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

had been the night before. It looked even spookier though, more bewilderingly
inexplicable, under the ordinary light of day than it had looked under the garish
artificial lighting the night before. This was no trick of the eyes, no confusion of light
and shadow. Although it couldn’t be, the goddamn thing was there.
The grounds crew did everything that they could think of to get the ball to
move, including tying a rope around it and having a dozen hefty men yank and heave
and strain at it, their feet scrambling for purchase, as if they were playing tug-of-war
with Mighty Joe Young and losing, but they could no more move the ball than
Kellenburger had been able to the night before.
It was becoming clear that it might be a long time before another game could
be played in Independence Stadium.
After two days of heated debate in the highest baseball circles, Yankee
Stadium was borrowed to restage the potential final out of the series. Thousands of
fans in the stadium (who had paid heretofore unheard-of prices for tickets) and
millions of television viewers watched breathlessly as Holzman went into his windup
and delivered the ball to the plate at a respectable ninety-five miles-per-hour. But
nothing happened except that Rivera took a big swing at the ball and missed. No
miracle. The ball thumped solidly into the catcher’s mitt (who’d had to be threatened
with heavy sanctions to get him to play, and who had a crucifix, a St. Christopher’s
medal, and an evil-eye-warding set of horns hung around his neck). Kellenburger,
the home-plate umpire, pumped his fist and roared “You’re out!” in a decisive,
no-nonsense tone. And that was that. The Philadelphia Phillies had won the World
Series.
The fans tore up the seats. Parts of New York City burned. The riots were still
going on the following afternoon, as were riots in Philadelphia and (for no particular
reason anyone could see; perhaps they were sympathy riots) in Cincinnati.
After another emergency session, the Commissioner announced that entire last
game would be replayed, in the interests of fairness. This time, the Yankees won,
7-5.
After more rioting, the Commissioner evoked special executive powers that no
one was quite sure he had, and declared that the Series was a draw. This satisfied
nobody, but eventually fans stopped burning down bits of various cities, and the
situation quieted.
The bizarre result went into the record books, and baseball tried to put the
whole thing behind it.
In the larger world outside the insular universe of baseball, things weren’t quite
that simple.
Dozens of newspapers across the country had indepen-dently—and perhaps
inevitably—come up with the headline HANGING CURVE BALL!!!, screamed
across the front page in the largest type they could muster. A novelty song of the
same name was in stores within four days of the Event, and available for download
on some internet sites in two. Nobody knows for sure how long it took for the first
Miracle Ball joke to appear, but they were certainly circulating widely by as early as
the following morning, when the strange non-ending of the World Series was the hot
topic of discussion in most of the workplaces and homes in America (and, indeed,
around the world), even those homes where baseball had rarely—if ever—been
discussed before.
Media hysteria about the Miracle Ball continued to build throughout the circus
of replaying the World Series; outside of sports circles, where the talk tended to
center around the dolorous affect all this was having on baseball, the focus was on