99 Classic Science-Fiction Short Stories. Айзек Азимов
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was growing smaller and tighter again and had passed over Idaho Falls two hours ago raging and squawling. 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 was 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 scattered around a vicinity of several miles.
Towards 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 minutes 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 slowly 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 that glistened far off at the edge of the bowl near the next rise. They looked like bits of glass.
"The meteor, maybe?" queried Ed. I shrugged. We rode steadily on 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 cacti 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 had 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 itself 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 had 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 bubbles.
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 and, in 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 and heading for the other two. 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, smooth, and very glassy and iridescent, 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 tough 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.
Another thought occurred to me.
"Do you think these things could have carried some creatures?" I asked. Ed stared at me a while, bit his lip, looked slowly around. He shrugged his shoulders without saying anything.
"The oddness of the air," I went on, "maybe it was like the air of some other world. Maybe they were trying to make our own air more breathable to them?"
Ed didn't answer that one either. It didn't require any. And he didn't ask me whom I meant by "they."
"And what makes the stink?" Ed finally commented. This time I shrugged.
Around us the smell waxed and waned. As if breezes were playing with a stream of noxious vapor. And yet, I suddenly realized, no breezes were blowing. The air was quite still. But still the smell grew stronger at one moment and weaker at another.
It was as if some creature were moving silently about, leaving no trace of itself save its scent.
"Look!" said Ed suddenly. He pointed to the west. I looked and stared at the sky. The whole west was a mass of seething dark clouds. But it was a curiously arrested mass. There was a sharply defined edge to the area—an edge of blue against which the black clouds piled in vain and we could see lightnings crackle and flash in the storm. Yet no wind reached us and no thunder and the sky was serene