Attack of the 50 Ft....Baby! Ponk Vonsydow ponkvonsydow@gmail.com A huge flying saucer crashed in downtown Nashville leaving debris and skid marks across a long tract of land in the woods near the Cumberland River. Emergency personnel responding to the accident discovered several dead passengers scattered among the wreckage that were dead giant, green, humanoid creatures some 50-feet in length! The sole surviving occupant was an eight-foot tall, giant baby! A flat-bed truck was used to transport the big baby to Fort Campbell, an army base in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee. For practical reasons, the baby's lodging was set up in the base gymnasium. Army doctors assigned to supervise the care of the giant baby were glad to discover he could eat solid foods. The baby put down two full crates of bananas, the most common fruit infants like to eat. Staff created a makeshift baby bottle by filling a five gallon plastic bucket with cow's milk and sending a tube into its lid that the baby could suck on like a straw. Nurses attending to the baby's needs figured out how to fabricate giant diapers by using queen-sized bed sheets fastened on the baby with a draw string. As expected, the big baby produced a good five to six pounds of feces once or twice a day which greatly exaggerated the act of changing his diapers, a routine necessity in the care of infants and impossible to avoid or put off for very long. There were many other issues in caring for a giant baby. Once, while one nurse pounded on the baby's back with both closed fists to burp him, the other was standing in front of him when the baby spit-up and soaked the poor nurse head-to-toe! When it was time to give the big baby his bath they had to hose him down like an elephant! The water was cold and the baby screamed and hated getting wet! He screamed and cried the entire time the nurses washed him and the noise was deafening! When the baby was clean, fed, and content, he slept for long hours allowing the staff to search out new and better methods of how to care for him. A clever orderly even made a baby rattle out of a typical coffee can, some dry beans, and a shortened broomstick handle. It was known that stuffed animals came in oversized models so the baby ended up with a giant, plush, blue teddy bear and a giant, fuzzy, pink rabbit. As news of the giant baby spread, people from around the nation volunteered to fashion oversized objects the big baby needed. It wasn't long before he had his own giant pacifier and a nice wooden crib with a comfortable mattress just his size. Expert seamstresses fashioned oversized baby clothes and the Buster Brown shoe company created giant baby shoes. Along the way, the Gerber baby food company began to ship gallon jugs of various kinds of baby food and they included an oversized baby spoon for the nurses to feed the big baby. It took two hands to hold the damn thing! Nurse Cynthia decided it was a good time for her to ask Dr. Ridgeway a question that had been bothering her. "Dr. Ridgeway, don't you think it's about time we gave the big baby a proper name?" Ridgeway replied: "What name do you have in mind?" Cynthia's face lit up because she was glad to offer her own idea for a name. "I was thinking we could call him Hercules because when he's grown he's liable to be stronger than a team of oxen." Ridgeway smiled. "Very well, Cynthia, you are free to inform the others to start calling the baby, Hercules." Cynthia smiled and was happy about the name selecting. She offered another question. "Listen Doc, have you given much thought to exactly how we'll handle Hercules once he's matured to the extent he's a toddler? He's liable to be twelve to fifteen-feet tall or bigger by then. How are we going to control him if he's toddling around getting into things?" Ridgeway reassured Cynthia. "The Army is already constructing a special habitat just for Hercules. He'll have to be confined to that space until he's old enough to be taught that he can't misbehave and be rowdy all the time." Cynthia wasn't so sure. "Okay, Doc, but exactly how shall we discipline him when the time comes?" Ridgeway had the answer to Cynthia's question. "We are planning to use a cattle prod." Cynthia grimaced and frowned when she heard Dr. Ridgeway's solution. "A cattle prod? You seriously can't be thinking we'll just zap him with a big jolt of electricity?" Ridgeway smiled. "The prod will be modified to provide only a small shock, but one that should be sufficient to discipline the child. I'm sorry Cynthia, but there's no other method we could devise and as soon as he's a toddler will need something that works 100% of the time." Cynthia was forced to agree. "Very well, Dr. Ridgeway. I see your point. Just don't zap him too much, okay?" Ridgeway replied. "Rest assured we don't intend to torture the boy." II Everyone on the base observing the Big Baby Project was taken by surprise when Hercules quadrupled in size by his first birthday. Dr. Ridgeway had his concerns when he addressed the Generals in the latest conference. "Gentlemen, as we can all see, Hercules, our big baby alien, has grown to be twenty-feet tall and he's already raising hell in his habitat! We feel his growth spurt may have to do with him being exposed to Earth's particular atmosphere which may have different properties than the planet his people came from and they were damn big as it is anyway! Or it could be how he responds to the kinds of food we give him. It is unknown at present just how big Hercules will become. But at this rate of growth, he will certainly be far larger than his parents and perhaps as much as one hundred-feet tall! “On a different subject, Hercules was not fazed at all by the cattle prod even when we resorted to using one at full strength. He may have a different kind of pain threshold than we do. We