Or else they unthinkingly follow the rule that governs their existence. At the moment Blumfeld turns, they too change their location and hide behind his back. Now Blumfeld is sitting with his back to the table, the cold pipe in his hand. The balls are now bouncing under the table, and because there’s a rug there, they are correspondingly quiet. This is much better; there are only weak dull sounds, you have to concentrate hard to even hear them. Blumfeld admittedly is concentrating hard, and he hears them all too well. But that’s just how it is now, probably in a little while he won’t hear them at all. The fact that they get so little change out of carpets strikes Blumfeld as a grave weakness in the balls. All you need do is push a rug or two under them, and they are almost powerless. Admittedly, only for a certain time, and moreover their mere being seems to constitute a sort of power in itself.

Now Blumfeld really could use a dog, a healthy young animal that would make short work of those balls; he pictures the dog swiping at them with its paws, driving them away from their position; he chases them all round the room, and in the end gets them between his jaws. Yes, it’s quite possible that Blumfeld will be acquiring a dog shortly.

But for the time being it’s only Blumfeld that the balls have to beware of, and he doesn’t feel like destroying them either, perhaps he lacks the resolve for that. He generally gets home in the evening tired out from work and now, just when he needs quiet, there is this surprise waiting for him. He starts to feel just how tired he is. He will destroy the balls, no question, and sooner rather than later, but not right away and probably not until tomorrow. If he were being dispassionate, he would have to say the balls are behaving pretty modestly. For instance they could be jumping out from time to time, showing themselves, and then go back to their place, or they could jump higher, to strike the underside of the table, thus making up for the muffling effect of the carpet. But they don’t do either thing; they don’t want to provoke Blumfeld needlessly, evidently they’re limiting themselves to the bare essentials.

These essentials, admittedly, are enough to make Blumfeld feel ill at ease at his table. He has been sitting there for a few minutes, and already he’s thinking of going to bed. One of his reasons is that he is unable to smoke where he is, having forgotten his matches on the bedside table. So he would have to fetch them, and once he’s there, it’s probably better just to stay there and lie down. He has an ulterior thought, namely that the balls in their blind need to always be behind him, will jump up onto the bed, and then, intentionally or otherwise, he can easily crush them. The possible objection that the remnants of the balls might be able to jump too, he rejects. Even the extraordinary has its limits. Ordinary balls bounce as well, though not incessantly; fragments of balls never do, and they won’t in this case either.

‘Hup!’ he calls out, almost emboldened by the thought, and tramps off to bed with the balls following him. His hopes seem to be borne out; as he stands deliberately right beside the bed, one of the balls promptly jumps up onto it. Then something unexpected happens, namely the other ball goes underneath it. Blumfeld had not considered the possibility that the balls could bounce underneath the bed. He is a little dismayed by this one ball, even though he feels it unfair of him, because by bouncing underneath the bed, this ball is perhaps discharging its duty even better than its fellow on the bed. Now it’s a question of where the balls decide to go, because Blumfeld doesn’t believe they are capable of operating separately for long. And in fact, a moment later, the lower ball now jumps up onto the bed.