«No, after all it is better to finish at once» – I solved, testing heavy suffocation, and began to take out stones from a pocket.
Someone’s hand stopped me.
– Wait! – I heard Wagner’s voice. In the rarefied air this voice sounded very poorly. – It is time to go down to us in a vault!
He took me by an arm, nodded to the-headed housekeeper who stood on a verandah, panting, and we went to a yard corner, to big round «window» in the earth. I lost the will and went dreamily. Wagner opened the heavy door conducting in underground laboratory and pushed me. Fainting, I softly fell to a stone floor.
I do not know whether long I was unconscious. My first feeling was that I breathe fresh air again. I opened eyes and very much was surprised, увидав the electric bulb strengthened in the middle of a floor, near the place where I lay.
– Be not surprised – I heard a voice of professor Wagner. – Our floor will become a ceiling soon. How do you feel?
– I thank you, better.
– Well, so get up, it is enough to lie! – And he took me by hand. I flew up up, to a glass ceiling, and very slowly fell down.
– Go, I will acquaint you with my underground apartment – Wagner told.
All room consisted of three rooms: two dark, lit only by electric bulbs, and one big, with a glass ceiling or a floor, I find it difficult to tell. The matter is that we endured, obviously, that moment when the attraction of Earth and centrifugal force made our bodies absolutely weightless.
It extremely complicated our travel on rooms. We did the most extraordinary pirouettes, clung to furniture, made a start, jumped, flew on tables, sometimes helplessly hung in mid-air, giving each other hands. Only several centimeters divided us, but we could not overcome this space while some smart trick did not bring us out of this unstable balance. The things shifted by us flew together with us. The chair «soared» among the room, glasses with water lay sideways, and water almost did not pour out – it gradually flowed round external walls of glass…
I noticed a door to the fourth room. There something hooted, but Wagner did not let me in this room. In it, obviously, there was a mechanism accelerating the movement of Earth.
Soon, however, ours «the interplanetary travel» terminated, and we fell on… a glass ceiling which from now on had to become our floor. It was not necessary to move things: they moved, and the electric lamp strengthened on a ceiling as it is impossible more useful was at us over the head, lighting our room in short nights.
Wagner really provided everything. Our room was well supplied with the air stored in special tanks. We were provided with canned food and water. «That is why the housekeeper did not go to a market» – I thought. Having moved to a ceiling, we went on it as freely, as on a floor though, in usual sense, we went headfirst. But the person gets used to everything. I felt rather well. When I looked down, under legs, through thick, but transparent glass, I saw under myself the sky, and it seemed to me that I stand on the round mirror reflecting in itself this sky.
However the mirror reflected in itself sometimes extraordinary and even terrible things.
The housekeeper declared that she needs to go to the house as she forgot oil.
– How you will go? – I told it. – You fall down down, that is up, faugh, the devil, everything was mixed!
