"Brinley, Bertrand R - The Mad Scientists' Club 01 - The Mad Scientists' Club 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brinley Bertrand R)

Contents

• The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake
• The Big Egg
• The Secret of the Old Cannon
• The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls
• The Great Gas Bag Race
• The Voice in the Chimney
• Night Rescue

The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake

Dinky Poore didn't really mean to start the story about the huge sea monster in Strawberry Lake. He was only telling a fib because he had to have an excuse for getting home late for supper. So he told his folks he'd been running around the lake trying to get a close look at a huge, snakelike thing he'd seen in the water, and the first thing he knew he was too far from home to get back in time.
His mother and father greeted this tale with some skepticism. But Dinky's two sisters were more impressionable, and that's how the story really got out. They kept pestering him for so many details about the monster that he had to invent a fantastic tale to satisfy them. That's one of the troubles with a lie. You've got to keep adding to it to make it believable to people.
It didn't take long for the story to get around town, and pretty soon Dinky Poore was a celebrity in Mammoth Falls. He even had his picture in the paper, together with an "artist's conception" of the thing he had seen. It was gruesome-looking—something like a dinosaur, but with a scaly, saw-toothed back like a dragon. Dinky was never short on imagination, and he was able to give the artist plenty of details.
It was the artist's sketch in the newspaper that got Henry Mulligan all excited. Henry is first vice-president and also chief of research for the Mad Scientists' Club and is noted for his brainstorms. Neither Henry nor anyone else in the club actually believed Dinky had seen a real monster, but we were all willing to play along with a gag—especially when Henry suggested that we could build a monster just like the one shown in the newspaper.
"Build a monster?" Freddy Muldoon's round face was all goggle-eyed. He liked the idea, but he just didn't know how Henry proposed going about it. He rubbed his button nose, which was always itching, and asked, "You mean a real monster that can swim?"
"Don't be a dope," said Dinky.
"I'm not a dope. But who ever heard of a monster that can't swim?"
"The one we build will float," said Henry, rubbing his chin and looking up at the rafters of the club laboratory the way he always did when he was speculating on a new project. "All we need is some canvas and chicken wire, and Jeff Crocker's canoe."
Jeff Crocker is president of our club—mainly because his father owns the barn that we have our lab in, but also because he's just as smart as Henry and maybe a little more scientific. Henry dreams up most of the schemes that we get messed up in; but it is usually Jeff who figures out how to do everything, or how to get us out of what we got into.
Since Henry's plan to build a lake monster seemed like a good one, we held a formal meeting of the club that night to take a vote on it. Naturally, we all voted in favor of it, and three days later we had most of it finished. We built it on a small piece of dry land hidden 'way back in the swampy end of the lake. Henry and Jeff had designed a frame of light lumber and laths that had the shape of a big land lizard, and we suspended this across the gunwales of the canoe. Then we hung chicken wire on the frame and stretched canvas over it. With a little paint and a few shiny tin can lids spotted here and there, we soon had a loathsome-looking creature guaranteed to scare the life out of anyone a hundred yards away from it.
Jeff had to keep putting the brakes on Henry's fancy ideas, but he did let him outfit the head with a pair of red eyes—which were just flashlights with red lenses stuck out through the canvas. Henry installed a switch and circuit breaker in the canoe, so that the "eyes" could be made to blink. After two days of practice back in the swamps we figured we could handle the beast well enough to make a test run out on the lake. The monster's profile stuck up about four feet out of the water, and it was a cinch for four of us to sit upright in the canoe to do the paddling and steering.
Meanwhile the town was still all excited about the possibility that there was a real, live sea monster in Strawberry Lake. A reporter from one of the big city papers had been in town to interview Dinky Poore, and when folks heard this, a lot of them began to recall seeing strange things on the water. Everybody wanted to get into the act, and pretty soon all sorts of people were volunteering information. Daphne Muldoon got her picture on the front page, not because she had seen the monster, but because she lived in Mammoth Falls and had a good-looking face and pretty legs. Daphne is one of Freddy Muldoon's cousins. Her younger brother, Harmon, used to be a member of our club. But he got kicked out for conduct unbecoming a scientist and for giving away secret information.
The first night we took the beast out was a Saturday, when the lake cabins and beachfront were crowded with weekend visitors. We figured it was best to wait until just before dark, then people couldn't see too well and there were fewer boats on the lake. There are plenty of small islands near the swampy end of Strawberry Lake, and this gave us a good chance to get the monster out into open water for a short run and then scoot it back into the cover of the swamp before anyone could discover where it had gone.
Homer Snodgrass, who is one of the brighter members of our club, had agreed to sit on the front porch of his folks' cabin so that we could get a firsthand report on what the monster looked like from the shore. Jeff and I were sitting in the middle of the canoe and doing the paddling. Mortimer Dalrymple, our electronics wizard, was steering; Henry sat up in the prow, where he could look out through two peepholes.
"Are there many people on the beach?" Jeff asked.
"Scads of them," said Henry. "It's still light enough to see pretty well, but I don't think anybody had sighted us yet."
It was dark as black velvet inside the monster, though, and there was a damp, musty odor of canvas and paint. It was a little like being in the Tunnel of Love at an amusement park. I started to giggle, and Jeff told me to shut up or I might spoil everything. But I think he wanted to giggle too and was afraid I might start him off.
"Don't get all shook up," came Mortimer's quiet voice from somewhere in the darkness back toward the monster's tail. Mortimer is always quiet like that. He never gets excited about anything. "It's half a mile over to the beach. They can't hear us unless we make a real big noise," he pointed out.
Suddenly Henry jumped violently, bumping his head on the framework of the beast's spine and rocking the canoe. "They've seen us," he cried. "They've seen us!"
"What? How do you know?" asked Jeff in a whisper.
"There's a whole bunch of them running out to the end of the boat dock. They're jumping up and down and pointing out here and waving and screaming."
Henry was right. We could hear some shouting now, and a few shrill screams of women.
"Let's rock the boat some!" Mortimer shouted from the back. "Give 'em a good show!" He was excited too, for once.
"I can't see anything now," Henry cried. "My glasses are all wet."
We could hear Henry moving around up front, as Mortimer started rocking the canoe from the rear and swishing the beast's huge tail back and forth through the water. Suddenly there was a splash and a gurgle, and my paddle hit something heavy and soft. Then there was a slurping noise, and something grabbed my paddle and tried to pull it out of my hands. There was a lot of thrashing going on, and I got scared and started hollering at Jeff to help me. The canoe and the whole framework of the monster were rocking violently.
"Maybe we've run into a real monster!" Mortimer snickered.
"Shut up and stop rocking," Jeff shouted. "Where's Henry?"
Just then Henry's head appeared right beside me, and one of his hands grasped the gunwale of the canoe. "Glurp," he said, "my glasses, I—lost 'em."
By this time Mortimer had stopped rocking and we managed to pull Henry back into the canoe.
"Get up front and see where we are," Jeff commanded, shoving me by the shoulder. "We've got to get this monster out of here before somebody starts chasing us in a motorboat. Henry, what were you doing in the water, anyway?"
Henry was choking on lake water, and didn't bother to answer.
When we got back into town that night we stopped in for a Coke and ice cream at Martin's Ice Cream Parlor, where Homer had agreed to meet us. The whole town was buzzing. Everybody in Martin's was talking about the sea monster, and about how Dinky Poore had been right, after all. We took a booth in a corner, where nobody could overhear us, and listened to Homer's report. There was no doubt the beast had been a sensational success. Homer said it had almost rolled over once and all the women on the beach had screamed. When Homer left the beach, state police cars had arrived and were sweeping the lake with their spotlights. But they didn't see anything, of course.
We took the monster out a couple more times that week, and got to be pretty expert at handling her. The town just about went wild. The newspaper offered a hundred dollars as a prize to anyone who could get a picture of the beast, and people started flocking into Mammoth Falls from all over the state, hoping to get a look at it. Lake cabins were renting for as high as two hundred dollars apiece, when they used to bring fifty a week; and a lot of local families just moved back into town and rented their cabins out to sightseers. All the concessions at the beach were doing a booming business, and the restaurants and the one hotel in town couldn't handle the crowds. Homer's father, who runs a hardware store, said he'd never seen such business.
Pretty soon we realized we had a tiger by the tail. Business was so good, and people in town were so happy, that we didn't dare stop taking the monster out, even though it was wearing us down.
We soon had something worse to worry about, however. Homer Snodgrass came running over to my house right after lunch one day, all breathless.
"Guess what?" said Homer.
"Guess what?" I asked.
"Give the club code word!" he said.
"Skinamaroo!" I said.
"The information you are about to receive classified confidential," Homer panted. "You swear not to tell it to anyone not a member of the Mad Scientists' Club?"
"I swear!"
Then Homer told me that Harmon Muldoon had been in his father's store with two men. They wanted ammunition for an elephant gun. Mr. Snodgrass doesn't carry that kind of ammunition, of course, but he did tell them where they could order it in Chicago. The two men were from out of town, and they said Harmon had promised to show them an island in the lake where they could set up a campsite and try to get a good shot at the monster when it came out in the evening. They decided to drive to Chicago to pick up the ammunition.
This news called for an emergency meeting of the club in executive session, and we held it that night in Jeff's barn. Everyone agreed that we couldn't take the beast out again and risk being shot through the head with an elephant gun. But Homer argued that we couldn't disappoint all the merchants and other people in town who were making money on the tourists. Dinky Poore as usual was in favor of writing a letter to the President and asking for his help.
While we were arguing Henry Mulligan suddenly turned his eyes up toward the rafters and started stroking his chin. Whenever this happens everybody stops talking and waits for Henry to speak. After a decent interval of respectful silence Henry brought his eyes down and fixed them on Jeff.
"Your father has a small outboard motor that can be mounted on the canoe hasn't he?"
"Sure," said Jeff. "We use it for fishing at the shallow end of the lake."
"And it's a pretty quiet one as I remember?"
"It doesn't even scare the fish."
"O.K." said Henry. "Now if Homer can bamboozle his father out of a few essential pieces of hardware I think we have enough equipment here in the lab to rig that motor up so that it can be controlled by radio. Then all we have to do is pick a good spot on the shore for our transmitters—on one of those steep hills on the north side—and we can make the beast do anything we want it to."
"And those hunters can shoot at it all they want and they won't do anything more than put a few holes in the canvas," observed Mortimer.
"Jeepers," said Dinky. "I bet that'll make Harmon mad!"
In about a week we had most of the club's radio gear rigged up in the canoe so that we could make Jeff's outboard motor speed up, slow down, idle, turn right or left, and reverse itself. We made a few short test runs with it 'way back in the swamp end of the lake, and everything worked fine. This time Jeff agreed to letting Henry add a pump that would squirt water out of the beast's nostrils. And he even gave in to another of Henry's brainstorms. Freddy could make a bellow that sounded like a bull moose on a rampage, because his voice was beginning to change. So Henry figured it would be a good idea to install a loudspeaker in the belly of the monster and let Freddy bellow into a microphone once in a while from the place where we hid the transmitting equipment.
The first trip of the motorized monster was a sensation. Homer and Dinky and I couldn't see much of it, because it was our job to go back in the swamp, get the beast from its hiding place, and start the motor. Then we called Jeff on our walkie-talkie and he directed the operation from the wooded hill where we had our transmitting apparatus. Henry and Mortimer operated the radio controls to steer the beast and make the eyes blink and the nostrils spout water. Freddy stood by to bellow whenever Jeff tapped him on the shoulder. Jeff watched the monster all the time through binoculars.
She moved through the water much faster now, and every time Freddy let out with the bull-moose call it echoed back and forth among the hills and caused a regular panic on the beach. We got her back into the protection of the swamp just before dark, all right; but we had some anxious moments when she passed the last island out in open water. Four or five shots were fired at her, and Jeff said he could see the bullets splashing in the water. But the beast kept on going as though nothing had happened, and this must have caused Harmon's hunter friends some consternation.
The next day every newspaper in the country must have carried the story. They quoted eye-witnesses who swore that the monster was mad about something, because it was swimming a lot faster and making a frightening noise. A scientist in New York speculated that it might be the mating season for the beast, and suggested the possibility that there might actually be two of them. Within three days there must have been a hundred and fifty reporters in Mammoth Falls from newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations. Newsreel camera crews were lined up along the beach, and several of them had large searchlights ready to sweep across the surface of the lake at dusk, when the monster usually appeared.
We kept the beast under wraps for a few days, and spent the time visiting with the camera crews and reporters. Most of them were camped on the beach, sleeping in cars and station wagons, because there weren't any rooms available in town. Besides getting a good line on what the reporters were planning to do, we were able to make a little money for the club treasury by running errands for them and operating a lemonade stand. Hot dogs were selling for thirty cents apiece at the beach, and for fifteen cents in town. We did a pretty good business buying them at Martin's Ice Cream Parlor and running them out to the beach in thermos jugs on our bicycles. Freddy Muldoon was able to get five dollars for an old telescope he bought for a dollar ninety-five through a magazine ad, and Henry traded some of his father's shaving cream for flash bulbs and camera film. We kept Dinky Poore's mother pretty busy making cakes and pies; but we didn't make much money on this venture, because Dinky and Freddy would eat up most of the profit. They also drank too much lemonade, and after the first day Jeff wouldn't let them run the stand any more.
By this time several of the reporters had made camp on the same island the hunters had been on, and rented some high-powered motorboats. They were determined to get close enough to the monster to get some good pictures. There were also a lot of people tramping around the shore every day, trying to get back into the swampy end of the lake. So we decided to move the beast to a new hiding place.
We picked out a deep cove studded with rocks and small islands, about two miles east of the swamp. Late at night, long after the searchlights had been turned off and people had gone to sleep, we towed the monster over there with a rowboat. Early the next morning, before the sun had come up, we took her out for a brief appearance on the lake and caught everybody by surprise. Some early-morning watchers on the beach started shouting, and this woke up a few of the reporters on the island. But the monster was not where they expected her to be, and by the time some of them had scrambled into their boats we had her back into the cove and covered up among a jumble of rocks.
This created quite a lot of confusion, and people began to believe the professor who had claimed there might be two monsters. But we could see that the string was running out for us. There were so many people exploring the lake now, and so many "scientific expeditions" on their way to investigate the "phenomenon," as they called it, that we were pretty sure somebody would discover our hiding place sooner or later. Even though most people were too scared to take boats out any more, there were several boats making regular patrols of the lake, and every once in a while a helicopter would fly over it.
We held a meeting to discuss the situation. Dinky Poore argued that Abraham Lincoln said you couldn't fool all of the people all of the time, and we might as well quit while we were ahead and claim the hundred-dollar reward the newspaper was offering. But Henry claimed that P. T. Barnum had proved Lincoln was wrong, and so had a lot of politicians. Homer Snodgrass was in favor of continuing as long as we could, because all the extra tourist business was good for the town, and Mammoth Falls had always been a pretty poor place. But Mortimer and Jeff and I were beginning to feel that we should confess the whole business to Mayor Scragg, because he was getting worried about the monster making the lake unsafe for boating and swimming. We also felt that Harmon Muldoon would get wise to us pretty soon and spill the beans. We had seen him sneaking around the lab a lot lately, and trying to follow us sometimes. We knew Harmon was a pretty bright boy. He had been our radio expert when he was in the club, and he had enough brains to figure out the whole deal eventually.
Freddy wasn't around when the meeting started, but he came busting in now, all out of breath after running all the way from his house. "The jig is up, fellas," he announced. "I think Harmon has snitched on us!"
We all started questioning Freddy at once, of course, and Jeff had to rap for order so that we could get the story straight. It seems that Harmon had been up early in the morning, fiddling with his ham radio outfit, and had picked up Freddy's bellow coming over the air. He recognized it as the sound the monster made, and he knew that it couldn't get on the air unless the monster was sitting next to a microphone.
"Holy smoke!" said Mortimer, slapping himself on the forehead. "We should have had brains enough to change all our frequencies after Harmon left the club. He knows which ones we use."
Freddy explained that Harmon had then gone to the local newspaper and told a reporter what he suspected, in the hopes of claiming the reward. The editors didn't intend to print his story until they had more proof, but they were certainly going to investigate his theory. Freddy got all this information from his father, who works in the composing room.
It didn't take us long to make a decision after getting this news. Mortimer had made good friends with one of the out-of-town reporters on the beach. His name was Bud Stewart and he wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which we knew was a big newspaper. So Jeff and Mortimer went to see him, and told him the story after he had agreed to a proposition. He got his home office to agree to buy the club an oscilloscope and a ten-channel transmitter for our lab, in return for exclusive pictures of the monster. Then we all sat down with Mr. Stewart and mapped out a plan of action.
Early the next morning we took him to our hiding place and uncovered the monster for him so he could take pictures of it. He also wanted to get some pictures of the beast in action, of course, so we planned to take it out for an excursion that very night. We figured that if we waited any longer Harmon Muldoon would have time to show the local newspaper people how to get a fix on the location of our transmitters by tuning in our frequency from two or three different places. Mr. Stewart went out to the airport to hire a helicopter. He planned to fly over the lake just before dusk, and when we saw him we were to unleash the monster.
That night we were all in our positions early, just in case Mr. Stewart misjudged the time. It seemed like a long wait, but he finally appeared and waved to us from the helicopter. We had the beast all ready and started her out to the open water. Those of us who had to stay back in the cove couldn't see what happened next, but we could tell, from all the shouts and the way the helicopter was flying, that this was the monster's most triumphant appearance. We got all the details later, including a look at Mr. Stewart's pictures.
The reporters who were camped on the island were ready for us this time, and three boatloads of them appeared as soon as the monster got out there. They had newsreel cameras mounted in the boats, and they were only about half a mile from the beast when Jeff gave the order to head her back to the cove. But Henry couldn't make her do a tight enough turn, and she started back on the far side of a large island that lay across the mouth of the cove. This island is a huge granite mountaintop that rises up out of the water as high as a hundred feet in some places. Once the beast got behind this mass, Henry lost contact with her, and for a few moments she was running free. For some reason the monster doubled back on its tracks, and to everyone's amazement shot out from behind the island again, heading straight for the boats of the pursuing cameramen. Incredibly, the beast suddenly gained speed and went roaring full throttle at the tiny boats—now less than a quarter of a mile away.
The newspaper men in the boats had been busy signaling their crewmen on the shore to turn on the big searchlights, and they didn't notice that the monster had reversed its course until it had closed almost half the gap between them. When they did turn to see it bearing down on them, with nostrils spouting spray and the red eyes blinking, panic broke loose among them. All three boats suddenly turned to head back for the safety of the beach. One of them nearly collided with another and had to turn so sharply that it capsized, spilling its occupants and its gear into the lake. There had been five men in the boat, and when they rose to the surface they swam frantically for the nearest island.
Henry and Mortimer, meanwhile, were pushing buttons and flipping switches so fast that the two of them looked like a centipede with a case of poison ivy. But no matter what they did they couldn't regain control of the beast. Suddenly Mortimer shouted, "Harmon Muldoon must be transmitting on our frequency, and he's got a stronger signal than we have! He's got the thing jammed at full throttle. Cut the receiver, Henry!"
Henry threw the emergency switch that cut off the power supply to the main receiver inside the beast. She slowed down so suddenly that the head almost went under water. Freddy was so excited that he gave out with a big "Hooray!" that sounded like the battle cry of a raging bull elephant. You could hear the screams of the people on the beach, as they heard it come out of the loudspeaker.
"Switch to the alternate receiver now!" cried Mortimer, and Henry did so. This one operated on a different frequency, and Mortimer had insisted on installing it in case something went wrong with the main one. Since Harmon Muldoon couldn't know we were changing frequencies, it was not very likely he could jam this one too.
The beast started back toward the cove like a docile cow coming home for supper, and the searchlights on the beach came on, finally. But all that the watchers on the shore could see was the tail of the beast disappearing in the darkness.
It was about two hours later that we met Mr. Stewart at Martin's Ice Cream Parlor to discuss what we should do next. The local radio station had just announced that Mayor Scragg had asked the Governor to get the Navy to fire depth charges in the lake in the hope of killing the monster. The reporters and cameramen stranded on the little island had been rescued by a police launch, but they were mad as wet hens and had apparently convinced the Mayor that the beast was a menace to the public health and safety.
We went back out to the lake that night and stripped all our equipment out of the beast, including Jeff Crocker's canoe. We mounted her frame on an old raft that someone had abandoned on the shore. Then we towed her far enough out in the lake so that she would be visible from the shore in the morning, and anchored her there. We hung a wreath of pine cones on her neck, and Henry and Mortimer rigged up some kind of a diabolical device inside her.
As soon as it was light in the morning we all climbed up to the place on the hillside where our transmitters were located. We could see a few people on the beach looking at the beast through binoculars, but nobody was taking any boats out. When the sun started to peep over the ridge at the east end of the lake, Henry pushed a button and a lot of smoke came billowing out of the monster. All of a sudden she burst into flames that climbed about thirty feet high, and a big column of black smoke went up into the sky. When the smoke had cleared away there was nothing left on the lake but a dirty smear of oil and a few pieces of black debris—and that was the last that anyone ever saw of the strange sea monster of Strawberry Lake.
We packed up our gear and started for home; and Dinky Poore, who is the youngest member of the Mad Scientists' Club, started to cry a little bit as we were trudging through the woods. Since the monster had really been his idea in the beginning, I guess he felt as though he had lost a close relative. But Jeff told him he could have two votes the next time the club had a meeting, and he had stopped blubbering by the time we got home.

