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A day that started a host of the nation's finest nuclear
physicists tottering towards psychiatrists' couches &#128513;
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: May 22, 2022, 5:45 pm
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--- Quote ---
> 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.
--- End Quote ---
[center]
HTML https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24119/24119-h/images/001.jpg[/center]
[center]"Shucks, sonny, no need to get this excited over a
little spilt milk."[/center]
[center]MAKE MINE HOMOGENIZED
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-110422142046.png[/center]
By RICK RAPHAEL
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-070422160139.gif
Illustrated by Freas
HOO," 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
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-220522191040.bmpcorn 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 blas� 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.
Two people looking down into a deep crater
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."
Two men standing in front of a cow while sniffing the contents
of a milk pail
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!"
Continued on next post on this thread:
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#Post#: 310--------------------------------------------------
&#128513; &quot;Well, cut out my tongue and call me
Oppenheimer,&quot; he exclaimed.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: May 22, 2022, 6:19 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
&#129312; MAKE MINE HOMOGENIZED continued from previous post on
this thread:
[center]
HTML https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24119/24119-h/images/frontis.jpg[/center]
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.
A rooster crowing into the face of a man
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 **** 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
HTML https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24119/24119-h/24119-h.htm
#Post#: 719--------------------------------------------------
&quot;In nothing but WAR, I say again, has Rome a claim to
originality.&quot;
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: December 17, 2022, 8:29 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
AGelbert NOTE: Book 2 Chapter 5 of Ben Hur
HTML https://librivox.org/ben-hur-a-tale-of-the-christ-by-lew-wallace/ is a &#9757;&#127995; lesson the Old Roman Empire refused to
learn. The NEW ROMAN EMPIRE (i.e. the United States of "might
equals right" &#129421; Social Darwinists) is making the EXACT
SAME MISTAKE.
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-090422150144.png
[center]
HTML https://www.archive.org/download/librivox_cd_covers/ben_hur.jpg[/center]
Librivox &#128266; Book 2 Chapter 5 of Ben Hur:
HTML https://ia902609.us.archive.org/0/items/benhur_0906_librivox/ben-hur_2-05_wallace.mp3
Complete Book:
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-120422122257-657398.pnghttps://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-120422122257-657398.pnghttps://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-120422122257-657398.png
[center]Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ[/center]
Lew Wallace &#10024; (1827 - 1905)
Ben-Hur is a story of two very different heroes. Judah Ben-Hur,
a prince of Jerusalem, is involved in an accident to the Roman
procurator which is taken to be intentional. He is seized and
sent to the fleet as a galley-slave, while his family is
imprisoned and the family goods confiscated. When Ben-Hur saves
the fleet captain from drowning after his ship is sunk in a
fight with pirates, that officer adopts him as son and heir.
With Roman training, Ben-Hur distinguishes himself in the arena
and the palistrae and appears to be on the way to high military
command.
With the help of a faithful family retainer and a generous Arab
sheik, Ben-Hur is enabled to take part in a widely touted
chariot race, where one of the other charioteers is the boyhood
friend who connived to punish him for the accident and split his
estate. That rival is crippled, financially and bodily, in a
no-holds-barred race (memorable from the 1959 movie with
Charlton Heston).
Ben-Hur turns his attention to the prophesied King of the Jews,
when through the sheik he meets Balthasar, one of the Three Wise
Men, and hears of the child born years ago. Will Ben-Hur be the
general who brings victories to the King, and finally liberates
Israel from the oppressive Roman yoke? In his quest for the
answer, Ben-Hur seeks out the Nazarene, now rumored to be The
Messiah.
THAT hero needs no introduction.
Curious about the lack of kingly trappings and ambitions about
this man, Ben-Hur begins to suspect that his kingdom is not of
this world. And with him, we receive a gut-wrenching eye-witness
view of Jesus� arrest, humiliation, and crucifixion.
