“Stations, children! Positions, if you please! You! Shifter! Leibel Shifter! Further back. Further back! Tushnet! You go back, too!”

The children began to scatter over the field. Shifter, the mad boy, the dog, kept going backward. Every minute or so he would stop, but Bettsack waved him farther on, until he was practically out of sight. “Stop!” the schoolmaster shouted. But Shifter still backpedaled, and the message to him had to be passed from orphan to orphan, from Krystal to Atlas to Tushnet, across the length of the field.

Finally they all held still. Bettsack bent down and picked up the dried squash; he just had the strength to lift it over his head. The next thing you knew the schoolmaster, a grown-up, responsible person, was rapidly spinning around. “Flicker!” he gasped to the boy who was nearest. “Citron!” he called, to the lad next farthest out. “Begin rotation!”

Trumpelman could hardly believe what he saw: both boys, and then Gutta Blit, and then all the others began to spin on the spot. It was like madness. Round and round they went, stepping all over their shadows. “West to east, Miss Atlas! Not like a clock!” Rose Atlas stopped; she reversed direction. The rest kept going, holding their little spheres. Bettsack had begun to stagger a little. The breath came visibly from his mouth.

“Now! Revolutions!”

Little Usher Flicker—between his fingers he had a pea from a pod—began to trip around the teacher, in a circle more or less. A bit farther out Citron was doing the same. The amazing thing was that as both boys went in this circular orbit, they did not stop whirling about. Gutta Blit, with the pink rubber ball, was spinning like a dervish too, and also Krystal, and so was everyone soon. Even Leibel Shifter, way out on the edge of the field, a half kilometer off, had started to run. However, because of the distance between him and Bettsack, he hardly seemed to be moving. Flicker, for instance, had run three times about the center, before Shifter, his legs thrashing, covered any noticeable ground. It would take him forever to complete a revolution.

“Attention! Moons!” Bettsack, with red patches that showed through his beard, with his necktie coming undone, practically shrieked this.

From behind the hill that led to the cemetery grounds fifteen, twenty, more than twenty children came pouring. What they did, with a whoop, with a shout, was to pick out some of the whirling orphans—Gutta, Rose Atlas, the puffing Mann Lifshits—and then begin to race as fast as they could around them. For a time the whole field was covered with these whizzing children, making circles inside of circles, curves within curves.

Then Trumpelman stood up in the dimming light; he walked into their midst. Through his split, puffy lips, he demanded of the reeling Bettsack, “What is the meaning of this? Speak!”

The schoolmaster dropped his squash. He started screaming. “It’s the whole solar system! Including the new planet of Pluto! In correct proportions! According to the system of Sir J. Frederick Herschel!” Then he threw his arms around the Asylum Director, clinging to him the way a drunkard does to a post. Just then Nathan Hobnover, an eight-year-old boy, came roaring over the hilltop, making a sizzling sound: zzzzzzz!