Damon Knight - Orbit 19

He followed it up. As soon as people moved into another house and there was rain thereafter, so soon was there a full complement of pebbles around that house.

You do not believe this? Pick out a housing development in your own region, and make a nuisance of yourself by observing it closely. You will be convinced, unless you are of such mind-set as defies conviction.

Sorel observed other housing developments, apartment projects, commercial constructions. Wherever eaves-runnels were not precluded by roof guttering and spouting, there would be white pebbles appearing in full force as soon as the structure had been put to human use and it had rained thereafter.

Sorel tried it at his own nineteenth-floor apartment. He figured a way to divert rainfall from the roof. He made this diversion, and he made a little ledge outside his window on which the diverted rain might fall.

(A little misunderstanding was created by these activities of Sorel. Firemen and policemen and psychologists and deacons came and soft-talked him and tried to capture him with hooks and ropes and nets. They thought he was contemplating jumping off the building to his own destruction. He wasn’t. There just wasn’t any way to divert the rain-drop without climbing around on the outside of that building.)

Well, it rained the night after Sorel had made these arrangements. There sure had not been any pebbles there before it rained. There had been nothing there but a little ledge or trough made out of number two pine boards and fastened to the brickwork with screws and lead anchors.

It rained and rained, and Bill Sorel kept night watch on his little ledge by the lightning flashes and the diffused night light of the town. One moment there had not been any pebbles. And the next moment there had been a complete complement of pebbles on the ledge. Sorel knew that the pebbles were for him. He knew they wouldn’t have appeared on the ledge of an apartment that nobody lived in. But how had the pebbles got to that nineteenth-floor ledge? This was the question that still lacked even a hint of an answer.

Bill Sorel in his Red Ranger arrived at a little acreage and came on a tall middleaged man who was eating round onions; and with him was a bright-faced little girl who was eating gingerbread.

“They’re good for the circulation,” the man said. “I bet I eat more onions than any man in the county. I’m George ‘Cow-Path’ Daylight. You sent me a postcard that you were coming to see me today.”

“Yes,” Bill Sorel said. “I’m told that you really know what makes a baseball curve. I’ve been looking for the answer to that one for a long time.”

“I’m Susie ‘Corn-Flower’ Daylight,” the bright-faced little girl said. “Mr. Cow-Path here is my grandfather.”

“Yes, I really know what makes a ball curve,” Cow-Path said. “It’s because I know what makes it curve that I’ve been striking out batters for thirty years. You ask the batters in Owasso and Coweta and Verdigris about me. You ask them in Chouteau and Salina and Locust Grove. Yeah, ask them in Oolagah and Tiawah and Bushy-head. They’ll tell you who keeps the Catoosa Mud-Cats on top of the heap year after year. I am the best small-town pitcher in northeast Oklahoma, and I’m the best because I know what makes a baseball curve.”

“And I am the best third-grade girl pitcher in Catoosa,” Susie Corn-Flower Daylight said. “I can even whizz them by most of those big girls in the fourth and fifth grades.”

“Cow-Path, they tell me that you maintain that the direction of the spin has nothing to do with the direction of the curve of a ball. And you say that there isn’t a gnat’s leg’s difference in the pressure on the top and the bottom of a ball.”

“Not a millionth of a gnat’s leg’s difference,” Cow-Path Daylight said. “A pitcher’s mustache with one more hair on one side than on the other would have more effect on the ball than any such difference in pressure. The reason that I understand the physics of the situation is that I spent two years in the sixth grade, which is why I learned that book General Science for The Primary Student so well. There was a paragraph in there about how a gyroscope top spins and leans and holds. I applied it to a baseball and became a great pitcher.”

“Well, if the direction of the spin doesn’t have any effect on the direction of the curve, what does have effect?” Sorel asked smoothly.

He had heard the explanation at second hand, but he wanted to hear it from the master.

“The direction of the axis of the spin is what causes the curve,” Cow-Path said, “but it doesn’t matter which direction the ball spins on the axis. Look!”

Cow-Path Daylight took a pencil from Sorel’s pocket and, with his strong fingers, he jabbed it clear through one of those big round onions that he liked. He had it centered perfectly. He spun the pencil with its spitted onion, and that was the axis of spin. He moved the whole thing head-on down the centerline of the hood of Sorel’s Red Ranger, but with the direction of the axis about eleven degrees off to the right of the direction of movement.

“The curve will be in the direction of the angle of the axis of spin,” Cow-Path said. “The ball, on the gyroscopic principle, tries to align its direction with the direction of the axis of spin. But the direction of the spin itself doesn’t matter. See!”

Cow-Path reversed the direction of spin while keeping the same axis of spin and the same forward motion. “See, the spin is exactly reversed, and reversing it will make no change whatever. But every change of axis, whatever the direction of spin, will have an effect on the direction of the ball.”

Cow-Path showed, with the gyroscopic onion, how a ball would behave with the axis tilted to the right or the left, or up or down. And he showed that it was all the same thing whether the spin was clockwise or counterclockwise.

“It is for this understanding that I am known as the artist of the backup ball,” Cow-Path said. “I can throw a fork-ball that moves like a slider, or a slider that moves like a fork-ball. And I can throw my floater and my drop with the same motion and the same direction of spin: only the tilt of the axis will be changed.”

Sorel saw that all of this was true with an eternal verity. It was one of those big Copernican moments. Things could never again be as they had been before. Infinitesimally and particularly there had been made a contribution towards a new Heaven and a new Earth.

When he had his feelings a bit under control, Bill Sorel made small talk with the two Daylight people. Then, believing that their well of wisdom could not be exhausted even by such a huge cask as had been drawn from it, he asked them questions.

“Do you know what causes thunder?” he asked them.

“Do you mean thunder, or do you mean the sound of thunder?” Susie Corn-Flower Daylight asked around her gingerbread. “They’re two different things.”

“I suppose I mean the sound of thunder,” Sorel said. “Thunder itself has no cause.”

“Why, how smart you are, for a city man!” Corn-Flower admired.

“I very nearly know what causes the sound of thunder, the sound of lightning really, but I don’t know exactly,” Cow-Path said. “Lightning is resinous, as we know from the color of it as well as from the odor. I believe that when lightning cracks or fractures the air, it coats both parts of the air with a sort of rosin dust—not too different from the rosin that pitchers use. Then, when the two parts of the air come together again immediately, they are a little bit offset from each other. So they grind and set themselves together, and the two rosined surfaces rubbing together make the noise.”