with them."

* * * * *

He strode along the hall toward the science room, Miss Gerkin following
meekly behind him. "I'm sure you're right, Gary, because the rest of the
class hardly showed any interest in what the boys were doing. I actually
asked Marilyn if she didn't want her necklace turned to gold, and she
said she was too busy to bother. Imagine that, from a high school kid!"

"Busy doing what?"

"Working out the application of the Law of Degravitation, she said."

"The Law of Degravitation? I never heard of it."

Miss Gerkin sniffed righteously. "Neither have I, and I've taught
science all my life."

Gary Elvin flung open the door of the science room. It was one minute
before the end of the period. For a moment he looked in on a peacefully
ideal classroom. Every student was at his bench working industriously.
Then, row by row, they began to float upward toward the ceiling, each of
them holding a tiny coil of thin wires twisted intricately around two
pieces of metal and an electronic tube. The breeze from the open window
gathered them languidly into a kind of huddle above the door.

The bell rang as Miss Gerkin began to scream. Elvin fought to hold on to
his own sanity as he tried to help her, but a degree of her hysteria
transferred itself to him. His mind became a patchwork of yawning blank
spaces interspersed with uncoordinated episodes of reality.

He remembered hearing the bell and the rush of the class out of the
room. He remembered the piercing screams of Miss Gerkin's terror echoing
through the suddenly crowded halls. Beyond one of his black gulfs of
no-memory, he was in the nurse's office helping to hold Miss Gerkin on
the lounge while the school doctor administered a sedative.

Slowly the integrated pattern of his thinking returned when he was
driving back toward the Schermerhorn ranch. It was late in the
afternoon; the sun was setting redly beyond the ridge of mountains. As
Elvin's fear receded, he was able to think with a kind of hazy clarity.
He had seen a metal Bunsen burner that had been turned into gold; he had
seen the crusty principal of the school break into a rumba, and three of
his colleagues driven to hysteria; he had seen a tenth grade class
floating unsupported in the air. All of it manifestly absurd and
impossible.

But it had happened. Elvin could visualize only two plausible
explanations: mass insanity or mass hypnosis. Hypnosis! A sluggish relay