The Big Egg

If Harmon Muldoon had been sneaking around The Mad Scientists' clubhouse one night last August, he would have seen the whole bunch of us sitting around the table staring at a grisly-looking object about the size of a football. As events turned out, he probably was, because we aren't sure to this day whether there isn't a prehistoric creature roaming around in the swamps north of Strawberry Lake.
"How old did you say that thing was, Henry?" asked Freddy Muldoon. Freddy was staring bug-eyed at the thing, with his elbows on the table and his fingers pushing his fat cheeks up around his eyeballs.
"It's probably about a hundred and fifty million years old, give or take a few million years," said Henry Mulligan.
Freddy's eyes bulged larger. "There isn't anything that old," he said. "That's older'n Methuselah!"
"That's right!" said Henry, matter-of-factly.
"What on earth are we going to do with it?" mused Dinky Poore, blinking his eyes and yawning.
"I don't know yet," said Henry, as he wiped his glasses. "I've got an idea, but I want to do a lot more research first."
"In that case, I think I'll go home to bed," said Dinky, slipping off his stool.
"Me too!" said Freddy Muldoon.
Whenever Henry says he has an idea, we know it's time to start catching up on sleep. He'd had us out all day digging for fossils in the old quarry back in the high hills west of the lake, and we were all dog-tired. We picked up the greenish-gray object that was sitting on the table and packed it carefully in a box of sawdust. Henry ran his hand slowly over its crusty surface before we put the lid on.
"Better lock it in the safe," he said.
Then we all went home to ponder over the thing that Henry said was a dinosaur egg. Dinky Poore had a good point. After all, what do you do with a dinosaur egg besides look at it?
But while the rest of us slept that hot August night, Henry Mulligan was very busy. What he was up to, none of us would have imagined in our wildest dreams. And it set in motion a chain of events that still has everyone in town confused.
"Hey, gang, I've got a great idea!" cried Dinky Poore, as he burst into the clubhouse the next day. "Why don't we set up a tent in Homer's front yard and charge ten cents a peek to look at the egg?"
"Crazy!" said Freddy Muldoon, who was munching sunflower seeds in the corner. "I'll bet we could almost make a million. Everybody in town would want to see it."
But Homer Snodgrass shook his head. "I've got a better idea," he said to Dinky. "Why don't we put the tent in your front yard and charge two bits?"
"My old man wouldn't like it. That's why!"
"That's parents for you," said Freddy, with his chin in his hand. "Always standing in the way of progress."
"You've got the wrong idea," said Henry, quietly. "This is a scientific curiosity. It may be an important discovery. You don't make money from a thing like that. Everybody's got a right to see it, and it's our duty to let the scientific world know about it."
"I guess that's why there are no rich scientists," said Freddy Muldoon.
Henry unlocked the safe and brought out the egg. It looked strangely different in the daylight, somehow. Not half so grisly.
"It seems a lot lighter than it did last night," said Dinky Poore, as he took it out of the box and laid it on the table.
"That's because you were tired," said Henry, "and we had to carry it a long way. You're stronger this morning."
"I guess so," said Dinky, feeling both his muscles. Dinky is always feeling his muscles, because he has the smallest ones in the club. Come to think of it, I guess that's why Freddy is always rubbing his belly. He has the biggest stomach in the club. Dinky's always wishing his muscles would get bigger, and Freddy's always wishing his waistline would shrink.
We helped Henry develop the pictures we had taken of the egg the night before, and we put them in a package with the loose shell fragments we had found near it. Mortimer Dalrymple, who is the only member of our club who can make the typewriter work, typed out all the dimensions and the weight of the egg, and Henry ran off to the post office to mail the whole works to some museum in New York City that he said knew all about dinosaurs. When he got back he told us what he thought we should do with the egg.
"I guess we'll have to give it to some museum," he said, "because it might turn out to be an important discovery, but I'd like to conduct a little experiment first."
"What's that?" asked Mortimer.
"I think we ought to try and hatch it!" said Henry.
Jeff Crocker dropped his gavel on the door and strode over to open the door and let a little air into the clubhouse.
"Henry, as president of this club, I want to know if you've gone off your rocker?" he said.
"You mean hatch a real dinosaur?" asked Dinky Poore.
"What else would come out of a dinosaur egg?" Henry observed.
"That egg doesn't look very fresh to me," said Homer, looking at it critically.
Jeff Crocker mopped his brow and sat down again. "Henry, I thought you said this thing was over a hundred and fifty million years old?"
"It probably is. But the sand around the Salton Sea is full of shrimp eggs that are over two thousand years old. You can buy them in hobby shops and in chemistry sets. All you do is put them in water and they'll hatch in twenty-four hours. If an egg doesn't die in two thousand years, when does it die?"
"When it stinks!" said Homer Snodgrass.
Dinky bent over and sniffed the big egg. "It does smell kind of funny," he said.
"What on earth do you feed a real dinosaur?" asked Freddy Muldoon.
About an hour later we were trudging through the low swamps that wind among the hills north of Strawberry Lake. This was where we had hidden the lake monster when we were building it. Almost nobody ever goes there except berry pickers, and there are a lot of places that nobody has ever explored. I guess we know the swamps as well as anybody, and even we don't ever venture into the more remote areas.
We were picking our way carefully along a tangled path that wound around the bottom of a hill, when all of a sudden some rocks came tumbling down the slope and we heard something scurrying off through the bushes. Jeff crept up through the undergrowth and took a look around, but said he couldn't see anything.
"Must have been a fox," he speculated.
"Maybe it was a member of the IES spying on us," said Mortimer Dalrymple.
"What's the IES?" asked Freddy, his eyes bulging.
"That's the International Egg Syndicate," said Mortimer in a low voice. "They're a dangerous band of criminals that specialize in stealing dinosaur eggs from museums and selling them to private collectors all over the world."
"Oh, knock it off, Mortimer!" Jeff muttered. "You read too many kooky books and watch all the wrong TV shows."
"Well, you can't be too careful these days," said Mortimer. "There're all kinds of international agents running around in the bushes."
Henry led us to a boggy area deep in the recesses of the swamp where a spit of pure white sand jutted out from the tail end of a small hill. It was mostly covered with blueberry bushes, but Henry picked out a sandy clearing near the bog and we buried the big egg there near the water, about a foot deep in the sand. We drew some lines in the sand to the edge of the clearing and placed stone markers there so we could locate the exact spot again.
"How long does it take a big egg like that to hatch?" asked Dinky.
"Nobody knows," said Henry, "That's one of the things we aim to find out. It would be an important contribution to paleontology."
"Watch your language!" said Freddy Muldoon. "I heard that."
"Would it take a year?" asked Dinky.
"Nobody knows," said Henry.
Dinky and Freddy weren't about to wait a year, however. They were back out in the swamp the next day to check on the egg, and when they got back into town they ran all over looking for the rest of us. They found Jeff and me at Henry's house, helping him wash the family car.
"The egg's gone!" Freddy cried, as soon as he spied us.
"It 'steriously disappeared!" chimed in Dinky.
"Is that so?" Henry said, cool as a cucumber.
"How do you know?" Jeff asked them.
"We dug it up, and it's not there."
"How could you dig it up, if it isn't there?" Henry asked, still scrubbing a tire.
"Aw, c'mon, Henry. You know what I mean," said Freddy, kicking the tire and getting his dirty fingers all over the trunk of the car.
"I'll bet Harmon Muldoon stole it," said Dinky, jumping up and down. "I'll bet it was him out there in the bushes that kicked those rocks down."
"Maybe we'd better go out there," said Jeff, looking at Henry.
"I suppose so," Henry answered. "Hand me that other brush."
"Well, let's get going," said Dinky, impatiently. "This old car can wait."
"Tomorrow morning'll be time enough," said Henry, as he hosed down the front of the car. "If the egg's already gone, nobody can steal it."
"Tomorrow morning?" Freddy exclaimed. "Aw, nuts! You gonna fiddle while Rome burns, I suppose!"
"Who's burning, besides you?" said Henry, spraying him with the hose.
"O.K., you old fiddler crab!" said Freddy.
The next morning we did make our way out to the sandpit again, but everything seemed to be normal. The markers we had left were still in place and the ground looked undisturbed.
"Somebody's been out here again!" said Dinky. "Freddy and I dug a big hole right there, looking for the egg, and somebody has filled it in."
"Well, let's just see if the egg is here now," said Jeff.
We drew lines out from the markers and started digging at the point where they intersected. The egg was there, all right, just as we'd left it, though it didn't look as though it had made much progress toward hatching. Everyone turned and looked at Dinky and Freddy.
"What's the idea, bringing us 'way out here on a wild-goose chase?" Mortimer snorted at them. "We've got more important things to do."
"If this is your idea of a joke, you two'll never make a living as comedians," said Jeff. "We oughta toss you in the swamp."
Little Dinky started to blubber. "Honest Injun, Jeff. Somebody has been out here. There wasn't any egg there when Freddy and I were here yesterday."
"Scout's honor!" said Freddy, giving the sign.
"Maybe you dug in the wrong place. You guys don't dig things too well, you know," said Mortimer sarcastically.
"Maybe we did. But who filled our hole up?" said Dinky, kicking sand at him. His voice was all choked up, and there was a big tear running down the left side of his face.
"How do I know? Maybe the whole thing was in your head," Mortimer jibed at him.
While they were arguing, I noticed that Henry had lifted the big egg out of the hole and was examining it closely with his pocket magnifying glass. There was a mysterious smile on his face as he placed it back in the sand.
"What's so funny, Henry? Can you see the dinosaur in there already?" I asked him.
Henry started, as though he hadn't realized anyone was looking at him. "Everything's fine, Charlie. Just fine," he said, and covered the egg up with sand.
But everything wasn't "just fine" as far as Dinky and Freddy were concerned. Dinky moped all the way home; and later he and Freddy told me they were certain the egg had been missing when they had tried to dig it up the day before.
"We think my cousin Harmon has been up to something, and we aim to find out what he's doing," Freddy explained.
"We've got to prove to the other guys that we're not nuts," Dinky added.
I felt sorry for both of them, and I agreed to help out in setting a watch on Harmon's clubhouse. This wasn't difficult, because Harmon's gang always meets on the second story of an old garage in back of Stony Martin's house. It faces Egan's Alley, and across the alley and just a little way down is the old Blaisdell barn. The Blaisdells are an old couple that can't run very fast, and they long ago got tired of trying to chase us out of their loft. Old man Blaisdell just decided to buy more insurance and relax, and we've had the run of the place ever since.
It's a neat place to spy from. There're windows at both ends of the loft, and there's a cupola on top that you can climb up into and look out through the ventilation slits. From it we could keep a good watch on Stony Martin's garage.
That night we saw Stony come out and dump a bucketful of stuff into a trash can in the alley. It sounded like rocks. Then he chipped away at the inside of the bucket with a screwdriver and washed it out with a hose. After he went back inside the garage, Dinky couldn't contain his curiosity any longer. He sneaked across the alley and shinnied up a telephone pole so he could peek inside the lighted window on the second floor. We held our breath, hoping nobody would come out and see him there. Suddenly we saw him swing over onto the sloping roof of the garage and lie flat against it. Harmon came to the lighted window and raised the sash so he could look out into the alley. He took a good look around, then pulled his head in and closed the window again. We breathed easier, but Dinky lay motionless on the roof, pressing himself against the shingles. Pretty soon the light went out, and we could hear them clumping down the stairs inside. Harmon and Stony came out the back door, locked it behind them, and disappeared down the alley.
As soon as they were out of sight, Dinky scrambled down the pole and came running pell-mell toward Blaisdell's barn. We met him halfway down the ladder from the loft.
"They've got our egg!" he said in a breathless whisper. "I saw it sitting on a table up there."
We dashed across the alley and Dinky shinnied up the pole again. He jumped onto the roof of the garage and let himself down over the eaves onto the windowsill. The window was unlocked, and it took him only a second to scramble inside. Then he groped his way down the stairs in the dark and unlatched the alley door. I slipped inside and went upstairs with him while Freddy kept watch behind one of the trash cans in the alley.
Dinky's flashlight picked out the table against the wall, and sure enough, there was the big egg sitting unprotected in the middle of it. We looked around for something to wrap it in and found a pile of burlap bags in one corner. I pulled a couple of them off the top of the pile and felt something hard under the next bag. Pulling it aside, I shined my flashlight onto what looked like a couple of small wash basins. Dinky stood beside me, breathing hard.
"What are those, Charlie? They look like big hunks of plaster."
"I think I know," I said. "And I think they can tell us a lot about what's been going on."
We got the big egg off the table and fitted it into the depression in one of the chunks of plaster. It fitted perfectly.
"These are plaster molds," I whispered. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Yeah! That's what Stony was throwing away in the ash can. Old chunks of plaster of Paris."
"Yes! But don't you see? These are two halves of a plaster mold made from our dinosaur egg. What would they make a mold for?"
"To make another egg," said Dinky.
"Exactly! And that's what's out in the swamp right now—a fake egg made out of plaster of Paris and painted up."
"I wonder why they'd do that?" Dinky hissed.
"So they could claim they found the egg, instead of us, and get all the credit. That Harmon would do anything; but this time he's gonna get fooled."
"Whatcha gonna do?"
"We're going to beat them at their own game," I said. "We're gonna switch eggs on them, and they'll never know the difference."
We wrapped the egg in a couple of burlap bags and beat it out of there, being careful to leave the door unlocked. It took us about two hours to get out to the right place in the swamps, find the fake egg in the darkness, and put the real egg back in its place. Then it took us another two hours to get back to Egan's Alley. Our hearts were thumping pretty loudly when we tiptoed up the creaky stairs of Stony's garage again; but it was well after midnight, and we figured we were pretty safe as long as we didn't make any noise. Since we found the door still unlocked, we were pretty sure nobody had discovered the egg was missing.
When we got to the top of the stairs, we groped our way carefully to the table. I reached out for the edge of it and almost screamed out loud when my hand came down on what felt like another human hand.
"It's about time you got back," said a voice. "What took you so long?"
Dinky jumped back clear to the top of the stairs and snapped his flashlight on. My heart had stopped, but it started beating again when I saw that the figure sitting at the end of the table was Henry Mulligan.
For a minute I had all sorts of wild thoughts. What was Henry doing here in Harmon Muldoon's clubhouse? Was he in cahoots with Harmon for some reason? How did he know what we were up to?
"Jeepers, Henry, you scared the daylights out of us," said Dinky.
"What on earth are you doing here?" I asked, when I could find my voice.
"Never mind," said Henry. "Put the egg back, and let's get out of here!"
"This isn't the real egg," said Dinky. "We found the real one here and took it back out to the swamp."
"I know all about where you've been," Henry said quietly. "You just had to prove you were right, didn't you? Now put the egg down and let's scram."
I propped the egg up on the table, just where we'd found the other one, and we cleared out of there. At least Dinky and Freddy had vindicated themselves. And even though we didn't know exactly what Harmon was up to, we figured we were a step ahead of him. The big question, though, was Henry Mulligan's strange behavior. And it became even stranger during the next several days.
He seemed to spend hours and hours in the clubhouse, fiddling around with our ham radio set, and he wouldn't even talk about dinosaurs or let anyone go out to check on the egg. "The egg is all right," he would say. "Don't worry about it." Finally, one day, we talked him into going fishing, and we all got on our bicycles and rode 'way up into the hills to a favorite stream of ours. Henry didn't catch any fish, though. He almost never does. Somehow or other it seems that really smart people just don't attract fish. I think they just get bored with it all and aren't patient enough.
By early afternoon, Henry had talked us all into going back to town. When we got back to his house there was a man sitting on the porch waiting to see him. He introduced himself as a science reporter for one of the big city newspapers.
"I'm Mr. Bowden from the Globe-Democrat," he said. "I'd like to ask you a few questions about this big egg you found."
"What big egg?" asked Freddy Muldoon.
"The big egg that's supposed to be a dinosaur egg," said Mr. Bowden.
"Oh, that egg!" said Freddy. "You'll have to talk to Henry Mulligan about that. He's our chief scientist."
"Thank you," Mr. Bowden said politely. "He's the one I came to talk to."
By this time Jeff had gotten hold of one of Freddy's ears and pulled him off to the side. Mr. Bowden explained that the American Museum of Natural History in New York had made fluorine tests on the shell fragments we sent them and were of the opinion that they were from the Jurassic period of the Mesozoic era. They thought the egg was probably that of a large sauropod dinosaur—possibly a brontosaurus, or maybe even a brachiosaurus. They were quite excited about it and had asked an expert from the state university to come down to Mammoth Falls to examine the egg. That was why Mr. Bowden was here. There would probably be reporters from other papers coming down with the expert.
"Who is he?" Henry asked.
"He's Professor Mudgeon, a very well-known paleontologist," said Mr. Bowden. "He'll be here tomorrow."
"What's all this stuff about the jackass period and all that?" asked Dinky Poore.
"That's Jurassic," said Henry. "All it means is that the egg is probably a hundred and fifty million years old, like I said."
The next day we all went over to the town hall to meet Professor Mudgeon, who had agreed to hold a press conference there. Mayor Scragg was there, of course. Whenever there's anything going on in Mammoth Falls that might get into the newspapers, you'll always find him in the middle of it. Today he was in great form, beaming and smiling, and patting Henry on the head as he introduced him to Professor Mudgeon. Henry kept ducking, trying to keep from getting his hair mussed, because he always figures a scientist should look as dignified as possible. Professor Mudgeon didn't look too dignified, though. His suit was a little rumpled, and his shirt collar was a little dirty, and he had bright, shining eyes that twinkled behind his thick-lensed glasses. And he had enough hair to make up for all that Mayor Scragg was lacking, and then some.
"We're very proud of these young men," said Mayor Scragg, mussing Henry's hair again.
"Well, I'm sure you should be," said Professor Mudgeon. "They may have made an important discovery." He had a habit of sucking air in through his teeth with a slurping sound after every statement, and then laughing with his teeth still closed.
After everybody had sat down, the professor gave a brief explanation of why he was there, and told the reporters something about dinosaur fossils. In answer to a reporter's question, he explained the various methods scientists use to determine the age of fossils or bones. When he got to the uranium method, of course, the reporter from the Mammoth Falls Gazette had to get up and ask him if this egg was radioactive, and if there would be any danger to the community.
"No! I hardly think so," said the professor, laughing through his teeth again.
"What a dope that reporter is," said Henry, under his breath.
"When do we get to see the egg?" another reporter asked.
"Well, that's up to these young men here," said the professor, looking toward Henry. "I haven't seen it, myself, yet. As a matter of fact, I don't even know where it is."
"We buried it," said Henry, nonchalantly.
"Buried it? What for?"
"To see if it would hatch."
This brought the house down. Even the professor was laughing—with his mouth open this time. Then a second laugh broke out when the Gazette reporter asked if there was any remote possibility that the egg might hatch, and a live dinosaur be born.
"No, of course not!" said the professor, laughing openly again. Then suddenly his face clouded and the scientist in him reasserted itself. "On the other hand, I don't really know," he said seriously. "Things like that are decided by an authority greater than I."
Mayor Scragg was in such an expansive mood that he volunteered the services of both the town police department and the fire department to transport everybody out to a point where we could walk into the swamps. He even lent the professor a pair of leather puttees that he had left over from World War I. All the way out there he kept telling the professor what an important place Mammoth Falls was for geological exploration, and the professor kept saying, "Very interesting. Very interesting indeed!"
A lot of other people who hadn't been invited came trailing along after us, and we noticed Harmon and some of the members of his gang among them. Dinky Poore, of course, had to run out ahead of everybody so he could be the one to show the professor where the egg was; and when the rest of us rounded the end of the little hill where the sandpit jutted into the swamp, he came dashing back through the bushes shouting, "The egg has hatched! The dinosaur has gone!"
Sure enough, when the rest of us got to the little clearing, all we saw were broken fragments of what once had been the big egg, lying in a shallow pit in the sand. Professor Mudgeon stopped at the edge of the clearing and asked everyone to stand back. He looked at the ground very carefully, and then he tiptoed over to the edge of the bog where a series of tiny depressions were visible in the wet sand. He straightened up and drew a large magnifying glass from his coat pocket. Then he bent down and studied the depressions very closely.
They certainly looked like the footprints of some unknown kind of animal. They were shaped a little bit like an acorn with three sharp little points at the top—or maybe more like the profile of a slightly deformed tulip, just opening up. There were smaller prints interspersed among them that looked like an empty acorn shell upside down. They proceeded in a wavering line along the short stretch of shore, and then disappeared in the bushes, where the sand was drier.
After studying them for a while, and shaking his head from side to side, the professor moved over to where the big chunks of broken eggshell lay in the pit and picked up one or two of them. Finally he snorted and rose to his feet.
"Very clever! Very clever!" he said. "But a complete fake!"
Mayor Scragg harrumphed loudly, and a babble of noise and excited questions broke loose from the reporters. Over it all I was sure I could hear the sound of Harmon Muldoon's laughter. To back up his statement, the professor picked up one of the egg fragments, crumbled it to a white powder between his fingers, and tasted it.
"Pure plaster of Paris!" he snorted, spitting it out.
Mayor Scragg had turned purple and his cheeks were bellowing in and out. He glared at Henry Mulligan and the rest of us. Then he looked back at the professor and harrumphed again. Professor Mudgeon had moved over to look again at the footprints in the sand.
"Somebody has done a very clever job of duplicating the footprints of an infant brontosaurus," he said, "but he forgot one thing. The brontosaurus had a long, heavy tail that he could barely lift off the ground, and there is no trace of a tail being dragged along the ground here." Then he turned toward Mayor Scragg. "I'm very sorry, Mr. Mayor. But I must also say that I'm a little disappointed at coming all the way down here to be victimized by a fraud and a hoax!"
"You don't know the half of it!" spouted the Mayor, turning all purple again. "I'm very sorry too, Professor Mudhen, but if you had to live in a town full of teenage Machiavellis you might be able to appreciate what I'm up against."
"Mudgeon!" said the professor.
"What's that?"
"Mudgeon!" he repeated. "My name is Mudgeon!"
"Oh yes! Of course! Very sorry!" said Mayor Scragg.
"That's quite all right. I'm used to it," said the professor.
Several of the reporters were now taking photographs of the footprints and the egg fragments. A couple of others were trying to get information out of Henry, but he wasn't talking. "I'm not ready to make any statements," he told them, and walked over to where we were standing.
"What's going on?" Jeff asked him. "Is that our egg, or isn't it?" But Henry just shrugged his shoulders and moved away from us.
"It looks like you guys goofed," said Jeff, turning to glare at Dinky and Freddy and me.
"Yeah!" Mortimer taunted. "You probably took the real egg out of the hole and lugged it back to Harmon's clubhouse. You sure went to a lot of trouble to louse things up!"
"Tell it to the Marines!" said Dinky, not knowing what to say.
We stood there with our arms folded, waiting to see what happened next. None of us knew any more about what was going on than Mayor Scragg did. The Mayor was trying desperately to apologize to the professor, but the professor wasn't paying any attention to him. He was standing in the middle of the clearing, chewing on his spectacles and muttering to himself.
"What I don't understand," he kept saying, "is that my friend Dr. Hoffmeister at the museum was so certain those shell fragments came from the Jurassic period. He might be misled by a photograph, but not by the pieces of shell… They were subjected to very scientific tests… I don't understand it. I don't understand it at all."
"Perhaps there never was an egg," suggested a reporter. "Maybe all that the boys found were pieces of shell, and they invented the egg."
"Ah, perhaps so," said the professor. "But then they were extremely clever. Because the weight and the dimensions that they sent to the museum checked exactly with what we would expect for the egg of a brontosaurus."
"Excuse me, Professor!" came a voice from the crowd. "I can show you where the real egg is."
"What's that?"
Harmon Muldoon and Stony Martin pushed their way to the center of the clearing. "We found the real dinosaur egg," said Harmon "I made up this dummy egg and planted it in the quarry to fool these other guys. It sure worked, too. They've spent about two weeks trying to hatch that hunk of plaster."
"Then I suppose you're the one who made these very authentic-looking footprints in the sand?"
"Yes!" said Harmon. "We figured that would give them a real charge."
"Well, you're a very clever young man," said the professor. "Now, supposing you show us the real egg."
"It's back at our clubhouse," said Harmon, and he started to lead the way back up the path.
"Harmon has always been one of the cleverest young lads in Mammoth Falls," Mayor Scragg confided to the professor, as he hurried to keep up with him over the rough ground. "I'll have to remember to tell him so."
The rest of us fell in behind them, and as we trudged back out to the road the members of the Mad Scientists' Club were the most dejected lot you ever saw. But I noticed that Henry had stayed behind and was searching among the broken chunks of plaster in the sand. I saw him put something in his pocket, and when he caught up with the rest of us he was wearing that quiet, mysterious smile again.
It was pretty hot on the second floor of Stony Martin's garage, and Mayor Scragg was already mopping the top of his head with his handkerchief on the way up the stairs. When Professor Mudgeon saw the big egg on the table he sucked a lot of air in through his teeth and lunged toward it with his hands outstretched.
"Ah, yes! This looks like the real thing," he exclaimed. "And such a beauty, too!"
The reporters were crowding around him as he bent over it with his glass. Somehow or other, Henry had managed to worm his way in among them and was standing right at the professor's shoulder.
"The light isn't very good here, Professor. Why don't we take it over to the window."
"An excellent idea," said the professor, "but be very careful. This looks like a very valuable fossil specimen."
"Oh, I'm sure it is," said Henry, as he spun around with the thing held lightly in his hands.
"Wait a minute! I'll carry it!" said Harmon Muldoon, grabbing Henry by the elbow.
"Look out!" Henry cried. The egg popped out of his hands and crashed to the floor, where it practically exploded into a litter of shards and white powder. "Gosh, I'm sorry, Harmon!" said Henry. "I'll clean it up for you."
"Never mind!" said Harmon, looking aghast at the mess on the floor. "I guess you win, Henry." And he crushed a big chunk of the plaster under the heel of his shoe. Something bright among the powder glinted in the faint light from the window Harmon bent down and picked it up. "Hey, that's my ring!" he said. "I lost it when I took it off the other day to mix the—"
"To mix what?" asked Henry.
"Never mind," said Harmon, sheepishly. Then he looked hard at Henry. "Hey! This must be the egg that I cast to put out in the swamp. How did it ever get back in here?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," said Henry.
"But the one out in the swamp—"
"Was a fake!" said Henry.
"So you were a step ahead of me all the time!"
Professor Mudgeon cleared his throat. "Excuse me! But I'm thoroughly confused."
"You said a mouthful, Professor!" muttered Dinky, as he stepped up to Henry with his face all red. "Do you mean you had us spend all night carrying chunks of plaster back and forth to that stinkin' swamp?"
"It wasn't my idea for you to switch those eggs," said Henry, calmly.
"Well, that wasn't very scientific," Dinky pouted.
"No!" Henry agreed. "But it was pretty funny."
"Well, you sure had me fooled," Harmon admitted. "I really thought you had found a genuine dinosaur egg out there in the quarry."
"We did!" said Henry.
"You did?"
The reporters pricked up their ears at this, and a barrage of questions hit Henry from all directions. But Mayor Scragg's voice trumpeted over all of them.
"Well, where is it, you young fool—I mean, won't you tell us where it is, Henry?"
"It's out in the swamp," said Henry, wiping the perspiration off his glasses, "but in a different place."
"Oh no! Not out in that swamp again!" groaned the Mayor, looking down at his muddy feet.
"Just a minute. I'm puzzled about one thing," said Mr. Bowden "My paper will want to know why you buried that fake egg in the first place, and why you led us out there on a wild-goose chase."
"I'm sorry about that," Henry apologized. "But without mentioning any names, I had an idea somebody would try to swipe the real egg. So I made a plaster cast of it the first night we brought it in, and took the real egg right out to the swamp and buried it. I couldn't resist taking you out to where the fake egg was buried, because you never would have gotten the whole story if I hadn't."
"And the culprit never would have come to light," boomed Mayor Scragg, fixing a baleful glare on Harmon Muldoon.
"I think the Professor will agree that a scientist can't be too careful about protecting his discoveries," Henry observed.
It was the professor's turn to wipe off his glasses. "Yes… Hmm… Uh," he stammered. "Unfortunately, history provides us with some classic examples of fraud and deception in the natural sciences—er—particularly in the field of paleontology, I may say."
"Like the Piltdown man?" questioned Mr. Bowden.
As we went down the stairs and out into Egan's Alley, Mayor Scragg was again hovering at Professor Mudgeon's shoulder. "That young Muldoon lad always was a meddlesome boob!" he said, confidentially.
"Very interesting! Very interesting!" said the professor.
Henry led us this time to the opposite side of the swamp, near where the White Fork road starts up into the hills. Not far off the road, at the foot of a bluff, he stopped at a point in the middle of a white stretch of sand. He dug into the sand with his hands and unearthed the big egg. It looked just the way it had that first night. Dinky carried it over to the professor to examine.
"Now I know why it felt so light that next day," he said.
The professor was enthused, and Mayor Scragg beamed proudly. "Truly a beautiful specimen," said the professor.
"Looks kind of ugly to me," said the Mayor. "But then, you know best, Professor."
While the professor was examining the egg, and everybody with a camera was taking pictures of it, I noticed Henry pulling something else out of the hole in the sand.
"What's that you have there, Henry?" I asked. It looked like one of our miniature transmitters.
"It's a sort of booby trap I rigged up as a burglar alarm," he said, and showed it to me. It was a little transmitter, all right, but Henry had rigged it with a pressure-type switch.
"As long as the egg was sitting on top of it, it kept on sending out a steady signal that I could pick up back at the clubhouse," he explained. "But if anyone moved the egg, the transmitter would shut off, and I'd know something was wrong."
"That was why you were never really worried about the egg?"
"That's right! I knew the real egg was here all the time, safe and sound. Any time I wanted to check, I'd just tune in this beep on our receiver."
Then I looked at him hard.
"Henry," I said, "is that what I saw you putting in your pocket over there when we dug up the fake egg? Is that why you knew we were in Stony Martin's garage that night we switched the eggs?"
"Oh, that?" said Henry. "That was a little different. When I cast the fake egg I did happen to drop one of these transmitters into the plaster. No matter where the egg went I could always follow the beep with our directional antenna. It seemed like a good idea at the time."
"So you tracked us all the way from Stony's garage out to the swamp, and then slipped over there just to scare the life out of us!"
"Not exactly. I wanted to make sure you were all right."
Then another thought struck me. "Come to think of it, Henry, you knew the minute Harmon had swiped that egg, and you also knew where he took it."
"Just about."
"But you let everybody poke fun at Dinky and Freddy for claiming the egg had been stolen!"
"I am a little ashamed of that," Henry admitted. "But I didn't want to louse up my plan. If I had admitted that the egg had been stolen, all you guys would have wanted to raid Harmon's clubhouse, and we wouldn't have had nearly as much fun."
"You mean you wouldn't!" I told him, shaking my head.
When the professor had finished examining the big egg he announced he was satisfied that it was genuine. He also asked the Mayor if the museum and the university could have the permission of the town authorities to conduct further excavations in the old quarry, in the hope that further fossil remains might be uncovered. Never one to stand in the way of the forward march of science, or the possible establishment of a tourist attraction, the Mayor assured him that the town would be most cooperative.
"What are you going to do with this egg?" asked one of the reporters.
Professor Mudgeon looked at Mayor Scragg, and Mayor Scragg turned and looked at Henry.
"What do you do with a dinosaur egg?" he asked.
"Usually they go into museums," said Henry.
"Unless the International Egg Syndicate happens to get hold of them," said Mortimer Dalrymple, sotto voce.
"I'm certain the American Museum of Natural History would be very pleased to have it," said Professor Mudgeon, suggestively.
"I suppose they would," mused Henry. "On the other hand, would you mind if we tried to hatch it first? They might rather have a live brontosaurus."
"Ohhh… I'm sure they would," said the professor, amidst the general laughter. Then with a gallant bow he added, "Why don't you proceed with your experiment, Professor Mulligan. The museum and I will be happy to wait our turn."
"After you, Professor!" said Henry Mulligan, indicating the path leading back to the cars.
"After you, Professor!" said Professor Mudgeon, waving Henry before him.
While they were gesticulating, Mayor Scragg stepped ahead of both of them and walked grandly up the path, beaming broadly.
We checked on the egg, off and on, for several weeks. Then one day Dinky and Freddy came tearing up the driveway to Jeff's barn on their bicycles.
"The egg has hatched! The egg has hatched!" Dinky was shouting, long before he was in earshot.
"Honest Injun! May my mother have pneumonia if I'm telling a lie!" cried Freddy.
We all got on our bikes and pedaled out the White Forks road as fast as we could.
"See, there!" shouted Dinky, as soon as we had gotten to the stretch of sand by the bluff. He was pointing to a shallow pit where the egg lay, broken into three pieces. Down by the water's edge were the same footprints we had seen before. But this time there was a definite line in the wet sand about as thick as a clothesline, waving among the tracks.
"Look! There's his tail! There's his tail!" Freddy shouted, while he jumped up and down.
We searched the bushes and the shores of the swamp for several hundred yards on either side of the little beach, but we could find no more footprints.
"It couldn't have gone into the water," Dinky blubbered. "Dinosaurs couldn't swim."
"That's right," Henry nodded. "They went into shallow water when they got too heavy to stand upright on dry land. But they were heavy enough to sink, even in loose mud. That's why so many of their skeletons were preserved as fossils."
Henry spent a long time studying the egg fragments and the footprints. Then he professed himself stumped.
"I don't know what to think," he said finally. "I'd like to think that we had hatched a live dinosaur, but if we can't find it we'll never know. It could just as well be that Harmon ended up a step ahead of us this time, after all."

The Secret of the Old Cannon

The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls

Dinky Poore and Freddy Muldoon found the mannequin in the city dump. Some department store had thrown it away because its face was chipped in one little place. But it was handsome, like all window dummies. Little Dinky and pudgy Fred dragged it all the way to Jeff Crocker's barn and set it up in a corner of our laboratory.
Henry Mulligan didn't like this at all. He said we shouldn't be cluttering up the clubhouse with a lot of junk. But when we put the matter to a vote, Henry lost out. Homer Snodgrass, who is almost as brilliant as Henry and Jeff, pointed out that we could make good use of the mannequin for anatomy lessons and recommended we add this subject to our training program.
Freddy Muldoon and Mortimer Dalrymple were appointed a committee of two to paint the human circulatory system on the dummy's front; but they never got around to it. The thing just stood there in the corner for months until everybody got sick of looking at it. Finally Mortimer pulled an old nylon stocking over its head and dubbed it the Invisible Man. The name seemed like a good one, and that's what we always called it—until Henry got his brilliant idea.
We all arrived at the clubhouse one day to find Henry sitting in a chair in the middle of the floor, staring at the mannequin as if he had never seen it before. He stared at it for a long time. Then he pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up onto his forehead and stared up at the ceiling of the lab.
There was the usual reverent silence. Henry always claimed that when he tilted his head back it made the blood flow to the back of his brain, which was where he kept his best ideas. Then he'd tilt his head forward again and a good idea would pop out.
It worked this time, all right. What came out of Henry, when he finally brought his eyes down from the ceiling, was probably the zaniest idea he has ever had.
"I think we could make this thing fly," said Henry.
"Holy smokes!" said Dinky Poore. "Are you some kind of a nut or something? Don't answer that."
"It's perfectly simple," said Henry wiping his glasses. "I think we can make the Invisible Man fly, and create a real sensation if we do it right."
"We won't be able to call him the Invisible Man any more," chirped Mortimer. "Maybe we could call him the Flying Sorcerer!"
"Maybe the Air Force would give him an Air Medal. Then he'd have something to wear!" said Freddy.
"That's enough jokes!" Jeff Crocker interrupted.
"Next week is Founders Day," Henry continued. "There's going to be a lot of speeches in the Town Square, and a pageant, and all that stuff. I think we can put on a demonstration with our friend the dummy that'll steal the show… Now, you know where the monument to Hannah Kimball is?"
Hannah Kimball is the heroine of Mammoth Falls. Some people say she founded the town. Anyway, she was an early settler who defended her cabin against a whole tribe of Indians with just a blunderbuss and a scarecrow. She stuck the scarecrow up through the chimney with a pole. It kept waving its arms even after it had been shot full of Indian arrows, and the attackers got scared and ran away.
After Henry finished outlining his plan, we started to work. During the next few days, we cut a hole in the back of the dummy and mounted two radio receivers inside him. We put a small speaker in his throat, and dressed him in overalls. When we got finished, he looked like any ordinary citizen of Mammoth Falls.
The night before Founders Day we were all ready. We met at the clubhouse late at night to carry the mannequin down to the Town Square.
Dinky Poore's little face screwed itself up into a doubting frown. "How we gonna get the dummy up on the monument? I'm not climbin' up there!"
"That's simple, stupid," said Freddy Muldoon, with a very superior air.
"Oh yeah?" Dinky puckered. "How would you do it, Mr. Great Brain?"
"That's easy," Freddy grunted. "I'd leave it to Henry, the Gentle Genius."
And that's just what he did.
Henry came up with a good plan, too—as he always does.
Hannah Kimball's monument stands in the center of a little park in front of the Town Hall. It's a slick marble column that goes 'way up in the air. Hannah Kimball herself stands at the top of it, holding her trusty blunderbuss at the ready. Somebody else could stand beside her if he could figure a way to get up there. Fortunately for us, there are telephone poles on either side of the park that are just a little taller than the monument is.
We showed up at the park late at night with about three hundred feet of good, stout piano rope. We looped a half-hitch around the dummy's neck and tied a length of clothesline to it for a guide rope. Two of us climbed up the telephone poles, which were right in line with the monument, and slipped the rope over the foot-spikes near the top of them. It was a simple matter to pull the rope taut from the ground; and the dummy was lofted into the air high enough to place him right on top of the monument by jockeying him into position with the guideline. Then we let the rope go at one end and pulled it free.
Early on the morning of Founders Day the Flying Man was standing there with his hands on his hips. Since the monument is surrounded by trees, he wasn't noticed by anyone until the band marched up to the monument at ten o'clock. It was leading the parade that had started at the bridge over Lemon Creek
Mortimer and Henry and I were sitting in the third-story loft over Snodgrass' hardware store—the one that Homer's father owns. We had our transmitting gear with us, and we had a good view of the monument and the whole Square through the two little windows at the end of the loft. Homer was down in the Square, where he could keep an eye on developments and let us know what was happening. We could pick up most of the conversation over the microphones we had hidden around the monument.
Mayor Scragg and the Founders Day Committee were riding in an open car right behind the band. The Mayor was standing up on the back seat, waving his hat at the crowd and smiling in every direction. Suddenly a voice rang out above the cheers and the music.
"Look out, Mr. Mayor! I'm going to jump!"
The voice came out of the mannequin, but it was Mortimer Dalrymple's voice.
The Mayor's car came to a stop so suddenly that he almost toppled into the front seat. The members of the Founders Day Committee grabbed hold of him to keep him from falling. They looked like the Marines trying to raise the flag on Iwo Jima. When the Mayor was upright again, he looked up and saw the mannequin at the top of the monument.
"How on earth did you get up there, young man?" he called out, shaking his umbrella furiously at the figure.
"I flew up here!" came the reply.
The Mayor looked at the members of the committee, and the members of the committee looked toward the chief of police, and the chief of police looked back at the Mayor. Mayor Scragg cleared his throat and flapped his cheeks in and out a few times, the way he always does when he doesn't know what to say. Then he leaned over and said very quietly to Chief Putney, "I think maybe we've got a nut on our hands."
"I agree," said Chief Putney. "Maybe if we ignore him he'll go away."
"Don't be silly," said the Mayor. "This kind doesn't go away. We've got to get him down from there before he ruins the whole Founders Day ceremony."
"What would you suggest, your Honor?"
"You're a chief of police," said the Mayor. "I'd suggest you start earning your salary." And the Mayor turned and smiled and waved at the crowds again.
"Did you call me a nut?" came the voice from the mannequin.
The Mayor looked up and flapped his cheeks in and out again.
"I'm not a nut. I'm a Mexican jumping bean," said the mannequin. "Wanna see me jump?"
By this time the open area around the monument had become crowded with people, all pushing against each other, trying to get a closer view of what was going on. The Mayor was still standing in the back seat of the open touring car, holding his arms up in the air and trying to get the crowd to be quiet. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he said, trying to sound as loud and important as he could.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" echoed the mannequin.
The Mayor looked up at the mannequin and said, "Shut up!"
"Shut up!" repeated the mannequin to the crowd. There was a great laugh.
"Fellow citizens!" said the Mayor.
"Fellow citizens!" said the mannequin.
"I implore you to pay no attention to the man on top of the monument," said the Mayor. "Your able chief of police, Harold Putney, and the fire department, I am sure, will manage to get him down safely."
"If they come near me I'll jump!" said the mannequin.
The Mayor flapped his cheeks in and out again.
"Pay no attention to that unfortunate man up there,". he said. "He needs all the help and understanding we can give him."
"I don't need help, but you do!" said the mannequin.
By this time Henry and I were laughing so hard Mortimer could hardly keep his face straight. He had to shut off the transmitter until we calmed down. The crowd was milling around Mayor Scragg's car, making suggestions about how to get the nut down off the monument. A bunch of kids were standing on the bleachers at the edge of the crowd yelling for him to jump.
"When'll we let him go?" I asked.
"Pretty quick now. Then we'll turn the show back to his Honor," said Henry.
He switched on the ham outfit. "We'd better see if we can reach Jeff and the others."
Jeff and Dinky and Freddy Muldoon were supposed to be somewhere out west of Strawberry Lake. When Henry reached them, they were sitting on a hilltop where they could see the Town Hall and the Square through binoculars. Henry checked the wind direction from the weather vane on top of Town Hall and suggested to Jeff that they move to another hill a little farther south. This was important to our plan.
We looked out on the Square again, and the crowd was still milling about, pointing up at the dummy and hollering to him. He just stood there with his hands on his hips, the way we had placed him, leaning slightly against the barrel of Hannah Kimball's blunderbuss.
Then we heard the wail of a siren and the clang of a bell as the Mammoth Falls fire department's hook and ladder nosed its way through the crowd. Mayor Scragg stepped down out of the automobile and directed operations with his hat as he waved the hook and ladder into position.
They maneuvered the huge truck close to the monument and extended the ladder up its side. Mayor Scragg stood up in the cab of the fire engine and shouted to the mannequin.
"And now, sir, will you please come down from there?"
"Will you promise not to bite me?"
The crowd roared again. Mayor Scragg flushed red and harrumphed.
"See here, young man. I'm not in a habit of biting people. Just come down the ladder and no one will hurt you."
"I don't climb ladders. I'm an eagle!" said the mannequin.
Mayor Scragg harrumphed again and tried to quiet the crowd.
"Do you want to see me fly?" cried the mannequin. At this point Mortimer let out with a hyena yell and shouted "Geronimo!" at the top of his lungs.
"No! No!" screamed the Mayor. "Wait a minute!"
The Mayor turned and looked at the Founders Day Committee, and the committee turned and looked at Chief Putney, and Chief Putney turned and looked at Constable Billy Dahr. Constable Dahr had a mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. He always wore a coat that hung down to his knees and carried a billy club clasped behind him that he'd waggle back and forth like a tail. When he found everybody looking at him he waggled the billy club faster than ever and looked behind him as if he was trying to see who the chief was looking at.
"Constable Dahr will go up and get the man," said Chief Putney.
"Just the man to do it, Mr. Putney," agreed the Mayor. And the committee nodded approval.
Billy Dahr pretended he couldn't hear what was being said to him. But finally he started to scale the ladder with great care and caution. He ascended three steps and paused there, brandishing his club.
"Now, you come down here, young man!" he said.
"If you come up here I'll pull your mustache with both hands," the mannequin shouted.
The crowd roared with laughter. Mayor Scragg was furious. He started poking Constable Dahr in the seat of the pants with his umbrella.
"Get on up there, Constable! Get on up there!"
"It's no use, Mr. Mayor," Billy Dahr complained. "I get dizzy from vertigo in high places."
"Oh, for heaven's sakes," said the Mayor.
By this time the fire chief had arrived on the scene and was conferring with Chief Putney. Chief Putney went over and said something to the Mayor that we couldn't hear, and the Mayor nodded. The next thing we knew, four groups of firemen were breaking out jumping nets. They stretched them out on all sides of the monument, with volunteers from the crowd helping to hold them. Two firemen started up the ladder, a third one following them with a straitjacket. Chief Putney and Constable Dahr were moving people back, clear of the monument.
"Hurry up, Mortimer," said Henry, "or we'll be in the soup."
Mortimer flicked on his mike. "Get back down that ladder!" he hollered. "If you come near me I'll jump!"
The firemen stopped. Mayor Scragg fumed.
"Get on up there, men!" said the fire chief. "If he jumps, we'll catch him in one of the nets."
"Who's going to catch them?" asked the mannequin.
The firemen stopped again. Finally, under the urging of their chief, they proceeded cautiously toward the top of the ladder, gently coaxing the mannequin to give himself up quietly.
When the lead fireman was three or four rungs from the top, Mortimer cut loose with a final "Geronimo!" and Henry flipped a switch on the transmitter that was tuned to the second receiver hidden inside the dummy. There was a sharp explosion like the pop of a medium-sized Fourth of July firecracker, and a package shot out from the back of the dummy. It fell about halfway down the side of the monument and dangled there for a moment at the end of a bundle of stout cords. Then, slowly, it expanded into the shape of a balloon and, growing ever larger, began to rise slowly upward.
The stunned firemen stood stock-still on the ladder. A hush fell over the crowd. Then an incredulous roar burst from it as the balloon swelled to huge proportions and soared upward on a gust of wind. It lifted the dummy clear of the monument, while cries of "I'm an eagle! I'm an eagle!" issued from its throat. It gained altitude rapidly and went careening off across the Town Square, heading toward the lake.
Henry and Mortimer and I were jumping up and down at the windows of the loft, slapping each other on the back and laughing till our sides ached. The stunt had worked perfectly, and Henry's wizardry had paid off for us again. The surplus weather balloon we had strapped to the dummy's back had been inflated by a capsule of compressed helium. Henry had rigged the firing mechanism from a CO₂ pistol so that it punctured the capsule with a small firing pin when the radio signal from our transmitter fired the charge that propelled the balloon out of its package.
Out on the Square, confusion reigned. The crowd had started to break up at the fringes as people ran pell-mell down side streets, trying to keep the intrepid balloonist in sight.
"Get on the air, Mortimer," Henry commanded. "We've got to keep in touch with Jeff if we don't want to lose half our radio gear."
Mortimer flipped on our outfit to get through to Jeff, and Henry started monitoring the police and emergency bands to see what information he could pick up. With binoculars and a compass I kept an eye on our flying mannequin. He was flying pretty high now, and was being blown out across Strawberry Lake just about the way we had figured.
Homer Snodgrass reported up from the Square that Mayor Scragg was in a real tizzy. He had ordered the civil defense units into full alert, and had told Chief Putney to notify the Air Force at Westport Field what had happened.
Henry picked up Chief Putney's transmission to Westport Field. He requested two helicopters to track the balloonist until he came down, so they could see that he got into the proper institution. The operator at Westport Field wouldn't believe him at first, but promised to relay the information to Colonel March, the base commander, anyway. Two minutes later we monitored a transmission from Westport Field on the emergency band. Colonel March was notifying all the stations in his net.
"Unidentified flying man sighted proceeding west out of Mammoth Falls. Sightings reported by police department, Mammoth Falls, and one airline pilot. Exact heading and altitude unknown. Destination unknown. No flight plan filed at this facility nor at local airport. Request reports of further sightings. Please stand by. Over and out."
We practically went through the roof of Mr. Snodgrass' loft when we heard this. Henry was in a sweat.
"We've got to work fast," he said. "I hope Colonel March doesn't find out we're behind this. He'll raise holy Ned with us."
One minute later Henry was sweating even more. Westport Field announced to all the stations in its net that it was scrambling two search craft and a helicopter team to see if it could confirm sightings of the unidentified flying man.
"Can you get a reading on the dummy?" Henry cried.
The dummy was silhouetted against a good cloud background right at that point. I took a sighting with my compass.
"Looks like two hundred and sixty-five degrees," I told Henry. "As far as I can tell, that's the direction he's drifting, and he's just about reached the lake."
"Good," said Henry. "We shall still have time."
He drew a line quickly on the map he had with him, and then grabbed for the hand set of the citizens' band transceiver.
"Grand Vizier to High Mogul!"
"Come in, Grand Vizier. This is High Mogul."
"Jeff! You'll have to get back to the hill where you were before. I figure you've got about six minutes. The dummy's coming in on a heading of two hundred and sixty-five degrees. That's eighty-five degrees from where you'll be. Let me know as soon as you sight him. And let me know as soon as he's overhead, so I can push the button."
"You're making it rough on us, Henry. Over and out."
Out on the Square we could hear the wail of sirens. Every ambulance in town seemed to be moving out on the road toward Strawberry Lake. Other cars were following, and still more were taking the road north of the lake in case the dummy drifted that way. Mayor Scragg was still standing near the monument, directing operations and waving his umbrella at all and sundry. The Founders Day ceremonies were completely forgotten.
"You've got to hand it to Mayor Scragg," said Mortimer. "He's got this town moving."
"That's going to make it rough on us," said Henry. "I didn't think he'd get things organized so fast."
Jeff's voice came over the receiver. "High Mogul to Grand Vizier! Come in! Come in!"
"This is Grand Vizier. Go ahead!"
"We're back on the other hill."
"Can you see the dummy?"
"Yes! He's getting close to this side of the lake. He's coming right toward us, but we're going to have to move down the hill to our right a bit. Don't cut it loose till I give you the signal."
"O.K.! We're standing by."
"This is going to be a near thing," Henry said. "Those search planes from Westport Field should be getting out over the lake soon. If the helicopters get in close enough to see what we're doing, it may spoil our whole plan."
"Let's not get Colonel March mad at us," said Mortimer. "He's done us a lot of favors."
"That's just what I'm worried about!" said Henry.
The Town Square was completely deserted now. Even Mayor Scragg had left to join the search parties that were hoping to track the balloonist to a landing somewhere in the wooded hills west of Strawberry Lake. I kept my binoculars frozen on the figure of the dummy and fed Henry information on his course and position.
Two search planes were already circling high above the dummy. Off to the north I could see the two helicopters from Westport Field churning their way south. In three or four minutes they would be at the other side of the lake.
"Better hurry," I said to Henry. "The choppers are closing in fast."
Just then Jeff's voice came over the receiver.
"He's just a little way from us now, Henry. You can drop him any time."
"O.K.," said Henry. "But keep under cover of the trees and work fast. There are two planes overhead right now, and there'll be two choppers on top of you in no time!"
Henry flipped a switch on our big transmitter and then ran to join me at the window. We saw the balloon jerk violently and begin to collapse. The charge Henry had wired to a second receiver inside it had blown a small hole in its side. The dummy sank rapidly toward the earth as the balloon folded in on itself. We lost sight of it in the trees.
What happened from then on we knew only through Jeff's radio reports. The dummy came swinging down faster than we had expected it would. Jeff and Freddy and Dinky watched it careening dizzily toward the side of the hill they were on, and hoped it would land in a soft place so the radio parts inside it wouldn't be smashed to bits. They scrambled down the hill in time to see it crash through a bushy maple. The balloon snagged itself in the branches, and the dummy jerked up short on the end of its shrouds, dangling twenty feet from the ground.
"Get up there and cut the balloon loose. We've got to get it out of sight!" Jeff shouted, as he boosted Dinky up the tree.
Little Dinky skinned up the maple like a wildcat. He was quick as a fox and skinny enough to worm his way through the tightest places. In a few seconds he had cut the balloon free with his Scout knife and Freddy and Jeff caught the dummy in their arms. Dinky was down out of the tree like a monkey, and the three of them took off through the woods for the cave where they had hidden their bicycles.
The cave was an unfinished shaft that had been abandoned when they stopped working the old zinc mine in that area. It's overgrown with bushes now, but a spur track leads from it to an old crusher; and from there a rusty, abandoned rail line runs due north to where it joins up with the main line just outside of Hyattsville.
When the dummy emerged from the cave, he was wearing the uniform of an Explorer Scout, just like the rest of the boys. He was lashed to the baggage rack of Jeff's bicycle, with his arms tied tight around Jeff's waist. With knapsacks and fishing rods to complete the ensemble, the whole group looked as though they were just returning from an overnight camping trip. They pedaled down the abandoned rail line, Jeff in the lead.
As they turned onto Turkey Hill Road, which leads back to town along the north shore of the lake, they began to pass some of the convoy vehicles that had brought search parties out to the scene. The antiquated touring car that had carried Mayor Scragg in the parade came charging around a bend.
"Get those bikes off the road, boys!" the Mayor shouted. "This is an emergency."
"Yes, sir," said Dinky. "We're getting back to town as fast as fast as we can." And he kept right on pedaling.
"Have you seen a man in blue overalls anywhere around here?" the Mayor shouted at Freddy Muldoon.
Freddy shouted back over his shoulder, "We haven't seen a living soul." And that was no lie.
A quarter of a mile farther down the road a blue Air Force sedan braked to a lurching stop. The driver put it in reverse and backed up fast. Colonel March's head popped out of the rear window.
"Hello, boys!" The Colonel was smiling.
Jeff kinda waved at him, with a grin that looked as if he was sick to his stomach, and kept right on pedaling. Dinky Poore, whose legs aren't long enough for him to sit on his seat, almost fell off his bike trying to give the Colonel a big salute as he chugged on past. But the Colonel reached out and stopped Freddy Muldoon.
"Who's the big boy riding with Jeff?" he asked.
"Oh, him?… Oh, he's a friend of ours," said Freddy "I think he's staying with Henry Mulligan."
"That's nice," said the Colonel. "Where's he from?"
"Henry lives right here in Mammoth Falls."
"I know that," said the Colonel. "I mean the new boy."
"Oh, him?… I don't know," said Freddy, "I think he's from Canada… Maybe England. I don't think you'd wanna meet him, Colonel."
"Oh, I see. He seems like a pretty big fellow. I just wondered why he didn't have a bike of his own, that's all."
"He's sick!" said Freddy. "Well… I mean… well, Colonel, you gotta realize, in some foreign countries people don't have very much money."
"Oh yes! I understand that's the case," said the Colonel. "Well, he seemed like a very nice young man. I just thought I'd like to meet him sometime."
"Oh, he is a very nice fellow," said Freddy. "He's not the least bit nosy, either!"
"I see what you mean," said the Colonel. "Well, good-bye, Freddy. Nice talking to you."
"Good-bye, Colonel!"
And Freddy took off like a jet to catch up with Dinky and Jeff.
Back in the loft over Mr. Snodgrass' hardware store, the rest of us had not been idle. The Town Square was completely deserted, except for Constable Billy Dahr, who had fallen asleep in the sun on the Town Hall steps. As soon as the coast was clear, Homer Snodgrass had shinnied up one of the telephone poles again and looped a length of piano wire over the topmost foot spike. The other end of the loop ran through a pulley we'd nailed fast to the wall of the loft.
When Jeff and Dinky and Freddy got back with the Flying Man, we pulled all our radio gear out of him and put him back into his blue overalls. Then we hooked him onto the piano wire with a guide-line attached. We pushed him out through the window and gave him a breeches buoy ride back out to the monument. It was easy to lower him by his own weight back into the cradle formed by Hannah Kimball's arms. Then we just cut the piano wire so it dangled free, and pulled the loose end in through the window.
We had barely gotten the piano wire back inside, and closed the loft window, when we saw Billy Dahr yawn and stretch himself on the Town Hall steps. All of a sudden he catapulted his creaky frame into the middle of the street and stood there gaping at the monument, his billy club in one hand and his false teeth in the other. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands and looked again. He looked all around the Town Square to make sure no one was there. Then he took off and high-tailed it down the street to the firehouse at the corner.
A half-hour later the Square was full of people again. Mayor Scragg's deep-breathing touring car pulled up in front of the monument, and shortly afterward the hook-and-ladder rig arrived. The firemen lost no time in cranking the ladder up the side of the marble shaft again, and two of them dashed up it pell-mell with the straitjacket. This time there was not a word from the man on the monument. He seemed to have lost his voice.
The lead fireman lunged up the last few rungs of the ladder and pinned the dummy against the statue of Hannah Kimball with both hands. Then he stepped back and stared at it. Suddenly he stepped forward and grabbed the dummy by the neck. There was a horrified scream from the crowd as he flung it from the top of the monument. It landed with a dull thud in one of the lifesaving nets.
Curious spectators crowded around the net to get a closer look at the man who had been thrown into it.
Mayor Scragg looked at it and said, "Hurrumph!"
He poked at it gingerly with the tip of his umbrella. Then he snorted, and stalked off into the Town Hall. The crowd of spectators gradually thinned out; and as twilight fell on the Square, Mike Corcoran could be seen walking toward his pool hall on Blake Street with the Unidentified Flying Man tucked under his arm.
Next day the ceremonies went off pretty well. Mayor Scragg got a bad crick in his neck from looking up at the top of the monument all the time, to see if the Flying Man was there again; but otherwise things went according to schedule.
Colonel March was there, and he took advantage of the Mayor's invitation to give a short speech on preparedness. He told everybody that the day was past when we could rely on stunts like Hannah Kimball's to defend ourselves. And he said that an important part of being prepared was to be ready for the unexpected. These days we have to look for a lot of unexpected things to happen; and when they do, we have to learn to accept them and not get panicky. He thought that yesterday's incident of the Unidentified Flying Man might serve as a good object lesson for everybody to think about.
After the ceremonies were over, and the politicians had shaken hands all around, Colonel March came over to where we were sitting in the bleachers. He looked right at Henry Mulligan.
"What happened to your friend from Canada?" he asked. "I thought maybe I'd get a chance to meet him."
"What friend?" said Henry.
"The one I saw riding on the bicycle with Jeff yesterday," said the Colonel.
"Oh, that one!" Henry looked around at all the rest of us. "Well, to tell you the truth, Colonel…"
"He died last night!" said Freddy Muldoon.
"I'm glad to hear that," said the Colonel. "I mean, that's too bad! I'm sorry."
"Yes! It was very sad," said Freddy.
"He didn't look too healthy when I saw him," said the Colonel.
"He was real sick," said Freddy Muldoon.
"Well, please extend my condolences to his family," the Colonel said, with a wink.
"We will!"
And that was the last that Colonel March ever said on the subject.
But the mystery of the Unidentified Flying Man still lives in Mammoth Falls. People still argue about it. Half of them believe there was a real man on the monument in the first place and somebody just dressed a dummy up to look like him afterward. Others think there were two dummies, and some ventriloquist in the crowd was just making the first one talk. But nobody can explain what happened to the first dummy, or the balloon, which has never been found.
Those who argue about it usually end up at Mike Corcoran's pool hall, where the Unidentified Flying Man still stands today in the front window. Mike had a sign painted that stands at the dummy's feet. It says:

