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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Make Mine Homogenized, by Rick Raphael
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Make Mine Homogenized
+
+Author: Rick Raphael
+
+Illustrator: Freas
+
+Release Date: January 2, 2008 [EBook #24119]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAKE MINE HOMOGENIZED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Bruce Albrecht and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Astounding Science
+Fiction, April, 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
+that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
+
+
+
+MAKE MINE HOMOGENIZED
+
+
+By RICK RAPHAEL
+
+Illustrated by Freas
+
+
+Anyone looking for guaranteed sound science will have to look
+elsewhere. But if it's fun you want ... try the world's most potent
+eggnog!
+
+
+"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 queer, 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 stared 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 jerked 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 hard on 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 queer 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 wad 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 wad 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 jerked 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 vodka 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...."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Make Mine Homogenized, by Rick Raphael
+
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