It was, as I recall, a calm and moonlit night. The wind was lightly in the south, the birds had ceased stomping noisily on my window sill, and the lovely Cassie came charging into my castle in a dead heat with Birnam Wood. Her skirt swinging loosely around her handsome limbs, she asked me if I would come help her find a meteor.

“Of course,” I said. That girl has always done this sort of thing to me, coming down on me like a large storm on a small ship. For her I would gladly go tippy-toe to Mars. But even so, after a moment I said: “A meteor?”

“Yes. But please come on. I’ll explain all about it as we go.”

“All right.” Then I noticed for the first time another party in the room—a large, grotesque specimen whom I recognized instantly as Harvey Kane, Cassie’s steady. I could not suppress a grimace of annoyance. Why, I asked myself, did we need him?

“Didn’t you see the paper yesterday?” Cassie asked.

I shook my head. We went down the stairs, Kane and I glaring ferociously at each other like lions above the same kill.

“It was in that ‘Yesterday’ column—you know? ‘Eighty years ago today…’ and so on. Well, yesterday they printed a column from the paper of eighty years ago, and it said that a meteor fell that day on a plantation just north of town. In May, eighteen eighty. It wasn’t a very big meteor, but it burned down some old slave quarters and made quite an impression. Isn’t that something?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, Harve and I checked at the newspaper office today to find out what happened to it. The man who owned the plantation let the meteor stay there—it was visible in the ground and stayed hot for a long while—and an awful lot of people went out to see it. But after that nobody knows what became of it. It’s probably still out there. So Harve and I decided”—she glanced at Harve and he shrugged glumly, and I saw who it was who had really decided—“to go out and see if we could find the thing. Because if we could, and gave it to the university, wouldn’t that be nice?”

I guess I ought to fill you in on Cassie and me. My name is Eldon Tyler White—“Doc” to you—and we both are graduate students here at the old U.; but she is in science and I am in English and there’s the rub, as the man would say. Our paths do not cross; the twain shall not meet. I don’t know if you know how it is in colleges these days. Well, everybody is studying just as hard as they possibly can to get to the point where nobody else can understand them. I mean, you drift down to the coffee shop and sit for a while with a few friends and they fill the air with ohms and ergs and positrons. And if you are a kindly, gentle soul like me, who likes to read Robert Frost and teach Hemingway and go off on an occasional fishing trip, you are somewhat out of the stream—sort of gasping on the bank, if you follow me.

Now, all of this should have made no difference in the natural course of things between Cassie and me. She is a girl the sight of whom makes strong men tremble and little boys grit their teeth; and even if she had been studying leprosy in Braille I still would have dropped all and come running at the first sight of her—which, as a matter of fact, I did.

I spied her one day in a geology class, gazing devotedly at a rock. And so love bloomed. I asked her out, of course. I was planning on asking her to marry me that first night—there seemed no point in putting off the obvious—but somehow I could never get her alone. Old Cass always seemed to have somebody around, or wanted to go where there were hordes of people discussing gneiss and schist and other rock-type subjects. Gradually I got the message. Cass was a romantic soul and had visions of herself as Madame Curie—she and her husband growing old together in a drab lab, panting at each other year after year over a brace of microscopes.

Being a veteran of many of these wars, I withdrew.

I didn’t go out with Cass again. I saw her occasionally around campus and heard she’d begun dating this Harve apparition. The word was that this was the real thing. Like seeks like, I thought; but Harvey was not only in geology, he was also infinitely wealthy. I went on drowning my sorrows in homemade and delightfully illegal wine and months went by, and then the girl was at my door asking me to go help her find a meteor.

Walking down the street beside her, enrapt, attentive, I nevertheless felt a sudden suspicion jolt my mind.. “By the way,” I said, “how big is this thing?”

“The meteor? Oh, I have no idea. Probably a hundred pounds or so. Maybe two hundred.”

And then I knew. I am a large man; my strength, as the poet says, is as the strength of ten. And that was why old Cass had come a-calling. All she wanted me for was to help lift the damned thing.

