A Theory of Gravity

by Wycroft Taylor

  “So I wonder: If we decided to go to their planet and succeeded in surviving the coma and the trip itself, what we find at the end of the journey? There might be no planet at all. There might be a decimated and, for us at least, an uninhabitable place, a place so cold or so hot or so stripped of life or so stripped of atmosphere as to make a mockery of the trouble we took to take the journey and make a mockery of whatever quixotic dreams about living there we might have harbored.”

  He did not simply listen to what she had to say. He also watched the words and the thoughts and feelings behind them play out on her face. He regarded and interpreted the way she frowned and opened and closed her eyes or pursed and then relaxed her lips. He saw a lot of worry and a lot of thought being revealed.

  Though he now fully agreed that the second choice would be a bad one and though it was obvious to him that that too was her conclusion and though it was probably also obvious to her that he agreed with her, she nevertheless wanted to summarize her thoughts and feelings regarding the second choice. Maybe she was trying to convince herself. Maybe a part of her still wanted the two of them to go there. Maybe the spirit of adventure, the same spirit that played a part in her becoming an astronaut, was egging her on.

  She summarized: “So that is the second choice they are willing to give us. To take it means breaking all ties with Earth and never returning there. We’d be put to sleep at the outset of the voyage and not awakened (assuming everything goes well) until we arrived in the vicinity of this faraway planet of theirs which may or may not be the same planet they recall.

  “And, though my misgiving might not materialize, it would be exciting to do such a thing, especially if you did it with the one you love, because of how much more we would learn about the language, the writing, the customs, the history, the philosophy, and even the religion of these creatures once we got there and it would be exciting also to learn also about other intelligent life forms living in other places that the creatures on that planet might know something about.

  “But, given the dangers inherent in so much of what we would be doing and given the fact that nothing we’d learn would go back to Earth, I just don’t like that option.

  “As far as the people back on Earth were concerned, we just got swallowed up by the asteroid and never returned. Other rescuers might be sent and be swallowed up in return. We’d be acting very irresponsibly. Though, I suppose, I might get the creatures to agree to let us leave behind a message for our space ships to retrieve. I’ve never asked the creatures if leaving a message would be okay with them. I suppose there is a chance that they would agree to something like that.

  He said, “I don’t think it is worthwhile even asking them about leaving behind messages. Based on all the things you’ve said and other thoughts that came to my mind while listening to you, I don’ like the second choice. I would not choose to go there. Surely, you too must feel the same way or do you?”

  She said, “I suppose I do. I hesitated to reach a definite conclusion but, now, with your help, I have. It would be stupid to do that. The dangers would be too great. The sense of being irresponsible and ungrateful to people back on Earth would inevitably grow and deepen until it would drain out of us whatever joy we might otherwise feel. So, yes, I too have to reject that option.”

  What is the third choice?” he asked her.

  She said, “The third choice is very simple. They have given us the option of just staying here indefinitely on this asteroid. You’d have to stay about a year anyway; and, as I’ve said, I’d stay with you that long but, after that, they would allow us, if we wished, to stay for as long as we want to stay. Our classes would continue. We’d eventually be taught how to read the inscriptions. We’d be taught about their customs, religion (if they have one), history, and philosophy. We’d be taught what they know about the existence of intelligent life other than their own existence and ours.”

  “And we would be together,” he said, “and have our routine of a drink every morning and a formal dinner of soup every night after the recitation of a poem.” She smiled when he added that part about the poem.

  “And we’d have our nice rooms and the choice of which one to sleep in every night,” she added.

  “And a chance to elaborate on our routine, making it ever more challenging and pleasant for us,” he said.

  “And we’d have what amounts to servants catering to our every wish,” she said.

  “And we could watch videos on those screens they put in our rooms,” he said.

  “And though the videos would not be Hollywood extravaganzas (maybe they have those too for all I know), they are in their own way very interesting and very entertaining. I know—I have seen a few,” she said.

  “Life could be nice like being in school back on Earth without having to worry about a lot that a student there would have to worry about,” he said.

  “We could think of it as a long vacation with nights and some parts of the day spent in a very nice and free hotel,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “Still, after a year of that, I think I would want to go home with you. The first option is best. It doesn’t preclude a long taste of the third option.

  “I am actually looking forward to staying here for a year. I am so grateful to you for agreeing to stay with me,” he said.

  “And I am grateful to you for coming here to rescue me and for being the kind of person you are,” she said with her husky voice and, as she said it, looked over at him with shiny eyes. He winked at her. She winked back.

  He looked then in the direction of the large room and saw the two eyes jutting back and forth from the edges of their respective walls. “I wanted to ask you about these festivities but we’ve taken so long and those eyes look so jittery that I feel it might be best to ask you about it tonight in bed.”

  “Pillow talk,” she said, laughing. “Yes, pillow talk,” he repeated. “We’ve made our decision. It’s time to go. You can tell them what we’ve decided.” He stood up then and held out his hand to her. She took his hand and got up.

