The Big Bounce | Page 5

seen it hit, and instantly afterward I saw a crack as wide as a finger open along the entire width of the road. And the ball had flown back up like a rocket.
My God, I was thinking, now it means business. And on the next bounce....
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 it finally did, we could hardly follow it. It whistled like a bomb and we saw the gray streak come plummeting to Earth almost a quarter of a mile 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 almost whispered, "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, if the farmer who owned that field had been home. We tore up everything we came to getting across it--including cabbages and rhubarb. But we had 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 a small-scale meteor crater. It was a good twenty feet deep. But at the bottom, no ball.
* * * * *
I stared wildly at it for a full minute before I focused my eyes enough to see, at the bottom, a thousand little gray fragments.
And immediately it came to both of us at the same time. A poor conductor, the ball had used up all its available heat on that final impact. Like a golfball that has been dipped in liquid air and dropped, it had smashed into thin splinters.
The hole had sloping sides and I scrambled down in it and picked up one of the pieces, using my handkerchief, folded--there was no telling just 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 head to one side and asked, "What do you suppose will happen when those pieces thaw?"
I stared at him. I began to think of a thousand tiny slivers whizzing around erratically, richocheting off buildings, in downtown San Francisco and in twenty counties, and no matter what they hit, moving and accelerating as long as there was any heat in the air to give them energy.
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 the shovels out and handed one to me.
We didn't say a word, neither of us, for hours. It takes a long time to fill a hole twenty feet deep--especially when you're shoveling very, 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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