Well, the Harve had a small foreign car and they wedged me into the back of it—along with a wheelbarrow and other assorted implements—and we soared off into the dark. The seat was not big and I sat there about as comfortable as a fat lady stuck in a tuba while Cassie’s hair washed delicious perfume across my face. All I can remember feeling is a sort of sad, paralyzed joy. We had gone some distance out into the country before it came to me that this was an odd hour to be prowling the woody dark. I raised the point.

“Oh”—Cass swung round the profile and gave me the full face—“we located the place this afternoon. The meteor fell on the old Pendleton plantation, near an old well. Only it isn’t the Pendleton place anymore. It belongs to McMangan, the contractor. You know the place—out on Lake George Road…”

But I was already tuned out. The name McMangan is a sickening sound in our county, and only then did I get the first pang that there might be something a mite lumpy in this meteor business. McMangan is a little man with all of the personal magnetism of a decaying oyster. He builds houses that collapse and is always in court being sued, and he regards a dollar with the same dark fixity of feeling that an anteater must have toward ants. I did not like the idea of having anything to do with McMangan, but when I tuned back in on Cass she was still rolling right along:

“…and a mine detector and a Geiger counter. We came out this afternoon and spotted the old well, and there was no point in asking permission, because if he didn’t say yes, then we’d have to steal it—you see? So there shouldn’t be any problem. We’ll just hop over the fence…”

I wanted to go back a page or two and review the paragraph on McMangan. I had heard, for example, that he kept large, hungry dogs. But there was no time. At that point the Harve stomped on the brakes. We had arrived at the scene. The Great Meteor Chase had begun.

It was a sinister scene, by George—no doubt about it. On the left was a large lake lapping the road and on the right a long, sloping hill rising up to a clutch of trees. Moonlight splashed indiscriminately over the whole thing. Just beyond the trees, I knew, lived McMangan the shabby housebuilder. I listened intently for dogs and heard nothing but the noisy lake. I turned again to Cass, wanting to reconsider the whole matter, but she was already climbing recklessly over the white fence and I caught a swift glimpse of white thigh and lace. The sad joy came back upon me. Watching a girl like that go over a fence, no man stays behind.

We pushed slowly up the hill, Cassie’s skirt flaring in the soft light. The old well, naturally, was right up near the McMangan house, right at the edge of the trees. We reached there panting and highly excited, and I listened for dogs and peered fretfully for McMangan, but nothing happened. It was black and very gloomy. Harve took the long gadget he had and began making strange sweeping motions over the ground. Cass explained that this was an Army mine detector he had borrowed from the R.O.T.C. people and that it would register the presence of buried metal. Then she stepped back and waited for me to do my stuff with the object I had in my hands. I looked at it blankly.

“Oh,” Cass whispered, “I thought you knew how to handle a Geiger counter.” She took the thing away from me like Mom taking away a toy and moved off counting Geigers. At this further evidence of the gulf of knowledge between us, I sat back soulfully on the edge of the well. I consoled myself by thinking they couldn’t possibly find the meteor anyway, and kept an acute eye peeled for the coming of McMangan, which I was certain would happen at any moment. And then Harve made a signal that he had detected something.

He knelt down and began digging away with a small shovel. Cassie crouched over him breathlessly. It still did not occur to me that he could really find the damned thing. I strolled toward them, keeping an eye on the top of the hill. Then came the dull clunk of metal against metal.

“We’ve hit something,” Harve breathed. He shoveled frantically, and Cassie went down on her knees to help him.

“Oh, this is it!” Cass chattered. “I really think this is it!”

And it was.

The thing in the hole was black and jagged-looking. I crouched to look. Harve pushed the end of the shovel under it and heaved. It moved. I backed off. I had sudden visions of the top of the thing starting to unscrew itself, as in many a science-fiction movie where monsters always come hopping out. I am not normally a squeamish soul, but after all, this black thing was not one of ours, if you follow me; it was from places far and dark where unimaginable things could occur. I regard it, I’ll tell you, with interest.

So did Cassie. She just sat on her lovely haunches and stared. “Just think,” she breathed wonderingly, “of all the millions of years it was out there alone in space…”

“Just think how heavy it is,” Harvey grunted. “Must weight a couple of hundred pounds.”

“Here, now,” I said suddenly, all enthusiasm, “stand back.” I straddled the hole and grabbed the shovel and with a massive effort rolled the thing over. Then I stopped and stared at it again. I had a very eerie feeling about it, and right then old Cass summed it up, phrasing it beautifully.

