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THE BIG BOUNCE
WALTER S. TEVIS
Illustrated by Johnson
"Let me show you something," Farnsworth said. He set his near-empty drink--a Bacardi martini--on the mantel and waddled out of the room toward the basement.
When he returned, after a moment, he had with him a small box, about three inches square. He held this carefully in one hand and stood by the fireplace dramatically--or as dramatically as a very small, very fat man with pink cheeks can stand by a fireplace of the sort that seems to demand a big man with tweeds, pipe and, perhaps, a saber wound.
Anyway, he held the box dramatically and he said, "Last week, I was playing around in the chem lab, trying to make a new kind of rubber eraser. Did quite well with the other drafting equipment, you know, especially the dimensional curve and the photosensitive ink. Well, I approached the job by trying for a material that would absorb graphite without abrading paper."
I was a little disappointed with this; it sounded pretty tame. But I said, "How did it come out?"
He screwed his pudgy face up thoughtfully. "Synthesized the material, all right, and it seems to work, but the interesting thing is that it has a certain--ah--secondary property that would make it quite awkward to use. Interesting property, though. Unique, I am inclined to believe."
This began to sound more like it. "And what property is that?" I poured myself a shot of straight rum from the bottle sitting on the table beside me. I did not like straight rum, but I preferred it to Farnsworth's rather imaginative cocktails.
"I'll show you, John," he said. He opened the box and I could see that it was packed with some kind of batting. He fished in this and withdrew a gray ball about the size of a golfball and set the box on the mantel.
"And that's the--eraser?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. Then he squatted down, held the ball about a half-inch from the floor, dropped it.
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