Hi Diddle Diddle

The day that Hydroponics Technician Al Mason got his big idea started out just like any other at Lunar Base Three—that is, with a bunch of bloodshot and fuzzy-brained scientists and engineers going through the motions of eating breakfast.

The first meal of the day at Lunar Base Three was never a pleasant proposition. Lunar Base Three was manned entirely by a bachelor staff of American researchers. With no women around at present, and with no stringent curfew laws, the men of Lunar Base Three thought nothing of staging lively bull-sessions that lasted far into the “night”—as late as two or three in the morning, by their arbitrary time-scale.

But there was a very definite reveille bell at half past seven in the morning on that same time-scale, and a very definite time during which the mess contingent served breakfast. So, each “morning,” several dozen men gathered, bleary-eyed, after only three or four or sometimes five hours of sleep. Conversation was rarely inspired at the breakfast table of Lunar Base Three; largely a matter of muttered grunts and yawns, pass-me-the-sugar, and vague complaints about the traditional lack of quality of the synthetic food served on the Moon.

Hydroponics Technician Al Mason had been up past three the night before, jawing with a visiting astronomer from Lunar Base One. Just now Mason was as red-eyed and as sleep-befogged as the rest of the men in Lunar Base Three. But an idea was beginning to blossom in his skull, forcing its way upward through the murkiness of fatigue.

“Powdered milk,” Mason grumbled, sourly. “Every morning, powdered milk I Thin anemic stuff that no self-respecting calf would sniff twice.” He poured himself a glassful and sipped at it glumly.

“If you’d drink coffee in the morning,” commented Biochemist Maury Roberts in a waspish tone, “you wouldn’t have to grouse about the milk all the time.”

“I like milk,” Mason replied stolidly. “I don’t like coffee.”

“Retarded maturity,” remarked Sam Brewster, an Electronics man. “Delayed adolescence. That’s why you still drink milk!”

Hydroponics Technician Mason was six feet three and weighed two hundred pounds under Earth gravity. It was unlikely that he suffered from any such fixations. He chuckled grimly at Brewster’s comment and took another swig of milk. “Go ahead, psychoanalyze me if you want to! But I still like milk, real milk, not this ersatz stuff.”

The milk pitcher passed round the table. Some of the men were having dry cereal; others liked milk in their coffee. And one thing was evident to all: the synthetic milk was getting wearisome. As were all the other synthetic foods, the vegeburgers and the yeast-cakes and the rest. But there was no helping the situation; at this stage of Lunar exploration, space travel was a costly proposition. It was more important to devote precious cargo space to vital instruments than to steaks and chops. The synthetics weren’t as tasty, but they were just as nutritious as the real goods—and they took up only a tenth as much space as real food on each Moonbound cargo ship from Earth.

Al Mason leaned Sleepily forward, thinking bleakly of how pleasant it would be to have real food at the base—not just at Christmas time, when the budget-happy appropriators in Congress relented for the sake of sentiment, but all the blessed year round. Real food. Good honest homogenized Grade A.

Mason downed the last of his milk and blinked as the idea that had been forming all morning suddenly erupted into the conscious levels of his mind. He started to laugh. It was a preposterous idea, sure. But he liked it.

Mason looked cautiously over his shoulder at the other table, where the top brass were breakfasting. Base Commander Henderson was shoveling a synthetic omelet into his mouth and was thumbing through the early-morning news bulletins off the Washington ticker, simultaneously. But Commander Henderson had notoriously sharp ears. And the C.O. might not care too much for the project Mason had just conceived. The base’s budget was too skimpy to permit horseplay.

In a low voice Mason said, “I just had a notion—about synthetic milk, and all.”

“Well?” Maury Roberts said. “What is it?”

“Not here,” Mason murmured. “Brass might down thumb it. I’ll tell you tonight, after hours. I think we’re going to have some fun.”

Al Mason said nothing about his great idea all day. He let it ripen in his mind. He moved busily and efficiently through the ’ponies chamber, tending to his chores. The hydroponics work had to come before anything else, and Mason knew it.

Eight small domed bases dotted the face of the Moon in that year of 1995. Three of the bases were American, three Russian, one Chinese, one Indian. Although the cold war had long since relaxed, assuming the nature of a perpetual stalemate rather than a helter-skelter scramble for destruction, the rivalry among the Moon bases remained keen. American science vied with Russian science for supremacy, and the men of the Lunar bases knew they had to work at top productivity all the time.

America’s Lunar Base One was a gigantic astronomical observatory. Lunar Base Two, like its Russian counterpart, was a military installation, complete with a dusty stockpile of fission-fusion-fission bombs and missiles. Most civilized peoples of the world preferred not to think much about America’s Lunar Base Two and the Russian equivalent, known as Outpost Lenin.

Lunar Base Three was devoted to basic scientific research. It had been hard to ram the concept of a Base Three through the minds of the members of the various Appropriations Committees, and even now Base Three did not have all the money it needed. But it carried on valuable research despite the annual harrying it received at budget time.

The Moon is a natural place for cryogenics research; cryogenics, therefore, was a major feature of Base Three. Hydroponics was another important project; as Man’s dominion extended outward into space, it would be increasingly more important to find ways of maintaining a Terrestrial ecology. Also carried on at Base Three were high-and low-pressure physics, solid-state work, advanced chemical research into atmosphere purification, and several dozen other things. There was remarkably little supervision, and no quota of practical results was demanded—though the men of Base Three were aware that their base would continue to exist only so long as the United States Government remained in a free-spending mood.

