A summary of the distribution of patients in the various schizophrenic classes is given in Table III.

  Each patient, in addition to being typed as one of the varieties listed above, can be further graded in accordance with the amount of deviation in the endochronic interval of the early-dissolving portions of thiotimoline and the late-dissolving portions. Since the maximum difference observed is about 0.010 seconds and since the endochronometroscope can easily detect time intervals of 0.001 seconds, ten grades may be distinguished, Grade 10 shows 0.010 seconds of deviations, Grade 9 shows 0.009 seconds of deviation and so on down to Grade 1 which shows 0.001 seconds of deviation.

  In general, the lower grades are more frequently populated, as may be seen in Table IV. (It will be noted that only 145 patients are listed in Table IV. It is obvious that in the case of the 5 isoschizophrenics, Grade numbers are not applicable.)

  The value of such a subdivision of schizophrenia may well be said to be of incalculable potentialities and, indeed, to found a new science of quantitative micropsychiatry. How much more useful it is to say of a patient that he is a vertical schizophrenic, levo variety, Grade 3, than simply to say that he is schizophrenic.

  If a small drawback exists in the magnificent structure now being erected, it is that all efforts have been so far unavailing in the attempt to find any medical meaning in our micropsychiatric divisions.{16} This failure of application should not however be allowed to diminish the aesthetic beauty and abstract symmetry of the new technique of endochronometroscopy and the science of quantitative micropsychiatry to which it has given birth.

  NOTE

  If you have grown interested in thiotimoline, two additional articles dealing with it have appeared since this book was first published. One is “Thiotimoline and the Space Age” which is included in my book Opus 100. The other is “Thiotimoline to the Stars” which appears in my book Buy Jupiter And Other Stories.

  CHAPTER TWELVE—PATÉ DE FOIE GRAS

  I couldn’t tell you my real name if I wanted to and, under the circumstances, I don’t want to.

  I’m not much of a writer myself, unless you count the kind of stuff that passes muster in a scientific paper, so I’m having Isaac Asimov write this up for me.

  I’ve picked him for several reasons. First, he’s a biochemist, so he understands what I tell him; some of it, anyway. Secondly, he can write: or at least he has published considerable fiction which may not, of course, be the same thing.

  But most important of all, he can get what he writes published in science-fiction magazines and he has written two articles on thiotimoline, and that is exactly what I need for reasons that will become clear as we proceed.

  I was not the first person to have the honor of meeting The Goose. That belongs to a Texas cotton farmer named Ian Angus MacGregor, who owned it before it became government property. (The names, places and dates I use are deliberately synthetic. None of you will be able to trace anything through them. Don’t bother trying.)

  MacGregor apparently kept geese about the place because they ate weeds, but not cotton. In this way, he had automatic weeders that were self-fueling and, in addition, produced eggs, down, and, at judicious intervals, roast goose.

  By summer of 1955, he had sent an even dozen of letters to the Department of Agriculture requesting information on the hatching of goose-eggs. The Department sent him all the booklets on hand that were anywhere near the subject, but his letters simply got more impassioned and freer in their references to his ‘friend’, the local Congressman.

  My connection with this is that I am in the employ of the Department of Agriculture. I have considerable training in agricultural chemistry, plus a smattering of vertebrate physiology. (This won’t help you. If you think you can pin my identity out of this, you are mistaken.)

  Since I was attending a convention at San Antonio in July of 1955, my boss asked me to stop off at MacGregor’s place and see what I could do to help him. We’re servants of the public and besides we had finally received a letter from MacGregor’s congressman.

  On July 17, 1955, I met The Goose.

  I met MacGregor first. He was in his fifties, a tall man with a lined face full of suspicion. I went over all the information he had been given, explained about incubators, the values of trace minerals in the diet, plus some late information on Vitamin E, the cobalamins and the use of antibiotic additives.