The Great Gas Bag Race

Zeke Boniface wears winter underwear all year long. The reason we know is that in summer he doesn't wear any shirt. You can always tell how long he's had the underwear on by the different color that shows at the beltline when he bends over to pick something up. The top two buttons are always unbuttoned and the hairs of his chest stick out there.
But Zeke runs the most wonderful junkyard in the world. You can find anything if you look long enough. Whenever you ask him for something he'll roll the stub of his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and scratch his mustache with one finger. Then he'll push his battered old black derby up off his forehead and scratch his head, as if he never heard of the thing you're asking for. But sooner or later, he'll recollect seeing something like what you want, and he'll lead the way to one of the mountains of cluttered junk that crowd his yard.
Zeke never touches any of the junk himself. He just shows you where it is, and then stands there talking about where he picked up a particular piece while you rummage through the pile to pull out what you want.
That was how we found the World War II inflatable life raft for the gondola of the balloon Henry Mulligan designed for the Great Gas Bag Race.
Every year Mammoth Falls is host for the County Fair, and ever since anyone can remember there's been some kind of a race on opening day. It used to be a horse and buggy race, and then for a long time they ran it with farm tractors. But lately it's been a balloon race, and people come from all over the state to see it. If the wind is blowing in the usual direction, it starts in White Fork, about fifty miles away, and ends up at the fair grounds.
Most of the balloons don't make it, because they run out of ballast or their gas leaks out long before they get to Mammoth Falls. Sometimes the sheriff's office and the state police spend the whole day trying to find the people who come down in the woods or in the hills between here and White Fork. Once in a while somebody gets real lost and spends the whole night trying to find his way back to town.
Henry figured the Mad Scientists' Club ought to be a cinch to win the race, because he had an idea for a balloon that didn't need any ballast and could stay up practically forever.
"What kinda balloon are we gonna make?" asked Freddy Muldoon between sniffles. Freddy had a bad cold.
"Never you mind," said Henry. "You'll find out after it's all built. Meanwhile I don't want it blabbermouthed all over town. Harmon is entering a balloon in the race too, and we don't want him stealing our ideas."
"Who else is going to ride in it?" asked Dinky Poore. Dinky, being our smallest member, knew he was a cinch to be a passenger.
Jeff Crocker rapped his gavel on the table. "As president, I appoint Henry Mulligan to figure that out," he said, "and whatever he decides is what we'll do!"
"That's all got to be figured out real scientific," said Freddy Muldoon, looking at Dinky Poore as though he hadn't grown up yet.
The next three weeks we were pretty busy. We knew we faced some stiff competition, because there were a lot of old-time balloonists entered in the race. Mike Corcoran, who runs the Idle Hour Pool Palace down on Baker Street, was sponsoring Harmon Muldoon's entry. We knew that Mike wanted to win the race for the sake of the publicity, and he was willing to put up a lot of money to make sure Harmon had the best balloon in the field of entries. We figured it was a case of Henry Mulligan's brains against all the money Harmon had behind him.
But where science is concerned, brains can make up for a lot of money, and we all had faith in Henry.
We built our balloon up in the loft over Mr. Snodgrass' hardware store. We didn't want to build it in Jeff Crocker's barn because some member of Harmon's gang is always hanging around trying to spy on what we're doing. The loft over Snodgrass' Hardware is on the third floor, and it's pretty hard to spy on anything going on there.
One thing about balloons you've got to be careful about—they're great Yo-yos. They can swing you up into the sky in a hurry, and then drop you back down again just as fast. Henry says it has something to do with the equilibrium between a body and the medium it's floating in. As long as your balloon weighs just a little less than the air it displaces, you're fine. It'll float along just a little way above the earth and not give you any trouble. But if the temperature rises, or an updraft catches you, you can zoom right up to twenty thousand feet and find yourself gasping for breath. When the updraft leaves you, or the temperature cools off, you find you've got the proverbial "lead balloon" on your hands, and you start losing altitude like crazy. The balloon doesn't just float back down to where it belongs. Gravity pulls it down so fast that it'll crash right into the ground if you don't have some kind of ballast to throw overboard, or some other means of increasing your lift.
Most balloonists figure to compensate for this by letting some of the gas out of the bag when they're rising too fast, or dumping sandbags overboard when they're dropping too fast. The big problem, of course, is that they eventually run out of gas, or sand, and they can't control the altitude of the balloon. Then they have to ditch it and give up. In a fifty-mile race, it's a good bet that better than ninety per cent of the balloons won't finish.
Henry figured he had this problem licked, and this was our big secret.
Henry's mother complains that he'd rather think than eat. Sometimes he'll start thinking right in the middle of supper. He'll push his plate aside and he won't take another bite until he's figured out a problem that's on his mind. When she nags him about not touching his food, he slips it under the table to the family dog while her back is turned. The Mulligans have the fattest dog in the neighborhood.
Some people think Henry's a nut. But to him food isn't that important. You gotta eat enough to keep strong, he always says, but don't let it go to your head. It all depends on whether you want to be a scientist when you grow up or the fat man of the circus.
Freddy Muldoon is different. He's always thinking too, but usually it's about food. When he asked Henry if he could be one of the flight crew on the balloon, Henry told him we didn't need that much ballast.
Henry's idea was really quite simple. Most great ideas are. He figured you could keep a balloon under control if you could just vary the size of it by pumping gas in and out of the bag. Then you wouldn't need any ballast. With a couple of pressure tanks in the gondola and a good compressor, you could pump gas back into the tanks when you wanted to go down, and let it expand into the balloon again when you wanted to go up.
We made the envelope for our balloon out of silk from surplus parachutes and inflated it in Jeff Crocker's barn in order to paint it. If you've never painted a balloon, don't try it. It's a lot worse than painting a house. There isn't any way to climb up on it; and even if you could, there isn't any way to keep yourself from falling off. Dinky Poore did most of the painting, slung in a big trash can hanging from a rope hung over the rafters in Jeff's barn.
Later we trucked the thing out to a clearing in the hills back of Strawberry Lake for some captive flight tests. Henry's calculations proved to be just about right. The balloon had over six hundred pounds of lift, which was enough to carry three of us in the gondola, along with the two pressure tanks for the helium supply, the gasoline-driven compressor, and a little miscellaneous gear. We floated it about a hundred feet in the air, tied down with long ropes, so Henry could experiment with the compressor and get an idea how rapidly the balloon would gain or lose altitude. He also had us tie it down with just one rope attached to a spring scale, so we could measure the amount of lift it had under full load.
When we got all through with the captive trials, Henry was satisfied. "I've studied the terrain between White Fork and the fair grounds," he said, "and I figure we've got to stay at about twelve hundred feet to clear the highest hills. But we've got enough lift to float at two thousand, if everything works perfectly and the weather conditions are ideal."
"Two thousand feet is nothin'," said Freddy Muldoon.
"It is if you have to step out at the end of the line," said Mortimer Dalrymple.
"Why two thousand feet, Henry?" I asked.
"At this time of year, on clear days, there's a fast-moving layer of air at that altitude. It might move us along at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, right toward the fair grounds. I checked all this with the meteorologist at Westport Field."
"Better not let Harmon Muldoon know that," said Dinky.
"Shucks, I'll bet we're not the only ones that know it," said Homer Snodgrass. "There's a lot of old-time balloonists in this race. They know all about the weather and the winds around here."
"Sure, they do," Henry observed, "but the big question is whether they can get up to two thousand feet and stay there. I figure we can if there are just three of us in the gondola, and one of them has to be you, Dinky."
"Aw, nuts!" said Freddy Muldoon.
We all knew that Henry had to be the second one, so the rest of us drew lots to see who would be lucky number three, and I got the long straw.
"Nuts!" said Freddy Muldoon.
The night before the big race, Zeke Boniface hauled us and all our gear over to White Fork in Richard the Deep Breather. We camped out on the grounds of the race track, where the balloons would start from, so we could be up early in the morning. There's a lot of work to be done before you can get a balloon off the ground. They just don't go up by themselves.
Naturally, we didn't sleep too much. There were a lot of other groups there making preparations for the launching in the morning, and Homer Snodgrass kept circulating among them, picking up gossip and information. Homer was particularly interested, because Daphne Muldoon, still his girl friend, would be selected Queen of the County Fair if our balloon won the race.
There were about twenty balloons entered in the race, and they were painted all the colors of the rainbow and then some. Some of them were decorated to look like Christmas-tree ornaments, and others like spinning tops. There was one that looked like a big fish and another one shaped like a big green caterpillar. Harmon Muldoon called his the "Green Onion," and it looked like one.
"I hope it springs a leek," quipped Dinky Poore, when he first saw it.
Our own balloon had a face painted on it that looked a little bit like Mayor Scragg. We called it "The Head." The nose on the face marked the location of the rip panel. You have to have a rip panel in case you get caught in a high wind near the ground and you want to let all the gas out of your balloon at once. Otherwise you might get dragged for miles, and smash up against trees and rocks.
The race was slated to start at eight o'clock sharp, and as early as 4 A.M. a lot of ground crews were already inflating their balloons and tying them down to stakes driven into the ground. Henry said we'd wait until well after sunrise to inflate The Head; because there was usually a strong wind about the time the sun came up, and with the temperature rising about twenty degrees, a lot of the crews were going to have a tough time holding their balloons on the ground. He proved right, too.
Harmon Muldoon's gang came over to look at our balloon and kid us as much as they could. We had it spread out on the ground, ready to inflate and weighted down with rocks and boards.
"You guys keep quiet!" said Jeff Crocker, when he saw them coming. "Let Henry and me do the talking. We don't want to get a fight started."
"Well, if that isn't the most!" said Stony Martin, who is known as a loudmouth even in Harmon Muldoon's gang.
"The most what?" chorused the rest of the gang.
"The most flattest balloon I ever saw!" said Stony, kicking one edge of the envelope. This was greeted with a loud guffaw.
"When you stop laughing, supposing you tell me what we can do for you," said Jeff, lounging back against his sleeping bag. "Did you come over for some advice?"
Harmon Muldoon bristled. He stood before Jeff with his fists dug into his hips. "We just came over to see if you were carrying any BB guns or sling shots," he said. "They're outlawed, you know."
"Do tell!" sighed Mortimer Dalrymple, breathing on his fingernails and polishing them on his shirt front.
"Oh, my gracious!" said Freddy Muldoon, with a loud sniffle. "That reminds me. I forgot to bring my bow and arrows!"
"I thought I told you guys to cool it," said Jeff, getting to his feet. He looked Harmon Muldoon straight in the eye. "If we win this race, Harmon, we'll win it fair and square. That's the only way we want it."
"We're not worried about you winning it," snorted Stony Martin. "We just want you to keep out of our way—that is, if you manage to get this sad sack off the ground."
"If we get in your way, write us a letter about it," said Mortimer, stifling a yawn.
"Stow it, Mortimer!" Jeff warned.
"What's your crew gonna ride in?" asked Harmon. "I don't see any gondola around here."
"This is our gondola," said Henry, tapping the bundle he was leaning against.
"What is it?"
"It's an inflatable life raft," said Henry. "Or didn't you know that you have to fly right across Strawberry Lake to get to the fair grounds?"
"We know it," shouted Stony with great glee, "but we're not planning on making any stops!"
After the laughter had died down, Henry smiled quietly. "Judging from your conversation, I assume you're using hot air for gas," he said coolly.
"Maybe you can talk your way across the lake," chirped Dinky Poore.
"That'll be enough of that!" said Jeff, standing up to his full height and looking down on Harmon Muldoon. "I think our guests are leaving. Nice of you to drop by, fellows!"
As the group shuffled off, Stony Martin aimed a rabbit punch at the back of Dinky Poore's neck. But somehow his feet went out from under him and he hit the ground with a thud.
"Excuse me!" said Mortimer Dalrymple, pulling his legs out of the way and handing Stony his hat. "For a minute I thought you'd lost your head!"
As soon as the sun came up, a pretty strong wind blew in from the east, just as Henry said it would. A lot of the crews had trouble keeping their balloons tied down. Two of them broke their moorings completely. They went careening across the race track and got fouled up in the woods on the other side of the railroad tracks.
"Scratch two balloons," said Henry. "They'll never get those repaired in time to get in the race."
Later we wandered over to see how Harmon Muldoon's gang was doing with the Green Onion. Sure enough, they were in trouble. They had to let some of the gas out of their bag to keep it from lifting off, and it had pulled out several of the mooring stakes. When we got there, the whole gang was flailing around trying to keep the rig from blowing away. Everybody had hold of a rope, trying to snub the lines shorter and tie the balloon closer to the ground. The huge bag was pitching and tossing in the wind like a cork on a stormy sea.
"You'll never do it that way," shouted Henry. "Work on one rope at a time!"
Just then a strong gust of wind shot the balloon skyward. Two of the crew lost their footing and were dragged across the ground until they let go of the ropes. Another mooring line snapped loose from the balloon. Stony Martin, with a rope coiled tightly around his left arm, was jerked off his feet and whipped sideways in a wide, sweeping curve. Only one line remained tied to a stake, and the force of the balloon's oscillations was working the stake loose from the ground. Stony was dangling six feet in the air, his legs kicking wildly, trying to find something solid to hold on to.
"That bag sure went up with a jerk!" snorted Dinky Poore.
Jeff Crocker dashed forward and aimed a flying tackle at Stony's legs. He caught him around the knees and brought him crashing to the ground. Before they could get to their feet another gust of wind shot the balloon upward again.
"Go get Zeke and the truck!" cried Mortimer, giving Dinky Poore a shove. Then he and Henry ran to the lone mooring stake and threw their weight on it. Homer Snodgrass and I dove for another line and dug our heels into the ground as best we could.
The rest of Harmon's gang staggered to their feet in bewilderment and tried to help out. They all managed to get hold of a piece of rope, but a balloon in a high wind is like a bucking bronco. We were just barely holding our own when Dinky got back with Zeke Boniface and Richard the Deep Breather in a whirling cloud of dust. Zeke brought the ancient truck to a skidding stop directly under the balloon, stepped up on the seat, and snaked one mooring line out of the air with a hamlike fist. With his leg hooked through the steering wheel, he gave a mighty tug on the rope and dragged the balloon and all the rest of us in his direction. Then he cinched the rope around the steering column and jumped to the back of the truck, where he made another line fast to the tailgate. The balloon still whipped angrily back and forth, but it was held fast to the ground by the sheer weight of Richard the Deep Breather.
"Gee! Thanks!" said Harmon Muldoon, after we had the balloon staked to the ground again and the wind had died down a bit.
"Don't mention it!" said Jeff Crocker. "Funny thing about a balloon. One minute you can't hold down, and the next thing you know, you can't get it off the ground."
"We won't have any trouble getting off the ground!" shouted Stony Martin as we moved away.
"Rots of ruck!" said Freddy Muldoon, shouting back.
It was well after sunrise when we started inflating The Head. The wind had dropped to a gentle breeze and the weather looked good. We had just about an hour till lift-off time. As usual, Henry made us go through a checkout procedure, by the numbers, for every phase of the operation. It sounded just like the countdown for a missile launching.
"It's the only way to make sure you aren't forgetting something," Henry explained. "When you have a lot of things to remember, it's easy to forget one of them. But if you assign every step a number, then it's a cinch. It's pretty hard to forget that 4 comes between 3 and 5."
The hot-air balloons were inflating too, and by the time the sun was fully up, the White Fork race track looked like a fantastic fairyland of bright-colored silk. Balloons and tents were everywhere, and people were streaming onto the grounds from every direction to see the start of the race. Dinky Poore was sitting on his knapsack with his eyes popped wide open and his chin in his hands.
"Gosh!" he said. "Charlemagne's army must have looked just like this when it started getting ready for battle."
"Charlie who?" grunted Freddy Muldoon.
"Shut up, you goofball!" said Dinky, and went right on staring at the balloons and the crowds.
Suddenly the loudspeakers started to crackle and a race official began giving instructions to the balloon crews. There was a noticeable change in the movement of the crowd of spectators as they sensed the race was about to begin. They began filing out of the center oval toward the stands and the railing that circled the track. It seemed as though everyone had a camera or a pair of binoculars, or both. Telescopes and cameras were being set up on tripods all over the place. Some people had even gotten up onto the roof of the stands and were setting up movie cameras, until the White Fork police chased them off.
All of a sudden it was for real. After all the weeks of preparation and planning and dreaming, The Head was just a few minutes away from her first flight. I could feel a big hollow place in the pit of my stomach, and I noticed that Henry kept taking his glasses off and wiping them for no reason at all.
The mayor of White Fork got up in the officials' stand and introduced Mayor Scragg of Mammoth Falls. Then the two of them introduced the girls who were candidates for Queen of the County Fair. Each girl had to give a speech and throw a rose to the captain of the balloon crew that sponsored her. If the rose hit the ground it was considered bad luck. Stony Martin's girlfriend, Melissa Plunkett, gave a good speech, but her aim was bad and Harmon Muldoon fell flat on his face diving for the rose. He got it, though, and he and his crew dashed off and climbed into the gondola of the Green Onion.
"You gotta hand it to Stony," sighed Mortimer Dalrymple. "That Melissa is a real knockout!"
"Her teeth stick out too much," said Dinky Poore.
When Daphne Muldoon was introduced, we whistled and cheered and stamped our feet. She blew Homer a kiss before she tossed the rose, and he was still standing there blushing and digging his toe in the ground when we all took off for our balloon.
Dinky and Henry and I scrambled into the gondola, and the rest of the crew started checking the mooring lines. According to the rules, we had to keep four lines tied down until the starting gun sounded. Henry was fidgeting nervously with the quick-release buckles and checking the pressure-gauges on the helium tanks. Jeff Crocker, with his arm raised in the air, was keeping one eye glued on the officials' stand.
We saw a checkered flag go up at the end of the line of balloons. A puff of smoke rose from the officials' stand, followed by the thin crack of a pistol shot. It didn't sound very loud, and we couldn't believe the race had started, until a roar went up from the stands and we saw one balloon rise up from the middle of the line.
"Cut her loose!" Jeff shouted, and jumped back from the gondola.
We flipped the levers on the release buckles and The Head shot upward for a few feet, then keeled over sideways and started spinning slowly counterclockwise. One rope still held her fast, and Dinky Poore was trying frantically to spring the buckle loose. I reached over and pulled with all my might on the release lever, but the buckle had been bent by the force of the balloon's pull, and it wouldn't budge. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Zeke Boniface step forward, and the blade of his hunting knife flashed in the sun. With one swipe he severed the rope, and The Head shot skyward for a moment, then jerked sideways and started to climb at a steep angle as the wind caught it and pushed it toward Mammoth Falls. We were on our way.
Henry was crouched on the floor of the gondola, glancing at his watch, then at the altimeter, then at the pressure gauges for the helium tanks and the balloon envelope. Dinky and I were leaning over the railing, waving wildly at the shrinking figures of the ground crew.
Suddenly the gondola lurched and swung crazily under our feet. A big orange balloon shot up from underneath us and bumped us again before it bounced free and went soaring straight up.
"Whew! That was close!" said Henry. "They're rising too fast. They'll have to let some gas out in a hurry if they want to keep her under control."
There hadn't been time to see what had happened to the Green Onion. The air was full of balloons, some rising lazily, some soaring rapidly, and some bouncing along the ground while their crews threw everything overboard, trying to get them aloft.
Our gondola pitched wildly again, as a heavy gust of wind hit us and drove us before it. Two of the balloons that were having trouble getting off the ground got caught in it and went careening across the fields and crashed into the woods the other side of the railroad track. One of them collapsed completely, and all we could see of it were the torn shreds of its envelope hanging from the limbs of the trees as we sailed overhead.
Dinky and I kept rubbernecking around, trying to catch sight of the Green Onion, but there was too much going on at once. The big orange balloon had climbed far above us and was now moving toward Mammoth Falls at a rapid rate. It was already about a mile ahead of us. Henry pointed upward.
"They've caught that layer of fast-moving air that we want to get into," he said. "But they're still climbing too fast. They'll climb right up out of it in a minute."
I trained my field glasses on the balloon and I could see the crew members slapping each other on the back. They thought they had it knocked for sure. But Henry was right. They kept on rising until the balloon was just a tiny speck in the sky. But it was no longer moving forward. We passed right under it as The Head rose into the slipstream and started moving for home. Suddenly the orange balloon started to descend again, but it wasn't coming down slowly. It plummeted toward the earth like a wounded duck.
"They let too much gas out too fast!" said Henry. "You've got to be careful you don't panic when you're rising too fast. It takes a light touch on the release valve. At the rate they're going they'll drop right down through the slipstream again. They might even hit the ground."
Sure enough, the orange balloon kept dropping, seeming to pick up speed as it neared the earth. Its gondola rocked wildly as the rig passed through the slipstream, and we could see the crew frantically dumping sand overboard.
"They'll never make it to Mammoth Falls," Henry observed. "They're dumping a lot of ballast in order to put on the brakes, and they might need it again later on."
The balloon slowed its descent, finally, far beneath us. Then it rose, perhaps a hundred feet, and leveled off. It was moving westward once again, but very slowly. We were two or three miles ahead of it by this time, and moving very fast in the slipstream.
"I think they're finished," said Henry. "Unless they're carrying a lot more ballast that they can get rid of, they'll never get enough altitude to clear the hills around Strawberry Lake."
By now we could see only about ten balloons in the sky. The rest had either foundered on take-off or were too far back to pick up. I finally sighted the Green Onion far to the south of us and at about the same altitude as The Head. Apparently Harmon and his crew had managed to get into the slipstream, too.
There's something about a balloon ride that's different from any other ride on earth. Unless you look down at the ground, you don't even realize you're moving. The balloon goes wherever the wind pushes it, and since you ride right with the wind, there isn't any air rushing past you. It's absolutely quiet and still, and sometimes you feel as though you're just hanging motionless from the sky. Of course, if you get caught in an updraft or a downdraft, or a good storm starts tossing you around, it's a little bit different. But in good, clear weather you can float right over a pasture full of cows and they won't even realize you're there.
Dinky Poore was resting his chin on the railing of our gondola, just daydreaming. It's awfully easy to do that in a balloon, and forget all about the fact you're in a race. I pointed out the location of the Green Onion to Henry. He looked at his watch and checked the map he had tacked to a board.
"I figure we ought to make the fair grounds in a little under two hours, if everything goes well," he said. "The big test comes at Strawberry Lake, when we have to clear those hills. If Harmon's balloon is still with us then, it may be an exciting race."
Just then we got a call on the radio from Jeff. He wanted to know if we could see the Green Onion, and we told him it was off to the south of us, doing pretty well. Just to the north of us, on the main road between White Fork and Mammoth Falls, we could see the long line of cars heading for the fair grounds. With my field glasses I could make out Richard the Deep Breather, chugging along well behind the rest of the caravan. There was a motorcycle escort out in front of the line of cars, and all the candidates for Queen of the County Fair were sitting up on the back seats of convertibles, surrounded by flowers. I couldn't make out which one was Daphne Muldoon.
The radio crackled again, and it was Jeff, telling us that they could see us now, and reminding us that if no balloon could land right on the fair grounds, the crew that could get there first on foot would be declared the winner.
Another voice broke into the transmission. It was Harmon Muldoon, heckling us from the Green Onion.
"If you're gonna run, you'd better get started now, 'cause we're gonna drop right in front of the reviewing stand!"
We looked toward the Green Onion and could see that it had drifted a lot closer to us now. We could see the figures of Harmon and Stony Martin, and Buzzy McCauliffe, the third member of their crew. When I trained the glasses on them, Stony was holding up a sign that said, "Go soak your Head in the lake!"
Dinky Poore started jumping up and down and thumbing his nose at them, and Henry had to tell him to sit down and stop rocking the gondola. In a little while Dinky didn't feel so exuberant, though. We sailed right under a big black cloud, and a summer squall hit us that pitched us around so badly Dinky turned green. He had to lean over the rail for real this time, while I held his legs to keep him from falling out. We were all soaked to the skin, and Dinky sat in two inches of water in the bottom of the life raft, holding his head and mumbling about what he'd do if he ever got back down on the ground again.
When we finally floated out from under that cloud, we'd taken a bad battering and had lost some altitude, but we were all right. Henry checked the altimeter and the helium gauges and decided to let more gas into the envelope of The Head. I climbed up in the rigging and released the sliding yoke to let the bag expand as the gas flowed into it. Henry let the gas out of the pressure tanks carefully. We just needed enough extra lift to get us back up-into the slipstream. Too much, and we'd rise right through it!
When we had leveled off again, and were getting a good wind, Henry told Dinky to keep his eye on the altimeter. "We're going to start rising again as soon as we dry out and lose some of the water we've taken on. We'll have to pump that extra gas back into the tanks again to stay in the slipstream."
"What about what I lost?" asked Dinky.
"Every ounce counts," said Henry. "I'll let you know if we want you to get sick again."
Now that we were out of the squall, we took a quick look around to take stock of the competition. Only three balloons were in sight. One was the Green Onion, far out ahead of us and heading for the hills east of Strawberry Lake. She had either missed the squall completely or just passed through the edge of it. The other two were closer to us and at lower altitude, neither of them moving as fast as we were. One was painted like a top, with red, white, and blue stripes, and the other was the one that looked like a green caterpillar. If there were any others still aloft, they were too far back to worry about.
"That caterpillar will be lucky to make it to the hills," said Henry. "She's been losing altitude ever since we got started, and I'll bet she's already thrown away all her ballast. I saw them dumping sand just before we went into the squall."
"What about the Green Onion?" I asked. "She must be two miles ahead of us."
"I've got an idea!" he answered, while he worked furiously with a pencil on the back of the map board. "Yes, it ought to work. I think we can pass her at Strawberry Lake, if the air currents are moving the way they should be moving."
"I hope you're right," I said. "It looks pretty hopeless right now."
"Gaining altitude, oh Great One!" Dinky Poore sang out. The sunshine and a little fresh air had brought his spirits back.
"Start the compressor!" said Henry. "We'll have to keep pumping a little gas back into the tanks as we dry out."
I cranked up the little gasoline engine and the compressor started to throb. Then I went up in the rigging again to adjust the yoke as the gas seeped back into the pressure tanks.
"Keep your eye on the Green Onion when she reaches the hills this side of the lake," Henry explained. "That ridge of hills creates a tremendous updraft. And when it meets the warm air rising from the lake, it becomes a regular funnel. If the Green Onion tries to cross the ridge in the slipstream, she'll get caught in that funnel and she may zoom up to ten thousand feet. If we play it just right we can slip in under her and beat her across the lake."
"I don't know how you're gonna do it, but I hope you're right!" I said.
"Leave it to Henry!" said Dinky Poore.
"A lot depends on how fast we can pump gas in and out of the bag to vary our lift," said Henry. "We've got to drop down out of the slipstream just before we reach the hills and go in low and heavy. Then, if we're lucky, that updraft should catch us and pop us over the ridge. If it does, we may be home free if we can get enough gas back into the bag fast enough to keep from dropping down the other side and into the lake."
"I hope you know what you're doing," I said, not quite sure of what Henry had in mind.
"Lead on, oh Great One!" said Dinky Poore with supreme confidence.
The Green Onion was now approaching the hills a little over a mile ahead of us. She was sailing high and proud. But Henry had predicted the course of events with uncanny accuracy. Just as she was about to cross the ridge, she veered upward and started to climb at an amazing rate.
"She's caught in the funnel!" Henry shouted. "Start the compressor again, Charlie. I want to lose at least eight hundred feet and come in well under that ridge."
The little gasoline engine whirred again, and soon we were dropping down out of the slipstream. Henry had timed it just right. We still had plenty of forward momentum; but if we continued dropping at the rate we were, we would crash right into the middle of the hills.
"Don't get sick now, Dinky!" Henry warned. "We need all the weight we have for another minute."
Off to our left we could see the big green caterpillar far below us. It bumped into the lower slopes of the hills and slid into a gully, where it stayed, rocking back and forth in the wind, while its crew tried frantically to get it airborne again. The red, white, and blue top was not much better off. The updraft had caught it, but too late, and it crashed into the upper slope of one huge hill, where it snagged itself among the trees.
"They're finished!" said Henry matter-of-factly. "Shut off the compressor, Charlie, and keep your fingers crossed."
I shut off the engine and stood ready at the pressure tanks to let gas back into the envelope if Henry gave the signal. In a few seconds we had stopped losing altitude and were being blown in toward the side of a hill, swinging and swaying crazily. For one brief moment it looked as though we would surely crash. Dinky Poore's eyes were the size of overcoat buttons, and his face looked like white paste. I guess mine did too, but I couldn't see it. Henry stood leaning against the gondola railing with his arms folded, looking intently at the hill rushing toward us. He seemed to be counting to himself under his breath. He was the complete scientist—intent only on the outcome of his experiment.
Suddenly our downward plunge slackened abruptly and we felt the rush of warm air past our faces. We were so close to the face of the hill that we could have jumped out if we wanted to. The gondola swung like a pendulum as we changed direction and started to rise again. We were in the updraft.
"A little gas, Charlie!" Henry shouted, and I opened the valves for a few critical seconds. "That's enough. Knock it off now!" We were climbing steeply, just swinging clear of the treetops. Dinky Poore's eyes started to go back to normal, and we all let out a gasp of relief.
"We've got to watch it at the top," Henry said quickly. "The hill is a lot steeper there, and we don't want to get caught in the mainstream of this updraft. The trick is to just sneak over the ridge as low as we can."
The Green Onion was still sailing upward, caught helplessly in the thermal funnel that roared up from the east end of the lake, but there wasn't time to watch her now. We were too busy saving our own skins.
We were just about a hundred feet from the crest of the hill when we suddenly stopped rising and dipped downward with a jolt. It was like being in a fast-rising elevator when it stops suddenly and the floor drops out from under you.
"We've slipped out of the updraft," Henry shouted. "We're going to—"
But the thud of the gondola as it banged against the steep upper slope of the hill bit the words off in his mouth. The Head bounced away from the slope, swayed drunkenly for a moment, then dipped suddenly again, and banged once more against the side of the hill. This time the gondola bounced and slid crazily down the slope. We were too heavy to stay aloft without the help of the updraft.
Henry grabbed Dinky Poore by the shoulders. "Jump out!" he shouted.
Dinky scrambled over the side and dug his toes and fingers into the shale of the hillside to break his slide. The Head bounced free of the slope once more and hung there precariously for a few anxious seconds. Then, very slowly, it started to drift perceptibly upward. Henry uncoiled the rope ladder hanging on the side of the gondola and flung one end of it over the side toward Dinky.
"Grab that and run up the hill!" he shouted.
Dinky snared one rung of the ladder, hooked it in the crook of his arm, and started clambering over the boulders and scrub growth toward the top of the slope. The Head drifted slowly above him like a huge umbrella, dwarfing his tiny figure with its broad shadow. Henry took his horn-rimmed glasses off and wiped them methodically on the tail of his shirt.
"I think we've got it made," he said, as he put the spectacles back on.
Then he took up the slack in the rope ladder and shouted down to Dinky. "Tie it around you and get ready to climb back up when I give you the signal."
Dinky wrapped the end of the ladder around him and stuck both arms through it, so it was laced across his chest and back. Then he grabbed a rung higher up and stood ready to climb.
"Shoot the gas to her, Charlie, but not too much," Henry told me.
I opened the valves and let more gas back into the envelope. The Head responded and started to climb more rapidly. We had topped the crest of the hill and could see Strawberry Lake on the other side of the next ridge. Dinky came up the ladder like a squirrel, and we heaved him over the side and into the gondola. He was grinning like a circus clown and hollering, "Go get 'em, White Cloud!" We rose rapidly into the slipstream again and picked up speed. We had slipped over the ridge without getting caught in the funnel, and were on the homestretch.
We all looked up now, trying to pick up the Green Onion. She was a tiny speck in the sky far above us, and not much closer to Mammoth Falls. All the time we had been working our way over the ridge, the Green Onion had been going practically straight up. If the wind we were riding held up, we would be 'way out ahead of her in a few minutes. But as it happened, it made no difference.
The speck in the sky suddenly grew larger. The Green Onion had slipped out of the funnel and was plunging toward the earth like a wounded pigeon. Henry grabbed the field glasses out of my hand and tracked the balloon in its descent.
"They're in trouble for sure," he said, after a minute. "Harmon has let too much gas out of the bag. I can tell by the wrinkles in it. That's a bad mistake! When you're caught in an updraft in a free balloon, all you can do is ride it out. If you let a lot of gas escape, you don't have enough lift left to hold you up when the updraft stops pushing you."
"What's gonna happen now?" asked Dinky.
"They'll slow down some, because the farther they drop the denser the air gets. But at the rate they're going, they'll dunk in the lake, for sure!"
Henry called Jeff Crocker on the radio and told him to alert the lake patrol for a possible rescue.
"Start the compressor again," he told me. "We're gonna have to drop down low over the lake, and if we're lucky we might be able to help them."
"Nuts to them!" said Dinky Poore. "We wanna win the race."
"Maybe nobody'll win this race," said Henry. "You start checking the release lines for the life raft. We may have to drop it to them, if we can get close enough."
We had our life raft rigged so we could cut it loose in a hurry if we needed it ourselves or if we wanted to get rid of its weight. The heavy tarpaulin that formed the walls and floor lining of our gondola would serve us well enough if we had to jettison the raft.
We all had our eyes fastened on the Green Onion as we settled down over the lake. Harmon and his crew were throwing everything conceivable overboard in a frantic effort to slow the speed of their descent. Shirts, shoes and socks, and even trousers came flying over the side of their gondola to splash in the lake. But it was all to no avail. The Green Onion plummeted into the water like a dead duck.
The force of the impact toppled the gondola on its side, spilling Stony Martin and Buzzy McCauliffe into the water. Harmon Muldoon clung to the rigging and rode with the balloon as it skidded across the surface of the lake, until the weight of the sunken gondola brought it to a stop. We were heading right for it when I shut off our compressor and we leveled off, drifting slowly about fifty feet above the surface.
"Cut the raft loose!" Henry shouted.
We all hit the release lines, and the life raft plopped into the lake about a hundred yards from where the heads of Stony Martin and Buzzy McCauliffe had bobbed to the surface. They both heard it hit the water and started swimming toward it. Henry was uncoiling the rope ladder again.
"Get ready to let more gas into the bag!" he told me, tersely. "And when I give you the signal, give her plenty. We're going to try and pick Harmon up, and until we get him clear of the water he's going to be plenty heavy."
Henry threw the ladder over the side and shouted to Harmon to swim for it. We were still about two hundred yards from him. He was clinging to the shrunken gas bag that had been the Green Onion. It was now a small bubble of green silk, still visible above the surface of the water, but it had drifted far to our left. It was touch-and-go whether Harmon could intercept the rope ladder as it bounced and splashed through the water.
We kept our fingers crossed for the next minute as Harmon swam through the water with strong strokes. Henry paid out all the slack on the ladder that he could, and Harmon got there in time to snag it with an outstretched arm. The effect on The Head was immediate. We dipped sharply downward, and I opened the gas valves without waiting for Henry's signal. We must have come within ten feet of the water before The Head shook violently and veered upward, pulling Harmon clear of the water.
"Good work, Charlie!" Henry cried. "Hang in there, Harmon, and we'll let you down on shore!"
We could see one of the motorboats of the lake patrol starting out from the far shore to pick up the life raft and its occupants. The Head sailed serenely onward under its added load, with Harmon clinging to the lower rungs of the ladder. When we reached the sandy beach on the west shore of the lake, Henry cut the ladder loose and Harmon plopped onto the sand. A baked bean sandwich hit the beach right beside him, and Dinky Poore hollered over the side of the gondola, "Just in case you don't make it back in time for lunch!"
We rose rapidly again, clearing the trees and the low hills on the west side of the lake. We could see the fairgrounds dead ahead of us. Henry and I scanned the horizon for signs of the other balloons. We could see three of them still in the air, but they were all far back of us on the other side of the ridge of hills. Unless the sky fell in, we had it made.
As soon as we were over the last ridge of hills we started pumping gas out of The Head at intervals and tightening the yoke up to decrease her size, so that we could lose altitude gradually and glide right in to the fair grounds. With Henry giving the commands, we made a perfect landfall and skimmed in over the heads of the crowd about fifteen feet off the ground. We threw out mooring lines, and about a hundred people tried to get hold of them and tow us up to the officials' stand.
The band had started playing as soon as we were sighted coming over the hills from the lake. It was still going full-blast with the "Washington Post March"; and with the crowd yelling and cheering, and fireworks going off all around us, the noise was deafening. The balloon was being pulled in all directions at once by the crowd, and the pitching and tossing of the gondola got so bad that Dinky started to turn green again. Pretty soon he slipped quietly over the side and disappeared among the press of people surging around us. Finally Chief Putney and Constable Billy Dahr managed to fight their way to the side of the gondola, and escorted us with some semblance of order up to the officials' stand.
Mayor Scragg was waving his hat and beaming at the crowd, and Daphne Muldoon stood beside him loaded down with flowers. She was blushing, and trying to keep from giggling, and worrying about the wind blowing her hair; but she managed to hold still long enough for them to put a crown on her head.
When the speechmaking and the band music were all over, we looked around for Dinky Poore. We found him sitting in the back of Zeke Boniface's truck, talking to some reporters from the Mammoth Falls Gazette. One of them asked him if he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up, but Dinky shook his head.
"No!" he said. "I think maybe I'd like to be a railroad engineer—or maybe just a movie actor."
"Something's wrong with him," said Freddy Muldoon. "I had to eat his lunch for him, and he doesn't even want a milkshake!"