  He began to walk towards the large room but she held him back. She put her arm around his shoulder and pressed her mouth to his ear and said, “Before I tell the teacher what we’ve decided to do, it might help for us to give a little thought to how long we estimate we’d stay here. How long do you think it would take for us to get the knowledge we want to acquire?”

  He put his hands on both of her shoulders and whispered, “You’re probably in a better position to make such an estimate than I am. After all, I’m a newcomer here. I’ve never taken a class. I’ve not yet experienced the acceleration of mental abilities that the electrodes they paste to our bodies and the food they give us to eat produces. You make an estimate. I’ll go along with whatever you say.” “Okay,” she said, “I think it might take from a year or eighteen months to learn what we want to learn. I doubt if it would take longer than that though it is possible that they would figure out ways of getting us to stay longer by holding out to us the possibility of learning something more that they think we’d be interested in learning. Then they’d offer to teach us something more and something more until we found ourselves staying for years.”

  “At some point,” he said, “We’d have to just call a halt to it and say we’ve gotten enough no matter what they do to entice us. Enough is enough after a while. We both agree we feel a responsibility to report back to Earth. Staying here indefinitely would be a kind of forced choice of option three and would actually not be much different from option two. In either case, the people back on Earth would wonder what happened to us and perhaps eventually would give up on us and possibly send ever more rescue missions.” She added, “The time would come when they would have to give up entirely on ever finding us. They would have to write off our missions as failed missions that taught them nothing and brought tragedy in their wake.

  “By the way, it just occurred to me that, when you talk to the teacher, explaining that we have decided to choose opti
on one but stay for approximately a year or eighteen months longer, you might ask if we might get a message put outside of the structure where the rocket ships are—maybe taped to the door or shot over to one of the rockets somehow.

  “It would be nice to let the computers on board those ships and the people back on Earth know that we found each other and are both doing fine and that we have chosen to stay here another year or eighteen months for the purpose of learning about the creatures we have found here, especially their language. We could add that, after being subjected to an arduous trial lasting a few days, the creatures have treated us decently. We might tell them not to send any more rescue missions but just to be patient and wait for us to emerge which should happen in a year or so.”

  “That is a good idea. I should have thought of it,” she said. “They might or might not agree but, regardless, it would be a good idea to ask. I’ll do it. I will ask them if that would be okay,” she said. Then she added, “I think that takes care of everything. Shall we go?” He nodded. They both stood up. She then pushed her right arm through the crook of his left elbow and walked, side by side with him, towards the big room.

  The two eyes still stared at them but sometimes curved around to stare into the big room. When it was obvious that they had finally stopped talking and would be leaving the alcove, the two eyes jumped back behind the edges of their respective walls very quickly. It was as if the guards did not want them to see how very nervous and impatient to get going they were. The two of them found the way the creatures acted and the way the creatures thought and felt (as they imagined the thoughts and feelings) very amusing. Also amusing was the fact that their assumptions about what was going on with the creatures were the same even though they hadn’t spoken them. They both laughed because of all this and were both laughing when they walked out into the large room.

  When they got out into the big room, the guards once again bowed first to Sylvia and then to Philby. One of them began making the clicking, buzzing, and squealing sounds directed at the two of them, the guards evidently having forgotten that only Sylvia knew their language and was capable of responding. When Sylvia only seemed to comprehend what they were saying and responded to them with clicking, buzzing, squealing, and whistling sounds of her own, the guards talked quietly to each other.

  It seemed as if one was reminding the other that only Sylvia could understand them. Then they bowed only to Sylvia and said something more to her. She responded.

  Chapter 43: Pandemonium

  Then the guards rolled away from the wall and turned so that they could face one another and push their sticks out into the room, creating a safe corridor for them. They walked slowly and in as stately a way as they could out into the large room where they found that something like pandemonium had broken loose since they were last there.

  It wasn’t exactly pandemonium. There was just a lot of noise being made by a lot of creatures, perhaps twice as many as were present when the two of them entered the alcove. Some of the creatures rolled around on the floor. Some crawled on the walls. A few dangled from the ceiling. The ones that crawled around constituted about two-thirds of the crowd. The other third rolled around in wheeled carts. Because of how crowded the room was, the ones crawling around on the floor were heaped one on top of another in some places while the ones in the carts sometimes rolled part of the way over creatures crawling on the floor but, in doing so, tilted over at such an angle that the driver, fearing toppling over, quickly backed away. Sometimes too the ones in the carts banged into one another and quickly backed away. The space was just too crowded.

  The creatures in wheeled carts that had musical instruments strapped onto their torsos occupied a corner of the room; they were all lined up in rows and seemed actually to be playing something together rather than practicing separately. It seemed to Peter that the creatures were playing what was to them some sort of popular song or symphony or military-style march.