“Makes you feel kind of funny, doesn’t it?” she said in a low voice.

Well, we lugged it down the hill. We got the wheelbarrow and sailed it right through a gate in the fence and stowed the thing in the car trunk.

As we drove back to town old Cass and I chatted happily, but the Harve was glum. He was all for leaving the meteor in the trunk and I knew why—the moon was low and sexy and there was still time to take Cass for a drive. But Cass wanted to get a look at the meteor in the light and I agreed. To my great delight we wound up at my place. Harve’s room was on the top floor of the frat house and we weren’t allowed in Cass’s, so we lugged the thing nobly up my stairs and then stood around for a few moments in awe.

“I must say,” Cass murmured finally, “it doesn’t look right, somehow.”

“Never saw a meteor,” I said. “How’s it supposed to look?”

“Sort of smooth, it should be,” Cass said thoughtfully. “Worn down by friction, you know. Sort of melty-looking.”

“Nice night out,” Harve said.

“Well,” I observed, “this thing looks pretty melty, all in all.”

“Yes, but”—Cass shook her head wonderingly, bent down and probed the black mass with a finger—“it just doesn’t…”

“Spring?” Harve said hopefully. “Moonlit night?”

He got through to Cass at last and she looked up at me in embarrassment. “Well,” she said, “I guess Doc really wants to get back to his reading…”

“Um.” Harve took her arm. I started to protest meekly, but she was helpless in his grip and a man has his pride. I stood stoically, saying nothing.

“Well, we’ll see you tomorrow,” Cass said, and went out the door, feet dragging. She managed to call back that it had been fun.

And it had. I had to admit that, by George, it had been a joy prodding around in the McMangan moonlight, meteor hunting. But now the sight of her being dragged out the door by arms not mine, being carried off like the Sabine women—well, it was a low moment.

I sat gazing at the meteor but I had no interest in it. I went to the window and regarded the moon. “So we’ll go no more a-roving,” I quoted sadly, “…and the moon be still as bright.”

Little did I know.

The meteor sat blackly in my room while I learned my way through the following day. When I staggered back home at last in the late afternoon, heading for some of the mildly medicinal which I keep buried under a stack of Henry James, whom nobody ever reads, I ran smack into Cass.

“Hey,” I said. “Hi.” I was about to remark that she wasn’t allowed in my room—certainly not alone and with the door closed—but that seemed an unfriendly thing to say and so I let it pass.

She was prodding the meteor. “I still say there’s something screwy here,” she said, frowning. “This thing isn’t iron—most of them, you know, are nickel-iron. Look here how it scratches.” She pointed to where she had gouged the thing with a screwdriver, and by George, the scratches were a bright silvery color.

“It shouldn’t do that,” she said gravely. “Much too soft.”

I nodded dumbly.

“Tell you what—let’s have it assayed.” She made me find a hammer and we knocked off one of the projecting knobs. Then we set out for the geology department. I didn’t say a great deal. Here I was by this magnificent stroke of fate walking along with Cass on a cheery day in spring, and what was there to say? Her skirt kept swirling and rapping me on the knees.

She didn’t say a great deal either. I noticed that she looked up at me oddly from time to time, but I had no idea why.

A man in the geology department took our little chunk of meteor without interest, studied it for maybe five minutes and then told us with glacial enthusiasm that this was very interesting and where in heck had we got a chunk of pure silver?

We wandered back out into the sun. Silver?

“But it doesn’t make sense,” Cass insisted.

“Why?”

“Well, meteors don’t come in silver, that’s all. It couldn’t be silver! And if it is, darn it, it isn’t a meteor.”

“Two hundred pounds,” I said.

Cass stopped and stared at me.

“Of pure—silver?” I said.

There was a long silence. Then Cass cleared her throat.

“Do you have any idea,” she said slowly, “what it’s worth?”
I shook my head.

“Neither do I.” She paused. “Hundreds?”

“Thousands?”

A slow, broad grin began to come over her face. “Doc, laddie,” she breathed with delight, “we’re rich!”

She reached out and grabbed me by the arm, and I automatically put my arm around her and kissed her.