The Voice in the Chimney

Night Rescue

"If you want to find a needle in a haystack, you've got to be systematic about it," said Henry Mulligan. "Otherwise it's like looking for a needle in a haystack."
This didn't make much sense to Dinky Poore, who isn't the most brilliant member of our club. But Henry proved he was right, as he always does.
It was the day the Air Force jet fighter exploded over Mammoth Falls. A big search and rescue effort was being organized. But when Henry and I offered the help of the Mad Scientists' Club, Mayor Scragg threw up his hands and told us to keep out of his hair—of which he has almost none.
"We don't need your help," said the Mayor testily, as he wiped the sweat from his glasses. "Every time you Mad Scientists get mixed up in something it gives me trouble. Why don't you go home and leave me alone?"
"But we have a plan, Mr. Mayor…" Henry ventured.
"I don't think we ought to turn down any offers of help," said a tall man in an Air Force uniform. It was Colonel March, from Westport Field. "If that pilot is still alive he may not last through the night. It's going to get dark pretty soon, and we've got to call off the air search. Let's put these boys to work. I don't see that they can do any harm."
"You don't know these boys!" said the Mayor.
"Didn't they say they belong to an Explorer post?" the Colonel asked.
"They call themselves the Mad Scientists of Mammoth Falls. You figure it out, Colonel."
"Our specialty is science, sir," Henry explained. "Jason Barnaby saw the plane explode—right over his apple orchard, up on Brake Hill, while he was plowing."
"We know the pilot got out," said the Colonel. "The ejection seat is missing."
"I have a theory about where he came down," Henry said seriously, "but I'd have to perform some experiments, first."
"O.K." The Colonel was smiling. "You go ahead and make your experiments—whatever they are. When you decide where you want to make your search, let me know, so I can coordinate it with the other search parties."
"Yes, sir!" Henry said, smartly.
We headed straight for our science lab in Jeff's barn, with Henry spitting out orders to me.
Henry said he had to stop off at his house to pick up some stuff, so I left him at the corner of Carmel Street and ran over to Jeff Crocker's barn. At the lab I pushed the Panic Button. This sounds a buzzer in the house of every member and it means, "Get over to the clubhouse pronto, Tonto."
Fifteen minutes later Henry showed up with two black cardboard cylinders that he shoved into his knapsack. Everybody else was already there, and Jeff Crocker had us all lined up, checking our equipment.
"Sure took you long enough," Jeff said to Henry. "We're practically ready to go. Only we don't know where."
"I had to call the airport for some important information," Henry explained. "We're going up on Brake Hill above Jason Barnaby's place."
Henry grabbed Homer Snodgrass and sat him down in front of our ham outfit.
"You've got to stay here near the phone, Homer, so we can contact Search and Rescue Headquarters at the Town Hall, if we have to. They won't let us use their radio frequency. We'll take the portable transmitters with us, and when we get set up on Brake Hill we'll call you."
We have a big map of the whole county on the wall of our clubhouse, with grid squares on it, and Henry put a red circle at the place where we expected to set up operations on the hill so Homer would know where we were.
When we finally got to the top of the hill it was already getting dark. Henry had Dinky and Freddy Muldoon pace off the distance to two large trees he had spotted on the ridge north and south of us. When they got back, Henry made some notes in his notebook. Then he had me spread out a big map, just like the one we have in our clubhouse, and orient it with a compass so that the north indicator on the map pointed exactly north.
We set up the two black cardboard cylinders Henry had brought with him.
"These are Army parachute flares," Henry explained. "They'll go up about a thousand feet and drift with the wind. We can track them with compasses to get a good idea where they come down. I've rigged a little radiosonde transmitter inside each of them. If the flare burns out before they reach the ground, we can still get a compass reading on where they land, with the directional radio receivers."
"Do you think we're going to find this pilot, Henry?" Jeff asked.
"If my calculations are correct, we should find him," Henry answered. "I checked with Westport Field, and the wind is still the same as it was when he bailed out this morning. This flare should at least tell us what direction he drifted. Then I'll have to calculate how far he went before he hit the ground."
A few minutes later Dinky Poore was 'way up in the big oak tree to the north of us with a night compass, and Jeff Crocker sat at the foot of it with one of our directional radio receivers. In the other big tree to the south, Mortimer Dalrymple and Freddy Muldoon were stationed with the same kind of equipment.
Henry walked over to the big rock where he had set up the first flare and pulled off the safety clip. We ducked behind a tree when the flare shot off with a swishing roar, straight up into the sky.
It exploded in a shower of sparks, and a bright red, glowing thing dangled there on the cords of a tiny parachute. It lighted up the whole of the hill and the valley to the west of us, and half the lake could be seen as clear as daylight. The wind began to blow the flare, and it swayed and danced in the sky, getting brighter all the time as it drifted off to the west a little bit north of the lake.
It kept getting smaller and smaller. When it finally went out, Henry ran over to the map and jotted down the last reading he got on his compass. Then he got on the walkie-talkie and talked with Jeff and Mortimer. Both of them said they were still getting a beep from the little transmitter in the flare.
When we were all together again, Henry took down the compass readings each team had gotten, and with a protractor and a ruler he drew these bearings on the map.
"I still don't see how all this bunk is gonna help us; find the pilot," grumbled Dinky. "Why don't we go out and start searching?"
"We'll search," said Henry, "but if the experiments work, we'll know where to search."
Then Henry really started to work. He sat on a flat rock with a pencil and slide rule and reams of paper. Pretty soon the ground all around him was littered with paper, but he came out with a point where the pilot was likely to have come down.
It was a point in the hills about six miles west of town, where we all knew there was an old abandoned quarry.
Dinky Poore was sent shinnying up a tall spruce to place a flashing road lantern at the very top of it. Henry said we would use this as a reference point to shoot a back azimuth to, so we could check our bearings on the way. Freddy Muldoon was given the job of staying on Brake Hill with the ham outfit so we could keep in touch with Homer back at the clubhouse. We packed our bedrolls, walkie-talkies, emergency rations, and first-aid supplies on our backs and took off.
The sharp edge of a cliff silhouetted against the stars served as a good landmark to guide us until we got down off of the hill and into the woods. Then we could no longer see it. Moving through woods at night without losing direction isn't easy, but Jeff and Henry had it all figured out.
"The important thing," Jeff said, "is to keep checking your direction all the time. When you shoot a compass bearing, pick out a landmark as far away from you as possible. This reduces the chance of making an error. It's just like drawing a straight line on a piece of paper. If you use a long ruler, it's easy. If you use one only two inches long, it's pretty hard to make the line straight."
"What if it's so dark you can't see any landmark at all?" Dinky asked him.
"I'll show you in a few minutes," Jeff said. "We're getting into pretty deep woods right now."
Sure enough, we got into a place so pitch black we couldn't even see each other. Then Jeff gave us a demonstration. He called it "leapfrogging." He sent Mortimer ahead with a flashlight. After he was two or three hundred yards ahead of us, Jeff would holler to him to move either right or left. When his light was right in line with the compass bearing we were supposed to follow, we would all take off to the place where he stood. Then Jeff would send him out ahead of us again.
Sometimes we'd sight back to the light we'd left on Brake Hill, if we could see it. If we couldn't, we'd call Freddy on the radio and have him turn on the radiosonde transmitter so we could tune in on the beep our directional receiver. This way we could check on how close we were keeping on course.
We had a little problem when we got to the creek that tumbles out of Strawberry Lake. We couldn't afford to get our equipment all wet by swimming across, so Jeff found a place where the bank on our side was pretty steep. He slung a length of rope over the bough of a big tree that stuck out over the water, and had us shine our flashlights on the other shore. Then he tore down the bank like Tarzan and swung out over the creek. He landed with a squishy splash just at the water's edge on the other side, knee-deep in mud. But he was all right, and we now had a good stout rope stretched across the stream, as well as a piece of clothesline that Jeff had tied securely to his belt.
Jeff tied the big rope good and taut to another tree on his side and we ferried all our stuff across by hanging it on a loop from the big rope and pulling the clothesline back and forth.
The rest of us went across hand over hand, with the clothesline hooked to our belts as a safety line and the loop slung under our armpits so we couldn't fall if our hands slipped off the rope. We all made it in good style except Dinky. He's so skinny that he slipped right out of the noose when he lost his grip, and we had to pull him out of the water with the clothesline. He was sopping wet and mud from head to foot, and he wanted to go home. But Jeff made him take all his clothes off and we pinned a big blanket around him.
"The best thing to do is to keep moving around when you're all wet, so you can build up plenty of body heat," said Jeff. "Let's move out now. We've got to keep going."
"This stinky old blanket scratches!" said Dinky, sobbing a little bit.
"Scratch it right back!" said Mortimer.
It was just about midnight when we crawled to the top of a low ridge that we figured must be in the area the pilot had drifted to.
We found a small clearing, where we set our gear down and held a council meeting to decide what to do next. First of all, Jeff insisted that we build a fire in the middle of the clearing and bank it up well with a rock and dirt firewall so it couldn't spread. This would give us a reference point to guide us while we did our scouting, and also would make it easy to get back to the clearing. Besides, Dinky could dry his clothes out and get dressed.
"There's a quarry back there, and we don't know much about it," Jeff said. "Let's get organized before we start."
We decided to tie ourselves together, two and two, with lengths of rope, the way mountain climbers do, and be extra careful. We left Dinky to watch the fire and listen for radio calls from Freddy. Then we set off through the woods.
"When you come to the quarry, don't go too near the edge," Jeff warned. "A piece might crumble off and dump you right to the bottom. Henry and I will go along the left rim. You two go to the right. If you see anything, or find a way down to the bottom, call us on the walkie-talkie."
Roped together, Mortimer and I crept along through the underbrush. At the edge of the quarry we could see Jeff and Henry on the other side, shining their flashlights down into the pit. It was so dark we couldn't see much, but it looked as though it was about eighty feet deep and covered with scrub growth on the bottom.
Henry called over the walkie-talkie that he would throw a road flare into the pit. The flare exploded into a big hissing ball of red light that cast eerie, dancing shadows on the quarry walls. We could see that the west end of the quarry was completely blocked off by a huge stagnant pond of rain water that had collected there.
"Look! Look!" shouted Mortimer.
I followed his pointing finger to the quarry wall on the opposite side. Right below the point where Jeff and Henry stood on the rim we could see the torn shreds and dangling cords of a parachute hanging from a scrub pine that grew out of the face of the wall. Huddled among the limestone boulders at the bottom we could dimly make out a dark shape.
"The pilot!" we shouted at the tops of our lungs. "The pilot's down there!"
The next fifteen minutes went so fast I can't remember all that happened, but Jeff told us to go get Dinky and all the rope we could find and come back to the quarry.
We made a safety line out of the rope and sent Dinky over the edge. We could hear him scrambling around over the boulders at the bottom. Suddenly he shouted up to us. "It's him, all right! It's the pilot!"
"How is he? Is he alive?"
"I don't know," Dinky answered. "It's scary down here!"
We pulled the rope back up, and Jeff went down to the quarry floor. Then we took off to get the rest of our gear. We doused the campfire at the clearing and carried everything to the rim of the quarry.
"The pilot's still alive," Jeff shouted up to us. "But he's pretty bad off. He's unconscious, and I don't want to move him 'cause he might have a broken back. It's foolish to try and get him out of here."
We decided to move everything to the bottom of the quarry and leave Mortimer up on the rim, where he could keep radio contact with Freddy. While Henry and I worked with the rope sling, Mortimer tried to reach Freddy on the walkie-talkie. A woman answered.
"What's your destination?" she asked.
"Where's Freddy?" Mortimer asked.
"What do you mean, where's Freddy? Who is this? Number Seven?"
"Who are you?"
"This is the Ajax Taxi Company. What do you want?
"Please get off the air, lady. This is an emergency!"
"You get off the air. We've got a license for this radio."
"Forget the walkie-talkie!" Henry said excitedly. "Hook up the portable ham transmitter. Tune it to one four five point two megacycles. That's the emergency frequency that they're working on. Get the Town Hall direct and tell them exactly where we are."
The next hour and a half we worked like beavers. Henry and Jeff went to work on the pilot while Dinky and I set up camp on the quarry floor. Messages kept coming through on the radio from Search and Rescue Headquarters at the Town Hall.
The pilot had a fracture of the leg. Jeff and Henry made a splint from branches of scrub trees and my shirt. They moved the rocks away from him so he could lie flat on his back, and covered him with blankets. He was in deep shock. Jeff told us to build fires at three widely separated points in the quarry to serve as location markers in case Colonel March wanted to fly a plane over the area to fix our location.
"We can do better than that, Jeff," Henry said. "I've got a surplus weather balloon in my knapsack and a thousand feet of nylon thread. We can fly the balloon with a flashlight tied beneath it, and they'll be able see it all the way from town."
Henry's knapsack was a regular McGee's closet. He could always pull something out of it you never knew he had.
We had just sent the balloon up when a message came through that they might try to send a small helicopter in before daylight if it was possible to land anywhere nearby. Jeff sent back word that we would clear an area on the quarry floor and let them know when we were ready.
One light plane did fly over, and the pilot saw the balloon and the fires all right, because he circled back and came in very low over the trees. We thought the vibration would shake the walls of the quarry loose when he went overhead. He pulled up sharply and dropped something over the side. It came swinging down on a small parachute and dropped with a big splash in the stagnant pond at the open end of the quarry.
"Come on!" Jeff shouted. "Bring a flashlight."
He crashed through the underbrush and charged right into the pond. I got there just in time to catch the parachute on the surface of the water in the beam of my flashlight, and I plunged right in after Jeff. The pond was a deep pit and we had to swim, but we got to the parachute in time to grab the package before it sank. We got it back to shore and opened it. It contained four flares, some medical supplies and a note. The note told us that if they decided to try a helicopter landing the pilot would circle overhead and drop a parachute flare to light up the area. Then we were to light the flares we had, two yellow and two red, to mark the place the chopper was to land.
Jeff and I were dripping wet but we soon dried off when we all went to work with hatchets to clear the scrub growth from an area about fifty feet in diameter in the middle of the triangle formed by our three campfires.
It wasn't long before we heard the putt-putt-putt of the chopper's motor and the thrashing of its rotor blades. Then we saw its blinking lights over the rim of the quarry and rushed out to set off the flares that marked the circle it was to land in. They sent up huge billowing clouds of red and yellow smoke. It made a beautiful sight as the smoke caught the light of the campfires and the chopper hovered overhead, beating the air with its blades. We could see the pilot and the Air Force doctor looking down at us. The wind from the rotor blades beat our shirts and trousers back against us and made the smoke from the flares swirl around on the ground. The whole quarry floor throbbed as the chopper settled down. We had to turn our backs to it and run for cover to get away from the loose gravel and dust it kicked up and sent flying in all directions.
It took only a minute for the doctor, who was an Air Force major, to check the jet pilot over thoroughly.
"Somebody did a first-rate job here!" he said quietly. "You probably saved this man's life. Get one of those stretchers over here."
It seemed like a long time, but it probably wasn't more than fifteen minutes before we had the stretcher back on the skids of the chopper and the pilot wrapped snugly in blankets under the protective plastic hood.
The Army pilot inspected everything carefully and radioed in to Westport Field for wind and temperature information. Then he looked slowly around the rim of the quarry, where the dawn was beginning to form a faint halo of light. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and spoke briefly with the doctor. Then they both walked over to where we were standing.
"How much do you weigh, fella?" the pilot was looking right at Dinky Poore.
Dinky gulped.
"Eighty-five pounds, sir."
"I'm going to need all the help I can get to lift out of here. The Major is too heavy. I need somebody about your weight to ride the other stretcher on my side and help balance the load. Would you like to take a ride?"
"Sure… yeah… I guess so…!" Dinky scratched his head and looked around at the rest of us for encouragement.
Dinky was trembling a little bit when we strapped him onto the other stretcher and put the plastic hood over his head, but it might have been because he was cold.
"Tie me on good," he said.
Just then a call came in on the chopper's radio. It was Colonel March, at Search and Rescue Headquarters, telling the pilot to make sure we stayed in the quarry until daylight. A big H21 helicopter would be over the quarry in about an hour to take us and all our gear back into town. We all gave a cheer when we heard this, and Dinky held up two fingers in the victory sign as the Army pilot revved up his motor.
We lowered Mortimer and our radio equipment down to the quarry floor on the rope sling. Now that the excitement was all over we flopped down on the ground dead tired, and I think most of us fell asleep.
The noise of the giant H21 "Grasshopper" woke me up. Colonel March stepped out of it when it touched down. He shook all our hands and told us the pilot had been flown direct to the Westport Field Hospital, where the doctors said he would live.
The big chopper brought us down in a field back of Town Hall, where tents had been set up for feeding the search teams. Freddy Muldoon was already there, gulping down hot cakes and bacon. Another helicopter had brought him and our ham equipment down off Brake Hill. Dinky Poore was lying on an Army cot sipping lemonade through a straw, while one Air Force nurse held the glass for him and another one treated the blisters on his feet.
When we climbed down out of the helicopter, Mayor Scragg and some of the Town Council were there to greet us, along with most of Colonel March's staff officers from Westport Field. Photographers started taking pictures, and they told us there would be a parade in our honor at the air base the next day.
Mayor Scragg had to make a flowery speech, and Mortimer Dalrymple sneezed all the way through it, because his feet were wet. From what the Mayor said, you'd have thought it was his own idea to send us out on the search. But we didn't really mind, because the Mayor had run home from the Town Hall and put on his best suit for the occasion, and he'd got several of the Council members out of bed to come meet us, so we felt quite flattered by it all.
Besides, Colonel March told us he was recommending that the Department of the Air Force award medals for meritorious service to all the members of the Mad Scientists' Club, and this made us really proud. He also said he hoped we would think about trying for the Air Force Academy when we got ready to go to college, because the Air Force needs plenty of scientists.
We all had some hot breakfast in the Red Cross tent, and then they bundled us into hostess wagons to take us home. Mayor Scragg shook all our hands again and asked us if there was anything more the town could do for us.
Freddy Muldoon said, "Yes! How about another plate of fried eggs?"

