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Make Mine Homogenized
By Rick Raphael
"SHOO," Hetty Thompson cried, waving her battered old felt hat at the clucking cluster of hens
eddying around her legs as she plowed through the flock towards the chicken house. "Scat.
You, Solomon!" she called out, directing her words at the bobbing comb of the big rooster
strutting at the edge of the mob. "Don't just stand there like a satisfied cowhand after
a night in Reno. Get these noisy females outta my way." She batted at the hens and they scattered
with angry squawks of protest. Hetty paused in the doorway of the chicken
house to allow her eyes to become accustomed to the cool gloom after the bright glare of
the ranch yard. She could feel the first trickles of sweat forming under the man's shirt she
was wearing as the hot, early morning Nevada sun beat down on her back in the doorway.
Moving carefully but quickly through the nests, she reached and groped for the eggs she knew
would be found in the scattered straw. As she placed each find carefully in the bucket
she carried, her lips moved in a soundless count. When she had finished, she straightened
up and left the chicken house, her face reflecting minor irritation.
Again the hens swirled about her, hoping for the handfuls of cracked corn she usually tossed
to them. On the other side of the yard Solomon stepped majestically along the edge of the
vegetable garden, never crossing the hoed line separating garden from yard.
"You'd better stay over there, you no-account Lothario," Hetty growled. "Five eggs short
this morning and all you do is act like you were just the business agent for this bunch
of fugitives from a dumpling pot." Solomon cocked his head and stared Hetty down. She
paused at the foot of the backporch steps and threw the rooster a final remark. "You
don't do any better than this you're liable to wind up in that pot yourself." Solomon
gave a scornful cluck. "Better still, I'll get me a young rooster in here and take over
your job." Solomon let out a squawk and took out at a dead run, herding three hens before
him towards the chicken house. With a satisfied smile of triumph, Hetty climbed
the steps and crossed to the kitchen door. She turned and looked back across the yard
towards the barn and corrals. "Barneeeeey," Hetty yelled. "Ain't you finished
with that milking yet?" "Comin' now, Miz Thompson," came the reply
from the barn. Hetty let the screen door slam behind her as she walked into the kitchen
and placed the bucket of eggs on the big work table. She had her arm up to wipe her moist
forehead on the sleeve of her shirt when she spotted the golden egg lying in the middle
of the others in the galvanized bucket. She froze in the arm-lifted position for several
seconds, staring at the dully glowing egg. Then she slowly reached out and picked it
up. It was slightly heavier than a regular egg, but for the dull, gold-bronze metallic
appearance of the shell, looked just like any of the other twenty-odd eggs in the bucket.
She was still holding it in the palm of her hand when the kitchen door again slammed and
the handy man limped into the room. He carried two pails of milk across the kitchen and set
them down near the sink. "Whatcha lookin' at, Miz Thompson?" Barney
Hatfield asked. Hetty frowned at the egg in her hand without
answering. Barney limped around the side of the table for a closer look. Sunlight streaming
through the kitchen windows glinted on the shell of the odd egg. Barney's eyes grew round.
"Now ain't that something," he whispered in awe.
Hetty started as though someone had snapped their fingers in front of her staring eyes.
Her normal look of practical dubiousness returned. "Huh," she snorted. "Even had me fooled for
a second. Something wrong with this egg but it sure is shootin' ain't gold. One of them
fool hens must of been pecking in the fertilizer storeroom and got herself an overdose of some
of them minerals in that stuff. "What are you staring at, you old fool," she
glared at Barney. "It ain't gold." Hetty laid the egg at one side of the table. She walked
to the sink and took a clean, two-gallon milk can from the drainboard and set it in the
sink to fill it from the pails of rich, frothy milk Barney had brought in the pails.
"Sally come fresh this morning, Miz Thompson," he said. "Got herself a real fine little bull
calf." Hetty looked at the two pails of milk. "Well,
where's the rest of the milk, then?" "That's Queenie's milk," Barney said. "Sally's
is still out on the porch." "Well bring it in before the sun clabbers
it." "Can't," Barney said.
Hetty swung around and glared at him. "What do you mean, you can't? You suddenly come
down with the glanders?" "No'm, it's just that Sally's milk ain't no
good," he replied. A frown spread over Hetty's face as she hoisted
one of the milk pails and began pouring into the can in the sink. "What's wrong with it,
Barney? Sally seem sick or something?" she asked.
Barney scratched his head. "I don't rightly know, Miz Thompson. That milk looks all right,
or at least, almost all right. It's kinda thin and don't have no foam like you'd expect
milk to have. But mostly, it sure don't smell right and it danged well don't taste right.
"Phooey." He made a face at the memory of the taste. "I stuck my finger in it when it
looked kinda ***, and took a taste. It shore tasted lousy."
"You probably been currying that mangey old horse of yours before you went to milking,"
Hetty snorted, "and tasted his cancerous old hide on your fingers. I've told you for the
last time to wash your hands before you go to milking them cows. I didn't pay no eighteen
hundred dollars for that prize, registered Guernsey just to have you give her bag fever
with your dirty hands." "That ain't so, Miz Thompson," Barney cried
indignantly. "I did too, wash my hands. Good, too. I wuzn't near my horse this morning.
That milk just weren't no good." Hetty finished pouring the milk into the cans
and after putting the cans in the refrigerator, wiped her hands on her jeans and went out
onto the porch, Barney trailing behind her. She bent over and sniffed at the two milk
pails setting beside the door. "Whew," she exclaimed, "it sure does smell funny. Hand
me that dipper, Barney." Barney reached for a dipper hanging on a nail
beside the kitchen door. Hetty dipped out a small quantity of the milk, sipped, straightened
up with a jerk and spewed the milk out into the yard. "Yaawwwk," she spluttered, "that
tastes worse 'n Diesel oil." She stirred distastefully at the swirling,
flat-looking liquid in the pails and then turned back to the kitchen. "I never saw the
like of it," she exclaimed. "Chickens come out with some kind of sorry-looking egg and
now, in the same morning, an eighteen hundred dollar registered, fresh Guernsey gives out
hogwash instead of milk." She stared thoughtfully across the yard at the distant mountains,
now shimmering in the hot, midmorning sun. "Guess we could swill the hogs with that milk,
rather'n throw it out, Barney. I never seen anything them Durocs wouldn't eat. When you
get ready to put the other swill in the cooker, toss that milk in with it and cook it up for
the hogs." Hetty went back into her kitchen and Barney
turned and limped across the yard to the tractor shed. He pulled the brim of his sweat-stained
Stetson over his eyes and squinted south over the heat-dancing sage and sparse grasslands
of Circle T range. Dust devils were pirouetting in the hazy distance towards the mountains
forming a corridor leading to the ranch. A dirt road led out of the yard and crossed
an oiled county road about five miles south of the ranch. The county road was now the
only link the Circle T had to the cattle shipping pens at Carson City. The dirt road arrowed
south across the range but fifteen miles from the ranch, a six-strand, new, barbed-wire
fence cut the road. A white metal sign with raised letters proclaimed "Road Closed. U.S.
Government Military Reservation. Restricted Area. Danger—Peligre. Keep Out."
The taut bands of wire stretched east and west of the road for more than twenty miles
in each direction, with duplicates of the metal sign hung on the fence every five hundred
yards. Then the wires turned south for nearly a hundred miles, etching in skin-blistering,
sun-heated strands, the outlines of the Nevada atomic testing grounds at Frenchman's Flat.
When the wire first went up, Hetty and her ranching neighbors had screamed to high heaven
and high congressmen about the loss of the road and range. The fence stayed up. Now they
had gotten used to the idea and had even grown blasé about the frequent nuclear blasts that
rattled the desert floor sixty miles from ground zero.
Barney built a fire under the big, smoke-blackened cauldron Hetty used for cooking the hog swill.
Dale Hamilton, the county agent, had given Hetty a long talk on the dangers of feeding
the pigs, raw, uncooked and possibly contaminated, garbage. When Hamilton got graphic about what
happened to people who ate pork from such hogs, Hetty turned politely green and had
Barney set up the cooking cauldron. After dumping the kitchen slops into the pot,
Barney hiked back across the yard to get the two pails of bad milk.
Hetty was sitting at the kitchen table, putting the eggs into plastic refrigerator dishes
when the hog slop exploded in a whooshing roar, followed a split second later by an
even louder blast that rocked the ranch buildings. The eggs flew across the room as the lid of
the slop cauldron came whistling through the kitchen window in a blizzard of flying glass
and buried itself, edgewise, in the wall over the stove. Hetty slammed backwards headfirst
into a heap of shattered eggs. A torrent of broken plaster, and crockery fragments rained
on her stunned figure. Through dazed eyes, she saw a column of purple-reddish fire rising
from the yard. A woman who has been thrown twenty-three times
from a pitching bronco and kicked five times in the process, doesn't stay dazed long. Pawing
dripping egg yokes and plaster from her face, Hetty Thompson struggled to her feet and staggered
to the kitchen door. "Barneeey," she bawled, "you all right?"
The column of weird-colored flame had quickly died and only a few flickering pieces of wood
from the cauldron fire burned in scattered spots about the yard. Of the cauldron, there
wasn't a sign. "Barney," she cried anxiously, "where are
you?" "Here I am, Miz Thompson." Barney's blackened
face peered around the corner of the tractor shed. "You O.K., Miz Thompson?"
"What in thunderation happened?" Hetty called out. "You try to build a fire with dynamite
for kindling?" Shaken but otherwise unharmed, Barney painfully
limped over to the ranch house porch. "Don't ask me what happened, m'am," he said.
"I just poured that milk into the slop pot and then put the lid back on and walked off.
I heered this big 'whoosh' and turned around in time to see the lid fly off and the kettle
begin to tip into the fire and then there was one helluva blast. It knocked me clean
under the tractor shed." He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette and shakily lighted
it. Hetty peered out over the yard and then looking
up, gasped. Perched like a rakish derby hat on the arm of the towering pump windmill was
the slop cauldron. "Well I'll be...." Hetty Thompson said.
"You sure you didn't pour gas on that fire to make it burn faster, Barney Hatfield?"
she barked at the handy man. "No siree," Barney declaimed loudly, "there
weren't no gas anywhere near that fire. Only thing I poured out was that there bad milk."
He paused and scratched his head. "Reckon that funny milk coulda done that, Miz Thompson?
There ain't no gas made what'll blow up nor burn so funny as that did."
Hetty snorted. "Whoever heard of milk blowing up, you old idiot?" A look of doubt spread.