After that not much is clear. I remember a long walk hand in hand and an expensive restaurant. We were much too wealthy now to go to Ptomaine Tavern, the campus cafeteria, and Cass wanted to eat downtown. I noticed that she never once mentioned calling the Harve. We sat and gorged and chatted, and by George, it was fine. We had the rest of that afternoon and we talked until dark about a hundred million extraordinarily delightful things. She never mentioned geology; I never mentioned English. And yet the afternoon was magnificent.

We left at last and walked back to the U. Cassie finally brought up the subject of Harve and how pleased he would be. I noticed that she would no longer look at me and I felt the black depression coming back.

“Cass,” I said.

She turned.

“You really going to marry that fellow?”

She looked away. A bright flush came to her cheeks. “Of course. A girl doesn’t go around getting engaged just to…just for…”

I let it pass. I mean, it was clear enough. If after a day like this she could still speak well of the Harve…

“I still wish I knew how that thing got into McMangan’s field,” she said. “And knew what it was. It certainly isn’t a meteor.”

I said nothing.

“Probably some thief a long time ago stole it and hid it there, maybe even as far back as the Civil War. Maybe somebody even took the family silver and melted it down to hide from the Yankees. How about that?”

But I couldn’t bring myself to think of it. We pushed on up to my room and Cassie came in, wanting to look at the thing again. I guess she wasn’t thinking much about it either. It was a long moment before either of us realized that the room was empty. The meteor was gone.

No doubt about it—the thing was gone. We speculated wildly and then Cass ran out and called Harve, thinking he’d taken it over to the frat house, but he wasn’t there and nobody knew anything about it.

We just sat for a while and looked at each other blankly. I mean, when a meteor is pinched, where does suspicion fall? But at this point Harve came charging into the room. He was hot and dusty and weary-looking, and when Cass told him the meteor was missing he gave her a look of extreme exasperation.

“Of course it is. I took it back.”

We were thunderstruck.

“I had to, damn it. And a heavy damned job it was too. Where the hell have you two been? I had to get two guys from the frat to help me lug the thing, and I tell you, up all last night dragging the blame thing out—”

“You put it back?”

“—and then out all afternoon doing the same damned thing. I tell you, it was work!”

“But why?”

“Because of the dean of men, that’s why.” He plumped himself grimly into my softest chair and gazed at us broodingly. “He called me in this afternoon. He was annoyed, and you know how he is when he’s annoyed—never gives you a chance to say a word, rattles on like a train off the track. Seems McMangan was in there early this morning screaming he’d been robbed. Somebody stole his meteor. He reads the papers too.” He glared accusingly at Cassie. “He saw the item about the meteor and knew it was on his land. And he woke up this morning and saw a big hole and tracks where something had been wheeled away, and he was fit to be tied. He thinks it might be valuable. The dean told him the only value it had was scientific, but that didn’t make any difference to McMangan. He swears it’s his, and whatever’s his is his.”

Cass turned to stare bleakly at me.

“So the dean knew who took it, of course,” Harve went on. “Everybody knows we got it—they knew all about the mine detector and everything. And of course—” he lowered his eyes uncomfortably—“I might have mentioned it to a few people. But anyway, the dean found out we had it and called me in and told me if it wasn’t back there tonight, we’d be out of here tomorrow. All three of us. For stealing. I came looking for you, but you—By the way, where were you?”

I sat in dumb meditation. Much as I dislike the Harve, I could see his point. An afternoon with our dean is not a thing men face lightly. No, I didn’t envy Harve his hour with Dean Kimmel, but—two hundred pounds of pure silver?

Cass turned anxiously to me. “Do you think McMangan knows?”

I thought. “No,” I concluded, “I doubt it. He’s just such a stingy rascal. I bet it’s just that anything that belongs to him…”

“Yes,” Cass said. “And that’s pretty hard ground and the thing had been there a long time. No, I’ll bet he doesn’t know.”

“Know what?” Harve said. “And where—”

“Well.” Cass stood up. “Nothing else to do, I guess. Have to go get it back.”

I agreed.

“Can’t just give the thing over to a messy man like that. Just can’t do it, that’s all.”

“Do what? Do who?”

