FALL OF PEBBLE-STONES

He was a good person, that cop. There weren’t

any rotten people around there. (But have

you looked under your eaves lately?)

R. A. Lafferty

And heal my heart and bless my bones

With nightly fall of pebble-stones.

Ellenbogen, Rainy Morning Rimes.

Bill Sorel stood at his nineteenth-floor window and shied pebbles and stones out over space to land in the sidewalk and street. It had rained the night before, and there were pebbles on that little ledge under his window after every rain. It’s always fun to throw stones, even small stones, in the morning and see what they will hit.

“Hey, that cop’s going to come up and get you again, Bill Sorel,” Etta Mae Southern called from her window next door. “Where were you last night? I called every guy I know for a date and couldn’t get anybody. You remember the other day the cop came all the way up to your place and told you the people in the street were getting crabby about getting hit on the head with pebbles.”

“I have been awarded the big red plum, Etta Mae,” Sorel boasted to the early morning air and his neighbor. “I’m not a professor; I’m not a doctor: I’m just a hardworking and dirty-scheming popularizer and feature writer. But I have wrested the big red plum from the big boys in the Q. and A. scientific field.”

“Well, don’t throw the plum-pit down on someone’s head when you’re finished,” Etta Mae said. “You told that cop, ‘They’re not very big pebbles,’ and he said, ‘No, I know they’re not.’ You told him, ‘People just like to complain about things,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I know they do. Now you just cut out hitting people on their heads with pebbles so they’ll have one less thing to complain about.’ You said, ‘How did you know it was me?’ and he said, ‘Who else in this building would be the mad pebble-thrower?’ He sure is a nice cop but I bet he won’t be so nice if he has to come all the way up here after you again.”

“I’ve been awarded the big red plum,” Sorel repeated, and he continued to pick the pebbles out of that little ledge below his window and throw them down over the street. “I have been selected to compile, edit, write or whatever The Child’s Big What and Why Book. This will pay me well. All I have to do is answer the scientific questions that children of all ages will ask, and do it in the style that the most doltish kid can understand and the smartest kid will not find patronizing. And really most of the work is already done before I start.”

“You hit a man with a pebble, Bill. He’s looking around to see where it came from. He’s on the edge of being real mad if he finds out someone hit him on purpose.”

“I didn’t,” Sorel said. “I discovered that I can’t hit any of them on purpose, so I concentrate on hitting them by accident. I just throw them and let them find their own targets. But it wasn’t a very big pebble and it didn’t hurt him much. Now all I have to do is find out half an answer to one question and a full answer to another, and I’ll be able to put the book together. Where do you think the pebbles come from, Etta Mae?”

“My idea is that the rain makes them. Pebbles are made out of silicon mostly. And silicon and nitrogen are almost exactly alike. I used to go with a smart fellow and he taught me things like that. When it lightens, the rain makes almost as much silicon water as nitrogen water, and it deposits it as pebbles. That’s one way. Hey, do you know that rotten people never have pebbles around their houses? The other way is that little pieces of sand come together and the lightning-impregnated water fuses them into pebbles. It has to be one of those ways or there wouldn’t always be pebbles after it rains. There’s a third way that pebbles could happen, but it’s a little bit doubty.”

“Tell me the third way, Etta Mae. I have to consider lots of fringe things for the Big What and Why Book.“

“It’s that somebody doesn’t want you to run out of pebbles because you have so much fun throwing them. So, whoever it is, he keeps making pebbles for you every time it rains. You know Mrs. Justex on the eighteenth floor. She always used to live in a house before she came here, and she had a little ledge outside her kitchen window where her milk would be left every morning. She took the apartment here and saw that there wasn’t any ledge. ‘How will I get milk?’ she asked herself. So she nailed up a little ledge like the one you fixed for yourself there. And every morning there would be a quart of milk for her on the ledge. This went on for a week till she happened to think, ‘Who is my route man here? And how does he get up to the eighteenth floor on the outside of this building?’ She heard him then—it was early in the morning—and she went to see. She opened the window suddenly and knocked him off. He fell down and was killed on the sidewalk. But he faded away, and there wasn’t anything left of him when she went down to look. After that, she had to start buying her milk in the store.”

“No, Etta Mae, I know Mrs. Justex. That’s just one of the stories that she tells when she’s wet-braining it in the Wastrels’ Club.”

“It did seem kind of doubty. I don’t believe she drinks milk at all. What is the half an answer and the whole answer that you have to find out before you can put the book together?”

“The half one is, ‘Why does a baseball curve?’ I think I have that half whipped. I’m going to see a man today who is supposed to know the answer. And the whole answer I’m looking for is to the question, ‘How do the pebbles get under the eaves?’“

“Oh, well, it’s got to be one of the three ways I told you.” Bill Sorel stood there at the window and threw every pebble away. That is important. He didn’t miss a one. Then he got a little broom and swept that ledge clear of everything.