The ambition of every bright young science student in the United States was to qualify for acceptance as a researcher in Lunar Base Three. While in Russia, the cream of the cream was chosen for similar work at Outpost Kapitza in Ptolemaeus Crater.

The working day at Lunar Base Three theoretically ended at 1700 hours. In practice, the men were under their own supervision. They were free to knock off at noon when they wanted to, and were equally free to work clear through till morning reveille if the urge smote them. Responsible-minded people rarely take advantage of such setups. The average work-week among the men of Lunar Base Three was in the vicinity of eighty or ninety hours a week. Occasionally Commander Henderson had to order a man to take some time off, for the sake of health.

But there were several recreation-sheds for the benefit of men who wanted to relax for after-hours bull sessions and the like. Hydroponics Technician Mason entered Recreation Shed B about 1900 hours that night, after shutting up shop at the ponies chambers.

None of the base’s administrative officials happened to be in the shed, for which Mason was grateful. But five of his fellow workers were there—Sam Brewster, Maury Roberts, Len Garfield of Cryogenics, Dave Herst of Chemistry, and Nat Bryan of the Solid-State team.

When Mason walked into the recreation shed he was humming an old nursery rhyme, singing a little of it in an erring basso:

Sam Brewster put down the microtape he was scanning and said, “Lord, Mason, you really are reverting to childhood, eh? Mother Goose, now? What’s next?”

“Thumb-sucking,” suggested Len Garfield.

“It’s those weird chemicals he uses in the ponies lab,” Maury Roberts offered. “They’re operating on his metabolism and reversing the direction of his—”

“O.K., hold it!” Mason said, holding up one big hand for silence. “As some of you birds may possibly remember, I had an idea, this morning.”

“Hooray! Mason had an idea!”

Mason glowered at Len Garfield, “Thank you. To continue: at breakfast, while grousing about the food, I thought to myself as follows: I despise this synthetic milk. How can I get some real fresh milk? And the answer came: the only place you can get fresh milk from is a cow.”

“A cow? On the Moon?” snorted Sam Brewster.

“You could let it graze in the ’ponies shed,” Maury Roberts ventured.

“O.K., wiseguys. Let me finish,” Mason said. “Obviously there’s no place in Lunar Base Three or anywhere else on the Moon for a live cow—and Earth wouldn’t ship one up to us, anyway, not with space freight costs what they are. But—we’re all trained scientists, I said to myself. We range virtually the entire spectrum of man’s resourcefulness, I said to myself. Why not, I said to myself—why not build a cow?”

For a moment there was absolute silence in the recreation shed.

“Build a cow?” three men repeated.

Al Mason nodded. “Yeah. Why not? As a kind of recreational project. Of course, the brass might not go for it too much, but we could keep it hush-hush until we got some results—”

“Build a cow?” Garfield said. “Complete, tail and all, and an artificial moo?”

Mason scowled pleasantly. “Cut the kidding. I mean a mechanical device that will produce milk, real milk. I visualize a heap of machinery with an output at one end, not anything that necessarily resembles a cow in anything but function.”

Mason looked around. It had taken only a few seconds for the initial shock of the idea to wear off. Mason knew that each of them was beginning to frame blueprints already. Not that they gave much of a damn about getting real milk or not; they had all said often enough that they could get along on synthetic cow-juice in their coffee. But it was the idea that caught them. They were men who didn’t need to draw a distinction between work and play. Tinkering, building things—that was both work and play for them.

Mason said, “I can’t carry this project out by myself. Are you five with me?”

He got five nods, one after another.

“I didn’t think you guys would back down from something like this,” Mason said. “We can call it Project Bossie. Let’s toss some ideas around.”

Ideas were tossed. The brainstorming session lasted, as usual, well past the arbitrarily defined Lunar “midnight,” and got more heated as it went.

“We understand the metabolism of a cow,” Mason said. “We know how a cow produces milk. We know what cow’s milk consists of—fat, lactose, protein, water. We know how a cow’s digestive system works. So why can’t we build a cow ourselves?”

“I don’t know how a cow’s metabolism works,” Len Garfield said. “It’s not a subject I’m likely to need in Cryogenics work. Maury, will you fill me in?”

The biochemist scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully. “Well, a cow’s intake is mostly grass, of course. Which is largely cellulose. The cow grinds the cellulose up and boots it around through its four stomachs. Microorganisms in the cow’s innards break the cellulose down into simpler compounds. Along the way, the stomach contents get fermented, then digested. The cow takes roughage, even sawdust if it has to, and converts it into energy-yielding substances.

“As for the milk—that’s manufactured from substances in the cow’s blood. A cow’s udder has milk-forming cells that secrete milk into alveoli that pass the milk out through a duct, where it collects and is drained off. As AL said, milk’s made up of fats, lactose, proteins, plus a lot of water. The fats are the common long-chain variety plus some short-chain fats which are quite unique. It’s a pretty clear process. All we need to do is duplicate the chemical reactions that take place all along the way, starting with a cellulose intake that gets broken down eventually into amino acids and short-chain fats. If we match the process step-by-step mechanically, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get authentic milk at the other end.”

