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“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 own bodies?”

“Well,” I chuckled, “they’ll find that out soon enough when the first interplanetary expedition tries to land on on of ’em!”

“Hmf!” grunted the medico. “That’ll be the least of their troubles!”

“But you said the polarity couldn’t be that of a magnet; then what?”

“Don’t you remember the common pith ball of your high school physics days? An accumulation of positive electricity repels an accumulation of negative–if indeed we can correctly use ‘accumulation’ for a negativity–and it is my idea that the earth is the container of a gigantic accumulation of this meta–or hyper-electricity which we are postulating; and our bodies contain a charge of the opposite sign.”

“But, Doctor, the retention of a charge of static electricity by a body in the presence of one of the opposite sign requires insulation of the containing bodies; for instance, lightning is a breaking down of the air insulation between the ground and a cloud. In our case we are constantly in contact with the earth, and the charges would equalize.”

“Please bear in mind, Jim, that we are not talking about electricity as now handled by man, but about some form of it as yet hypothetical. We don’t know what kind of insulation it would require. We may be constitutionally insulated.”

“And you think the fire-ball broke down that insulation by the shock to Tristan’s system?” I asked. The logic of the thing was shaping up hazily, but unmistakably. “But, then, why don’t we frequently see people kiting off the earth as the result of explosions?”

” How do you know they haven’t? Don’t we have plenty of mysterious disappearances as the result of explosions, and particularly, strangely large numbers of missing in a major war?”

My blood chilled. The world was beginning to seem a pretty awful place.

Grosnoff saw my disturbance, and placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder.

“I’m afraid,” he said, smiling, “that I rather yielded to the temptation to get a rise out of you. That suggestion might be unpleasantly true under special circumstances. But I particularly have an eye out for the special capacities of that weird and rare phenomenon, the fire-ball. It isn’t impossible that the energy of the fire-ball went into the re-polarization rather than into a destructive concussion–hence Tristan’s escape.”

“You mean its effect is qualitatively different from that of any other explosion?”

“It may be so. It is known to be an electric conglomeration of some kind–but that’s all.”

* * * * *

Meantime circumstances were not going well with us; the financial burden of Tristan’s support, added to the strain of the situation, was becoming overwhelming. Tristan knew this and felt it keenly; this brought him to a momentous decision. He looked down at us from the ceiling one day with an expression of unusual tenseness, and announced that he was going out permanently, and to take part in the world again.

“I’ve gotten now so that I can bear to look out of the windows quite well. It’s only a matter of time and practise until I can stand the open. After all, it isn’t any worse than being a steel worker or steeplejack. Even if the worst came to the worst, I’d rather be burst open by the frozen vacuum of interstellar space than to splash upon a sidewalk before an admiring populace–and people do that

every day!”