Hal and Mario in the dark: true in transit
Maybe then whatever’s said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit. Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person’s stick.
Context
The novel's clearest statement that Mario's sincerity is not naïveté but a different physics. Hal, unable to imagine how someone of "your kind of Panglossian constitution" ever detects a lie, arrives at the answer: Mario's total belief actually transforms what's said to him. A lie leaves the liar's "stick" with mendacious spin and, crossing the distance to Mario, "reverses its spin and hits you true." This is the anthology's boldest claim about single-entendre reception — that credulity operated at Mario's pitch isn't a deficit (a failure to detect deceit) but a generative capacity, a way of being spoken to that makes speech true by receiving it as true. Mario isn't fooled; he's running a different game with different rules, in which the question "was that a lie?" simply never arises and the words land clean regardless. Sincerity as physics, not virtue.