He pulled and pushed on things. He found that the rods on the one end folded up and out and locked into place, creating an extension. And he realized the two rods were about the same distance apart and the right size (at least at the lower edge which was thinner than the rest) that they might fit into the two holes he had found in the flange.
Then he turned the door around and shook the door. This time, something slid out—a pair of rectangular bars with a section of round rods at right angles to them and firmly welded onto them.
He set the door down and pulled on the rods he had found inside of the rectangular opening. He got the rods out as far as they would go. At some point, he heard a clicking sound and could pull no longer. Those rods and bars seemed to have gotten locked into place.
Looking at what he had now, he realized that what he had was a ladder. He could put the two rods at the end into those holes (assuming they fit) and, with the door and its extension upright or at a steep angle, lean it against the door on the ceiling. Then, assuming it held steady, he could climb up to that door and try to open it.
Being very careful not to fall into the abyss, he moved the ladder, inserted the two short poles into the holes at one edge of the door, pushed the rods and bars that projected out the other side against the frame that projected out from the door up there, and climbed upwards.
He was very afraid that this peculiar ladder would collapse from his weight and send him down into the abyss. In fact, he was worried that the whole thing was just a trap devised by some diabolical fiend determined to see if he was just intelligent enough to figure out how to die stupidly.
But he kept climbing despite his fears and doubts and despite the fact that the ladder was quite shaky. He tried not to look down into the abyss. Instead, he kept his eyes as much as possible level or upraised.
When he got up so high that his head touched the surface of the upper door, he held onto the ladder with just one hand and, with the other one, pushed the part of the door that was near the ladder higher than the ladder itself had pushed it. He was relieved to see that there was light up there. There seemed to be a room or another corridor up there though he was unable to make out any of the details of the new space.
He then pushed with his head on the door while holding the ladder with one hand and reaching into the space between the door and the space it enclosed with the other hand. Then, bending forward, he got to the point where the door rested on his back. Then, he reached with both hands deeper into the new space until the balance of his weight lay in the new, rather than in the old, space. Then he straightened out his legs and wriggled farther along with his arms stretched in front of him. He then turned over on his left side, bent his legs, and rolled onto the new floor.
As he did that, one hip pushed one of the rods of his ladder sideways and that caused the ladder to shake loose of its moorings and fall to the ground beneath him, making a terrible clatter.
He quickly turned around, lifted up the door which had fallen back into its flange, and looked down. He saw the ladder on the floor down below, lying partially across the abyss, rocking slightly. One of the rods that had been inserted into the hole in that flange was bent and twisted.
Even from his current vantage point, the sight of that abyss frightened him. He thought, “What if this floor gives way?” Frightened, he scooted backwards. He lowered the door that he had just come through and carefully put it back in its right place. With the door back where it belonged and the spaces down below securely covered, he felt safer. He sat up then and looked around.
Chapter 14: Two Benches
He felt the onset of despair. He crawled to the nearest wall, brought his legs up to his chest, wrapped his arms around his legs, dropped his head on his knees, and began muttering, “one step at a time one step at a time one step at a time.”
After a while, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He dreamed of being in a department store and wandering aimlessly among the merchandise and being approached by a saleslady who asked him if she could help him. He said, “Not yet” and continued wandering through the aisles. She approached him again a little while later and asked him the same question to which he responded with the same answer. He said, “Not yet.”
Later, while wandering through the toy department, he came to a shelf filled with stuffed toys one of which was a clown. The stuffed clown was larger than any of the other toys. It had a huge face and eyes that opened and closed according to how it was tilted. It had a wide mouth with a zipper instead of teeth. He unzipped the zipper, opened the mouth, and saw instead of a tongue a heart-shaped pillow with the words “I love you” printed on both of its sides. For some reason, finding a heart inside of a clown’s mouth frightened him.
He closed his eyes and felt a little while after someone tapping on his shoulder. It was the saleslady asking him if she could help him. He said “thank you not yet.” But, even while saying “not yet,” he looked more closely at the saleslady than he had looked before. She seemed slightly familiar. He asked her, “Haven’t I met you somewhere else sometime in the past?” She looked at him quizzically while saying, “I don’t think so.” And, as she said that, he made the connection. She looked like Sylvia Ridgeway. She was Sylvia Ridgeway.
After he answered her last query with the words “I don’t think so,” she walked quickly away from her. He called out, “Wait. Come back. You can help me. I want to know your name. I want to know if you are Sylvia Ridgeway.” He ran after her but no matter how fast he ran she seemed to go faster and got to a door at the far end of the store and opened it and went quickly inside and pulled the door closed behind her with him running as fast as he could yelling “Help me. Help me. It is me—Peter Philby—your rescuer.” He got to the door only find that it was locked. He knocked and pounded on it to no avail. She was gone. He sank to the floor in an agony of grief and remorse because he felt that he had forfeited his chance to encounter the one he sought and the reason for his being there in that department store this time and had no idea whether or not there would ever be another time.