Contents

• The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake
• The Big Egg
• The Secret of the Old Cannon
• The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls
• The Great Gas Bag Race
• The Voice in the Chimney
• Night Rescue

The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake

Dinky Poore didn't really mean to start the story about the huge sea monster in Strawberry Lake. He was only telling a fib because he had to have an excuse for getting home late for supper. So he told his folks he'd been running around the lake trying to get a close look at a huge, snakelike thing he'd seen in the water, and the first thing he knew he was too far from home to get back in time.
His mother and father greeted this tale with some skepticism. But Dinky's two sisters were more impressionable, and that's how the story really got out. They kept pestering him for so many details about the monster that he had to invent a fantastic tale to satisfy them. That's one of the troubles with a lie. You've got to keep adding to it to make it believable to people.
It didn't take long for the story to get around town, and pretty soon Dinky Poore was a celebrity in Mammoth Falls. He even had his picture in the paper, together with an "artist's conception" of the thing he had seen. It was gruesome-looking—something like a dinosaur, but with a scaly, saw-toothed back like a dragon. Dinky was never short on imagination, and he was able to give the artist plenty of details.
It was the artist's sketch in the newspaper that got Henry Mulligan all excited. Henry is first vice-president and also chief of research for the Mad Scientists' Club and is noted for his brainstorms. Neither Henry nor anyone else in the club actually believed Dinky had seen a real monster, but we were all willing to play along with a gag—especially when Henry suggested that we could build a monster just like the one shown in the newspaper.
"Build a monster?" Freddy Muldoon's round face was all goggle-eyed. He liked the idea, but he just didn't know how Henry proposed going about it. He rubbed his button nose, which was always itching, and asked, "You mean a real monster that can swim?"
"Don't be a dope," said Dinky.
"I'm not a dope. But who ever heard of a monster that can't swim?"
"The one we build will float," said Henry, rubbing his chin and looking up at the rafters of the club laboratory the way he always did when he was speculating on a new project. "All we need is some canvas and chicken wire, and Jeff Crocker's canoe."
Jeff Crocker is president of our club—mainly because his father owns the barn that we have our lab in, but also because he's just as smart as Henry and maybe a little more scientific. Henry dreams up most of the schemes that we get messed up in; but it is usually Jeff who figures out how to do everything, or how to get us out of what we got into.
Since Henry's plan to build a lake monster seemed like a good one, we held a formal meeting of the club that night to take a vote on it. Naturally, we all voted in favor of it, and three days later we had most of it finished. We built it on a small piece of dry land hidden 'way back in the swampy end of the lake. Henry and Jeff had designed a frame of light lumber and laths that had the shape of a big land lizard, and we suspended this across the gunwales of the canoe. Then we hung chicken wire on the frame and stretched canvas over it. With a little paint and a few shiny tin can lids spotted here and there, we soon had a loathsome-looking creature guaranteed to scare the life out of anyone a hundred yards away from it.
Jeff had to keep putting the brakes on Henry's fancy ideas, but he did let him outfit the head with a pair of red eyes—which were just flashlights with red lenses stuck out through the canvas. Henry installed a switch and circuit breaker in the canoe, so that the "eyes" could be made to blink. After two days of practice back in the swamps we figured we could handle the beast well enough to make a test run out on the lake. The monster's profile stuck up about four feet out of the water, and it was a cinch for four of us to sit upright in the canoe to do the paddling and steering.
Meanwhile the town was still all excited about the possibility that there was a real, live sea monster in Strawberry Lake. A reporter from one of the big city papers had been in town to interview Dinky Poore, and when folks heard this, a lot of them began to recall seeing strange things on the water. Everybody wanted to get into the act, and pretty soon all sorts of people were volunteering information. Daphne Muldoon got her picture on the front page, not because she had seen the monster, but because she lived in Mammoth Falls and had a good-looking face and pretty legs. Daphne is one of Freddy Muldoon's cousins. Her younger brother, Harmon, used to be a member of our club. But he got kicked out for conduct unbecoming a scientist and for giving away secret information.
The first night we took the beast out was a Saturday, when the lake cabins and beachfront were crowded with weekend visitors. We figured it was best to wait until just before dark, then people couldn't see too well and there were fewer boats on the lake. There are plenty of small islands near the swampy end of Strawberry Lake, and this gave us a good chance to get the monster out into open water for a short run and then scoot it back into the cover of the swamp before anyone could discover where it had gone.
Homer Snodgrass, who is one of the brighter members of our club, had agreed to sit on the front porch of his folks' cabin so that we could get a firsthand report on what the monster looked like from the shore. Jeff and I were sitting in the middle of the canoe and doing the paddling. Mortimer Dalrymple, our electronics wizard, was steering; Henry sat up in the prow, where he could look out through two peepholes.
"Are there many people on the beach?" Jeff asked.
"Scads of them," said Henry. "It's still light enough to see pretty well, but I don't think anybody had sighted us yet."
It was dark as black velvet inside the monster, though, and there was a damp, musty odor of canvas and paint. It was a little like being in the Tunnel of Love at an amusement park. I started to giggle, and Jeff told me to shut up or I might spoil everything. But I think he wanted to giggle too and was afraid I might start him off.
"Don't get all shook up," came Mortimer's quiet voice from somewhere in the darkness back toward the monster's tail. Mortimer is always quiet like that. He never gets excited about anything. "It's half a mile over to the beach. They can't hear us unless we make a real big noise," he pointed out.
Suddenly Henry jumped violently, bumping his head on the framework of the beast's spine and rocking the canoe. "They've seen us," he cried. "They've seen us!"
"What? How do you know?" asked Jeff in a whisper.
"There's a whole bunch of them running out to the end of the boat dock. They're jumping up and down and pointing out here and waving and screaming."
Henry was right. We could hear some shouting now, and a few shrill screams of women.
"Let's rock the boat some!" Mortimer shouted from the back. "Give 'em a good show!" He was excited too, for once.
"I can't see anything now," Henry cried. "My glasses are all wet."
We could hear Henry moving around up front, as Mortimer started rocking the canoe from the rear and swishing the beast's huge tail back and forth through the water. Suddenly there was a splash and a gurgle, and my paddle hit something heavy and soft. Then there was a slurping noise, and something grabbed my paddle and tried to pull it out of my hands. There was a lot of thrashing going on, and I got scared and started hollering at Jeff to help me. The canoe and the whole framework of the monster were rocking violently.
"Maybe we've run into a real monster!" Mortimer snickered.
"Shut up and stop rocking," Jeff shouted. "Where's Henry?"
Just then Henry's head appeared right beside me, and one of his hands grasped the gunwale of the canoe. "Glurp," he said, "my glasses, I—lost 'em."
By this time Mortimer had stopped rocking and we managed to pull Henry back into the canoe.
"Get up front and see where we are," Jeff commanded, shoving me by the shoulder. "We've got to get this monster out of here before somebody starts chasing us in a motorboat. Henry, what were you doing in the water, anyway?"
Henry was choking on lake water, and didn't bother to answer.
When we got back into town that night we stopped in for a Coke and ice cream at Martin's Ice Cream Parlor, where Homer had agreed to meet us. The whole town was buzzing. Everybody in Martin's was talking about the sea monster, and about how Dinky Poore had been right, after all. We took a booth in a corner, where nobody could overhear us, and listened to Homer's report. There was no doubt the beast had been a sensational success. Homer said it had almost rolled over once and all the women on the beach had screamed. When Homer left the beach, state police cars had arrived and were sweeping the lake with their spotlights. But they didn't see anything, of course.
We took the monster out a couple more times that week, and got to be pretty expert at handling her. The town just about went wild. The newspaper offered a hundred dollars as a prize to anyone who could get a picture of the beast, and people started flocking into Mammoth Falls from all over the state, hoping to get a look at it. Lake cabins were renting for as high as two hundred dollars apiece, when they used to bring fifty a week; and a lot of local families just moved back into town and rented their cabins out to sightseers. All the concessions at the beach were doing a booming business, and the restaurants and the one hotel in town couldn't handle the crowds. Homer's father, who runs a hardware store, said he'd never seen such business.
Pretty soon we realized we had a tiger by the tail. Business was so good, and people in town were so happy, that we didn't dare stop taking the monster out, even though it was wearing us down.
We soon had something worse to worry about, however. Homer Snodgrass came running over to my house right after lunch one day, all breathless.
"Guess what?" said Homer.
"Guess what?" I asked.
"Give the club code word!" he said.
"Skinamaroo!" I said.
"The information you are about to receive classified confidential," Homer panted. "You swear not to tell it to anyone not a member of the Mad Scientists' Club?"
"I swear!"
Then Homer told me that Harmon Muldoon had been in his father's store with two men. They wanted ammunition for an elephant gun. Mr. Snodgrass doesn't carry that kind of ammunition, of course, but he did tell them where they could order it in Chicago. The two men were from out of town, and they said Harmon had promised to show them an island in the lake where they could set up a campsite and try to get a good shot at the monster when it came out in the evening. They decided to drive to Chicago to pick up the ammunition.
This news called for an emergency meeting of the club in executive session, and we held it that night in Jeff's barn. Everyone agreed that we couldn't take the beast out again and risk being shot through the head with an elephant gun. But Homer argued that we couldn't disappoint all the merchants and other people in town who were making money on the tourists. Dinky Poore as usual was in favor of writing a letter to the President and asking for his help.
While we were arguing Henry Mulligan suddenly turned his eyes up toward the rafters and started stroking his chin. Whenever this happens everybody stops talking and waits for Henry to speak. After a decent interval of respectful silence Henry brought his eyes down and fixed them on Jeff.
"Your father has a small outboard motor that can be mounted on the canoe hasn't he?"
"Sure," said Jeff. "We use it for fishing at the shallow end of the lake."
"And it's a pretty quiet one as I remember?"
"It doesn't even scare the fish."
"O.K." said Henry. "Now if Homer can bamboozle his father out of a few essential pieces of hardware I think we have enough equipment here in the lab to rig that motor up so that it can be controlled by radio. Then all we have to do is pick a good spot on the shore for our transmitters—on one of those steep hills on the north side—and we can make the beast do anything we want it to."
"And those hunters can shoot at it all they want and they won't do anything more than put a few holes in the canvas," observed Mortimer.
"Jeepers," said Dinky. "I bet that'll make Harmon mad!"
In about a week we had most of the club's radio gear rigged up in the canoe so that we could make Jeff's outboard motor speed up, slow down, idle, turn right or left, and reverse itself. We made a few short test runs with it 'way back in the swamp end of the lake, and everything worked fine. This time Jeff agreed to letting Henry add a pump that would squirt water out of the beast's nostrils. And he even gave in to another of Henry's brainstorms. Freddy could make a bellow that sounded like a bull moose on a rampage, because his voice was beginning to change. So Henry figured it would be a good idea to install a loudspeaker in the belly of the monster and let Freddy bellow into a microphone once in a while from the place where we hid the transmitting equipment.
The first trip of the motorized monster was a sensation. Homer and Dinky and I couldn't see much of it, because it was our job to go back in the swamp, get the beast from its hiding place, and start the motor. Then we called Jeff on our walkie-talkie and he directed the operation from the wooded hill where we had our transmitting apparatus. Henry and Mortimer operated the radio controls to steer the beast and make the eyes blink and the nostrils spout water. Freddy stood by to bellow whenever Jeff tapped him on the shoulder. Jeff watched the monster all the time through binoculars.
She moved through the water much faster now, and every time Freddy let out with the bull-moose call it echoed back and forth among the hills and caused a regular panic on the beach. We got her back into the protection of the swamp just before dark, all right; but we had some anxious moments when she passed the last island out in open water. Four or five shots were fired at her, and Jeff said he could see the bullets splashing in the water. But the beast kept on going as though nothing had happened, and this must have caused Harmon's hunter friends some consternation.
The next day every newspaper in the country must have carried the story. They quoted eye-witnesses who swore that the monster was mad about something, because it was swimming a lot faster and making a frightening noise. A scientist in New York speculated that it might be the mating season for the beast, and suggested the possibility that there might actually be two of them. Within three days there must have been a hundred and fifty reporters in Mammoth Falls from newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations. Newsreel camera crews were lined up along the beach, and several of them had large searchlights ready to sweep across the surface of the lake at dusk, when the monster usually appeared.
We kept the beast under wraps for a few days, and spent the time visiting with the camera crews and reporters. Most of them were camped on the beach, sleeping in cars and station wagons, because there weren't any rooms available in town. Besides getting a good line on what the reporters were planning to do, we were able to make a little money for the club treasury by running errands for them and operating a lemonade stand. Hot dogs were selling for thirty cents apiece at the beach, and for fifteen cents in town. We did a pretty good business buying them at Martin's Ice Cream Parlor and running them out to the beach in thermos jugs on our bicycles. Freddy Muldoon was able to get five dollars for an old telescope he bought for a dollar ninety-five through a magazine ad, and Henry traded some of his father's shaving cream for flash bulbs and camera film. We kept Dinky Poore's mother pretty busy making cakes and pies; but we didn't make much money on this venture, because Dinky and Freddy would eat up most of the profit. They also drank too much lemonade, and after the first day Jeff wouldn't let them run the stand any more.
By this time several of the reporters had made camp on the same island the hunters had been on, and rented some high-powered motorboats. They were determined to get close enough to the monster to get some good pictures. There were also a lot of people tramping around the shore every day, trying to get back into the swampy end of the lake. So we decided to move the beast to a new hiding place.
We picked out a deep cove studded with rocks and small islands, about two miles east of the swamp. Late at night, long after the searchlights had been turned off and people had gone to sleep, we towed the monster over there with a rowboat. Early the next morning, before the sun had come up, we took her out for a brief appearance on the lake and caught everybody by surprise. Some early-morning watchers on the beach started shouting, and this woke up a few of the reporters on the island. But the monster was not where they expected her to be, and by the time some of them had scrambled into their boats we had her back into the cove and covered up among a jumble of rocks.
This created quite a lot of confusion, and people began to believe the professor who had claimed there might be two monsters. But we could see that the string was running out for us. There were so many people exploring the lake now, and so many "scientific expeditions" on their way to investigate the "phenomenon," as they called it, that we were pretty sure somebody would discover our hiding place sooner or later. Even though most people were too scared to take boats out any more, there were several boats making regular patrols of the lake, and every once in a while a helicopter would fly over it.
We held a meeting to discuss the situation. Dinky Poore argued that Abraham Lincoln said you couldn't fool all of the people all of the time, and we might as well quit while we were ahead and claim the hundred-dollar reward the newspaper was offering. But Henry claimed that P. T. Barnum had proved Lincoln was wrong, and so had a lot of politicians. Homer Snodgrass was in favor of continuing as long as we could, because all the extra tourist business was good for the town, and Mammoth Falls had always been a pretty poor place. But Mortimer and Jeff and I were beginning to feel that we should confess the whole business to Mayor Scragg, because he was getting worried about the monster making the lake unsafe for boating and swimming. We also felt that Harmon Muldoon would get wise to us pretty soon and spill the beans. We had seen him sneaking around the lab a lot lately, and trying to follow us sometimes. We knew Harmon was a pretty bright boy. He had been our radio expert when he was in the club, and he had enough brains to figure out the whole deal eventually.
Freddy wasn't around when the meeting started, but he came busting in now, all out of breath after running all the way from his house. "The jig is up, fellas," he announced. "I think Harmon has snitched on us!"
We all started questioning Freddy at once, of course, and Jeff had to rap for order so that we could get the story straight. It seems that Harmon had been up early in the morning, fiddling with his ham radio outfit, and had picked up Freddy's bellow coming over the air. He recognized it as the sound the monster made, and he knew that it couldn't get on the air unless the monster was sitting next to a microphone.
"Holy smoke!" said Mortimer, slapping himself on the forehead. "We should have had brains enough to change all our frequencies after Harmon left the club. He knows which ones we use."
Freddy explained that Harmon had then gone to the local newspaper and told a reporter what he suspected, in the hopes of claiming the reward. The editors didn't intend to print his story until they had more proof, but they were certainly going to investigate his theory. Freddy got all this information from his father, who works in the composing room.
It didn't take us long to make a decision after getting this news. Mortimer had made good friends with one of the out-of-town reporters on the beach. His name was Bud Stewart and he wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which we knew was a big newspaper. So Jeff and Mortimer went to see him, and told him the story after he had agreed to a proposition. He got his home office to agree to buy the club an oscilloscope and a ten-channel transmitter for our lab, in return for exclusive pictures of the monster. Then we all sat down with Mr. Stewart and mapped out a plan of action.
Early the next morning we took him to our hiding place and uncovered the monster for him so he could take pictures of it. He also wanted to get some pictures of the beast in action, of course, so we planned to take it out for an excursion that very night. We figured that if we waited any longer Harmon Muldoon would have time to show the local newspaper people how to get a fix on the location of our transmitters by tuning in our frequency from two or three different places. Mr. Stewart went out to the airport to hire a helicopter. He planned to fly over the lake just before dusk, and when we saw him we were to unleash the monster.
That night we were all in our positions early, just in case Mr. Stewart misjudged the time. It seemed like a long wait, but he finally appeared and waved to us from the helicopter. We had the beast all ready and started her out to the open water. Those of us who had to stay back in the cove couldn't see what happened next, but we could tell, from all the shouts and the way the helicopter was flying, that this was the monster's most triumphant appearance. We got all the details later, including a look at Mr. Stewart's pictures.
The reporters who were camped on the island were ready for us this time, and three boatloads of them appeared as soon as the monster got out there. They had newsreel cameras mounted in the boats, and they were only about half a mile from the beast when Jeff gave the order to head her back to the cove. But Henry couldn't make her do a tight enough turn, and she started back on the far side of a large island that lay across the mouth of the cove. This island is a huge granite mountaintop that rises up out of the water as high as a hundred feet in some places. Once the beast got behind this mass, Henry lost contact with her, and for a few moments she was running free. For some reason the monster doubled back on its tracks, and to everyone's amazement shot out from behind the island again, heading straight for the boats of the pursuing cameramen. Incredibly, the beast suddenly gained speed and went roaring full throttle at the tiny boats—now less than a quarter of a mile away.
The newspaper men in the boats had been busy signaling their crewmen on the shore to turn on the big searchlights, and they didn't notice that the monster had reversed its course until it had closed almost half the gap between them. When they did turn to see it bearing down on them, with nostrils spouting spray and the red eyes blinking, panic broke loose among them. All three boats suddenly turned to head back for the safety of the beach. One of them nearly collided with another and had to turn so sharply that it capsized, spilling its occupants and its gear into the lake. There had been five men in the boat, and when they rose to the surface they swam frantically for the nearest island.
Henry and Mortimer, meanwhile, were pushing buttons and flipping switches so fast that the two of them looked like a centipede with a case of poison ivy. But no matter what they did they couldn't regain control of the beast. Suddenly Mortimer shouted, "Harmon Muldoon must be transmitting on our frequency, and he's got a stronger signal than we have! He's got the thing jammed at full throttle. Cut the receiver, Henry!"
Henry threw the emergency switch that cut off the power supply to the main receiver inside the beast. She slowed down so suddenly that the head almost went under water. Freddy was so excited that he gave out with a big "Hooray!" that sounded like the battle cry of a raging bull elephant. You could hear the screams of the people on the beach, as they heard it come out of the loudspeaker.
"Switch to the alternate receiver now!" cried Mortimer, and Henry did so. This one operated on a different frequency, and Mortimer had insisted on installing it in case something went wrong with the main one. Since Harmon Muldoon couldn't know we were changing frequencies, it was not very likely he could jam this one too.
The beast started back toward the cove like a docile cow coming home for supper, and the searchlights on the beach came on, finally. But all that the watchers on the shore could see was the tail of the beast disappearing in the darkness.
It was about two hours later that we met Mr. Stewart at Martin's Ice Cream Parlor to discuss what we should do next. The local radio station had just announced that Mayor Scragg had asked the Governor to get the Navy to fire depth charges in the lake in the hope of killing the monster. The reporters and cameramen stranded on the little island had been rescued by a police launch, but they were mad as wet hens and had apparently convinced the Mayor that the beast was a menace to the public health and safety.
We went back out to the lake that night and stripped all our equipment out of the beast, including Jeff Crocker's canoe. We mounted her frame on an old raft that someone had abandoned on the shore. Then we towed her far enough out in the lake so that she would be visible from the shore in the morning, and anchored her there. We hung a wreath of pine cones on her neck, and Henry and Mortimer rigged up some kind of a diabolical device inside her.
As soon as it was light in the morning we all climbed up to the place on the hillside where our transmitters were located. We could see a few people on the beach looking at the beast through binoculars, but nobody was taking any boats out. When the sun started to peep over the ridge at the east end of the lake, Henry pushed a button and a lot of smoke came billowing out of the monster. All of a sudden she burst into flames that climbed about thirty feet high, and a big column of black smoke went up into the sky. When the smoke had cleared away there was nothing left on the lake but a dirty smear of oil and a few pieces of black debris—and that was the last that anyone ever saw of the strange sea monster of Strawberry Lake.
We packed up our gear and started for home; and Dinky Poore, who is the youngest member of the Mad Scientists' Club, started to cry a little bit as we were trudging through the woods. Since the monster had really been his idea in the beginning, I guess he felt as though he had lost a close relative. But Jeff told him he could have two votes the next time the club had a meeting, and he had stopped blubbering by the time we got home.

