Page:Fantastic v08n11 1959-11.djvu/74

force moving those particles. They're in a force-field. If they were powdered iron or black iron oxide (but they aren't) it would be a magnetic field moving them, a magnetic field created by an electric current moving through the wire, though I think it would have to be a lot stronger current than a dry cell could furnish.

But the particles aren't iron or iron oxide (too heavy to float in air, besides this has to be just Wycherly basement dust—ashes, lint, earth, powdered wood and paper) so it can't be a magnetic field that's moving them, though they're moving exactly as if they were in a force-field, of some sort. So it has to be gravity . . . a gravitic force-field they're moving in, at least that's the only other force I know of it could be.

An electric current moving through a conductor creates a magnetic field.

A what?-current . . . call it a gravitic current anyway . . . though it could be a magnetic current . . . a gravitic current moving through a conductor creates a gravitic field.

The sunlight faded swiftly. As the yellow beam moved upward, dimming, its last rays showed more and more dust motes pouring into the vortex, joining in the frenzied yet orderly circling.

As the dark basement twilight closed in, Ronald reached out and grasped the battery protectively, possessively. With his other hand he bent the wire away from the terminal. Already he had begun to worry about the battery running down.

A minute or so later it occurred to him to use his flashlight to examine the battery more closely. It was a distinctly smaller cylinder than the other dry cells, he saw now—only about five inches high and an inch-and-a-half in diameter—and it had no cardboard sheath around it, which had been the chief reason he'd thought of it as older and more likely to be completely exhausted than the others. And the terminals, although of the screw-on, knurled-nut type, didn't seem to be brass, but something grayer, like the zinc, or whatever it was, of the battery's body.

He tried to force himself to think in a systematic way about the possible source of the thing, granting that it really was a gravity battery—something that another part of his mind was already working out delightful ways