I HADN’T SEEN SAUL Graben leave, but he must have been gone because now he opened the door and came back. He was carrying a heavy rim gyroscope that was spinning in a set of frictionless gymbals. He looked most confused.
He said, “I’ve spent what seems like an hour. You can’t tell me that this gizmo is inseparable from the selfish, insular intellect of terrestrial so-called homo sapiens.”
He turned the base and we all watched the gymbal rings rotate to keep the gyro wheel in the same plane. “It should be cosmic,” he said. “But every time I start, I find myself biting myself on the back of the neck. Look. If you make the axle horizontal in front of you and rotate the gyro with the top edge going away from you, you can define a common reference. But motion beyond that cannot be explained.