The Big Egg

If Harmon Muldoon had been sneaking around The Mad Scientists' clubhouse one night last August, he would have seen the whole bunch of us sitting around the table staring at a grisly-looking object about the size of a football. As events turned out, he probably was, because we aren't sure to this day whether there isn't a prehistoric creature roaming around in the swamps north of Strawberry Lake.
"How old did you say that thing was, Henry?" asked Freddy Muldoon. Freddy was staring bug-eyed at the thing, with his elbows on the table and his fingers pushing his fat cheeks up around his eyeballs.
"It's probably about a hundred and fifty million years old, give or take a few million years," said Henry Mulligan.
Freddy's eyes bulged larger. "There isn't anything that old," he said. "That's older'n Methuselah!"
"That's right!" said Henry, matter-of-factly.
"What on earth are we going to do with it?" mused Dinky Poore, blinking his eyes and yawning.
"I don't know yet," said Henry, as he wiped his glasses. "I've got an idea, but I want to do a lot more research first."
"In that case, I think I'll go home to bed," said Dinky, slipping off his stool.
"Me too!" said Freddy Muldoon.
Whenever Henry says he has an idea, we know it's time to start catching up on sleep. He'd had us out all day digging for fossils in the old quarry back in the high hills west of the lake, and we were all dog-tired. We picked up the greenish-gray object that was sitting on the table and packed it carefully in a box of sawdust. Henry ran his hand slowly over its crusty surface before we put the lid on.
"Better lock it in the safe," he said.
Then we all went home to ponder over the thing that Henry said was a dinosaur egg. Dinky Poore had a good point. After all, what do you do with a dinosaur egg besides look at it?
But while the rest of us slept that hot August night, Henry Mulligan was very busy. What he was up to, none of us would have imagined in our wildest dreams. And it set in motion a chain of events that still has everyone in town confused.
"Hey, gang, I've got a great idea!" cried Dinky Poore, as he burst into the clubhouse the next day. "Why don't we set up a tent in Homer's front yard and charge ten cents a peek to look at the egg?"
"Crazy!" said Freddy Muldoon, who was munching sunflower seeds in the corner. "I'll bet we could almost make a million. Everybody in town would want to see it."
But Homer Snodgrass shook his head. "I've got a better idea," he said to Dinky. "Why don't we put the tent in your front yard and charge two bits?"
"My old man wouldn't like it. That's why!"
"That's parents for you," said Freddy, with his chin in his hand. "Always standing in the way of progress."
"You've got the wrong idea," said Henry, quietly. "This is a scientific curiosity. It may be an important discovery. You don't make money from a thing like that. Everybody's got a right to see it, and it's our duty to let the scientific world know about it."
"I guess that's why there are no rich scientists," said Freddy Muldoon.
Henry unlocked the safe and brought out the egg. It looked strangely different in the daylight, somehow. Not half so grisly.
"It seems a lot lighter than it did last night," said Dinky Poore, as he took it out of the box and laid it on the table.
"That's because you were tired," said Henry, "and we had to carry it a long way. You're stronger this morning."
"I guess so," said Dinky, feeling both his muscles. Dinky is always feeling his muscles, because he has the smallest ones in the club. Come to think of it, I guess that's why Freddy is always rubbing his belly. He has the biggest stomach in the club. Dinky's always wishing his muscles would get bigger, and Freddy's always wishing his waistline would shrink.
We helped Henry develop the pictures we had taken of the egg the night before, and we put them in a package with the loose shell fragments we had found near it. Mortimer Dalrymple, who is the only member of our club who can make the typewriter work, typed out all the dimensions and the weight of the egg, and Henry ran off to the post office to mail the whole works to some museum in New York City that he said knew all about dinosaurs. When he got back he told us what he thought we should do with the egg.
"I guess we'll have to give it to some museum," he said, "because it might turn out to be an important discovery, but I'd like to conduct a little experiment first."
"What's that?" asked Mortimer.
"I think we ought to try and hatch it!" said Henry.
Jeff Crocker dropped his gavel on the door and strode over to open the door and let a little air into the clubhouse.
"Henry, as president of this club, I want to know if you've gone off your rocker?" he said.
"You mean hatch a real dinosaur?" asked Dinky Poore.
"What else would come out of a dinosaur egg?" Henry observed.
"That egg doesn't look very fresh to me," said Homer, looking at it critically.
Jeff Crocker mopped his brow and sat down again. "Henry, I thought you said this thing was over a hundred and fifty million years old?"
"It probably is. But the sand around the Salton Sea is full of shrimp eggs that are over two thousand years old. You can buy them in hobby shops and in chemistry sets. All you do is put them in water and they'll hatch in twenty-four hours. If an egg doesn't die in two thousand years, when does it die?"
"When it stinks!" said Homer Snodgrass.
Dinky bent over and sniffed the big egg. "It does smell kind of funny," he said.
"What on earth do you feed a real dinosaur?" asked Freddy Muldoon.
About an hour later we were trudging through the low swamps that wind among the hills north of Strawberry Lake. This was where we had hidden the lake monster when we were building it. Almost nobody ever goes there except berry pickers, and there are a lot of places that nobody has ever explored. I guess we know the swamps as well as anybody, and even we don't ever venture into the more remote areas.
We were picking our way carefully along a tangled path that wound around the bottom of a hill, when all of a sudden some rocks came tumbling down the slope and we heard something scurrying off through the bushes. Jeff crept up through the undergrowth and took a look around, but said he couldn't see anything.
"Must have been a fox," he speculated.
"Maybe it was a member of the IES spying on us," said Mortimer Dalrymple.
"What's the IES?" asked Freddy, his eyes bulging.
"That's the International Egg Syndicate," said Mortimer in a low voice. "They're a dangerous band of criminals that specialize in stealing dinosaur eggs from museums and selling them to private collectors all over the world."
"Oh, knock it off, Mortimer!" Jeff muttered. "You read too many kooky books and watch all the wrong TV shows."
"Well, you can't be too careful these days," said Mortimer. "There're all kinds of international agents running around in the bushes."
Henry led us to a boggy area deep in the recesses of the swamp where a spit of pure white sand jutted out from the tail end of a small hill. It was mostly covered with blueberry bushes, but Henry picked out a sandy clearing near the bog and we buried the big egg there near the water, about a foot deep in the sand. We drew some lines in the sand to the edge of the clearing and placed stone markers there so we could locate the exact spot again.
"How long does it take a big egg like that to hatch?" asked Dinky.
"Nobody knows," said Henry, "That's one of the things we aim to find out. It would be an important contribution to paleontology."
"Watch your language!" said Freddy Muldoon. "I heard that."
"Would it take a year?" asked Dinky.
"Nobody knows," said Henry.
Dinky and Freddy weren't about to wait a year, however. They were back out in the swamp the next day to check on the egg, and when they got back into town they ran all over looking for the rest of us. They found Jeff and me at Henry's house, helping him wash the family car.
"The egg's gone!" Freddy cried, as soon as he spied us.
"It 'steriously disappeared!" chimed in Dinky.
"Is that so?" Henry said, cool as a cucumber.
"How do you know?" Jeff asked them.
"We dug it up, and it's not there."
"How could you dig it up, if it isn't there?" Henry asked, still scrubbing a tire.
"Aw, c'mon, Henry. You know what I mean," said Freddy, kicking the tire and getting his dirty fingers all over the trunk of the car.
"I'll bet Harmon Muldoon stole it," said Dinky, jumping up and down. "I'll bet it was him out there in the bushes that kicked those rocks down."
"Maybe we'd better go out there," said Jeff, looking at Henry.
"I suppose so," Henry answered. "Hand me that other brush."
"Well, let's get going," said Dinky, impatiently. "This old car can wait."
"Tomorrow morning'll be time enough," said Henry, as he hosed down the front of the car. "If the egg's already gone, nobody can steal it."
"Tomorrow morning?" Freddy exclaimed. "Aw, nuts! You gonna fiddle while Rome burns, I suppose!"
"Who's burning, besides you?" said Henry, spraying him with the hose.
"O.K., you old fiddler crab!" said Freddy.
The next morning we did make our way out to the sandpit again, but everything seemed to be normal. The markers we had left were still in place and the ground looked undisturbed.
"Somebody's been out here again!" said Dinky. "Freddy and I dug a big hole right there, looking for the egg, and somebody has filled it in."
"Well, let's just see if the egg is here now," said Jeff.
We drew lines out from the markers and started digging at the point where they intersected. The egg was there, all right, just as we'd left it, though it didn't look as though it had made much progress toward hatching. Everyone turned and looked at Dinky and Freddy.
"What's the idea, bringing us 'way out here on a wild-goose chase?" Mortimer snorted at them. "We've got more important things to do."
"If this is your idea of a joke, you two'll never make a living as comedians," said Jeff. "We oughta toss you in the swamp."
Little Dinky started to blubber. "Honest Injun, Jeff. Somebody has been out here. There wasn't any egg there when Freddy and I were here yesterday."
"Scout's honor!" said Freddy, giving the sign.
"Maybe you dug in the wrong place. You guys don't dig things too well, you know," said Mortimer sarcastically.
"Maybe we did. But who filled our hole up?" said Dinky, kicking sand at him. His voice was all choked up, and there was a big tear running down the left side of his face.
"How do I know? Maybe the whole thing was in your head," Mortimer jibed at him.
While they were arguing, I noticed that Henry had lifted the big egg out of the hole and was examining it closely with his pocket magnifying glass. There was a mysterious smile on his face as he placed it back in the sand.
"What's so funny, Henry? Can you see the dinosaur in there already?" I asked him.
Henry started, as though he hadn't realized anyone was looking at him. "Everything's fine, Charlie. Just fine," he said, and covered the egg up with sand.
But everything wasn't "just fine" as far as Dinky and Freddy were concerned. Dinky moped all the way home; and later he and Freddy told me they were certain the egg had been missing when they had tried to dig it up the day before.
"We think my cousin Harmon has been up to something, and we aim to find out what he's doing," Freddy explained.
"We've got to prove to the other guys that we're not nuts," Dinky added.
I felt sorry for both of them, and I agreed to help out in setting a watch on Harmon's clubhouse. This wasn't difficult, because Harmon's gang always meets on the second story of an old garage in back of Stony Martin's house. It faces Egan's Alley, and across the alley and just a little way down is the old Blaisdell barn. The Blaisdells are an old couple that can't run very fast, and they long ago got tired of trying to chase us out of their loft. Old man Blaisdell just decided to buy more insurance and relax, and we've had the run of the place ever since.
It's a neat place to spy from. There're windows at both ends of the loft, and there's a cupola on top that you can climb up into and look out through the ventilation slits. From it we could keep a good watch on Stony Martin's garage.
That night we saw Stony come out and dump a bucketful of stuff into a trash can in the alley. It sounded like rocks. Then he chipped away at the inside of the bucket with a screwdriver and washed it out with a hose. After he went back inside the garage, Dinky couldn't contain his curiosity any longer. He sneaked across the alley and shinnied up a telephone pole so he could peek inside the lighted window on the second floor. We held our breath, hoping nobody would come out and see him there. Suddenly we saw him swing over onto the sloping roof of the garage and lie flat against it. Harmon came to the lighted window and raised the sash so he could look out into the alley. He took a good look around, then pulled his head in and closed the window again. We breathed easier, but Dinky lay motionless on the roof, pressing himself against the shingles. Pretty soon the light went out, and we could hear them clumping down the stairs inside. Harmon and Stony came out the back door, locked it behind them, and disappeared down the alley.
As soon as they were out of sight, Dinky scrambled down the pole and came running pell-mell toward Blaisdell's barn. We met him halfway down the ladder from the loft.
"They've got our egg!" he said in a breathless whisper. "I saw it sitting on a table up there."
We dashed across the alley and Dinky shinnied up the pole again. He jumped onto the roof of the garage and let himself down over the eaves onto the windowsill. The window was unlocked, and it took him only a second to scramble inside. Then he groped his way down the stairs in the dark and unlatched the alley door. I slipped inside and went upstairs with him while Freddy kept watch behind one of the trash cans in the alley.
Dinky's flashlight picked out the table against the wall, and sure enough, there was the big egg sitting unprotected in the middle of it. We looked around for something to wrap it in and found a pile of burlap bags in one corner. I pulled a couple of them off the top of the pile and felt something hard under the next bag. Pulling it aside, I shined my flashlight onto what looked like a couple of small wash basins. Dinky stood beside me, breathing hard.
"What are those, Charlie? They look like big hunks of plaster."
"I think I know," I said. "And I think they can tell us a lot about what's been going on."
We got the big egg off the table and fitted it into the depression in one of the chunks of plaster. It fitted perfectly.
"These are plaster molds," I whispered. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Yeah! That's what Stony was throwing away in the ash can. Old chunks of plaster of Paris."
"Yes! But don't you see? These are two halves of a plaster mold made from our dinosaur egg. What would they make a mold for?"
"To make another egg," said Dinky.
"Exactly! And that's what's out in the swamp right now—a fake egg made out of plaster of Paris and painted up."
"I wonder why they'd do that?" Dinky hissed.
"So they could claim they found the egg, instead of us, and get all the credit. That Harmon would do anything; but this time he's gonna get fooled."
"Whatcha gonna do?"
"We're going to beat them at their own game," I said. "We're gonna switch eggs on them, and they'll never know the difference."
We wrapped the egg in a couple of burlap bags and beat it out of there, being careful to leave the door unlocked. It took us about two hours to get out to the right place in the swamps, find the fake egg in the darkness, and put the real egg back in its place. Then it took us another two hours to get back to Egan's Alley. Our hearts were thumping pretty loudly when we tiptoed up the creaky stairs of Stony's garage again; but it was well after midnight, and we figured we were pretty safe as long as we didn't make any noise. Since we found the door still unlocked, we were pretty sure nobody had discovered the egg was missing.
When we got to the top of the stairs, we groped our way carefully to the table. I reached out for the edge of it and almost screamed out loud when my hand came down on what felt like another human hand.
"It's about time you got back," said a voice. "What took you so long?"
Dinky jumped back clear to the top of the stairs and snapped his flashlight on. My heart had stopped, but it started beating again when I saw that the figure sitting at the end of the table was Henry Mulligan.
For a minute I had all sorts of wild thoughts. What was Henry doing here in Harmon Muldoon's clubhouse? Was he in cahoots with Harmon for some reason? How did he know what we were up to?
"Jeepers, Henry, you scared the daylights out of us," said Dinky.
"What on earth are you doing here?" I asked, when I could find my voice.
"Never mind," said Henry. "Put the egg back, and let's get out of here!"
"This isn't the real egg," said Dinky. "We found the real one here and took it back out to the swamp."
"I know all about where you've been," Henry said quietly. "You just had to prove you were right, didn't you? Now put the egg down and let's scram."
I propped the egg up on the table, just where we'd found the other one, and we cleared out of there. At least Dinky and Freddy had vindicated themselves. And even though we didn't know exactly what Harmon was up to, we figured we were a step ahead of him. The big question, though, was Henry Mulligan's strange behavior. And it became even stranger during the next several days.
He seemed to spend hours and hours in the clubhouse, fiddling around with our ham radio set, and he wouldn't even talk about dinosaurs or let anyone go out to check on the egg. "The egg is all right," he would say. "Don't worry about it." Finally, one day, we talked him into going fishing, and we all got on our bicycles and rode 'way up into the hills to a favorite stream of ours. Henry didn't catch any fish, though. He almost never does. Somehow or other it seems that really smart people just don't attract fish. I think they just get bored with it all and aren't patient enough.
By early afternoon, Henry had talked us all into going back to town. When we got back to his house there was a man sitting on the porch waiting to see him. He introduced himself as a science reporter for one of the big city newspapers.
"I'm Mr. Bowden from the Globe-Democrat," he said. "I'd like to ask you a few questions about this big egg you found."
"What big egg?" asked Freddy Muldoon.
"The big egg that's supposed to be a dinosaur egg," said Mr. Bowden.
"Oh, that egg!" said Freddy. "You'll have to talk to Henry Mulligan about that. He's our chief scientist."
"Thank you," Mr. Bowden said politely. "He's the one I came to talk to."
By this time Jeff had gotten hold of one of Freddy's ears and pulled him off to the side. Mr. Bowden explained that the American Museum of Natural History in New York had made fluorine tests on the shell fragments we sent them and were of the opinion that they were from the Jurassic period of the Mesozoic era. They thought the egg was probably that of a large sauropod dinosaur—possibly a brontosaurus, or maybe even a brachiosaurus. They were quite excited about it and had asked an expert from the state university to come down to Mammoth Falls to examine the egg. That was why Mr. Bowden was here. There would probably be reporters from other papers coming down with the expert.
"Who is he?" Henry asked.
"He's Professor Mudgeon, a very well-known paleontologist," said Mr. Bowden. "He'll be here tomorrow."
"What's all this stuff about the jackass period and all that?" asked Dinky Poore.
"That's Jurassic," said Henry. "All it means is that the egg is probably a hundred and fifty million years old, like I said."
The next day we all went over to the town hall to meet Professor Mudgeon, who had agreed to hold a press conference there. Mayor Scragg was there, of course. Whenever there's anything going on in Mammoth Falls that might get into the newspapers, you'll always find him in the middle of it. Today he was in great form, beaming and smiling, and patting Henry on the head as he introduced him to Professor Mudgeon. Henry kept ducking, trying to keep from getting his hair mussed, because he always figures a scientist should look as dignified as possible. Professor Mudgeon didn't look too dignified, though. His suit was a little rumpled, and his shirt collar was a little dirty, and he had bright, shining eyes that twinkled behind his thick-lensed glasses. And he had enough hair to make up for all that Mayor Scragg was lacking, and then some.
"We're very proud of these young men," said Mayor Scragg, mussing Henry's hair again.
"Well, I'm sure you should be," said Professor Mudgeon. "They may have made an important discovery." He had a habit of sucking air in through his teeth with a slurping sound after every statement, and then laughing with his teeth still closed.
After everybody had sat down, the professor gave a brief explanation of why he was there, and told the reporters something about dinosaur fossils. In answer to a reporter's question, he explained the various methods scientists use to determine the age of fossils or bones. When he got to the uranium method, of course, the reporter from the Mammoth Falls Gazette had to get up and ask him if this egg was radioactive, and if there would be any danger to the community.
"No! I hardly think so," said the professor, laughing through his teeth again.
"What a dope that reporter is," said Henry, under his breath.
"When do we get to see the egg?" another reporter asked.
"Well, that's up to these young men here," said the professor, looking toward Henry. "I haven't seen it, myself, yet. As a matter of fact, I don't even know where it is."
"We buried it," said Henry, nonchalantly.
"Buried it? What for?"
"To see if it would hatch."
This brought the house down. Even the professor was laughing—with his mouth open this time. Then a second laugh broke out when the Gazette reporter asked if there was any remote possibility that the egg might hatch, and a live dinosaur be born.
"No, of course not!" said the professor, laughing openly again. Then suddenly his face clouded and the scientist in him reasserted itself. "On the other hand, I don't really know," he said seriously. "Things like that are decided by an authority greater than I."
Mayor Scragg was in such an expansive mood that he volunteered the services of both the town police department and the fire department to transport everybody out to a point where we could walk into the swamps. He even lent the professor a pair of leather puttees that he had left over from World War I. All the way out there he kept telling the professor what an important place Mammoth Falls was for geological exploration, and the professor kept saying, "Very interesting. Very interesting indeed!"
A lot of other people who hadn't been invited came trailing along after us, and we noticed Harmon and some of the members of his gang among them. Dinky Poore, of course, had to run out ahead of everybody so he could be the one to show the professor where the egg was; and when the rest of us rounded the end of the little hill where the sandpit jutted into the swamp, he came dashing back through the bushes shouting, "The egg has hatched! The dinosaur has gone!"
Sure enough, when the rest of us got to the little clearing, all we saw were broken fragments of what once had been the big egg, lying in a shallow pit in the sand. Professor Mudgeon stopped at the edge of the clearing and asked everyone to stand back. He looked at the ground very carefully, and then he tiptoed over to the edge of the bog where a series of tiny depressions were visible in the wet sand. He straightened up and drew a large magnifying glass from his coat pocket. Then he bent down and studied the depressions very closely.
They certainly looked like the footprints of some unknown kind of animal. They were shaped a little bit like an acorn with three sharp little points at the top—or maybe more like the profile of a slightly deformed tulip, just opening up. There were smaller prints interspersed among them that looked like an empty acorn shell upside down. They proceeded in a wavering line along the short stretch of shore, and then disappeared in the bushes, where the sand was drier.
After studying them for a while, and shaking his head from side to side, the professor moved over to where the big chunks of broken eggshell lay in the pit and picked up one or two of them. Finally he snorted and rose to his feet.
"Very clever! Very clever!" he said. "But a complete fake!"
Mayor Scragg harrumphed loudly, and a babble of noise and excited questions broke loose from the reporters. Over it all I was sure I could hear the sound of Harmon Muldoon's laughter. To back up his statement, the professor picked up one of the egg fragments, crumbled it to a white powder between his fingers, and tasted it.
"Pure plaster of Paris!" he snorted, spitting it out.
Mayor Scragg had turned purple and his cheeks were bellowing in and out. He glared at Henry Mulligan and the rest of us. Then he looked back at the professor and harrumphed again. Professor Mudgeon had moved over to look again at the footprints in the sand.
"Somebody has done a very clever job of duplicating the footprints of an infant brontosaurus," he said, "but he forgot one thing. The brontosaurus had a long, heavy tail that he could barely lift off the ground, and there is no trace of a tail being dragged along the ground here." Then he turned toward Mayor Scragg. "I'm very sorry, Mr. Mayor. But I must also say that I'm a little disappointed at coming all the way down here to be victimized by a fraud and a hoax!"
"You don't know the half of it!" spouted the Mayor, turning all purple again. "I'm very sorry too, Professor Mudhen, but if you had to live in a town full of teenage Machiavellis you might be able to appreciate what I'm up against."
"Mudgeon!" said the professor.
"What's that?"
"Mudgeon!" he repeated. "My name is Mudgeon!"
"Oh yes! Of course! Very sorry!" said Mayor Scragg.
"That's quite all right. I'm used to it," said the professor.
Several of the reporters were now taking photographs of the footprints and the egg fragments. A couple of others were trying to get information out of Henry, but he wasn't talking. "I'm not ready to make any statements," he told them, and walked over to where we were standing.
"What's going on?" Jeff asked him. "Is that our egg, or isn't it?" But Henry just shrugged his shoulders and moved away from us.
"It looks like you guys goofed," said Jeff, turning to glare at Dinky and Freddy and me.
"Yeah!" Mortimer taunted. "You probably took the real egg out of the hole and lugged it back to Harmon's clubhouse. You sure went to a lot of trouble to louse things up!"
"Tell it to the Marines!" said Dinky, not knowing what to say.
We stood there with our arms folded, waiting to see what happened next. None of us knew any more about what was going on than Mayor Scragg did. The Mayor was trying desperately to apologize to the professor, but the professor wasn't paying any attention to him. He was standing in the middle of the clearing, chewing on his spectacles and muttering to himself.
"What I don't understand," he kept saying, "is that my friend Dr. Hoffmeister at the museum was so certain those shell fragments came from the Jurassic period. He might be misled by a photograph, but not by the pieces of shell… They were subjected to very scientific tests… I don't understand it. I don't understand it at all."
"Perhaps there never was an egg," suggested a reporter. "Maybe all that the boys found were pieces of shell, and they invented the egg."
"Ah, perhaps so," said the professor. "But then they were extremely clever. Because the weight and the dimensions that they sent to the museum checked exactly with what we would expect for the egg of a brontosaurus."
"Excuse me, Professor!" came a voice from the crowd. "I can show you where the real egg is."
"What's that?"
Harmon Muldoon and Stony Martin pushed their way to the center of the clearing. "We found the real dinosaur egg," said Harmon "I made up this dummy egg and planted it in the quarry to fool these other guys. It sure worked, too. They've spent about two weeks trying to hatch that hunk of plaster."
"Then I suppose you're the one who made these very authentic-looking footprints in the sand?"
"Yes!" said Harmon. "We figured that would give them a real charge."
"Well, you're a very clever young man," said the professor. "Now, supposing you show us the real egg."
"It's back at our clubhouse," said Harmon, and he started to lead the way back up the path.
"Harmon has always been one of the cleverest young lads in Mammoth Falls," Mayor Scragg confided to the professor, as he hurried to keep up with him over the rough ground. "I'll have to remember to tell him so."
The rest of us fell in behind them, and as we trudged back out to the road the members of the Mad Scientists' Club were the most dejected lot you ever saw. But I noticed that Henry had stayed behind and was searching among the broken chunks of plaster in the sand. I saw him put something in his pocket, and when he caught up with the rest of us he was wearing that quiet, mysterious smile again.
It was pretty hot on the second floor of Stony Martin's garage, and Mayor Scragg was already mopping the top of his head with his handkerchief on the way up the stairs. When Professor Mudgeon saw the big egg on the table he sucked a lot of air in through his teeth and lunged toward it with his hands outstretched.
"Ah, yes! This looks like the real thing," he exclaimed. "And such a beauty, too!"
The reporters were crowding around him as he bent over it with his glass. Somehow or other, Henry had managed to worm his way in among them and was standing right at the professor's shoulder.
"The light isn't very good here, Professor. Why don't we take it over to the window."
"An excellent idea," said the professor, "but be very careful. This looks like a very valuable fossil specimen."
"Oh, I'm sure it is," said Henry, as he spun around with the thing held lightly in his hands.
"Wait a minute! I'll carry it!" said Harmon Muldoon, grabbing Henry by the elbow.
"Look out!" Henry cried. The egg popped out of his hands and crashed to the floor, where it practically exploded into a litter of shards and white powder. "Gosh, I'm sorry, Harmon!" said Henry. "I'll clean it up for you."
"Never mind!" said Harmon, looking aghast at the mess on the floor. "I guess you win, Henry." And he crushed a big chunk of the plaster under the heel of his shoe. Something bright among the powder glinted in the faint light from the window Harmon bent down and picked it up. "Hey, that's my ring!" he said. "I lost it when I took it off the other day to mix the—"
"To mix what?" asked Henry.
"Never mind," said Harmon, sheepishly. Then he looked hard at Henry. "Hey! This must be the egg that I cast to put out in the swamp. How did it ever get back in here?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," said Henry.
"But the one out in the swamp—"
"Was a fake!" said Henry.
"So you were a step ahead of me all the time!"
Professor Mudgeon cleared his throat. "Excuse me! But I'm thoroughly confused."
"You said a mouthful, Professor!" muttered Dinky, as he stepped up to Henry with his face all red. "Do you mean you had us spend all night carrying chunks of plaster back and forth to that stinkin' swamp?"
"It wasn't my idea for you to switch those eggs," said Henry, calmly.
"Well, that wasn't very scientific," Dinky pouted.
"No!" Henry agreed. "But it was pretty funny."
"Well, you sure had me fooled," Harmon admitted. "I really thought you had found a genuine dinosaur egg out there in the quarry."
"We did!" said Henry.
"You did?"
The reporters pricked up their ears at this, and a barrage of questions hit Henry from all directions. But Mayor Scragg's voice trumpeted over all of them.
"Well, where is it, you young fool—I mean, won't you tell us where it is, Henry?"
"It's out in the swamp," said Henry, wiping the perspiration off his glasses, "but in a different place."
"Oh no! Not out in that swamp again!" groaned the Mayor, looking down at his muddy feet.
"Just a minute. I'm puzzled about one thing," said Mr. Bowden "My paper will want to know why you buried that fake egg in the first place, and why you led us out there on a wild-goose chase."
"I'm sorry about that," Henry apologized. "But without mentioning any names, I had an idea somebody would try to swipe the real egg. So I made a plaster cast of it the first night we brought it in, and took the real egg right out to the swamp and buried it. I couldn't resist taking you out to where the fake egg was buried, because you never would have gotten the whole story if I hadn't."
"And the culprit never would have come to light," boomed Mayor Scragg, fixing a baleful glare on Harmon Muldoon.
"I think the Professor will agree that a scientist can't be too careful about protecting his discoveries," Henry observed.
It was the professor's turn to wipe off his glasses. "Yes… Hmm… Uh," he stammered. "Unfortunately, history provides us with some classic examples of fraud and deception in the natural sciences—er—particularly in the field of paleontology, I may say."
"Like the Piltdown man?" questioned Mr. Bowden.
As we went down the stairs and out into Egan's Alley, Mayor Scragg was again hovering at Professor Mudgeon's shoulder. "That young Muldoon lad always was a meddlesome boob!" he said, confidentially.
"Very interesting! Very interesting!" said the professor.
Henry led us this time to the opposite side of the swamp, near where the White Fork road starts up into the hills. Not far off the road, at the foot of a bluff, he stopped at a point in the middle of a white stretch of sand. He dug into the sand with his hands and unearthed the big egg. It looked just the way it had that first night. Dinky carried it over to the professor to examine.
"Now I know why it felt so light that next day," he said.
The professor was enthused, and Mayor Scragg beamed proudly. "Truly a beautiful specimen," said the professor.
"Looks kind of ugly to me," said the Mayor. "But then, you know best, Professor."
While the professor was examining the egg, and everybody with a camera was taking pictures of it, I noticed Henry pulling something else out of the hole in the sand.
"What's that you have there, Henry?" I asked. It looked like one of our miniature transmitters.
"It's a sort of booby trap I rigged up as a burglar alarm," he said, and showed it to me. It was a little transmitter, all right, but Henry had rigged it with a pressure-type switch.
"As long as the egg was sitting on top of it, it kept on sending out a steady signal that I could pick up back at the clubhouse," he explained. "But if anyone moved the egg, the transmitter would shut off, and I'd know something was wrong."
"That was why you were never really worried about the egg?"
"That's right! I knew the real egg was here all the time, safe and sound. Any time I wanted to check, I'd just tune in this beep on our receiver."
Then I looked at him hard.
"Henry," I said, "is that what I saw you putting in your pocket over there when we dug up the fake egg? Is that why you knew we were in Stony Martin's garage that night we switched the eggs?"
"Oh, that?" said Henry. "That was a little different. When I cast the fake egg I did happen to drop one of these transmitters into the plaster. No matter where the egg went I could always follow the beep with our directional antenna. It seemed like a good idea at the time."
"So you tracked us all the way from Stony's garage out to the swamp, and then slipped over there just to scare the life out of us!"
"Not exactly. I wanted to make sure you were all right."
Then another thought struck me. "Come to think of it, Henry, you knew the minute Harmon had swiped that egg, and you also knew where he took it."
"Just about."
"But you let everybody poke fun at Dinky and Freddy for claiming the egg had been stolen!"
"I am a little ashamed of that," Henry admitted. "But I didn't want to louse up my plan. If I had admitted that the egg had been stolen, all you guys would have wanted to raid Harmon's clubhouse, and we wouldn't have had nearly as much fun."
"You mean you wouldn't!" I told him, shaking my head.
When the professor had finished examining the big egg he announced he was satisfied that it was genuine. He also asked the Mayor if the museum and the university could have the permission of the town authorities to conduct further excavations in the old quarry, in the hope that further fossil remains might be uncovered. Never one to stand in the way of the forward march of science, or the possible establishment of a tourist attraction, the Mayor assured him that the town would be most cooperative.
"What are you going to do with this egg?" asked one of the reporters.
Professor Mudgeon looked at Mayor Scragg, and Mayor Scragg turned and looked at Henry.
"What do you do with a dinosaur egg?" he asked.
"Usually they go into museums," said Henry.
"Unless the International Egg Syndicate happens to get hold of them," said Mortimer Dalrymple, sotto voce.
"I'm certain the American Museum of Natural History would be very pleased to have it," said Professor Mudgeon, suggestively.
"I suppose they would," mused Henry. "On the other hand, would you mind if we tried to hatch it first? They might rather have a live brontosaurus."
"Ohhh… I'm sure they would," said the professor, amidst the general laughter. Then with a gallant bow he added, "Why don't you proceed with your experiment, Professor Mulligan. The museum and I will be happy to wait our turn."
"After you, Professor!" said Henry Mulligan, indicating the path leading back to the cars.
"After you, Professor!" said Professor Mudgeon, waving Henry before him.
While they were gesticulating, Mayor Scragg stepped ahead of both of them and walked grandly up the path, beaming broadly.
We checked on the egg, off and on, for several weeks. Then one day Dinky and Freddy came tearing up the driveway to Jeff's barn on their bicycles.
"The egg has hatched! The egg has hatched!" Dinky was shouting, long before he was in earshot.
"Honest Injun! May my mother have pneumonia if I'm telling a lie!" cried Freddy.
We all got on our bikes and pedaled out the White Forks road as fast as we could.
"See, there!" shouted Dinky, as soon as we had gotten to the stretch of sand by the bluff. He was pointing to a shallow pit where the egg lay, broken into three pieces. Down by the water's edge were the same footprints we had seen before. But this time there was a definite line in the wet sand about as thick as a clothesline, waving among the tracks.
"Look! There's his tail! There's his tail!" Freddy shouted, while he jumped up and down.
We searched the bushes and the shores of the swamp for several hundred yards on either side of the little beach, but we could find no more footprints.
"It couldn't have gone into the water," Dinky blubbered. "Dinosaurs couldn't swim."
"That's right," Henry nodded. "They went into shallow water when they got too heavy to stand upright on dry land. But they were heavy enough to sink, even in loose mud. That's why so many of their skeletons were preserved as fossils."
Henry spent a long time studying the egg fragments and the footprints. Then he professed himself stumped.
"I don't know what to think," he said finally. "I'd like to think that we had hatched a live dinosaur, but if we can't find it we'll never know. It could just as well be that Harmon ended up a step ahead of us this time, after all."

The Secret of the Old Cannon

The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls

Dinky Poore and Freddy Muldoon found the mannequin in the city dump. Some department store had thrown it away because its face was chipped in one little place. But it was handsome, like all window dummies. Little Dinky and pudgy Fred dragged it all the way to Jeff Crocker's barn and set it up in a corner of our laboratory.
Henry Mulligan didn't like this at all. He said we shouldn't be cluttering up the clubhouse with a lot of junk. But when we put the matter to a vote, Henry lost out. Homer Snodgrass, who is almost as brilliant as Henry and Jeff, pointed out that we could make good use of the mannequin for anatomy lessons and recommended we add this subject to our training program.
Freddy Muldoon and Mortimer Dalrymple were appointed a committee of two to paint the human circulatory system on the dummy's front; but they never got around to it. The thing just stood there in the corner for months until everybody got sick of looking at it. Finally Mortimer pulled an old nylon stocking over its head and dubbed it the Invisible Man. The name seemed like a good one, and that's what we always called it—until Henry got his brilliant idea.
We all arrived at the clubhouse one day to find Henry sitting in a chair in the middle of the floor, staring at the mannequin as if he had never seen it before. He stared at it for a long time. Then he pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up onto his forehead and stared up at the ceiling of the lab.
There was the usual reverent silence. Henry always claimed that when he tilted his head back it made the blood flow to the back of his brain, which was where he kept his best ideas. Then he'd tilt his head forward again and a good idea would pop out.
It worked this time, all right. What came out of Henry, when he finally brought his eyes down from the ceiling, was probably the zaniest idea he has ever had.
"I think we could make this thing fly," said Henry.
"Holy smokes!" said Dinky Poore. "Are you some kind of a nut or something? Don't answer that."
"It's perfectly simple," said Henry wiping his glasses. "I think we can make the Invisible Man fly, and create a real sensation if we do it right."
"We won't be able to call him the Invisible Man any more," chirped Mortimer. "Maybe we could call him the Flying Sorcerer!"
"Maybe the Air Force would give him an Air Medal. Then he'd have something to wear!" said Freddy.
"That's enough jokes!" Jeff Crocker interrupted.
"Next week is Founders Day," Henry continued. "There's going to be a lot of speeches in the Town Square, and a pageant, and all that stuff. I think we can put on a demonstration with our friend the dummy that'll steal the show… Now, you know where the monument to Hannah Kimball is?"
Hannah Kimball is the heroine of Mammoth Falls. Some people say she founded the town. Anyway, she was an early settler who defended her cabin against a whole tribe of Indians with just a blunderbuss and a scarecrow. She stuck the scarecrow up through the chimney with a pole. It kept waving its arms even after it had been shot full of Indian arrows, and the attackers got scared and ran away.
After Henry finished outlining his plan, we started to work. During the next few days, we cut a hole in the back of the dummy and mounted two radio receivers inside him. We put a small speaker in his throat, and dressed him in overalls. When we got finished, he looked like any ordinary citizen of Mammoth Falls.
The night before Founders Day we were all ready. We met at the clubhouse late at night to carry the mannequin down to the Town Square.
Dinky Poore's little face screwed itself up into a doubting frown. "How we gonna get the dummy up on the monument? I'm not climbin' up there!"
"That's simple, stupid," said Freddy Muldoon, with a very superior air.
"Oh yeah?" Dinky puckered. "How would you do it, Mr. Great Brain?"
"That's easy," Freddy grunted. "I'd leave it to Henry, the Gentle Genius."
And that's just what he did.
Henry came up with a good plan, too—as he always does.
Hannah Kimball's monument stands in the center of a little park in front of the Town Hall. It's a slick marble column that goes 'way up in the air. Hannah Kimball herself stands at the top of it, holding her trusty blunderbuss at the ready. Somebody else could stand beside her if he could figure a way to get up there. Fortunately for us, there are telephone poles on either side of the park that are just a little taller than the monument is.
We showed up at the park late at night with about three hundred feet of good, stout piano rope. We looped a half-hitch around the dummy's neck and tied a length of clothesline to it for a guide rope. Two of us climbed up the telephone poles, which were right in line with the monument, and slipped the rope over the foot-spikes near the top of them. It was a simple matter to pull the rope taut from the ground; and the dummy was lofted into the air high enough to place him right on top of the monument by jockeying him into position with the guideline. Then we let the rope go at one end and pulled it free.
Early on the morning of Founders Day the Flying Man was standing there with his hands on his hips. Since the monument is surrounded by trees, he wasn't noticed by anyone until the band marched up to the monument at ten o'clock. It was leading the parade that had started at the bridge over Lemon Creek
Mortimer and Henry and I were sitting in the third-story loft over Snodgrass' hardware store—the one that Homer's father owns. We had our transmitting gear with us, and we had a good view of the monument and the whole Square through the two little windows at the end of the loft. Homer was down in the Square, where he could keep an eye on developments and let us know what was happening. We could pick up most of the conversation over the microphones we had hidden around the monument.
Mayor Scragg and the Founders Day Committee were riding in an open car right behind the band. The Mayor was standing up on the back seat, waving his hat at the crowd and smiling in every direction. Suddenly a voice rang out above the cheers and the music.
"Look out, Mr. Mayor! I'm going to jump!"
The voice came out of the mannequin, but it was Mortimer Dalrymple's voice.
The Mayor's car came to a stop so suddenly that he almost toppled into the front seat. The members of the Founders Day Committee grabbed hold of him to keep him from falling. They looked like the Marines trying to raise the flag on Iwo Jima. When the Mayor was upright again, he looked up and saw the mannequin at the top of the monument.
"How on earth did you get up there, young man?" he called out, shaking his umbrella furiously at the figure.
"I flew up here!" came the reply.
The Mayor looked at the members of the committee, and the members of the committee looked toward the chief of police, and the chief of police looked back at the Mayor. Mayor Scragg cleared his throat and flapped his cheeks in and out a few times, the way he always does when he doesn't know what to say. Then he leaned over and said very quietly to Chief Putney, "I think maybe we've got a nut on our hands."
"I agree," said Chief Putney. "Maybe if we ignore him he'll go away."
"Don't be silly," said the Mayor. "This kind doesn't go away. We've got to get him down from there before he ruins the whole Founders Day ceremony."
"What would you suggest, your Honor?"
"You're a chief of police," said the Mayor. "I'd suggest you start earning your salary." And the Mayor turned and smiled and waved at the crowds again.
"Did you call me a nut?" came the voice from the mannequin.
The Mayor looked up and flapped his cheeks in and out again.
"I'm not a nut. I'm a Mexican jumping bean," said the mannequin. "Wanna see me jump?"
By this time the open area around the monument had become crowded with people, all pushing against each other, trying to get a closer view of what was going on. The Mayor was still standing in the back seat of the open touring car, holding his arms up in the air and trying to get the crowd to be quiet. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he said, trying to sound as loud and important as he could.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" echoed the mannequin.
The Mayor looked up at the mannequin and said, "Shut up!"
"Shut up!" repeated the mannequin to the crowd. There was a great laugh.
"Fellow citizens!" said the Mayor.
"Fellow citizens!" said the mannequin.
"I implore you to pay no attention to the man on top of the monument," said the Mayor. "Your able chief of police, Harold Putney, and the fire department, I am sure, will manage to get him down safely."
"If they come near me I'll jump!" said the mannequin.
The Mayor flapped his cheeks in and out again.
"Pay no attention to that unfortunate man up there,". he said. "He needs all the help and understanding we can give him."
"I don't need help, but you do!" said the mannequin.
By this time Henry and I were laughing so hard Mortimer could hardly keep his face straight. He had to shut off the transmitter until we calmed down. The crowd was milling around Mayor Scragg's car, making suggestions about how to get the nut down off the monument. A bunch of kids were standing on the bleachers at the edge of the crowd yelling for him to jump.
"When'll we let him go?" I asked.
"Pretty quick now. Then we'll turn the show back to his Honor," said Henry.
He switched on the ham outfit. "We'd better see if we can reach Jeff and the others."
Jeff and Dinky and Freddy Muldoon were supposed to be somewhere out west of Strawberry Lake. When Henry reached them, they were sitting on a hilltop where they could see the Town Hall and the Square through binoculars. Henry checked the wind direction from the weather vane on top of Town Hall and suggested to Jeff that they move to another hill a little farther south. This was important to our plan.
We looked out on the Square again, and the crowd was still milling about, pointing up at the dummy and hollering to him. He just stood there with his hands on his hips, the way we had placed him, leaning slightly against the barrel of Hannah Kimball's blunderbuss.
Then we heard the wail of a siren and the clang of a bell as the Mammoth Falls fire department's hook and ladder nosed its way through the crowd. Mayor Scragg stepped down out of the automobile and directed operations with his hat as he waved the hook and ladder into position.
They maneuvered the huge truck close to the monument and extended the ladder up its side. Mayor Scragg stood up in the cab of the fire engine and shouted to the mannequin.
"And now, sir, will you please come down from there?"
"Will you promise not to bite me?"
The crowd roared again. Mayor Scragg flushed red and harrumphed.
"See here, young man. I'm not in a habit of biting people. Just come down the ladder and no one will hurt you."
"I don't climb ladders. I'm an eagle!" said the mannequin.
Mayor Scragg harrumphed again and tried to quiet the crowd.
"Do you want to see me fly?" cried the mannequin. At this point Mortimer let out with a hyena yell and shouted "Geronimo!" at the top of his lungs.
"No! No!" screamed the Mayor. "Wait a minute!"
The Mayor turned and looked at the Founders Day Committee, and the committee turned and looked at Chief Putney, and Chief Putney turned and looked at Constable Billy Dahr. Constable Dahr had a mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. He always wore a coat that hung down to his knees and carried a billy club clasped behind him that he'd waggle back and forth like a tail. When he found everybody looking at him he waggled the billy club faster than ever and looked behind him as if he was trying to see who the chief was looking at.
"Constable Dahr will go up and get the man," said Chief Putney.
"Just the man to do it, Mr. Putney," agreed the Mayor. And the committee nodded approval.
Billy Dahr pretended he couldn't hear what was being said to him. But finally he started to scale the ladder with great care and caution. He ascended three steps and paused there, brandishing his club.
"Now, you come down here, young man!" he said.
"If you come up here I'll pull your mustache with both hands," the mannequin shouted.
The crowd roared with laughter. Mayor Scragg was furious. He started poking Constable Dahr in the seat of the pants with his umbrella.
"Get on up there, Constable! Get on up there!"
"It's no use, Mr. Mayor," Billy Dahr complained. "I get dizzy from vertigo in high places."
"Oh, for heaven's sakes," said the Mayor.
By this time the fire chief had arrived on the scene and was conferring with Chief Putney. Chief Putney went over and said something to the Mayor that we couldn't hear, and the Mayor nodded. The next thing we knew, four groups of firemen were breaking out jumping nets. They stretched them out on all sides of the monument, with volunteers from the crowd helping to hold them. Two firemen started up the ladder, a third one following them with a straitjacket. Chief Putney and Constable Dahr were moving people back, clear of the monument.
"Hurry up, Mortimer," said Henry, "or we'll be in the soup."
Mortimer flicked on his mike. "Get back down that ladder!" he hollered. "If you come near me I'll jump!"
The firemen stopped. Mayor Scragg fumed.
"Get on up there, men!" said the fire chief. "If he jumps, we'll catch him in one of the nets."
"Who's going to catch them?" asked the mannequin.
The firemen stopped again. Finally, under the urging of their chief, they proceeded cautiously toward the top of the ladder, gently coaxing the mannequin to give himself up quietly.
When the lead fireman was three or four rungs from the top, Mortimer cut loose with a final "Geronimo!" and Henry flipped a switch on the transmitter that was tuned to the second receiver hidden inside the dummy. There was a sharp explosion like the pop of a medium-sized Fourth of July firecracker, and a package shot out from the back of the dummy. It fell about halfway down the side of the monument and dangled there for a moment at the end of a bundle of stout cords. Then, slowly, it expanded into the shape of a balloon and, growing ever larger, began to rise slowly upward.
The stunned firemen stood stock-still on the ladder. A hush fell over the crowd. Then an incredulous roar burst from it as the balloon swelled to huge proportions and soared upward on a gust of wind. It lifted the dummy clear of the monument, while cries of "I'm an eagle! I'm an eagle!" issued from its throat. It gained altitude rapidly and went careening off across the Town Square, heading toward the lake.
Henry and Mortimer and I were jumping up and down at the windows of the loft, slapping each other on the back and laughing till our sides ached. The stunt had worked perfectly, and Henry's wizardry had paid off for us again. The surplus weather balloon we had strapped to the dummy's back had been inflated by a capsule of compressed helium. Henry had rigged the firing mechanism from a CO₂ pistol so that it punctured the capsule with a small firing pin when the radio signal from our transmitter fired the charge that propelled the balloon out of its package.
Out on the Square, confusion reigned. The crowd had started to break up at the fringes as people ran pell-mell down side streets, trying to keep the intrepid balloonist in sight.
"Get on the air, Mortimer," Henry commanded. "We've got to keep in touch with Jeff if we don't want to lose half our radio gear."
Mortimer flipped on our outfit to get through to Jeff, and Henry started monitoring the police and emergency bands to see what information he could pick up. With binoculars and a compass I kept an eye on our flying mannequin. He was flying pretty high now, and was being blown out across Strawberry Lake just about the way we had figured.
Homer Snodgrass reported up from the Square that Mayor Scragg was in a real tizzy. He had ordered the civil defense units into full alert, and had told Chief Putney to notify the Air Force at Westport Field what had happened.
Henry picked up Chief Putney's transmission to Westport Field. He requested two helicopters to track the balloonist until he came down, so they could see that he got into the proper institution. The operator at Westport Field wouldn't believe him at first, but promised to relay the information to Colonel March, the base commander, anyway. Two minutes later we monitored a transmission from Westport Field on the emergency band. Colonel March was notifying all the stations in his net.
"Unidentified flying man sighted proceeding west out of Mammoth Falls. Sightings reported by police department, Mammoth Falls, and one airline pilot. Exact heading and altitude unknown. Destination unknown. No flight plan filed at this facility nor at local airport. Request reports of further sightings. Please stand by. Over and out."
We practically went through the roof of Mr. Snodgrass' loft when we heard this. Henry was in a sweat.
"We've got to work fast," he said. "I hope Colonel March doesn't find out we're behind this. He'll raise holy Ned with us."
One minute later Henry was sweating even more. Westport Field announced to all the stations in its net that it was scrambling two search craft and a helicopter team to see if it could confirm sightings of the unidentified flying man.
"Can you get a reading on the dummy?" Henry cried.
The dummy was silhouetted against a good cloud background right at that point. I took a sighting with my compass.
"Looks like two hundred and sixty-five degrees," I told Henry. "As far as I can tell, that's the direction he's drifting, and he's just about reached the lake."
"Good," said Henry. "We shall still have time."
He drew a line quickly on the map he had with him, and then grabbed for the hand set of the citizens' band transceiver.
"Grand Vizier to High Mogul!"
"Come in, Grand Vizier. This is High Mogul."
"Jeff! You'll have to get back to the hill where you were before. I figure you've got about six minutes. The dummy's coming in on a heading of two hundred and sixty-five degrees. That's eighty-five degrees from where you'll be. Let me know as soon as you sight him. And let me know as soon as he's overhead, so I can push the button."
"You're making it rough on us, Henry. Over and out."
Out on the Square we could hear the wail of sirens. Every ambulance in town seemed to be moving out on the road toward Strawberry Lake. Other cars were following, and still more were taking the road north of the lake in case the dummy drifted that way. Mayor Scragg was still standing near the monument, directing operations and waving his umbrella at all and sundry. The Founders Day ceremonies were completely forgotten.
"You've got to hand it to Mayor Scragg," said Mortimer. "He's got this town moving."
"That's going to make it rough on us," said Henry. "I didn't think he'd get things organized so fast."
Jeff's voice came over the receiver. "High Mogul to Grand Vizier! Come in! Come in!"
"This is Grand Vizier. Go ahead!"
"We're back on the other hill."
"Can you see the dummy?"
"Yes! He's getting close to this side of the lake. He's coming right toward us, but we're going to have to move down the hill to our right a bit. Don't cut it loose till I give you the signal."
"O.K.! We're standing by."
"This is going to be a near thing," Henry said. "Those search planes from Westport Field should be getting out over the lake soon. If the helicopters get in close enough to see what we're doing, it may spoil our whole plan."
"Let's not get Colonel March mad at us," said Mortimer. "He's done us a lot of favors."
"That's just what I'm worried about!" said Henry.
The Town Square was completely deserted now. Even Mayor Scragg had left to join the search parties that were hoping to track the balloonist to a landing somewhere in the wooded hills west of Strawberry Lake. I kept my binoculars frozen on the figure of the dummy and fed Henry information on his course and position.
Two search planes were already circling high above the dummy. Off to the north I could see the two helicopters from Westport Field churning their way south. In three or four minutes they would be at the other side of the lake.
"Better hurry," I said to Henry. "The choppers are closing in fast."
Just then Jeff's voice came over the receiver.
"He's just a little way from us now, Henry. You can drop him any time."
"O.K.," said Henry. "But keep under cover of the trees and work fast. There are two planes overhead right now, and there'll be two choppers on top of you in no time!"
Henry flipped a switch on our big transmitter and then ran to join me at the window. We saw the balloon jerk violently and begin to collapse. The charge Henry had wired to a second receiver inside it had blown a small hole in its side. The dummy sank rapidly toward the earth as the balloon folded in on itself. We lost sight of it in the trees.
What happened from then on we knew only through Jeff's radio reports. The dummy came swinging down faster than we had expected it would. Jeff and Freddy and Dinky watched it careening dizzily toward the side of the hill they were on, and hoped it would land in a soft place so the radio parts inside it wouldn't be smashed to bits. They scrambled down the hill in time to see it crash through a bushy maple. The balloon snagged itself in the branches, and the dummy jerked up short on the end of its shrouds, dangling twenty feet from the ground.
"Get up there and cut the balloon loose. We've got to get it out of sight!" Jeff shouted, as he boosted Dinky up the tree.
Little Dinky skinned up the maple like a wildcat. He was quick as a fox and skinny enough to worm his way through the tightest places. In a few seconds he had cut the balloon free with his Scout knife and Freddy and Jeff caught the dummy in their arms. Dinky was down out of the tree like a monkey, and the three of them took off through the woods for the cave where they had hidden their bicycles.
The cave was an unfinished shaft that had been abandoned when they stopped working the old zinc mine in that area. It's overgrown with bushes now, but a spur track leads from it to an old crusher; and from there a rusty, abandoned rail line runs due north to where it joins up with the main line just outside of Hyattsville.
When the dummy emerged from the cave, he was wearing the uniform of an Explorer Scout, just like the rest of the boys. He was lashed to the baggage rack of Jeff's bicycle, with his arms tied tight around Jeff's waist. With knapsacks and fishing rods to complete the ensemble, the whole group looked as though they were just returning from an overnight camping trip. They pedaled down the abandoned rail line, Jeff in the lead.
As they turned onto Turkey Hill Road, which leads back to town along the north shore of the lake, they began to pass some of the convoy vehicles that had brought search parties out to the scene. The antiquated touring car that had carried Mayor Scragg in the parade came charging around a bend.
"Get those bikes off the road, boys!" the Mayor shouted. "This is an emergency."
"Yes, sir," said Dinky. "We're getting back to town as fast as fast as we can." And he kept right on pedaling.
"Have you seen a man in blue overalls anywhere around here?" the Mayor shouted at Freddy Muldoon.
Freddy shouted back over his shoulder, "We haven't seen a living soul." And that was no lie.
A quarter of a mile farther down the road a blue Air Force sedan braked to a lurching stop. The driver put it in reverse and backed up fast. Colonel March's head popped out of the rear window.
"Hello, boys!" The Colonel was smiling.
Jeff kinda waved at him, with a grin that looked as if he was sick to his stomach, and kept right on pedaling. Dinky Poore, whose legs aren't long enough for him to sit on his seat, almost fell off his bike trying to give the Colonel a big salute as he chugged on past. But the Colonel reached out and stopped Freddy Muldoon.
"Who's the big boy riding with Jeff?" he asked.
"Oh, him?… Oh, he's a friend of ours," said Freddy "I think he's staying with Henry Mulligan."
"That's nice," said the Colonel. "Where's he from?"
"Henry lives right here in Mammoth Falls."
"I know that," said the Colonel. "I mean the new boy."
"Oh, him?… I don't know," said Freddy, "I think he's from Canada… Maybe England. I don't think you'd wanna meet him, Colonel."
"Oh, I see. He seems like a pretty big fellow. I just wondered why he didn't have a bike of his own, that's all."
"He's sick!" said Freddy. "Well… I mean… well, Colonel, you gotta realize, in some foreign countries people don't have very much money."
"Oh yes! I understand that's the case," said the Colonel. "Well, he seemed like a very nice young man. I just thought I'd like to meet him sometime."
"Oh, he is a very nice fellow," said Freddy. "He's not the least bit nosy, either!"
"I see what you mean," said the Colonel. "Well, good-bye, Freddy. Nice talking to you."
"Good-bye, Colonel!"
And Freddy took off like a jet to catch up with Dinky and Jeff.
Back in the loft over Mr. Snodgrass' hardware store, the rest of us had not been idle. The Town Square was completely deserted, except for Constable Billy Dahr, who had fallen asleep in the sun on the Town Hall steps. As soon as the coast was clear, Homer Snodgrass had shinnied up one of the telephone poles again and looped a length of piano wire over the topmost foot spike. The other end of the loop ran through a pulley we'd nailed fast to the wall of the loft.
When Jeff and Dinky and Freddy got back with the Flying Man, we pulled all our radio gear out of him and put him back into his blue overalls. Then we hooked him onto the piano wire with a guide-line attached. We pushed him out through the window and gave him a breeches buoy ride back out to the monument. It was easy to lower him by his own weight back into the cradle formed by Hannah Kimball's arms. Then we just cut the piano wire so it dangled free, and pulled the loose end in through the window.
We had barely gotten the piano wire back inside, and closed the loft window, when we saw Billy Dahr yawn and stretch himself on the Town Hall steps. All of a sudden he catapulted his creaky frame into the middle of the street and stood there gaping at the monument, his billy club in one hand and his false teeth in the other. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands and looked again. He looked all around the Town Square to make sure no one was there. Then he took off and high-tailed it down the street to the firehouse at the corner.
A half-hour later the Square was full of people again. Mayor Scragg's deep-breathing touring car pulled up in front of the monument, and shortly afterward the hook-and-ladder rig arrived. The firemen lost no time in cranking the ladder up the side of the marble shaft again, and two of them dashed up it pell-mell with the straitjacket. This time there was not a word from the man on the monument. He seemed to have lost his voice.
The lead fireman lunged up the last few rungs of the ladder and pinned the dummy against the statue of Hannah Kimball with both hands. Then he stepped back and stared at it. Suddenly he stepped forward and grabbed the dummy by the neck. There was a horrified scream from the crowd as he flung it from the top of the monument. It landed with a dull thud in one of the lifesaving nets.
Curious spectators crowded around the net to get a closer look at the man who had been thrown into it.
Mayor Scragg looked at it and said, "Hurrumph!"
He poked at it gingerly with the tip of his umbrella. Then he snorted, and stalked off into the Town Hall. The crowd of spectators gradually thinned out; and as twilight fell on the Square, Mike Corcoran could be seen walking toward his pool hall on Blake Street with the Unidentified Flying Man tucked under his arm.
Next day the ceremonies went off pretty well. Mayor Scragg got a bad crick in his neck from looking up at the top of the monument all the time, to see if the Flying Man was there again; but otherwise things went according to schedule.
Colonel March was there, and he took advantage of the Mayor's invitation to give a short speech on preparedness. He told everybody that the day was past when we could rely on stunts like Hannah Kimball's to defend ourselves. And he said that an important part of being prepared was to be ready for the unexpected. These days we have to look for a lot of unexpected things to happen; and when they do, we have to learn to accept them and not get panicky. He thought that yesterday's incident of the Unidentified Flying Man might serve as a good object lesson for everybody to think about.
After the ceremonies were over, and the politicians had shaken hands all around, Colonel March came over to where we were sitting in the bleachers. He looked right at Henry Mulligan.
"What happened to your friend from Canada?" he asked. "I thought maybe I'd get a chance to meet him."
"What friend?" said Henry.
"The one I saw riding on the bicycle with Jeff yesterday," said the Colonel.
"Oh, that one!" Henry looked around at all the rest of us. "Well, to tell you the truth, Colonel…"
"He died last night!" said Freddy Muldoon.
"I'm glad to hear that," said the Colonel. "I mean, that's too bad! I'm sorry."
"Yes! It was very sad," said Freddy.
"He didn't look too healthy when I saw him," said the Colonel.
"He was real sick," said Freddy Muldoon.
"Well, please extend my condolences to his family," the Colonel said, with a wink.
"We will!"
And that was the last that Colonel March ever said on the subject.
But the mystery of the Unidentified Flying Man still lives in Mammoth Falls. People still argue about it. Half of them believe there was a real man on the monument in the first place and somebody just dressed a dummy up to look like him afterward. Others think there were two dummies, and some ventriloquist in the crowd was just making the first one talk. But nobody can explain what happened to the first dummy, or the balloon, which has never been found.
Those who argue about it usually end up at Mike Corcoran's pool hall, where the Unidentified Flying Man still stands today in the front window. Mike had a sign painted that stands at the dummy's feet. It says:

