A Theory of Gravity

by Wycroft Taylor

  He got tired of waiting for the owl. The way the light kept switching places also began to scare and unnerve him.

  Chapter 19: Changed Conditions

  He made a decision about what to do. He stood up and picked up the stool he had been sitting on. He moved the stool to the exact same spot where the stool had been when he first saw it. He also turned the stool over on its side with the seat facing the same direction it did when he first came across the stool. And then, passing by the stool, he walked in the same direction he was walking when he first saw the windows and the stool.

  After the slight turn to the right at the windows, he had to walk for about ten minutes before seeing something in the distance, possibly a wall. The long line of overhead lights pointed towards it.

  The walls on his left and right seemed to be made out of concrete but, on both sides, about four feet up, there was a ledge a few inches wide on both walls. He did not perceive any other detail on those walls during the whole time he climbed that ramp except for the ledge and the fact that the walls were painted pale yellow and reflected the light that came down from overhead quite well.

  At a certain point while making his way forward, he heard something crack behind him. He turned around but saw nothing unusual. He wondered if the cracking sound was the sound of one or both of the windows breaking. He was tempted to turn back but didn’t; instead, he kept walking forward. Shortly after hearing the cracking sound, however, he began hearing a very faint whistling sound coming from behind him which gradually rose both in pitch and volume.

  The closest analogy he could think of was the sound tea kettle makes as the pressure of the water builds up inside and starts pushing with ever greater force against the kettle’s tiny release valve.

  Yet the sound he heard was not exactly the same as the sound boiling water inside a kettle makes. This sound was different from that other sound and so strange to him that he could not think of a better analogy than that of the whistling sound of a teapot with boiling water inside of it.

  He also felt a wind coming from behind him. He felt it blowing on his back. His jacket and pants sometimes billowed out. The air around him also seemed to have become colder.

  Because of the change in sound and the appearance of the wind, he decided he had to investigate what was going on. So he slowly turned around and retraced his steps. Getting closer to the windows (fighting the wind all the while), he saw that the window that the owl had partially opened was now wide open.

  He supposed that, as the wind blew past the openings at the window’s top and bottom edges, it made a whistling sound that fluctuated slightly as the wind’s force changed.

  The sound was hypnotic. There was a melody to it. He closed his eyes in order better to concentrate on it. Affected by the melody that he believed he heard, he swayed from side to side. He pictured a fawn standing atop an isolated rock that stood in the middle of a green meadow. It had a flute in its hands and blew into a side hole while its fingers flew around covering and uncovering holes quickly and expertly. The flute was attached to a chain that hung around the fawn’s neck.

  Suddenly, in his dream, the fawn looked up, startled, and watched as the sky grew alternately light and dark. Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. The faun took its flute from its mouth and pointed with it into the distance somewhere. Then it dropped the flute and began to run back and forth with the flute swaying wildly beneath its neck while it ran.

  The fawn appeared to him to be panicking. Then, very awkwardly, as if not knowing where to go, it began running around. It ran as if on stilts.

  He stopped dreaming when the music stopped. He opened his eyes and looked around and saw that the window the owl had partially opened was now gone. It seemed to have been blown out of its frame by the wind. He saw the frame lying on the floor beneath and slightly to the right of the window’s opening. Shards of glass lay around it. He supposed the sound of the breaking glass was the thunder he had heard in his dream.

  There must have been a lull in the wind. Now, it rose in volume. But, because it did not have to veer around a partially opened window, its only whistling was faint and more like a rumble than a shriek.

  He tried walking forward. He wanted to get closer to the windows but found that it was becoming quite difficult to go that way—the wind was too strong. Still, he made an effort to fight the wind. He leaned forward and tried to take a step but that step kept ending up where it began. And he had to lean farther and farther forward in order to remain upright. Realizing that making any further progress was impossible and, besides, would do no good, he turned around and found that now walking was difficult for a different reason—the wind pushed on him with such force that he had to run to keep from being pushed over.

  Chapter 20: Two Bottles

  He was being buffeted by a very strong, cold, and relentless wind. He had to run to keep from being pushed over.

  The wind was so cold that he had to button the top buttons of his coat to keep from shivering. And, even though he had to run to keep from being pushed over by the wind, he nevertheless tried, as much as possible, to look around him despite the fact that he was cold, uncomfortable, and running. He didn’t want to miss anything such as a door or chute or cave or paper with an explanation on it or inscription carved into the wall—anything that might serve as a means for him to understand or escape this place.

  And he did see something. At one point he saw two tall dark glass bottles sitting on a ledge, a little bit higher than he was tall. There was also a single glass sitting in between the two bottles. What caught his attention was the glittering reflection of the overhead lights.

  Despite the wind, he managed to get over to where the bottles and glass were. He managed to anchor himself against the force of the wind by lodging a foot against an irregularity he found on the surface of the wall. He looked up at the bottles and discovered pieces of paper jutting out from the edge of the ledge. There were two pieces of paper, one beneath each bottle.

