it-alls do their best to put down the gifted person just because his notions don’t agree with theirs. And, far too often, they succeed.
    This is a study in “how to stomp on the crackpot.”
    With the exception of General B-f, all the characters mentioned in this story were actual historical persons, but, with the possible exception of King Charles II, were nothing like I have depicted them.
    My apologies especially to Isaac Barrow, who, as far as my historical reading has led me to believe, was a much nicer guy.

    18 June 1957
    Trinity College
    Cambridge

    Sir James Trowbridge
    No.14 Berkeley Mews
    London

    My dear James,
    I’m sorry to have lost touch with you over the past few years; we haven’t seen each other since the French War, back in 1948. Nine years! It doesn’t seem it.
    I’ll tell you right off I want a favour of you. (No, I do not want to borrow another five shillings! I haven’t had my pocket picked again, thank you. ) This has to do with a little historical research I’m doing here. I stumbled across something rather queer, and I’m hoping you can help me with it.
    I am enclosing copies of some old letters received by Isaac Newton nearly three hundred years ago. As you will notice, they are addressed to “Mr. Isaac Newton, A.B.”; it rings oddly on the ear to hear the great man addressed as anything but “your Grace,” but of course he was only a young man at the time. He hadn’t written his famous Principia yet—and wouldn’t for twenty years.
    Reading these letters is somewhat like listening to a conversation when only one of the speakers is audible, but they seem to indicate another side to the man, one which has not heretofore been brought to light.
    Dr. Henry Blake, the mathematician, has looked them over, and he feels that it is possible that Newton stumbled on something that modern thought has only recently come up with-the gravitational and light theories of the Swiss mathematician, Albert Einstein.
    I know it’s fantastic to think that a man of even Newton’s acknowledged genius could have conceived of such things three centuries before their proper place in history, but Blake says it’s possible. And if it is, Blake himself will probably do to Newton’s correspondents the same thing that was done to Oliver Cromwell at the beginning of the Restoration—disinter the bodies and have them