Cass explained about the silver. “So,” she went on happily before the Harve could get a word in, “all we have to do now is find the real one. That’s all. Find the real one and put it in the first hole and nobody’ll ever know the difference. We’ll cover our tracks this time. Isn’t that right, Doc?” She looked at me appealingly.

I nodded, overcome with admiration. Here, I said to myself, was a real woman.

Cass was driving and we were there in no time. We trundled out the barrow and recaptured the meteor—or, rather, the silver—and Cass ordered the Harve to take it back down to the car while I went scouting around for the real meteor. He left, sweating and grumbling, rolling the thing down the hill, and I took a pleasant moment to watch him go.

I saw right away that he was going too fast. You sense these things. Any man with wheelbarrow experience will tell you that there is a bit of independence in the finest barrows; you have to keep a tight rein on them all the time or they get out of hand. So I knew from the beginning that Harve was going too fast. He was running down the hill, aiming for the gate, picking up speed, and of course when he went through the gate he was going much too fast and there was nothing he could do about it. He made an effort to stop the barrow but at the same time he held on, and when the barrow went into the lake he went over with it. There was a horrendous splash. Bright gallons of water sprayed up into the moonlight.

We ran down and fished him out. He was wet and very mad. We let him sit in the car while we went back and hunted for the meteor. There wasn’t time right then to get the silver out of the lake, which was pretty deep right at that point, and this business with the real meteor was pressing. We hunted—mine detector and Geiger counter in constant search—all over McMangan’s blighted plot, as close to his house as we dared. We hunted into the wee hours, and the moon went down and Harve nearly froze in the car, but we never detected a blasted thing. In the whole rest of McMangan’s field, I guarantee, there wasn’t so much as a large nail.

We left the silver in the lake and drove home into the sunrise, aware that we were in serious difficulty. In an hour or so McMangan would arise and survey his field, and there would be a hole and no meteor. Shortly after that he would be conferring with the dean and the dean with us, and we all would be ex-students.

“Well,” Cass said unhappily, “I don’t know. I guess the best thing to do is lie low until we think of something. We’d better not be where the dean can find us. But, golly”—she tossed her soft curls fretfully—“we have to think of something. Now, if only we could find a real meteor somewhere…”

“Where on earth,” I said wittily, “do you find a meteor?”

“In museums,” Cass said. “In geology mu—”

She stopped. She looked at me. Our eyes were alight.

“There’s a meteor in our museum!” Her face had a wondrous smile.

The Harve muttered something under his breath.

“We could swipe that easily,” I said. “This time of the morning, no watchmen around the geology building…”

And we could put it in that blasted hole and who’d know the difference?”

The Harve stared at both of us. “Are you crazy?” he said wildly. “That’s really stealing! And besides, won’t they miss it?”

But Cass was turning to me with a happy smile. “You know I bet it would work. I bet it really would.”

“But the dean—” Harve said weakly.

“Harvey,” Cass said firmly, “how long have you been at this school?”

Harve looked at her blankly. “Five years. Going on six.”

“Have you ever been in the geology museum?”

“No.”

“Have you ever known anybody to go into the museum?”
“No, but—”

“Have you ever even heard of anybody going into the museum?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Of course!” She grinned triumphantly. “Nobody ever goes there except maybe strangers and visiting professors. None of our people ever do. So who’s to know the meteor is missing? I’ll bet it’ll be weeks before they find out, and by that time we’ll be out of school and it’ll be summer!”

So we went to the museum and pinched the meteor.

We lugged it to my room. Seeing this one in the flesh, I could understand now why Cassie had been so suspicious of the silver one. This one was all pitted with holes and infinitely heavy. Harve had to help me lug the thing in, and when he finished he was gasping.

“I’m going home and go to bed,” he announced. “Back to my frat. Back to where friends care if a man lives or dies.”

“We’ll wait until tonight and then take this one out and dump it in the hole,” Cass said.

Harve murmured something incoherent and stalked out.

“Watch out for the dean,” Cass called gaily. “If he shows up, tell him you haven’t had a chance to return Mr. McMangan’s meteor yet.” Then she cocked her head to one side and regarded me cheerfully. “Breakfast?” she said.

But there was no time. The sun was fully up and vengeance is swift, as they say. Looking out the window, we saw the approaching figure of the Black Phantom himself—Kimmel, the dean of men. We backed into the room.