  He managed to slip both of those sheets of paper out from under their respective bottles without upsetting the bottles. Symbols like those he had seen before were scribbled on the pieces of paper. Rather than try to fight the wind while making copies, he decided that his best bet would be to slip the sheets of paper in his pocket.

  That way, he would have something better than a copy: he would have something written by a native of the place. He would slip the notes into his notebook at some point and, if he ever was lucky enough to return to Earth, would hand everything over to the translators.

  He took the bottle that was on his left from the shelf, discovered that it was open, shook it a bit and discovered that there was liquid inside. He put his nose to the opening but didn’t smell anything. He put that bottle carefully back on the shelf and took down the second bottle which also was open and had liquid inside. He sniffed at the opening but again did not smell anything.

  It occurred to him to pour a small amount of the liquid in the glass. So he took the glass from the ledge and poured some of the liquid from the second bottle into it. He dipped a finger into it. The finger neither froze nor got scalded. He pulled the finger out and examined it. He considered licking the finger or even taking a small taste of the liquid in the glass.

  He decided he would be better off not drinking from these bottles—the risk of being poisoned was just too great. So he poured the liquid in the glass back into the bottle he was holding and put both glass and bottle back on the ledge approximately where he found them. He took his foot from the crevice where he had placed it and was immediately seized by the wind. Just as had happened to him before he found this place, he had to run to keep the wind from blowing him over.

  Chapter 21: Seven Doors

  There was a wall up ahead with dark geometric shapes on it. Shortly before reaching it, the ramp became a level floor. He had reached either the end of it or a landing (a temporary interruption of it). At that same place, the walls on either side of him veered away at approxim
ately right angles and made other right-angled turns about ten feet away from him on either side.

  He was in a room with a very high ceiling—much higher than the ceiling of the ramp. The line of light like fluorescent lighting that characterized the ramp also changed. Another line of light ran across the middle of this room at right angles to the line of light that was a continuation of the light on the ramp. This meant that a big “X” or “cross” of light ran from the center of each wall to the center of each opposite wall.

  These walls were different than what he had seen before. They were nicely finished. They were pale yellow. The floor consisted of big white stone tiles separated by smaller black stone tiles that separated each tile from every other. If one paid attention only to the black tiles, one would see lines of black crisscrossing across the floor at right angles to each other.

  There were no ledges on these walls. The walls were plain and flat except that, on the left, a stairway came out of the wall there and came to an end at the wall that he faced. There was a triangular door built into the side of those stairs but no door at the top of the stairs; however, there were several doors on the wall facing him. These were to the right of the stairway. Every door had symbols painted on it.

  The wind still blew but seemed to be growing weaker. The air also seemed to grow a little warmer. He unbuttoned his coat and shirt and looked all around him, thinking he might have missed something when he first glanced at the place.

  Instead, he turned to his right and sat with his back against the wall that was there. He could now look at the various doors and the short stairway that had a door cut into its side and that led up to a blank wall.

  He watched the doors. He wondered if they would open on their own. He wondered if Sylvia Ridgeway or one of the creatures native to this place stood calmly on the other side of one of the doors. He crossed his legs and rested his elbows and forearms on his crossed legs and looked intently at each door.

  Instead of yelling her name, he whispered: “Sylvia Ridgeway, are you somewhere nearby? Answer me out loud or with three knocks on a nearby door or wall just to let me know you can hear me.” But there was no reply.

  He studied the stairs. They were about three feet wide but did not lead to a door. They didn’t seem to lead anywhere except to a blank wall. He looked at the wall at the top of the stairs for any sign of a door having once been there, but he did not detect any signs of irregularity in the color or texture of the stone that was there. Like the walls, the stairway was pale yellow.

  About a foot from the wall and starting maybe six inches above the floor, a small door in the shape of a right triangle was set into the side of the stairway. There was a round shiny knob about halfway up the sloping side of that door in the shape of a right triangle, and, like the other doors, the one in the shape of a right triangle had a number of symbols inscribed on it.

  To the right of the stairway with its little door, he counted six doors. Counting the little triangular doors, that meant that there were a total of seven doors in this room. Closest to the stairway and about four feet from the floor were two rectangular doors, each one with symbols inscribed on it.

  In front of the second of the pair of doors was a set of wooden steps that did not seem to be attached either to the wall below the door or to the floor beneath it. In fact, the wooden stairway seemed to have runners at its base. It was a kind of sled that would move by being pushed across the stone floor.

  The portable wooden steps fit perfectly the two doors for the top step came to just slightly below the bottom edge of either of those doors.

  To the right of the two rectangular doors were two round doors, one on top of the other. They were separated from each other only by the width of their frames. And the bottom door was separated from the floor only by the width of its frame.