But it was all a dream. He woke up and looked around again and this time really looked at what surrounded him. He was sitting in a room that was about 8 feet square and with a very high ceiling that he estimated might be as much as 15 feet high. A single lamp dangled from the very center of the ceiling. A cord emerged from a carved or molded circular panel that might have been made of wood, tin, or plaster. The design on the ornamental panel was very elaborate. Branches, leaves, and flowers curved around and around and wound into and out of each other.
The cord was white. From it hung a spherical lampshade inside of which a light bulb glowed. The lampshade too was white. The bulb inside gave off a white light. The ornamental panel up above was painted white. The walls were white. The ceiling was white. And the floor too was white. Even the facing side of the door through which he had come was white.
The room also had two benches in it. Both were exactly the same in color and design and material as far as he could tell. Both were made of wood with wooden armrests that curved up and then around and then down into the wooden seats. The seats were about 5 feet long and three feet wide and seemed to him to be made out of single planks. The surfaces were pitted and worn, reminding him of the surfaces of pieces of driftwood he had seen. The benches were painted white with the white paint not quite filling the pits on the surfaces of the benches.
The benches, with their backs against opposite walls, faced each other. He was sitting on the floor close to a third wall. He looked from bench to bench. He looked at the door on the floor through which he had come when entering the room. “Ridgeway, Sylvia Ridgeway, can you hear me?” he whispered. “Can anyone else, anyone at all, anyone in possession of a little compassion and pity, hear me?” he yelled.
Then he got up from the floor and sat down on one of the benches. “Pardon me,” he said. He looked at the bench in front of him and said, “Pardon me.” Then he fell into a reverie. He imagined looki
ng up and seeing astronaut Ridgeway sitting on the bench opposite him. She looked as calm as could be. She was reading a book the title of which was, “How to Negotiate a Maze.”
Putting her finger on one of the pages and closing the book, she sighed and glanced around the room and, in the course of doing that, looked over at him, smiled and said, “I wondered how long it would take for you to notice me. Now that you have, we can be formally introduced. My name is Sylvia Ridgeway.” He said, “You look exactly like one of the pictures of you I studied before coming here. Thank you for reappearing if only in this dream of mine.” “I am glad I could help,” she said. Then she opened her book back up and resumed reading it.
Looking at this apparition of his, he appraised it, thinking, “She seems very nice. He wanted to stand up, motion for her to do likewise, and then go up to her and hug her. He imagined doing it. He imagined feeling very calm and good both in anticipation and in the realization.
After a while, he awakened from his reverie and was disappointed to see that the bench opposite his was empty. He looked around the room again.
He noticed some kind of irregularity on the wall above the bench he was facing. He got up, went over there, and walked from side to side, trying to figure out what it was. He finally concluded it was another one of the inscriptions though barely legible because the wall had been painted so many times since that inscription was carved that all of the angled surfaces were rounded and almost completely filled in. He had to run his finger down what he thought were the original lines of the inscription.
He took off his backpack, pulled out his notebook and very carefully made a copy of the inscription, every once in a while checking a line by getting up and going close and walking from side to side and sometimes running his finger along a carved line.
These symbols seemed to be somewhat different from what he had found before. There were pictures of creatures that looked something like beetles or turtles with multiple arms and legs arranged in different patterns. Some were fighting by shooting arrows into each other. Others were depicted hugging or holding out their hands as if making gestures of peace. Of course he knew that his interpretations might be entirely off base. He’d leave it to the translators to do the interpreting. He wondered if the language of this inscription was older, possibly much older, than the language of the others he had found.
When he finished doing the drawing and examining it to make sure that there was no inadvertent error in the copying, he wrote another note to Sylvia Ridgeway. He said, “I have been sent to find and, if possible, rescue you. If you come this way, know that I am here and looking for you. He placed the note on a ledge beneath the door he had just come through.
He began nervously tapping on the wood of the plank on which he sat. He wished that the ladder hadn’t fallen down. If it hadn’t, he might try to go back in the direction from which he came. Maybe there was something he missed. Maybe something changed back there. Maybe a door opened that had earlier found to be closed. Maybe some emergency workers had shown up back there and were wondering where he went. He wished the ladder hadn’t fallen down into the room below and that jumping down into the space below didn’t risk falling into the abyss.
Next he heard a rumbling sound that turned into a sharp and persistent grating sound. It came from the right. He looked there and saw an opening where there hadn’t been one before. From it, came another white light. It seemed even brighter than the light in the room where he now was.
He realized that what he thought was a wall was actually a door. And it was sliding on tracks he hadn’t noticed before. It was sliding to the left. It kept sliding. It slid until it had disappeared inside a crevice of the receiving wall. And now, instead of a small room, there was a long corridor, interrupted only by strips of grey on both sides, marking the place where the sliding door used to be. He saw also another set of strips of grey about two feet beyond the first set.
