WHIFF.(The Talk of the Town)(ideas that have failed)

William Shawn, this magazine's editor absolute for a great many years, used to tell his nonfiction writers that the world's worst subject was the future. Hard to tie down, the future could too easily come loose and take off on unexpected vectors. While he did not in any way wish to intrude on a writer's sovereign franchise to think through ideas that might occur, it would nonetheless, he felt, be best to avoid the future. Reacting to a proposal of mine, he once slightly modified his position, informing me that the future was actually the second-worst subject in the world, the worst being the Loch Ness monster. In the twenty-some years that I submitted ideas to him, he did, as it happened, accept two stories that relied on projection into chartless time. The first had to do with a rigid airship of novel configuration--a bulbous delta more than a thousand feet long and a thousand feet wide--that was intended to cross oceans carrying vast amounts of freight and then touch down anywhere at all in the least-developed countries of the world, "eliminating the need for roads, railroads, tunnels, bridges, airports, storage facilities, and prepared harbors." Founded by the minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Trenton, New Jersey, the company that meant to build the airship would also build hundreds like it, using lighter-than-air flight to "revolutionize missionary aviation." It would be "a Faith Fleet, a Christian Freight Line marked with the insignia of the National Council of Churches, to carry food, goods, and Bibles to people in what the church called the opportunity countries--fifty transformers to the Voltaic Republic, a hundred thousand Bibles to Nigeria, a million peaches to the Haut-Katanga." The story ran serially in three New Yorkers in February, 1973. For thirty years, the twenty-six-foot prototype whose flight tests the articles described has been hidden under a large black cloth in a T-hangar at a central New Jersey airfield, awaiting further developments.

Also in the seventies, I undertook to describe, with Mr. Shawn's faint blessing, a floating nuclear power plant that would produce twenty-three hundred megawatts of electricity and was meant to float 2.8 miles off the New Jersey coast near Atlantic City. The plant would consist of two state-of-the-art reactors, each in its own hull built by the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company, and protected by a penannular breakwater that would be the largest structure ever built on ...