The Man Who Lost the Sea  By Theodore Sturgeon  Originally
published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
October 1959  Say you're a kid, and one dark night you're
running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand,
saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and
he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks
you're too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in
the sand and tell him it isn't a toy, it's a model. You tell him
look here, here's something most people don't know about
helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and
show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back
and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You
start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the
gyroscopic effect, but he won't listen. He doesn't want to think
about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most
especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody.
Not now. Now, he wants to think about the s