“It’s such a shame,” thought the Professor. “Such a
shame that there is a wall in the way.”
He was sitting in his comfortable reading chair with a
book on his lap, trying to make sense of a particularly challenging passage.
The shadows were getting longer in the room, but outside the afternoon sun was
still shining.
Unfortunately, the Professor’s reading chair was
facing the fireplace not the window. So he could not enjoy the fact that the
weather was nice. It really was a great shame.
Returning to his reading, the Professor started at the
top of the page for the umpteenth time. He made it to the bottom, but could still
not get to the bottom of it. The book made no sense to him at all.
“All these complicated words,” he complained. “Can’t
help feeling that they’re messing up the message.”
“Have to get through somehow. I just wish it could
have been more transparent.”
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” he thought, in a
moment of unexpected inspiration.
“If I could make the walls transparent, then it
wouldn’t matter that there is no window. I would be able to look straight out
into the garden. And enjoy the afternoon sun.”
“Even when I’m stuck here not understanding this
infernal book.”
He went off to the inventing studio to try to figure
out how to make a wall see-through. He did not really know how to get started,
so he decided to poke around a bit. He started by checking out various bits of
unfinished inventions, trying to figure out what, if anything, they were good
for.
The idea came to him when he was moving an old TV
screen out of the way. He started thinking about how amazing it was that live
images could be displayed on a flat screen like that. All because of funny
fluid crystals that reacted to electric currents in a special way.
“What if... you could make the bricks in the house act
in the same way?”
“Suppose you could make brick that become transparent when
you run a weak electric current through them. Then you could make the walls
disappear whenever you want to.”
“It would be like being outside and inside at the same
time.”
It was a beautiful idea, but not one easily made into
reality.
It took the Professor a lot of hard work and some
serious thinking, but a couple of weeks later he was done. The house had been
completely rewired and the invention was ready to be tested.
He flicked the switch on the wall, which faded from
view until it was gone completely. At least he could not see it anymore.
He was looking out at the back garden. It was a grey
day. Clouds were gathering and it seemed likely that it was going to rain. It
looked cold and miserable. The Professor shivered. It might have been wise to
test the invention when the sun was out, but it was too late now. He decided to
have a bath to warm up.
As he was soaking his body in the hot bath, it started
raining. He could hear raindrops tip-tip-tapping on the roof. The rhythm was
soothing and he started feeling sleepy. Just as he was about to doze off
something happened.
The rain short-circuited the new invention. The
see-through walls became temperamental. All of a sudden, the bathroom walls
disappeared.
One moment, the Professor was relaxing in a nice warm
bathroom. The next moment, he was still in the bathtub but it now appeared to
be outdoors.
This was not just impractical. It was embarrassing.
The Professor could not reach his towel, and he did not want to get out of the
bath completely naked, in full view of the world outside. What would the
neighbours think?
He had no choice. He had to stay in the bath until the
temperamental walls decided to switch back again.
This did not happen.
The water in the bath got cold. The Professor was
freezing, but modesty forced him to stay where he was. It was getting dark
outside, but as he had thoughtlessly switched the light on in the bathroom this
made the situation even worse.
Eventually, well after midnight, he made his move. He
managed to get his frozen limbs out of the bath, wrapped himself in a towel and
went straight to bed. He needed three extra blankets to get warm again.
As for the
walls, they eventually had enough of being see-through and returned to normal.
This was just as well, really, because there is quite a lot going on in a house
that you would rather not see.
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