Uncle John gave me a good belt of the bourbon he'd been thoughtful enough to pack along.
"What was it you say hit you, boy?" Doc Grandy wanted to know, reaching absently for the bottle.
"Buckshot, I suppose. What was it you just hacked out of me?"
"Hah!" He passed the bottle back to Uncle John. "Not like any buckshot I ever saw. Little balls, or shells of metallic stuff all right. But not lead. Peculiar. M-mph. You know what, boy?"
"You're mighty liberal with the iodine, I know that. What else?"
"You say you saw a big flash of light. Come to think on it, I saw a streak of light up the mountainside about that same time. I was out on the porch. You know, boy, I believe you got something to feel right set up about. I believe you been hit by a meteor. If it weren't—ha-ha—pieces of one of them flying saucers you read about."
Well, I didn't feel so set up about it, then or ever. But it did turn out he was right.
Doc Grandy got a science professor from Eastern State Teachers College there in Poxville to come look. He agreed that they were meteor fragments. The two of them phoned it in to the city papers during a slow week and, all in all, it was a big thing. To them. To me it was nothing much but a pain in the rear.
The meteor, interviewed scientists were quoted as saying, must have almost burned up coming through the atmosphere, and disintegrated just before it hit me. Otherwise I'd have been killed. The Poxville professor got very long-winded about the peculiar shape and composition of the pieces, and finally carried off all but one for the college museum. Most likely they're still there. One I kept as a souvenir, which was silly. It wasn't a thing I wanted to remember—or, as I found later, would ever be able to forget. Anyway, I lost it.
All right. That was that and, except for a lingering need to sit on very soft cushions, the end of it. I thought. We went back to town.