"You put all that milk in there?" "No'm, just the one bucket." Barney pointed
to the other pail beside the kitchen door, now half-empty and standing in a pool of liquid
sloshed out by the blast wave. Hetty studied the milk pail for a minute and then resolutely
picked it up and walked out into the yard. "Only one way to find out," she said. "Get
me a tin can, Barney." She poured about two tablespoons of the milk
into the bottom of the can while Barney collected a small pile of kindling. Removing the milk
pail to a safe distance, Hetty lighted the little pile of kindling, set the tin can atop
the burning wood and scooted several yards away to join Barney who had been watching
from afar. In less than a minute a booming whoosh sent a miniature column of purple,
gaseous flame spouting from the can. "Well whadda you know about that?" Hetty exclaimed
wonderingly. The can had flown off the fire a few feet
but didn't explode. Hetty went back to the milk pail and collecting less than a teaspoon
full in the water dipper, walked to the fire. Standing as far back as she could and still
reach over the flames, she carefully sprinkled a few drops of the liquid directly into the
fire and then jumped back. Miniature balls of purple flame erupted from the fire before
she could move. Pieces of flaming kindling flew in all directions and one slammed Barney
across the back of the neck and sent a shower of sparks down his back.
The handy man let out a yowl of pain and leaped for the watering trough beside the corral,
smoke trailing behind him. Hetty thoughtfully surveyed the scene of her experiment from
beneath raised eyebrows. Then she grunted with satisfaction, picked up the remaining
milk in the pail and went back to the ranch house. Barney climbed drippingly from the
horse trough. The kitchen was a mess. Splattered eggs were
over everything and broken glass, crockery and plaster covered the floor, table and counters.
Only one egg remained unbroken. That was the golden egg. Hetty picked it up and shook it.
There was a faint sensation of something moving inside the tough, metallic-looking shell.
It shook almost as a normal egg might, but not quite. Hetty set the strange object on
a shelf and turned to the task of cleaning up.
Johnny Culpepper, the ranch's other full-time hand and Hetty's assistant manager, drove
the pickup into the yard just before noon. He parked in the shade of the huge cottonwood
tree beside the house and bounced out with an armload of mail and newspapers. Inside
the kitchen door, he dumped the mail on the sideboard and started to toss his hat on a
wall hook when he noticed the condition of the room. Hetty was dishing out fragrant,
warmed-over stew into three lunch dishes on the table. She had cleaned up the worst of
the mess and changed into a fresh shirt and jeans. Her iron-gray hair was pulled back
in a still-damp knot at the back after a hasty scrubbing to get out the gooey mixture of
eggs and plaster. "Holy smoke, Hetty," Johnny said. "What happened
here? Your pressure kettle blow up?" His eyes widened when he saw the lid of the slop cauldron
still embedded in the wall over the stove. His gaze tracked back and took in the shattered
window. "Had an accident," Hetty said matter-of-factly,
putting the last dishes on the table. "Tell you about it when we eat. Now you go wash
up and call Barney. I want you to put some new glass in that window this afternoon and
get that danged lid outta the wall." Curious and puzzled, Johnny washed at the
kitchen sink and then walked to the door to shout for Barney. On the other side of the
yard, Barney released the pump windmill clutch. While Johnny watched from the porch, the weight
of the heavy slop cauldron slowly turned the big windmill and as the arm adorned by the
kettle rotated downward, the cast-iron pot slipped off and fell to the hard-packed ground
with a booming clang. "Well, for the luvva Pete," Johnny said in
amazement. "Hey, Barney, time to eat. C'mon in."
Barney trudged across the yard and limped into the kitchen to wash. They sat down to
the table. "Now just what have you two been up to," Johnny demanded as they attacked the
food-laden dishes. Between mouthfuls, the two older people gave
him a rundown on the morning's mishaps. The more Johnny heard, the wilder it sounded.
Johnny had been a part of the Circle T since he was ten years old. That was the year Hetty
*** him out of the hands of a Carson City policeman who had been in the process of hauling
the ragged and dirty youngster to the station house for swiping a box of cookies from a
grocery store. Johnny's mother was dead and his father, once the town's best mechanic,
had turned into the town's best drunk. During the times his father slept one off,
either in the shack the man and boy occupied at the edge of town, or in the local lockup,
Johnny ran wild. Hetty took the boy to the ranch for two reasons.
Mainly it was the empty ache in her heart since the death of Big Jim Thompson a year
earlier following a ranch tractor accident that had crushed his chest. The other was
her well-hidden disappointment that she had been childless. Hetty's bluff, weathered features
would never admit to loneliness or heartache. Beneath the surface, all the warmth and love
she had went out to the scared but belligerent youngster. But she never let much affection
show through until Johnny had become part of her life. Johnny's father died the following
winter after pneumonia brought on by a night of lying drunk in the cold shack during a
blizzard. It was accepted without legal formality around the county that Johnny automatically
became Hetty's boy. She cuffed and comforted him into a gawky-happy
adolescence, pushed him through high school and then, at eighteen, sent him off to the
University of California at Davis to learn what the pundits of the United States Department
of Agriculture had to say about animal husbandry and ranch management.
When Hetty and Barney had finished their recitation, Johnny wore a look of frank disbelief. "If
I didn't know you two better, I'd say you both been belting the bourbon bottle while
I was gone. But this I've got to see." They finished lunch and, after Hetty stacked
the dishes in the sink, trooped out to the porch where Johnny went through the same examination
of the milk. Again, a little fire was built in the open safety of the yard and a few drops
of the liquid used to produce the same technicolored, combustive effects.
"Well, what do you know," Johnny exclaimed, "a four hundred octane Guernsey cow!"
Johnny kicked out the fire and carried the milk pail to the tractor shed. He parked the
milk on a workbench and gathered up an armful of tools to repair the blast-torn kitchen.
He started to leave but when the milk bucket caught his eye, he unloaded the tools and
fished around under the workbench for an empty five-gallon gasoline can. He poured the remaining
milk into the closed gasoline can and replaced the cap. Then he took his tools and a pane
of glass from an overhead rack and headed for the house.
Hetty came into the kitchen as he was prying at the cauldron lid in the wall.
"You're going to make a worse mess before you're through," she said, "so I'll just let
you finish and then clean up the whole mess afterwards. I got other things to do anyway."
She jammed a man's old felt hat on her head and left the house. Barney was unloading the
last of the supplies Johnny had brought from Carson in the truck. Hetty shielded her eyes
against the metallic glare of the afternoon sun. "Gettin' pretty dry, Barney. Throw some
salt blocks in the pickup and I'll run them down to the south pasture and see if the pumps
need to be turned on. "And you might get that wind pump going in
case we get a little breeze later this afternoon. But in any case, better run the yard pump
for an hour or so and get some water up into the tank. I'll be back as soon as I take a
ride through the pasture. I want to see how that Angus yearling is coming that I picked
out for house beef." A few minutes later, Hetty in the pickup disappeared
behind a hot swirl of yellow dust. Barney ambled to the cool pump house beneath the
towering windmill. An electric motor, powered either from the REA line or from direct current
stored in a bank of wet cell batteries, bulked large in the small shed. To the left, a small,
gasoline-driven generator supplied standby power if no wind was blowing to turn the arm-driven
generator or if the lines happened to be down, as was often the case in the winter.
Barney threw the switch to start the pump motor. Nothing happened. He reached for the
light switch to test the single bulb hanging from a cord to the ceiling. Same nothing.
Muttering darkly to himself, he changed the pump engine leads to DC current and closed
the switch to the battery bank. The engine squeaked and whined slowly but when Barney
threw in the clutch to drive the pump, it stopped and just hummed faintly. Then he opened
the AC fuse box. Johnny had freed the cauldron lid and was
knocking out bits of broken glass from the kitchen window frame before putting in the
new glass when Barney limped into the room. "That pot busted the pump house 'lectric line,
Johnny, when it went sailing," he said. "Miz Thompson wants to pump up some water and on
top of that, the batteries are down. You got time to fix the line?"
Johnny paused and surveyed the kitchen. "I'm going to be working here for another hour
anyway so Hetty can clean up when she gets back. Why don't you fire up the gasoline kicker
for now and I'll fix the line when I get through here," he said.
"O.K.," Barney nodded and turned to leave. "Oh, forgot to ask you. Miz Thompson tell
you about the egg?" "What egg?" Johnny asked.
"The gold one." Johnny grinned. "Sure, and I saw the goose
when I came in. And you're Jack and the windmill is your beanstalk. Go climb it, Barney and
cut out the fairy tales." "Naw, Johnny," Barney protested, "I ain't
kidding. Miz Thompson got a gold egg from the hens this morning. At least, it looks
kinda like gold but she says it ain't. See, here it is." He reached into the cupboard
where Hetty had placed the odd egg. He walked over and handed it to Johnny who was sitting
on the sink drain counter to work on the shattered window.
The younger man turned the egg over in his hand. "It sure feels funny. Wonder what the
inside looks like?" He banged the egg gently against the edge of the drain board. When
it didn't crack, he slammed it harder, but then realizing that if it did break suddenly,
it would squish onto the floor, he put the egg on the counter and tapped it with his
hammer. The shell split and a clear liquid poured
out on to the drain board, thin and clear, not glutenous like a normal egg white. A small,
reddish ball, obviously the yolk, rolled across the board, fell into the sink and broke into
powdery fragments. A faint etherlike odor arose from the mess.
"I guess Miz Thompson was right," Barney said. "She said that hen musta been pecking in the
fertilizer chemicals. Never seen no egg like that before."
"Yeh," Johnny said puzzledly. "Well, so much for that." He tossed the golden shell to one
side and turned back to his glass work. Barney left for the pumphouse.
Inside the pumphouse, Barney opened the gasoline engine tank and poked a stick down to test
the fuel level. The stick came out almost dry. With another string of mutterings, he
limped across the yard to the tractor shed for a gas can. Back in the pumphouse, he poured
the engine tank full, set the gas can aside and then, after priming the carburetor, yanked
on the starter pull rope. The engine caught with a spluttering roar and began racing madly.
Barney lunged for the throttle and cut it back to idle, but even then, the engine was
running at near full speed. Then Barney noticed the white fluid running down the side of the
engine tank and dripping from the spout of the gasoline can. He grinned broadly, cut
in the pump clutch and hurriedly limped across the yard to the kitchen.
"Hey, Johnny," he called, "did you put that milk o' Sally's into a gas can?"
Johnny leaned through the open kitchen window. "Yeh, why?"