Genre(s): Action & Adventure Fiction, Historical Fiction,
Christian Fiction
Language: English &#128266;
HTML https://librivox.org/ben-hur-a-tale-of-the-christ-by-lew-wallace/
#Post#: 1137--------------------------------------------------
The Face of the Lord is Against Them that Do Evil, to Cut Off
the Remembrance of Them from the Earth.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: June 24, 2023, 10:15 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[center]
HTML https://archive.org/download/treasureisland_librivox/treasure_island_1.jpg[/center]
[center]&#128266; [glow=blue,2,300]&#128176; Treasure[/glow]
[glow=red,2,300]
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622202719-14071062.gif &#9760;&#65039; Island [/glow]by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850
-
1894)
HTML https://librivox.org/treasure-island-by-robert-louis-stevenson/[/center]
Treasure Island is an adventure novel, a thrilling tale of
"buccaneers and buried gold." Traditionally considered a coming
of age story, it is an adventure tale of superb atmosphere,
character and action, and also a wry commentary on the ambiguity
of morality�as seen in Long John Silver�unusual for children's
literature then and now. (Summary from wikipedia.org)
#Post#: 1138--------------------------------------------------
In this tale, we follow the travels and adventures of Boy, a
loveable and loyal wire-haired fox-terrier in city and coun
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: June 27, 2023, 12:43 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[move]In this tale, we follow the travels and adventures of Boy,
a loveable and loyal wire-haired fox-terrier in city and
country. [/move]
[center]
HTML https://archive.org/download/boythewanderingdog_1608_librivox/boythewanderingdog_1608.jpg[/center]
[center]&#128266; [glow=teal,2,300]Boy the Wondering Dog[/glow]
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-110422180554-644315.gif by Marshall Saunders (1861 - 1947)[/center]
Agelbert NOTE: This book is allegedly a "children's" book. I can
guarantee you that it has thoughts (from the narrative of the
dogs speaking to each other) in it as deep as any adult level
book. This fictional tale takes place during and shortly after
World War I. Check
out[url=
HTML https://ia801203.us.archive.org/10/items/boythewanderingdog_1608_librivox/boythewanderingdog_11_saunders_128kb.mp3] CHAPTER 11
HTML https://librivox.org/boy-the-wandering-dog-by-marshall-saunders/ in which dogs in New York City are arguing about the War (some
are German breeds and some not) when it appears Germany has had
some victories against the Allies. It is well worth the listen.
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-050422145549-5701455.gif 
#Post#: 1150--------------------------------------------------
'Tilda Jane is fiction but the hardhips and hard hearts
portrayed are all too real in human society.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: July 2, 2023, 4:04 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
--- Quote ---
> Genre(s): Historical Fiction
>
> When spunky 'Tilda Jane isn't allowed to keep her beloved dog
with her at the orphanage, she decides to set out on her own in
search of a home where the inseparable pair will be accepted.
Throughout her weary travels she encounters many people, both
rich and poor, kind and cantankerous -- but will she ever find
family? Set in the Canadian wilderness and coast of Maine,
'Tilda Jane is a story of true grit, forgiveness, and unlikely
friendship. (Summary by [glow=teal,2,300]Twinkle[/glow])
--- End Quote ---
AGelbert NOTE: Don't miss the sequel titled 'Tilda Jane's
Orphans to this [glow=teal,2,300]heart warming story of a God
fearing orphan girl [/glow]&#128330;&#65039;&#9757;&#127995;.
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-110422180553-643238.gif
[center]
HTML https://archive.org/download/tilda_jane_1704_librivox/tilda_jane_1704.jpg[/center]
[center][url=
HTML https://librivox.org/tilda-jane-by-marshall-saunders/]&#128266; [glow=teal,2,300]'Tilda Jane[/glow] by Marshall Saunders (1861
-
1947)[/center]
Agelbert NOTE: This book is fiction but the hardhips and hard
hearts portrayed are all too real in human society. This book
has a happy ending. That too, is reality based, but for too many
exploited and abused members of our society, a society
continuously degraded by the morally bankrupt among us, no happy
ending comes to pass in this, the valley of tears. I post books
like these so that more people of good will decide to dedicate
their lives to doing good by seeking and following the
[glow=green,2,300]light unto their path that God's word
provides[/glow], despite all the
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-050422182057.gif [glow=red,2,300]adversity experienced[/glow].
And [glow=teal,2,300]others[/glow] &#128330;&#65039; had trial
of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and
imprisonment: [glow=teal,2,300]They[/glow] &#128330;&#65039;
were stoned, [glow=teal,2,300]They[/glow] &#128330;&#65039;
were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword:
[glow=teal,2,300]They[/glow] &#128330;&#65039; wandered about
in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted,
tormented; (Of [glow=teal,2,300]whom[/glow] &#128330;&#65039;
the world was not worthy:) [glow=teal,2,300]they[/glow]
&#128330;&#65039; wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in
dens and caves of the earth. ~ Hebrews 11:36-39
[glow=teal,2,300]These[/glow] all died in faith, not having
received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were
persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that
[glow=teal,2,300]they were strangers and pilgrims[/glow] on the
earth. ~ Hebrews 11:13
--- Quote ---
> Genre(s): Animals & Nature
>
> When the story of 'Tilda Jane appeared serially in The Youth's
Companion in 1901, the original manuscript was very much
condensed. When the time for book publication arrived nearly all
the omitted matter was restored. However, some incidents were
still left out, and they have formed the beginning of a new
story written to please the many boys and girls who have
expressed a wish to know something more of the fortunes of the
orphan and her dogs.
