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. 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 middle-aged 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 Vedigris about me. You ask them in Oolagah and Tiawah and Bushyhead. 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 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 loans and holds. I applied it to 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 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 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 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 a noise.”
Bill Sorel was amazed. Cow-Path's explanation was gibberish, of course. But it sounded almost like the real explanation would sound if given in code, and it may have been just that. And Susie Corn-Flower's divination that the thunder and the sound of thunder were two different entities was — well, it was a thunderous sort of intention. Sorel felt very pleased and gratified with these two persons.
So he tried them with the final question.
“How do pebbles get under the eaves of houses and buildings?” he asked.
“Oh, I suppose they come off the roof,” Cow-Path said. “The rain must loosen them, and then they roll off the roof into the eaves-drop ditch.”
“No, Grandpa, no,” Susie Corn-Flower Daylight said. “Why would they ever be on the roof to fall off? The pebble angel puts the pebbles directly into the eaves-drop ditch. He puts them there as a sign he is guarding that building and that everything is all right. Buildings without people living in them never have pebbles under the eaves.”
“No, I know they don't, Corn-Flower,” Sorel said. “But did you ever hear that rotten people don't have pebbles around their houses either?”
“I've never known any rotten people,” Susie Corn-Flower said. “We've never had any rotten people in our town.”
“That's right. There never have been any here,” Cow-Path said.
Bill Sorel had The Child's Big What and Why Book finish
ed a week later — he was a fast worker — and it was ready to send off. But he had two versions of one page, and he had not yet made his selection between them. This was the page that covered the question, “How do the pebbles get under the eaves?” Sorel went to the Wastrel's Club to drink white rum and think about it. One version gave the old safe answer, that there are always pebbles around everywhere, and that the rain washed the dirt away from them and leaves the pebbles. This was the safe falsehood.
The other version was somewhat different. It was true, probably: or at least it was a coded statement of a truth. But could Sorel get away with a truth like that in the What and Why Book?
Etta Mae Southern was already in Wastrels with a handsome, rich, and good-humored man. She made very small horizontal circles with her finger in the air.
“That's the world's smallest record playing, ‘I wish it were you instead,’ ” she called across the club room.
And Mrs. Justex was already in Wastrels. She was drinking one of those lacteal gin-sloshes that are called Milky Ways. So Mrs. Justex did drink milk, sometimes, and in a way. That fact changed just about everything. It meant that the widest of improbables was still possible.
On the wall of Wastrels was a paragraph of wisdom:
“When one has discarded all absolutely impossible explanations of a thing, then what is left, however improbable it seems, must be accepted as the explanation until a better explanation comes along.”
Bill Sorel had seen that paragraph on the wall a dozen times, but it had never hit him between the ears before.
A cop came into Wastrels and said it had started to rain outside. He had a Salty Dog. Cops are the only people left in the world who still drink them.
“You will be in my apartment in fifteen minutes,” Bill Sorel said.
“Why will I be?” the cop asked him.
“To try to make me stop hitting people on their heads with pebble-stones,” Sorel said. And Sorel left Wastrels and went to his apartment. He selected one of the two versions of the disputed pages and put it with the rest of the pages. He sealed and stapled the completed What and Why, and went out and down in the elevator and out into the rain to mail the thing in the stand-up mailbox on the corner. And then he came back to his apartment with happy anticipation.
Then he was standing at his opened window in the early dark. It was raining and blowing and getting him pretty wet. He was scooping up handfuls, double-handfuls of pebbles from the ledge under his window and flinging them out at the lower world. He scooped out twenty, thirty, fifty handfuls of pebbles from that little ledge-trough that wouldn't hold three handfuls at one time. But now that trough stood full of pebble-stones no matter how many he scooped out of it.
Somebody was banging at Sorel's apartment door, and he let him bang. And pretty soon somebody was shaking Sorel's shoulder, and he let him shake.
“Hey, you got to quit throwing pebbles down there,” the cop was saying. “You're hitting people that are trying to get taxis in the rain, and you're tearing their umbrellas. Those are bigger pebble-stones than you usually throw, aren't they?”
“These are the biggest ever,” Sorel said happily. “These are prime pebbles. Say, I used the page about the pebble angel in the book. That's going to hit a lot of people crossways. I mailed the whole thing off with that in it. I'm glad I did.”
“They come in just as fast as you throw them out, don't they?” the cop said. “I wonder where they come from? I never noticed that that's the way pebbles come when it rains. Can't you throw more of them faster and get ahead of them?”
Oh, it was with a wonderful clatter that the pebbles arrived!
“Man, this is as fast as I can throw them,” Sorel panted. “I bet I've thrown a thousand pounds of them down already. It sure is fun. It looks like I made a breakthrough in pebbles. The pebble angel is showing that he likes the mention.”
“Maybe if we both scooped them and threw them as fast as we could, we could almost keep up with them,” the cop said. “Yeah, it is fun.” The cop threw left-handed, and the two fitted well together at the window.
