Sally yawned and rose. "What you need is a classroom," she said. "I'll pass the word along in case any of the rest feel the need of brushing up on their education."
Her departure scarcely disturbed Marlin's train of thought. His theory, of course, gave birth to other perplexing problems. How account for the fact that neither sphere nor passengers were crushed by the enormous acceleration?
He had an answer for that one.
Logically, he reasoned, they owed their salvation to the fact that they, too, were subject to the momentary repulsion of the activated plates. Repulsion hurled them violently away—acceleration pressed them back. The two forces practically cancelled out. Possibly the insulation on the upper surfaces of the plates gave acceleration a slight edge, causing the crushing sensation Marlin had felt at the onset of their flight.
But the anti-gravity force was no longer in effect—probably had lasted not more than a few seconds. What had caused the plates to become imbued with an opposite force—an attractive force akin to gravity?
To answer this, Marlin found himself seeking analogies in the realm of electrical phenomena.
A magnet, he reflected, is a bar of iron in which the movements of the molecules are so organized as to keep the lines of their magnetic axis parallel—all the molecular north poles pointing toward the same end of the bar. It is accomplished by placing the bar in a larger magnetic field, and it is made permanent by tempering—which fixes the molecules in permanent alignment.
Thornboldt's atomic polarization principle must be similar. Under terrific stress, the molecules of the repulsion plates, and their constituent atoms, were polarized in such a way that they exercised the force of repulsion. But when the stress was released, there would be no tempering to maintain the molecular set. They would—in a manner of speaking—snap back, like rubber bands released from tension, not quite to their original condition, but to a condition tending toward the opposite of that occasioned by the stress.
The attractive property now inherent in the plates, in other words, was a reaction from the terrific stress of their momentary anti-gravity polarization.