*Nice vernacular video. Maybe it's just me, but this harmless, hack-friendly pitch sure has the strong vibe of being the first two minutes of a really good TWILIGHT ZONE episode. Cubic centimeter by cubic centimeter, the infectious Clay From Out of Space eats its way into everything!
"He and his wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before.
"It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night.
"The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft. (((Uh-oh))) It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; (((you don't say))) and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken less than they thought.
"The day after that-all this was in June of '82-the professors had trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory..."
