New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club (18 page)

        We could
see two figures running toward the barn from the rear of the house as the
Sorcerer plunged down a steep, grassy slope, heading for a rickety cow shed in
the lower meadow. It hit the shed and cows started scattering in all
directions. Then we lost sight of the whole spectacle as the lane turned behind
a wooded hillock. I jabbed Zeke in the ribs.

       
"Take that wagon road up to Chestnut Hill," I shouted. "Maybe we
can get out in front of her and grab her when she hits the slope. She hasn't
got enough lift to get over the hill."

        All the
guys in the back of the truck had their heads sticking out around the edge of
the tarpaulin as we jounced along the wagon road that twisted up the slope of
the hill. We were about halfway up when two blasts from what sounded like a
shotgun echoed among the sawed-off tree stumps that dotted the crest of the
hill.

       
"Stop here!" I shouted to Zeke, and Richard the Deep Breather
shuddered to a full stall as he slammed on the brakes.

        We all
scrambled out of the truck, clambered through the barbed wire fence that
separated the road from the pasture, and headed for a clump of big juniper
bushes about twenty yards away. Two more shotgun blasts split the air, and we
stuck our heads up above the juniper to see Joel Prendergast puffing and
stumbling up the slope of the hill, blasting away at the Sorcerer whenever he
could get within range. His wife was farther down the slope with a big stick in
her hand, hoping to scare off their huge Holstein bull, who was snorting and
pawing the ground, trying to find a way up to where all the excitement was.
Their hired hand was floundering around somewhere to the rear of the bull,
managing to keep out of the action and still look busy.

        We
crouched there behind the bush, wanting to dash out and save the Sorcerer, but
knowing that we might get a seat full of buckshot if we did. We watched,
helpless, as Joel Prendergast unloaded two more barrels and blasted a gaping
hole in the side of the craft. The last of the helium escaped with a whoosh,
and the once proud Sorcerer came crashing to the ground. You could hear the
bamboo struts snapping loose inside her.

        Just
then the Holstein bull raised his nose in the air and gave out with a bellow
that left no doubt of his intention. He pawed the ground twice, snorted loudly,
then charged headlong up the slope toward the Sorcerer. Mrs. Prendergast
scampered out of the way, and Joel barely made it to safety behind an
outcropping of granite as a pair of flashing horns mounted on fourteen hundred
pounds of muscle zipped past him and plowed head on into the fragile silk and
bamboo hull. He went right through it, of course, and it collapsed around him.
He was still bellowing and thrashing around inside the thing, trying to get his
horns loose, when we crawled away from the juniper and made our way back
through the pasture fence.

       
"What a mess!" said Mortimer Dalrymple, after we had gotten through
the fence. "If that bull had any sense he'd have known that saucer might
be full of little green men with death-ray guns, and all that stuff."

       
"That's what ignorance will do to you," said Henry. "You can't
fool anybody who's really stupid."

        Dinky
Poore was blubbering, like he usually does when one of our projects comes a
cropper; but this time it was worse, because he always felt The Flying Sorcerer
had been built just for him and he had a very personal attachment to it. Homer
Snodgrass tried to comfort him, but Dinky pushed him away.

       
"Phew! You stink!" he said.

        "I
do not!" Homer protested.

       
"Oh, yes you do," said Freddy Muldoon. "You sure don't smell
like no rose."

        "I
must've stepped in something bad!" said Homer, trying to inspect his shoes
in the darkness.

        "I
think you sat in it!" said Mortimer Dalrymple. "Just for that you'll
have to ride on the running board. You're not getting in the back of the truck
with
me
."

       
"Me, neither!" said Freddy Muldoon.

        So Homer
rode home standing up on the running board, while the rest of us stretched out
in the back of Richard the Deep Breather and dreamed about real flying saucers
and imaginary bulls.

The Great Confrontation

© 1968 by Bertrand R. Brinley
Illustrations by Charles Geer

I
T
WAS WAR
! Total war! Harmon Muldoon's gang
had invaded practically every secret haunt of the Mad Scientists' Club.

