University of Colorado Boulder

The University of Colorado Boulder provides the institutional setting for Hubert Twitchell’s secretive gravitational research. Its defense contract funds a new physics laboratory in the mountains outside town, where an experiment meant to reverse gravity instead opens onto a far more consequential phenomenon: objects and, apparently, people vanish from the test cage, while their return is uncertain and incomplete.

University and Laboratory

During Chuck Freudenberg’s senior year, he earns money as a laboratory assistant at the university, first working in its cryogenics lab. When the university receives a substantial defense contract concerning Edinburgh field theory, it builds a new physics laboratory in the mountains and reassigns Chuck there. The account thus connects the university’s ordinary student employment and research facilities to a classified military project.

The new laboratory is overseen by Dr. Hubert Twitchell, a physicist who narrowly missed the Nobel Prize and, as Chuck describes him, became bitter about it. Twitchell’s work is not presented as part of the university’s public academic life: Chuck says Twitchell does not show him the computer results, and the experiment proceeds in a test cage with a solenoid and coins used as markers.

The Experiment and Its Objects

Twitchell initially attempts to level a gravitational field. When he instead polarizes the apparatus around another axis, he reasons that the field might be reversed. The first attempt appears to do nothing; after feeding the results into the computer, however, he becomes visibly excited. He places two marked silver dollars in the test cage and activates the solenoid. Both coins disappear.

The coins make the experiment tangible: the outcome is not a theoretical change in a field but the sudden absence of familiar, marked objects. A week later, one of the two dollars reappears. The other does not. Chuck’s joking comparison to a stage magician’s trick underscores the gap between a spectacular disappearance and an explanation of what has happened, while the partial return leaves the experiment’s mechanism unresolved.

A guinea pig also appears in the cage while Chuck is cleaning up after Twitchell has gone home. It is not a laboratory animal he recognizes, and the university’s biology lab reports no missing animal, though Chuck notes that it is difficult to keep an exact count of guinea pigs. He takes it home as a pet. The unexplained animal extends the experiment’s consequences beyond the apparatus: something living has arrived from an unknown elsewhere, just as the silver dollars have vanished into one.

Disappearances and Uncertainty

Chuck recalls that three people tried the experiment. One was Dr. Leonard Vincent, an instructor who entered the laboratory with Twitchell while Chuck was present. Twitchell sent Chuck home, but Chuck waited outside. Twitchell eventually emerged; Vincent did not. To Chuck’s knowledge, Vincent remained inside, and he was no longer teaching at the university afterward.

The other two participants were students who entered together with Twitchell. Twitchell was the only one of the three to come back out. One student was in class the next day; the other was missing for a week. Chuck offers no account of where the missing people went or how the student returned. As with the coins, the evidence establishes an uneven pattern of disappearance and return without resolving its cause.

Narrative Significance

The university’s role is both practical and consequential: it supplies Chuck’s employment, the mountain laboratory, and the defense-funded research setting in which Twitchell’s experiment takes place. The sequence moves from marked coins to an unaccounted-for guinea pig and then to human participants, widening the stakes while withholding a complete explanation. Chuck’s recollection is also explicitly qualified: he admits that he did not witness every part of the story and would rather tell it as though he had. The university episode therefore presents its discoveries through partial testimony, leaving the laboratory’s most important result suspended between reported fact and unresolved mystery.