disturbance of the moonplant roots, but none of them offered a solution to the increasing racket.

It was about this time that plumblines started hanging crooked. Oh, it wasn't detected at first. How could it be, at first? Because you judge things by plumblines, not vice-versa. However, in a month, when everything was about five degrees off the vertical, notice began to be taken.

When oranges began rolling off the ground in the California and Florida groves, and huddling in a mound here and there upon the countryside, the Spirit of Worry injected itself into the public consciousness. Niagara Falls' spectacular skew-wise splashing toward the Canadian side didn't set many hearts at ease, either.

And then someone remembered the moonplants, and saw that each new apparent gravity-tug was coming from the stump of one of the plants, and a leading scientist figured out the answer, after getting a snipped-off segment of moonplant root and testing the hell out of it.

"It seems," he announced to the world, or that portion of the world that was watching his appearance on TV; there being considerable competition with a new series of NBC Specials on another channel, "It seems that this Peter W. Merrill Moonplant is—er—magnetic, to a certain degree. Though not magnetism as we know it. It's more as though each plant, through the positioning of its roots, and the coiling of same, plus a heavy concentration of iron in its physical makeup, has managed to make itself—or, rather, the stump of itself, since all such plants were cut down, a short while back—to make itself the center of an artificial gravity field. This field seems to grow—Rather, these many fields seem to grow in strength by the hour, and they have a tendency to topple things, the gravitational 'tug' being most disastrous near the centers of the fields. The rims, though the angle of gravity is sharper there, are safer for stability only because they are balanced by more 'tugs' from adjoining fields...."

Well, he went on this way for an hour or so, and soon his listeners—those who stayed tuned in—knew what the problem was: "Down" wasn't going to be "down" much longer. It was going to depend on which moonplant stump you happened to be near.

The prospect didn't seem too much fun, and people started selling their homes and such, and booking passage to the moon, where life was controlled, but carefree, and free of annoying vibrations and rolling oranges.

Lunar Real Estate enjoyed a fabulous boom for weeks after the telecast by the scientist, but it was soon "all filled up," and further immigrations would have to await the construction of more Domes to house the newcomers.

The laggards, understandably, raised a fuss about this callous attitude, and went moonward anyway until about two-thirds of the Earth's population was on the moon, the place becoming so hopelessly crowded that people had to half-rent rooms there, sleeping in alternating shifts with other half-renters, and spending their waking hours wandering the streets.

"Things," sighed one realtor to another, "can't get much worse."

And that's when the first meteor landed on Earth. In the general excitement, first about vibrations, then about gravitational fields, then about packing up and going to the moon, most newspapers had pushed to the want-ad pages little articles by eminent astronomers, in which were noted the odd behaviors of certain large planetoids in the asteroid belt between Earth and Mars. These cosmic hunks of rock seemed to be "peeling off" the general formation of the ellipse followed by their fellows, and moving sunward[1] singly or in small homogenous groupings.

Well, the first one landed and left a dent on Earth where the Congo used to be, the shock being felt as far north as Oslo, to add to their vibrational,