The big puddle looked normal. John Ostrowski drove his car into it without a thought. Bang! The right front wheel dropped into a hidden pothole, splashing brown water up into the engine compartment. The car spluttered and died, leaving Ostrowski astonished and struggling with the sudden lack of power steering. He maneuvered to a stop on the shoulder.

"Dammit." That hole hadn't been half as big yesterday. Three days of heavy summer rain must have undermined the road. He ground the starter, but the car wouldn't turn over. He got out to examine the engine. It looked dirty and wet. Ostrowski was no mechanic. He slammed the Chevy's hood closed with one large hand and looked around. He lived a half mile or so further down the road, in this wooded section of town where there were few other houses.

There was no reason he couldn't walk home and return later for the car. Now that the rain had stopped, the walk would be tolerable if not exactly pleasant.

The air was cool and the surrounding woods gave off a thick earthy odor. There were no sounds save for the drip of water and the twittering of late-afternoon birds. The sun came out from behind the clouds, filling the glades with green light that spilled onto the road. The pebbles of the asphalt lay in a thin tepid stew of rainwater and worms.

A stray ray of sunlight hit the car's hood. Ostrowski sighed. He stepped around to the passenger door, opened it, and bent to lift the object on the seat: a large, heavy bell jar, destined to provide a temporary home for the humidity-loving fittonia clippings in the conservatory attached to his house.

He locked the car and turned to the road with the jar cradled in his arms and his battered old rain hat stuck on the back of his head.

He walked slowly, smoothly, almost majestically, not unlike a blimp. As his feet rose and fell, his small gray eyes peered here, glanced there, as if to provide clear passage for his large lumpish nose and the scraggly mustache hiding beneath it along his thin upper lip. Pink papery ears, secured on his head at right angles to his skull supported the rain hat. The color of his tie matched his eyes, purely by accident: after his wife left him he had happily stopped worrying about what in his wardrobe matched what.

As he walked, he considered his car. If it didn't start, he'd have to leave it for tomorrow. If it didn't start then, he'd have to call the garage. Preoccupied, he didn't hear the odd noise from the woods until it was repeated.

He halted. It came again. He couldn't identify it.

It was a strange sort of rattling clatter. Frowning, he turned toward the dripping wall of foliage to his right. The sound seemed to be coming from no more than ten feet away. It was like someone shaking a sheet of tinfoil.

What would someone be doing shaking tinfoil in the woods after a rainstorm?

He stepped off the road, ignoring the dripping grasses in the ditch, and found himself peering through a screen of branches into a clearing.

In the center of the treeless area, something floated about four feet off the ground. Ostrowski thrust his head forward, hunching his shoulders. His lower lip slowly sagged, exposing yellowish teeth.

It was a cloud, a little cloud no bigger than a toaster.

A minuscule web of white lighting flickered from it, followed by the rattling sound. A faint odor of ozone reached his nostrils.

He bit the sides of his tongue and chewed, making wet noises.

The cloud rattled and roiled. It was a perfect, functioning cumulonimbus, a basic anvil-head thundercloud, apparently normal in every respect--except for its size.

It looked small enough to fit inside his bell jar. Without debating with himself, he decided to capture the thing if he could. Carefully he detached the jar's ceramic base and moved into the glade.

Stalking the cloud was like trying to fish bits of shell out of a frying egg, in that some operant field relationship seemed to keep the thing at a distance from him. It also tended to avoid the trees and overhanging branches. He tried to recall something, anything, about electromagnetic energy from his high school physics course.

The cloud drifted this way, then that, and he became bolder as it eluded him. He would have it. He began making awkward lunges at it with the bell jar, coming closer each time, yet cringing: expecting to feel a sharp stab of lightning.

As he danced clumsily around the clearing, he wondered vaguely where the thing could have come from. How had it found its way down into this open space below the overhanging foliage?

Stretching like Nijinsky, Ostrowski managed to back the cloud toward a copse of ghostly white birch. Whatever kept it away from him kept it away from them, too. It hovered in mid-air, pulsating in electric dismay.

His eyes opened wide as he brought the opening of the jar down over the cloud and clapped the base into place. The little patch of vapor flickered. An arc of baby lightning forked out in vain against the thick glass. Ostrowski slumped, panting and red-faced.

The cloud was his.

As fast as he dared, burdened as he was, he hurried home. The anomalous size of his prize made him acutely conscious of the immensity of the oaks and maples around him. He felt like a gnome scurrying along under nodding ferns.

The courtyard at the end of his driveway was pleasantly cool in the deepening twilight. The conservatory shone wetly. It was an aluminum-strutted structure with Plexiglas panes, built on what had once been a porch at the southeast side of the house, directly across the courtyard from the garage.