But Charles was not accustomed to having his words disregarded. And nothing is more insulting than to have your own choicest insults met with blank indifference. Without stopping to wonder why this was so, he gave a squawk of sheer rage and charged out into the open field at the little Martian.
Jinx and Freddy got up, but Uncle Ben told them sharply to stay where they were. “Rooster’s a fool,” he said. “Must take his chances.”
“But he’s our friend,” Freddy protested.
“Yeah,” said Jinx, “and if we go back without him and Henrietta hears we didn’t stand by him—boy! I’d rather be scalped by Martians than face that hen when she’s mad. Come on, Freddy.” But then he paused. “Oh-oh! Guess we aren’t needed after all.” For the little Martian had at last caught sight of Charles and started to run.
Charles ran after him. It wasn’t a very exciting chase. Charles was hampered by his heavy space suit, and his usual swift run became a series of clumsy hops. But slow as he was, he was overtaking the other, whose bright yellow shoes seemed to be so much too big for him that he kept stepping on his own feet as he waddled hastily towards the woods, half a field away.
“That little guy sure isn’t Olympic material,” said Jinx. “I guess Charles can handle him.”
The Martian, who had already fallen over his own feet several times, now fell again, just as he reached the shelter of the trees. Charles was right behind him. What he intended to do wasn’t very clear, for he could use only his feet and spurs as weapons, since his beak was inside the helmet. But before he could do anything, something swooped down upon him—a great bird, it looked like, but in the shadows under the trees they couldn’t really make out what shape it had. And it snatched Charles up and flew off with him. For a little while they heard over their walkie-talkies his frantic cries for help. Then there was silence.
and it snatched Charles up.…
The Martian had disappeared, but they were too horrified to notice. It was the last they would ever see of an old and tried—and sometimes, of course, very trying—friend. Of that they were sure. Even Uncle Ben was saddened by the catastrophe, though he and Charles had never been very close. Mrs. Peppercorn, however, made no bones about the satisfaction she felt.
“Noisy, gabby critter,” she said; “good riddance, I say. Place for him is on a platter with a dumpling tucked under each wing, but if the Martians are smart, they’ll parboil him all day first. Boil some of the oratory out of him.”
Jinx had said some pretty harsh things about Charles at various times, but this made him mad. “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Well, if the Martians catch us, I’ll see that they roast you over a slow fire. Though I’m sorry for the guy that takes the first bite. I hope he knows a good dentist.”
“No way to talk to a lady,” said Uncle Ben reprovingly.
“Well,” said Freddy, “it isn’t really any way for a lady to talk about our friend, who has just been carried off to a horrible fate by a whatever-it-was. What do you imagine it was, Uncle Ben?” he asked, thinking it would be tactful to change the subject.
“Dunno.” Uncle Ben shook his head. “Mebbe the big critter that whooped, last night.”
“Sort of like a dragon,” Freddy said. “Golly, I hope there aren’t a lot of those things around.” He glanced apprehensively towards the trees where Charles had disappeared. “No use chasing that little guy with the shoes now. Hadn’t we better go back to the ship and hold a—well, a sort of council of war?”
Georgie’s voice cut in on them. “You can’t get back now. The ship is surrounded. I’ve just shut and locked the door. The Martians are all around me. What ’ll I do, Freddy?”
CHAPTER
9
Back on the Bean farm there was a good deal of worrying going on, and Alice and Emma, the two ducks, were certainly doing their share. They had reason to. It had all started the day of the fire, when the Centerboro engines had pumped so much water out of the pond, and with it a great deal of the rich nutritious mud on which they depended for their three meals a day. At first they had been almost sick with worry, for not only was the mud gone, but they feared that with it had vanished all their family jewelry.
To speak of ducks having family heirlooms in the shape of rings and necklaces and brooches may seem odd, and it will no doubt surprise many people to learn that most ducks have quite a tidy fortune in jewels concealed in the bottoms of streams and ponds. Mostly these are things that people have dropped out of boats, though Alice and Emma had also a number of very handsome pieces that Uncle Wesley had collected in his travels. Among them, and perhaps the pride of the collection, was a string of a hundred and eighteen matching pearls with a ruby clasp which he had picked up one day while having lunch in a swamp near Syracuse.