"Well, I just filled the kicker with it by accident, and man, you orter hear that engine
run," Barney exclaimed. "Come see." Johnny swung his legs through the window and
dropped lightly to the yard. The two men were halfway across the yard from the pumphouse
when a loud explosion ripped the building. Parts of the pump engine flew through the
thin walls like shrapnel. A billowing cloud of purple smoke welled out of the ruptured
building as Johnny and Barney flattened themselves against the hot, packed earth. Flames licked
up from the pump shed. The men ran for the horse trough and grabbing pails of water,
raced for the pumphouse. The fire had just started into the wooden walls of the building
and a few splashes of water doused the flames. They eyed the ruins of the gasoline engine.
"Holy cow," Johnny exclaimed, "that stuff blew the engine right apart." He gazed up
at the holes in the pumphouse roof. "Blew the cylinders and head right out the roof.
Holy cow!" Barney was pawing at the pump and electric
motor. "Didn't seem to hurt the pump none. Guess we better get that 'lectric line fixed
though, now that we ain't got no more gas engine."
The two men went to work on the pump motor. The broken line outside the building was spliced
and twenty minutes later, Johnny threw the AC switch. The big, electric motor spun into
action and settled into a workmanlike hum. The overhead light dimmed briefly when the
pump load was thrown on and then the slip-slap sound of the pump filled the shed. They watched
and listened for a couple of minutes. Assured that the pump was working satisfactorily,
they left the wrecked pumphouse. Johnny was carrying the gasoline can of milk.
"Good thing you set this off to one side where it didn't get hit and go off," he said. "The
way this stuff reacts, we'd be without a pump, engine, or windmill if it had.
"Barney, be a good guy and finish putting in that glass for me will you? I've got the
frame all ready to putty. I've got me some fiddlin' and figurin' to do."
Johnny angled off to the tractor and tool shed and disappeared inside. Barney limped
into the kitchen and went to work on the window glass. From the tractor shed came the sounds
of an engine spluttering, racing, backfiring and then, just idling.
When Hetty drove back into the ranch yard an hour or so later, Johnny was rodeoing the
farm tractor around the yard like a teen-ager, his face split in a wide grin. She parked
the truck under the tree as Johnny drove the tractor alongside and gunned the engine, still
grinning. "What in tarnation is this all about?" Hetty
asked as she climbed down from the pickup. "Know what this tractor's running on?" Johnny
shouted over the noise of the engine. "Of course I do, you young idiot," she exclaimed.
"It's gasoline." "Wrong," Johnny yelled triumphantly. "It's
running on Sally's milk!" The next morning, Johnny had mixed up two
hundred gallons of Sally's Fuel and had the pickup, tractor, cattle truck and his 1958
Ford and Hetty's '59 Chevrolet station wagon all purring on the mixture.
Mixing it was a simple process after he experimented and found the right proportions. One quart
of pure Sally's milk to one hundred gallons of water. He had used the two remaining quarts
in the gasoline can to make the mixture but by morning, Sally had graced the ranch with
five more gallons of the pure concentrate. Johnny carefully stored the concentrated milk
in a scoured fifty-five gallon gasoline drum in the tool shed.
"We've hit a gold mine," he told Hetty exultantly. "We're never going to have to buy gasoline
again. On top of that, at the rate Sally's turning this stuff out, we can start selling
it in a couple of weeks and make a fortune." That same morning, Hetty collected three more
of the golden eggs. "Set 'em on the shelf," Johnny said, "and
when we go into town next time I'll have Dale look at them and maybe tell us what those
hens have been into. I'll probably go into town again Saturday for the mail."
But when Saturday came, Johnny was hobbling around the ranch on a wrenched ankle, suffered
when his horse stumbled in a gopher hole and tossed him.
"You stay off that leg," Hetty ordered. "I'll go into town for the mail. Them girls can
just struggle along without your romancing this week." Johnny made a wry face but obeyed
orders. "Barneeey," Hetty bawled, "bring me a quarter
of beef outta the cooler." Barney stuck his head out of the barn and nodded. "I been promising
some good beef to Judge Hatcher for a month of Sundays now," Hetty said to Johnny.
"If you're going to stop by the courthouse, how about taking those crazy eggs of yours
into the county agent's office and leave them there for analysis," Johnny suggested. He
hobbled into the kitchen to get the golden eggs.
Barney arrived with the chilled quarter of beef wrapped in burlap. He tossed it in the
bed of the pickup and threw more sacks over it to keep it cool under the broiling, midmorning
sun. Johnny came out with the eggs in a light cardboard box stuffed with crumpled newspapers.
He wedged the box against the side of beef in the forward corner of the truck bed. "One
more thing, Hetty," he said. "I've got a half drum of drain oil in the tractor shed that
I've been meaning to trade in for some gearbox lube that Willy Simons said he'd let me have.
Can you drop it off at his station and pick up the grease?"
"Throw it on," Hetty said, "while I go change into some town clothes."
Johnny started to hobble down the porch steps when Barney stopped him. "I'll get it boy,
you stay off that ankle." Barney climbed into the pickup and drove it around to the tractor
shed. He spotted two oil drums in the gloomy shed. He tilted the nearest one and felt liquid
slosh near the halfway mark, then rolled it out the door. Barney heaved it into the truck
bed, stood it on end against the cab and drove the pickup back to the ranch house door as
Hetty came out wearing clean jeans and a bright, flowered blouse. Her gray hair was tucked
in a neat bun beneath a blocked Stetson hat. She climbed into the truck, waved to the two
men and drove out the yard. As she bumped over the cattle guard at the gate, the wooden
plug that Johnny had jury-rigged to cork the gasoline drum with its twenty-gallon load
of pure Sally's milk, bounced out. A small geyser of white fluid shot out of
the drum as she hit another bump and then the pickup went jolting down the ranch road,
little splashes of Sally's milk sloshing out with each bump and forming a pool on the bottom
of the truck. When Hetty cowboyed onto the county road, the drum tipped dangerously and
then bounced back onto its base. This time a fountain of milk geysered out and splashed
heavily into the box of golden eggs. Hetty drove on.
But not for long. With a ranch woman's disregard for watching
the road, Hetty constantly scanned the nearby range lands where small bands of her cherished
black Angus grazed. She prided herself on the fact that despite her sixty years, her
eyes were still sharp enough to spot a worm-ridden cow at a thousand yards.
Two miles after she turned onto the county road, which ran through Circle T range land,
her roving gaze took in a cow and calf on a hillside a few hundred yards south of the
road. Hetty slowed the pickup to fifty miles an hour and squinted into the sun. She grunted
with satisfaction and slammed on the brakes. The truck swerved and skidded to a halt at
the left side of the deserted road. Hetty leaped from the truck and began a fast walk
up the hillside for a closer look at the cow and calf.
She never heard the dull thump of the milk drum tipping onto the edge of the truck bed.
Hetty topped the hill and walked slowly towards the cow and calf that were now edging away
from her. As she eased down the far side of the hill out of sight of the pickup, a steady
stream of Sally's milk was engulfing the box of golden eggs. A minute later, the reduced
contents caused the drum to shift and slip. It fell onto the eggs, cracking a half dozen.
The earth split open and the world around Hetty erupted in a roaring inferno of purple-red
fire and ear-shattering sound. The rolling concussion swept Hetty from her feet and tumbled
her into a drywash gully at the base of the hill. The gully saved her life as the sky-splitting
shock wave rolled over her. Stunned and deafened, she flattened herself under a slight overhang.
The rolling blast rocked ranches and towns for more than one hundred miles and the ground
wave triggered the seismographs at the University of California nearly two hundred miles away
and at UCLA, four hundred miles distant. Tracking and testing instruments went wild along the
entire length of the AEC atomic test grounds, a mere sixty miles south of the smoking, gaping
hole that marked the end of the Circle T pickup truck.
In a direct line, the ranch house was about eight miles from the explosion.
Johnny was lounging in Hetty's favorite rocking chair on the wide back verandah, lighting
a cigarette and Barney was perched on the porch railing when the sky was blotted out
by the dazzling violet light of the blast. They were blinking in frozen amazement when
the shock wave smashed into the ranch, flattening the flimsier buildings and buckling the side
and roof of the steel-braced barn. Every window on the place blew out in a storm of deadly
glass shards. The rolling ground wave in the wake of the shock blast, rocked and bounced
the solid, timber and adobe main house. The concussion hit Johnny like a fist, pinwheeling
him backwards in the rocker against the wall of the house. It caught Barney like a sack
of sodden rags and flung him atop the dazed and semiconscious younger man.
The first frightened screams of the horses in the barns and corrals were mingling with
the bawling of the heifers in the calf pens when the sound of the explosion caught up
with the devastation of the shock and ground waves.
Like the reverberation of a thousand massed cannon firing at once, the soul-searing sound
rumbled out of the desert and boiled with almost tangible density into the shattered
ranch yard. It flattened the feebly-stirring men on the porch and then thundered on in
a tidal wave of noise. Barney moaned and rolled off the tangle of
porch rocker and stunned youth beneath him. Johnny lay dazed another second or two and
then began struggling to his feet. "Hetty," he croaked, pointing wildly to the
south where a massive, dirty column of purple smoke and fire rose skyward like the stem
of a monstrous and malignant toadstool. "Hetty's out there."
He stumbled from the porch and broke into a staggering run to the pile of broken planks
that seconds ago had been the tractor shed. As he crossed the yard, a great gust of wind
whipped back from the north, pumping clouds of dry, dusty earth before it. The force of
the wind almost knocked the bruised and shaken Johnny from his feet once again as it swept
back over the ranch, in the direction of the great pillar of purple smoke.
"Implosion," Johnny's mind registered. He tore at the stack of loose boards leaning
against the station wagon, flinging them fiercely aside in his frantic efforts to free the vehicle.
Barney limped up to join him and a minute later they had cleared a way into the wagon.
Johnny squeezed into the front seat and drove it back from under more leaning boards. Three
of the side windows were smashed but the windshield was intact except for a small, starred crack
in the safety glass. Clear of the debris, Barney opened the opposite door and slid in
beside Johnny. Dirt spun from beneath the wheels of the car as he slammed his foot to
the floor and raced towards the smoke column that now towered more than a mile and a half
into the air. Beneath her protective overhang, Hetty stirred
and moaned feebly. Twin rivulets of dark blood trickled from her nostrils. Thick dust was
settling on the area and she coughed and gasped for breath.
On the opposite side of the hill, a vast, torn crater, nearly a hundred feet across
and six to ten feet deep, smoked like a stirring volcano and gave off a strange, pungent odor
of ether. Johnny Culpepper's dramatic charge to the
rescue was no more dramatic than the reaction in a dozen other places in Nevada and California.
Particularly sixty miles south where a small army of military and scientific men were preparing
for an atomic underground shot when the Circle T pickup vanished.
