Sometimes he’d become conscious that his mind was wandering. He’d stop and turn around and survey what was behind him. He wondered if he had missed something he should have seen. He even considered retracing his steps but wondered if doing that made sense considering that his mind continuously wandered and would wander as much during the going back as it did during the going forward.
He decided at last that he just couldn’t risk going back and forth endlessly in this little corner of this place. He wanted to see what else there was. He felt a way out might exist up ahead. He needed to check it out and, to do that, he had to keep going.
In the meantime, he kept going forward; and, at a certain point, he saw what he thought might well be an end to this corridor. Instead of perspective lines endlessly converging to a point, he thought he saw a place where the lines converged only as far as a rectangle. The lines reached the corners of a rectangle and stopped.
Encouraged by the thought that the corridor finally was coming to an end, he picked up his pace while, at the same time, continuing to try to look around him as carefully as he could. Once, he even looked so carefully from side to side, he bumped into one of the lowest of the hanging lamps. It began rocking back and forth and then swung steadily from side to side. He had to catch it and steady it before letting it go. When it still rocked from side to side a little bit, he caught it and steadied it again. This time, when he let it go, it stayed still.
Then he went forward again, more careful than before. His head hurt from having bumped into the one lamp. He didn’t want to bump into another.
In the meantime, the rectangle he took to be the end of the corridor got steadily larger. The time came when he realized it actually was a wall. Furthermore, he began to notice dark little rectangles inside of the pale big one. After a while, he realized the smaller rectangles were doors.
So anxious was he to reach the wall with the doors on it that he began running and, even so, it took him quite a while to reach the wall. On the way, he passed something he should have seen which might well have been another way to exit this place.
In any case, when he got close to the wall, he saw that the corridor widened into a room a few feet away from the wall. He stopped where the room began and studied its far wall. There were three doors on that wall. He studied them all as well as the wall to which they were mounted.
Chapter 15: The Gap
The room that he faced was about twenty feet wide and about ten feet deep. A number of doors were set into the wall opposite him. The wall to which the doors were attached was separated from the adjacent walls by stained and polished wood molding.
There were significant differences in the two strips of molding with the one on the right being flush with the wall while the one on the left did not quite touch the adjacent wall. There was a shadowy gap there. Also, the molding strip on the left was narrower and slightly lighter in tone than the molding strip on the right. The molding on the left also did not quite meet the wall.
The wall itself was white. It had three dark brown wooden doors on it. One was close to the left edge. Its bottom was even with the floor. A second one was close to the right edge. Its bottom was about a foot away from the floor. The third one was a foot or two away from the second door and was high up on the wall. Its bottom edge was at about the same height as the top edge of the door on the far left side of the facing wall.
That middle door was also shorter and wider than the other two (which were about the same size). All three doors had small cards like business cards set into brass frames attached to them. From where he was standing, he could plainly see that something was printed on the cards, but he could not make out the words.
Before examining the doors and their cards, however, he wanted to examine the gap on the left that existed between the molding on the facing wall and the wall on the left side. The gap puzzled and intrigued him mainly because it seemed so unnecessary for a gap to be there. He wondered if the gap indicated that what appeared to be a wall was actually a door. And, if so, then what appeared to be three doors could be one of two things: (1) doors within a larger door or (2) nothing more than decorative objects made to resemble doors.
He wondered mostly about the gap, asking himself this: Is the surface that looks like a wall a sliding door (like some others he had found) that, for some reason, had not completely closed?
He walked over to that gap. He peered through it but saw nothing but darkness. He wondered if it might make sense to reach in there and feel around and maybe, by that means, find something.
At the same time, he wondered if the gap that happened to be just large enough to admit a hand and arm might amount to a trap that, once an arm went in there, would snap shut possibly so quickly and with such force as to amputate his arm.
The gap was about 7 or 8 inches wide. In the end, his caution surrendered to his curiosity, and, after doing everything possible to position himself so that he would be able to pull his arm out very quickly if the wall began to close, he reached inside.
And so curious did he become about what might be in there, he forgot his determination not to get into a position in which he could not quickly pull his arm away.
He pushed his hand deeper and deeper into the opening. He pushed it until his chin was tight against the corner. He still hadn’t touched anything. He wiggled his fingers but didn’t feel anything.
Then, scared, he pulled his arm all the way out and backed up against the wall on the left and waited for his heart to slow down and for his breath to calm down.
Then, feeling brave again, he pushed his arm back into the gap. This time, he felt along the sides of the crevice. He also tried to reach as high as he could. He got up on his toes so that he could reach as high as was physically possible for him. Still, he didn’t find anything to grasp.
Then he explored the area down below. He hunched over and then got down on his knees and eventually was lying down and feeling along the floor of that dark cavity. Doing that, he did feel something—a something that was round and smooth. Worried that what he felt might be alive or once alive but now dead and rotting, something like a mouse or a rat, he pulled his hand quickly away.
