anet.

The world went mad with jubilation. From the capitals of the free
nations congratulations poured into Washington. From Moscow came word
of a one-hundred-ton spaceship to be launched in a few days, powered by
a mixture of vodka and orange juice discovered by a bartender in
Novorosk who was studying chemistry in night school. This announcement
was followed twenty-four hours later by a story in _Pravda_ proving
conclusively that Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III was a direct
descendant of Nikita's Mujik Droshky V, a prize Guernsey bull produced
in the barns of the Sopolov People's Collective twenty-six years ago.

Late in August, Air Force Major Clifton Wadsworth Quartermain climbed
out of the port of the two-hundred-ton, two dozen-egg, two-hundred-thirty
gallon space rocket _Icarus_, the first man into space and back. He had
circled 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 Allen
radiation belts.

On September 15th, Sally's Cloverdale Marathon III, having been milked
harder and faster than any Guernsey in history, went dry.

Less than half of the approximately twelve-hundred gallons of fuel she
had produced during her hay days, remained on hand in the AEC storage
vaults.

Three days later, Solomon, sprinting after one of his harem who was
playing hard to get, bee-lined into the path of a security police jeep.
There was an agonized squawk, a shower of feathers and mourning. A
short time later, the number of golden eggs dropped daily until one
morning, there were none. They never reappeared. The United States had
stockpiled twenty-six dozen in an underground cave deep in the Rockies.

Man, who had burst like a butterfly into space, crawled back into his
cocoon 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's
Cloverdale Marathon III came home to the Circle T in disgrace. In a
corner of the truck, the late Solomon's harem cackled and voiced loud
cries of misery as they huddled in the rude, slatted shipping coop. The
truck turned off the county road and onto the dirt road leading to the
main buildings. It rattled across the cattle guard and through the
new-unprotected and open gate in the barbed wire fence. Life had
returned almost to norm