The shock wave rippled across the desert floor, flowed around the mountains and tunneled into
Frenchman's Flat, setting off every shock-measuring instrument. Then came the ground wave, rolling
through the earth like a gopher through a garden. Ditto for ground-wave measuring devices.
Lastly, the sound boomed onto the startled scientists and soldiers like the pounding
of great timpani under the vaulted dome of the burning sky.
On mountain top observation posts, technicians turned unbelieving eyes north to the burgeoning
pillar of smoke and dust, then yelped and swung optical and electronic instruments to
bear on the fantastic column. In less than fifteen minutes, the test under
preparation had been canceled, all equipment secured and the first assault waves of scientists,
soldiers, intelligence and security men were racing north behind white-suited and sealed
radiation detection teams cradling Geiger counters in their arms like submachine guns.
Telephone lines were jammed with calls from Atomic Energy Commission field officials reporting
the phenomena to Washington and calling for aid from West Coast and New Mexico AEC bases.
Jet fighters at Nellis Air Force base near Las Vegas, were scrambled and roared north
over the ground vehicles to report visual conditions near the purple pillar of power.
The Associated Press office in San Francisco had just received word of the quake recorded
by the seismograph at Berkeley when a staffer on the other side of the desk answered a call
from the AP stringer in Carson City, reporting the blast and mighty cloud in the desert sky.
One fast look at the map showed that the explosion was well north of the AEC testing ground limits.
The Carson City stringer was ordered to get out to the scene on the double and hold the
fort while reinforcements of staffers and photographers were flown from 'Frisco.
Before any of the official or civil agencies had swung into action, the Circle T station
wagon had rocketed off the ranch road and turned onto the oiled, county highway leading
both to Carson City—and the now-expanding but less dense column of smoke.
Johnny hunched over the wheel and peered through the thickening pall of smoke and dust, reluctant
to ease off his breakneck speed but knowing that they had to find Hetty—if she were
alive. Neither man had said a word since the wagon raced from the ranch yard.
There was no valid reason to associate the explosion with Hetty, yet instinctively and
naggingly, Johnny knew that somehow Hetty was involved. Barney, still ignorant of his
error of the oil drums, just clung to his seat and prayed for the best.
The dust was almost too thick to see, forcing Johnny to slow the station wagon as they penetrated
deeper into the base of the smoke column. Hiding under his frantic concern for Hetty
was the half-formed thought that the whole thing was an atomic explosion and that he
and Barney were heading into sure radiation deaths. His logic nudged at the thought and
said, "If it were atomic, you started dying back on the porch, so might as well play the
hand out." A puff of wind swirled the dust up away from
the road as the station wagon came up to the smoking crater. Johnny slammed on the brakes
and he and Barney jumped from the car to stand, awe-struck, at the edge of the hole.
The dust-deadened air muffled Johnny's sobbing exclamation:
"Dear God!" They walked slowly around the ragged edges
of the crater. Barney bent down and picked a tiny metallic fragment from the pavement.
He stared at it and then tapped Johnny on the arm and handed it to him, wordlessly.
It was a twisted piece of body steel, bright at its torn edges and coated with the scarlet
enamel that had been the color of the Circle T pickup.
Johnny's eyes filled with tears and he shoved the little scrap of metal in his pocket. "Let's
see what else we can find, Barney." The two men began working a slow search of the area
in ever-widening circles from the crater that led them finally up and over the top of the
little hill to the south of the road. Fifteen minutes later they found Hetty and
ten minutes after that, the wiry, resilient ranchwoman was sitting between them on the
seat of the station wagon, explaining how she happened to be clear of the pickup when
the blast occurred. The suspicion that had been growing in Johnny's
mind, now brought into the open by his relief at finding Hetty alive and virtually unhurt,
bloomed into full flower. "Barney," Johnny asked softly, "which oil
drum did you put in the back of the pickup?" The facts were falling into place like the
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle when the Carson City reporter, leading a caravan of cars and
emergency vehicles from town by a good ten minutes and beating the AEC and military teams
by twenty minutes, found the Circle T trio sitting in the station wagon at the lip of
the now faintly smoldering crater. A half hour later, the AP man in San Francisco
picked up the phone. "I've just come back from that explosion,"
the Carson City stringer said. The AP man put his hand over the phone and called across
the desk. "Get ready for a '95' first lead blast."
"O.K.," the San Francisco desk man said, "let's have it." He tucked the phone between chin
and shoulder and poised over his typewriter. "Well, there's a crater more than one hundred
feet across and ten feet deep," the Carson City stringer dutifully recounted. "The scene
is on County Road 38, about forty miles east of here and the blast rocked Carson City and
caused extensive breakage for miles around." "What caused it," the AP desk man asked as
he pounded out a lead. "A lady at the scene said her milk and eggs
blew up," the Carson City stringer said. Ten miles south, the leading AEC disaster
truck stopped behind the six-strand fence blocking the range road. Two men with wire
cutters, jumped from the truck and snipped the twanging wires. The metal "Keep Out" sign
banged to the ground and was kicked aside. The truck rolled through the gap and the men
swung aboard. Behind them was a curtain of dust rising sluggishly in the hot sky, marking
the long convoy of other official vehicles pressing *** the trail of the emergency
truck. When the range road cut across the county
highway, the driver paused long enough to see that the heaviest smoke concentrations
from the unknown blast lay to the west. He swung left onto the oiled road and barreled
westward. In less than a mile, he spied the flashing red light of a State trooper's car
parked in the center of the road. The scene looked like a combination of the San Francisco
quake and the Los Angeles county fair. Dozens of cars, trucks, two fire engines and
a Good Humor man were scattered around the open range land on both sides of the vast
crater still smoldering in the road. A film of purple dust covered the immediate area
and still hung in the air, coating cars and people. Scores of men, women and children
lined the rim of the crater, gawking into the smoky pit, while other scores roamed aimlessly
around the nearby hill and desert. A young sheriff's deputy standing beside the
State trooper's car raised his hand to halt the AEC disaster van. The truck stopped and
the white-suited radiation team leaped from the vehicle, counters in hand, racing for
the crater. "Back," the chief of the squad yelled at the
top of his lungs. "Everybody get back. This area is radiation contaminated. Hurry!"
There was a second of stunned comprehension and then a mad, pan-demonic scrambling of
persons and cars, bumping and jockeying to flee. The radiation team fanned out around
the crater, fumbling at the level scales on their counters when the instruments failed
to indicate anything more than normal background count.
All of the vehicles had pulled back to safety—all except a slightly battered station wagon still
parked a yard or two from the eastern edge of the crater.
The radiation squad leader ran over to the wagon. Three people, two men and a dirty,
disheveled and bloody-nosed older woman, sat in the front seat munching Good Humor bars.
"Didn't you hear me?" the AEC man yelled. "Get outta here. This area's hot. Radioactive.
Dangerous. GET MOVING!" The woman leaned out the window and patted
the radiation expert soothingly on the shoulder. "Shucks, sonny, no need to get this excited
over a little spilt milk." "Milk," the AEC man yelped, purpling. "Milk!
I said this is a hot area; it's loaded with radiation. Look at this—" He pointed to
the meter on his counter, then stopped, gawked at the instrument and shook it. And stared
again. The meter flicked placidly along at the barely-above-normal background level count.
"Hey, Jack," one of the other white-suited men on the far side of the crater called,
"this hole doesn't register a thing." The squad chief stared incredulously at his
counter and banged it against the side of the station wagon. Still the needle held in
the normal zone. He banged it harder and suddenly the needle dropped to zero as Hetty and her
ranch hands peered over the AEC man's shoulder at the dial.
"Now ain't that a shame," Barney said sympathetically. "You done broke it."
The rest of the disaster squad, helmets off in the blazing sun and lead-coated suits unfastened,
drifted back to the squad leader at the Circle T station wagon. A mile east, the rest of
the AEC convoy had arrived and halted in a huge fan of vehicles, parked a safe distance
from the crater. A line of more white-suited detection experts moved cautiously forward.
With a stunned look, the first squad leader turned and walked slowly down the road towards
the approaching line. He stopped once and looked back at the gaping hole, down at his
useless counter, shook his head and continued on to meet the advancing units.
By nightfall, new strands of barbed wire reflected the last rays of the red Nevada sun. Armed
military policemen and AEC security police in powder-blue battle jackets, patrolled the
fences around the county road crater. And around the fence that now enclosed the immediate
vicinity of the Circle T ranch buildings. Floodlights bathed the wire and cast an eerie
glow over the mass of parked cars and persons jammed outside the fence. A small helicopter
sat off to the right of the impromptu parking lot and an NBC newscaster gave the world a
verbal description of the scene while he tried to talk above the snorting of the gas-powered
generator that was supplying the Associated Press radio-telephone link to San Francisco.
Black AEC vans and dun colored military vehicles raced to and from the ranch headquarters,
pausing to be cleared by the sentries guarding the main gates.
The AP log recorded one hundred eighteen major daily papers using the AP story that afternoon
and the following morning: CARSON CITY, NEV., May 12 (AP)—A kiloton
eggnog rocked the scientific world this morning. "On a Nevada ranch, forty miles east of here,
60-year-old Mehatibel Thompson is milking a cow that gives milk more powerful than an
atomic bomb. Her chickens are laying the triggering mechanisms.
"This the world learned today when an earth-shaking explosion rocked...."
Inside the Circle T ranch house, Hetty, bathed and cleaned and only slightly the worse for
her experiences, was hustling about the kitchen throwing together a hasty meal. Johnny and
Barney had swept up a huge pile of broken glass, crockery and dirt and Hetty had salvaged
what dishes remained unshattered by the blast. She weaved through a dozen men grouped around
the kitchen table, some in military or security police garb, three of them wearing the uniform
of the atomic scientist in the field—bright Hawaiian sports shirts, dark glasses, blue
denims and sneakers. Johnny and Barney huddled against the kitchen drainboard out of the
main stream of traffic. The final editions of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, Oakland
Tribune, Los Angeles Herald-Express and the Carson City Appeal were spread out on the
table. Hetty pushed them aside to put down dishes.
The glaring black headlines stared up at her. "Dairy Detonation Devastates Desert," the
alliterative Chronicle banner read; "Bossy's Blast Rocks Bay Area," said the Trib; "Atomic
Butter-And-Egg Blast Jars LA," the somewhat inaccurate Herald-Ex proclaimed; "Thompson
Ranch Scene of Explosion," the Appeal stated, hewing to solid facts.
"Mrs. Thompson," the oldest of the scientists said, "won't you please put down those dishes
for a few minutes and give us the straight story. All afternoon long its been one thing
or another with you and all we've been able to get out of you is this crazy milk-egg routine."