        We
didn't mind so much when they started using the council ring on Indian Hill for
their so-called secret meetings, because we could spy on them whenever we
wanted to. And we really didn't care about them trying to rig up the old
Harkness mansion with a lot of hoked-up gimmicks that were supposed to scare
people. We had already gotten our laughs out of that one, and we knew that
nobody in town really believed the place was haunted.

       
"They're just a buncha cheap copycats!" Dinky Poore had sneered, when
we first heard about what they were doing.

        But we
began to get worried when we discovered they had taken the rusty old handcar
out of the zinc mine and dumped it into the river where the big bend curves eastward
about eight miles down the track. And finally, we knew they were bent on
deliberate harassment when they raided our clubhouse in Jeff Crocker's barn
early one Saturday morning and kidnapped Dinky and Harmon's cousin, Freddy
Muldoon.

        Jeff was
the first one to learn of it, when he went out to the barn to do some work on a
chemistry experiment he and Henry Mulligan were smelling the place up with. He
didn't exactly find a ransom note, but you could call it the same thing. It was
a message Harmon Muldoon had taped on one of our recorders, and then tapped
into the circuit for opening our clubhouse door. The volume was turned on full
blast.

        To get
into our clubhouse you have to know the diabolical system Henry Mulligan
devised for springing the lock. First, you have to know where the photoelectric
beam is located, and then you have to trigger it by intercepting the beam with
your hand in the proper code sequence. Henry could set it up for any
combination of Morse code signals, but this particular week we were using the
SOS signal (... --- ...). For a dash, you held your hand in the beam for almost
a full second. For a dot, you just flicked it through the beam as fast as you
could. After you had given the proper code signal, you could hear the lock
snap, and then you could push the door open.

        But
instead of the lock snapping open when Jeff triggered the beam, all he heard
was the loud raspberry that Harmon Muldoon opened his message with:

       
PFFFFFFFFRRRRRMMMMPPPPH! IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHERE DINKY AND FREDDY ARE, YOU'LL
HAVE TO GIVE US THE MIDGET SUBMARINE AND THE RIGHT TO USE THE COOL CAVERN. MAKE
UP YOUR MINDS, CHUMS, CAUSE FREDDY WON'T HAVE NOTHING TO EAT WHERE HE'S GOING.
LEAVE YOUR ANSWER UNDER A ROCK BEHIND THE CANNON AT MEMORIAL POINT.

        Jeff
kicked the door open, which wasn't locked at all, and hooked up the tape
recorder properly again, so he could rerun the tape. There were two things
Harmon Muldoon didn't understand, he figured. One was that the Cool Cavern had
been blocked off ever since a big piece of the ledge had broken off Mammoth
Falls, and the only way to get in there was through the underwater passage. The
other thing was that Freddy Muldoon never went anywhere without two bologna
sandwiches hidden somewhere in his clothing. He'd even been known to keep one
in his shoe. This made a pretty flat sandwich, but with Freddy it was the
calories that counted.

        Jeff sat
for a long while on Henry Mulligan's old piano stool, with one hand propped
under his chin, just thinking. Every time he shifted position and spun the seat
of the stool around, he made a mental note to tell Henry to oil the thing. It
squeaked like the lid of a used coffin.

        Finally,
Jeff got up off the stool and threw the switch that activates the panic buzzer
in the house of every member of the Mad Scientists' Club. As president, Jeff
Crocker has authority to call an emergency meeting without pushing the panic
button like the rest of us have to; but this time he felt it was important to
get us all together as fast as possible.

        While
the members of the Mad Scientists' Club were scrambling to their bicycles to
head for Jeff Crocker's barn, Dinky and Freddy were standing on the shore of a
small island way out in Strawberry Lake, shouting insults at a retreating
rowboat. Harmon Muldoon and Stony Martin were waving farewell to the two
figures on the shore from the rear seat of the boat, while Buzzy McCauliffe
pulled a steady oar toward a cove in the northwest corner of the lake. Dinky
and Freddy were still hurling abuses into the wind when the rowboat disappeared
around a rocky point a good mile away.

