E-text prepared by Greg Weeks, Jacqueline Jeremy, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 23153-h.htm or 23153-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/1/5/23153/23153-h/23153-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/1/5/23153/23153-h.zip) THE BIG BOUNCE by WALTER S. TEVIS _Seeing it in action, anybody would quaver in alarm: What hath Farnsworth overwrought?_ 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. I sat in my big leather chair, feeling very peaceful with the world, watching the fire. Whatever Farnsworth would have to show to-night would be far more entertaining than watching T.V.--my custom on other evenings. Farnsworth, with his four labs in the house and his very tricky mind, never failed to provide my best night of the week. 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.