"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 a.s.sorted -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 a.s.sistant put a hand over the mouthpiece of his telephone and leaned towards Peterson.
"It"s the a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sistant 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 a.s.sembled 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 subst.i.tute 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sive 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 b.u.t.ton 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ce, leaving a shock wave that cracked houses and shattered gla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ceship 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 s.p.a.ce rocket Icarus, the first man into s.p.a.ce 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 b.u.t.terfly into s.p.a.ce, crawled back into his coc.o.o.n 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 a.s.sumption 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.