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 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.