He considered pulling his crowbar out of his knapsack and using that to probe the space. He considered also pulling his flashlight out of his knapsack and lighting up the space. Without those things, he felt he was taking chances he shouldn’t be taking. He was impatient though and did not want to take the time to fish things out of his knapsack. So he got down on his hands and knees and then down on his stomach and reached inside that part of the gap where he felt the round thing once more.
He reached in as far as he could go and succeeded in feeling a thing, which he was sure must be the same thing he felt before. He touched it with his finger, pushed on it, and pulled away. Before he got his hand very far away from it, he felt it again. It had receded from him because of his push and then had come back on its own. Perhaps it bounced back, he thought.
He pushed his hand into the cavity again, very slowly, and, when he touched the thing, touched it lightly with only one finger. He then bent his fingers and flicked at the thing. Then he quickly pulled his hand out of the gap.
As if chasing after those fingers of his, a little round rubber ball rolled out of the gap. He had evidently shot it back against another wall—one that was farther back than the length of his arm. Then, having hit the far wall, the ball bounced back, the force of the collision with the wall being enough to make it bounce out of the gap. He got up and walked beside it as it rolled along. He watched it as it slowed down and stopped.
When the ball stopped rolling, he sat down beside it, picked it up, and rolled it along first one foreleg and then another. The little ball was a great object of mystery to him. It was also a kind of companion, being like him a thing that was compact and mobile and lost in a space where nothing else was either compact or mobile. Everything else it seemed was nailed down or screwed in or glued or bound by mortar and the
weight of gravity.
It was the kind of little round rubber ball that little girls (mostly) play with when they play jacks. They bounce it up and, while it is up in the air, try to grab whatever number of the six-pronged steel jacks their progress in the game requires. The ball was about 2 inches in diameter.
The same kind of ball, he realized, was also the kind sometimes found attached to a paddle by means of a rubber band drawn through a hole drilled into the center of the paddle and stapled to the other side. Kids hit the ball with the paddle and it flies away but slows down when the rubber band reaches the limits of its elasticity and then is pulled back towards the paddle as the rubber band returns to the length it has when not stretched out.
The more he thought about the game with the paddle, the more vivid his memories of what it was like to play the game became. He remembered that, if the ball is hit at the right angle and if the child hitting it is adroit enough to move the paddle so that it is waiting where the ball comes because of the rubber band, the game can be kept up for quite a while. He recalled making up games and contests having to do with how many times he could hit the ball that way and how far away he could make the ball fly. He remembered teaching the games he made up to other kids and being taught by other kids the games they had invented.
He didn’t see any dangling rubber cord, not even a little piece of one sticking out of some hole drilled into that rubber ball. He didn’t see any hole. That might mean the ball was never attached to a paddle but it didn’t necessarily mean that.
It occurred to him that the ball might be a memento that Sylvia Ridgeway put into one of her pockets before getting into the space ship that shot her into space. He wondered if the ball had fallen out of her pocket when she got to this place and wriggling through the space into which he had put his arm, a space that had been much wider when she was there.
He put the ball on the ground and stood up beside it. He kicked the ball lightly with the tip of his shoe. It hit the wall and bounced off at an angle. He followed it some more. The red of the dye or the paint that the manufacturer had applied to the ball had been worn away in spots, revealing the pink of the rubber underneath. There was an intricate array of pink spots, lines, bright red, and blotches on the surface probably a result of having been played with a lot. Or perhaps, he thought, it had been chewed on by a baby or animal. Maybe, he thought, Sylvia Ridgeway sometimes chewed on it out of nervousness or anxiety.
He picked the ball up. He tried bouncing it. It was so badly wounded by its treatment and so worn down by time that it didn’t bounce too well. It didn’t go as high as he felt other balls of that kind would. Throwing it against the floor with more force, he found that it still wouldn’t bounce very high. He bounced it a few times against the different surfaces of the room and discovered also that it sometimes bounced off at odd angles.
He bounced the ball a couple more times while wondering what to do with it. The idea that it once belonged to Sylvia Ridgeway appealed to him more and more as time went on because that thought meant that the little ball he was playing with connected him both to Sylvia Ridgeway who he wanted very much to find and to Earth which was his and her true home and where the ball came from.
Still not sure what to do with the ball that now meant so much to him (though he fully realized that all his surmises might be wrong), he put the ball in a side pocket of his coat and turned his attention to the wall (or larger door) that faced him when he entered this place, and the three doors on it.
As was already noted, there were labels on each door about the size of business cards. These were inserted into little brass frames mounted to the doors by little brass screws or nails. All the labels were about eye height (with the card on the middle door very close to the bottom edge of that door).
After pulling his notebook and pen out of his knapsack, he went from door to door, assuming that he would find symbols on each card that he would copy.
