Free All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By by John Farris

well-stocked library 100 feet in length on the ground floor. A portion of the estate is lease-farmed, crossed and recrossed by luxurious blackberry and lingonberry hedgerows, some of which are fishnetted during summer to discourage birds from stripping them clean—the 680-acre marsh contains one of England's first bird sanctuaries.
    A spring-fed race divides the estate (the spring water has long been valued for its supposed medicinal properties). There is a gristmill down where the race widens and yields its tumbled clarity to the dankly green River Ouse; a ruined friary dating from the fourteenth century; and an ornamental park half-heartedly kept up by the Fullerite Medical Missionary Society, which inherited the estate and uses it as the final home of those honorable men and women gone to seed, some prematurely, after long service in the grueling heat of Africa.
    On the morning the bomb exploded in the park at Hawkspurn, killing one old man instantly and causing great fear in the neighborhood—particularly among children boarding at the farm next door who recently had been evacuated from hard-hit sections of London and Manchester—there were a total of eight retired Fullerites and a staff of fourteen, mostly middle-aged women, in residence.
    A call was made to the local Civil Defense office shortly before 11 A.M. In turn the Bomb Disposal Unit at Driffield Aerodrome was alerted, and within the hour the BD lorry arrived.
    Lieutenant Ronad Kellow, R.E., soon discovered that something unique had transpired. A flash sufficiently brilliant to have been observed for at least a quarter-mile on a gorgeously clear day was not the result of any bomb or parachute mine the experts were familiar with. There was no crater, which signified a rare explosion above ground level, ruling out the possibility that a buried UXB had gone off. Also, no report of an unexploded bomb had ever come from the Hawkspurn area. An explosion above the ground was certainly feasible, but this close to Hawkspurn House any type of explosion involving more than a minimum burster charge would have created a shock wave strong enough to pulverize every window in the place. No one who was in the house at the time reported feeling the slightest bump. Only a couple of panes showed cracks, which examination proved had been there for many weeks.
    Testimony of several children who were bathing in a pond 200 yards from the park was, at best, confusing. All had been aware of the pale green flash, and two children facing the park when it occurred suffered painful but superficial corneal burns. It was as if they had tried to stare down the sun. Two children maintained there had been a terrific bang and roar, of the sort they were accustomed to hearing at home. The others vehemently challenged this observation, but said they had noticed a brief, hurricanelike wind.
    Lance Sergeant McDougal's sensitive nose detected no odor of TNT lingering anywhere in the park. No shrapnel damage was visible, yet trees, shrubs, the grass itself had been withered and bleached in a circle nearly fifty feet in diameter. And there was a victim, the poor man reportedly disfigured, all clothing ripped away by the force of whatever it was.
    Lieutenant Kellow didn't know, he only feared there might be more of them around: some novelty Jerry's armorers had concocted, "sapper funnies" the BD lads called them, although there was nothing at all amusing about the devastation caused by the pie-shaped butterfly bombs painted a bright yellow to attract curious children, nor the big ones that rained down and dug in but didn't go bang until some luckless soul set off a trembler switch or a sapper ran afoul of a new type of anti-handling fuse.
    After making a report to his group captain by telephone, Lieutenant Kellow sealed off Hawkspurn estate and began to conduct a thorough search for examples of small but deadly ordnance—a long-range shell, perhaps—loosed from German planes operating