The corridor seemed not to have an end to it. Its walls, ceiling, and floor receded into space without apparent end. The lines of this space drew together as they receded because of perspective.
He got up, walked carefully around the door, and got to where the walls of this corridor were equally distant from him. He started walking forward. He tried to see if there was an end to this corridor. He saw now, not just one hanging lamp, but a long line of such lamps, each exactly the same and about three feet apart and running down the whole length of the corridor.
He got to the gray strip which was the track on which the door had slid. He examined it. The part that ran from the top to the bottom of the wall on the right was actually the trailing edge of the door that had slid into the wall. On the left side, the grey strip seemed to be a steel strip that sprung across the gap in the wall once the door had slid out of its groove.
On the ceiling and floor, the grey strips were tracks. He reached the second band of gray strips; and finding these to be exactly like the first band of gray, he concluded that two doors existed here, one after the other, and that both doors had slid all the way into the wall on the right.
He got past both places where the gray strips were with the intention of going just a little way down the corridor, as little as 10 or 20 yards. He decided he would then stop to consider what to do. He was thinking of turning back if nothing new showed up or if, from 10 or 20 yards ahead, the corridor still seemed endless.
But the choice turned out not to be his for, just a few seconds after he crossed the second band of gray strips, the first door and then the second began swiftly sliding across the tracks. Both moved too quickly for him to feel it was possible to get through the first of the doors. And he had a horror of being trapped in the small space between the first and second door.
One second the space was wide open. The next, it was shut. He heard a shuffling sound behind him, turned around, and saw a white wall behind him that was considerably closer to him than the white wall he recalled seeing just a few seconds earlier. Also the double band of gray strips was gone. The hanging lamp in that direction was gone as were the two benches, the inscriptions on the walls that actually were doors. Also gone was the door on the floor of the space where he had been, the door that, if opened, led to the space down below and the abyss.
Again, he felt despair rise up inside of him. The feeling practically paralyzed him. He could barely breathe. He had to sit down, lean against a wall, close his eyes, and make an effort to breathe steadily for a while. A couple of hours later he got up.
He had an idea. He walked back to the door that had just closed and examined it carefully. He looked all around its edges. He knocked on it. He put his ear to it and listened. Nothing came of that.
While he examined the wall, he began hearing a scraping and then a screeching sound. The sounds seemed to be occurring somewhere on the other side of the wall or door he had his ear to. He heard a whirring sound that steadily rose in pitch.
The sound he was hearing rose up ever higher in pitch and, at a certain point, made a cracking sound and then a squealing sound. It sounded to him as if a flywheel had begun to spin freely. He heard a whistling sound.
The combination of sounds scared him. He had no idea what they meant or whether they had any relationship to him. He heard a sharp smacking sound come from behind the door he had his ear to.
He was very scared. He pushed away from the wall or door against which he was leaning, turned around, and began running down the long corridor—not in order to reach anything but in order to get away from the horrible sounds.
When he stopped running, he was breathing very fast. His heart was pounding. Sweat stood on his forehead. He had a terrible headache. He leaned back against the wall while thoughts of walls falling on him or sliding into him or trapping him ran through his head.
He closed his eyes, trying to think of other, less frightening, things. And perhaps he did think of other, less frightening things because he now saw fireworks explode across the night sky of his dreamscape. He saw lines and
points and circles of light. There were a lot of different colors. At one point, a thousand tiny explosions spelled out the words of a question which was: ‘Where am I?’ Even the question mark was included in the fantastic display. “One step at a time one step at a time one step at a time” he said to himself, over and over again.
He resolved to walk down what seemed to be an endless corridor illuminated by an endless line of hanging lamps until some way of getting somewhere else appeared which he felt had to happen sooner or later.
So he walked forward. Since some of the hanging lamps came down to eye-level and some others as far down as chest-level, he had to pay attention and duck below or walk around some of the lamps. He went slowly, looking around very carefully, trying not to miss a door or inscription.
Going slowly was hard for him in light of the fact that the corridor seemed to be endless and mostly featureless. It was inevitable that he would not be able to sustain his watchfulness. He lapsed into pure unthinking inattention and mechanical motion for long stretches of time. He also daydreamed. Then he’d snap to attention when he realized that he had ceased to pay attention. He would then look around very carefully again for a little while and then, his mind wandering, become inattentive again.
A series of disconnected images from his life back on Earth filled his mind. He remembered going to a restaurant with a woman he once knew. He remembered the candles on the table. He remembered the flowers that filled a vase set in the middle of the table. He remembered afterwards strolling along a path beside a river hand in hand and asking the woman if she would marry him and seeing the embarrassment and hearing the hemming and hawing and finally being told no.
He remembered thinking later that night about how nice it might be to be an astronaut, not only because of the adventurous life it entailed but also because of the chance of going where rejection and the inevitable embarrassment that followed rejection would hardly be likely to occur.
A Theory of Gravity Page 8
