Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 89: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

shrapnel? Make five yeast pieces and five stench pots out of each Yeast Man?” “I think,” replied the King, “that the Eupenians will be only too anxious to do that job for us. Again I repeat, gentlemen, that we must observe the greatest secrecy. Keep the anti-aircraft machines in constant operation, espe- cially on cloudy days. May God save our Country and bless our good friend, Mr. Billings. Now, gentlemen, to work, day and night, without rest, to make this machinery, gather an abundance of material and train men to use the machines.” Near every road connecting the two countries, large canvas camouflage screcns were erected, Captive observation balloons sent up by the Eupenian air service reported no massing of Moronian troops. Behind these canvas screens, however, thousands of men and women of the little mountain king- dom took turns leading five thousand Yeast Men on their monotonous jour- ney toward death, All day and all night on the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth of September, these five thousand Yeast Men moved and grew behind the protecting curtains. Their genesis had been so timed that at dusk on the third day some were two days, twenty-three hours and thirty minutes old. Then they were turned loose on the main highways and started on their slow shuffle toward Eupenia. Some, of course, were checked at the border barricades. Others crawled around or over and had advanced several hundred yards into the enemy’s country before dissolution occurred. In the meantime peculiar-looking machine guns were being placed at intervals of one mile, each manned by a group of trained Moronian soldiers. These guns were simple in construction, and mounted on sturdy tripods. Above each was a small hopper, from which yeast was fed to a small but powerful press operated by condensed air. Each blow of the ram produced a Yeast Man one-eighth of an inch high. These were dropped into the barrel of the gun and shot into the air several hundred yards from the gun. Like thistle-down they floated, gradually dropping to the ground, base downward and head erect. Immediately on touching the earth, they began their peculiar shuffling movement, which was to c-ntinue in the exact direction in which they had started. As the guns worked, they revolved slowly through a forty- five degree horizontal arc. Each gun fired two Yeast Men a second. That meant one hundred and twenty a minute; seven thousand, two hundred an hour, or 172,800 in the course of twenty-four hours. There were seven hundred guns made, but only about five hundred were in actual use at any one time; the others acting as replacements. Counting the total time these five hundred guns were in use, it was later estimated that they fired about ten days. This made a total of 1,728,- 000 for each gun, or a grand total of 864,000,000 Yeast Men manufactured during the campaign. Each Yeast Man, dead, produced thirty pounds of end- slime, a total of 12,960,000 tons. It will be remembered that this slime, in a one-to-a-thousand dilution, was sufficiently strong to produce disabling vom- iting. These guns began operations twenty-four hours before the five thousand fully-grown Yeast Men were liberated. Then they moved slowly forward, and. behind them came successive waves of smaller and yet smaller men of 87 comiclbooks. conn