New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club (14 page)

        All of
us made for Indian Hill, and when we had scrambled to the summit we found
Mortimer and Homer trying to coax Dinky down off the rock. But he wouldn't
budge. He just kept scanning the horizon through a pair of binoculars and
muttering to himself.

       
"What's the matter with you, you little nut?" Jeff shouted at him,
when he and Henry had arrived. "Come on down here, or we'll come up and
get you."

        "Go
away!" said Dinky petulantly.

       
"I'm going to count to ten," Jeff warned, "and if you aren't
down here I'm coming up to get you."

       
"Come ahead!" Dinky pouted. "I'll kick anybody in the face that
sticks his head up here."

        We all
looked at each other. Dinky was peering intently at the horizon.

       
"Let him stay there til he grows up!" Mortimer said disgustedly.

        "If
you don't come down, we'll vote you out of the club! How do you like
that?" taunted Freddy.

       
"Yeah!" Mortimer chimed in. "We already voted you 'most likely
to secede.' How do you like that?"

       
"Very funny!" Dinky said with a yawn.

       
"Dinky, won't you please tell us what you're doing up there?" Henry
pleaded.

        Dinky
pulled his eyes away from the binoculars and stared at Henry for a moment.
"I'm looking for flying saucers," he said matter-of-factly.

       
Everybody laughed.

       
"Come on, Dinky. Be serious," Jeff prodded.

       
"I'm looking for flying saucers!" Dinky repeated.

       
"How many have you seen?" asked Mortimer.

        "I
ain't seen none yet," Dinky replied. "But I will."

       
Everybody laughed again. Then Dinky turned his back on us; but not before we
saw a big tear trickle down his left cheek.

       
"The kid's daft," said Mortimer. "He really means it."

       
"Look! He's crying. He's crying," shouted Freddy, jumping up and
down.

       
"Shut up! You big fathead!" Dinky blubbered, throwing down a handful
of loose pebbles.

       
"Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" Henry cautioned. "Let's not get
emotional about it. Dinky, if you stay up there in that hot sun much longer
you'll see flying saucers all right -- and pink elephants too."

        "I
don't care," Dinky sniffled. "I'm gonna stay here till I see
one."

       
"There ain't no such thing as flying saucers, you nut!" said Freddy
Muldoon.

       
"Yes there is," Dinky persisted. "You read about them in the
paper every day. People are seeing them all over the country -- everybody
except me. I bet I'm the only person in the whole world that hasn't seen
one."

       
"Cool it, man," said Mortimer. "Flying saucers aren't news
anymore. They're as old as the hills."

       
"Nuts to you," said Dinky. "They're the latest."

       
"Oh, yeah? I just betcha people been seein' them things for three thousand
years," Mortimer teased. "I betcha that Arabian that invented the
Magic Carpet started the whole thing. I been told people called him the first
Flying Sorcerer."

        Another
handful of pebbles came flying down from the rock, and Henry pulled Mortimer
off to one side to talk with Jeff. They whispered together for a minute, and
Jeff and Mortimer nodded their heads.

       
"Dinky!" said Henry, walking back to the base of the rock. "Will
you come down if we promise you that we'll build a flying saucer -- a real one
-- just for you?"

       
"Honest?" said Dinky, doubtfully.

       
"Honest!"

       
"Scout's Honor?"

       
"Scout's Honor!" said Henry.

        "A
real flying saucer that will fly?"

        "A real
flying saucer that will fly!" said Henry.

       
"That's what I thought you'd do!" said Dinky, and he slid down off
the rock.

        Henry
was true to his word. He had us all working like beavers for the next two
weeks, building something far better than anything we had dreamed of. Most of
us had thought he was kidding when he told Dinky we would build a flying saucer
that could really fly. But when we found out what he had in mind, we got pretty
excited.

        Henry
and Jeff drew up some plans for a real monster of a saucer. It was about twenty
feet in diameter and six feet high; shaped like a flat top, or one of those
striped Christmas tree ornaments squashed down. Henry explained that we would
have to build it on the principle of a dirigible, with a rigid, but very
lightweight frame covered with an envelope of balloon silk. Filled with some of
the helium we had left over from our last balloon expedition, it would have
enough lift to stay aloft with the added weight of a propulsion system and a few
other gadgets Henry had dreamed up to make the experiment more interesting.

        We
decided to build the thing in one of the old ore car sheds near the entrance to
the abandoned zinc mine up in the hills west of Strawberry Lake. Nobody except
us ever snooped around there, and besides, Henry figured it would be a good
place to operate from once we got the saucer built.

        We had
most everything we needed, except material for the frame. Henry figured that
bamboo would be the best thing, because it is tough and light and easy to work
with. But bamboo doesn't grow in our part of the country.

        "I
know where there's plenty of bamboo," said Freddy Muldoon.

       
"Where?" asked Jeff.

        "I
seen a whole load of new fishin' poles -- great big ones -- comin' in at
Snodgrass's Hardware Store."

       
Everybody turned and looked at Homer. Homer Snodgrass rubbed his nose and dug
the toe of one shoe into the top of the other. "Okay!" he said.
"I'll volunteer to work in the store Saturday morning."

