Disowned, Page 2

hadassisted me in preparing for his permanent care at home. The devicewas simple; we had just taken his room, remodeled the ceiling as afloor, and fitted it with furniture upside down. Most of the problemsinvolved in this were fairly simple. The matter of a bath ratherstumped us for a while, until we hit upon a shower. The jets came upfrom under Tristan's feet, from the point of view of his perceptions;he told us that one of the strangest of all his experiences was to seethe waste water swirl about in the pan _over_ his head, and beingsucked up the drain as though drawn by some mysterious magnet.

  My brother and I shared a flat alone, so there was no servant problemto deal with. But he was going to need care as well as companionship,and I had to earn my living. For Alice, it was a case where the voiceof the heart chimed with that of necessity; and I was best man atperhaps the weirdest marriage ceremony which ever took place on thisearth. Held down in bed with the roped sheet, all betraying signscarefully concealed, Tristan was married to Alice by an unsuspectingdominie who took it all for one of those ordinary, though romanticsick-bed affairs.

  From the first, Tristan felt better and more secure in his specialquarters, and was now able to move about quite freely within hislimits; though such were his mental reactions that for his comfort wehad to refinish the floor to look like a plaster ceiling, to eliminateas far as possible the upside-down suggestions left in the room, andto keep the windows closely shaded. I soon found that the sight of me,or any one else, walking upside down--to him--was very painful; onlyin the case of Alice did other considerations remove theunpleasantness.

  Little by little the accumulation of experience brought to my mind thefull and vivid horror of what the poor lad had suffered and wassuffering. Why, when he had looked out of that window into the sky, hewas looking _down_ into a bottomless abyss, from which he wassustained only by the frail plaster and planking under his feet! Thewhole earth, with its trees and buildings, was suspended over hishead, seemingly about to fall at any moment with him into the depths;the sun at noon glared _upward_ from the depths of an inferno,lighting from _below_ the somber earth suspended overhead! Thus thewarm comfort of the sun, which has cheered the heart of man from timeimmemorial, now took on an unearthly, unnatural semblance. I learnedthat he could never quite shake off the feeling that the houses wereanchored into the earth, suspended only by the embedment of theirfoundations in the soil; that trees were suspended from their roots,which groaned with the strain; that soil was held to the bedrock onlyby its cohesion. He even dreaded lest, during storms, the grip of themuddy soil be loosened, and the fields fall into the blue! It was onlywhen clasped tight in Alice's arms that the horrors wholly left him.

  All the reasoning we might use on his mind, or that he himself couldbring to bear on it, was useless. We found that the sense of up anddown is ineradicably fixed by the balancing apparatus of the body.

  * * * * *

  Meanwhile, his psychology was undergoing strange alterations; the moreI came to appreciate the actual conditions he was living under, themore apparent it seemed to me that he must have a cast-iron mentalstamina to maintain sanity at all. But he not only did that; he beganto recover normal strength, and to be irked unbearably by his constantconfinement. So it came about that he began to venture a little at atime from his room, wandering about on the ceiling of the rest of thehouse. However, he could not yet look out of windows, but sidled up tothem with averted face to draw any blinds that were up.

  As he grew increasingly restless, we all felt more and more that thething could not continue as it was; some way out must be found. We hadmany a talk with Grosnoff, at last inducing him to speak about thestill half-formed theory which he had dimly conceived at the first.

  "For a good many decades," he said, "there have been a few whoregarded the close analogies between magnetism and gravitationalaction as symptomatic of a concealed identity between them. Einstein's'Field Theory' practically proves it on the mathematical side. Now itis obvious that if gravitation is a form of magnetism--and if so itbelongs to another plane of magnetic forces than that which we knowand use--then the objects on a planet must have the opposite polarityfrom that of the planet itself. Since the globe is itself a magnet,with a positive and negative pole, its attraction power is not that ofa magnet on any plane, because then the human race would be dividedinto two species, each polarized in the sign opposite to its ownpole; when an individual of either race reached the equator, he wouldbecome weightless, and when he crossed it, would be repelled intospace."

