ing storms, the grip of the
muddy soil be loosened, and the fields fall into the blue! It was only
when clasped tight in Alice's arms that the horrors wholly left him.

All the reasoning we might use on his mind, or that he himself could
bring to bear on it, was useless. We found that the sense of up and
down is ineradicably fixed by the balancing apparatus of the body.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, his psychology was undergoing strange alterations; the more
I came to appreciate the actual conditions he was living under, the
more apparent it seemed to me that he must have a cast-iron mental
stamina to maintain sanity at all. But he not only did that; he began
to recover normal strength, and to be irked unbearably by his constant
confinement. So it came about that he began to venture a little at a
time from his room, wandering about on the ceiling of the rest of the
house. However, he could not yet look out of windows, but sidled up to
them with averted face to draw any blinds that were up.

As he grew increasingly restless, we all felt more and more that the
thing could not continue as it was; some way out must be found. We had
many a talk with Grosnoff, at last inducing him to speak about the
still half-formed theory which he had dimly conceived at the first.

"For a good many decades," he said, "there have been a few who
regarded the close analogies between magnetism and gravitational
action as symptomatic of a concealed identity between them. Einstein's
'Field Theory' practically proves it on the mathematical side. Now it
is obvious that if gravitation is a form of magnetism--and if so it
belongs to another plane of magnetic forces than that which we know
and use--then the objects on a planet must have the opposite polarity
from that of the planet itself. Since the globe is itself a magnet,
with a positive and negative pole, its attraction power is not that of
a magnet on any plane, because then the human race would be divided
into two species, each polarized in the sign opposite to its own
pole; when an individual of either race reached the equator, he would
become weightless, and when he crossed it, would be repelled into
space."

"Lord!" I said. "There would be a plot for one of your scientific
fiction writers!"

* * * * *

"I can present you with another," said Dr. Grosnoff. "How do we know
whether another planet would have the opposite sign to our o