"Clark, Brian - The Man Who Walked On The Ceiling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clark Brian)

yonder."

-------------------------

Although he was an avid reader of science fiction,
George was not scientifically inclined. So he did not bother
to set the experiment down on paper, or even counted the
number of times he repeated it.
Each time, clad only in his shorts and with the room
temperature set at a comfortable level (he did not want the
distraction of clothing, or of feeling too warm or too
cool), he lay on top of his bed and stared at the ceiling.
Except, he repeatedly told himself, that is not
necessarily the ceiling. There is nothing in the multiverse
which insists one direction must always be up and the other
down. What he was looking at could just as easily be 'down'.
And when one is looking down at a horizontal surface, logic
dictates it is a floor.
Admittedly it was a peculiar floor, looking almost like
stippled plaster. But that was a trick of the light,
transforming what was likely a rough pour of concrete. A
mysterious force, presumably a runaway antigrav, was
pressing George upward against a soft surface. It was
embarrassing, but what the hell. He had been in tougher
situations.
There was, for instance, that time he successfully
jury-rigged the Constellation Andromeda only seconds before
the space liner and her thousands of passengers would have
disappeared forever below the event horizon of a black hole.
And it was only last week he received the Star and Cluster
for his work during the Capella Negotiations--bringing
permanent peace to a sector which had been at war for
hundreds of generations.
Alternately mindtwisting, alternately rationalizing,
forcing his tired brain out of the rut into which it had
been forced over a lifetime, George Kalewiski persisted.
Down was up, the ceiling was the floor, everything which
told him otherwise was illusion. Matter, gravity, energy,
electromagnetism, grass and onions, quarks and airplanes,
poached eggs, a rainy day, even the insufferable pipsqueak
who managed the clothing store where he worked--all
dreamstuff, the creation of his mind. So what his mind could
do, his mind and determination could undo.
It only needed practice.
Determination.

-------------------

"There were witnesses?"
"A dozen or so, including a priest. Our boy apparently