I had looked down, expecting to look into the street; and there were the stars shining below me, millions of miles away. And yet the noises of the street fell distinctly on my ears. The earth seemed to have melted away beneath my dwelling, which apparently hung upside down in the sky; but the sounds of traffic and human voices were all about me.
A horror that made me dizzy had crept over me, but, gripping the narrow sill with both hands, I twisted my face fearfully upward. Then for the first time a scream left my lips.
Above me, not thirty feet away was the street filled with its accustomed hum and populated with people and with traffic—all upside down.
Men and women walked the pavement, head downward, as a fly walks the ceiling. Automobiles rolled past in frantic procession, their tops to ward me, their wheels miraculously clinging to the overhanging roadway.
You, by this time, will have comprehended what had happened. did not. Frightened, bewildered half-mad, I drew in my head and fell back upon the whitewashed floor; and then, as I lay there upon my back, I saw what I had not seen before. On the ceiling of the room, clinging to it, head downward as the motors had clung to the street, was the missing furniture of my study.
It was arranged precisely as I had left it, except that it was upside down and appeared to have changed sides. The heavy desk at which I had sat hung directly over me, and with gasp of terror I jumped aside; I thought that it would fall and crust me. The missing carpet was spread across the ceiling, and the tables and chairs reposed upon it; the books on table and bookcase hung easily from the under-surface, and none fell.
I pulled out my watch, and it slipped from my hand and shot upward the length of the chain. When I had recovered it, I looked at the hour, and everything that I wished to know flashed over me.
It was midnight, and Penelope was in perihelion!
The influence of my natal star had overcome the pitiful attraction of the earth, and I had been released from earth’s influence. I was now held by the gravity of the star Penelope. The earth remained as it had been; the house was not upside down; only I! And I had thought I had fallen from my chair! Ye Gods, I had risen from it—as you would understand it—and had crashed against the ceiling of my room!
I sat there, upside down from the earth point of view, upon the ceiling of my study, and considered my position. Then I stood up and paced back and forth across the ceiling, and as I moved coins and keys fell from my pockets and dropped downward—upward—as you will—to the floor of the room.
One thing was clear. I had averted a very serious disaster by clinging to the window-frame when I looked out. With that fearsome influence upon me, a moment of overbalancing would have pulled me over the edge and I should have been precipitated into the awful depths of space which gleamed like an ocean beneath my window.
Mad as was the thought, I wondered what time would be required for my cometlike flight to the shores of the star Penelope. I saw myself speeding like a meteor across those tremendous distances to plunge at last into the heart of the Infinite mystery. Even while I shook with the sick horror of the thought, it was not without its allure.
The heat of the room was great, for heat rises and I was on the ceiling. A human desire to leave the study and go outside seized me, and, perilous as I knew the action to be, I resolved to try it.
I walked across to the door of my study, but it was so high above my head that I could not grasp the knob. I remembered, too, that I had locked the door and thrown away the key. Fortunately, the transom was open and as this was nearer to me I made a spring and grasped its frame. Then painfully, I pulled myself up and managed to climb through, dropping to the ceiling on the other side.
It was dark in the corridor, and as I crossed the ceiling I heard footsteps ascending the stairs, which were above and to one side of me. Then a candle flickered around the bend, and my landlord came into view, walking head downward like the rest of the world.
In his hand he grasped what, as he came nearer, I made out to be a revolver. Apparently he had heard the strange noises from my part of the house and was intent on inquiring their meaning. I trembled, for knew that if he caught sight of me, upside down as he would think, against the ceiling, he would instantly shoot me—supposing he did not faint from fright.
But he did not see me, and after prowling about for twenty minutes he went away satisfied, and I was left to make my way out of the house as best I could.
I felt curiously light, as if I had lost many pounds of weight, which indeed must have been the case; and I made very little sound as I trod the ceilings toward the back of the house, where I knew there was a fire-escape leading to the street. The door into the rear room was open, and I clambered over the obstacle interposed by the top of its frame and entered the chamber, crossing quietly to the window.
I dared not look down as I climbed through the aperture, but once I had seized the ironwork of the fire-escape I felt more at ease; then carefully I began my strange upward climb toward the overhanging street. To any one looking up I would have seemed to be a whimsical acrobat coming down the ironwork on his hands, and I suppose I would have created a sensation.
At the bottom my difficulties began, for I could not hope to remain on the earth without support; walking on my hands would not solve the puzzle. The pull of Penelope was exactly the pull of the earth when one hangs by his hands from a height. With fear in my heart, I began my extraordinary journey, toward the street, taking advantage of every inequality in the foundation of the house, and often I was clinging desperately to a single little shelf of brick, for while ostensibly I was walking on my hands, actually I was hanging at a fearful height in momentary danger of dropping into the immeasurable abyss of the sky beneath me.
An iron fence ran around the house, and at one point it was close enough for me to reach out a hand and seize it. Then, with a shudder, I drew myself across onto its iron pickets, where, after a bit, I felt safer.
The fence offered a real support, for the iron frame about its top became a narrow but strong rest for my feet. But the fence was not particularly high, and as I progressed the earth, owing to the inequalities of the ground, often was only a few inches above my head. Anyone stop ping to look would have seen a man—a madman, as he would have supposed—standing on his head against the iron fence, and occasionally moving forward by convulsive movements of his rigid arms.
The traffic had thinned, and there seemed to be few pedestrians on my side of the thoroughfare. A wild idea seized me—to negotiate the distance to your home, Haswell, clinging to the fences along the way. I thought it could be done, and you were the only person to whom I felt I could tell my strange story with a hope of belief.
Had I attempted the journey, I should have been lost without a doubt; somewhere along the way my arm sockets would have rebelled, my grasp would have torn away, and I would have been plunged into the depths of a star-strewn space and become a wanderer in the void speed-