  He shook his head. He had tried it all and still the eggs wouldn’t hatch. He had tried every gander he could get as co-workers in the deal and that hadn’t helped either.

  What could I do? I’m a Civil Service employee and not the archangel Gabriel. I’d told him all I could and if the eggs still wouldn’t hatch, they wouldn’t and that was that. I asked politely if I might see his geese, just so no one could say afterward I hadn’t done all I possibly could.

  He said, ‘It’s not geese, mister; it’s one goose.’

  I said, ‘May I see the one goose?’

  ‘Rather not.’

  ‘Well, then, I can’t help you any further. If it’s only one goose, then there’s just something wrong with it. Why worry about one goose? Eat it.’

  I got up and reached for my hat.

  He said, ‘Wait!’ and I stood there while his lips tightened and his eyes wrinkled and he had a quiet fight with himself.

  He said, ‘If I show you something, will you keep it secret?’

  He didn’t seem like the type of man to rely on another’s vow of secrecy, but it was as though he had reached such a pit of desperation that he had no other way out.

  I said, ‘If it isn’t anything criminal——’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ he snapped.

  And then I went out with him to a pen near the house, surrounded by barbed wire, with a locked gate to it, and holding one goose—The Goose.

  ‘That’s The Goose,’ he said. The way he said it, I could hear the capitals.

  I stared at it. It looked like any other goose, heaven help me, fat, self-satisfied and short-tempered. I said, ‘Hmm’ in my best professional manner.

  MacGregor said, ‘And here’s one of its eggs. It’s been in the incubator. Nothing happens.’ He produced it from a capacious overall pocket. There was a queer strain about his manner of holding it.

  I frowned. There was something wrong with the egg. It was smaller and more spherical than normal.

  MacGregor said, ‘Take it.’

  I reached out and took it. Or tried to. I gave it the amount of heft an egg like that ought to deserve and it just sat where it was. I had to try harder and then up it came.

  Now I knew what was queer about the way MacGregor held it. It weighed nearly two pounds (To be exact, when we weighed it later, we found its mass to be 852.6 grams.)

  I stared at it as it lay there, pressing down the palm of my hand, and MacGregor grinned sourly. ‘Drop it,’ he said.

  I just looked at him, so he took it out of my hand and dropped it himself.

  It hit soggy. It didn’t smash. There was no spray of white and yolk. It just lay where it fell with the bottom caved in.

  I picked it up again. The white egg-shell had shattered where the egg had struck. Pieces of it had flaked away and what shone through was a dull yellow in color.

  My hands trembled. It was all I could do to make my fingers work, but I got some of the rest of the shell flaked away, and stared at the yellow.

  I didn’t have to run any analyses. My heart told me.

  I was face to face with The Goose!

  The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs!

  You don’t believe me. I’m sure of that. You’ve got this tabbed as another thiotimoline article.

  Good! I’m counting on your thinking that. I’ll explain later.

  Meanwhile, my first problem was to get MacGregor to give up that golden egg. I was almost hysterical about it. I was almost ready to clobber him and make off with the egg by force if I had to.

  I said, ‘I’ll give you a receipt. I’ll guarantee you payment. I’ll do anything in reason. Look, Mr. MacGregor, they’re no good to you anyway. You can’t cash the gold unless you can explain how it came into your possession. Holding gold is illegal. And how do you expect to explain? If the government——’

  ‘I don’t want the government butting in,’ he said, stubbornly.

  But I was twice as stubborn. I followed him about. I pleaded. I yelled. I threatened. It took me hours. Literally. In the end, I signed a receipt and he dogged me out to my car and stood in the road as I drove away, following me with his eyes.

  He never saw that egg again. Of course, he was compensated for the value of the gold ($656.47 after taxes had been subtracted) but that was a bargain for the government.

  When one considers the potential value of that egg——

  The potential value! That’s the irony of it. That’s the reason for this article.