  Atop the raised platform, the creature which seemed to function as king sat on its throne. Its upper limbs each held short sticks like the ones the teacher was earlier that morning examining. It swung the sticks around, sometimes hitting (accidentally it seemed) the guards who stood erect in their rolling carts on either side of the king.

  While swinging the sticks, the slits on the chest of the creature-who-was-king opened and closed in rhythm with the music being played. Peter wondered whether the king was actually trying to conduct the music while singing along or was just expressing its enthusiasm for the music and for whatever else was about to happen by swinging the sticks.

  Looking over what was unfolding in front of them, Peter had a thought which he tried to whisper into Sylvia’s ear. He said, “If these creatures had their own Franz Kafka, the Franz Kafka would no doubt write a story about waking up one morning in a human body and being shocked and ashamed by the strange metamorphosis it had undergone.”

  Sylvia could not hear him over the din. “What?” she asked. When he tried to repeat what he had said, she pulled away from him and said, “I just can’t hear you. Tell me later.”

  In the meantime, they kept close to the wall while walking around the room towards the classroom. They walked carefully, sometimes nearly stepping on creatures crawling on the floor and sometimes brushing against creatures clinging to the wall.

  When they got to the classroom, two guards standing on each side of the wall on the side of the classroom, at a signal from the teacher, pulled sliding doors shut. The doors drowned out a lot of the noise that came from the big room. It was relatively quiet in the classroom.

  Sylvia nodded to the guards and said something to them. Then she nodded in the direction of the teacher.

  Then she looked at a square contraption hanging on the wall that had a lot of arrows emerging from the centers of a number of different circles. There were also inscriptions printed around the edges of the circles.

  She said, “Look how much time has passed since we were last here.” “What does that mean—look how much time has passed?” he asked. “How can I look? How can you look? We don’t have watches.” She laughed at his questions. He had noticed that she looked at the contraption hanging on the wall when she said that. He pointed at it now and asked, “Is that thing a clock?” She laughed even harder and then, worried that she might be hurting his feelings, put her arm around his shoulder and said, “That contraption as you call it is indeed a clock. I should have told you about it before now.”

  He commented, “If you can make sense of that clock, then, it seems to me, you have at least taken some initial steps towards knowing how to read. “Not really,” she said. “I’ve just learned to pay attention to one of those circles—that one (she pointed)—that one works a lot like our own clocks. It’s easy to tell time by it. I’ll teach you how to do it.”

  She saw that he still looked puzzled and a little hurt so she got serious and, pointing to the clock, said, “I don’t know what the inscriptions around the circles mean. They might be numbers. Or they might be something else entirely. These creatures seem to jot down thoughts whenever they have a chance, regardless of whether it fits the things they’re printed or inscribed on. That is one of their peculiarities. Maybe that is true of the inscriptions on the clocks too.”

  She smiled, an inward smile, thinking about this and possibly thinking about others of the creatures’ peculiarities that had come to her attention over the last couple of years; and, while smiling and thinking, she pointed to the circle to which she had referred. When he could not locate the circle, there being so many so close together, she walked over to the clock and pointed to the circle she had in mind and then came back to him.

  “Just look at that circle and the arrows on it whenever you are curious about the time. Read it as if it was a clock like that which we have back on Earth. While the periods of time do not correspond to our hours, minutes, and seconds; the measuring of the flow of time seems to be about the same as it is with us.”

  She told him to
sit down in one of the two seats set up for them some days earlier while she would go and tell the teacher what decision they had reached. “Make sure you remember to ask him if they will get a note or recording to one or both of the space ships in such a way that the note or recording is likely to be found and transmitted back to Earth.” “Oh, yes,” she said, “I’m glad you reminded me. I might have forgotten to ask about that otherwise.”

  Chapter 44: Before Class Begins

  While he sat down in the chair assigned to him, she walked over to the teacher and began talking quietly to him. The teacher no longer was sorting through a number of sticks that looked like pool cues as it was doing earlier that morning. Instead, it carried just one of the sticks in its upper right limb and was pointing with it. Where the other sticks were, Peter could only guess because those other sticks were nowhere to be seen. He looked around the room and saw a few doors on the walls that might have been storage rooms or closets and supposed that the sticks might have been stashed behind one of those doors.

  In any case, before Sylvia walked over to him and started talking to him, the teacher was pointing with the stick it held in its left upper limb at one thing after another: now at the few students who sat in a row at the back of the room, now at the few who sat scattered about the room in ones and twos, now at the door where the two guards stood, now at the clock, and now at the screen that was attached to a place high up on the wall behind the teacher, and now at the floor.

  He looked at the students and noticed for the first time that the ones that sat in a row at the back of the room were considerably smaller than the other tick-like or beetle-like creatures. Whereas the usual size was three to four feet in length and two feet wide, these were maybe half that size. Also, the coloring of those sitting in the back row was different from the rest. While the color of the full-grown ones varied from gray to black, these were brown and pink. The background color was brown. The pink came in circular and oval shapes scattered across their chests and backs.