  Because the circular doors were so close to one another and were arranged so that one was directly on top of the other and had frames that seemed to blend into one another, the two doors together suggested to him the idea of a figure eight or of an infinity symbol turned sideways.

  He liked the way those two doors looked on the wall but noticed, not right away but eventually, that they were not exactly identical. One difference had to do with how they related to the wall. Whereas the one on top was deeply recessed in its frame, the one on the bottom was flush with the wall.

  To the right of the circular doors were two doors that seemed perfectly square. Those two doors stood side by side.

  The first one, though, was slightly elevated above the floor by a riser, or a single step that was beneath it, while the bottom edge of the second of the square doors touched the floor. There might have, at most, been a slight gap between the bottom edge of that door and the floor as indicated by a shadowy line that he saw there.

  This made a total of seven doors unless he was missing something. He looked all around to see if maybe a door was hidden on one of the walls, the floor, or up in the ceiling.

  He stood up after a while and walked around on the floor, stomping on some of the large white tiles to see if he might detect a hollow sound in which case it was possible some of the tiles were combined to make the surface of a door, but nothing sounded hollow.

  He walked over to the stairs that led to no door. Then he climbed the stairs, pausing only to rap against the wall on his right side occasionally. He was listening for a hollow sound but heard none. The wall on his right seemed to be very solid. He also looked for signs that someone had plastered or painted over what was originally on that wall, but there were no signs of any such work.

  When he got to the top of the stairs, he looked again for signs of plastering or painting over what once was and might still be a door, but, even from up close, he didn’t see anything like that. There just were no signs of any door having ever been either above or to the right of the stairs.

  After checking the parts of the two walls that the stairway made accessible to him for signs of concealed or abandoned doors, he looked up while walking all around the room. He was studying the ceiling. He was looking for signs that one or more doors was or might once have been up there, but he saw no signs of anything like that.

  He decided it was high time he began the laborious process of copying the symbols on each door. He sat down on the stairway that led nowhere, opened his backpack, and pulled out his notebook and paper. Then, though there were a lot of symbols, he patiently copied what he found. He put the symbols on each door on a separate sheet of notebook paper, labeling the first page “First Door on the left/ Room with seven doors” and continuing labeling according to the same pattern on each subsequent page until he had finished with his copying.

  He was tired when he finished. He carefully put his notebook and pencil back in his knapsack, leaned the knapsack against the bottom step, and laid down on the floor in such a way that he could use the knapsack as a pillow.

  Despair immediately paid him a visit. With regard to despair, HE was the door. It came uninvited, an unwelcome visitor, and knocked. It took hold of the knob, and rattled the door. He waited. He didn’t say a word. He barely breathed. He wanted despair to think he was a very solid locked door that it would take a lot of force and a lot of heavy tools to get to open. His ruse seemed to work because, after the passage of time, despair seemed to give up and go away. He breathed a huge sigh of relief when that happened.

  When he opened his eyes and looked around and satisfied himself that Despair was nowhere nearby, he noticed also that the wind that had been so strong a little while before was now nearly nonexistent. He felt only a few tepid gusts now and then. In between the gusts, which happened also to be getting less frequent and weaker, he felt nothing at all.

  He decided that the wind at least would no longer be a problem. But, soon after he drew that conclusion about the wind, the wind picked up again. He was still lying on the floor with his head on his backpack. He wanted more than anything to sleep. And he might have easily gotten some sleep right then if it had
not been for the wind which he now realized was intensifying. There was no denying it. It was getting stronger.

  The air was also growing colder. To make himself a little more comfortable, he pulled his coat tighter around himself, closed his eyes, and still, despite the wind and cold, tried to fall back asleep. He dreamed about a train chugging along through a countryside filled with orchards. He was in the last car and was convinced that astronaut Ridgeway was also in the same train but in one of the other cars that comprised it. He believed she was somewhere up ahead.

  To get to her, he ran forward, through car after car, pulling open one of the sliding doors after another and ran through one section of accordion sheeting that bound the cars together after another. Before he got to the front of the train, he was stopped by one of the doors that, try though he might, he could not get to open. So he sat back discouraged in one of the front seats of the car of which that door was a part and heard a voice say: “Just as the engine of a train embarked on a voyage can operate through the night whether or not the passengers are sleeping, the part of the mind that calculates chugs on whether or not the person doing it is sleeping.”

  The same voice said this next, “Now, the most powerful computer could not do what the calculator inside the mind, the part that keeps chugging away, is required to do. The computer would simply seize up. It might blow a circuit. It might crash. Yet the chugging calculator of the mind goes on, and the reason it goes on relentlessly has to do with how imperfectly it works.

  “It assigns arbitrary values. It makes arbitrary determinations and just chugs along. It assigns scores to each of many factors. It decides on thresholds below which a factor cannot play a part. It adds and subtracts and divides and multiplies and, in so doing, eventually arrives at a total score that causes the calculator to shriek and whistle the way a slot machine does when a gambler gets a jackpot.