There's no doubt about it,' said Billings.
He snapped his pencil and stood up. That Goose is a living nuclear reactor.' The Goosewas obviously a mutation.
A mutation suggested radiation among other things and radiation brought up the thought of nuclear tests conducted in 1952 and 1953 several hundred miles away from the site of MacGregor's farm. (If it occurs to you that no nuclear tests have been conducted in Texas, it just shows two things; I'm not telling you everything and you don't know everything.) I doubt that at any time in the history of the atomic era was background radiation so thoroughly analyzed and the radioactive content of the soil so rigidly sifted.
Back records were studied. It didn't matter how top-secret they were. By this time, Project Goose had the highest priority that had ever existed.
Even weather records were checked in order to follow the behavior of the winds at the time of the nuclear tests.
Two things turned up.
One: The background radiation at the farm was a bit higher than normal. Nothing that could possibly do harm, I hasten to add. There were indications, however, that at the time of the birth of The Goose, the farm had been subjected to the drifting edge of at least two fallouts. Nothing really harmful, I again hasten to add.
Second: The Goose, alone of all geese on the farm, in fact, alone of all living creatures on the farm that could be tested, including the humans, showed no radioactivity at all. Look at it this way: everything shows traces of radioactivity; that's what is meant by background radiation. But The Goose showed none.
Finley sent one report on December 6, 1955, which I can paraphrase as follows:
The Goose is a most extraordinary mutation, born of a high-level radioactivity environment which at once encouraged mutations in general and which made this particular mutation a beneficial one.
The Goose has enzyme systems capable of catalyzing various nuclear reactions. Whether the enzyme system consists of one enzyme or more than one is not known. Nor is anything known of the nature of the enzymes in question. Nor can any theory be yet advanced as to how an enzyme can catalyze a nuclear reaction, since these involve particular interactions with forces five orders of magnitude higher than those involved in the ordinary chemical reactions commonly catalyzed by enzymes.
The overall nuclear change is from oxygen-18 to gold-197. The oxygen-18 is plentiful in its environment, being present in significant amount in water and all organic foodstuffs. The gold-197 is excreted via the ovaries. One known intermediate is iron-56 and the fact that auremoglobin is formed in the process leads us to suspect that the enzyme or enzymes involved may have heme as a prosthetic group.
There has been considerable thought devoted to the value this overall nuclear change might have to the Goose. The oxygen-18 does it no harm and the gold-197 is troublesome to be rid of, potentially poisonous, and a cause of its sterility. Its formation might possibly be a means of avoiding greater danger. This danger-'
But just reading it in the report, friend, makes it all seem so quiet, almost pensive. Actually, I never saw a man come closer to apoplexy and survive than Billings did when he found out about our own radioactive gold experiments which I told you about earlier-the ones in which we detected no radioactivity in the goose, so that we discarded the results as meaningless.
Many times over he asked how we could possibly consider it unimportant that we had lost radioactivity.
'You're like the cub reporter,' he said, 'who was sent to cover a society wedding and on returning said there was no story because the groom hadn't shown up.
'You fed The Goose radioactive gold and lost it. Not only that, you failed to detect any natural radioactivity about The Goose. Any carbon - I4. Any potassium-40. And you called it failure.'
We started feeding The Goose radioactive isotopes. Cautiously, at first, but before the end of January of 1956 we were shoveling it in.
The Goose remained nonradioactive.
'What it amounts to,' said Billings, 'is that this enzyme-catalyzed nuclear process of The Goose manages to convert any unstable isotope into a stable isotope.'
'Useful.' I said.
'Useful?Its a thing of beauty. It's the perfect defense against theatomic age. Listen, the conversion of oxygen-18 to gold-197 should liberate eight and a fraction positrons per oxygen atom. That means eight and a fraction gamma rays as soon as each positron combines with an electron. No gamma rays, either.
The Goose must be able to absorb gamma rays harmlessly.'
We irradiated The Goose with gamma rays. As the level rose, The Goose developed a slight fever and we quit in panic. It was just fever, though, not radiation sickness. A day passed, the fever subsided, and The Goose was as good as new.
'Do you see what we've got?' demanded Billings.
'A scientific marvel,' said Finley.
'Man, don't you see the practical applications? If we could find out the mechanism and duplicate it in the test tube, we've got a perfect method of radioactive ash disposal. The most important drawback preventing us from going ahead with a full-scale atomic economy is the headache of what to do with the radioactive isotopes manufactured in the process. Sift them through an enzyme preparation in-large vats and that would be it.
'Find out the mechanism, gentlemen, and you can stop worrying about fallouts. We would find a protection against radiation sickness.
'Alter the mechanism somehow and we can have Geese excreting any element needed. How about uranium-235 eggshells?
The mechanism! The mechanism!'
We sat there, all of us, staring at The Goose.
If only the eggs would hatch. If only we could get a tribe of nuclear-reactor Geese.
'It must have happened before,' said Finley. 'The legends of such Geese must have started somehow.'
'Do you want to wait?' asked Billings.
If we had a gaggle of such Geese, we could begin taking a few apart. We could study its ovaries. We could prepare tissue slices and tissue homogenates.
That might not do any good. The tissue of a liver biopsy did not react with oxygen-18 under any conditions we tried.
But then we might perfuse an intact liver. We might study intact embryos, watch for one to develop the mechanism.
But with only one Goose, we could do none of that.
We don't dare kill The Goose That Lays The Golden Eggs. The secret was in the liver of that fat Goose.
Liver of fat goose! Pate de foie gras! No delicacy to us!
Nevis said thoughtfully, 'We need an idea. Some radical departure. Some crucial thought.'
'Saying it won't bring it,' said Billings despondently.
And in a miserable attempt at a joke, I said, 'We could advertise in the newspapers,' and that gave me an idea.
'Science fiction!' I said.
'What?' said Finley.
'Look, science-fiction magazines print gag articles. The readers consider it fun. They're interested.' I told them about the thiotimoline articles Asimov wrote and which I had once read.
The atmosphere was cold with disapproval.
'We won't even be breaking security regulations,' I said, 'because no one will believe it.' I told them about the time in 1944 when Cleve Cartmill wrote a story describing the atom bomb one year early and the F.B.I, kept its temper.
'And science-fiction readers have ideas. Don't underrate them. Even if they think it's a gag article, they'll send their notions in to the editor. And since we have no ideas of our own, since we're up a dead-end street, what can we lose?'