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From: sharp%farmer.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Do you recognize this story?
Message-ID: <12533@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Oct-84 13:43:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12533
Posted: Mon Oct  1 13:43:25 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 5-Oct-84 05:36:39 EDT
Lines: 28

From:  sharp%farmer.DEC@decwrl.ARPA  (Don Sharp, MKO1-1/B7 DTN 264-6068)

From: Peter.Monta@cmu-cs-g.arpa

>A young alien boy lives on Earth, and he is unaware of his origins.
>Apparently he has a sense of ``winding number'', in that if he were
>to walk around the block, he would feel a desire to turn once in the
>opposite direction, to regain his equilibrium.  Naturally, he
>attempts to suppress this strange behavior, and as he gets older he
>is able to tolerate larger winding numbers---at the end of the day
>he stands on his bed turning and doing backflips.  The purpose of
>the sense is to orient him with respect to his home, which is a
>distant star.

I recognize this enough to supply some more detail, but I can't place it.
The story's protagonist was not an alien, but a human with the distinction
of being the first human born in freefall, in orbit. He might also have
spent some pre-natal time in freefall. He grew up with this infallible
inertial sense of direction, and nobody could figure out how come. Then
later in his life he suddenly experienced a debilitating case of chronic
vertigo. His directional sense suddenly deserted him. Since they didn't know
where it came from in the first place doctors had no explanation where it
went. But by diligent research he found his own answer: a radio signal from
space had suddenly turned off. It was a galactic carrier signal, that our
hero had sensed with some hitherto dormant organ, and the vertigo he
experienced heralded a message from the Benevolent Space Brothers.

-Don.