For a time the ducks had kept these treasures in the vaults of the First Animal Bank, of which Freddy was President. But an attempt to rob the bank, though unsuccessful, alarmed them, and they had returned the jewels to the bottom of the pond. When so much of the mud had been pumped out with the water, they feared that the jewelry had been sucked out with it; but the pumper had worked at the northwest end of the creek, the jewelry, hidden near the outlet at the southeast end was, when they looked for it, undisturbed.
But after all, as Emma said, what good were pearls and diamonds when there was nothing to eat in the pantry? Now when they dived, their broad bills scraped along the bare stony bottom.
Uncle Wesley’s letter in the newspaper however had brought one result: Mr. Bismuth had read it and come to see him. There had been several conferences—what they had discussed Alice and Emma had not found out. But they were worried, for their uncle had gone off with Mr. Bismuth and had not been seen for two days. It was the day after he had left that the report came in that a ship full of wild-eyed and ferocious creatures from another world had landed a few miles north of the farm. Alice and Emma shook their heads sorrowfully over it. “Poor Uncle,” Alice said, “it would be just like him to try to capture these dreadful people single-handed.”
“I know,” said Emma. “He would have been too proud to hide from them. I have sometimes wished that he was not quite so courageous.”
They were both sure that the pompous little fraud had died a hero’s death.
But nobody so far had seen anything of the visitors from outer space. The state troopers refused to take any stock in the report that a space ship had landed; they wouldn’t even go look for it in the woods north of the farm. “It’s just another of those flying saucer yarns,” they said, when Mr. Bean insisted that he had seen it himself. “If these things have landed on the earth, where are they?”
Mr. Margarine, however, the city man who owned the place just west of the Bean farm, had seen the ship, and he and his chauffeur, and Mr. Bean and Zenas Witherspoon and the Macy boys and some of the other farmers patrolled the woods, armed with rifles and shotguns. They had all seen the ship, or claimed to, but they hadn’t ventured very close to it.
It was John, the fox who spent his summers on the Bean farm, that told the ducks of having seen one of the visitors. “I was up in Witherspoon’s pasture,” he said, “and I looked over towards the woods—it was raining and I couldn’t see very well—but this thing came out to the edge of the woods. It looked—well it looked more like a toadstool than anything, although it had legs and walked on ’em.”
“How dreadful!” said Alice, and Emma murmured faintly: “Oh, mercy!”
“It looked as if it was made of dark metal,” John continued. “Or maybe it is the stuff ants and beetles are made of, shiny and black—”
At this point Emma fainted.
At this point Emma fainted.
When Alice had brought her round, John had discreetly left.
And then two days after Uncle Wesley’s disappearance, the brook that fed the pond stopped running. It stopped as abruptly as if someone had turned off a faucet, and when the water had all run out the other end the bottom lay exposed and drying in the sun. The mud at the outlet end
dried and cracked, and here and there in the cracks you could see the yellow of gold or the flash of a diamond.
The ducks just sat on the bank and cried, and the tears ran down each side of their yellow bills and splashed on the grass. But at last Alice sat up and dabbed at her eyes with a burdock leaf. “Come, sister,” she said; “this is unworthy of us. What would dear Uncle Wesley say?”
“He would say what he always said,” Emma replied: “that we were a pair of silly females. That we just sat down and sniffled when we ought to be up and doing. And he was right, sister.”
“He was always right, dear Uncle Wesley,” said Alice. “Be up and doing—that was his motto.”
“Yes it was, sister. But—” Emma hesitated. “Well, we’re up, but I don’t know what comes next. What could we be doing that would be any good? Oh, I do wish Uncle were here!” And she began to cry again.
“Now, now,” said a voice behind them. “In trouble? Tell old Bismuth all about it. Yes sir—ha, ha!—Bring your troubles to Bismuth; he’ll straighten ’em out for you.”