Bill Sorel should have had an easy job of putting that book together. He already knew all the answers except for that half answer and that full answer. He had once handled a lot of the questions in a little daily feature before it was canceled out on him. He could use that material again. And most of the other answers he had already filed in his head for ready use. Besides, there were already many such books that he could draw upon, besides the real reference books, and besides the palaver of his own keenwitted friends. He had had it down to three unanswered questions when he applied for a shot at the Big What and Why. And now he had it down to one and one-half.

When Bill Sorel had come on the scene there had been three questions going around wearing blatantly false answers. These were: “What Makes it Thunder?” “What Makes a Baseball Curve?” “How Do the Pebbles Get Under the Eaves?” It is hard to believe the answers that had been given to these questions by scientists, some of them grown men.

Listen to this one:

“Thunder is produced when lightning heats the surrounding air and causes it to expand and send out waves. The expanding wave is heard as thunder.”

Well, what can you do when you come on something like that? Possibly it was better than the answer that earlier generations gave, that the lightning burned up the air and the thunder was caused by new air rushing in to fill up the place.

Well, Bill Sorel had found out what causes thunder. It was really a wonder that somebody else hadn’t stumbled onto the right answer before he had. Read it. Read the amazingly evident answer in The Child’s Big What and Why Book.

Listen to this about a baseball. And it’s been repeated again and again for more than a century.

“The curving of a baseball is caused by denser air on the bottom of the baseball than on the top. Therefore the bottom spin will be more effective than the top spin, will have more traction on the air, and will cause the ball to curve. The ball will curve to the right if the pitcher throws it with a clockwise spin, and to the left if the spin is counterclockwise. Artillery shells behave according to the same rule.”

Oh, great bloated bulls! What? A three-and-a-half inch difference in elevation would cause enough pressure difference between the top and the bottom of a baseball to make the thing curve up to eighteen inches in sixty-six feet? Where is your sense of proportion? Suppose the difference in elevation-pressure should be a hundred thousand times as much, the difference between low ground and the height of thirty thousand feet or so. Would the thrown ball then curve a hundred thousand times as much? Would it curve thirty miles off course in sixty-six feet of travel? As Etta Mae would say, “It’s kind of doubty.”

But now Bill Sorel halfway knew what made a baseball curve. He had heard the explanation at second hand. Today he hoped to hear it at first hand.

And listen to this one about pebbles in the little rain-worn ditches under the eaves of buildings:

“It is sometimes asked why there are usually small white pebble-stones under the eaves-drops of buildings when there do not seem to be any other pebbles around anywhere. But the answer is that there are always pebbles around everywhere. They are mixed with the great bulk of the earth and are not noticed. But rain washes the finer and lighter earth particles away and leaves the pebbles behind. That is the reason that there seem to be so many pebbles under the eaves of buildings, particularly after a rain.”

Aw, heel-flies! Bill Sorel didn’t know the answer to that one, but he knew that such drivel wasn’t the answer.

Yeah, he had a big red plum. He wasn’t going to let it get away. He was going to make sure of it. He got in his Red Ranger (a type of motor car) and drove off to find the man who could complete his half answer to the second question. And as he drove, he reviewed in his mind that momentous third question.

Some pebbles are limestone, but most of them are quartz. And there are not always pebbles around. In much earth there are no pebbles at all. In most earth, the true pebbles will make up less than one part in fifty thousand. Ah, but you put up a building or house and move into it, and after the very first rain there is a thick accumulation of pebbles in its eaves-drops. Has fifty thousand times their amount of earth been washed away to reveal them?

Bill Sorel had made a nuisance of himself around building projects in checking out the pebble situation. In one place he had taken a cubic yard of dirt, hauled it aside, and gone over it all with a toothbrush and sieve. And he had not found any pebbles at all. The only things too big to go through the sieve were organic things, roots, hickory nut hulls, twigs, pieces of bark and pieces of worms. There were not any natural pebbles at all. He kept track of all artificial pebbles (pieces of mortar, cinder block fragments, bits of limestone gravel and of flint chat). He would always know them from genuine pebbles, and he already knew that they would not accumulate under eaves.

He continued his surveillance as the seven houses on this particular tract were raised, were finished, were first rained upon. He examined them. The rain had made little under-the-eaves ditches around all the houses, but there were no pebbles in those ditches. Something was missing from the formula. The premonition of what it might be excited Bill Sorel and almost scared him.

People moved into one of the houses, and Sorel waited impatiently for it to rain. But it didn’t rain for a whole week. People moved into a second of the houses, and that night it rained. Sorel was around with a flashlight at dismal, drenching dawn (it was partly for such devoted labor as this that Sorel had won the big red plum), and he discovered that the two inhabited houses now had pebbles in their eaves-drop runnels, and that the five uninhabited houses had none.

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.”

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 intuition. 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 that 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 finished 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 Wastrels’ 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 washes 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 goodhumored 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 clubroom.

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 so 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 page 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 lefthanded, 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?)