A Theory of Gravity

by Wycroft Taylor

  He thought the blinking of the lights would resume, but that didn’t happen. The lights on his side stayed strong and kept steady. He banged once more on the glass. He called her name time and again. He felt all around the edges of several of the panes of glass, but found no way to pry or push any open.

  He decided he’d better go forward where perhaps he might find a door that would give him access to the space where astronaut Ridgeway was confined.

  Chapter 25: Thirty Doors

  He quickly came to the end of the corridor where lights flashed like strobes and where mirrors became windows.

  The corridor through which he walked emptied into a room with walls, ceiling, and floors were made entirely of red brick or something that very much resembled red brick. The ceiling, instead of being flat, seemed to be arched. It met the walls by curving outward and downward towards them.

  Some of the bricks had been painted white or black but a lot of the paint had crumbled off or been scraped off, creating a mottled, multi-colored effect. There were also a lot of wooden doors on all of the walls except the one through which he had come to enter the room. The doors had once been painted white but, just as was the case with the bricks, a lot of the paint had crumbled off or been scraped off. The result was very picturesque because of the quaint combination of colors. Everywhere he looked he saw speckled colors: red, yellow & brown (the brick), white, and black.

  The doors were of many different sizes but all were square. All had little round knobs on them. Because of the weathering or scraping of paint, each door displayed its own abstract patterning of white and brown spots, lines, and patterns.

  Painted in black on each door was a single symbol. Unlike the symbols he had seen before, these were not surrounded by an outer geometric shape. Though the symbols meant nothing to him, he got the idea for some reason that they were numbers. If so, the number painted on each door was unique—no two symbols were the same though some parts of some of the symbols were identical.

  With the various numbers (or symbols) being in different styles and sizes painted on different places on the different doors, the whole presented quite a spectacle given the mottled look of the doors and walls.

  Wondering how many doors there were, he decided to count them, starting from the left edge of the wall on his left and continuing to the right bottom edge of the wall on his left. He found that there were thirty doors in all.

  Having lost his backpack to the wind, he had no way of copying this set of symbols; and this inability to copy frustrated him a great deal because of how much work he had put into what he had already done and also because of how important he felt it was to make a copy of every symbol he encountered.

  He wished he had put his notebook and at least one pencil or pen in one of his pockets instead of so compulsively putting the notebook and pencil away in his knapsack each time. But he had done what he had done and, in this place and in these circumstances, he felt that regret could not possibly accomplish anything.

  He knew he had to choose among these doors if he was ever to get out of this place, but he didn’t know how to go about doing it.

  Then he found that, when he turned around and faced in the direction from which he came, he found on the lower left corner of that wall an area about three feet square with a set of symbols inscribed on it. While some of the paint had peeled away, crumbled off, or been scraped, just like everywhere else in this room, the paint was, in comparison with the paint elsewhere in the room, relatively intact. Enough of what was there remained for him to be able to read what was written there. And, of course, the first thing that occurred to him was that here was the code—here was the secret behind the numbering.

  Furthermore, he saw, sitting in the corner next to the inscribed symbols, a stool very much like the stool he found in the room with the round windows. But, whereas the other stool was not painted, this stool was. Like everything else in this room, the paint had crumbled or peeled or been scraped away, but, in the case of the stool, there were so many layers of paint that the weathering of one layer merely revealed a layer beneath and if that second coat was weathered still another coat of paint was revealed.

  The stool was painted black on white on red on green. It was so badly weathered that he was able to see flecks of each of the colors as well as the reddish-brown color of the underlying wood.

  The stool sat upright. On top of the stool he was amazed to see what looked like a notebook and pencil. Picking up the notebook and thumbing through the pages, he found that all were blank. He wondered why it was there and whether its presence meant that the creatures who monitored his actions wanted him to copy the inscriptions if that was indeed what he wished to do.

  Though this notebook that he found was not the same notebook that he had carried inside of his backpack, it was a notebook and pencil nevertheless. He figured he could copy the symbols on the doors as well as these symbols set into the wall in this corner of the room in this notebook and then transfer them to his other notebook if he ever found it again.

  He sat down on the stool and, when he did, realized it was also taller and slenderer than the stool that he found sitting beneath the pair of round windows a little while back. After copying what was inscribed in the corner, he got up off the stool and, moving clockwise around the room, copied each of the symbols painted on each of the doors. When he was finished and had satisfied himself that his copying was accurate, he put the pencil away in his shirt pocket and the notebook away in his back pants’ pocket.

  Suddenly he became utterly convinced that someone was watching him, that there was either a peephole on one of the walls or doors or that there was a hidden camera carefully secreted on the ceiling, a wall, or door, with the lens perhaps hidden behind some very thin yet transparent material. So convinced was he that he was being watched that he acted as if he was. He tried not to show emotion. He pretended he was made of stone or metal.