don't really have an effective method by which to discipline him! He's also been testing the strength of his habitat's hanger doors. If he gets much bigger, eventually he'll be strong enough to tear down one of those doors and if he runs away, we'll be left trying to corral him! I have our people already putting together a large, steel-wire net which can be dropped on him from above via a helicopter. But it's possible he will be a little too fast and casting a net over him from the air is not an exact science. What I am bringing up here is the inevitable. One day we'll likely be dealing with a giant, humanoid child who's running amok!" General Forrester spoke first. "Can't we just eliminate him? We're going to all this trouble to care for the big baby only to foster the maturation of a creature that we won't be able to control or keep penned up. Maybe it's best we just rid ourselves of Hercules right now before it's too late." Obviously General Forrester's opinion didn't sit well with the others, especially the nurses, so he quickly back-peddled. "Okay, okay...maybe that's a really bad idea nobody will agree to, but it's essential we have a contingency plan! What about drugs? Can't we dart him and put him to sleep?" Ridgeway replied. "We've already tried every sleeping potion our chemists could concoct and no earthly chemical does what we need. The kid just shrugs it off and he doesn't even yawn!" General Forrester frowned. "Then we men must appeal to congress for funds to be appropriated to construct a more solid concrete enclosure that Hercules can't escape from and we need to get it built pronto before he's too big to deal with in an effort to place him in there." Everyone agreed Forrester's second plan was the best one. The problem was it took Congress too long to appropriate the necessary funds to get construction started on the new impregnable enclosure in time to be completed before Hercules was officially into his terrible twos. He now stood 50-ft. tall and the big baby was a powerhouse! Measures had been taken to reinforce the hanger doors, but on the day Hercules decided to throw a major temper tantrum, he easily tore one of the doors off its hinges and escaped. Army soldiers scrambled and chased him both in jeeps and trucks, following behind the agile baby who was very quick-on-his-feet but the jeeps and trucks were unable to follow Hercules when he ran off the road into a field. They ordered in the helicopter to attempt to net the giant baby who was still running and now in the direction of Clarksville. The helicopter crew did drop the net but it missed the baby. Unfortunately, the helicopter and crew had to land to retrieve the net which was very heavy and cumbersome so the job was very time consuming. By the time they managed to get the net back in the helicopter, Hercules had already entered the Clarksville city limits! The pilot of the helicopter chasing Hercules, called in. "Headquarters, this is Big Baby One, reporting attempts to net the big baby have failed! He's now entering the city of Clarksville and we can't get near enough to him to try again dropping the net again! You boys better send in the ground troops! Over." Meanwhile Hercules, all 50 feet and two-tons of him, was terrifying the locals in Clarksville. He knocked down power-lines as he ran through them causing a blackout in the city! Then, like most babies, he was curious about billboards and storefront signs, and Hercules's was destructive pulling them out of the ground and tossing or dropping them causing further destruction. He was also curious about the cars and trucks parked on the street and picked them up to play with them, but he dropped them immediately when he set eyes on the local water tower outside town. Hercules ran towards the tower and then did his best to topple it over! Finally, after leaning into the tower with all his weight, he managed to push it over! When it crashed to the ground, the baby laughed loudly as the tank broke open and thousands of gallons of water rushed out! As soon as his feet got wet, Hercules started to bawl because he still hated to get wet! The helicopter pilot reported everything the big baby did as he observed him from the air above Clarksville. Soon, the ground troops arrived supervised by General Forrester himself. Dr. Ridgeway was with Forrester. "Okay, Doc, it's going down just as I feared it might. Can you see what I was talking about? We've got no choice. We're got to kill that big baby before he kills someone! I'm giving the order to open fire as soon as we corner him!" Ridgeway was about to protest when he saw something shiny in the sky above. The helicopter pilot saw the thing, too, and reported what he saw. "Headquarters, this is Big Baby One. I'm pretty sure there's an unidentified flying object approaching. Yes, I am sure of it! There is a flying saucer coming to hover over Clarksville! Over." Dr. Ridgeway could now see the flying object looked a lot like the broken up flying saucer he saw in the woods where they found Hercules. "General! You better hold off giving the order for your troops to open fire on Hercules! It looks like the big baby's people have returned, possibly to fetch him!" Forrester agreed. Everyone concerned watched as the large flying saucer landed in the field near the big baby. When its doors opened and its ramp descended to the ground the forty-foot tall, green humanoid aliens climbed out and quickly corralled Hercules, leading him back inside the saucer. The saucer's captain commented to his crew about Hercules. "It must have been the planet's atmosphere or maybe the food they fed him that explains why he's already as tall as his people's full grown adults!" Dr. Ridgeway had a final thought for General Forrester. "Well, General it looks like nobody's going to end up calling you a baby killer now!" enough