A Theory of Gravity

by Wycroft Taylor

  When the latch found its opening, he heard a clicking sound. He hoped he hadn’t caused what turned out to be an open door to lock by pushing the door a little bit too hard and not taking into account the door’s momentum. To test that possibility, he turned the knob again and slightly pulled the door towards him. He was relieved to discover that everything remained the same as before.

  He pushed the door closed again and went to the second door, the one that was set a few feet off the floor. Still, he was able to reach the door knob from the floor because the knob was centered on the door and close to the bottom edge. It was low enough down for him to be able to reach it.

  He noticed too that there were two hinges, one about a foot from the left edge and the other about a foot from the right edge. Both had one-half screwed onto the top edge of the door and another half screwed onto the wall above the door. So he assumed that this door was designed to swing towards him while remaining attached to the bottom edge rather than swing away from him at the right edge like the previous door.

  He was wondering how he’d manage to go through this door if it did open and if he did decide to use it. He supposed that, by jumping up and grabbing hold of the bottom part of the door’s frame and scooting forward, he’d be able to manage it. Though getting up there and through the doorway would be difficult, he was sure it would be possible.

  The knob on the second door was also designed differently than the other two doors. While the others were round and (he was assuming the knob on the third door worked like the knob on the first door) spun around their center points, this one was a latch with a handle that pointed upwards. He supposed that the design and orientation of the handle meant that it would spin around a point close to its bottom edge.

  He grabbed hold of the knob and tried turning it to the left, but it wouldn’t turn at all in that direction. He then tried turning it to the right and found that it moved. It moved from a 90 degree angle (straight up) to about an angle of 15 degrees where it stopped. He then tried pulling the top edge of the door towards him but there was no give at all. He tried pushing on the door, thinking it might go inwards and away from him, but the door still did not budge.

  It occurred to him that somewhere between the upright position and the 15-degree angle, there might be an opening on some kind of locking mechanism found on the other side of the door. But he decided not to play safecracker at this point.

  He wondered if brute force might work. He decided to try it. So he grabbed the handle with both hands at both the upright position and at the position of 15 degrees above the horizontal on the right, but the door wouldn’t budge.

  He decided to put off any further attempt to open the second door for the present and instead to try the third door.

  So he let go of the handle of the second door, backed away, took the ball out of his pocket again, bounced it a couple of times on the floor. He bounced the ball against the second door for good measure and actually managed to catch it when it bounced back. Pleased that he had caught the ball, he threw it against the second door a second time but missed catching it the second time. When it took an unexpected angle, it ricocheted off the side of his left hand and flew away. It hit the floor to his right. He had to run after it and didn’t grab hold of it until it had bounced three times off the floor.

  He bounced it against the door a third time and once again was not able to catch it because of the odd angle of its rebound. This time it went over his head and behind him. To get it, he had to run a few feet back into the corridor with the hanging lamps down which he had come to get into this room.

  He then walked to the third door. He threw the ball a little bit up in the air and caught it when it fell.

  The knob on the third door was on the left side of the door. It was about two-fifths of the way up from the bottom edge. He supposed that the placement of the knob meant the door would open inwards or possibly outwards at the left edge.

  With the ball in his left hand, he grabbed the knob of that door with his right hand and turned it first to the left and then to the right. He found that the knob turned very easily and smoothly. With the knob turned to the right, he pulled and, when that did not work, he pushed on the door and, in doing so, found that the door opened inwards. He closed it. Then he turned the knob all the way to the left and pulled. Nothing happened. Keeping it turned all the way to the left, he pushed and discovered that the door opened outwards this time. He pulled it just a little way open and then pushed the door closed.

  The opening of this door, either inwards or outwards, was so smooth and quiet that he concluded that the hinges, the knob, and the latch must have been recently lubricated which he took to be a good sign—a sign that someone still alive and responsible for the upkeep of this place existed somewhere.

  He stayed where he was. He had to make a decision and was trying to figure out if he had any reason to believe that any decision could be better or worse than any other.

  Two doors could readily be opened. The second one presented a problem. It would take more time and a very careful touch to get it to open if at all.

  Which one should he choose to open all the way and go through? He decided that one thing he could do to improve his chances of making the best decision without really committing himself to one course of action over another would be to open the two doors that opened easily far enough so that he could look through the openings. That way, maybe he could see something by looking through the openings that would help him make his decision.

  He grabbed the knob of the third door, turned it, pulled the door, stepped carefully around it, found an opening, and peered inside. His heart was pounding. He was very nervous. All he saw was a very small space, quite dark, with openings on the left and right, and something on the back wall. A little bit of white light came from the left and right. And there also seemed to be some light coming from overhead. The air was cool but stifling as if filled with dust.

