We investigate the possibility that gamma-ray bursts originate in a
concentric spherical shell with a given average redshift and find that this is
indeed compatible with the data from the third BATSE (3B) catalog. It is also
shown that there is enough freedom in the choice of unknown burst properties to
allow even for extremely large distances to the majority of bursts. Therefore,
we speculate about an early, and very energetic, origin of bursts, and suggest
that they come from phase transitions in massive objects of pure quark matter,
left over from the Big Bang.Comment: 11 pages, Latex, 3 postscript figures, to be publ in the Proc of the
Joint Meeting of the Networks 'The Fundamental Structure of Matter' and
'Tests of the Electroweak Symmetry Breaking', Ouranoupolis, Greece, May 199
