More stuff clatters down, but I’m too busy holding the growing welt on my forehead to notice. How heavy is that tape measure? A 3-foot fall off a table left a bump on my head.

“That. Did not work,” I say to no one. That whole experience was just ridiculous. Like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie.

Actually…it really was like that. A little too much like that.

That same feeling of “wrongness” strikes me.

I grab a nearby test tube and toss it into the air. It goes up and comes down like it should. But it annoys me. Something about falling objects ticks me off right now. I want to know why.

What do I have to work with? Well, I have an entire laboratory and I know how to use it. But what’s readily at hand? I look around at all the junk that fell to the floor. A bunch of test tubes, sample swabs, Popsicle sticks, a digital stopwatch, pipettes, some Scotch tape, a pen…

Okay, I may have what I need here.

I get back to my feet and dust off my toga. There’s no dust on it—my whole world seems really clean and sterile, but I do the motions just the same.

I pick up the tape measure and take a look. It’s metric. Maybe I’m in Europe? Whatever. Then I grab the stopwatch. It’s pretty sturdy, like something you’d take on a hike. It has a solid plastic shell with a hard rubber ring around it. Undoubtedly waterproof. But also dead as a doornail. The LCD screen is completely blank.

I press a few buttons, but nothing happens. I turn it over to get a look at the battery compartment. Maybe I can find a drawer with batteries in it if I know what kind it needs. I spot a little red plastic ribbon coming out of the back. I give it a pull and it comes out entirely. The stopwatch beeps to life.

Kind of like “batteries included” toys. The little plastic tab was there to keep the battery from running down before the owner uses it for the first time. Okay, this is a brand-spanking-new stopwatch. Honestly, everything in this lab looks brand-new. Clean, tidy, no signs of wear. Not sure what to make of that.

I play with the stopwatch for a while until I understand the controls. Pretty simple, really.

I use the tape measure to find out how high the table is. Anyway, the table’s underside is 91 centimeters from the floor.

I pick up a test tube. It’s not glass. It may be some kind of high-density plastic or something. It certainly didn’t break when it fell 3 feet to a hard surface. Anyway, whatever it’s made of, it’s dense enough for air resistance to be negligible.

I lay it on the table and ready the stopwatch. I push the test tube off the table with one hand and start the stopwatch with the other. I time how long it takes to hit the ground. I get about 0.37 seconds. That’s pretty darn fast. I hope my own reaction time isn’t skewing the results.

I note the time down on my arm with the pen—I haven’t found any paper yet.

I put the test tube back and repeat the test. This time I get 0.33. I do it twenty times total, noting the results, to minimize the effects of my error margin in starting and stopping the timer. Anyway, I end up with an average of 0.348 seconds. My arm looks like a math teacher’s chalkboard, but that’s okay.

0.348 seconds. Distance equals one-half acceleration times time squared. So acceleration equals two times distance over time squared. These formulas come easily to me. Second nature. I’m definitely skilled at physics. Good to know.

I run the numbers and come up with an answer I don’t like. The gravity in this room is too high. It’s 15 meters per second per second when it should be 9.8. That’s why things falling “feel” wrong to me. They’re falling too fast. And that’s why I’m so weak despite these muscles. Everything weighs one and a half times as much as it should.

Thing is, nothing affects gravity. You can’t increase or decrease it. Earth’s gravity is 9.8 meters per second per second. Period. And I’m experiencing more than that. There’s only one possible explanation.

I’m not on Earth.

***

Chapter 1