“I can think of a reason,” Sam Brewster said. “A cow’s udder is one devil of a complicated affair. If you’re expecting me to build a mechanical duplicate of a filter system that precise, let me tell you right now that I’m not guaranteeing results in less than ninety years.”

“That’s the one part of the system that doesn’t need to be mechanical,” Maury Roberts said. “I agree, building a filter to draw milk out of the system is beyond our ability—but we can always hook a real udder into the system to handle the output.”

“Eh?” Brewster said. “Where are you going to get—”

“I’ve got,” Roberts said. The biochemist grinned. “I suspect you knew about this, Al—didn’t you?”

Mason nodded. “Maury has quite a collection of tissue extracts sitting in his deep freeze for biological research.

Including, so I’ve learned, a couple of snips of tissue from a cow udder.”

“It wouldn’t be any trouble at all to borrow a few cells from that test tube,” Roberts said. “Set up an incubator, grow the cells in a protein nutrient bath. They’ll grow indefinitely, doubling every forty-eight hours or so. In hardly any time at all we’ll have enough udder tissue to extract all the milk we want.”

“That takes care of the output, I suppose,” Nat Bryan said. “But how about these symbiotic microorganisms that take part in the digestive process? You don’t have any of those in the deep freeze!”

“We’ll synthesize ’em,” Dave Herst said. “Over at our lab we can whip up an enzyme to do most any job. You just tell me what’s needed, Maury, and—”

“I know what’s needed,” Sam Brewster objected. “We need a whole slew of equipment. What we’re building amounts to a still that yields milk instead of booze, and we’re going to need plenty of hardware for it.”

“We’ll pinch it,” Mason said quietly. “Item by item. Nobody’s going to squawk if we requisition a few yards of tubing or a couple of metal vats for our work. The trick is not to be too conspicuous.”

He saw by the sly looks on their faces that they were completely hooked. There hadn’t been a really good gag at Lunar Base Three in a couple of months, not since a computer man had programed one of the heavy-duty robot drudges to give hotfoots.

They continued far into the night, raising possible objections and squelching them, putting forth suggestions and ideas. About three a.m. they decided they had had it for the night. It was going to take plenty more jaw-thinking before they could begin on the schematics. But the general concept was clear already: a mechanical duplication of the bovine digestive system, coupled with a tissue-culture-grown mammary gland at the output.

The next morning at breakfast they were their usual uncommunicative selves, as might be expected after four hours of sleep. After breakfast and before starting work for the day, Mason paid a visit to the office of Base Commander Henderson and formally applied for permission to use one of the base’s vacant labs.

Henderson glanced over the filled-out application form and said, “Are you branching out, Al?”

“I’ve got an idea, sir. I want to give it a try.” Henderson smiled. “That’s what we’re here for—to give things a try. Care to tell me about it?”

Mason’s face reddened slightly. “If it’s all the same, sir, I’d prefer to keep it under my hat. At least until I see if it works out, anyway.”

Henderson said, “I suppose that’s O.K. here.” His eyes narrowed. “Ah . . . this project of yours isn’t going to involve a change in the budget, is it?”

“No, sir. Any equipment needed will be covered by present appropriations.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” the C.O. said in a tired voice. “The people in Washington are snapping at my heels, Al. They want to peel five or ten or fifty million off our budget for the next fiscal year, and the way things are happening on Capitol Hill these days they may very well succeed. So this isn’t the time to begin any ambitious or expensive new projects. We may be lucky just to hold the status quo here, after Congress gets through with our appropriation for next year.”

“I understand, sir. But I don’t think this is going to be very expensive. It’s just—well, call it a sideline, sir.” Henderson smiled. “Very well, Al. Permission granted.” Mason thanked him, stepped outside, and called Maury Roberts at the Biochemistry Unit. He said, “Everything’s O.K. The old man is letting us use Room 106a.”

“Swell. I’ve got the udder-tissue out of the storage freeze, and I just popped it into the nutrient bath. And last night after we split up I worked out a diagram blocking out the cow’s digestive system unit by unit. We can use that as our jump-off point.”

“Right. See you later,” Mason said happily.

The six men spent the first week doing mouthwork—throwing out ideas, pulling them apart, putting them back together. It was a week of bickering and haggling, a week of bantering and chaffing. But it was also a week of results. By the end of the week they had a reasonably operational plan. There was plenty of disagreement, of course, but that only added spice to the project. There were long hours of completely irrelevant hairsplittings and side-issues—but, somehow, the irrelevancies turned out to be relevant after all, later on.

Meanwhile, the bit of tissue in the Bioehem lab grew . . . and grew . . . and grew. Cells nourished by benevolent proteins and warmed by the incubator divided, and divided again. By the end of the first week, the cells formed a visible spot on the surface of the nutrient base.

Sam Brewster worked up a set of blueprints for electronically-controlled feeder mechanisms. Dave Herst quietly worked out a few of the problems of enzyme synthesis. Mason co-ordinated. Slowly, over a couple of weeks, the contradictory ideas of six men turned into one master plan—Project Bossie.

