ening children, one of the younger calves bawled. Her polled,
brindled mother ran in ungainly fashion to the fence and mooed with
great carrying power.

"All right!" Stonecypher yelled. The cow closed her big mouth, but
stayed by the gate. "Can't go by what you hear the tenants tell their
kids," Stonecypher cautioned the calf. "Atomic Bomb is as dead as the
tank and the battleship.

"Now, like I was sayin', the scientists put Atomic Bomb on a hundred
foot tower and blowed him up. There was a flash of fire, and an awful
racket, and the blast raised up a lot of dirt and dust from the ground.
All this dust achurnin' around in the cloud bumped into little bits of
metal and stuff that was highly radioactive. That means, the basic atoms
of matter had been thrown out of kilter, sorta deranged. The protons and
electrons in an atom oughta be about equal for it to be stable, but
these were shootin' off electrons, or beta particles, and givin' off
something like powerful x-rays, called gamma rays, and things like that.

"Anyhow, this radiation affected all the sand and bits of rock and dirt
in that bomb cloud. This radiation is dangerous. Some of it will go
right through several inches of lead. Enough'll kill you. Your ancestors
were ten miles or so from where Atomic Bomb went off.

"They were just plain Whiteface cattle. They weren't supposed to be
there, but I reckon none of the scientists bothered to warn 'em. The
dust started settlin' all over your ancestors. In about a week, there
were sores and blisters on their backs. The red hair dropped off. When
it grew back, it was gray.

"The scientists got real excited when they heard about it, 'cause they
wanted to see how horrible they could make Atomic Bomb. So, they shipped
fifty-nine cattle up to Oak Ridge. That was a Government town, a hundred
miles southwest of here, where they made some of the stuff to put in
Atomic Bomb. The University of Tennessee was runnin' an experimental
farm there. They had donkeys, and pigs, and chickens, and other animals
that they exposed to radioactivity. Then they killed 'em and cut 'em up
to see what had happened. I know it's gruesome, but that's how it was.

"The awful fact is, the scientists slaughtered more than half that
original Atohmy herd for experiments. Some of the rest,
they--uh--married. Wanted to see if the calves had two heads, or
something; if radioactivity had speeded up the mutation rate.

"Back then, they didn't understand