"Time enough to talk after we've all had a bite to eat," Hetty said, juggling a platter
of steaks and a huge bowl of mashed potatoes to the table. "Now we've all had a hard day
and we can all stand to get on the outside of some solid food. I ain't had a bite to
eat since this morning and I guess you boys haven't had much either. And since you've
seemed to have made yourselves to home here, then by golly, you're going to sit down and
eat with us. "Besides," she added over her shoulder as
she went back to the stove for vegetables and bread, "me 'n Johnny have already told
you what story there is to tell. That's all there is to it."
She put more platters on the now-heaping table and then went around the table pouring coffee
from the big ranch pot. "All right, you men sit down now and dig in," she ordered.
"Mrs. Thompson," an Army major with a heavy brush mustache said, "we didn't come here
to eat. We came for information." Hetty shoved back a stray wisp of hair and
glared at the man. "Now you listen to me, you young whippersnapper.
I didn't invite you, but since you're here, you'll do me the goodness of being a mite
more polite," she snapped. The major winced and glanced at the senior
scientist. The older man raised his eyes expressively and shrugged. He moved to the table and sat
down. There was a general scuffling of chairs and the rest of the group took places around
the big table. Johnny and Barney took their usual flanking positions beside Hetty at the
head of the board. Hetty took her seat and looked around the
table with a pleased smile. "Now that's more like it."
She bowed her head and, after a startled glance, the strangers followed suit.
"We thank Thee, dear Lord," Hetty said quietly, "for this food which we are about to eat and
for all Your help to us this day. It's been a little rough in spots but I reckon You've
got Your reasons for all of it. Seein' as how tomorrow is Your day anyway, we ask that
it be just a mite quieter. Amen." The satisfying clatter of chinaware and silver
and polite muttered requests for more potatoes and gravy filled the kitchen for the next
quarter of an hour as the hungry men went to work on the prime Circle T yearling beef.
After his second steak, third helping of potatoes and gravy and fourth cup of coffee, the senior
scientist contentedly shoved back from the table. Hetty was polishing the last dabs of
gravy from her plate with a scrap of bread. The scientist pulled a pipe and tobacco pouch
from his pocket. "With your permission, m'am," he asked his
hostess. Hetty grinned. "For heaven's sake, fire it up, sonny. Big Jim—that was my husband—used
to say that no meal could be said properly finished unless it had been smoked into position
for digestion." Several of the other men at the table followed
suit with pipes, cigars and cigarettes. Hetty smiled benignly around the table and turned
to the senior scientist. "What did you say your name was, sonny?" she
asked. "Dr. Floyd Peterson, Mrs. Thompson," he replied,
"and at forty-six years of age, I deeply thank you for that 'sonny'."
He reached for the stack of newspapers on the floor beside his chair and pushing back
his plate, laid them on the table. "Now, Mrs. Thompson, let's get down to facts,"
he rapped the headlines with a knuckle. "You have played hell with our schedule and I've
got to have the answers soon before I have the full atomic commission and a congressional
investigation breathing down my neck. "What did you use to make that junior grade
earthquake?" "Why, I've already told you more'n a dozen
times, sonny," Hetty replied. "It must of been the combination of them *** eggs and
Sally's milk." The brush-mustached major sipping his coffee,
spluttered and choked. Beside him, the head of the AEC security force at Frenchman's Flat
leaned forward. "Mrs. Thompson, I don't know what your motives
are but until I find out, I'm deeply thankful that you gave those news hounds this ... this,
butter and egg business," he said. "Milk and eggs," Hetty corrected him mildly.
"Well, milk and eggs, then. But the time has ended for playing games. We must know what
caused that explosion and you and Mr. Culpepper and Mr. Hatfield," he nodded to Johnny and
Barney sitting beside Hetty, "are the only ones who can tell us."
"Already told you," Hetty repeated. Johnny hid a grin.
"Look, Mrs. Thompson," Dr. Peterson said loudly and with ill-concealed exasperation, "you
created and set off an explosive force that dwarfed every test we've made at Frenchman's
Flat in four years. The force of your explosive was apparently greater than that of a fair-sized
atomic device and only our Pacific tests—and those of the Russians—have been any greater.
Yet within a half hour or forty-five minutes after the blast there wasn't a trace of radiation
at ground level, no aerial radiation and not one report of upper atmosphere contamination
or fallout within a thousand miles. "Mrs. Thompson, I appeal to your patriotism.
Your friends, your country, the free people of the world, need this invention of yours."
Hetty's eyes grew wide and then her features set in a mold of firm determination. Shoving
back her chair and raising to stand stiffly erect and with chin thrust forward, she was
every inch the True Pioneer Woman of the West. "I never thought of that," she said solemnly.
"By golly, if my country needs this like that, then by golly, my country's going to have
it." The officials leaned forward in anticipation.
"You can have Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III and I don't want one cent for her, either.
And you can take the hens, too." There was a stunned silence and then the Army
major strangled on a mouthful of coffee; the security man turned beet red in the face and
Dr. Peterson's jaw bounced off his breastbone. Johnny, unable to hold back an explosion of
laughter, dashed for the back porch and collapsed. The kitchen door slammed and Dr. Peterson
stamped out on to the porch, pipe clamped between clenched teeth, his face black with
anger and frustration. He ignored Johnny who was standing beside the rail wiping tears
from his eyes. Culpepper recovered himself and walked over to the irate physicist.
"Dr. Peterson you're a man of science," Johnny said, "and a scientist is supposed to be willing
to accept a fact and then, possibly determine the causes behind the fact after he recognizes
what he sees. Isn't that so?" "Now, look here," Peterson angrily swung around
to face Johnny. "I've taken all I intend to take from you people with your idiotic story.
I don't intend to...." Johnny took the older man by the elbow and
gently but firmly propelled him from the porch towards the barn. "I don't intend to either
insult your intelligence, Dr. Peterson, or attempt to explain what has happened here.
But I do intend to show you what we know." Bright floodlights illuminated the yard and
a crew of soldiers were stringing telephone wires from the guarded front gate across the
open space to the ranch house. Beyond the new barbed wire fence, there was an excited
stir and rush for the wire as a sharp-eyed newsman spotted Johnny and the scientist crossing
the yard. The two men ignored the shouted requests for more up-to-the-minute information
as they walked into the barn. Johnny switched on the lights.
The lowing of the two prize Guernseys in the stalls at the right of the door changed to
loud, plaintive bawling as the lights came on. Both cows were obviously in pain from
their swollen and unmilked udders. "Seeing is believing. Doc?" Johnny asked,
pointing to the cows. "Seeing what?" Peterson snapped.
"I knew we were going to have some tall explaining to do when you fellows took over here," Johnny
said, "and, of course, I don't blame you one bit. That was some blast Hetty set off out
there." "You don't know," Dr. Peterson murmured fearfully,
"you just don't know." "So," Johnny continued, "I deliberately didn't
milk these cows, so that you could see for yourself that we aren't lying. Now, mind you,
I don't have the foggiest idea WHY this is happening, but I'm going to show you at least,
WHAT happened." He picked up a pair of milk buckets from a
rack beside the door and walked towards the cow stalls, Peterson trailing. "This." Johnny
said, pointing to the larger of the two animals, "is Queenie. Her milk is just about as fine
as you can get from a champion milk producing line. And this," he reached over and patted
the flank of the other cow, "is Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III. She's young and up to now has
given good but not spectacular quantities or qualities of milk. She's from the same
blood line as Queenie. Sally had dried up from her first calf and we bred her again
and on Wednesday she came fresh. Only it isn't milk that she's been giving. Watch!"
Kicking a milking stool into position, he placed a bucket under Queenie's distended
bag and began squirting the rich, foaming milk into the pail with a steady, fast and
even rhythm. When he had finished, he set the two full buckets with their thick heads
of milk foam, outside the stall and brought two more clean, empty buckets. He moved to
the side of the impatient Sally. As Peterson watched, Johnny filled the buckets with the
same, flat, oily-looking white fluid that Sally had been producing since Wednesday.
The scientist began to show mild interest. Johnny finished, stripped the cow, and then
carried the pails out and set them down beside the first two.
"O.K., now look them over yourself," he told Peterson.
The scientist peered into the buckets. Johnny handed him a ladle.
"Look, Culpepper," Peterson said, "I'm a physicist, not a farmer or an agricultural expert. How
do you expect me to know what milk is supposed to do? Until I was fifteen years old, I thought
the milk came out of one of those spigots and the cream out of another."
"Stir it," Johnny ordered. The scientist took the ladle angrily and poked at the milk in
Queenie's buckets. "Taste it," Johnny said. Peterson glared at
the younger man and then took a careful sip of the milk. Some of the froth clung to his
lips and he licked it off. "Taste like milk to me," he said.
"Smell it," Johnny ordered. Peterson sniffed. "O.K., now do the same things to the other
buckets." Peterson swished the ladle through the buckets
containing Sally's milk. The white liquid swirled sluggishly and oillike. He bent over
and smelled and made a grimace. "Go on," Johnny demanded, "taste it."
Peterson took a tiny sip, tasted and then spat.
"All right," he said, "I'm now convinced that there's something different about this milk.
I'm not saying anything is wrong with it because I wouldn't know. All I'm admitting is that
it is different. So what?" "Come on," Johnny took the ladle from him.
He carried the buckets of Queenie's milk into the cooler room and dumped them in a small
pasturizer. Then carrying the two pails of Sally's milk,
Johnny and the physicist left the barn and went to the shattered remains of the tractor
shed. Fumbling under wrecked and overturned tables
and workbenches, Johnny found an old and rusted pie tin.
Placing the tin in the middle of the open spaces of the yard, he turned to Peterson.
"Now you take that pail of milk and pour a little into the pan. Not much, now, just about
enough to cover the bottom or a little more." He again handed the ladle to Peterson.
The scientist dipped out a small quantity of the white fluid and carefully poured it
into the pie plate. "That's enough," Johnny cautioned. "Now let's
set these buckets a good long ways from here." He picked up the buckets and carried them
to the back porch. He vanished into the kitchen. By this time, the strange antics of the two
men had attracted the attention of the clamoring newsmen outside the fence and they jammed
against the wire, shouting pleas for an interview or information. The network television camera
crews trained their own high-powered lights into the yard to add to the brilliance of
the military lights and began recording the scene. Dr. Peterson glared angrily at the
mob and turned as Johnny rejoined him. "Culpepper, are you trying to make a fool of me?" he hissed.