The first installations went into place in the fifth week of the project—four massive copper kettles, linked by plastic tubing. The kettles represented the four stomachs of a cow. Sam Brewster rigged a force-pump to keep the digestive products moving along the system. The pump, like the kettles, came out of the base’s excess stores, on special requisition. Nobody asked any questions.

A fifth kettle was added, and a sixth, and a seventh, as the project continued. Work was carried on, generally, in after-hours time; none of the cow-builders was foolish enough to neglect his own specialty during the day.

After the seventh week, it started to become apparent that duplicating the innards of a cow was not a simple matter of rigging a continuous flow-line. There were all sorts of complications.

Some of the artificial enzymes reacted unfavorably with others; it became necessary to devise an intricate enzyme-injection scheme to maintain proper digestive control. The acetic acid produced in one of the four stomachs as part of the process had unhappy effects on some of the tubing, which had to be replaced. A complex and expensive centrifuge had to be surreptitiously snaffled from Maury Roberts’ biochemistry section and introduced into the works to separate the digestive products properly, in the absence of the simple hormones that took care of that job in a cow.

Toward the ninth week of the project, glimmers of light began to show. But a new cloud appeared on the horizon that week. And a quite unexpected thunderbolt descended.

The first word arrived one morning in the mess hall. One of the signal-room orderlies entered the mess hall, snapped to attention in front of the rear table where the top brass ate, and plunked a yellow message sheet down in front of Base Commander Henderson. Henderson’s immediate profane outburst silenced all conversation. The Base Commander rose and looked around the mess hall. His face drooped in a dark scowl.

In somber tones he said, “Gentlemen, I hate to ruin. your meal like this, but I have some bad news that might as well be shared with the entire staff.” He chewed at his lower lip for a moment—a sign, everyone knew, not so much of nervousness as of smoldering anger. “As you may know but probably don’t care, this is an election year down below in the States. Ten months from now a lot of congressmen and senators are going to lose their jobs, unless they can convince their constituents meanwhile that they deserve to hold office for another term. So tills is the time of year when senators and congressmen go junketing all over hither and yon, trying to dig up scandals and such.

“To come to the point, gentlemen: I’ve just received work that the next cargo ship from Earth, which is due here in twenty-seven days, is bringing us three senators and three representatives. They’re coming up to investigate our operations here.”

When Al Mason and his five cohorts gathered in Laboratory 106a that night for their regular session of work on Project Bossie, they all wore sheepish, abashed expressions—the sort of look a man might wear if he picked up a kitten to stroke it and abruptly discovered he was clutching a tiger by the tail.

“Well,” Mason said, surveying the imposing array of gadgetry which was Project Bossie. “I knew it was too good to last. Senators! Congressmen!”

“Dirty snoopers,” Sam Brewster muttered.

“We’ll have a fine time explaining this to them,” Nat Bryan said, waving a hand at the installation. “How will they understand that we were just having a little fun?”

“Fun,” Maury Roberts said morosely. “Congressmen don’t think scientists are supposed to have fun. We’re supposed to be deadly serious characters who speak in four-syllable words interspersed with equations. If they find out I hooked a nine hundred dollar centrifuge just for fun, they’ll—”

“And a hundred bucks’ worth of relays and transistors,” Sam Brewster said.

“And an incubator for that udder,” added Dave Herst.

“And all these kettles, and the tubing,” Len Garfield said. “The flow-meters, the pipelines, the refrigeration unit—”

“So?” Al Mason demanded loudly. “Are you guys voting to pull out?”

“No, but—”

Mason cut into Sam Brewsters reply. “No, but what? Do you want to break the project up and return all this stuff to the stores? That way the investigating committee will never find out what we’ve been up to. And we can tell Henderson that our project was a failure and we disbanded it.”

“But it’s not a failure,” Dave Herst said vehemently. “Another month and we may have the whole thing licked! We can’t give up now, Al.”

“O.K., then,” Mason said. “Stop worrying about congressmen. When they come, we’ll just suspend operations in here and hope they don’t ask any questions. We’re too deep into this thing to give up now. Yes?”

“I’ll go along with you, Al,” Nat Bryan said.

“Same here,” put in Dave Herst.

The others agreed. Project Bossie was not to be discontinued. Work would proceed.

Work proceeded. The tissue-culture udder had now reached functional size, and one night it was transported from the Biochemistry Unit to Lab 106a, incubator and all, and hooked into the system. It was the eleventh week. It was now possible to introduce waste cellulose at the intake of the artificial cow and have it pass through the four “stomachs” to be broken down into the desired products. The result was synthetic blood from which the udder could extract milk. Mason computed that three hundred quarts of such blood would be needed to produce a quart of milk. It wasn’t a bad ratio, but they determined to improve on it.

Other unforeseen hitches developed. The first batch of milk that was produced, in the twelfth week, was vile stuff, about sixty per cent fat and fifteen per cent protein; it looked curdled the moment after it appeared, and rapidly got worse. It was discovered that the bleeder-lines at the final stage of the digestive process were faulty; glucose and galactose were being held back, too much fat admitted. The men went to work on this problem.

They solved it. But the solution involved rigging a new and elaborate system of tubing. The synthetic cow was taking on frightening aspects by this time. Dimly discernible beneath the network of pipes and tubes and stopcocks were the original four kettles of the digestive system. But now the apparatus took up virtually every square inch of floor space in Laboratory 106a. It sprawled toward the four comers of the room and up to the ceiling.

