Brian Clark - The Man Who Walked On The Ceiling

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6190 words THE MAN WHO WALKED ON THE CEILING

J. Brian Clarke

"He fell out of the sky, you say? Literally?"

"Damn right. Splat into the middle of a field."

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

It was a fine Friday morning. His mother was away for a

few days, so the house was quiet. Perhaps a little too quiet

for 7.00 am. Still half asleep, George Harold Kalewiski

stretched luxuriously and wriggled his toes. The morning sun

penetrated the small gap above the closed blinds, forming

thousands of tiny elongated shadows from the raised bumps of

the stippled ceiling.

It was like a landscape.

Correction. It was a landscape. An endless, monotonous

desert whose dunes were side-illuminated by the rising glare

of an alien sun. Casting its own looming shadow (in shape,

remarkably similar to the ceiling light-fixture in another

life), was a two-hundred meter dome which had once been a

ship; a mighty interstellar ark which brought the last

remanent of humanity to this fourth planet of Epsilon

Eridani. The terraforming was a slow process; it would be at

least another couple of generations before people could

venture outside without protection. But the oxygen level was

already up to six percent, and the current mean daily

temperature of forty-five degrees celsius was certainly not

the hellish sixty-three degrees of a quarter of a century

ago.

George touched the controls of his lift belt and

drifted downward toward the lock on the Ark's north side. It

had been a tough fourteen hour grind to get Air Plant M-6 up

to spec, but finally the monster was happily chewing up

rocks as it belched its life-giving residue into the

atmosphere.

He drifted lower, the antigrav bearing him smoothly

over those silly, regularly spaced dunes.

His stomach growled.

A dog barked.

A couple of kids screamed at each other, and the

morning newspaper arrived at the front door with a thud.

George sighed. Although his mind games were getting

better, and were certainly more entertaining than the slop

served up on the idiot box, he never seemed to be able to

maintain his concentration long enough. Just when things

would start to get interesting, so-called reality always

intruded and dragged him back to the mundane. Even his

mother; that dear, fussing, aggravating nuisance of a parent

who still treated her thirty-five year old offspring as an

adolescent; even when she was not around, there was always

something to prick his romantic bubble.

Now he had three days to change that--and he would use

every precious moment. By the day after tomorrow, or perhaps

even sooner, what he already thought of as his mindtwist,

would be transformed into an ability as much beyond

daydreaming as speech is beyond the grunts of apes.

It was too bad he was so misunderstood, especially by

his mother. When she was in a bad mood (which was often),

she called him lazy. Other times, usually when one of her

garrulous friends was present, she would soften the

criticism to one which labeled her only child as

introspective. Sure, he was no prize. George had been

painfully aware of that fact since his lonely, pimply

adolescence. And his job as assistant manager of a mens

clothing store barely covered expenses, including the modest

rent he paid the old lady. He had never had a steady girl,

although he supposed it would be nice to have such a

relationship--that is, if it did not involve so much time,

money and effort. So beyond the occasional fleeting affair,

usually with someone as colorless as he was, and which more

often than not broke up because of George's lack of interest

rather than from anything else, his happiest moments

remained with his books and the worlds they contained.

He had hundreds of books. Perhaps thousands, counting

those boxed in the basement--he had lost count years ago.

Mostly fantasy and science-fiction, they lined two walls of

his room, floor to ceiling, two deep. They were in no

particular order because he preferred it that way. It was an

adventure in itself, to half close his eyes and wander his

fingers along the paper spines as he imagined each as a door

into a different universe. When he took one, whether it was

a dog-eared copy of something he picked up for a dollar in a

flea market, or a new release he bought only days before, it

made no difference. George would drop into the comfortable

leather of the old chair he had inherited from his father

(who never in his life read anything more significant than

the sports pages), turn on the reading lamp, and shed his

ordinariness like the proverbial frog who turns into a

prince.

Mindtwist had first occurred to George when he read one

of those science fact articles which occasionally make an

unexpected appearance in a usually all-fiction magazine. In

this case, the magazine was a fly-by-night which blossomed

amid a blizzard of advertising, lasted for three issues, and

then faded away when its backers realized they have lost

their lower garments as well as their shirts. But because

the article was written by a physics Ph.D who happened to be

(in George's humble opinion) one the most underrated talents

in the science fiction firmament, George happily absorbed

what was pompously proclaimed in the title as THE ILLUSION

OF REALITY.

After explaining that reality is literally a 'creature

of the mind', the writer went on to claim that the potential

exists for as many alternate realities as there are minds to

conceive them. Only because human beings are brainwashed

from birth to believe in a single indivisible reality, does

the universe appear to be structured that way--when, in

fact, we exist within an infinitely flexible multiverse,

which needs only the touch of an untrammeled imagination to

become modified into whatever a person chooses.

It was heady stuff, and perhaps if George was not so

desperate to believe (he had already flirted with

Dianetics), he would have spotted the exploitative nature of

the piece, not to mention its obvious contradictions. But,

George reasoned, if he could almost turn a stippled ceiling

into the fourth planet of Epsilon Eridani, then perhaps--

Start small, he told himself. Start small.

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