  "Lord!" I said. "There would be a plot for one of your scientificfiction writers!"

  * * * * *

  "I can present you with another," said Dr. Grosnoff. "How do we knowwhether another planet would have the opposite sign to our ownbodies?"

  "Well," I chuckled, "they'll find that out soon enough when the firstinterplanetary expedition tries to land on on of 'em!"

  "Hmf!" grunted the medico. "That'll be the least of their troubles!"

  "But you said the polarity couldn't be that of a magnet; then what?"

  "Don't you remember the common pith ball of your high school physicsdays? An accumulation of positive electricity repels an accumulationof negative--if indeed we can correctly use 'accumulation' for anegativity--and it is my idea that the earth is the container of agigantic accumulation of this meta--or hyper-electricity which we arepostulating; and our bodies contain a charge of the opposite sign."

  "But, Doctor, the retention of a charge of static electricity by abody in the presence of one of the opposite sign requires insulationof the containing bodies; for instance, lightning is a breaking downof the air insulation between the ground and a cloud. In our case weare constantly in contact with the earth, and the charges wouldequalize."

  "Please bear in mind, Jim, that we are not talking about electricityas now handled by man, but about some form of it as yet hypothetical.We don't know what kind of insulation it would require. We may be_constitutionally_ insulated."

  "And you think the fire-ball broke down that insulation by the shockto Tristan's system?" I asked. The logic of the thing was shaping uphazily, but unmistakably. "But, then, why don't we frequently seepeople kiting off the earth as the result of explosions?"

  "_How do you know they haven't?_ Don't we have plenty of mysteriousdisappearances as the result of explosions, and particularly,strangely large numbers of missing in a major war?"

  My blood chilled. The world was beginning to seem a pretty awfulplace.

  Grosnoff saw my disturbance, and placed a reassuring hand on myshoulder.

  "I'm afraid," he said, smiling, "that I rather yielded to thetemptation to get a rise out of you. That suggestion _might_ beunpleasantly true under special circumstances. But I particularly havean eye out for the special capacities of that weird and rarephenomenon, the fire-ball. It isn't impossible that the energy of thefire-ball went into the re-polarization rather than into a destructiveconcussion--hence Tristan's escape."

  "You mean its effect is _qualitatively_ different from that of anyother explosion?"

  "It may be so. It is known to be an electric conglomeration of somekind--but that's all."

  * * * * *

  Meantime circumstances were not going well with us; the financialburden of Tristan's support, added to the strain of the situation, wasbecoming overwhelming. Tristan knew this and felt it keenly; thisbrought him to a momentous decision. He looked down at us from theceiling one day with an expression of unusual tenseness, andannounced that he was going out permanently, and to take part in theworld again.

  "I've gotten now so that I can bear to look out of the windows quitewell. It's only a matter of time and practise until I can stand theopen. After all, it isn't any worse than being a steel worker orsteeplejack. Even if the worst came to the worst, I'd rather be burstopen by the frozen vacuum of interstellar space than to splash upon asidewalk before an admiring populace--and people do _that_ every day!"

  Dr.
Grosnoff, who was present, expressed great delight. His patientwas coming along well mentally, at least. Alice sat down, trembling.

  "But, good Lord, Tristan," I said, "what possible occupation could youfollow?"

  "Oh, I've brooded over that for weeks, and I've crossed the Rubicon. Ithink we're a long way past such petty things as personal pride. Didit ever occur to you that what from one point of view is a monstrouscatastrophe, from another is an asset?"

  "What in the dickens are you talking about?" I asked.

  "I'm talking about the--the--" he gulped painfully--"the stage."

  Alice wrung her hands, crying bitterly:

  "Wonderful! Splendid! Tristan LeHuber,