He was a good person, that cop. There weren't any rotten people around there. (But have you looked under your eaves after a rain?)
And All The Skies Are Full Of Fish
Beware aesthetics throwing stones
(We state it here prologgy).
Oh by our fathers' busted bones
We'll fight with dint and doggy!
—Rocky McCrocky comic strip
Austro was still only twelve years old, and Chiara Benedetti had just had her thirteenth birthday and so had to resign from the club. She nominated Austro to take her place.
Ivan Kalisky had also turned thirteen and would have to get out of it. He nominated his little, fat, freckled, glasses-wearing sister Susie Kalisky to take his place. Susie Kalisky looked a lot like the Susie Kalusy in the Rocky McCrocky comic strip.
There was another vacancy in the gang. One small boy who shall be nameless had been expelled when it was discovered that he was as yellow as a daffodil. Austro, as soon as he was confirmed as a member, nominated his dog for this other vacant place.
“People will laugh at us if we have a dog for a member,” Dennis Oldstone said.
“People won't laugh a whole lot at a dog that can swallow them in one swallow,” Austro argued.
“And there is a certain prestige in having the biggest dog in the world as a member,” Lowell Ragswell supported Austro. So they accepted the dog into their club. And they had gotten their membership in shape just in time.
There was another group of young people around; these were pure-hearted and aesthetic, and they had psychokinetic powers that reflected their pure-heartedness. They danced willow dances and they wore sweet-gum leaves in their hair. And it had been announced that they would give a public demonstration of their powers. There was quite a bit of scientific interest in the demonstration.
But the gang that Susie and Austro and the dog had just joined was more known for its fish fries than for its pure-heartedness. And it was known for its harassing of those aesthetic kids. In its reorganized form, it now took the name of “The Local Anaesthetics” to show that it was at war with the aesthetic kids. It had never had a name before this.
Along about this time, Barnaby Sheen was opinionating to some of us. “We deal in facts at our place,” he said. “We are open-minded, but we do not let just every wind blow through. We respect the new as well as the old, but we do know that some things must be rejected instantly. There are people around here who still haven't rejected the pretensions of those willow-dancing, rainmaking kids. Austro, you have assured me twice that you don't belong to that whey-witted bunch of squid kids, but I keep hearing tales about you. Assure me one more time that you're not a member of them.”
“By the busted bones of my fathers, I am not a member of the willow dancers,” Austro swore the oath truly. And that was the start of that.
The willow-dance children were to give a “Sunshine and Showers” presentation right in the Civic Center area to show their powers and to promote science and inquiry. They had the full support of the city magistrates in this. Our magistrates were all proud of those talented and scientific children, and we were all proud of our magist— “We sure do have good-looking magistrates in our town,” Barnaby Sheen would say with that forked tongue of his. “They're not as competent as we'd like. They're not as dedicated as we'd like. They haven't much integrity. They bumble and they stumble, and they're just not very smart. But they are good-looking.”
“And it will be a good-looking show that they put on,” George Drakos said. “We are all for pure-hearted and aesthetic children with a scientific bent, and we are all for willow dancing (what is it anyhow?); we are certainly for ‘Sunshine and Showers’ in proper proportion. I, at least, do not reject the weather making powers of these children instantly. If they do it, then it can be done. Let us see the presentation.”
“The weather influences me a lot, and maybe I i
nfluence the weather a little bit,” Harry O'Donovan stated. “If I had my life to do all over again, I believe that I could influence the weather and many other things much more than I did. Well, these children do have lives to do all over again. They start where we left off. Children always did have special powers. We tend to forget about it, but even we had a smattering of powers once.”
“Ah, peacock pug, we did not!” Barnaby Sheen argued. “There are no special powers.”
“I myself haven't any doubt that humans do influence the weather,” Cris Benedetti said. “The ideal system is to let the towns go drysod in their sunshine, and let the farmers enjoy their needed rain. As a general thing, that has always been the real as well as the ideal case. There are records to confirm this. Cities do have (from the viewpoint of cities) more pleasant weather than do the countrysides: milder in summer, milder in winter also, dryer most times, and more sunny and more smiling than country places. This is because, in the cities, there are greater numbers of minds working for fine weather. The people of a town, by their desires and sympathies, can literally hold an umbrella over a town and protect it from inclement weather. But in the country there is need for great falls of rain and for, ah, sometimes showers of proteid matter also.”
“Into each rain some albuminoid must fall,” Austro said. “That's a proverb.”
“Prayers for rain have been part of the furniture of the Church from the beginning,” George Drakos commented. “They have always been effective, but perhaps they were more effective when the majority of the people were rural. Dozens of great historical droughts have been broken by the fervent prayers of the peoples.”
“I don't doubt the efficacy of prayer,” Barnaby said. “But I will doubt the efficacy of this weather-making pseudo-science that has been shoveled into tender children's minds by certain mentors. And I doubt the efficacy of the little fetish magic that the children themselves contribute to it.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 232
