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?”