A new flaw was discovered: a vital liver secretion was missing, causing difficulties in the process of fat digestion. A cow’s milk has no more than four per cent fat in it; they were unable to lower the fat percentage below twenty-five per cent. Some quick research produced the reason. But a week of fruitless labor told them that it was going to be an enormous task to duplicate mechanically the necessary organ of secretion.

The project tottered on the brink of failure.

Nat Bryan made a suggestion: “We have a real udder. How about a real liver, too?”

Maury Roberts prowled through the inventory of the Biochem unit and discovered liver tissue in cold storage. The next day, a second incubator was in use; Roberts was busy growing a cow liver. It was either that or abandon the project.

Day by day the cells proliferated. The udder, meanwhile, was doing splendidly, and had to be trimmed back every three days to keep it from growing unlimitedly.

Success was approaching.

But so, unfortunately, were the congressmen.

They arrived right on schedule, 0900 hours on the 28th of January, 1996. There were six of them, as advertised. The total mass of the six legislators and their belongings was better than thirteen hundred pounds, and therefore that much useful equipment had to be displaced on the cargo ship. As Commander Henderson mournfully explained, there would be no new supply of reading-tapes this month, nor any shipments of beer. A small comptometer requisitioned by the astronomers in Base One had been left over till next time, too. It couldn’t be helped; the legislators had a right to visit the Lunar installations if they chose.

The morning of the delegation’s arrival, each man in Base Three found a mimeographed memo waiting for him on his breakfast plate:\

Al Mason put down the memo sheet and peered owlishly at his mess-hall neighbor, Sam Brewster. “Avoid any conspicuous material extravagance that might be tough to explain!” he quoted. “Talk about locking the bam door too late! We have already been extravagant, and Td hate to have to explain.”

“If the C.O. ever pokes his nose into 106a,” Brewster said, “were going to have to explain. You better start thinking up something convincing, Al.”

Mason didn’t say anything. He grinned palely and took a long, deep, unsatisfying slug of his synthetic milk.

The senators were quartered in the Administration hut, while the congressmen had to put up with accommodations in one of the storage shacks. They were old men, the six of them—the youngest couldn’t have been much less than fifty-five—and they just loved the low gravity. But from the first hour, when they glanced beady-eyed around the base as if looking for their first target, it was evident to all hands that a real going-over was in the cards.

The six members of Project Bossie decided that for the nonce it was best to keep out of Laboratory 106a for the next ten days, except for performing routine operations necessary for maintenance of the complex contraption. There would be the deuce to pay if the investigating committee ever caught on. For one thing, the installation had become immense. For another, better than ten thousand dollars worth of good equipment had been sidetracked into the project by this time, along with a good many man-hours of highly skilled time. It would be unwise in the extreme to let the visitors find out that six men, without the knowledge of the Base Commander, had squandered so much time and energy and money for anything so frivolous as the production of milk—and just for the fun of it.

So Mason and his fellow conspirators entered Laboratory 106a at odd hours just to keep things running—mostly to keep an eye on the nutrient bath that supported the rapidly sprouting liver tissue. The udder was doing fine.

It didn’t take long to learn who were the legislators to watch out for. Representative Claude Manners was the fiercest ogre of the lot—a crusty New Englander from, of all places, Masons home state of New Hampshire. Representative Manners regarded any sort of governmental expenditure with horror. He persisted in wandering around the base asking, in a thin and insistent voice, “Yes, but what practical use does this have?”

On the senatorial side, the hardest to deal with was Senator Albert Jennings of Alabama. Senator Jennings’ favorite questions were, “Can’t this project really be dispensed with?” and “Let me see the cost figures on this equipment, please.”

It was trial by budget. Base Three was fidgety and tense. AL Mason began to wish he had never thought of building a synthetic cow. It was only a matter of time before the secret would be out.

And they were so close to the finish, too. Everything had seemed to check out at the last examination. The liver was thriving now—in fact, it was threatening to outgrow its space allotment, and Maury Roberts had to lower the incubator temperature in order to inhibit the organ’s boundless growth. The rest of the system was in working order. If only those snoopers would leave the Base, Mason thought, so we could run the final tests—

On the fourth day, after the arrival of the congressional commission, Al Mason was engaged busily in tidying up his hydroponics lab, in anticipation of a visit from Representative Manners later in the day, when his office phone rang.

He picked it up. “Hydroponics. Mason speaking.”

“Al, Commander Henderson here. Think you can stop off at my office for a few minutes?”

“I suppose so, sir. You mean, right now?”

“Yes. Right now, if you’re free.” The commander’s voice sounded oddly tense. Mason hung up, told his assistant he was leaving, and headed for Commander Henderson’s office on the double.

The C.O. looked worried. His face was drawn and weary. The visit was telling on his nerves more than anyone’s.

He said, in a ragged voice, “Al, about an hour ago I took the guests on a tour of the north end of the base. They came across Laboratory 106a.”

Oh, oh, Mason thought sickly. “Yes, sir?”

Henderson flashed a faint smile. “That’s quite an installation you’ve been building in there, Al.”

“It is rather complex,” Mason admitted.

Henderson nodded. The comers of his mouth quirked. “Ah—some of our guests were very interested in it. They wanted to know what function it performed. That’s what Representative Manners asked me particularly—what function it performed.”