  The head of my section at the Department of Agriculture is Louis P. Bronstein. (Don’t bother looking him up. The ‘P.’ stands for Pittfield if you want more misdirection.)

  He and I are on good terms and I felt I could explain things without being placed under immediate observation. Even so, I took no chances. I had the egg with me and when I got to the tricky part, I just laid it on the desk between us.

  Finally, he touched it with his finger as though it were hot.

  I said, ‘Pick it up.’

  It took him a long time, but he did, and I watched him take two tries at it as I had.

  I said, ‘It’s a yellow metal and it could be brass only it isn’t because it’s inert to concentrated nitric acid. I’ve tried that already. There’s only a shell of gold because it can be bent with moderate pressure. Besides, if it were solid gold, the egg would weigh over ten pounds.’

  Bronstein said, ‘It’s some sort of hoax. It must be.’

  ‘A hoax that uses real gold? Remember, when I first saw this thing, it was covered completely with authentic unbroken egg-shell. It’s been easy to check a piece of the egg-shell. Calcium carbonate. That’s a hard thing to gimmick. And if we look inside the egg (I didn’t want to do that on my own, chief) and find real egg, then we’ve got it, because that would be impossible to gimmick. Surely, this is worth an official project.’

  ‘How can I approach the Secretary with——’ He stared at the egg.

  But he did in the end. He made phone calls and sweated out most of the day. One or two of the Department brass came to look at the egg.

  Project Goose was started. That was July 20, 1955.

  I was the responsible investigator to begin with and remained in titular charge throughout, though matters quickly got beyond me.

  We began with the one egg. It’s average radius was 35 millimeters (major axis, 72 millimeters; minor axis, 68 millimeters). The gold shell was 2.45 millimeters in thickness. Studying other eggs later on, we found this value to be rather high. The average thickness turned out to be 2.1 millimeters.

  Inside was egg. It looked like egg and it smelled like egg-

  Aliquots were analyzed and the organic constituents were reasonably normal. The white was 9.7 per cent albumin. The yolk had the normal complement of vitellin, cholesterol, phospholipid and carotenoid. We lacked enough material to test for trace constituents but later on with more eggs at our disposal we did and nothing unusual showed up as far as the contents of vitamins, coenzymes, nucleotides, sulfhydryl groups, etc., etc., were concerned.

  One important gross abnormality that showed was the eggs behavior on heating. A small portion of the yolk, heated, ‘hard-boiled’ almost at once. We fed a portion of the hard-boiled egg to a mouse. It survived.

  I nibbled at another bit of it. Too small a quantity to taste, really, but it made me sick. Purely psychosomatic, I’m sure.

  Boris W. Finley, of the Department of Biochemistry of Temple University (a Department consultant) supervised these tests.

  He said, referring to the hard-boiling, ‘The ease with which the egg-proteins are heat-denatured indicates a partial denaturation to begin with and, considering the nature of the shell, the obvious guilt would lie at the door of heavy-metal contamination.’

  So a portion of the yolk was analyzed for inorganic constituents, and it was found to be high in chloraurate ion, which is a singly-charged ion containing an atom of gold and four of chlorine, the symbol for which is AuCl4——. (The ‘Au’ symbol for gold comes from the fact that the Latin word for gold is ‘aurum’). When I say the chloraurate ion content was high, I meant it was 3.2 parts per thousand, or 0.32 per cent. That’s high enough to form insoluble complexes of ‘gold-protein’ which would coagulate easily.

  Finley said, ‘It’s obvious this egg cannot hatch. Nor can any other such egg. It is heavy-metal poisoned. Gold may be more glamorous than lead but it is just as poisonous to proteins.’

  I agreed gloomily, ‘At least it’s safe from decay, too.’

  ‘Quite right. No self-respecting bug would live in this chlorauriferous soup.’