  He moved slowly and then, embarrassed by his awkward attempt at not attracting attention, he decided to do the very opposite of not trying to attract attention. He decided to act silly. He decided to embarrass whoever or whatever watched. The first thing he did was put his hands on his hips, break into a smile, lean back, and laugh. Then, shifting into pantomime, he twisted his mouth in different ways, opened and closed different eyes, and made his cheeks go in and out. He made a lot of different combinations and generally tried to look like a fool. “Are you happy now, you Watchers?” he asked. “Do you see what you’ve done to me? Do you intend to do more?”

  He slapped his thigh. He wiped his eyes. He bent forwards and backwards and tilted his head from one side to another and stuck out his tongue and pointed it in different directions.

  Somewhere along the way, he recoiled at the very idea of laughing, especially when what he really wanted to do was cry. But he didn’t dare expose his weakness by doing that. So he carried on the pantomime of laughing for a little while longer.

  Then, when he got tired of playing the fool, he made his way slowly back to the stool and sat there, out of breath, with his hands hanging limply on his lap. After a while, he looked up as if looking into a camera lens behind which someone watched. He asked, “Are you happy? Do you see what you have turned me into? Do you see that you might very well have driven me insane?”

  When nothing answered him, he looked around the room. He wanted to get out of it. He wanted still to find astronaut Ridgeway. He looked at all the doors and decided to do what he had done earlier, that is, to try just to turn the knob of each door and then try just to see if a door opened and then just try to see if the door was real. Then he would know at least which of the many doors it would be possible for him to enter.

  He found that every one of these knobs turned and that every door would open and that all were real. These opened away from him—inwards towards spaces he had not yet and might never enter. Though some of the knobs turned more easily than others, all turned. Though some doors were harder to budge than others, all
moved.

  But he did not open any all the way. Nor did he look through any doorway. Nor did he go inside any corridor. What he did do after opening each door was to call astronaut Ridgeway’s name, calling sometimes “Sylvia, are you there? Do you hear me?” Other times, he called, “Astronaut Ridgeway, do you hear me? I am from Earth and trapped in here like you are. Come to me if you hear me. Knock on this door.”

  When no reply came through any corridor, he returned to the stool, sat down, and contemplated his predicament for a while. He just sat idly on the stool for a long time thinking about the strange place he had entered and in which he had been trapped. He wondered about its nature, its mysteries, its purposes, its history, and other things. Hours might have passed while he considered all of these things. What brought him out of his reverie was the fact that the lights coming from the corridor behind him started flickering again.

  He stood up. He didn’t want to waste any time. He wanted to get back to the panes of glass that, when the lights on his side went off, would turn into windows.

  He went back alright but saw nothing when the lights on his side went out. He saw only shiny black glass. When the lights went on, he saw his own reflection as before. He wondered what happened to the world out there. He wondered if what he thought of as windows or mirrors were instead actually screens that played movies that whoever was in control of this place wished to play just to see what reaction was evoked.

  Disappointed by what happened in the corridor of glass, he decided that he might as well return to the room with the thirty doors. He decided he would just pick one at random and take his chances that the one he picked was a good one. He had maybe a one-in-thirty chance of choosing the best door and maybe more than a one-in-thirty chance of choosing a good door. At least that is how he figured it.

  He turned the choosing of a door into a game of chance like a lottery. He hoped he’d be lucky. He said out loud to the walls, to the ceiling, to the doors, and to whoever might be behind any of those or behind a microphone planted in any of those: “Well, I am ready. Here goes. Wish me luck.”

  And, with that, he closed his eyes and turned around and around and stopped when he thought he faced the wall again and stuck out a finger. He decided he would go to the door his finger pointed at, open it, and go through.

  The first time he did that, he ended up pointing at the wall on the left of the corridor, where there were no doors. After feeling around on that wall and hitting a corner and realizing it was the corridor, he backed up and turned around a couple of more times and walked forward and felt around. This time he felt a door, found the knob, turned the knob, opened the door, and walked inside of its doorway.

  He kept his eyes closed that whole time. He walked a few steps without opening his eyes. He didn’t want to see something disappointing, get scared, run back, and have to play this lottery game all over again. So he kept his eyes closed.

  He did not shut the door behind him. He just walked away from it. Walking forward, he opened his eyes. It was very dark. He felt a wind. He heard a sharp slap. It occurred to him that the wind had closed the door.

  In a panic, he turned around and ran back in the direction from which he had come. When he reached the door which now was firmly closed, he discovered that there was, on his side, no knob, latch, or any other projection by means of which he might try to open the door. So he had no choice but to turn around and continue in the direction he had been going before he felt the wind and heard the slapping sound. He called “astronaut Ridgeway” every so often while walking but got no reply or anything that might even be interpreted as a reply.

  Chapter 26: Wondering about Others

  Overhead lights began coming on. There seemed to be a line of overhead lights. Perhaps every fifth one went on at first and very dimly, then every fourth one, then every third until all the lights were on. Then the lights brightened.

