But how would I or this physicist explain this quivering mess of protoplasm I got on my hands by accident this particular Friday night? I experimented some more. I got out the kids' junior encyclopedia and looked up some things I'd forgot, and some I had never learned in the first place. * * * * * So it got to be Saturday morning. Fred and Claude phoned about the fishing trip and I made an excuse. No one else bothered me. All day Saturday, I studied. And all Saturday night and Sunday. But I couldn't figure out any sensible answers that would make peace with my minister. It looked like I had created some form of life. Either that or some life-form in the stove oil that had been asleep a billion years had suddenly found a condition to its liking and had decided to give up hibernating in favor of reproduction. What drove me on was the thought that I must have something here that was commercially important--a new culture of something that would revolutionize some branch of chemistry or biology. I wouldn't even stop to fry an egg. I chewed up some crackers and drank a few more bottles of beer when my stomach got too noisy. I wasn't sleepy, although my eyes felt like they were pushed four inches into my skull. Junior's little chemistry set didn't tell me very much when I made the few tests I knew how. Litmus paper remained either red or blue when stuck into the jelly. This surprised me a little because this whole mass of de-sudsed washing compound mixture had started out with a pretty good shot of lye in it. So my notes grew, but my useful information didn't. By midnight Sunday, it appeared that my jelly invention had only one important talent: The ability to drink endlessly anything containing water. And only the water was used, it seemed. Dissolved solids were cast aside in the form of variously colored dusts. By now, the goop had outgrown the pail and was two-thirds up in the laundry tub. A slow drip from the faucet kept the surface of my monster in a constant state of frenzy, like feeding a rumpot beer by the thimbleful. It was fascinating to watch the little curleycues of jelly flip up after each drop, reaching for more, and then falling back with a cranky little lash. * * * * * At two o'clock this morning, I began to get a little sense in me. Or maybe it was just the fear finally catching up again. _There was danger here._ I was too fuzzy to know exactly what the danger was, but I began to develop a husky hate for the whole project. "Kill it!" came into my mind. "Get rid of it, Charlie!" Lottie's scream shrilled back into my ears, and this command became very important to me. I became angry. "Want a drink, do you?" I shouted out loud. I put on the tea kettle and when it was to full steam, I took it back to the tub. "I'll give you a drink with a kick in it!"