"Got a match?" Johnny queried, ignoring the question. The pipe-smoking scientist pulled
out a handful of kitchen matches. Johnny produced a glass fish casting rod with a small ***
of cloth tied to the weighted hook. Leading Peterson back across the yard about fifty
feet, Johnny handed the rag to Peterson. "Smell it," he said. "I put a little kerosene
on it so it would burn when it goes through the air." Peterson nodded.
"You much of a fisherman?" Johnny asked. "I can drop a fly on a floating chip at fifty
yards," the physicist said proudly. Johnny handed him the rod and reel. "O.K., Doc, light
up your rag and then let's see you drop it in that pie plate."
While TV cameras hummed and dozens of still photographers pointed telescopic lenses and
prayed for enough light, Dr. Peterson ignited the little *** of cloth. He peered behind
to check for obstructions and then, with the wrist-flicking motion of the devoted and expert
fisherman, made his cast. The tiny torch made a blurred, whipping streak of light and dropped
unerringly into the pie plate in the middle of the yard.
The photographers had all the light they needed! The night turned violet as a violent ball
of purple fire reared and boiled into the darkened sky. The flash bathed the entire
ranch headquarters and the packed cars and throngs outside the fence in the strange brilliance.
The heat struck the dumfounded scientist and young rancher like the suddenly-opened door
of a blast furnace. It was over in a second as the fire surged
and then winked out. The sudden darkness blinded them despite the unchanged power of the television
and military floodlights still focused on the yard. Pandemonium erupted from the ranks
of newsmen and photographers who had witnessed the dazzling demonstration.
Peterson stared in awe at the slightly smoking and warped pie tin. "Well, cut out my tongue
and call me Oppenheimer," he exclaimed. "That was just the milk," Johnny said. "You
know of a good safe place we could try it out with one of those eggs? I'd be afraid
to test 'em anywhere around here after what happened to Hetty this morning."
An hour later, a military helicopter chewed its way into the night, carrying three gallons
of Sally's milk from the ranch to Nellis AFB where a jet stood ready to relay the sealed
cannister to the AEC laboratories at Albuquerque. In the ranch house living room Peterson had
set up headquarters and an Army field telephone switchboard was in operation across the room.
An AEC security man was running the board. Hetty had decided that one earthquake a day
was enough and had gone to bed. Barney bewildered but happily pleased at so much company, sat
on the edge of a chair and avidly watched and listened, not understanding a thing he
saw or heard. At the back of the room, Johnny hunched over Big Jim Thompson's roll-top desk,
working up a list of supplies he would need to repair the damages from the week's growing
list of explosions. Peterson and three of his staff members were
in lengthy consultation at a big table in the middle of the room. The Army field phone
at Peterson's elbow jangled. Across the room, the switchboard operator
swung around and called: "It's the commissioner, Dr. Peterson. I just got through to him."
Peterson picked up the phone. "John," he shouted into the instrument, "Peterson
here. Where have you been?" Tinny, audible squawks came from the phone and Peterson held
it away from his ear. "Yes, I know all about it," he said. "Yes
... yes ... yes. I know you've had a time with the papers. Yes, I heard the radio. Yes,
John, I know it sounds pretty ridiculous. What? Get up to the ranch and find out. Where
do you think I'm calling from?" The squawking rattled the receiver and Peterson
winced. "Look, commissioner," he broke in, "I can't
put a stop to those stories. What? I said I can't put a stop to the stories for one
reason. They're true." The only sound that came from the phone was
the steady hum of the line. "Are you there, John?" Peterson asked. There
was an indistinct mumble from Washington. "Now listen carefully, John. What I need out
here just as quickly as you can round them up and get them aboard a plane is the best
team of biogeneticists in the country. "What? No, I don't need a team of psychiatrists,
commissioner. I am perfectly normal." Peterson paused. "I think!"
He talked with his chief for another fifteen minutes. At two other telephones around the
big table, his chief deputy and the senior security officer of the task force handled
a half dozen calls during Peterson's lengthy conversation. When Peterson hung up, the machinery
was in motion gathering the nation's top biochemists, animal geneticists, agricultural and animal
husbandry experts and a baker's dozen of other assorted -ists, ready to package and ship
them by plane and train to the main AEC facility at Frenchman's Flat and to the Circle T.
Peterson sighed gustily as he laid down the phone and reached for his pipe. Across the
table, his assistant put a hand over the mouthpiece of his telephone and leaned towards Peterson.
"It's the Associated Press in New York," he whispered. "They're hotter than a pistol about
the blackout and threatening to call the President and every congressman in Washington if we
don't crack loose with something." "Why couldn't I have flunked Algebra Two,"
Peterson moaned. "No, I had to be a genius. Now look at me. A milkmaid." He looked at
his watch. "Tell 'em we'll hold a press conference at 8:00 a.m. outside the ranch gate."
The assistant spoke briefly into the phone and again turned to Peterson. "They say they
want to know now whether the milk and egg story is true. They say they haven't had anything
but an official runaround and a lot of rumor." "Tell them we neither deny nor confirm the
story. Say we are investigating. We'll give them a formal statement in the morning," Peterson
ordered. He left the table and walked to the desk where
Johnny was finishing his list of building supplies.
"What time do you usually get those eggs?" he asked.
"Well, as a rule, Hetty gets out and gathers them up about nine each morning. But they've
probably been laid a couple of hours earlier. "That's going to make us awfully late to produce
anything for those babbling reporters," the scientist said.
"Come to think of it," Johnny said thoughtfully, "we could rig up a light in the chicken house
and make the hens lay earlier. That way you could have some eggs about four or five o'clock
in the morning." Barney had been listening.
"And them eggs make a mighty fine breakfast of a morning," he volunteered cheerfully.
Peterson glared at him and Johnny grinned. "I think the doctor wants the golden kind,"
he said with a smile. "Oh, them," Barney said with a snort of disgust.
"They wouldn't make an omelet fit for a hog. You don't want to fuss with them, doc."
Under Johnny's direction, a crew of technicians ran a power line into the slightly-wrecked
chicken house. There were loud squawks of indignation from the sleeping hens as the
men threaded their way through the nests. The line was installed and the power applied.
A one-hundred-fifty-watt bulb illuminated the interior of the chicken house to the discordant
clucking and cackling of the puzzled birds. Solomon, the big rooster, was perched on a
crossbeam, head tucked under his wing. When the light flooded the shed he *** awake
and fastened a startled and unblinking stare at the strange sun. He scrambled hastily and
guiltily to his feet and throwing out his great chest, crowed a shrieking hymn to Thomas
A. Edison. Johnny chuckled as the technicians jumped at the sound. He left the hen house,
went back to the house and to bed. He set his alarm clock for 4:00 a.m. and dropped
immediately into a deep and exhausted sleep. When he and the sleepy-eyed Peterson went
into the chicken house at 4:30, there were eleven of the golden eggs resting on the straw
nests. They turned the remainder of the normal eggs
over to Hetty who whipped up a fast and enormous breakfast. While Peterson and Johnny were
eating, a writing team of AEC public information men who had arrived during the night, were
polishing a formal press release to be given to the waiting reporters at eight. The phones
had been manned throughout the night. Peterson's bleary-eyed aide came into the kitchen and
slumped into a chair at the table. "Get yourself a cup of coffee, boy," Hetty
ordered, "while I fix you something to eat. How you like your eggs?"
"Over easy, Mrs. Thompson and thanks," he said wearily. "I think I've got everything
lined up, doctor. The eggs are all packed, ready to go in your car and the car will be
ready in about ten minutes. They're still setting up down range but they should be all
in order by the time you get there. "The bio men and the others should be assembled
in the main briefing room at range headquarters. I've ordered a double guard around the barn,
to be maintained until the animal boys have finished their on-the-ground tests. And they're
padding a device van to take Sally to the labs when they're ready.
"And ... oh yeah, I almost forgot ... the commissioner called about ten minutes ago
and said to tell you that the Russians are going to make a formal protest to the U.N.
this morning. They say we're trying to wipe out the People's Republic by contaminating
their milk." The sound of scuffling in the yard and loud
yells of protest came through the back porch window. The door swung open and a spluttering
and irate Barney was thrust into the room, still in the clutches of a pair of armed security
policemen. "Get your hands offn me," Barney roared as
he struggled and squirmed impotently in their grip. "Doc, tell these pistol-packing bellhops
to turn me loose." "We caught him trying to get into the barn,
sir," one of the officers told Peterson. "Of course I was going into the barn," the
indignant ranch hand screamed. "Where'd you think I would go to milk a cow?"
Peterson smiled. "It's all right, Fred. It's my fault. I should have told you Mr. Hatfield
has free access." The security men released Barney. He shook
himself and glared at them. "I'm terribly, sorry, Barney," Dr. Peterson
said. "I forgot that you would be going down to milk the cows and I'm glad you reminded
me. Do me a favor and milk Sally first, will you? I want to take that milk, or whatever
it is, with us when we leave in a few minutes." The sun was crawling up the side of the mountains
when Johnny and Dr. Peterson swung out of the ranch yard between two armored scout cars
for the sixty-mile trip down the range road. Dew glistened in the early rays of light and
the clear, cool morning air held little hint of the heat sure to come by midmorning. There
was a rush of photographers towards the gate as the little convoy left the ranch. A battery
of cameras grabbed shots of the vehicles heading south.
It was the beginning of a day that changed the entire foreign policy of the United States.
It was also the day that started a host of the nation's finest nuclear physicists tottering
towards psychiatrists' couches. In rapid order in the next few days, Peterson's
crew reinforced by hundreds of fellow scientists, technicians and military men, learned what
Johnny Culpepper already knew. They learned that (1) Sally's milk, diluted
by as much as four hundred parts of pure water, made a better fuel than gasoline when ignited.
They also learned that (2) in reduced degrees of concentration, it became a substitute for
any explosive of known chemical composition; (3) brought in contact with the compound inside
one of the golden eggs, it produced an explosive starting at the kiloton level of one egg to
two cups of milk and went up the scale but leveled off at a peak as the recipe was increased;
(4) could be controlled by mixing jets to produce any desired stream of explosive power;
and (5) they didn't have the wildest idea what was causing the reaction.