>
> That the orphan's old friends will follow with interest, her
often groping and stumbling, yet never-wearying steps along the
path of uplift for human beings and dumb creatures, is the
earnest hope of the author. ([glow=teal,2,300]Marshall
Saunders[/glow] &#10024; - from the Prefatory Note)
--- End Quote ---
[center]
HTML https://archive.org/download/tildajanesorphans_1801_librivox/tilda_jane_orphans_1801.jpg[/center]
[center][url=
HTML https://librivox.org/tilda-janes-orphans-by-marshall-saunders/]&#128266; [glow=teal,2,300]'Tilda Jane's Orphans[/glow] by Marshall
Saunders (1861 - 1947)[/center]
#Post#: 1165--------------------------------------------------
The Story of a Kitten and Her Friends
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: July 9, 2023, 5:23 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
--- Quote ---
> Genre(s): Animals & Nature
>
> "My name is P u s s y Black-Face, and I am a naughty young
kitten. I wish I were good like my mother. She is the best cat
that I ever saw. I try to be like her, and sometimes I succeed,
but most times I don't." From the start of this darling book
about a kitten and her mis-adventures in the house and the more
dangerous place outside. Follow her as she learns (mostly the
hard way) about people, children, dogs and other cats. - Summary
by phil chenevert
--- End Quote ---
[center]
HTML https://archive.org/download/librivoxcdcoverart34/pussyblackface_2001.jpg[/center]
[size=14pt]AGelbert NOTE: Because the 19th century word for
kitty in the title gets censored to ****
&#129318;&#8205;&#9794;&#65039;, the link to the audiobook does
not work.
&#129488; This link will take you to a list of all the &#128266;
audiobooks by Marshall Saunders
HTML https://librivox.org/author/4741?primary_key=4741&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results, where you will find the link to this
HTML https://archive.org/download/librivoxcdcoverart34/pussyblackface_2001.jpg heart warming tale of a kitten's adventures, including cat
fights and cat friendships. Enjoy.
HTML http://robservations.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/happy-cat1.jpg
#Post#: 1195--------------------------------------------------
This Audiobook is fiction but the hardhips portrayed are all too
real in human society.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: July 21, 2023, 7:16 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
--- Quote ---
> Genre(s): Animals & Nature
>
> Dear little Princess Sukey sitting by the fire�pretty little
pigeon�of what is she thinking as she dreamily eyes the blazing
wood? If a pigeon could review its past life, what she has of
bird mind would be running back over the series of adventures
that she had ere she established herself in this well ordered
household.
>
> Has she any mentality of her own, or are all pigeons stupid as
has been said? Listen to her story, and judge for yourself.
(Excerpt from Chapter I)
--- End Quote ---
[center]
HTML https://archive.org/download/princesssukey_2201_librivox/princesssukey_2201.jpg[/center]
[center][url=
HTML https://librivox.org/princess-sukey-the-story-of-a-pigeon-and-her-human-friends-by-marshall-saunders/]&#128266; Princess Sukey: The Story of a Pigeon and Her Human Friends by
Marshall Saunders (1861 - 1947)[/center]
Agelbert NOTE: This fictional narrative takes place when horse
drawn wheeled carriages, horse drawn sleds and steam powered
trains were the main forms of transportation, but the hardhips
portrayed are all too real in human society. This book has a
happy ending. That too, is reality based, but for too many
exploited and abused members of our society, a society
continuously degraded by the morally bankrupt among us, no happy
ending comes to pass in this, the valley of tears. Unlike too
many Judges today, the retired Judge in this book has a
&#9757;&#127995; conscience, and he &#128330;&#65039; lives by
it &#10024;. I post books like these in the hope that more
people of good will decide to dedicate their lives to doing good
by seeking and following the [glow=green,2,300]light unto their
path that God's word provides[/glow], despite all the
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-050422182057.gif [glow=red,2,300]adversity experienced[/glow].
And [glow=teal,2,300]others[/glow] &#128330;&#65039; had trial
of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and
imprisonment: [glow=teal,2,300]They[/glow] &#128330;&#65039;
were stoned, [glow=teal,2,300]They[/glow] &#128330;&#65039;
were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword:
[glow=teal,2,300]They[/glow] &#128330;&#65039; wandered about
in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted,
tormented; (Of [glow=teal,2,300]whom[/glow] &#128330;&#65039;
the world was not worthy:) [glow=teal,2,300]they[/glow]
&#128330;&#65039; wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in
dens and caves of the earth. ~ Hebrews 11:36-39
[glow=teal,2,300]These[/glow] all died in faith, not having
received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were
persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that
[glow=teal,2,300]they were strangers and pilgrims[/glow] on the
earth. ~ Hebrews 11:13
#Post#: 1229--------------------------------------------------
Beautiful Joe is a real dog rescued from a cruel master, and
&quot;Beautiful Joe&quot; is his real name.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: August 8, 2023, 8:07 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
--- Quote ---
> Genre(s): Animals
>
> Beautiful Joe is a real dog, and "Beautiful Joe" is his real
name. He belonged during the first part of his life to a cruel
master, who mutilated him in the manner described in the story.
