"Oh, good heavens, son, that craft would never do. We need sail." The old man tugged at one of the small boats he had been working on and pointed to another in the dim corner of the shop. "Drag that one here."When I think of freedom of thought and speech in totalitarian state or culture, I remember these passages. Best thing we could do in such situation is to decompose and disguise what we really want to say in separate ugly pieces and fake censorship like that.
Wondering, Conan did as he was told. Though he knew practically nothing about boats, it was apparent that the squat, ugly little runabout would never do for an ocean voyage, even for one person. He glanced at Teacher, puzzled.
"Turn it around," the old man ordered. "Put the two boats together, stern to stern."
Conan joined the boats, then stepped back and looked at them. He gasped. The ugliness had vanished. In the fading light it seemed that he was peering at single hull, pointed at either end, with the long, flowing lines of a sailing craft. (The Incredible Tide by Alexander Key, Chapter 5)
This juvenile novel on the world and humanity after an whole-earth electromagnetic apocalypse once inspired Hayao Miyazaki. He produced an animation series Future Boy Conan, adapted from this novel. The correspondent of original scene quoted above did not appear in the series.
