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to check. Let's see, he thought, it could be a genuine gravity battery manufactured as such by human beings engaged in secret government-sponsored anti-gravity research either in this country or elsewhere—there are such projects—though then how it should get into Aunt Wycherly's basement seems to require very weird assumptions. Or else—my God, this gets fantastic—it could come from off this earth and have been manufactured, by extra-terrestrials—got to consider every possibility—though that involves us in even more weird assumptions.
Or it could just have happened. I mean the battery could have started out as an ordinary battery, but sitting here in Aunt Wycherly's basement and undergoing all sorts of rhythmical temperature changes and God knows what else, the chemicals in it could have been transformed into substances generating a current—gravitic, magnetic, how should I know what jargon to use?—that, in turn creates a gravitic field. Like spontaneous combustion, or something. Old rags. That's not unusual.
Or it could all be illusion or freak air currents.
Or I could just be going nuts—that's something to keep in mind too.
But while Ronald was making his brain hammer out these possibilities, another section of his thoughts was darting around like kittens to investigate all sorts of wonderful ideas, making use of the thirty years' rag-tag accumulation of information in Ronald's mind—a quite remarkable and varied assortment. For one thing he was thinking that since this basement phenomenon behaved so much like magnetism, it must be a dipolar gravity field he had here, promising both positive and negative gravity if properly harnessed; that is, not only gravitic attraction but gravitic repulsion—in other words, antigravity, the secret of rocketless spaceflight! There were ways to check that, of course. And what was the wonderful stuff that flowed through the wire and made the field grab and the motes spin? Gravitic fluid, could you call it? Liquid gravity? Was it particles, like electrons? Gravitrons, would you call them? Hell, nobody really understood electricity yet! Still—
"Ronald, why are you taking so long? Mr. Espy will be coming soon and I don't want