       
"Whatta we do now?" Dinky wailed, as the tail end of the rowboat went
out of sight.

       
"Wait'll I get my hands on that Harmon," Freddy muttered, shaking his
pudgy fist in the direction of the shoreline. "Just let me get my hands
around his neck just once, and I'll sure make his ears pop!"

       
"Seems to me like you had plenty of chance just now," Dinky observed.

       
"Yeah? Well, I just wasn't ready," Freddy grunted, as he took a
sidewise swipe at a small rock and kicked it thirty feet into the water.
"Oh boy!" he chortled, "When I get through with him, even Daphne
won't recognize him."

        Daphne
is Harmon Muldoon's sister, and she's pretty sleek. She's even prettier than
Stony Martin's girl friend, Melissa Plunkett. And her teeth don't stick out in
front, like Melissa's do.

        "Oh
boy! Oh boy!" Freddy muttered again through tightly pressed lips, as he ran
up the narrow beach and took another vicious swipe at a larger rock. The rock
didn't move, and Freddy hopped around in the sand holding his right foot in one
hand and bellowing like a mad bull.

       
"Let's knock off the comedy and figure out what we're gonna do,"
Dinky said impatiently, as he plunked himself down in the sand and adopted the
pose of The Thinker. "We're marooned, and nobody knows where we are,"
he added dramatically.

        Both
Freddy and Dinky can swim, but not very far; and the closest point of the
shoreline was more than a half mile away. Of course, Freddy can float forever,
but he doesn't make much progress unless somebody pushes him.

       
"Maybe we could built a raft," Dinky mused.

       
"With what?" Freddy sneered. "We ain't even got an axe, and no
nails or nothin'."

        "We
could build one if we had enough ingenuity," said Dinky.

       
"Injun what?"

       
"In-gen-oo-it-tee, stupid!"

        "I
never heard a' that stuff. Will it float real good?"

        "You
fat dummy!" Dinky snorted, as he threw a handful of sand at Freddy's head.
Freddy threw a handful right back and caught Dinky with his mouth open.

       
"Well, you're always such a big Indian expert, I thought maybe you had
something real good in your noodle -- like a birch bark canoe or
somethin'."

       
"How we gonna make a canoe, when we can't even make a raft?" Dinky
sputtered, as he tried to get the sand out of his teeth. "Sometimes you
make me sick!"

       
"Well, we can't stay here forever," said Freddy. "Pretty soon
it'll be lunch time, and I gotta eat."

       
"Whew!" said Dinky. "Is that all you ever think about? I can see
you risin' up in your coffin and askin' for a sandwich before they bury
you."

        "At
least I ain't skinny as you!" Freddy replied.

       
"C'mon. Let's take a walk around the island," said Dinky. "Maybe
we can find an old log that'll float, and we can drag it out into the
water."

        Half an
hour later they flopped down on the sand again on the same stretch of beach
where the rowboat had left them. There just wasn't anything loose on that
island that would float.

        Freddy
took his shoes off and worked his bare toes into the sand.

       
"Boy, that feels good. Hey! Why don't we build a fire and send up smoke
signals. Somebody'll see 'em and come out and rescue us."

       
"Nuts!" said Dinky.

       
"Why not? I've seen you start a fire with nothin' at all. And you know all
them Indian smoke signals too."

       
"Nobody'll pay any attention to any smoke signals," said Dinky.
"People are building campfires on these islands all the time, for picnics.
We'd have to set the whole island on fire before it would attract
attention."

       
"Maybe somebody would notice it if we built a big fire at night."

        "I
don't figure on spending the night here," said Dinky, as he jumped to his
feet. "I just had an idea!"

        From his
pocket Dinky pulled a scuffed-up leather marble pouch, pulled the thong loose,
and spilled the contents on the ground. Three beautiful agates, two steelies,
and a small red-eye rolled into a crevice in the sand. A little shaking brought
out two fish hooks, a ball of line, a GI can opener, and a bright metal object
with a hole in it that looked like it might be some kind of whistle.