Sam flung off the glove and was wringing his hand.

“Hurt you, Sam?” Roy called.

“No, it’s this dang glove.”

Though he did not show it, the pitch had bothered the Whammer no end. Not just the speed of it but the sensation of surprise and strangeness that went with it — him batting here on the railroad tracks, the crazy carnival, the drunk catching and a clown pitching, and that queer dame Harriet, who had five minutes ago been patting him on the back for his skill in the batting cage, now eyeing him coldly for letting one pitch go by.

He noticed Max had moved farther back.

“How the hell you expect to call them out there?”

“He looks wild to me.” Max moved in.

“Your knees are knockin’,” Sam tittered.

“Mind your business, rednose,” Max said.

“You better watch your talk, mister,” Roy called to Mercy.

“Pitch it, greenhorn,” warned the Whammer.

Sam crouched with his glove on. “Do it again, Roy. Give him something simular.”

“Do it again,” mimicked the Whammer. To the crowd, maybe to Harriet, he held up a vaunting finger showing there were other pitches to come.

Roy pumped, reared and flung.

The ball appeared to the batter to be a slow spinning planet looming toward the earth. For a long light-year he waited for this globe to whirl into the orbit of his swing so he could bust it to smithereens that would settle with dust and dead leaves into some distant cosmos. At last the unseeing eye, maybe a fortuneteller’s lit crystal ball — anyway, a curious combination of circles — drifted within range of his weapon, or so he thought, because he lunged at it ferociously, twisting round like a top. He landed on both knees as the world floated by over his head and hit with a whup into the cave of Sam’s glove.