In that same order it brought (1) Standard Oil stock down to the value of wallpaper;
(2) ditto for DuPont; (3) a new purge in the top level of the Supreme Soviet; (4) delight
to rocketeers at Holloman Air Force Research Center, Cape Canaveral and Vandenburg Air
Force Base; and (5) agonizing fits of hair-tearing to every chemist, biologist and physicist
who had a part in the futile attempts to analyze the two ingredients of what the press had
labeled "Thompson's Eggnog." While white-coated veterinarians, agricultural
experts and chemists prodded and poked Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III, others were giving
a similar going-over to Hetty's chicken flock. Solomon's outraged screams of anger echoed
across the desert as they subjected him to fowl indignities never before endured by a
rooster. Weeks passed and with each one new experiments
disclosed new uses for the amazing Eggnog. While Sally placidly chewed her cuds and continued
to give a steady five gallons of concentrated fury at each milking, Solomon's harem dutifully
deposited from five to a dozen golden spheres of packaged power every day. At the same time,
rocket research engineers completed their tests on the use of the Eggnog.
In the early hours of June 4th, a single-stage, two-egg, thirty-five gallon Atlas rocket poised
on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral. From the loud-speaker atop the massive block-house
came the countdown. "X minus twenty seconds. X minus ten seconds.
Nine ... eight ... seven ... six ... five ... four ... three ... two ... FIRE!"
The control officer stabbed the firing button and deep within the Atlas a relay clicked,
activating a solenoid that pushed open a valve. A thin stream of Sally's milk shot in from
one side of the firing chamber to blend with a fine spray of egg, batter coming from a
jet in the opposite wall. Spewing a solid tail of purple fire, the Atlas
leaped like a wasp-stung heifer from the launching pads and thundered into space. The fuel orifices
continued to expand to maximum pre-set opening. In ten seconds the nose cone turned from cherry-red
to white heat and began sloughing its outer ceramic coating. At slightly more than forty-three
thousand miles an hour, the great missile cleaved out of atmosphere into the void of
space, leaving a shock wave that cracked houses and shattered glass for fifty miles from launching
point. A week later, America's newest rocket vessel,
weighing more than thirty tons and christened The Egg Nog, was launched from the opposite
coast at Vandenburg. Hastily modified to take the new fuel, the weight and space originally
designed for the common garden variety of rocket fuel was filled with automatic camera
and television equipment. In its stern stood a six-egg, one-hundred-gallon engine, while
in the nose was a small, one-egg, fourteen-quart braking engine to slow it down for the return
trip through the atmosphere. Its destination—Mars!
A week later, The Eggnog braked down through the troposphere, skidded to a piddling two-thousand
miles, an hour through the stratosphere, automatically sprouted gliding wing stubs in the atmosphere
and planed down to a spraying halt in the Pacific Ocean, fifty miles west of Ensenada
in Baja, California. Aboard were man's first views of the red planet.
The world went mad with jubilation. From the capitals of the free nations congratulations
poured into Washington. From Moscow came word of a one-hundred-ton spaceship to be launched
in a few days, powered by a mixture of *** and orange juice discovered by a bartender
in Novorosk who was studying chemistry in night school. This announcement was followed
twenty-four hours later by a story in Pravda proving conclusively that Sally's Cloverdale
Marathon III was a direct descendant of Nikita's Mujik Droshky V, a prize Guernsey bull produced
in the barns of the Sopolov People's Collective twenty-six years ago.
Late in August, Air Force Major Clifton Wadsworth Quartermain climbed out of the port of the
two-hundred-ton, two dozen-egg, two-hundred-thirty gallon space rocket Icarus, the first man
into space and back. He had circled Venus and returned. No longer limited by fuel weight
factors, scientists had been able to load enough shielding into the huge Icarus to protect
a man from the deadly bombardment of the Van Allen radiation belts.
On September 15th, Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III, having been milked harder and faster
than any Guernsey in history, went dry. Less than half of the approximately twelve-hundred
gallons of fuel she had produced during her hay days, remained on hand in the AEC storage
vaults. Three days later, Solomon, sprinting after
one of his harem who was playing hard to get, bee-lined into the path of a security police
jeep. There was an agonized squawk, a shower of feathers and mourning. A short time later,
the number of golden eggs dropped daily until one morning, there were none. They never reappeared.
The United States had stockpiled twenty-six dozen in an underground cave deep in the Rockies.
Man, who had burst like a butterfly into space, crawled back into his cocoon and pondered
upon the stars from a worm's eye point of view.
Banging around in the back end of a common cattle truck, Sally's Cloverdale Marathon
III came home to the Circle T in disgrace. In a corner of the truck, the late Solomon's
harem cackled and voiced loud cries of misery as they huddled in the rude, slatted shipping
coop. The truck turned off the county road and onto the dirt road leading to the main
buildings. It rattled across the cattle guard and through the new-unprotected and open gate
in the barbed wire fence. Life had returned almost to normal at the Circle T.
But not for long. Five days after Sally's ignominious dismissal
from the armed forces, a staff car came racing up to the ranch. It skidded to a halt at the
back-porch steps. Dr. Peterson jumped out and dashed up to the kitchen door.
"Well, for heaven's sake," Hetty cried. "Come on in, sonny. I ain't seen you for the longest
spell." Peterson entered and looked around.
"Where's Johnny, Mrs. Thompson?" he asked excitedly. "I've got some wonderful news."
"Now ain't that nice," Hetty exclaimed. "Your wife have a new baby or something? Johnny's
down at the barn. I'll call him for you." She moved towards the door.
"Never mind," Peterson said, darting out the door, "I'll go down to the barn." He jumped
from the porch and ran across the yard. He found Johnny in the barn, rigging a new
block and tackle for the hayloft. Barney was helping thread the new, manila line from a
coil on the straw-littered floor. "Johnny, we've found it," Peterson shouted
jubilantly as he burst into the barn. "Why, Doc, good to see you again," Johnny
said. "Found what?" "The secret of Sally's milk," Peterson cried.
He looked wildly around the barn. "Where is she?"
"Who?" "Sally, of course," the scientist yelped.
"Oh, she's down in the lower pasture with Queenie," Johnny replied.
"She's all right, isn't she?" Peterson asked anxiously.
"Oh, sure, she's fine, Doc. Why?" "Listen," Peterson said hurriedly, "our people
think they've stumbled on something. Now we still don't know what's in those eggs or in
Sally's milk that make them react as they do. All we've been able to find is some strange
isotope but we don't know how to reproduce it or synthesize it.
"But we do think we know what made Sally give that milk and made those hens start laying
the gold eggs." Johnny and Barney laid down their work and
motioned the excited scientist to join them on a bench against the horse stalls.
"Do you remember the day Sally came fresh?" Peterson continued.
"Not exactly," Johnny replied, "but I could look it up in my journal. I keep a good record
of things like new registered stock births." "Never mind," Peterson said. "I've already
checked. It was May 9th." He paused and smiled triumphantly.
"I guess that's right if you say so," Johnny said. "But what about it?"
"And that was the same day that the hens laid the first golden egg too, wasn't it?" Peterson
asked. "Why it sure was, Doc," Barney chimed in.
"I remember, cause Miz Thompson was so mad that the milk was bad and the eggs went wrong
both in the same day." "That's what we know. Now listen to this,
Johnny," the scientist continued. "During the night of May 8th, we fired an entirely
new kind of test shot on the range. I can't tell you what it was, only to say that it
was a special atomic device that even we didn't know too much about. That's why we fired it
from a cave in the side of a hill down there. "Since then, our people have been working
on the pretty good assumption that something happened to that cow and those chickens not
too long before they started giving the Eggnog ingredients. Someone remembered the experimental
test shot, checked the date and then went out and had a look at the cave. We already
had some earlier suspicions that this device produced a new type of beam ray. We took sightings
from the cave, found them to be in a direct, unbroken line with the Circle T. We set up
the device again and using a very small model, tried it out on some chick embryos. Sure enough,
we got a mutation. But not the right kind. "So we're going to recreate the entire situation
right here, only this time, we're going to expose not only Sally but a dozen other Guernseys
from as close to her blood line as we can get.
"And we already knew that you had a young rooster sired by Solomon."
"But, Doc," Johnny protested. "Sally had a calf early that morning. Isn't that going
to make a difference?" "Of course it is," Peterson exclaimed. "And
she's going to have another one the same way. And so are all the other cows. You're the
one that told me she had her calf by artificial insemination, didn't you?"
Johnny nodded. "Well, then she's going to have another calf
from the same bull and so will the other cows." "Pore Sally," Barney said sorrowfully. "They're
sure takin' the romance outta motherhood for you."
The next day the guards were back on the gate. By midafternoon twelve fine young Guernseys
arrived, together with a corps of veterinarians, biologists and security police. By nightfall,
Sally and her companions were all once again in a "delicate condition."
A mile from the ranch house, a dormitory was built for the veterinarians and biologists
and a barracks thrown up for the security guards. A thirty-five thousand dollar, twelve-foot
high chain link fence, topped by barbed wire, was constructed around the pasture and armored
cars patrolled the fence by day and kept guard over the pregnant bovines by night in the
barn. Through the fall, into the long winter and
back to budding spring again, the host of experts and guards watched and cared for the
new calf-bloated herd. The fact that Sally had gone dry had been
kept a carefully guarded national secret. To keep up the pretense and show to the world
that America still controlled the only proven method of manned space travel, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff voted to expend two hundred gallons of the precious, small store of milk on hand
for another interplanetary junket, this time to inspect the rings around Saturn.
Piloting a smaller and more sophisticated but equally-well protected version of Icarus,
Major Quartermain abandoned the fleshpots of earth and the adulation of his coast-to-coast
collection of worshiping females to again hurtle into the unknown.
"It was strictly a milk run," Major Quartermain was quoted as saying as he emerged from his
ship after an uneventful but propaganda-loaded trip.
By the middle of May, it was the consensus of the veterinarians that Delivery Day would
be July 4th. Plans were drafted for the repeat atomic cave shot at 9:00 p.m., July 3rd. The
pregnant herd was to be given labor-inducing shots at midnight, and, if all went well,
deliveries would start within a few hours. Just to be sure that nothing would shield
the cows from the rays of the explosion, they were put in a corral on the south side of
the barn until 9:30 p.m., on the night of the firing.
Solomon's successor and a new bevy of hens were already roosting in the same old chicken
house and egg production was normal. On the night of July 3rd, at precisely 9:00
p.m., a sheet of light erupted from the Nevada hillside cave and the ground shook and rumbled
for a few miles. It wasn't a powerful blast, nor had been the original shot. Sixty miles
away, thirteen Guernsey cows munched at a rick of fresh hay and chewed contentedly in
the moonlight. At 3:11 a.m., the following morning the first
calf arrived, followed in rapid order by a dozen more.
Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III dropped her calf at 4:08 a.m. on Independence Day.
At 7:00 a.m., she was milked and produced two and a half gallons of absolutely clear,
odorless, tasteless and non-ignitable fluid. Eleven other Guernseys gave forth gushing,
foaming, creamy rich gallon after gallon of Grade A milk.