“Lock the door,” Cassie cried frantically.

“It doesn’t lock.”

“Oh, fine. If he catches me here, I’m really cooked. How will I explain being in your room at this hour?”

“And the meteor.” I dragged the meteor swiftly into the closet and beckoned Cass to follow. She came in and we closed the door just as the dean’s loud knock was heard.

We waited, panting. The dean knocked harder and we heard the door creak open. The closet was tiny and I could not bend down, but through the crack in the door I saw his grim face. When he saw the room was empty a baffled look came over it. He turned and walked out, not even closing my door.

“Whew!” Cassie breathed in my ear. “Boy, that was close. Open the door.”

I reached down and groped for the handle. It occurred to me after a brief search that there wasn’t any. Not on the inside. “It doesn’t open,” I said.

Cass groped.

“No handle,” I added helpfully.

“Some apartment,” Cass said testily. “Your front door doesn’t close and your closet door doesn’t open.”

“Well,” I said foolishly, “that’s how it goes.”

And suddenly I began to laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was pretty funny.

“What are you laughing at?”

I guffawed.

“How come you’re up so high?” she said.

“I’m standing on the meteor.”

“Oh.” She giggled. In a few moments we both were laughing hysterically.

“Have you ever,” I gasped, “have you ever…been locked in a closet…with a gorgeous girl and a hot meteor?”

Cassie roared. We both collapsed helplessly, and I leaned against her and then reached out and found her hand.

After a while I stopped laughing. “You use nice perfume,” I said.

“Glad you like it.”

I noticed it was beginning to get pretty warm. I let go her hand.

“I wonder when we’ll get out of here,” she said. Her voice sounded odd, sort of breathy.

“Nobody ever comes by,” I said. “Probably be here for hours.” I paused. “I don’t suppose you want me to break the door down?”

“No. No point in messing up a nice door like that.”

“Glad you think that way. Hate to do it. Fine door.”

We were silent. But the feel of her there in the dark next to me was overpowering. I began to have trouble with my breath.

“Doc?”

“Yes?”

“You sound funny. How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

“No, you don’t. Let me feel your forehead.”

Her hand came out of the black and went to my face, and my hands went along her arm and then she stepped up on the meteor and I was kissing her. Lord, I was kissing her. After a while I stopped and said, “Oh, my,” and went back to kissing her. She didn’t mind.

Eventually she said in my ear: “I was afraid of this.”

“Oh?”

“I always wanted you to do this. First time I ever saw you, that’s the way I felt. You scared me, honestly—I didn’t know what to do. And then you stopped asking me out and I thought, It’s all for the best; we have nothing in common.”

“The hell we don’t,” I said.

“That’s true. Oh, my goodness, that’s true.”

And I said, “Boy, what a team we’ll make! You with the science and me in the arts—what can stand against us?”

And we went back to kissing.

Sometime later that day Andy Baker came by and heard us and let us out. The rat.

So that night we buzzed back out to McMangan’s with the museum’s meteor. Harve came by to help us and sensed instantly from the way we were holding hands that all was not well for him, but he took it amazingly well. He was sniffling and sneezing and he said good-naturedly that he was better off free of a girl who would probably, sooner or later, have been the death of him.

But when we finally did get the meteor all the way up the hill and safely into the hole, Harve arose and began to make a long, violent speech as to how he had had it with meteors, by golly—he had had it forever. Never again in his life would he lift so much as a large pebble.

He was really just getting started when out from behind a large group of trees, shotgun in hand, came the long-overdue figure of McMangan.

“Oh, I gotcha! I gotcha! Crooks! Thieves! Robbers!”

He went on that way for a long while, the shotgun twitching ominously. He informed us with deep relish that he had already called the dean and the sheriff. I managed to point out finally that the meteor was back in the hole—it was still pretty dark and he hadn’t seen it—but though that slowed him up a bit he went on insisting that this was still a crime, still black skullduggery. We had no right dashing on and off his premises at these ungodly hours, and he was going to see…et cetera.

Well, Cass backed up against me and I held on to her. We were just a month away from getting our degrees, and now that Cass and I were about to do the orange-blossom bit I needed the degree desperately in order to support her. And it would be just like Dean Kimmel, that frosty soul, to throw me out as a lesson to other graduate students.