“Function, sir?” Mason repeated lamely.

“Yes. Function.” The commander stirred uneasily. “I . . . ah . . . told them it was being used for biological research. They wanted me to be more specific, and I kept getting vaguer, and finally I had to admit that I didn’t know what the damned pile of equipment was supposed to do! So I’m in a bit of hot water now, Al. They seem to have the idea that a Commanding Officer should be aware of every single project being carried on at his base.”

Mason moistened his lips. He said nothing.

The commander continued, “With luck, I can wiggle out of this without too much trouble. But it may turn out to be very damaging. Tell me, Al—just in case they bother me about it again. What is that thing you’ve been constructing in 106a?”

Mason took a very deep breath. When he spoke, his voice came out thin and feeble. “It’s a cow, sir.”

The commander’s double-take was admirably brief. He recovered equilibrium almost at once and said, “Let’s have that again?”

Mason smiled humorlessly. “It’s . . . uh . . . a device for processing cellulose and converting it to nutritive products, sir. Milk, to be precise.”

Henderson was nodding slowly. “A cow. I see, Al. You built a machine that produces milk.”

“Yes, sir. It’s not quite finished, yet.”

“Tell me: why did you feel it necessary to build such a machine?”

“Well . . . uh . . . it was sort of just for fun, sir. A recreational project. Only we didn’t think it was going to use so much equipment, you see, and—” Mason saw the look in Henderson’s eyes, and his voice trailed off.

“O.K., Al,” Henderson said in a rigidly controlled voice. “You built it for him. Well, I’m a mild-tempered man.

I won’t get sore. Just scram, over to the ’ponies chamber, and get to work. If anybody asks you, that thing in 106a is a biological converter. Make up some fancy double-talk. Whatever you do, don’t let any of those congressmen find out that you built that expensive junk pile for the sheer joy of building it. Or that it’s intended to produce milk. We’ll never hear the end of this, if they catch wise.”

“Yes, sir.”

“O.K. Now get.”

Mason got.

The hydroponics man stepped out of Henderson’s office and almost collided with Maury Roberts. The little biochemist started talking at once.

“I’m on my way over to 106a, Al. Bryan just stuck his nose in there and told me that the liver tissue is growing like crazy. I’ll have to trim it back and dispose of the excess . . . Al, is there something wrong?”

“Yeah.”

“You look terrible!”

“I feel terrible.” Mason jerked his thumb back in the general direction of the Administration hut. “The Old Man just had me on the carpet. Seems the visitors snooped their way into the Project Bossie lab this morning and wanted to know what all the hardware was being used for.”

“No.”

“Yeah. Well, the C.O. didn’t know, so he bluffed them. But he doesn’t know how long they’re going to be satisfied with his bluff.”

“Al, this is terrible! What’s going to happen?”

Mason shrugged. “Henderson’ll probably wiggle out of it, but you can bet he’ll come down hard on us once the visitors are gone. He wasn’t at all amused by the whole idea.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Nothing,” Mason said. “Just keep going through the motions. You go over to the lab and trim that liver, if you want to. I’ve got to get back to work.”

Roberts took off for Laboratory 106a at a quick trot. Mason sauntered morosely across the clearing. He stopped, stared up through the vaulting plastic roof of the dome at the night-shrouded Earth that hung in the sky.

Who needed these senators anyway? he asked himself.

Snoopers. Pennywise meddlers. But they were necessary evils, Mason admitted reluctantly. Only now the C.O. was in trouble, and it was a sure bet that once the delegation from Washington had left, there would be merry hell raised around Base Three. Creative independence was one thing; funneling all kinds of costly equipment into a silly enterprise like a synthetic cow was different. And if the truth ever leaked to the Appropriations Committee—

Mason shuddered. He admitted that the cow had gotten somewhat out of hand. But it had simply turned out to be a more complicated job than they had expected, that was all.

Then he frowned. What had Roberts been trying to say? The liver was growing; so he would have to trim off the excess and dispose of it—

Wait a minute!

What Maury Roberts was trimming away was good edible meat. And if the machine could produce meat and milk—heck, Mason thought, it isn’t as useless as it seems! We don’t need to skulk and hide! We’ve invented something downright handy I But—

A sudden cry interrupted his train of thought.

“Hey, All Come here!”

Mason turned slowly. The door of the mess hall was open, and Roily Firestone, Cook First Class, was standing in the opening, arms akimbo. Firestone was grinning.

“What is it, Roily?” Mason grunted.

“Got something for you. Something you’ll like, Al.” Shrugging, Mason walked over. Firestone’s green eyes were alight with some secret glee. Crooking one finger, he led Mason through the mess hall and into the kitchen. “You wait here,” Firestone said.

Mason wondered impatiently what the cook was up to. But he had only a moment to wait. Firestone busied himself at the back of the kitchen and returned almost immediately holding a glass containing a white liquid.

“You’re the one who’s always been griping about the synthetic milk,” Firestone said. “So I figured I’d give you a little treat. Just don’t get me in trouble for it.” Mason took the glass. He sniffed. It smelled like milk. It looked like milk.

“Go on,” Firestone urged. “Drink it.”