On the first door, there were four symbols, with the surrounding symbols all being circles with sections missing. The inner symbols were slanted lines that were straight in the middle but turned into zigzag designs at both ends. The differences between the inner symbols had to do with the number of lines, their angles and the sharpness and lengths of extension of the zigzags. He made copies that were as exact as possible and labelled the drawing, “First door on my left inside the room with the gap inside of which was a rubber ball.”
When he was finished copying the symbols on the first door, he walked over to the second door and began copying the symbols on the card attached to that door. There were just two with the outer symbols being squares with rounded corners and the inner symbols being circles of various sizes arranged in different ways.
He labeled his drawing of the two symbols: “Second door on my left—room with rubber ball.” While making the drawing, for some reason he imagined himself floating high up in the air back on earth in a basket dangling beneath a hot-air balloon. He imagined a seagull flying towards him and landing on the railing of the basket and sitting there on that railing calmly despite the fact that he put his hand on its back and caressed it and said, “Hi, Sylvia. How are you?” The seagull raised and then dipped its head and, at one point, seemed to regurgitate a red rubber ball which it dropped into the basket. When that happened, his daydream ended.
He got to the third door and found just one symbol printed on the card that was attached to it. This was a series of triangles. The outer triangle was right-side up, with the point at the top and a straight horizontal line at the bottom. Inside of that triangle was another smaller triangle upside down. Inside of that one was another smaller triangle right side up. The pattern continued until triangles became so small that he could not distinguish them from black dots.
He wished he had a magnifying glass in his knapsack, but he did not have one. He copied what he saw as well as he could, labeled the picture, and wrote this note at the bottom: “triangles may continue indefinitely. I lacked a magnifying glass.”
While making this copy, an image of a flowering vine climbing a fence filled his inner eye. He imagined a white and blue flower growing from one of the branches. While he watched, it withered and dried. Its leaves fell off and got carried away by a breeze. His daydream then ended.
He began pacing nervous from one side of the room to another. He decided to try calling Sylvia Ridgeway’s name once again while also pounding on the walls and doors. He yelled as loud as he could, asking if she heard him and, if she did, to try to find some way of letting him know she heard him.
At some point, he stopped his pounding and yelling and listened. He heard what he thought was some banging coming from somewhere that might have been very close or might have been far away, depending on the nature of the surfaces that separated him from that noise.
The banging that he heard or thought he heard did not last long however. He thought he heard four more quick bangs or slaps coming from somewhere and, after that, silence.
He decided that the time had come for him to get out of this room with the three doors. He started walking from one side of the other, going first towards and then away from the doors. He’d go first towards and then away from any of the walls. He didn’t know what door to try to open and enter so, for the time being, he did not do anything.
At a certain point, to while away the time, he reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out the little rubber ball, and started bouncing it against the floor. He walked around and around, bouncing the ball. When the ball took an unexpected bounce, which it sometimes did, he ran after it, scooped it up, and then returned to his elliptical path and resumed the bouncing of the ball.
Then, at a certain point, he came to a halt, stood in front of the three doors, and stared from one to another. He had the rubber ball in his right hand. He turned that closed right hand in different directions so that the ball would variously be below, beside, or on top of his closed fist.
It occurred to him that there might not be anything
at all behind any of these doors. It occurred to him also that, even if these were doors and even if they led the way to somewhere else, the doors might be locked. Another thing that occurred to him was that each of the doors opened into the same exact space in which case it would not matter which door he opened and entered.
He decided that maybe one thing he might do is just check the knob on each door. At least that way, he could determine if a door would open. He decided just to turn the different knobs a little way—perhaps a quarter turn and see if they rotated. That way, he wouldn’t have to commit himself to any specific course of action. He would just turn the different knobs. He could also just slightly pull or push them after turning them. That way, still without having committed himself to any specific course of action, he’d learn if the doors opened.
If a knob didn’t work or if, even though the knob turned, a door wouldn’t budge, then he could eliminate that door. If only one worked and opened, his problem would be solved—he’d just walk through whichever door opened. If none worked or opened, he’d be back at square one. Whatever happened, he figured, he’d have narrowed the range of his options.
So, having reached a conclusion about what to at least begin to do, he walked up to the first door. The knob was where knobs on doors usually were, on the right side, about two-fifths of the way up.
Still holding the ball with his right hand, he grabbed the knob with his left hand and tried to turn it counter-clockwise. At first, it seemed stuck, but, after shaking it a little, he got it to turn. Then he tried pushing on it.
When that didn’t seem to do any good, he tried pulling on it, not too hard, just a little bit, just enough to see if it would open. And it DID start to open. He saw the edge of it draw forward in its frame, about a half inch or inch. When he saw that, he stopped pulling. Instead, still holding onto the knob, he pushed the door until it was almost closed, leaving it that way. He noticed that the knob jiggled a little to the right and then to the left when he let go of it. Also, the door closed all the way, snapping shut.
A Theory of Gravity Page 9
