B64 <=> B66 (BTG III Cause of delay in falling, p. 65)

“In short,” continued the captain, “I began my service just when your Right Reverence was departing for the place of your exile.

“I was still only a ‘sweeper’ on the long-distance ships of that period.

“Yes . . . a long, long time has passed by.

“Everything has undergone change and is changed since then; only our LORD AND SOVEREIGNremains unchanged. The blessings of ‘Amenzano’ on HIS UNCHANGEABLENESS throughout Eternity!

“You, your Right Reverence, have condescended to remark very justly that the former ships were very inconvenient and cumbersome.

“Yes, they were then, indeed, very complicated and cumbersome. I too remember them very well. There is an enormous difference between the ships of that time and the ships now.

“In our youth all such ships both for intersystem and for interplanetary communication were still run on the cosmic substance ‘Elekilpomagtistzen,’ which is a totality consisting of two separate parts of the omnipresent Okidanokh.

“And it was to obtain this totality that just those numerous materials were necessary which the former ships had to carry.

“But these ships did not remain in use long after you flew from these parts, having soon thereafter been replaced by ships of the system of Saint Venoma.”

Chapter IV

The Law of Falling

THE Captain continued:

“This happened in the year 185, by objective time-calculation.

“Saint Venoma had been taken for his merits from the planet ‘Soort’ to the holy planet ‘Purgatory,’ where, after he had familiarized himself with his new surroundings and new duties, he gave all his free time to his favorite work.

“And his favorite work was to seek what new phenomena could be found in various combinations of already existing, law-conformable phenomena.

“And sometime later, in the course of these occupations, this Saint Venoma first constated in cosmic laws what later became a famous discovery, and this discovery he first called the ‘Law of Falling.’

“This cosmic law which he then discovered, St. Venoma himself formulated thus:

“’Everything existing in the World falls to the bottom. And the bottom for any part of the Universe is its nearest “stability,” and this said “stability” is the place or the point upon which all the lines of force arriving from all directions converge.

“The centers of all the suns and of all the planets of our Universe are just such points of ‘stability.’ They are the lowest points of those regions of space upon which forces from all directions of the given part of the Universe definitely tend and where they are concentrated. In these points there is also concentrated the equilibrium which enables suns and planets to maintain their position.

“In this formulation of his, Saint Venoma said further that everything when dropped into space, wherever it may be, tends to fall on one or another sun or on one or another planet, according to which sun or planet the given part of space belongs to, where the object is dropped, each sun or planet being for the given sphere the ‘stability’ or bottom.