  He backed away, pushed the door closed, turned the knob until he heard the latch catch, and stepped back a few feet. Then he walked to the first door. He took the ball out of his pocket and bounced it against the ground a couple of times. When he got near the first door, he threw it against the wall beside it, and caught it as it bounced back. Then he put the ball back in his pocket.

  He turned the knob of the first door and pulled it open just a crack and then more than a crack. He stepped around the door to get a better look and then peered inside. What he saw through this opening was very much like what he saw when looking through the opening behind the third door. He saw a dark space, with some light coming from the sides and overhead, a wall not far away, musty air, and openings on the right and left.

  He pushed the door closed, backed up, took the ball out of his pocket, and, while rolling it around in his hand, tried to figure out what there was for him to do.

  If he put together what he saw looking through both doors and made a continuous image out of the two glimpses he got, then it seemed that he was looking at a single corridor running parallel to the wall on which the doors were fixed, with short walls running perpendicular to the wall he faced that stopped before reaching another wall, thus creating a corridor.

  If what he supposed was true was actually true, then it wouldn’t matter which door he used, he reasoned.

  On the other hand, he realized that his assumptions might be wrong, that a wall to the right of one opening and to the left of the other went completely across the space he thought of as a corridor. If that was so, there would be two altogether separate places, with corridors of their own that made altogether different twists and turns and led to altogether different endpoints.

  He thought that, though both might lead him eventually to freedom, both might not. One might but the other might not. So, though he had no way of knowing which choice would be best, he still had to choose with maybe his very life depending on his making the right choice.

  There was also that matter of something being on the wall behin
d the third door. Though he couldn’t be positive about what it was, he suspected it was a door in which case the opening behind the third door offered two possibilities, not one. Of course, after any twist or turn, either space might offer other possibilities.

  He didn’t know what to do. He kept rolling the ball around in his hand. He wished he had a second ball. He wished he had a third one. With two, he could roll them around each other in the palm of a hand in the way people do when they play with what are called ‘worry stones.’ With three, he could try to teach himself how to juggle. And, once he mastered the juggling, he could think of each ball as the equivalent of a door, and make up a game of chance where the first ball that he dropped would be the door he either would or would not take.

  Chapter 16: A Roaring Sound

  His thinking was interrupted when he heard a strange sound. It was a rushing sound. The sound reminded him of the sound made by a wind going through a tunnel. The sound increased in volume very quickly, building up quickly into a loud roar. Then he heard, along with the roar, a companion sound—a clicking or clattering or rattling. He looked up and noticed that, though he felt no movement of the air, all three of the doors, were rattling. He concluded that the rushing sound came from behind the doors.

  He concluded that a storm was raging in the space or spaces behind those doors. The sound became a shriek. The rattling of the doors too became louder and more insistent.

  Then suddenly all three doors flew open. The doors on the left and right hit the walls behind them and bounced back and closed with a sharp banging sound. The one in the middle, high up on the wall, rose up and revealed curved brass tracks on either side. Some kind of hooks underneath the door rode up on those. When the door hit the ceiling and began to bounce down, it must have twisted a little bit, causing those hooks to catch in or twist those tracks. So that middle door which, earlier, he decided he could not open was now the only one open.

  And now the rushing sound stopped. So, whatever it was that disturbed the air in there, vanished just as quickly as it was born. He walked up to the middle door, put his hands on the lower edge of the opening behind it, and looked through. About three feet back, stairs going upwards began. A little bit of light seemed to come from up above. It all seemed very gray and musty as if long ago deserted or long ago constructed but never once used.

  Did he now still have three choices? To test the possibility, he walked over to the first door and tried to open it. It would not open. The knob turned, but he could not pull the door open. “Back to two choices,” he muttered. Then he walked over to the third door. There too, the knob turned, but the door simply would not open. He used all his force. He banged on it in different places, hoping to shake it loose. Nothing worked.

  “One choice,” he said. He took the ball, which he had earlier returned to his pocket, out, tossed it up into the air, caught it, tossed it up again, caught it again, and then put it back in his pocket.

  Then he hoisted himself up on the floor of the space behind the middle door. He got both elbows up on the ledge and then swung sideways until he got a knee and leg up there. As he did this, he pushed his pants pocket against the ledge in such a way as to push the ball that was in there out. He watched as it fell onto the floor and then, seeming to take on a life of its own, began bouncing wildly.

  He considered jumping down onto the floor and run after the ball but worried at the same time if, while he did that, he would lose his chance to get through this or any door. He was worried that this door might close while he was down there and that no other door was open.

  With those thoughts in mind, he decided that he had no other real choice but to let the ball go regardless of how much it had come to mean to him.

  Consoling himself by thinking that the ball might now return to Sylvia Ridgeway or might at some future time and in some other place appear before him again, he said “Goodbye, ball,” and, from his vantage point on the ledge beneath the open doorway, he just watched it bounce and roll away from him.