The ducks had heard enough about Mr. Bismuth to suspect that people who brought their troubles to him just exchanged them for worse ones. Also, they were much too ladylike to discuss private affairs with anyone except their uncle—which may explain why their affairs were often so badly snarled up.
But Mr. Bismuth knew what the trouble was without their saying anything. “Water, eh? Gone to make mud somewhere else, I guess. Well, that’s an easy one. If you want mud, mud won’t come to you, so go where the mud is. Hey? Well, come along; I’ll show you.”
The ducks didn’t really believe that he was going to be much help, but when you say “mud” to a duck it’s the same as saying “ice cream” to a boy. So they followed him across along the southern edge of the woods a ways, then down towards where in a little depression in the meadow Mr. Bean had planted a vegetable garden. Only now, instead of vegetables, there was just water. It had made a pond out of the garden. It flowed in as a new little brook that came out of the woods, and at the lower end it flowed out again, joining the old bed of the brook a little farther down.
“Why this is dreadful!” Alice exclaimed. “All Mr. Bean’s lovely vegetables! Oh, dear me!”
“But this must be our brook,” said Emma. “How did it get over here?”
“Don’t anybody know,” said Mr. Bismuth. “No, sir; some say one thing and some another. Some say the brook got tired of running in the same old channel and kind of struck out for itself. Ha, ha! Went explorin’, like. And other folks, they think that the fishes in the brook were the ones got tired of swimmin’ up and down between the same old banks, and just started off cross lots, and the water had to follow ’em.”
Alice and Emma didn’t like to be teased, especially by a comparative stranger like Mr. Bismuth. “There is no need to insult our intelligence with silly stories,” Emma said with dignity. “If you don’t know, kindly say so.”
“I apologize, I apologize,” he said. “A Bismuth will have his joke, you know—ha, ha! Sorry if it displeases you. Matter of fact, nobody knows what happened to the brook. Some think these flying saucer folks changed its course. Maybe we’ll find out if we ain’t all killed in the next day or so.”
Emma said: “Oh, dear!” in a faint voice, but Alice said: “Perhaps you can tell us, sir, if there is any news of our Uncle Wesley. He went away with you, we believe. Did he return with you?”
“Wesley? Wesley?” Mr. Bismuth looked down at the ground frowning, as if in deep thought. At least that was the impression he intended to give, though with his nose twisted so far to the left he looked, as Alice said afterwards, rather as if he was listening to see if he was going to sneeze. “No,” he said. “Don’t remember the name. Your uncle, you say?” But before they could protest he pulled out a large nickel watch and examined it. “Dear me, I’m afraid I’m late. Should have been there an hour ago. Bismuth’s always absent-minded, very. Ha, ha! Excuse me, ladies.” And he turned and hurried off.
“Well, that’s very abrupt, I must say,” Alice remarked.
“A most offensive manner, with his ill-timed witticisms,” said Emma. “I know what Uncle Wesley would say.”
Alice nodded. “Yes. Hardly a gentleman, I think dear uncle would feel. Yet I suspect that he knows something. Well, sister, I suppose we can only wait. And meanwhile—dear me, it’s very uncomfortable on this dry grass. Of course Mr. Bean wouldn’t like to have us in his garden, but it’s scarcely a garden now, is it? I really don’t think he’d mind.” And she waddled down into the water. After looking around rather doubtfully, Emma followed her.
They swam around for a while, and dove to explore the bottom. “I can’t say I care for this new mud,” Alice said. “Such an odd flavor.”
“It does taste queer,” Emma agreed. “Not really the sort of thing we’re used to.” She came up a minute later with a limp tomato plant in her bill. “Oh, poor Mr. Bean!” she said. “His lovely garden, all drowned. You know,” she said, “in a way I’m relieved that Uncle Wesley isn’t here. I just found a—forgive me for mentioning it, sister—an angleworm.” They both shuddered delicately. “Not that I mind them, really—I suppose they’re quite nourishing. But you know how particular he was about his food. Merely the thought of one made him quite ill.”
A deep voice in the tree overhanging the pool said sarcastically: “Just how I feel about him, pompous little squirt.”