He was rescued from him, and is now living in a happy home with
pleasant surroundings, and enjoys a wide local celebrity.
>
> The character of Laura is drawn from life, and to the smallest
detail is truthfully depicted. The Morris family has its
counterparts in real life, and nearly all of the incidents of
the story are founded on fact. (Summary by
[glow=teal,2,300]Marshall Saunders
&#128330;&#65039;[/glow])[/size]
--- End Quote ---
[center]
HTML https://www.archive.org/download/LibrivoxCdCoverArt/Beautiful_Joe_1002.jpg[/center]
[center][url=
HTML https://librivox.org/beautiful-joe-by-marshall-saunders/]&#128266; Beautiful Joe by [glow=teal,2,300][color=blue]Marshall
Saunders
&#128330;&#65039; (1861 - 1947)[/glow][/color][/center]
Agelbert NOTE: This is a heart warming story of animals and
people in the late 19th century. I learned much about the care
of farm animals in those days and what a Check Rein on a horse
is. Sheep really do only respond to the voice of their shepherd!
Dogs, &#128008; cats, cows, &#128052; horses, &#128055; pigs and
even &#128000; rats, are a LOT smarter than most people give
them credit for &#129312;.
Back then cow milk was not pasteurized. It seems the only
requirement placed on milk delivered to homes was that it must
have "at least 13% solids". I guess that was to keep people from
adding water to it to increase profits. Kind handling without
any beating, as well as keeping the cows clean and comfortable
(i.e. Properly fed and exercised in a pasture, no loud or
otherwise disturbing noises in roofed living area where milking
took place, not too cold or hot, floor and walls cleaned
regularly, adequate cow grooming to keep dirt, ticks and flies
off of them) was the surest way to get a regular amount of
disease free supply of milk. They would separate the calf from a
cow after one year, so they could get milk from the cow for
about a year. The calf was raised with sufficient nutrition
(some kind of mash they made) to grow as healthy as if it had
been given cow milk.
Even back then, farmers with a conscience who raised cows did
not engage in the cruel practice of immobilizing calfs several
weeks so their muscles would remain "tender" and they could be
sold for veal after their short lives of cruel total restraint.
Of course, as it is today, there were far too many people,
farmers included, who cared nothing for the welfare of their
animals beyond the profits they could extract from exploiting
them. &#128542;
The central theme of the book is that humans who are kind to
animals are invariably kind to other humans and vice versa.
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040622153109-13652067.png 
[center][url=
HTML https://librivox.org/beautiful-joe-by-marshall-saunders/]&#128266; Beautiful Joe by [glow=teal,2,300][color=blue]Marshall
Saunders
&#128330;&#65039; (1861 - 1947)[/glow][/color][/center]
#Post#: 1295--------------------------------------------------
Mr. Joerling''s story &#128565; is not for the faint of heart.

DIR By: AGelbert
Date: September 8, 2023, 6:00 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Genre(s): Nautical & Marine Fiction
[center]
HTML https://www.archive.org/download/librivox_cd_covers/an_antarctic_mystery_cover.jpg[/center]
[center][url=
HTML https://librivox.org/an-antarctic-mystery-or-the-sphinx-of-the-ice-fields/]&#128266; An Antarctic Mystery, or The Sphinx of the Ice Fields
[/center]
--- Quote ---
> By Jules Verne (1828 - 1905) Translated by Frances Sarah
Cashel Hoey (1830 - 1908)
>
> Edgar Allan Poe's telling of Arthur Pym's narrative is shown
to be true as events come together that bring out clues that
help Captain Len Guy trace the fate of his brother's ship the
Jane; the very ship that Arthur Pym was on board at the time of
his disappearance. Through the efforts of Mr. Joerling, the crew
of the Halbrane is enticed to make the trip to Antarctica to
search for any survivors of the Jane. (Summary from Wikipedia)
--- End Quote ---
AGelbert NOTE: Except for the racist remarks by Jules Verne
about his African American cook character named Endicott, this
fictional narrative is an exciting tale of the valiant attempt
to rescue the crew of a ship feared lost in the Antarctic. Many
kinds of dangers on land and on the sea are faced with
determination and true grit. There is plenty of pain and loss
along the way. This story is not for the faint of heart.
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