  The final spectrographic analysis of the gold of the shell came in. Virtually pure. The only detectable impurity was iron which amounted to 0.23 per cent of the whole. The iron content of the egg yolk had been twice normal, also. At the moment, however, the matter of the iron was neglected.

  One week after Project Goose was begun, an expedition was sent into Texas. Five biochemists went (the accent was still on biochemistry, you see) along with three truckloads of equipment, and a squadron of army personnel. I went along, too, of course.

  As soon as we arrived, we cut MacGregor’s farm off from the world.

  That was a lucky thing, you know—the security measures we took right from the start. The reasoning was wrong, at first, but the results were good.

  The Department wanted Project Goose kept quiet at the start simply because there was always the thought that this might still be an elaborate hoax and we couldn’t risk the bad publicity, if it were. And if it weren’t a hoax, we couldn’t risk the newspaper hounding that would definitely result for any goose-and-golden-egg story.

  It was only well after the start of Project Goose, well after our arrival at MacGregor’s farm, that the real implications of the matter became clear.

  Naturally, MacGregor didn’t like the men and equipment settling down all about him. He didn’t like being told The Goose was government property. He didn’t like having his eggs impounded.

  He didn’t like it but he agreed to it—if you can call it agreeing when negotiations are being carried on while a machine gun is being assembled in a man’s barnyard and ten men, with bayonets fixed, are marching past while the arguing is going on.

  He was compensated, of course. What’s money to the government?

  The Goose didn’t like a few things, either—like having blood samples taken. We didn’t dare anesthetize it for fear of doing anything to alter its metabolism, and it took two men to hold it each time. Ever try to hold an angry goose?

  The Goose was put under a twenty-four hour guard with the threat of summary court-martial to any man who let anything happen to it. If any of those soldiers read this article, they may get a sudden glimmering of what was going on. If so, they will probably have the sense to keep shut about it. At least, if they know what’s good for them, they will.

  The blood of The Goose was put through every test conceivable.

  It carried 2 parts per hundred thousand (0.002 per cent) of chloraurate ion. Blood taken from the hepatic vein was richer than the rest, almost 4 parts per hundred thousand.

  Finley grunted. The liver,’ he said.

  We took X-rays. On the X-ray negative, the liver was a cloudy mass of light gray, lighter than the viscera in its neighborhood, because it stopped more of the X-rays, because it contained more gold. The blood vessels showed up lighter than the liver proper and the ovaries were pure white. No X-rays got through the ovaries at all.

  It made sense and in an early report, Finley stated it as bluntly as possible. Paraphrasing the report, it went, in part:

  ‘The chloraurate ion is secreted by the liver into the blood stream. The ovaries act as a trap for the ion, which is there reduced to metallic gold and deposited as a shell about the developing egg. Relatively high concentrations of unreduced chloraurate ion penetrate the contents of the developing egg.

  ‘There is little doubt that The Goose finds this process useful as a means of getting rid of the gold atoms which, if allowed to accumulate, would undoubtedly poison it. Excretion by egg-shell may be novel in the animal kingdom, even unique, but there is no denying that it is keeping The Goose alive.

  ‘Unfortunately, however, the ovary is being locally poisoned to such an extent that few eggs are laid, probably not more than will suffice to get rid of the accumulating gold, and those few eggs are definitely unhatchable.’

  That was all he said in writing, but to the rest of us, he said, ‘That leaves one peculiarly embarrassing question.’

  I knew what it was. We all did.

  Where was the gold coming from?

  No answer to that for a while, except for some negative evidence. There was no perceptible gold in The Goose’s feed, nor were there any gold-bearing pebbles about that it might have swallowed. There was no trace of gold anywhere in the soil of the area and a search of the house and grounds revealed nothing. There were no gold coins, gold jewelry, gold plate, gold watches, or gold anything. No one on the farm even had as much as gold fillings in his teeth.

  There was Mrs. MacGregor’s wedding ring, of course, but she had only had one in her life and she was wearing that one.