Without watching for it to go up, I drove as quickly as I could off
the road and over--carrying part of a wire fence with me--to where it
had hit. There was no mistaking it; there was a depression about three
feet deep, like a small crater.

I jumped out of the car and stared up. It took me a few seconds to
spot it, over my head. One side caught by the pale and slanting
morning sunlight, it was only a bright diminishing speck.

The car motor was running and I waited until the ball disappeared for
a moment and then reappeared. I watched for another couple of seconds
until I felt I could make a decent guess on its direction, hollered at
Farnsworth to get out of the car--it had just occurred to me that
there was no use risking his life, too--dove in and drove a hundred
yards or so to the spot I had anticipated.

I stuck my head out the window and up. The ball was the size of an egg
now. I adjusted the car's position, jumped out and ran for my life.

It hit instantly after--about sixty feet from the car. And at the same
time, it occurred to me that what I was trying to do was completely
impossible. Better to hope that the ball hit a pond, or bounced out to
sea, or landed in a sand dune. All we could do would be to follow, and
if it ever was damped down enough, grab it.

It had hit soft ground and didn't double its height that time, but it
had still gone higher. It was out of sight for almost a lifelong
minute.

And then--incredibly rotten luck--it came down, with an ear-shattering
thwack, on the concrete highway again. I had 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 every