  He was finally able to see what surrounded him. He was in another corridor the walls of which consisted of what seemed to be stucco over brick. Because some of the stucco had fallen off the wall, he saw not only the shape of what seemed to be brick under the stucco but also the look of what seemed to be kiln-fired brick made of some sort of iron-rich clay. Of course, any resemblance to materials familiar to him might have been purely coincidental.

  The ceiling was arched. The floor consisted of boards laid down from one side of the corridor to the other.

  He spotted nails hammered through the boards in parallel lines down the length of the corridor about a foot from the wall on each side. So he presumed that boards laid lengthwise were underneath the boards at the floor’s surface. When he walked in the middle of the corridor, his feet made a hollow sound. He concluded that some kind of cavity existed beneath the boards at his feet.

  Lighting came from small bulbs set into what looked like round porcelain fixtures. The lights and fixtures were evenly spaced; they jutted out of the very center of the arched ceiling. These, when all were lit and shining brightly, lit the corridor quite well. He was not able to see the end of the corridor because it seemed to curve to the right.

  There were no windows or designs or murals on the wall. There were no apparent inscriptions. Everything was very clean to the point of being spotless. That indicated to him that someone or something must, from time to time, enter this place if only to keep it clean. For example, a lot of the stucco had fallen away from the brick yet there was no sign of any rubble or dust. Instead, the floor gleamed as if it had been recently varnished, waxed, and polished.

  He walked very carefully for a while down the middle of the corridor. Then, playfully, he veered from side to side. Then he walked only in straight lines and right angles. Then he hopped for a little while. Then he pretended to slide. He pretended that he was an ice skater.

  He wondered if Sylvia Ridgeway was still alive. And, if she was, he wondered where she was. Had he just seen her when walking through that last corridor or was that an automaton made to resemble her or was that a film of her taken two years before? He wondered if she was still trapped inside of this maze or had escaped to the surface of the asteroid or had encountered the makers or monitors of the maze and put into a dungeon or tortured or put inside a luxurious chamber where she was treated like a queen.

  He wondered also if perhaps others, explorers from some planet or asteroid of the sun’s galaxy or some other galaxy, had come here, entered the little building, and gotten trapped like he and Sylvia Ridgeway had been. And, if others besides the two of them were here, was each one wandering inside of a maze of such size and complexity that the chances of anyone running into anyone else would be slim to the point of being nonexistent?

  He wondered: Might ten or a hundred or a thousand others be somewhere inside of here, traversing different parts of this same maze without ever seeing, hearing, or getting any sort of clue that the others were also here?

  For all he knew, someone was walking down this same corridor but just far enough ahead or behind that he could neither see nor hear the person or creature. Nor could they see or hear him unless possibly they possessed senses more acute than his and, knowing his location, avoided him.

  He wondered if he might be better off just sitting down in this corridor and staying put. Then maybe someone coming along behind him could catch up with him. Another thought that occurred to him was this: Maybe, instead of staying put, he should try to go faster down this corridor because then he might have a chance to catch up with someone or something somewhere up ahead of him.

  He wondered if maybe the maze was designed in such a way as to make it hard or impossible for any two people trapped inside of the maze to make contact. Perhaps, he thought, the doors worked as elaborate regulating mechanisms that shunted people this way or that according to how easy or hard they were to open.

  He resumed moving erratically through the corridor. He skipped around. He touched first one wall and then another. He jumped again and tried to touch a light bulb even though he knew full we
ll they were too high for him to reach even if he jumped higher than was usually possible for him. After one of these futile attempts to touch one of those elusive light bulbs, he landed crouching, sprung up, and saw in front of him the corridor’s end, another room, and another set of doors.

  Chapter 27: Make a Change

  All of the doors in the new room were round. And all were the same size, about 18” in diameter which meant that getting through the opening would not be easy. It would be a tight fit. He’d have to wriggle through any door that opened.

  Each door seemed to be made out of sheet metal that might or might not cover some underlying substance. He had no way of judging the thickness or heft or weight of what he saw. They were all painted in dull pastel colors. Two were green; three blue; four were yellow; and three red.

  He noticed some very fine lines scratched into the surfaces, lines that seemed uneven, that went off in odd angles, and that skipped in places. He doubted if these were symbols. The scratches seemed to him to be more like the clawing of some wild and desperate animal that found itself trapped inside. Or perhaps, he thought, the scratches were those of a person who was raving mad and had, in addition, sharp claws or a diamond-tipped stylus like the one he had in his knapsack but never thought to use.

  The wall containing the doors was divided into two parts. There was a projecting strip above the doors and a recessed strip where the doors were.

  On the projecting strip above the doors, a large rectangular sheet of tin was affixed. This strip above the doors did seem to have symbols inscribed on it but the symbols were barely legible because at some point, after they had been made, someone or something had painted over them, thus softening the edges while also partially filling in the parts that had been hollowed out.