It was a sticky moment, and as I saw the gaunt black figure approaching I had only one hope—that the sight of the meteor back in the hole would mollify the man.

But I was in for a nasty shock. Kimmel had a large flashlight with him, and the first thing he spotted was the meteor in the hole. He stopped and snorted and then bent down to give it a closer look.

“Well, hello!” he said curiously. “Here’s a queer thing. Isn’t this our meteor? Yes, by Jupiter, it is. This belongs to the university. Note the little label on the side. What’s it doing out here?”

One couldn’t get mad at Cass for forgetting to remove that little label. I mean, it had been a long day. But at that moment, of course, all hope died. I stood woodenly glazed, to mix a metaphor mildly, while Kimmel turned to McMangan. The little man was slack-jawed.

“Whatayamean that’s your meteor? That’s my meteor! They just brung it back!”

Kimmel looked down at the man from a great height and then suddenly, surprisingly, began to chuckle. “I must say this is rather remarkable,” he said, grinning, while we stood staring at him.

“What is truly interesting, my friend,” Kimmel went on blandly, “is that this was your meteor—or, rather, this is the same meteor that fell on the Pendleton place in 1880. But I looked up the whole matter today in the university files. The newspaper did not mention it, but the meteor that fell on Pendleton’s property was given by Mr. Pendleton to the university in—ah—1885, as I recall. It was, then, this same meteor. Which is rather remarkable, don’t you think?”

He turned to regard me with a sort of high, snide humor. McMangan was speechless behind him.

“The point is,” Kimmel went on coolly, “what is our meteor doing out here?”

I waved my arms helplessly.

“And what exactly did you young ruffians find out here in the first place?”

I could see all was lost. I threw an arm despairingly around Cassie’s shoulders. I started to speak, but Kimmel cut me off.

“Well, well, well, this is rather an unfortunate affair. I’m afraid it can’t be overlooked, can’t at all. Well, come now, come—what was it that you people found out here?”

I gave up. “It’s in the lake.”

“What’s in the lake?”

“Well, we put it in a wheelbarrow and then the wheelbarrow went in the lake and then—”

Kimmel chuckled again. He didn’t let me finish. “Aha, the light! I begin to see. You found a rock or something—oh, this is quite remarkable—and bungled it into the lake and couldn’t get it out, and then when I ordered young Harvey to put it back of course you couldn’t, so you were at quite a loss.”

He smiled. I could see he was pleased with his capacity to piece the whole thing together from scraps, so I gave him rein. “Oh, this is very funny. But really, boy, you people take me much too literally. I must have frightened you, eh?” He chuckled again, turning to McMangan.

“I don’t mean to be harsh with these boys but I can’t help it. Got to rule with a firm hand, you know. But sometimes it’s laughable. I told this Harvey boy to get that meteor back in the hole and he couldn’t, so rather than risk further wrath he put back the only one he could find. I see. Shows commendable attention to orders, don’t you think? Plus a certain initiative. Well—” he turned to us—“I think you’ve had enough. No point in belaboring you.” He chuckled again and started away, but then turned back to McMangan.

“Your property, Mr. McMangan, is at the bottom of the lake. It is most probably a large rock or a piece off the parent meteor, and in either case is absolutely worthless. There is therefore no larceny involved. I seriously doubt that any court would take much interest in prosecuting these young people for trespassing, but even if they did, may I remind you that the university often has construction work to be done? And will not look kindly on your further annoyance in this matter? Thank you. Good night.”

He waved cheerily at us and then said absent-mindedly as he left: “All of you are on probation, of course.”

We left the silver in the lake and lugged the real meteor back to its rightful place and finally drove home. We mentioned going back for the silver, but Harvey had said his piece up on the hill and he stood by it. He offered us his share as a wedding present. The thing is still in the lake, as far as I know, and we plan to leave it there as a nest egg—maybe for the first of many children. Or at least until our calluses heal. We haven’t much time for meteors now anyway, and besides, we’re not allowed off campus.

One other thing—we took the chunk Cass broke off for assay purposes and had two rings made of it.

I thought that was rather a nice touch.

First published in Redbook, October 1960

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