Gravitation 3 



under him (or over him anyway between him and 

 the floor), brace your feet on the floor, and give him a 

 push. (If he happens to step on your toes while you 

 are doing this, you do not mind in the least, because he 

 does not weigh anything, you know.) If you push 

 hard enough to get the elephant started, he rises slowly 

 toward the ceiling. When he objects on the way, and 

 struggles and kicks and tries to get back to the floor, it 

 does not help him at all. His bulky, kicking body 

 floats steadily on till it crashes into the ceiling. 



No chairs or beds are needed in this place. You can 

 lie or sit in mid-air, or cling to a fixture on a wall, resting 

 as gently there as a feather might. There is no need to 

 set the table for meals just lay the dishes with the 

 food on them in space and they stay there. If the top 

 of your cup of chocolate is toward the ceiling, and your 

 plate of food is turned the other way, no harm is done. 

 Your feet may happen to point toward the ceiling, while 

 some one else's point toward the floor, as you sit in mid- 

 air, eating. There is some difficulty in getting the food 

 on the dishes, so probably you do not wish to bother 

 with dishes, after all. Do you want some mashed 

 potatoes ? All right, here it is and the cook jerks the 

 spoon away from the potatoes, leaving them floating 

 before you, ready to eat. 



It is literally a topsy-turvy place. 



Do you want to know why all this would happen? 

 Here is the reason : There is a great force known as 

 gravitation. It is the pull that everything in the uni- 

 verse has on everything else. The more massive a 

 thing is, the more gravitational pull it has on other 