The thirteenth cow filled two buckets with something that looked like weak cocoa and
smelled like stale tea. But when a white-smocked University of California
poultry specialist entered the chicken house later in the morning, he found nothing but
normal, white fresh eggs in the nests. He finally arrived at the conclusion that Solomon's
old harem had known for some time; whatever it was that Solomon had been gifted with,
this new rooster just didn't have it. A rush call went out for a dozen of the precious
store of golden eggs to be sent to the testing labs down range.
Two hours later, Dr. Peterson, surrounded by fellow scientists, stood before a bank
of closed circuit television monitors in the Frenchman's Flat headquarters building. The
scene on the screens was the interior of a massive steel-and-concrete test building several
miles up range. Resting on the floor of the building was an open, gallon-sized glass beaker
filled with the new version of Sally's milk. Poised directly above the opened beaker was
a funnel-shaped vessel containing the contents of one golden egg.
Dr. Peterson reached for a small lever. By remote control, the lever would gradually
open the bottom of the funnel. He squeezed gently, slowly applying pressure. An involuntary
gasp arose from the spectators as a tiny trickle of egg fluid fell from the funnel towards
the open beaker. Instinctively, everyone in the room clamped
their eyes shut in anticipation of a blast. A second later, Peterson peered cautiously
at the screen. The beaker of milk had turned a cloudy pale blue. It neither fizzed nor
exploded. It just sat. He levered another drop from the funnel. The
stringy, glutenous mass plopped into the beaker and the liquid swirled briefly and turned
more opaque, taking on more of a bluish tinge. A babble of voices broke through the room
when it was apparent that no explosion was forthcoming.
Peterson slumped into a nearby chair and stared at the screen.
"Now what?" he moaned. The "what" developed twelve hectic hours later
after time lost initially in shaking, bouncing and beaming the new substance on the outside
chance it might develop a latent tendency towards demolition.
Satisfied that whatever it was in the beaker wasn't explosive, the liquid was quickly poured
off into sixteen small half-pint beakers and speeded to as many different laboratories
for possible analysis. "What about the other stuff?" Peterson was
asked, referring to the brownish "milk" subsequently identified as coming from a dainty young cow
known as Melody Buttercup Greenbrier IV. "One thing at a time," replied Peterson. "Let's
find out what we have here before we got involved in the second problem."
At 9:00 p.m., that night, Peterson was called to the radiation labs. He was met at the door
by a glazed-eyed physicist who led him back to his office.
He motioned Peterson to a seat and then handed him a sheaf of photographic papers and other
charts. Each of the photo sheets had a clear, white outline of a test beaker surrounded
by a solid field of black. Two of the papers were all white.
"I don't believe it, Floyd," the physicist said, running his hands through his hair.
"I've seen it, I've done it, I've tested it, proven it, and I still don't believe it."
Peterson riffled the sheaf of papers and waited expectantly.
"You don't believe what, Fred?" he asked. The physicist leaned over and tapped the papers
in Peterson's hands. "We've subjected that crazy stuff to every source and kind of high
and low energy radiation we can produce here and that means just about everything short
of triggering an H-device on it. We fired alphas, gammas, betas, the works, in wide
dispersion, concentrated beam and just plain exposure.
"Not so much as one neutron of any of them went beyond the glass surrounding that forsaken
slop. "They curved around it, Floyd. They curved
around it." The physicist leaned his head on the desk.
"Nothing should react like that," he sobbed. He struggled for composure as Peterson stared
dazedly at the test sheets. "That's not the whole story," the physicist
continued. He walked to Peterson's side and extracted the two all-white sheets.
"This," he said brokenly, "represents a sheet of photographic paper dipped in that crud
and then allowed to dry before being bombarded with radiation. And this," he waved the other
sheet, "is a piece of photo paper in the center of a panel protected by another sheet of ordinary
typing paper coated with that stuff." Peterson looked up at him. "A radiation-proof
liquid," he said in awed tones. The other man nodded dumbly.
"Eight years of university," the physicist whispered to himself. "Six years in summer
schools. Four fellowships. Ten years in research. "All shot to hell," he screamed, "by a stinking,
hayburning cow." Peterson patted him gently on the shoulder.
"It's all right, Fred. Don't take it so hard. It could be worse."
"How?" he asked hollowly. "Have this stuff milked from a kangaroo?"
Back in his office, Peterson waved off a dozen calls while he gave orders for fresh quantities
of the blue milk to be rushed to the Argonne laboratories for further radiation tests and
confirmation of the Nevada results. He ordered a test set up for the brown fluid for the
following morning and then took a call from the AEC commissioner.
"Yes, John," he said, "we've got something." Operation Milkmaid was in full swing!
The following morning observers again clustered about the monitoring room as Peterson prepared
to duplicate the tests, using a sample of the Melody's brownish milk.
There was the same involuntary remote cringing as the first drop of egg fell towards the
beaker, but this time, Peterson forced himself to watch. Again the gentle plop was heard
through the amplifiers and nothing more. A similar clouding spread through the already
murky fluid and when the entire contents of one egg had been added, the beaker took on
a solid, brown and totally opaque appearance. The scientists watched the glass container
for several minutes, anticipating another possible delayed blast.
When nothing occurred, Peterson nodded to an assistant at an adjoining console. The
aide worked a series of levers and a remotely-controlled mechanical arm came into view on the screen.
The claw of the arm descended over the beaker and clasping it gently, bounced it lightly
on the cement bunker floor. The only sound was the muffled thunk of the glass container
against the concrete. The assistant wiggled his controls gently
and the beaker jiggled back and forth, a few inches off the floor.
Peterson, who had been watching closely, called out. "Do that again."
The operator jostled the controls. "Look at that," Peterson exclaimed. "That stuff's hardened."
A quick movement confirmed this and then Peterson ordered the beaker raised five feet from the
floor and slowly tipped. Over the container went as the claw rotated in its socket. The
glass had turned almost 180° towards the floor when the entire mass of solidified glob
slid out. The watchers caught their breath as it fell
to the hard floor. The glob hit the floor, bounced up a couple of inches, fell back,
bounced again and then quivered to a stop. What was soon to be known as Melody's Mighty
Material had been born. The testing started. But there was a difference.
By the time the brown chunk had been removed from the bunker it had solidified to the point
that nothing would break or cut it. The surface yielded slightly to the heaviest cutting edge
of a power saw and then sprang back, unmarked. A diamond drill spun ineffectually.
So the entire block started making the rounds of the various labs. It was with downright
jubilation that radiation labs reported no properties of resistance for the stuff. One
after the other, the test proved nothing until the physical properties unit came up with
an idea. "You can't cut it, break it or tear it," the
technician told Peterson, as he hefted the chunk of lightweight enigma. "You can't burn
it, shoot holes in it, or so much as mark the surface with any known acid. This stuff's
tougher than steel and about fifty times lighter." "O.K.," Peterson asked, "so what good is it?"
"You can mold it when you mix it," the technician said significantly.
"Hey, you're right," Peterson jumped up excitedly. "Why, a spacer cast out of this stuff and
coated with Sally's paint would be light enough and shielded enough to work on regular missile
fuels." Working under crash priorities, the nation's
three leading plastics plants turned out three, lightweight, molded, one-man space vehicles
from the government-supplied Melody's Mix. A double coating of Sally's Paint then covered
the hulls and a single stage liquid fuel rocket engine was hooked to the less-than-one-ton
engineless hull. Twenty-eight days after the milk first appeared,
on a warm August evening, the first vehicle stood on the pads at Cape Canaveral, illuminated
by towers of lights. Fuel crews had finished loading the tanks which would be jettisoned
along with the engine at burn-out. Inside the rocket, Major Quartermain lounged uncomfortably
and cramped in the take-off sling for a short but telling trip through the Van Allen radiation
fields and back to Earth. The take-off sling rested inside an escape
capsule since the use of chemical fuel brought back many of the old uncertainties of launchings.
On the return trip, Quartermain would eject at sixty thousand feet and pull the capsule's
huge parachute for a slow drop to the surface of the Atlantic where a recovery fleet was
standing by. The light rocket hull would pop a separate chute and also drift down for recovery
and analysis. Inside the ship, Quartermain sniffed the air
and curled his nose. "Let's get this thing on the road," he spoke into his throat mike.
"Some of that Florida air must have seeped in here."
"Four minutes to final countdown," blockhouse control replied. "Turn on your blowers for
a second." Outside the ship, the fuel crews cleared their
equipment away from the pad. The same ripe, heavy odor hung in the warm night air.
At 8:02 p.m., twenty-eight days after the new milks made their first appearance, Major
Quartermain blasted off in a perfect launching. At 8:03 p.m., the two other Melody Mix hulls
standing on nearby pads, began to melt. At 8:04 p.m., the still-roaring engine fell
from the back end of Quartermain's rocket in a flaming arc back towards Earth. Fifteen
seconds later, he hurtled his escape capsule out of the collapsing rocket hull. The parachute
opened and the daring astronaut drifted towards the sea.
Simultaneously, in a dozen labs around the nation, blocks and molds of Melody's Mix made
from that first batch of milk, collapsed into piles of putrid goo. Every day thereafter,
newer blocks of the mix reached the twenty-eight-day limit and similarly broke down into malodrous
blobs. It was a month before the stinking, gooey
mess that flowed over the launching pads at the Cape was cleaned up by crews wearing respirators
and filter masks. It took considerably longer to get the nation's three top plastics firms
back in operation as the fetid flow of unfinished rocket parts wrecked machinery and drove personnel
from the area. The glob that had been Quartermain's vehicle
fell slowly back to Earth, disintegrating every minute until it reached the consistency
of thin gruel. At this point, it was caught by a jet air stream and carried in a miasmic
cloud halfway around the world until it finally floated down to coat the Russian city of Urmsk
in a veil of vile odor. The United States disclaimed any knowledge of the cloud.
"LAS VEGAS, NEV., May 8 (AP)—The Atomic Energy Commission today announced it has squeezed
the last drop from Operation Milkmaid." "After a year of futile experimentation has
failed to get anything more than good, Grade A milk from the world's two most famous cows,
the AEC says it has closed down its field laboratory at the Circle T ranch."
"Dr. Floyd Peterson, who has been in charge of the attempt to again reproduce Sally's
Milk, told newsmen that the famed Guernsey and her stablemate, Melody, no longer gave
exotic and unidentifiable liquids that sent man zooming briefly to the stars."
"For a while, it looked like we had it in the bag," Peterson said. "You might say now,
though, that the tests have been an udder failure."
"Meanwhile, in Washington, AEC commissioner..."