Mason took an experimental sip, then another, and then a hefty gulp. It was milk. And not synthetic, either. This was the pure authentic article, unadulterated, homogenized, creamy and rich to the taste. Milk.

“Where in blazes did you get it?” Mason demanded. It couldn’t possibly be a product of the unfinished milk-still; in any event, Firestone knew nothing about the project. But where else, Mason wondered, could real milk have come from on the Moon?

The rotund cook said, “It’s Representative Manners’ private stock. I figured he could spare you a glassful or so. He must have brought five or ten gallons up from Earth with him.”

Mason’s jaw dropped. “He brought . . . five or ten . . . gallons . . . of milk?”

Firestone nodded amiably. “And, me knowing how much you went for the stuff, I figured I’d invite you in here for a little sip of it on the sly—”

“But why . . . why did he bring milk with him?”

“He’s got stomach ulcers,” the cook confided. “He’s on a milk diet. Drinks quarts and quarts of the stuff every day, hardly eats anything else. It’s a nuisance, I tell you, keeping that milk of his under refrigeration and dishing it out to him. But the commander says we gotta cater to those birds, and so I give ’em the best treatment. You ought to hear the rest of them grumble about the synthetic foods I”

Mason shrugged. “It’s their own fault they have to eat synthetics up here,” he said, “We eat ersatz because the budget doesn’t allow for anything else.”

“Yeah,” Firestone said. “You try to tell them that!”

“Me?” Mason asked. He grinned broadly, making his face a little uglier, and finished off his milk. “I just work here, Roily. I’m not looking for any trouble. Well, thanks for the milk, old man.”

“Just don’t tell anyone I let you have some.”

“I’ll keep mum,” Mason promised.

During the next couple of days, Mason and his buddies paid a few surreptitious visits to the Project Bossie lab, for maintenance purposes. One innovation was put into effect: the surplus growth from the liver tissue was no longer inhibited nor discarded, but now was carefully trimmed away and refrigerated. As Mason explained, it was perfectly edible meat, and there was no sense in letting it go to waste. As soon as the Washingtonites were gone, they would turn the meat supply over to Roily Firestone with much fanfare. Some real meat would be a vast improvement over algae steaks.

Just before dinner call on the sixth day of the visit, Al Mason was on his way to quarters to wash up when Roily Firestone intercepted him in the clearing.

“Al, can I talk with you for a minute?” the little cook whispered.

“Sure. What’s up?”

“Remember the milk I gave you a couple of days ago? Representative Manners’ milk?”

“Yeah,” Mason said. “What about it?”

Firestone looked terrified. “You didn’t tell anyone I let you have some, did you?”

“Of course not. You don’t think I’d say anything that would get you in trouble, Roily?”

Firestone said in a low voice, “If anyone ever finds out that I left you have Manners’ milk, Al, I’ll be drawn and quartered by Henderson.”

“Huh? What for?”

“Because,” Firestone whispered, “I just had a peek in Manners’ milk container. It’s practically empty. All gone. Guzzled completely and utterly. Manners has enough left for tonight, but come breakfast-time there’ll be a rumpus.”

“But he brought gallons, you said. How could he run out of milk?”

“He didn’t keep track of how much he was drinking,” said Firestone. “And who was I to tell him he was using it up too fast? Anyway, I wasn’t paying attention. So he was ordering milk every time his stomach gave a twitch, five, six, seven times a day, and now there isn’t any more.”

Mason laughed. “I like that. The congressman who’s so eager to cut everybody else’s appropriation can’t even budget his own milk supply I”

“It isn’t funny, Al! Manners will raise the roof over it, and you can bet he isn’t going to admit it’s his own fault!”

“Have you told Henderson yet?”

“No. I’ll let him know after dinner. But remember, not a word about the glass I slipped you, or I’m done! They’ll accuse me of having given his milk to all the men!”

“Don’t worry, Roily. I’ll stick by you.” Mason chuckled happily. A lovely idea was forming. He wondered if they could handle the job in time.

For the first time since the arrival of the Washington visitors, real work went on in Laboratory 106a after hours. The lab lights were on right through the night, as the members of Project Bossie labored fiercely to iron out the final bugs in their system.

Toward morning, the last hitches were straightened away. Mason and his cohorts stood back, proudly surveying the monstrous device that almost completely filled Laboratory 106a. A bale of waste paper—to supply cellulose in the absence of grass—stood stacked near the intake. A receptacle waited at the far end of the room. In between was a spiderweb of pistons and rods, pipes and tubes, stopcocks and flow-meters and vats of chemicals—with the two organic components of the device, the culture-grown liver, and milk gland, occupying positions of prominence.

“O.K.,” Mason said. “Let’s try her out.”

Maury Roberts and Nat Bryan stuffed the waste-paper bale onto the intake platform, while Sam Brewster’s hand hovered over the electronic keyboard that controlled the entire operation. He thumbed a switch. The machine hummed. The bale of paper moved ponderously forward, into the jaws of the shredders.

From there the shredded cellulose proceeded to the first stomach to be mangled and pulped into a soggy semiliquid; then on to the second stomach for further breaking-down, then to the wringer in the third stomach, then to the fourth, where digestion proper could begin. Translucent feed lines spurted enzymes into the system at the properly programed intervals. Counters clicked; gears meshed. The effect was imposing.

