“That Canadian cold front must have reached the other side of the mountains,” I said, waving toward the great rampart of the Rockies to the East. “We’re probably feeling the only tendril of it to get over.”
“That’s sort of odd,” Ed said. “There shouldn’t be any
getting over at all. It must be a very powerful front.”
I nodded and wondered what the boys in the Bureau were getting on it. Probably snowfall in the northern part of the state. If I had known what the Chief knew that morning, I might have started back in a hurry. But neither of us did, and I guess we saw something that no one else has, as a result.
For, at the Bureau, the Chief knew that morning that we were in for some extraordinary weather. He predicted for the Rock Springs paper the wildest storm ever. You see, the southern warm front had definitely gotten a salient through by that time. It was already giving Salt Lake City one of the hottest days on record, and what was more, the warm wave was coming our way steadily.
The next thing was that storm from the west. It was growing smaller and tighter again and had passed over Idaho Falls two hours earlier, raging and squalling. It was heading in our direction like an arrow from a bow.
And finally the cold front had done the impossible. It was beginning to sweep over the heights and to swoop down into the Divide Basin, heading straight for the warm front coming north.
And there were Ed and I with a premonition and nothing more. We were riding along right into the conflux of the whole mess, and we were looking for meteors. We were looking for what we expected to be some big craters or pockmarks in the ground and a bunch of pitted iron rocks scattered around a vicinity of several miles.
Toward ten that morning we came over a slight rise and dipped down into a bowl-shaped region. I stopped and stared around. Ed wheeled and came back.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Notice anything funny in the air?” I asked and gave a deep sniff.
Ed drew in some sharp breaths and stared around. “Sort of odd,” he finally admitted. “Nothing I. can place, but it’s sort of odd.”
“Yes,” I answered. “Odd is the word. I can’t place anything wrong, but it seems to smell differently than the air did a few moments ago.” I stared around and wrinkled my brow.
“I think I know now,” I finally said. “The temperature’s changed somewhat. It’s warmer.”
Ed frowned. “Colder, I’d say.”
I became puzzled. I waved my hands through the air a bit. “I think you’re right; I must be wrong. Now it feels a bit colder.”
Ed walked his horse a bit. I stared after him.
“Y’know,” I finally said, “I think I’ve got it. It’s colder, but it smells like warm air. I don’t know if you can quite understand what I’m driving at. It smells as if the temperature should be steaming, yet actually it’s sort of chilly. It doesn’t smell natural.”
Ed nodded. He was puzzled, and so was I. There was something wrong here. Something that got on our nerves.
Far ahead I saw something sparkle. I stared as we rode and then mentioned it to Ed. He looked, too.
There was something, no, several things far off at the edge of the bowl near the next rise, that glistened. They looked like bits of glass.
“The meteor, maybe?” queried Ed. I shrugged. We rode on steadily in that direction.
“Say, something smells funny here,” Ed remarked, stopping again.
I came up next to him. He was right. The sense of strangeness in the air had increased, the nearer we got to the glistening things. It was still the same—warm-cold. There was something else again. Something like vegetation in the air. Like something growing, only there still wasn’t any more growth than the usual cactus and sage. It smelled differently from any other growing things, and yet it smelled like vegetation.
It was unearthly, that air. I can’t describe it any other way. It was unearthly. Plant smells that couldn’t come from any plant or forest I ever encountered, a cold warmness unlike anything that meteorology records.
Yet it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t frightening. It was just peculiar. It was mystifying.
We could see the sparkling things now. They were like bubbles of glass. Big, iridescent, glassy balls lying like some giant child’s marbles on the desert.
We knew then that, if they were the meteors, they were like none that had ever been recorded before. We knew we had made a find that would go on record, and yet we weren’t elated. We were ill at ease. It was the funny weather that did it.
I noticed then for the first time that there were black clouds beginning to show far in the west. It was the first wave of the storm.
We rode nearer the strange bubbles. We could see them clearly now. They seemed cracked a bit, as if they had broken. One had a gaping hole in its side. It must have been hollow, just a glassy shell.
Ed and I stopped short at the same time. Or rather our horses did. We were willing, too, but our mounts got the idea just as quickly. It was the smell.
There was a new odor in the air. A sudden one. It had just that instant wafted across our nostrils. It was at first repelling. That’s why we stopped. But sniffing it a bit took a little of the repulsion away. It wasn’t so very awful.
In fact, it wasn’t actually bad. It was hard to describe. Not exactly like anything I’ve ever smelled before. Vaguely it was acrid, and vaguely it was dry. Mostly I would say that it smelled like a curious mixture of burning rubber and zinc ointment.
It grew stronger as we sat there, and then it began to die away a bit as a slight breeze moved it on. We both got the impression at the same time that it had come from the broken glass bubble.
We rode on cautiously.
“Maybe the meteors landed in an alkali pool and there’s been some chemical reaction going on,” I opined to Ed.
“Could be,” he said, and we rode nearer.
The black clouds were piling up now in the west, and a faint breeze began to stir. Ed and I dismounted to look into the odd meteors.
“Looks like we better get under cover till it blows over,” he remarked.
“We’ve got a few minutes, I think,” I replied. “Besides, by the rise right here is just about the best cover around.”
Back at the Weather Station, the temperature was rising steadily and the Chief was getting everything battened down. The storm was coming next, and, meeting the thin edge of the warm-front wedge which was now passing Rock Springs, would create havoc. Then the cold wave might get that far because it was over the Divide. In a few minutes all hell would break loose. The Chief wondered where we were.
We were looking into the hole in the nearest bubble. The things—they must have been the meteors we were looking for—were about twelve feet in diameter and pretty nearly perfect spheres. They were thick-shelled and smooth and very glassy and iridescent and like mother-of-pearl on the inside. They were quite hollow, and we couldn’t figure out what they were made of and what they could be. Nothing I had read or learned could explain the things. That they were meteoric in origin I was sure because there was the evidence of the scattered ground and broken rocks about to show the impact. Yet they must have been terrifically strong or something, because, save for the few cracks and the hole in one, they were intact.
Inside, they stank of that rubber-zinc smell. It was powerful. Very powerful.
The stink had obviously come from the bubbles—there was no pool around.
It suddenly occurred to me that we had breathed air of some other world. For if these things were meteoric and the smell had come from the inside, then it was no air of Earth that smelled like burning rubber and zinc ointment. It was the air of somewhere, I don’t know where, somewhere out among the endless reaches of the stars. Somewhere out there, out beyond the sun.