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 STARTED 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.