        That
solved our problem on the bamboo. Saturday morning Dinky and I sat in the shade
in the alley back of Snodgrass's Hardware Store, along with Freddy Muldoon.
Every time Homer had an excuse to go back to the stockroom to fill an order, he'd
throw another fishing pole out the window, and one of us would lug it down the
alley to a vacant lot where he hid them in the tall grass. Homer had to work a
little overtime, because it took us until two o'clock in the afternoon before
we thought we had enough poles to do the job. Homer's dad was so proud of him
for working past noontime that he paid him an extra fifty cents.

        With the
bamboo poles we constructed two geodesic domes, twenty feet across, and then
mated the two together to form a flattened sphere. On top we added a little,
fat, circular structure that looked like a tank turret. Henry explained that
the geodesic construction, with mutually supporting triangles of bamboo lashed
together, would give us the strongest frame with the least amount of material.
We didn't need a lot of supporting braces inside, and could use the rest of our
bamboo for mounting the propulsion system and the other gadgets we wanted to
have on board.

        The
propulsion system consisted of two large tanks of pressurized carbon dioxide
attached to nozzles which protruded from the underside of the saucer. There
were two sets of nozzles; one set projecting horizontally, and the other two
pointing down at about a forty-five degree angle. With two solenoid-operated
valves for each tank, controlled from a central relay box, we could exhaust
spurts of carbon dioxide gas through either set of nozzles as a pair, or
actuate them individually in any combination we wanted to. In this way we could
make the saucer fly straight ahead, zoom upward at a sharp angle, or execute a
few banks and turns.

       
"We'll only be able to fly it when it's fairly calm," Henry said,
"because we won't have enough power to buck a strong wind, and we'll run
out of fuel pretty fast."

        We
mounted a bright green light in the turret, and over it we fitted an aluminum
cylinder with a slit in it. A little electric motor, powered by a dry cell,
would rotate the cylinder just like the reflector for a lighthouse beacon. We
installed a ring of clear plexiglass inside the turret, and cemented it to the
balloon silk that covered the turret. Then we cut windows through the silk, and
we had a first-class spook effect that would make anyone think the saucer was
sending out coded signals.

        Around
the perimeter of the saucer we mounted twelve spin rockets that burned a
mixture of zinc and sulphur. We could fire any of these by sending a signal
through the command receiver, and make the saucer spin on its vertical axis. If
we wanted to fire them all at once, we could really create a sensation.

        Besides
the command receiver, we installed a second receiver for a voice channel and
mounted two speakers in the bottom of the saucer -- "just in case we want
to broadcast messages to earthmen," Jeff explained.

       
"Once we get this thing up in the air, how do we get, it down again?"
asked Freddy Muldoon.

       
"Good question!" said Mortimer. "That shows you're
thinking."

       
"When I want an answer from you, I'll ask a more stupid question,"
Freddy retorted.

        "It
so happens that
is
a very good question, Freddy," Henry
interrupted. "Because we're going to have to depend on a good deal of luck
to get the thing back down and we may lose it entirely. When and where we try
to fly it will depend a lot on wind conditions. What I hope to do is launch it
from here, give it a little push from the propulsion tanks, and let it drift
out over the lake toward town. It should drift at about a thousand feet. The
zinc mine, here, is about five hundred feet above the elevation of the town; so
we'd have to try and bring it down gradually, by letting some of the helium
escape as we head it back in this direction."

       
"Pretty hairy!" said Freddy, scratching his head.

       
"And that's not all of the problem," said Henry. "We want to
make it do a few stunts while it's floating over town; but we have to make sure
we have enough carbon dioxide left in the tanks to push it back here. We can
save fuel if we have a light wind blowing back in this direction. But if we
have a crosswind, we just won't be able to fly it."

       
"Why not let Freddy ride in it?" Mortimer suggested. "He has a
lot of extra wind."

        Henry
ignored the comment, and Freddy curled his lip in disdain.

       
"Then there's the problem of capturing the thing when it gets back
here," Henry continued. "We might have to chase it all over the
hillside, even if we get it back down to the right altitude; and it might get
fouled up in the trees. It might even miss this ridge of hills and keep on
going toward Claiborne."

        "If
that happens, we could let all the helium out through the escape valve and let
it crash wherever it wants to," said Jeff. "We could probably get to
it before anyone else could, because we'd know about where it is."

       
"Seems to me they bring dirigibles down with handlines that they drop over
the side. Why don't we do something like that?" I suggested.

       
"We'll have to," said Henry. "I guess we could coil a couple of
ropes on the underside of the saucer, and cut 'em loose with the same command
signal that opens the helium escape valve."

       
"We'll stand a better chance of snatching it if we weight the ropes with
some grappling hooks, and string a few hundred yards of wire between the trees
up on the ridge there," said Jeff.

       
"Now everybody's thinking," said Mortimer.

       
"Yeah! Everybody but you," sneered Freddy Muldoon.

       
"I've been thinking too," said Mortimer, "and I've thought up a
name for this flat balloon. I move we christen it The Flying Sorcerer as a
tribute to my wit."

        "I
like The Flat Balloon better," said Freddy.

       
"It's my saucer," said Dinky Poore, "and I vote for The Flying
Sorcerer, because it sounds a lot cornier."