  It nearly hit a hanging lamp. Then, farther down, it did hit one and, as a result, bounced off at an angle while the hanging lamp swung wildly back and forth. The ball hit a wall and then the floor and then the other wall and then the floor again. He just watched as the ball zigzagged down the corridor away from him.

  “Goodbye, ball,” he said again out loud but very quietly. He was talking then only to the ball.

  Then, after doing a lot of wriggling, he got enough of himself up on the ledge so that, by turning sideways, he would be able to get the rest of him up into the space beyond it.

  He then rolled back and away from the opening, got up on his knees, and stood. Seeing that he was covered by dust, he brushed his hands against his jacket, shirt, and pants, and stamped his feet on the ground.

  When he stamped his feet, he must have set off a vibration of some kind that caused the hooks on the underside of the door to get free and, therefore, the door slid shut and snapped closed. He went back to it and tried to open it, but he wasn’t able to. He pushed and pounded. He pulled. He hit the brass tracks at various places including where they were attached to the underside of the wall and the door, hoping to free the door from whatever was holding it. But that did not do much good. He was stuck between a locked door on one side, two musty walls, and a stairway the end of which he could not see.

  He was in a very tight space with no way out except a gloomy stairway that rose above him without any visible end.

  Despair invaded him again. It was like the roaring wind. It came rushing into the void that had been created by the elimination of the problem of choosing among doors and by the loss of a ball to play with and to imagine by.

  The space around him was fairly narrow. It was just the landing at the bottom of concrete stairs that went up and up, endlessly it seemed. Some kind of light drifted down from up there. He sat down on the fourth step and just curled up like some character he vaguely recalled seeing in one of Picasso’s paintings from the blue period.

  He put his thumb in his mouth and closed his eyes. He would wait for as long as it took for the despair to go away. In the meantime, he thought only of the difficulty of his situation. He wondered if there was any reason to believe there was any way out of it.

  He spent a few hours that way, curled up at the bottom of a stairway, thinking gloomy thoughts, and waiting patiently for despair to go away. Finally the gloom began to lift. It took a few hours for that to happen. He took his hand out of his mouth, opened his eyes, and propped himself up on one hand. He began muttering “one step at a time” as a way to motivate himself to try again and move forward. He got up on his feet. He looked upwards and saw that a faint light was coming from up above somewhere. Curious to know where the light was coming from, he started climbing the stairs.

  He climbed going step by step and got some comfort from the thought that he was going higher and higher because he thought that going higher meant getting closer to the surface and possibly returning to his space ship and being able to talk to the computer on board and the people back on Earth what an ordeal he had undergone.

  As he climbed, everything around him stayed basically the same even as it changed. The walls, steps, and ceiling up above all seemed to be made of poured concrete that had, over the course of time, become very grimy. Nothing interesting or unusual or different broke up the monotony of these surroundings unless the very fact of there being nothing of interest was itself interesting.

  One thing did change: the nature of the light that shone down on him. It seemed to fluctuate a little bit in brightness. It didn’t flicker—there was always light—but it fluctuated. When he first noticed this, he suspected that his eyes were playing tricks on him but, as time went on with the effect continuing, he decided that the light was definitely fluctuating. He looked for the source of the light but could not find it. It came from somewhere high overhead. Even at its brightest, the light was quite weak.

  As he climbed still higher, he noticed tha
t the heights of the steps seemed to change a little. They became greater as time went on with each step a little farther away from the one below it than the one below was from the one below that. He had to concentrate on those steps. He had to lift the leg that he raised to reach the next highest step a little higher each time.

  Eventually, he felt like an infant mounting steps designed for adults or like an adult mounting steps designed for giants. He had to lean on a step and pivot his body sideways in order to swing onto the step. Then he had to roll over in order to get completely onto the step. Then reaching the next highest step he had to do the same thing all over again. Each time it got a little harder to do.

  Eventually, looking up, he saw a step that might be the last step. There was no sign of any steps towering over it. There were not the series of parallel lines he had gotten used to seeing. While he realized that what he was seeing might be nothing more than a landing on the other side of which more steps existed, he was encouraged nevertheless.

  The light kept fluctuating but now it seemed that there were two lights, one coming from the right and the other from the left. He figured they came from a recessed ledge somewhere high overhead.

  As he kept climbing, he noticed that the lights took the shape of cones with the bottom edge of the beam coming from the left crisscrossing the bottom edge of the beam coming from the right.

  The crisscrossing beams created a new shape which was brighter than the light coming from either the right or left. It resembled a fish without fins or an eye without a pupil or a fat cigar.

  Finally, the time came when the steps came to an end. He counted the last few in reverse so that, when he saw that he only had eight left, he counted down from there, saying aloud the number left: “Seven, six, five” and so on.