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.