The ducks looked up and saw old Whibley, the owl, perched on a lower branch.
Emma said hufflily: “You would not dare speak slightingly of Uncle Wesley, were he here to defend himself.”
“Well, why isn’t he here?” said Whibley. “Pistols for two in the cold dawn, hey? Fine! I’ll fight a duel with him—any weapons he chooses: pistols, swords, war clubs, coke bottles, or just beaks and claws. Well, where is he?”
“You are very bold,” said Alice, “when you know quite well he is not here.”
“Went off with old busy Bismuth, didn’t he?” the owl asked. “D’you know where they went, or why? Or what they were having all those conferences together about?”
“We see no reason why we should answer these questions about Uncle Wesley’s private affairs,” said Emma. And Alice said: “Indeed, they are highly improper.”
“Oh, be yourselves!” said Whibley impatiently. “I know the answers. I’m just trying to find out if you do. Because if you do, you’re in trouble. Same as your silly old uncle. You—”
“I think we do not have to listen to this, sister,” said Emma with a toss of her head. The ducks turned their backs and swam off.
“Oh, wait, wait!” Whibley called after them.
“Don’t be so darned ladylike.—Oh, all right,” he said as they continued to move away from him. He dropped from the branch and floated on his big silent wings across over their heads. “If you and old Wes got Bismuth to monkey with the brook, and bring it down here so you’d have more mud, you’re going to have Mr. Bean in your hair. Or in your feathers. Which will probably be stuffing one of the spare room pillows by next fall.” His wings beat lazily and he drifted off towards the woods.
Emma turned anxiously to her sister. “What do you suppose he meant? Do you think Mr. Bismuth really changed the course of the brook?”
But Alice just tossed her head old maidishly and said: “I don’t think anything he could say would be worth listening to. Not after those slighting remarks about Uncle.”
“No, I suppose not,” Emma agreed. “He’s always so sarcastic. I suppose it comes from sitting up so late nights.”
They paddled along, quacking quiet agreement that the owl was indeed rather an undesirable character, and certainly a bad example to the younger animals on the farm.
CHAPTER
10
Back in the space ship, Georgie felt pretty much alone. As soon as he had seen figures moving stealthily among the black spikes around the ship, he had reported to his friends, and at their suggestion had closed and lock
ed the door.
“We can’t get back to the ship while you are being besieged,” Freddy said, “but I think maybe we can drive the Martians away. After dark we’ll try some of the Big Bangs. That ought to scare ’em off.”
Among the things that they had brought along to trade with the Martians were several dozen of the Benjamin Bean Increasingly Loud Explosive Alarm Clocks, known as “Big Bangs” to the trade. This clock was one of Uncle Ben’s less successful inventions. It shot off a series of firecrackers at two minute intervals, each louder than the last—the idea being that a light sleeper would be roused easily by the first mild bang, a heavy sleeper by some later and heavier bang, and the really lazy person, who kept turning over after each bang and trying to go to sleep again, would be lifted right out of bed by the final bang, which was a jim-dandy. The only trouble with the clock was that frequently the final bang blew it to pieces, scattering little brass wheels all over the bedroom. And nobody wants to buy an alarm clock that can’t be used more than once. So Uncle Ben had a lot of them on his hands.
Now they picked up the Big Bangs, leaving the other trade goods where they were spread out on the grass, and crept cautiously back towards the ship. They had gone only a little way when Georgie’s voice came again into their ear phones. “Mrs. Wurz. just phoned again,” he said. “She says the brook—you know, the one that comes down through the woods into the duck pond—well, it has stopped running into the pond and it’s coming down along the west side of the woods and flooding Mr. Bean’s garden. It’s going to spoil all the vegetables. They think those flying saucer people did it, but they don’t know why. Some think the farm will be attacked next.”
“I think we ought to get home,” Freddy said. “We mustn’t let Mr. Bean down. And since the Martians don’t seem to want to trade peaceably, we’ll have to come back again with more guns and things. We can’t fight ’em with what we’ve got.”
Freddy and the Space Ship Page 6
