"Gardner Dozois - The Hanging Curve" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

The Hanging Curve
By Gardner Dozois
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IT WAS A COOL OCTOBER night in Philadelphia, with a wet wind coming off the
river that occasionally shifted to bring in the yeasty spoiled-beer smell of the nearby
refineries. Independence Stadium, the relatively new South Philly stadium that had
been built to replace the old Veteran’s Stadium, which still stood deserted a block or
so away, was filled to capacity, and then some, with people standing in the aisles. It
was the last game of a hard-fought and bitterly contested World Series between the
New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, 3-2 in favor of the Phillies, the
Yankees at bat with two out in the top of the ninth inning, and a man on third base.
Eduardo Rivera was at bat for the Yankees against pitcher Karl Holzman, the
Yankees’ best slugger against the Phillies’ best stopper, and Holzman had run a full
count on Rivera, 3-2. Everything depended on the next pitch.
Holzman went into his slow, deliberate windup. Everybody in the stadium was
leaning forward, everybody was holding their breath. Though there were almost ten
thousand people in the stands, nobody was making a sound. Even the TV
announcers were tense and silent. Hey, there it is! The pitch—
Some pundits later said that what was about to happen happened because the
game was so tight, because so much was riding on the next pitch—that it was the
psychic energy of the thousands of fans in the stands, the millions more in the
viewing audience at home, every eye and every mind focused on that particular
moment. That what happened was caused by the tension and the ever-tightening
suspense felt by millions of people hanging on the outcome of that particular
pitch….
And yet, in the more than a century and a half that people had been playing
professional baseball, there had been many games as important as this one, many
contests as closely fought, many situations as tense or tenser, with as much or more
passion invested in the outcome—and yet what happened that night had never
happened before, in any other game.
Holzman pitched. The ball left his hand, streaked toward the plate….
And then it froze.
The ball just stopped, inches from the plate, and hung there, motionless, in
midair.
After a second of stunned surprise, Rivera stepped forward and took a mighty
hack at the motionless ball. He broke his bat on it, sending splinters flying high. But
the ball itself didn’t move.
The catcher sat back on his butt with a thump, then, after a second, began to
scoot backward, away from the plate. He was either praying or cursing in Spanish,
perhaps both. Hurriedly, he crossed himself.
The home-base umpire, Kellenburger, had been struck dumb with
astonishment for a moment, but now he raised his hands to call time. He took his
mask off and came a few steps closer to lean forward and peer at the ball, where it
hung impossibly in midair.
The umpire was the first to actually touch the ball. Gingerly, he poked it with
his finger, an act either very brave or very foolish, considering the circumstances. “It
felt like a baseball,” he later said, letting himself in for a great deal of comic ridicule
by late-night talk show hosts, but it really wasn’t that dumb a remark, again
considering the circumstances. It certainly wasn’t acting like a baseball.
He tried to scoop the ball out of the air. It wouldn’t budge. When he took his