theentire width of the road. And the ball had flown back up like arocket.
_My God_, I was thinking, _now it means business. And on the nextbounce...._
It seemed like an incredibly long time that we craned our necks,Farnsworth and I, watching for it to reappear in the sky. And when itfinally did, we could hardly follow it. It whistled like a bomb and wesaw the gray streak come plummeting to Earth almost a quarter of amile away from where we were standing.
But we didn't see it go back up again.
For a moment, we stared at each other silently. Then Farnsworth almostwhispered, "Perhaps it's landed in a pond."
"Or in the world's biggest cow-pile," I said. "Come on!"
We could have met our deaths by rock salt and buckshot that night, ifthe farmer who owned that field had been home. We tore up everythingwe came to getting across it--including cabbages and rhubarb. But wehad to search for ten minutes, and even then we didn't find the ball.
What we found was a hole in the ground that could have been asmall-scale meteor crater. It was a good twenty feet deep. But at thebottom, no ball.
* * * * *
I stared wildly at it for a full minute before I focused my eyesenough to see, at the bottom, a thousand little gray fragments.
And immediately it came to both of us at the same time. A poorconductor, the ball had used up all its available heat on that finalimpact. Like a golfball that has been dipped in liquid air anddropped, it had smashed into thin splinters.
The hole had sloping sides and I scrambled down in it and picked upone of the pieces, using my handkerchief, folded--there was no tellingjust how cold it would be.
It was the stuff, all right. And colder than an icicle.
I climbed out. "Let's go home," I said.
Farnsworth looked at me thoughtfully. Then he sort of cocked his headto one side and asked, "What do you suppose will happen when thosepieces thaw?"
I stared at him. I began to think of a thousand tiny slivers whizzingaround erratically, richocheting off buildings, in downtown SanFrancisco and in twenty counties, and no matter what they hit, movingand accelerating as long as there was any heat in the air to give themenergy.
And then I saw a tool shed, on the other side of the pasture from us.
But Farnsworth was ahead of me, waddling along, puffing. He got theshovels out and handed one to me.
We didn't say a word, neither of us, for hours. It takes a long timeto fill a hole twenty feet deep--especially when you're shovelingvery, very carefully and packing down the dirt very, very hard.
--WALTER S. TEVIS
+----------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's Note: | | | |The spelling of "richochet" has been retained as in | |the original. | | | |This etext was produced from Galaxy February 1958. | |Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that| |the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. | +----------------------------------------------------+
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