"I can see myself visiting a psychiatrist by the time we get back," grunted Hendricks. "We're landing—upward—and I'm getting the screaming terrors already from that feeling of falling upward into the sky."
"What you're suffering from is the shattering of your basic faith in the solidity of solid ground," remarked Billy. "Well, the project will land upside down, and we'll take hold tight with the anchor-projectors. Long enough, at least, to scrape a sample off of Eureka, here, to take back and analyze."
"If this whole space is made of the same stuff, I can see a minor industry springing up, gathering metal and stuff for gravity-proof gadgets."
"Wonder—probably good for something. Well, we're as close as we can go, all of us standing with our heads pointing at the planet and held to the floor of our project by centrifugal force caused by the planet's rotation. We won't stay long. None of us can stand the mental strain of looking out of the window and seeing solid ground a few feet above our heads and a million million miles of sky to fall down into if we step out of the door. Brrrrr."
"Close the sun proof shutters and don't look," suggested Billy. "I'm taking a nice large bromide to chill off a few screaming nerves and then I am going out and take me a shovelful of that dirt and rock up there. Gosh, it's going to feel funny digging down something that wants to rise. Let's make it quick."
Billy emerged from the lock completely clad in spacesuit. He took air samples, and then, with the catch-knob between his shoulder blades firmly in the focal sphere of a tractor-pressor beam, Billy was shoved up to the surface of the planet. Reaching up over his head, Billy pulled down a few stones and dropped them upward into the bucket he held inverted. They fell upward to the surface of the planet, and the bucket was held by their weight.
They never did know whether there were any Eurekans, but if there were, and the Terrans were watched, it was a strange sight they saw. A sixty-foot rectangular building of steel, one story high, resting upside down with the planet-side to the sky. Projectors dug into the ground, pulled by the anchoring tractors that pulled the upside-down building even tighter to their planet.