The Great Gas Bag Race

Zeke Boniface wears winter underwear all year long. The reason we know is that in summer he doesn't wear any shirt. You can always tell how long he's had the underwear on by the different color that shows at the beltline when he bends over to pick something up. The top two buttons are always unbuttoned and the hairs of his chest stick out there.
But Zeke runs the most wonderful junkyard in the world. You can find anything if you look long enough. Whenever you ask him for something he'll roll the stub of his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and scratch his mustache with one finger. Then he'll push his battered old black derby up off his forehead and scratch his head, as if he never heard of the thing you're asking for. But sooner or later, he'll recollect seeing something like what you want, and he'll lead the way to one of the mountains of cluttered junk that crowd his yard.
Zeke never touches any of the junk himself. He just shows you where it is, and then stands there talking about where he picked up a particular piece while you rummage through the pile to pull out what you want.
That was how we found the World War II inflatable life raft for the gondola of the balloon Henry Mulligan designed for the Great Gas Bag Race.
Every year Mammoth Falls is host for the County Fair, and ever since anyone can remember there's been some kind of a race on opening day. It used to be a horse and buggy race, and then for a long time they ran it with farm tractors. But lately it's been a balloon race, and people come from all over the state to see it. If the wind is blowing in the usual direction, it starts in White Fork, about fifty miles away, and ends up at the fair grounds.
Most of the balloons don't make it, because they run out of ballast or their gas leaks out long before they get to Mammoth Falls. Sometimes the sheriff's office and the state police spend the whole day trying to find the people who come down in the woods or in the hills between here and White Fork. Once in a while somebody gets real lost and spends the whole night trying to find his way back to town.
Henry figured the Mad Scientists' Club ought to be a cinch to win the race, because he had an idea for a balloon that didn't need any ballast and could stay up practically forever.
"What kinda balloon are we gonna make?" asked Freddy Muldoon between sniffles. Freddy had a bad cold.
"Never you mind," said Henry. "You'll find out after it's all built. Meanwhile I don't want it blabbermouthed all over town. Harmon is entering a balloon in the race too, and we don't want him stealing our ideas."
"Who else is going to ride in it?" asked Dinky Poore. Dinky, being our smallest member, knew he was a cinch to be a passenger.
Jeff Crocker rapped his gavel on the table. "As president, I appoint Henry Mulligan to figure that out," he said, "and whatever he decides is what we'll do!"
"That's all got to be figured out real scientific," said Freddy Muldoon, looking at Dinky Poore as though he hadn't grown up yet.
The next three weeks we were pretty busy. We knew we faced some stiff competition, because there were a lot of old-time balloonists entered in the race. Mike Corcoran, who runs the Idle Hour Pool Palace down on Baker Street, was sponsoring Harmon Muldoon's entry. We knew that Mike wanted to win the race for the sake of the publicity, and he was willing to put up a lot of money to make sure Harmon had the best balloon in the field of entries. We figured it was a case of Henry Mulligan's brains against all the money Harmon had behind him.
But where science is concerned, brains can make up for a lot of money, and we all had faith in Henry.
We built our balloon up in the loft over Mr. Snodgrass' hardware store. We didn't want to build it in Jeff Crocker's barn because some member of Harmon's gang is always hanging around trying to spy on what we're doing. The loft over Snodgrass' Hardware is on the third floor, and it's pretty hard to spy on anything going on there.
One thing about balloons you've got to be careful about—they're great Yo-yos. They can swing you up into the sky in a hurry, and then drop you back down again just as fast. Henry says it has something to do with the equilibrium between a body and the medium it's floating in. As long as your balloon weighs just a little less than the air it displaces, you're fine. It'll float along just a little way above the earth and not give you any trouble. But if the temperature rises, or an updraft catches you, you can zoom right up to twenty thousand feet and find yourself gasping for breath. When the updraft leaves you, or the temperature cools off, you find you've got the proverbial "lead balloon" on your hands, and you start losing altitude like crazy. The balloon doesn't just float back down to where it belongs. Gravity pulls it down so fast that it'll crash right into the ground if you don't have some kind of ballast to throw overboard, or some other means of increasing your lift.
Most balloonists figure to compensate for this by letting some of the gas out of the bag when they're rising too fast, or dumping sandbags overboard when they're dropping too fast. The big problem, of course, is that they eventually run out of gas, or sand, and they can't control the altitude of the balloon. Then they have to ditch it and give up. In a fifty-mile race, it's a good bet that better than ninety per cent of the balloons won't finish.
Henry figured he had this problem licked, and this was our big secret.
Henry's mother complains that he'd rather think than eat. Sometimes he'll start thinking right in the middle of supper. He'll push his plate aside and he won't take another bite until he's figured out a problem that's on his mind. When she nags him about not touching his food, he slips it under the table to the family dog while her back is turned. The Mulligans have the fattest dog in the neighborhood.
Some people think Henry's a nut. But to him food isn't that important. You gotta eat enough to keep strong, he always says, but don't let it go to your head. It all depends on whether you want to be a scientist when you grow up or the fat man of the circus.
Freddy Muldoon is different. He's always thinking too, but usually it's about food. When he asked Henry if he could be one of the flight crew on the balloon, Henry told him we didn't need that much ballast.
Henry's idea was really quite simple. Most great ideas are. He figured you could keep a balloon under control if you could just vary the size of it by pumping gas in and out of the bag. Then you wouldn't need any ballast. With a couple of pressure tanks in the gondola and a good compressor, you could pump gas back into the tanks when you wanted to go down, and let it expand into the balloon again when you wanted to go up.
We made the envelope for our balloon out of silk from surplus parachutes and inflated it in Jeff Crocker's barn in order to paint it. If you've never painted a balloon, don't try it. It's a lot worse than painting a house. There isn't any way to climb up on it; and even if you could, there isn't any way to keep yourself from falling off. Dinky Poore did most of the painting, slung in a big trash can hanging from a rope hung over the rafters in Jeff's barn.
Later we trucked the thing out to a clearing in the hills back of Strawberry Lake for some captive flight tests. Henry's calculations proved to be just about right. The balloon had over six hundred pounds of lift, which was enough to carry three of us in the gondola, along with the two pressure tanks for the helium supply, the gasoline-driven compressor, and a little miscellaneous gear. We floated it about a hundred feet in the air, tied down with long ropes, so Henry could experiment with the compressor and get an idea how rapidly the balloon would gain or lose altitude. He also had us tie it down with just one rope attached to a spring scale, so we could measure the amount of lift it had under full load.
When we got all through with the captive trials, Henry was satisfied. "I've studied the terrain between White Fork and the fair grounds," he said, "and I figure we've got to stay at about twelve hundred feet to clear the highest hills. But we've got enough lift to float at two thousand, if everything works perfectly and the weather conditions are ideal."
"Two thousand feet is nothin'," said Freddy Muldoon.
"It is if you have to step out at the end of the line," said Mortimer Dalrymple.
"Why two thousand feet, Henry?" I asked.
"At this time of year, on clear days, there's a fast-moving layer of air at that altitude. It might move us along at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, right toward the fair grounds. I checked all this with the meteorologist at Westport Field."
"Better not let Harmon Muldoon know that," said Dinky.
"Shucks, I'll bet we're not the only ones that know it," said Homer Snodgrass. "There's a lot of old-time balloonists in this race. They know all about the weather and the winds around here."
"Sure, they do," Henry observed, "but the big question is whether they can get up to two thousand feet and stay there. I figure we can if there are just three of us in the gondola, and one of them has to be you, Dinky."
"Aw, nuts!" said Freddy Muldoon.
We all knew that Henry had to be the second one, so the rest of us drew lots to see who would be lucky number three, and I got the long straw.
"Nuts!" said Freddy Muldoon.
The night before the big race, Zeke Boniface hauled us and all our gear over to White Fork in Richard the Deep Breather. We camped out on the grounds of the race track, where the balloons would start from, so we could be up early in the morning. There's a lot of work to be done before you can get a balloon off the ground. They just don't go up by themselves.
Naturally, we didn't sleep too much. There were a lot of other groups there making preparations for the launching in the morning, and Homer Snodgrass kept circulating among them, picking up gossip and information. Homer was particularly interested, because Daphne Muldoon, still his girl friend, would be selected Queen of the County Fair if our balloon won the race.
There were about twenty balloons entered in the race, and they were painted all the colors of the rainbow and then some. Some of them were decorated to look like Christmas-tree ornaments, and others like spinning tops. There was one that looked like a big fish and another one shaped like a big green caterpillar. Harmon Muldoon called his the "Green Onion," and it looked like one.
"I hope it springs a leek," quipped Dinky Poore, when he first saw it.
Our own balloon had a face painted on it that looked a little bit like Mayor Scragg. We called it "The Head." The nose on the face marked the location of the rip panel. You have to have a rip panel in case you get caught in a high wind near the ground and you want to let all the gas out of your balloon at once. Otherwise you might get dragged for miles, and smash up against trees and rocks.
The race was slated to start at eight o'clock sharp, and as early as 4 A.M. a lot of ground crews were already inflating their balloons and tying them down to stakes driven into the ground. Henry said we'd wait until well after sunrise to inflate The Head; because there was usually a strong wind about the time the sun came up, and with the temperature rising about twenty degrees, a lot of the crews were going to have a tough time holding their balloons on the ground. He proved right, too.
Harmon Muldoon's gang came over to look at our balloon and kid us as much as they could. We had it spread out on the ground, ready to inflate and weighted down with rocks and boards.
"You guys keep quiet!" said Jeff Crocker, when he saw them coming. "Let Henry and me do the talking. We don't want to get a fight started."
"Well, if that isn't the most!" said Stony Martin, who is known as a loudmouth even in Harmon Muldoon's gang.
"The most what?" chorused the rest of the gang.
"The most flattest balloon I ever saw!" said Stony, kicking one edge of the envelope. This was greeted with a loud guffaw.
"When you stop laughing, supposing you tell me what we can do for you," said Jeff, lounging back against his sleeping bag. "Did you come over for some advice?"
Harmon Muldoon bristled. He stood before Jeff with his fists dug into his hips. "We just came over to see if you were carrying any BB guns or sling shots," he said. "They're outlawed, you know."
"Do tell!" sighed Mortimer Dalrymple, breathing on his fingernails and polishing them on his shirt front.
"Oh, my gracious!" said Freddy Muldoon, with a loud sniffle. "That reminds me. I forgot to bring my bow and arrows!"
"I thought I told you guys to cool it," said Jeff, getting to his feet. He looked Harmon Muldoon straight in the eye. "If we win this race, Harmon, we'll win it fair and square. That's the only way we want it."
"We're not worried about you winning it," snorted Stony Martin. "We just want you to keep out of our way—that is, if you manage to get this sad sack off the ground."
"If we get in your way, write us a letter about it," said Mortimer, stifling a yawn.
"Stow it, Mortimer!" Jeff warned.
"What's your crew gonna ride in?" asked Harmon. "I don't see any gondola around here."
"This is our gondola," said Henry, tapping the bundle he was leaning against.
"What is it?"
"It's an inflatable life raft," said Henry. "Or didn't you know that you have to fly right across Strawberry Lake to get to the fair grounds?"
"We know it," shouted Stony with great glee, "but we're not planning on making any stops!"
After the laughter had died down, Henry smiled quietly. "Judging from your conversation, I assume you're using hot air for gas," he said coolly.
"Maybe you can talk your way across the lake," chirped Dinky Poore.
"That'll be enough of that!" said Jeff, standing up to his full height and looking down on Harmon Muldoon. "I think our guests are leaving. Nice of you to drop by, fellows!"
As the group shuffled off, Stony Martin aimed a rabbit punch at the back of Dinky Poore's neck. But somehow his feet went out from under him and he hit the ground with a thud.
"Excuse me!" said Mortimer Dalrymple, pulling his legs out of the way and handing Stony his hat. "For a minute I thought you'd lost your head!"
As soon as the sun came up, a pretty strong wind blew in from the east, just as Henry said it would. A lot of the crews had trouble keeping their balloons tied down. Two of them broke their moorings completely. They went careening across the race track and got fouled up in the woods on the other side of the railroad tracks.
"Scratch two balloons," said Henry. "They'll never get those repaired in time to get in the race."
Later we wandered over to see how Harmon Muldoon's gang was doing with the Green Onion. Sure enough, they were in trouble. They had to let some of the gas out of their bag to keep it from lifting off, and it had pulled out several of the mooring stakes. When we got there, the whole gang was flailing around trying to keep the rig from blowing away. Everybody had hold of a rope, trying to snub the lines shorter and tie the balloon closer to the ground. The huge bag was pitching and tossing in the wind like a cork on a stormy sea.
"You'll never do it that way," shouted Henry. "Work on one rope at a time!"
Just then a strong gust of wind shot the balloon skyward. Two of the crew lost their footing and were dragged across the ground until they let go of the ropes. Another mooring line snapped loose from the balloon. Stony Martin, with a rope coiled tightly around his left arm, was jerked off his feet and whipped sideways in a wide, sweeping curve. Only one line remained tied to a stake, and the force of the balloon's oscillations was working the stake loose from the ground. Stony was dangling six feet in the air, his legs kicking wildly, trying to find something solid to hold on to.
"That bag sure went up with a jerk!" snorted Dinky Poore.
Jeff Crocker dashed forward and aimed a flying tackle at Stony's legs. He caught him around the knees and brought him crashing to the ground. Before they could get to their feet another gust of wind shot the balloon upward again.
"Go get Zeke and the truck!" cried Mortimer, giving Dinky Poore a shove. Then he and Henry ran to the lone mooring stake and threw their weight on it. Homer Snodgrass and I dove for another line and dug our heels into the ground as best we could.
The rest of Harmon's gang staggered to their feet in bewilderment and tried to help out. They all managed to get hold of a piece of rope, but a balloon in a high wind is like a bucking bronco. We were just barely holding our own when Dinky got back with Zeke Boniface and Richard the Deep Breather in a whirling cloud of dust. Zeke brought the ancient truck to a skidding stop directly under the balloon, stepped up on the seat, and snaked one mooring line out of the air with a hamlike fist. With his leg hooked through the steering wheel, he gave a mighty tug on the rope and dragged the balloon and all the rest of us in his direction. Then he cinched the rope around the steering column and jumped to the back of the truck, where he made another line fast to the tailgate. The balloon still whipped angrily back and forth, but it was held fast to the ground by the sheer weight of Richard the Deep Breather.
"Gee! Thanks!" said Harmon Muldoon, after we had the balloon staked to the ground again and the wind had died down a bit.
"Don't mention it!" said Jeff Crocker. "Funny thing about a balloon. One minute you can't hold down, and the next thing you know, you can't get it off the ground."
"We won't have any trouble getting off the ground!" shouted Stony Martin as we moved away.
"Rots of ruck!" said Freddy Muldoon, shouting back.
It was well after sunrise when we started inflating The Head. The wind had dropped to a gentle breeze and the weather looked good. We had just about an hour till lift-off time. As usual, Henry made us go through a checkout procedure, by the numbers, for every phase of the operation. It sounded just like the countdown for a missile launching.
"It's the only way to make sure you aren't forgetting something," Henry explained. "When you have a lot of things to remember, it's easy to forget one of them. But if you assign every step a number, then it's a cinch. It's pretty hard to forget that 4 comes between 3 and 5."
The hot-air balloons were inflating too, and by the time the sun was fully up, the White Fork race track looked like a fantastic fairyland of bright-colored silk. Balloons and tents were everywhere, and people were streaming onto the grounds from every direction to see the start of the race. Dinky Poore was sitting on his knapsack with his eyes popped wide open and his chin in his hands.
"Gosh!" he said. "Charlemagne's army must have looked just like this when it started getting ready for battle."
"Charlie who?" grunted Freddy Muldoon.
"Shut up, you goofball!" said Dinky, and went right on staring at the balloons and the crowds.
Suddenly the loudspeakers started to crackle and a race official began giving instructions to the balloon crews. There was a noticeable change in the movement of the crowd of spectators as they sensed the race was about to begin. They began filing out of the center oval toward the stands and the railing that circled the track. It seemed as though everyone had a camera or a pair of binoculars, or both. Telescopes and cameras were being set up on tripods all over the place. Some people had even gotten up onto the roof of the stands and were setting up movie cameras, until the White Fork police chased them off.
All of a sudden it was for real. After all the weeks of preparation and planning and dreaming, The Head was just a few minutes away from her first flight. I could feel a big hollow place in the pit of my stomach, and I noticed that Henry kept taking his glasses off and wiping them for no reason at all.
The mayor of White Fork got up in the officials' stand and introduced Mayor Scragg of Mammoth Falls. Then the two of them introduced the girls who were candidates for Queen of the County Fair. Each girl had to give a speech and throw a rose to the captain of the balloon crew that sponsored her. If the rose hit the ground it was considered bad luck. Stony Martin's girlfriend, Melissa Plunkett, gave a good speech, but her aim was bad and Harmon Muldoon fell flat on his face diving for the rose. He got it, though, and he and his crew dashed off and climbed into the gondola of the Green Onion.
"You gotta hand it to Stony," sighed Mortimer Dalrymple. "That Melissa is a real knockout!"
"Her teeth stick out too much," said Dinky Poore.
When Daphne Muldoon was introduced, we whistled and cheered and stamped our feet. She blew Homer a kiss before she tossed the rose, and he was still standing there blushing and digging his toe in the ground when we all took off for our balloon.
Dinky and Henry and I scrambled into the gondola, and the rest of the crew started checking the mooring lines. According to the rules, we had to keep four lines tied down until the starting gun sounded. Henry was fidgeting nervously with the quick-release buckles and checking the pressure-gauges on the helium tanks. Jeff Crocker, with his arm raised in the air, was keeping one eye glued on the officials' stand.
We saw a checkered flag go up at the end of the line of balloons. A puff of smoke rose from the officials' stand, followed by the thin crack of a pistol shot. It didn't sound very loud, and we couldn't believe the race had started, until a roar went up from the stands and we saw one balloon rise up from the middle of the line.
"Cut her loose!" Jeff shouted, and jumped back from the gondola.
We flipped the levers on the release buckles and The Head shot upward for a few feet, then keeled over sideways and started spinning slowly counterclockwise. One rope still held her fast, and Dinky Poore was trying frantically to spring the buckle loose. I reached over and pulled with all my might on the release lever, but the buckle had been bent by the force of the balloon's pull, and it wouldn't budge. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Zeke Boniface step forward, and the blade of his hunting knife flashed in the sun. With one swipe he severed the rope, and The Head shot skyward for a moment, then jerked sideways and started to climb at a steep angle as the wind caught it and pushed it toward Mammoth Falls. We were on our way.
Henry was crouched on the floor of the gondola, glancing at his watch, then at the altimeter, then at the pressure gauges for the helium tanks and the balloon envelope. Dinky and I were leaning over the railing, waving wildly at the shrinking figures of the ground crew.
Suddenly the gondola lurched and swung crazily under our feet. A big orange balloon shot up from underneath us and bumped us again before it bounced free and went soaring straight up.
"Whew! That was close!" said Henry. "They're rising too fast. They'll have to let some gas out in a hurry if they want to keep her under control."
There hadn't been time to see what had happened to the Green Onion. The air was full of balloons, some rising lazily, some soaring rapidly, and some bouncing along the ground while their crews threw everything overboard, trying to get them aloft.
Our gondola pitched wildly again, as a heavy gust of wind hit us and drove us before it. Two of the balloons that were having trouble getting off the ground got caught in it and went careening across the fields and crashed into the woods the other side of the railroad track. One of them collapsed completely, and all we could see of it were the torn shreds of its envelope hanging from the limbs of the trees as we sailed overhead.
Dinky and I kept rubbernecking around, trying to catch sight of the Green Onion, but there was too much going on at once. The big orange balloon had climbed far above us and was now moving toward Mammoth Falls at a rapid rate. It was already about a mile ahead of us. Henry pointed upward.
"They've caught that layer of fast-moving air that we want to get into," he said. "But they're still climbing too fast. They'll climb right up out of it in a minute."
I trained my field glasses on the balloon and I could see the crew members slapping each other on the back. They thought they had it knocked for sure. But Henry was right. They kept on rising until the balloon was just a tiny speck in the sky. But it was no longer moving forward. We passed right under it as The Head rose into the slipstream and started moving for home. Suddenly the orange balloon started to descend again, but it wasn't coming down slowly. It plummeted toward the earth like a wounded duck.
"They let too much gas out too fast!" said Henry. "You've got to be careful you don't panic when you're rising too fast. It takes a light touch on the release valve. At the rate they're going they'll drop right down through the slipstream again. They might even hit the ground."
Sure enough, the orange balloon kept dropping, seeming to pick up speed as it neared the earth. Its gondola rocked wildly as the rig passed through the slipstream, and we could see the crew frantically dumping sand overboard.
"They'll never make it to Mammoth Falls," Henry observed. "They're dumping a lot of ballast in order to put on the brakes, and they might need it again later on."
The balloon slowed its descent, finally, far beneath us. Then it rose, perhaps a hundred feet, and leveled off. It was moving westward once again, but very slowly. We were two or three miles ahead of it by this time, and moving very fast in the slipstream.
"I think they're finished," said Henry. "Unless they're carrying a lot more ballast that they can get rid of, they'll never get enough altitude to clear the hills around Strawberry Lake."
By now we could see only about ten balloons in the sky. The rest had either foundered on take-off or were too far back to pick up. I finally sighted the Green Onion far to the south of us and at about the same altitude as The Head. Apparently Harmon and his crew had managed to get into the slipstream, too.
There's something about a balloon ride that's different from any other ride on earth. Unless you look down at the ground, you don't even realize you're moving. The balloon goes wherever the wind pushes it, and since you ride right with the wind, there isn't any air rushing past you. It's absolutely quiet and still, and sometimes you feel as though you're just hanging motionless from the sky. Of course, if you get caught in an updraft or a downdraft, or a good storm starts tossing you around, it's a little bit different. But in good, clear weather you can float right over a pasture full of cows and they won't even realize you're there.
Dinky Poore was resting his chin on the railing of our gondola, just daydreaming. It's awfully easy to do that in a balloon, and forget all about the fact you're in a race. I pointed out the location of the Green Onion to Henry. He looked at his watch and checked the map he had tacked to a board.
"I figure we ought to make the fair grounds in a little under two hours, if everything goes well," he said. "The big test comes at Strawberry Lake, when we have to clear those hills. If Harmon's balloon is still with us then, it may be an exciting race."
Just then we got a call on the radio from Jeff. He wanted to know if we could see the Green Onion, and we told him it was off to the south of us, doing pretty well. Just to the north of us, on the main road between White Fork and Mammoth Falls, we could see the long line of cars heading for the fair grounds. With my field glasses I could make out Richard the Deep Breather, chugging along well behind the rest of the caravan. There was a motorcycle escort out in front of the line of cars, and all the candidates for Queen of the County Fair were sitting up on the back seats of convertibles, surrounded by flowers. I couldn't make out which one was Daphne Muldoon.
The radio crackled again, and it was Jeff, telling us that they could see us now, and reminding us that if no balloon could land right on the fair grounds, the crew that could get there first on foot would be declared the winner.
Another voice broke into the transmission. It was Harmon Muldoon, heckling us from the Green Onion.
"If you're gonna run, you'd better get started now, 'cause we're gonna drop right in front of the reviewing stand!"
We looked toward the Green Onion and could see that it had drifted a lot closer to us now. We could see the figures of Harmon and Stony Martin, and Buzzy McCauliffe, the third member of their crew. When I trained the glasses on them, Stony was holding up a sign that said, "Go soak your Head in the lake!"
Dinky Poore started jumping up and down and thumbing his nose at them, and Henry had to tell him to sit down and stop rocking the gondola. In a little while Dinky didn't feel so exuberant, though. We sailed right under a big black cloud, and a summer squall hit us that pitched us around so badly Dinky turned green. He had to lean over the rail for real this time, while I held his legs to keep him from falling out. We were all soaked to the skin, and Dinky sat in two inches of water in the bottom of the life raft, holding his head and mumbling about what he'd do if he ever got back down on the ground again.
When we finally floated out from under that cloud, we'd taken a bad battering and had lost some altitude, but we were all right. Henry checked the altimeter and the helium gauges and decided to let more gas into the envelope of The Head. I climbed up in the rigging and released the sliding yoke to let the bag expand as the gas flowed into it. Henry let the gas out of the pressure tanks carefully. We just needed enough extra lift to get us back up-into the slipstream. Too much, and we'd rise right through it!
When we had leveled off again, and were getting a good wind, Henry told Dinky to keep his eye on the altimeter. "We're going to start rising again as soon as we dry out and lose some of the water we've taken on. We'll have to pump that extra gas back into the tanks again to stay in the slipstream."
"What about what I lost?" asked Dinky.
"Every ounce counts," said Henry. "I'll let you know if we want you to get sick again."
Now that we were out of the squall, we took a quick look around to take stock of the competition. Only three balloons were in sight. One was the Green Onion, far out ahead of us and heading for the hills east of Strawberry Lake. She had either missed the squall completely or just passed through the edge of it. The other two were closer to us and at lower altitude, neither of them moving as fast as we were. One was painted like a top, with red, white, and blue stripes, and the other was the one that looked like a green caterpillar. If there were any others still aloft, they were too far back to worry about.
"That caterpillar will be lucky to make it to the hills," said Henry. "She's been losing altitude ever since we got started, and I'll bet she's already thrown away all her ballast. I saw them dumping sand just before we went into the squall."
"What about the Green Onion?" I asked. "She must be two miles ahead of us."
"I've got an idea!" he answered, while he worked furiously with a pencil on the back of the map board. "Yes, it ought to work. I think we can pass her at Strawberry Lake, if the air currents are moving the way they should be moving."
"I hope you're right," I said. "It looks pretty hopeless right now."
"Gaining altitude, oh Great One!" Dinky Poore sang out. The sunshine and a little fresh air had brought his spirits back.
"Start the compressor!" said Henry. "We'll have to keep pumping a little gas back into the tanks as we dry out."
I cranked up the little gasoline engine and the compressor started to throb. Then I went up in the rigging again to adjust the yoke as the gas seeped back into the pressure tanks.
"Keep your eye on the Green Onion when she reaches the hills this side of the lake," Henry explained. "That ridge of hills creates a tremendous updraft. And when it meets the warm air rising from the lake, it becomes a regular funnel. If the Green Onion tries to cross the ridge in the slipstream, she'll get caught in that funnel and she may zoom up to ten thousand feet. If we play it just right we can slip in under her and beat her across the lake."
"I don't know how you're gonna do it, but I hope you're right!" I said.
"Leave it to Henry!" said Dinky Poore.
"A lot depends on how fast we can pump gas in and out of the bag to vary our lift," said Henry. "We've got to drop down out of the slipstream just before we reach the hills and go in low and heavy. Then, if we're lucky, that updraft should catch us and pop us over the ridge. If it does, we may be home free if we can get enough gas back into the bag fast enough to keep from dropping down the other side and into the lake."
"I hope you know what you're doing," I said, not quite sure of what Henry had in mind.
"Lead on, oh Great One!" said Dinky Poore with supreme confidence.
The Green Onion was now approaching the hills a little over a mile ahead of us. She was sailing high and proud. But Henry had predicted the course of events with uncanny accuracy. Just as she was about to cross the ridge, she veered upward and started to climb at an amazing rate.
"She's caught in the funnel!" Henry shouted. "Start the compressor again, Charlie. I want to lose at least eight hundred feet and come in well under that ridge."
The little gasoline engine whirred again, and soon we were dropping down out of the slipstream. Henry had timed it just right. We still had plenty of forward momentum; but if we continued dropping at the rate we were, we would crash right into the middle of the hills.
"Don't get sick now, Dinky!" Henry warned. "We need all the weight we have for another minute."
Off to our left we could see the big green caterpillar far below us. It bumped into the lower slopes of the hills and slid into a gully, where it stayed, rocking back and forth in the wind, while its crew tried frantically to get it airborne again. The red, white, and blue top was not much better off. The updraft had caught it, but too late, and it crashed into the upper slope of one huge hill, where it snagged itself among the trees.
"They're finished!" said Henry matter-of-factly. "Shut off the compressor, Charlie, and keep your fingers crossed."
I shut off the engine and stood ready at the pressure tanks to let gas back into the envelope if Henry gave the signal. In a few seconds we had stopped losing altitude and were being blown in toward the side of a hill, swinging and swaying crazily. For one brief moment it looked as though we would surely crash. Dinky Poore's eyes were the size of overcoat buttons, and his face looked like white paste. I guess mine did too, but I couldn't see it. Henry stood leaning against the gondola railing with his arms folded, looking intently at the hill rushing toward us. He seemed to be counting to himself under his breath. He was the complete scientist—intent only on the outcome of his experiment.
Suddenly our downward plunge slackened abruptly and we felt the rush of warm air past our faces. We were so close to the face of the hill that we could have jumped out if we wanted to. The gondola swung like a pendulum as we changed direction and started to rise again. We were in the updraft.
"A little gas, Charlie!" Henry shouted, and I opened the valves for a few critical seconds. "That's enough. Knock it off now!" We were climbing steeply, just swinging clear of the treetops. Dinky Poore's eyes started to go back to normal, and we all let out a gasp of relief.
"We've got to watch it at the top," Henry said quickly. "The hill is a lot steeper there, and we don't want to get caught in the mainstream of this updraft. The trick is to just sneak over the ridge as low as we can."
The Green Onion was still sailing upward, caught helplessly in the thermal funnel that roared up from the east end of the lake, but there wasn't time to watch her now. We were too busy saving our own skins.
We were just about a hundred feet from the crest of the hill when we suddenly stopped rising and dipped downward with a jolt. It was like being in a fast-rising elevator when it stops suddenly and the floor drops out from under you.
"We've slipped out of the updraft," Henry shouted. "We're going to—"
But the thud of the gondola as it banged against the steep upper slope of the hill bit the words off in his mouth. The Head bounced away from the slope, swayed drunkenly for a moment, then dipped suddenly again, and banged once more against the side of the hill. This time the gondola bounced and slid crazily down the slope. We were too heavy to stay aloft without the help of the updraft.
Henry grabbed Dinky Poore by the shoulders. "Jump out!" he shouted.
Dinky scrambled over the side and dug his toes and fingers into the shale of the hillside to break his slide. The Head bounced free of the slope once more and hung there precariously for a few anxious seconds. Then, very slowly, it started to drift perceptibly upward. Henry uncoiled the rope ladder hanging on the side of the gondola and flung one end of it over the side toward Dinky.
"Grab that and run up the hill!" he shouted.
Dinky snared one rung of the ladder, hooked it in the crook of his arm, and started clambering over the boulders and scrub growth toward the top of the slope. The Head drifted slowly above him like a huge umbrella, dwarfing his tiny figure with its broad shadow. Henry took his horn-rimmed glasses off and wiped them methodically on the tail of his shirt.
"I think we've got it made," he said, as he put the spectacles back on.
Then he took up the slack in the rope ladder and shouted down to Dinky. "Tie it around you and get ready to climb back up when I give you the signal."
Dinky wrapped the end of the ladder around him and stuck both arms through it, so it was laced across his chest and back. Then he grabbed a rung higher up and stood ready to climb.
"Shoot the gas to her, Charlie, but not too much," Henry told me.
I opened the valves and let more gas back into the envelope. The Head responded and started to climb more rapidly. We had topped the crest of the hill and could see Strawberry Lake on the other side of the next ridge. Dinky came up the ladder like a squirrel, and we heaved him over the side and into the gondola. He was grinning like a circus clown and hollering, "Go get 'em, White Cloud!" We rose rapidly into the slipstream again and picked up speed. We had slipped over the ridge without getting caught in the funnel, and were on the homestretch.
We all looked up now, trying to pick up the Green Onion. She was a tiny speck in the sky far above us, and not much closer to Mammoth Falls. All the time we had been working our way over the ridge, the Green Onion had been going practically straight up. If the wind we were riding held up, we would be 'way out ahead of her in a few minutes. But as it happened, it made no difference.
The speck in the sky suddenly grew larger. The Green Onion had slipped out of the funnel and was plunging toward the earth like a wounded pigeon. Henry grabbed the field glasses out of my hand and tracked the balloon in its descent.
"They're in trouble for sure," he said, after a minute. "Harmon has let too much gas out of the bag. I can tell by the wrinkles in it. That's a bad mistake! When you're caught in an updraft in a free balloon, all you can do is ride it out. If you let a lot of gas escape, you don't have enough lift left to hold you up when the updraft stops pushing you."
"What's gonna happen now?" asked Dinky.
"They'll slow down some, because the farther they drop the denser the air gets. But at the rate they're going, they'll dunk in the lake, for sure!"
Henry called Jeff Crocker on the radio and told him to alert the lake patrol for a possible rescue.
"Start the compressor again," he told me. "We're gonna have to drop down low over the lake, and if we're lucky we might be able to help them."
"Nuts to them!" said Dinky Poore. "We wanna win the race."
"Maybe nobody'll win this race," said Henry. "You start checking the release lines for the life raft. We may have to drop it to them, if we can get close enough."
We had our life raft rigged so we could cut it loose in a hurry if we needed it ourselves or if we wanted to get rid of its weight. The heavy tarpaulin that formed the walls and floor lining of our gondola would serve us well enough if we had to jettison the raft.
We all had our eyes fastened on the Green Onion as we settled down over the lake. Harmon and his crew were throwing everything conceivable overboard in a frantic effort to slow the speed of their descent. Shirts, shoes and socks, and even trousers came flying over the side of their gondola to splash in the lake. But it was all to no avail. The Green Onion plummeted into the water like a dead duck.
The force of the impact toppled the gondola on its side, spilling Stony Martin and Buzzy McCauliffe into the water. Harmon Muldoon clung to the rigging and rode with the balloon as it skidded across the surface of the lake, until the weight of the sunken gondola brought it to a stop. We were heading right for it when I shut off our compressor and we leveled off, drifting slowly about fifty feet above the surface.
"Cut the raft loose!" Henry shouted.
We all hit the release lines, and the life raft plopped into the lake about a hundred yards from where the heads of Stony Martin and Buzzy McCauliffe had bobbed to the surface. They both heard it hit the water and started swimming toward it. Henry was uncoiling the rope ladder again.
"Get ready to let more gas into the bag!" he told me, tersely. "And when I give you the signal, give her plenty. We're going to try and pick Harmon up, and until we get him clear of the water he's going to be plenty heavy."
Henry threw the ladder over the side and shouted to Harmon to swim for it. We were still about two hundred yards from him. He was clinging to the shrunken gas bag that had been the Green Onion. It was now a small bubble of green silk, still visible above the surface of the water, but it had drifted far to our left. It was touch-and-go whether Harmon could intercept the rope ladder as it bounced and splashed through the water.
We kept our fingers crossed for the next minute as Harmon swam through the water with strong strokes. Henry paid out all the slack on the ladder that he could, and Harmon got there in time to snag it with an outstretched arm. The effect on The Head was immediate. We dipped sharply downward, and I opened the gas valves without waiting for Henry's signal. We must have come within ten feet of the water before The Head shook violently and veered upward, pulling Harmon clear of the water.
"Good work, Charlie!" Henry cried. "Hang in there, Harmon, and we'll let you down on shore!"
We could see one of the motorboats of the lake patrol starting out from the far shore to pick up the life raft and its occupants. The Head sailed serenely onward under its added load, with Harmon clinging to the lower rungs of the ladder. When we reached the sandy beach on the west shore of the lake, Henry cut the ladder loose and Harmon plopped onto the sand. A baked bean sandwich hit the beach right beside him, and Dinky Poore hollered over the side of the gondola, "Just in case you don't make it back in time for lunch!"
We rose rapidly again, clearing the trees and the low hills on the west side of the lake. We could see the fairgrounds dead ahead of us. Henry and I scanned the horizon for signs of the other balloons. We could see three of them still in the air, but they were all far back of us on the other side of the ridge of hills. Unless the sky fell in, we had it made.
As soon as we were over the last ridge of hills we started pumping gas out of The Head at intervals and tightening the yoke up to decrease her size, so that we could lose altitude gradually and glide right in to the fair grounds. With Henry giving the commands, we made a perfect landfall and skimmed in over the heads of the crowd about fifteen feet off the ground. We threw out mooring lines, and about a hundred people tried to get hold of them and tow us up to the officials' stand.
The band had started playing as soon as we were sighted coming over the hills from the lake. It was still going full-blast with the "Washington Post March"; and with the crowd yelling and cheering, and fireworks going off all around us, the noise was deafening. The balloon was being pulled in all directions at once by the crowd, and the pitching and tossing of the gondola got so bad that Dinky started to turn green again. Pretty soon he slipped quietly over the side and disappeared among the press of people surging around us. Finally Chief Putney and Constable Billy Dahr managed to fight their way to the side of the gondola, and escorted us with some semblance of order up to the officials' stand.
Mayor Scragg was waving his hat and beaming at the crowd, and Daphne Muldoon stood beside him loaded down with flowers. She was blushing, and trying to keep from giggling, and worrying about the wind blowing her hair; but she managed to hold still long enough for them to put a crown on her head.
When the speechmaking and the band music were all over, we looked around for Dinky Poore. We found him sitting in the back of Zeke Boniface's truck, talking to some reporters from the Mammoth Falls Gazette. One of them asked him if he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up, but Dinky shook his head.
"No!" he said. "I think maybe I'd like to be a railroad engineer—or maybe just a movie actor."
"Something's wrong with him," said Freddy Muldoon. "I had to eat his lunch for him, and he doesn't even want a milkshake!"

