In his and Hollins' cars, they got to the scene of the fragment's fall, two miles out of town, by following a faint, fading glow. They were almost the first to reach the spot. Tiflin and Ramos, who had been working on their jobs, came with their boss, along with a trailing horde of cars from town.
Flashlights probed into the hot impact pit in the open field, where the frozen soil had seemed to splash like a liquid. Crumpled in the hole was a lump of half-fused sheet steel, wadded up like paper. It was probably part of the Far Side's central hub. Magnesium and aluminum, of which the major portions had certainly been made, were gone; they could never have endured the rush through the atmosphere.
Ramos got down into the pit. After a minute, he gave a queer cry, and climbed out again. His mitten smoked as he opened it, to show something.
"It must have been behind a heavy object," he said very seriously, not like his usual self at all. "That broke the molecular impact with the air—like a ceramic nose cone. Kept it from burning up completely."
The thing was a lady's silver compact, from which a large piece had been fused away. A bobbypin had gotten welded to it.
Old Paul Hendricks cursed. Poor Two-and-Two moved off sickly, with a palm clamped over his mouth.
Eileen Sands gasped, and seemed about to yell. But she got back most of her poise. Women have nursed the messily ill and dying, and have tended ghastly wounds during ages of time. So they know the messier side of biology as well as men.
Ramos gave the pathetic relic to a cop who was trying to take charge.
"Somebody must have goofed bad on the Far Side, for it to miss orbit like that," Ramos grated. "Or was something wrong, beforehand? Their TV transmitter went out—we were watching, too, at the garage... You can see the aurora—the Northern Lights... Those damn solar storms might have loused up instruments...! But who'll ever know, now...?"