Johnny McAllister (Original Fiction)
Johnny McAllister had always been a curious boy. Since the day he picked up his first pebble on a pre-school field trip to the foot of Olympus Mons, he had an insatiable appetite for knowledge. More than once his teachers had nearly collapsed from exhaustion brought on by the never ending stream of questions.
So it came as no surprise to his sixth grade teacher, Ms. Jacobs, when—on an excursion to a quaint flea market in San Francisco—Johnny picked up a small, thin, oblong object and asked the man behind the table, “What’s this?”
“That, my young friend, is an interesting little artifact that long ago could be found in virtually every office, every school, every home,” answered the elderly man, his white beard lightly blowing in the cool breeze, round spectacles perched upon his smallish nose.
Johnny listened with a look of keen interest and excitement upon his face. A million questions were taking shape in his head; and one was just forming on the tip of his tongue when the elderly man asked, “How old are you, sonny?”
“Ten,” replied Johnny.
“Then I bet you spend a lot of time writing for class and to your friends, don’t you?” asked the man.
“You bet!” Johnny blurted out with uncontainable enthusiasm. “I have my pocket composer with me all the time! Everyone says that, for my age, I'm quicker with the keypad that anyone they've ever seen!"
"You know," said the man, "there was a time when people wrote without the pocket composer."
"How'd they do that?"
"Why, with this object right here. It's called a pen."
"A pen?" asked Johnny slowly, turning the strange word over in his mouth, "How does it work?"
"You see that thing over there?" asked the man, pointing to a flat white object sitting on a small table, "That's called a piece of paper."
"I've never seen one before," cut in Johnny.
"I wouldn't think so," replied the man, "it's about as antiquated as this pen. Anyway, what you did when you wanted to write was to take this pen and touch it to the paper... like this."
The man drew a few strokes on the paper and Johnny looked on with amazement, his eyes sparkling. It was just like one of the early composers his grandfather had shown him; only with the early composer you touched a thin metal rod to
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