According to Mason’s computations, the process, vastly accelerated over its natural counterpart, would take about three hours from waste-paper to milk. The time was 0540 hours when the first few drops of yield came filtering through the udder. At 0650, after Maury Roberts had run some quick chemical tests and after the yield had been refrigerated, the six bleary-eyed experimenters gravely toasted each,other with milk that was milk to the last decimal point.

Shutting up shop, they left—five of them to try to catch some rest before the bonging of the reveille bell half an hour hence. But Al Mason had an errand to run. He stepped out into the cool breeze of the artificial morning and headed for Commander Henderson’s office.

Henderson always rose at least an hour before reveille. Mason saw his office lights on. He opened the door and found himself staring at Major Chalmers, Henderson’s aide-de-camp.

“Good morning, Major,” Mason said briskly.

“Morning, Mason.”

“The commander busy?” Mason asked. “I’d like to talk to him for a minute, if I could.”

“I’m afraid he is busy,” Chalmers replied. “Maybe you’d better try later—around noon, maybe.”

From within came a loud expostulatory outburst in Commander Henderson’s voice. “I tell you, Donovan, I have to have milk for Manners. He’s going to find out in half an hour that his supply is gone, and then he’ll howl loud enough to be heard on Mars. No, I can’t tell him that it’s his own fault for drinking it up too fast! Would you tell a man like Manners something like that?”

Mason grinned at Major Chalmers. “What’s all that about?”

Chalmers said dourly, “Seems Representative Manners has ulcers, and he’s on a milk diet. He brought his own milk supply along with him, but he didn’t figure consumption right, and Roily Firestone discovered yesterday that the milk’s all gone. Manners can’t eat anything else, he refused to touch the powdered milk, and the C.O.’s been on the wire with Earth all night, trying to get them to O.K. a special shipment-rocket for Manners.”

“But it would take four days for any rocket to get here,” Mason said.

“You see the pickle we’re in, Mason. So be a good fellow and go away, until—”

“No,” Mason said. “Look, sir, could you get me in to see Commander Henderson right away?”

“Of course not. I told you, he’s on the wire to Earth!”

“Who cares about that? Tell him I can get him milk. Real milk!”

“You—what? Listen, Mason, this is no time for funny business.”

“I know,” Mason said. “But I can supply milk. M—I—L—K. Will you tell the commander that?”

“Don’t try to make fools out of us,” Chalmers warned. Mason uttered a brief cry of disgust and deftly sidestepped the startled Chalmers. He pushed his way into Commander Henderson’s office. The C.O. was bent over his communication panel, speaking loudly into the mike.

He looked up and barked, “Get out of here, Mason. I’m on the line to Earth!”

“I know, sir. You can hang up. I know what you’re calling for. I just want to tell you that the synthesizer is working, sir. We have milk for Representative Manners!”

“What?” Henderson’s eyes widened astonishingly. He muttered something into the microphone and broke the contact with a brusque gesture. “You mean that crackbrained scheme of yours actually worked? That thing in 106a gives milk?”

“Yes, sir. And liver, too. We got it working last night.”

Mason repressed a yawn of exhaustion. “If you like, sir, you can have some milk for Representative Manners.”

In due time the congressional delegation departed, on the February ship from Earth. And the month sped by, until it was time for the March ship.

Commander Henderson sent for Mason after the cargo of the March ship had been unloaded.

The commander spread some microfilm transcripts out on his desk. “An excerpt from the Congressional Record. Listen: this is Representative Manners speaking.

“. . . I am deeply impressed with the resourcefulness and cleverness of the scientists at Lunar Base Three. Compelled by the exigencies of nature to subsist on synthetic foods they have shrewdly and economically devised means for creating virtual duplicates of certain Terran foods. My colleagues and I, after several days of subsistence on normal synthetic foods, were delighted one day to be greeted with milk and meat which seemed undeniably Terrestrial in origin—only to be shown, after the meal, how these commodities were produced, virtually magically, by means of a startling technique termed biochemical transmutation. Milk and meat created from waste paper! And at remarkably low cost! A triumphant example of Yankee ingenuity at its finest—’”

Henderson paused and looked up. “Manners’ style is on the flowery side, so I won’t read any more.”

“I guess we impressed him,” Mason said.

“I guess so. Producing those quarts of milk really bowled them over—and saved Manners’ face, too. And the liver made a real hit with them. We’re getting ten million tacked onto our appropriation for ’96-’97.”

“I’m glad to hear that, sir.”

Henderson smiled. “I still haven’t apologized for getting sore when you told me what the gadgetry was for.

“Apologies aren’t necessary, sir.”

Henderson shook his head. “They are, Al. You were having fun, and I roasted you for it—but I should have known that your kind of fun gets results. Now, thanks to your fun—which I should have known is the essence of fundamental research!—weve solved a major problem of life on the Moon. We have a meat-and-milk synthesizer. It’s a little cumbersome, perhaps, but—”

“I was meaning to talk to you about that, sir. We . . . ah . . . have a new model in the works. It’s a little more streamlined—a lot smaller, and a better yield. But it’s going to need some tricky equipment, and the cost may run a little high, so—”

Henderson’s eyes twinkled. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Mason. “Here, Al. An authorization for unlimited research funds. You’ve got a blank check to have some more fun with. Go build us a better cow.”