The Voice in the Chimney

Night Rescue

"If you want to find a needle in a haystack, you've got to be systematic about it," said Henry Mulligan. "Otherwise it's like looking for a needle in a haystack."
This didn't make much sense to Dinky Poore, who isn't the most brilliant member of our club. But Henry proved he was right, as he always does.
It was the day the Air Force jet fighter exploded over Mammoth Falls. A big search and rescue effort was being organized. But when Henry and I offered the help of the Mad Scientists' Club, Mayor Scragg threw up his hands and told us to keep out of his hair—of which he has almost none.
"We don't need your help," said the Mayor testily, as he wiped the sweat from his glasses. "Every time you Mad Scientists get mixed up in something it gives me trouble. Why don't you go home and leave me alone?"
"But we have a plan, Mr. Mayor…" Henry ventured.
"I don't think we ought to turn down any offers of help," said a tall man in an Air Force uniform. It was Colonel March, from Westport Field. "If that pilot is still alive he may not last through the night. It's going to get dark pretty soon, and we've got to call off the air search. Let's put these boys to work. I don't see that they can do any harm."
"You don't know these boys!" said the Mayor.
"Didn't they say they belong to an Explorer post?" the Colonel asked.
"They call themselves the Mad Scientists of Mammoth Falls. You figure it out, Colonel."
"Our specialty is science, sir," Henry explained. "Jason Barnaby saw the plane explode—right over his apple orchard, up on Brake Hill, while he was plowing."
"We know the pilot got out," said the Colonel. "The ejection seat is missing."
"I have a theory about where he came down," Henry said seriously, "but I'd have to perform some experiments, first."
"O.K." The Colonel was smiling. "You go ahead and make your experiments—whatever they are. When you decide where you want to make your search, let me know, so I can coordinate it with the other search parties."
"Yes, sir!" Henry said, smartly.
We headed straight for our science lab in Jeff's barn, with Henry spitting out orders to me.
Henry said he had to stop off at his house to pick up some stuff, so I left him at the corner of Carmel Street and ran over to Jeff Crocker's barn. At the lab I pushed the Panic Button. This sounds a buzzer in the house of every member and it means, "Get over to the clubhouse pronto, Tonto."
Fifteen minutes later Henry showed up with two black cardboard cylinders that he shoved into his knapsack. Everybody else was already there, and Jeff Crocker had us all lined up, checking our equipment.
"Sure took you long enough," Jeff said to Henry. "We're practically ready to go. Only we don't know where."
"I had to call the airport for some important information," Henry explained. "We're going up on Brake Hill above Jason Barnaby's place."
Henry grabbed Homer Snodgrass and sat him down in front of our ham outfit.
"You've got to stay here near the phone, Homer, so we can contact Search and Rescue Headquarters at the Town Hall, if we have to. They won't let us use their radio frequency. We'll take the portable transmitters with us, and when we get set up on Brake Hill we'll call you."
We have a big map of the whole county on the wall of our clubhouse, with grid squares on it, and Henry put a red circle at the place where we expected to set up operations on the hill so Homer would know where we were.
When we finally got to the top of the hill it was already getting dark. Henry had Dinky and Freddy Muldoon pace off the distance to two large trees he had spotted on the ridge north and south of us. When they got back, Henry made some notes in his notebook. Then he had me spread out a big map, just like the one we have in our clubhouse, and orient it with a compass so that the north indicator on the map pointed exactly north.
We set up the two black cardboard cylinders Henry had brought with him.
"These are Army parachute flares," Henry explained. "They'll go up about a thousand feet and drift with the wind. We can track them with compasses to get a good idea where they come down. I've rigged a little radiosonde transmitter inside each of them. If the flare burns out before they reach the ground, we can still get a compass reading on where they land, with the directional radio receivers."
"Do you think we're going to find this pilot, Henry?" Jeff asked.
"If my calculations are correct, we should find him," Henry answered. "I checked with Westport Field, and the wind is still the same as it was when he bailed out this morning. This flare should at least tell us what direction he drifted. Then I'll have to calculate how far he went before he hit the ground."
A few minutes later Dinky Poore was 'way up in the big oak tree to the north of us with a night compass, and Jeff Crocker sat at the foot of it with one of our directional radio receivers. In the other big tree to the south, Mortimer Dalrymple and Freddy Muldoon were stationed with the same kind of equipment.
Henry walked over to the big rock where he had set up the first flare and pulled off the safety clip. We ducked behind a tree when the flare shot off with a swishing roar, straight up into the sky.
It exploded in a shower of sparks, and a bright red, glowing thing dangled there on the cords of a tiny parachute. It lighted up the whole of the hill and the valley to the west of us, and half the lake could be seen as clear as daylight. The wind began to blow the flare, and it swayed and danced in the sky, getting brighter all the time as it drifted off to the west a little bit north of the lake.
It kept getting smaller and smaller. When it finally went out, Henry ran over to the map and jotted down the last reading he got on his compass. Then he got on the walkie-talkie and talked with Jeff and Mortimer. Both of them said they were still getting a beep from the little transmitter in the flare.
When we were all together again, Henry took down the compass readings each team had gotten, and with a protractor and a ruler he drew these bearings on the map.
"I still don't see how all this bunk is gonna help us; find the pilot," grumbled Dinky. "Why don't we go out and start searching?"
"We'll search," said Henry, "but if the experiments work, we'll know where to search."
Then Henry really started to work. He sat on a flat rock with a pencil and slide rule and reams of paper. Pretty soon the ground all around him was littered with paper, but he came out with a point where the pilot was likely to have come down.
It was a point in the hills about six miles west of town, where we all knew there was an old abandoned quarry.
Dinky Poore was sent shinnying up a tall spruce to place a flashing road lantern at the very top of it. Henry said we would use this as a reference point to shoot a back azimuth to, so we could check our bearings on the way. Freddy Muldoon was given the job of staying on Brake Hill with the ham outfit so we could keep in touch with Homer back at the clubhouse. We packed our bedrolls, walkie-talkies, emergency rations, and first-aid supplies on our backs and took off.
The sharp edge of a cliff silhouetted against the stars served as a good landmark to guide us until we got down off of the hill and into the woods. Then we could no longer see it. Moving through woods at night without losing direction isn't easy, but Jeff and Henry had it all figured out.
"The important thing," Jeff said, "is to keep checking your direction all the time. When you shoot a compass bearing, pick out a landmark as far away from you as possible. This reduces the chance of making an error. It's just like drawing a straight line on a piece of paper. If you use a long ruler, it's easy. If you use one only two inches long, it's pretty hard to make the line straight."
"What if it's so dark you can't see any landmark at all?" Dinky asked him.
"I'll show you in a few minutes," Jeff said. "We're getting into pretty deep woods right now."
Sure enough, we got into a place so pitch black we couldn't even see each other. Then Jeff gave us a demonstration. He called it "leapfrogging." He sent Mortimer ahead with a flashlight. After he was two or three hundred yards ahead of us, Jeff would holler to him to move either right or left. When his light was right in line with the compass bearing we were supposed to follow, we would all take off to the place where he stood. Then Jeff would send him out ahead of us again.
Sometimes we'd sight back to the light we'd left on Brake Hill, if we could see it. If we couldn't, we'd call Freddy on the radio and have him turn on the radiosonde transmitter so we could tune in on the beep our directional receiver. This way we could check on how close we were keeping on course.
We had a little problem when we got to the creek that tumbles out of Strawberry Lake. We couldn't afford to get our equipment all wet by swimming across, so Jeff found a place where the bank on our side was pretty steep. He slung a length of rope over the bough of a big tree that stuck out over the water, and had us shine our flashlights on the other shore. Then he tore down the bank like Tarzan and swung out over the creek. He landed with a squishy splash just at the water's edge on the other side, knee-deep in mud. But he was all right, and we now had a good stout rope stretched across the stream, as well as a piece of clothesline that Jeff had tied securely to his belt.
Jeff tied the big rope good and taut to another tree on his side and we ferried all our stuff across by hanging it on a loop from the big rope and pulling the clothesline back and forth.
The rest of us went across hand over hand, with the clothesline hooked to our belts as a safety line and the loop slung under our armpits so we couldn't fall if our hands slipped off the rope. We all made it in good style except Dinky. He's so skinny that he slipped right out of the noose when he lost his grip, and we had to pull him out of the water with the clothesline. He was sopping wet and mud from head to foot, and he wanted to go home. But Jeff made him take all his clothes off and we pinned a big blanket around him.
"The best thing to do is to keep moving around when you're all wet, so you can build up plenty of body heat," said Jeff. "Let's move out now. We've got to keep going."
"This stinky old blanket scratches!" said Dinky, sobbing a little bit.
"Scratch it right back!" said Mortimer.
It was just about midnight when we crawled to the top of a low ridge that we figured must be in the area the pilot had drifted to.
We found a small clearing, where we set our gear down and held a council meeting to decide what to do next. First of all, Jeff insisted that we build a fire in the middle of the clearing and bank it up well with a rock and dirt firewall so it couldn't spread. This would give us a reference point to guide us while we did our scouting, and also would make it easy to get back to the clearing. Besides, Dinky could dry his clothes out and get dressed.
"There's a quarry back there, and we don't know much about it," Jeff said. "Let's get organized before we start."
We decided to tie ourselves together, two and two, with lengths of rope, the way mountain climbers do, and be extra careful. We left Dinky to watch the fire and listen for radio calls from Freddy. Then we set off through the woods.
"When you come to the quarry, don't go too near the edge," Jeff warned. "A piece might crumble off and dump you right to the bottom. Henry and I will go along the left rim. You two go to the right. If you see anything, or find a way down to the bottom, call us on the walkie-talkie."
Roped together, Mortimer and I crept along through the underbrush. At the edge of the quarry we could see Jeff and Henry on the other side, shining their flashlights down into the pit. It was so dark we couldn't see much, but it looked as though it was about eighty feet deep and covered with scrub growth on the bottom.
Henry called over the walkie-talkie that he would throw a road flare into the pit. The flare exploded into a big hissing ball of red light that cast eerie, dancing shadows on the quarry walls. We could see that the west end of the quarry was completely blocked off by a huge stagnant pond of rain water that had collected there.
"Look! Look!" shouted Mortimer.
I followed his pointing finger to the quarry wall on the opposite side. Right below the point where Jeff and Henry stood on the rim we could see the torn shreds and dangling cords of a parachute hanging from a scrub pine that grew out of the face of the wall. Huddled among the limestone boulders at the bottom we could dimly make out a dark shape.
"The pilot!" we shouted at the tops of our lungs. "The pilot's down there!"
The next fifteen minutes went so fast I can't remember all that happened, but Jeff told us to go get Dinky and all the rope we could find and come back to the quarry.
We made a safety line out of the rope and sent Dinky over the edge. We could hear him scrambling around over the boulders at the bottom. Suddenly he shouted up to us. "It's him, all right! It's the pilot!"
"How is he? Is he alive?"
"I don't know," Dinky answered. "It's scary down here!"
We pulled the rope back up, and Jeff went down to the quarry floor. Then we took off to get the rest of our gear. We doused the campfire at the clearing and carried everything to the rim of the quarry.
"The pilot's still alive," Jeff shouted up to us. "But he's pretty bad off. He's unconscious, and I don't want to move him 'cause he might have a broken back. It's foolish to try and get him out of here."
We decided to move everything to the bottom of the quarry and leave Mortimer up on the rim, where he could keep radio contact with Freddy. While Henry and I worked with the rope sling, Mortimer tried to reach Freddy on the walkie-talkie. A woman answered.
"What's your destination?" she asked.
"Where's Freddy?" Mortimer asked.
"What do you mean, where's Freddy? Who is this? Number Seven?"
"Who are you?"
"This is the Ajax Taxi Company. What do you want?
"Please get off the air, lady. This is an emergency!"
"You get off the air. We've got a license for this radio."
"Forget the walkie-talkie!" Henry said excitedly. "Hook up the portable ham transmitter. Tune it to one four five point two megacycles. That's the emergency frequency that they're working on. Get the Town Hall direct and tell them exactly where we are."
The next hour and a half we worked like beavers. Henry and Jeff went to work on the pilot while Dinky and I set up camp on the quarry floor. Messages kept coming through on the radio from Search and Rescue Headquarters at the Town Hall.
The pilot had a fracture of the leg. Jeff and Henry made a splint from branches of scrub trees and my shirt. They moved the rocks away from him so he could lie flat on his back, and covered him with blankets. He was in deep shock. Jeff told us to build fires at three widely separated points in the quarry to serve as location markers in case Colonel March wanted to fly a plane over the area to fix our location.
"We can do better than that, Jeff," Henry said. "I've got a surplus weather balloon in my knapsack and a thousand feet of nylon thread. We can fly the balloon with a flashlight tied beneath it, and they'll be able see it all the way from town."
Henry's knapsack was a regular McGee's closet. He could always pull something out of it you never knew he had.
We had just sent the balloon up when a message came through that they might try to send a small helicopter in before daylight if it was possible to land anywhere nearby. Jeff sent back word that we would clear an area on the quarry floor and let them know when we were ready.
One light plane did fly over, and the pilot saw the balloon and the fires all right, because he circled back and came in very low over the trees. We thought the vibration would shake the walls of the quarry loose when he went overhead. He pulled up sharply and dropped something over the side. It came swinging down on a small parachute and dropped with a big splash in the stagnant pond at the open end of the quarry.
"Come on!" Jeff shouted. "Bring a flashlight."
He crashed through the underbrush and charged right into the pond. I got there just in time to catch the parachute on the surface of the water in the beam of my flashlight, and I plunged right in after Jeff. The pond was a deep pit and we had to swim, but we got to the parachute in time to grab the package before it sank. We got it back to shore and opened it. It contained four flares, some medical supplies and a note. The note told us that if they decided to try a helicopter landing the pilot would circle overhead and drop a parachute flare to light up the area. Then we were to light the flares we had, two yellow and two red, to mark the place the chopper was to land.
Jeff and I were dripping wet but we soon dried off when we all went to work with hatchets to clear the scrub growth from an area about fifty feet in diameter in the middle of the triangle formed by our three campfires.
It wasn't long before we heard the putt-putt-putt of the chopper's motor and the thrashing of its rotor blades. Then we saw its blinking lights over the rim of the quarry and rushed out to set off the flares that marked the circle it was to land in. They sent up huge billowing clouds of red and yellow smoke. It made a beautiful sight as the smoke caught the light of the campfires and the chopper hovered overhead, beating the air with its blades. We could see the pilot and the Air Force doctor looking down at us. The wind from the rotor blades beat our shirts and trousers back against us and made the smoke from the flares swirl around on the ground. The whole quarry floor throbbed as the chopper settled down. We had to turn our backs to it and run for cover to get away from the loose gravel and dust it kicked up and sent flying in all directions.
It took only a minute for the doctor, who was an Air Force major, to check the jet pilot over thoroughly.
"Somebody did a first-rate job here!" he said quietly. "You probably saved this man's life. Get one of those stretchers over here."
It seemed like a long time, but it probably wasn't more than fifteen minutes before we had the stretcher back on the skids of the chopper and the pilot wrapped snugly in blankets under the protective plastic hood.
The Army pilot inspected everything carefully and radioed in to Westport Field for wind and temperature information. Then he looked slowly around the rim of the quarry, where the dawn was beginning to form a faint halo of light. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and spoke briefly with the doctor. Then they both walked over to where we were standing.
"How much do you weigh, fella?" the pilot was looking right at Dinky Poore.
Dinky gulped.
"Eighty-five pounds, sir."
"I'm going to need all the help I can get to lift out of here. The Major is too heavy. I need somebody about your weight to ride the other stretcher on my side and help balance the load. Would you like to take a ride?"
"Sure… yeah… I guess so…!" Dinky scratched his head and looked around at the rest of us for encouragement.
Dinky was trembling a little bit when we strapped him onto the other stretcher and put the plastic hood over his head, but it might have been because he was cold.
"Tie me on good," he said.
Just then a call came in on the chopper's radio. It was Colonel March, at Search and Rescue Headquarters, telling the pilot to make sure we stayed in the quarry until daylight. A big H21 helicopter would be over the quarry in about an hour to take us and all our gear back into town. We all gave a cheer when we heard this, and Dinky held up two fingers in the victory sign as the Army pilot revved up his motor.
We lowered Mortimer and our radio equipment down to the quarry floor on the rope sling. Now that the excitement was all over we flopped down on the ground dead tired, and I think most of us fell asleep.
The noise of the giant H21 "Grasshopper" woke me up. Colonel March stepped out of it when it touched down. He shook all our hands and told us the pilot had been flown direct to the Westport Field Hospital, where the doctors said he would live.
The big chopper brought us down in a field back of Town Hall, where tents had been set up for feeding the search teams. Freddy Muldoon was already there, gulping down hot cakes and bacon. Another helicopter had brought him and our ham equipment down off Brake Hill. Dinky Poore was lying on an Army cot sipping lemonade through a straw, while one Air Force nurse held the glass for him and another one treated the blisters on his feet.
When we climbed down out of the helicopter, Mayor Scragg and some of the Town Council were there to greet us, along with most of Colonel March's staff officers from Westport Field. Photographers started taking pictures, and they told us there would be a parade in our honor at the air base the next day.
Mayor Scragg had to make a flowery speech, and Mortimer Dalrymple sneezed all the way through it, because his feet were wet. From what the Mayor said, you'd have thought it was his own idea to send us out on the search. But we didn't really mind, because the Mayor had run home from the Town Hall and put on his best suit for the occasion, and he'd got several of the Council members out of bed to come meet us, so we felt quite flattered by it all.
Besides, Colonel March told us he was recommending that the Department of the Air Force award medals for meritorious service to all the members of the Mad Scientists' Club, and this made us really proud. He also said he hoped we would think about trying for the Air Force Academy when we got ready to go to college, because the Air Force needs plenty of scientists.
We all had some hot breakfast in the Red Cross tent, and then they bundled us into hostess wagons to take us home. Mayor Scragg shook all our hands again and asked us if there was anything more the town could do for us.
Freddy Muldoon said, "Yes! How about another plate of fried eggs?"