me. Dome a favor and milk Sally first, will you? I want to take that milk, orwhatever 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 forthe sixty-mile trip down the range road. Dew glistened in the earlyrays of light and the clear, cool morning air held little hint of theheat sure to come by midmorning. There was a rush of photographerstowards the gate as the little convoy left the ranch. A battery ofcameras grabbed shots of the vehicles heading south.
It was the beginning of a day that changed the entire foreign policy ofthe United States. It was also the day that started a host of thenation's finest nuclear physicists tottering towards psychiatrists'couches.
In rapid order in the next few days, Peterson's crew reinforced byhundreds of fellow scientists, technicians and military men, learnedwhat Johnny Culpepper already knew.
They learned that (1) Sally's milk, diluted by as much as four hundredparts of pure water, made a better fuel than gasoline when ignited.
They also learned that (2) in reduced degrees of concentration, itbecame 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 totwo cups of milk and went up the scale but leveled off at a peak as therecipe was increased; (4) could be controlled by mixing jets to produceany desired stream of explosive power; and (5) they didn't have thewildest idea what was causing the reaction.
In that same order it brought (1) Standard Oil stock down to the valueof wallpaper; (2) ditto for DuPont; (3) a new purge in the top level ofthe Supreme Soviet; (4) delight to rocketeers at Holloman Air ForceResearch Center, Cape Canaveral and Vandenburg Air Force Base; and (5)agonizing fits of hair-tearing to every chemist, biologist andphysicist who had a part in the futile attempts to analyze the twoingredients of what the press had labeled "Thompson's Eggnog."
While white-coated veterinarians, agricultural experts and chemistsprodded and poked Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III, others were giving asimilar going-over to Hetty's chicken flock. Solomon's outraged screamsof anger echoed across the desert as they subjected him to fowlindignities never before endured by a rooster.
Weeks passed and with each one new experiments disclosed new uses forthe amazing Eggnog. While Sally placidly chewed her cuds and continuedto give a steady five gallons of concentrated fury at each milking,Solomon's harem dutifully deposited from five to a dozen golden spheresof packaged power every day. At the same time, rocket researchengineers completed their tests on the use of the Eggnog.
* * * * *
In the early hours of June 4th, a single-stage, two-egg, thirty-fivegallon 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 Atlasa relay clicked, activating a solenoid that pushed open a valve. A thinstream of Sally's milk shot in from one side of the firing chamber toblend with a fine spray of egg, batter coming from a jet in theopposite wall.
Spewing a solid tail of purple fire, the Atlas leaped like a wasp-stungheifer from the launching pads and thundered into space. The fuelorifices continued to expand to maximum pre-set opening. In ten secondsthe nose cone turned from cherry-red to white heat and began sloughingits outer ceramic coating. At slightly more than forty-three thousandmiles an hour, the great missile cleaved out of atmosphere into thevoid of space, leaving a shock wave that cracked houses and shatteredglass for fifty miles from launching point.
A week later, America's newest rocket vessel, weighing more than thirtytons and christened _The Egg Nog_, was launched from the opposite coastat Vandenburg. Hastily modified to take the new fuel, the weight andspace originally designed for the common garden variety of rocket fuelwas filled with automatic camera and television equipment. In its sternstood a six-egg, one-hundred-gallon engine, while in the nose was asmall, one-egg, fourteen-quart braking engine to slow it down for thereturn trip through the atmosphere.
Its destination--Mars!
A week later, _The Eggnog_ braked down through the troposphere, skiddedto a piddling two-thousand miles, an hour through the stratosphere,automatically sprouted gliding wing stubs in the atmosphere and planeddown to a spraying halt in the Pacific Ocean, fifty miles west ofEnsenada in Baja, California. Aboard were man's first views of the redplanet.
The world went mad with jubilation. From the capitals of the freenations congratulations poured into Washington. From Moscow came wordof a one-hundred-ton spaceship to be launched in a few days, powered bya mixture of vodka and orange juice discovered by a bartender inNovorosk who was studying chemistry in night school. This announcementwas followed twenty-four hours later by a story in _Pravda_ provingconclusively that Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III was a directdescendant of Nikita's Mujik Droshky V, a prize Guernsey bull producedin the barns of the Sopolov People's Collective twenty-six years ago.
Late in August, Air Force Major Clifton Wadsworth Quartermain climbedout of the port of the two-hundred-ton, two dozen-egg, two-hundred-thirtygallon space rocket _Icarus_, the first man into space and back. He hadcircled 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 Allenradiation belts.
On September 15th, Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III, having been milkedharder and faster than any Guernsey in history, went dry.
Less than half of the approximately twelve-hundred gallons of fuel shehad produced during her hay days, remained on hand in the AEC storagevaults.
Three days later, Solomon, sprinting after one of his harem who wasplaying hard to get, bee-lined into the path of a security police jeep.There was an agonized squawk, a shower of feathers and mourning. Ashort time later, the number of golden eggs dropped daily until onemorning, there were none. They never reappeared. The United States hadstockpiled twenty-six dozen in an underground cave deep in the Rockies.
Man, who had burst like a butterfly into space, crawled back into hiscocoon 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'sCloverdale Marathon III came home to the Circle T in disgrace. In acorner of the truck, the late Solomon's harem cackled and voiced loudcries of misery as they huddled in the rude, slatted shipping coop. Thetruck turned off the county road and onto the dirt road leading to themain buildings. It rattled across the cattle guard and through thenew-unprotected and open gate in the barbed wire fence. Life hadreturned almost to normal at the Circle T.
But not for long.
Five days after Sally's ignominious dismissal from the armed forces, astaff car came racing up to the ranch. It skidded to a halt at theback-porch steps. Dr. Peterson jumped out and dashed up to the kitchendoor.
"Well, for heaven's sake," Hetty cried. "Come on in, sonny. I ain'tseen you for the longest spell."
Peterson entered and looked around.
"Where's Johnny, Mrs. Thompson?" he asked excitedly. "I've got somewonderful news."
"Now ain't that nice," Hetty exclaimed. "Your wife have a new baby orsomething? Johnny's down at the barn. I'll call him for you." She movedtowards the door.
"Never mind," Peterson said, darting out the door, "I'll go down to thebarn." He jumped from the porch and ran across the yard.
He found Johnny in the barn, rigging a new block and tackle for thehayloft. Barney was helping thread the new, manila line from a coil onthe straw-littered floor.
"Johnny, we've found it," Peterson shouted jubilantly
as he burst intothe barn.
"Why, Doc, good to see you again," Johnny said. "Found what?"
"The secret of Sally's milk," Peterson cried. He looked wildly aroundthe 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 stumbledon something. Now we still don't know what's in those eggs or inSally's milk that make them react as they do. All we've been able tofind is some strange isotope but we don't know how to reproduce it orsynthesize