the amazing Eggnog. While Sally placidly chewed her cuds and continued
to give a steady five gallons of concentrated fury at each milking,
Solomon's harem dutifully deposited from five to a dozen golden spheres
of packaged power every day. At the same time, rocket research
engineers completed their tests on the use of the Eggnog.

* * * * *

In the early hours of June 4th, a single-stage, two-egg, thirty-five
gallon Atlas rocket poised on the launching pads at Cape Canaveral.
From the loud-speaker atop the massive block-house came the countdown.

"X minus twenty seconds. X minus ten seconds. Nine ... eight ...
seven ... six ... five ... four ... three ... two ... FIRE!"

The control officer stabbed the firing button and deep within the Atlas
a relay clicked, activating a solenoid that pushed open a valve. A thin
stream of Sally's milk shot in from one side of the firing chamber to
blend with a fine spray of egg, batter coming from a jet in the
opposite wall.

Spewing a solid tail of purple fire, the Atlas leaped like a wasp-stung
heifer from the launching pads and thundered into space. The fuel
orifices continued to expand to maximum pre-set opening. In ten seconds
the nose cone turned from cherry-red to white heat and began sloughing
its outer ceramic coating. At slightly more than forty-three thousand
miles an hour, the great missile cleaved out of atmosphere into the
void of space, leaving a shock wave that cracked houses and shattered
glass for fifty miles from launching point.

A week later, America's newest rocket vessel, weighing more than thirty
tons and christened _The Egg Nog_, was launched from the opposite coast
at Vandenburg. Hastily modified to take the new fuel, the weight and
space originally designed for the common garden variety of rocket fuel
was filled with automatic camera and television equipment. In its stern
stood a six-egg, one-hundred-gallon engine, while in the nose was a
small, one-egg, fourteen-quart braking engine to slow it down for the
return trip through the atmosphere.

Its destination--Mars!

A week later, _The Eggnog_ braked down through the troposphere, skidded
to a piddling two-thousand miles, an hour through the stratosphere,
automatically sprouted gliding wing stubs in the atmosphere and planed
down to a spraying halt in the Pacific Ocean, fifty miles west of
Ensenada in Baja, California. Aboard were man's first views of the red
pl