Freddy and the Space Ship

by Walter R. Brooks

  “But I do breathe it,” said the owl. “It’s good air, contrary to what people on earth have always supposed. Take off that helmet; I’ll prove it.”

  “No!” Freddy yelled. “No! I will not! You must think I’m crazy.”

  “All right, all right,” said Whibley irritably. “I never argue with lunatics. If you like to walk around with a kettle over your head, go to it.”

  “But I have to,” Freddy insisted. “If this is Mars, the air would poison me in a—” He broke off. “Hey, what am I saying! If this is Mars—If! But is it? Say, look! Let me see who that is with you.” For it suddenly came to him that the fizzing sound the other Martian had made was very familiar. It was exactly the sound Mr. Bean made when he laughed.

  And sure enough, the light swung down and there in the beam was Mr. Bean’s face, with a broad grin on it, probably, though you couldn’t tell behind all those whiskers. But he was fizzing.

  Freddy’s mind was putting two and two together at top speed. The night when the space ship had spun around, and Uncle Ben had been afraid that he might have lost his way and be headed for the wrong planet. The landing in the forest of black spikes—which might be—what? A burned-over area on some other planet? But the trees, which were so much like earthly trees. And the four leafed clover. A burned area on earth? Or—good gracious—in the Big Woods?

  “Looks like you’ve got it,” said Mr. Bean. “Take off the helmet; we want to talk to you.”

  Freddy unscrewed the nuts that locked the helmet, then lifted it off—and he and Cousin Augustus took a good long breath of earthly air. “Then—then Uncle Ben did get mixed up after all?” he asked. “Got turned around and aimed back at earth instead of Mars?”

  “Must have,” said Mr. Bean. “You came down in the Big Woods, not a hundred yards from the Grimby house. Not half a mile from where you started. Hope you had a nice ride.” And he fizzed some more.

  “Yes,” said Freddy. “But—well, I’m pretty confused. Is Charles all right?”

  “Making speeches to the Martians, likely,” said Mr. Bean. “Bein’ Martians, they don’t understand English, so probably they get about as much out of what he says as I do.” And he fizzed some more.

  “Oh my goodness, Whibley,” Freddy exclaimed, “was it you that grabbed Charles and flew off with him? I thought it was some kind of a Martian dragon.”

  “Leave it to you to make a good story,” the owl grumbled.

  “Oh, all right, all right!” Freddy said irritably. “So I thought you were a dragon. So Uncle Ben aimed for Mars and got turned around and landed us back plunk! right where we started. I suppose if you’d been along, everything would have turned out all right!”

  “Well, no,” said Whibley mildly. “I guess I’d have thought we were on Mars, too. Matter of fact, when I heard you’d landed in the Big Woods, I thought what everybody else thought: that one of these flying saucers from some other planet was paying us a visit. But I was investigating Bismuth—he was up to something we’ll tell you about later—and when I had a look at you I knew who you were. I was following him the other night and when you shot at him and he ran—I guess you heard him yell.” The owl gave his steamboat whistle laugh. “I swooped down and tweaked his nose—I’ve been wanting to get a yank at that nose ever since he’s been around here.”

  “But there was something following him,” Freddy said. “Looked like a dwarf in big yellow shoes. Charles was chasing it when you snatched him up.”

  “Dwarf with yellow shoes, hey?” said Mr. Bean, and he fizzed like a leaky steam boiler. “That’s a good one! Don’t you worry about him, we know who he is, although we don’t know right now where he is. Well, we got kind of a scheme we want you to try. Tell him, owl.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  When Old Whibley had recognized Freddy, the evening the rocket had landed in the burned-over part of the Big Woods, he of course realized at once that Uncle Ben had miscalculated. For the explorers showed by their actions that they thought they were on Mars. But he didn’t tell them where they were, partly because he thought they were funny, clumping around the Big Woods in the uncomfortable clothes and stuffy helmets, thinking they were in great peril on a distant planet, when the only real danger was that they might fall down and bump their noses.

  Except when he was called on for advice, Old Whibley seldom mixed much in the affairs of the farm. But when any serious danger threatened, he would take action. The Bismuths seemed to him a serious danger; if they were allowed to stay on, it would mean bad trouble for everybody, from Mr. Bean down to the smallest chicken in the henhouse. With Freddy away and Mrs. Wiggins in jail, there was nobody who could plan any kind of a campaign against the Bismuths—although there were plenty of animals who would be eager to take part in such a campaign. Mr. Bean, of course, would do nothing because Mrs. Bismuth was Mrs. Bean’s cousin. Old Whibley got pretty impatient with him, and even told him so—which is more than any other animal on the farm would have dared to do.

  But Mr. Bean just shook his head. “They’re family,” he said. “What’s going to happen to ’em if I tell ’em to go?”

  Whibley didn’t say what he would like to see happen to them. He didn’t even let on that he knew about the conferences that Mr. Bismuth was having with Uncle Wesley, although the result of them was to be the flooding of Mr. Bean’s garden. And for some time he didn’t tell Mr. Bean that the rocket that everybody thought was a flying saucer from outer space, was really Uncle Ben’s rocket. But when he found that Uncle Ben and his crew all believed that they had landed on Mars, he went to Mr. Bean again, told him all he knew, and got him to agree to a plan for getting rid of the Bismuths.

  “Don’t like it,” Mr. Bean had said. “Don’t like plotting against my wife’s relatives, and specially don’t like playin’ tricks on my wife. She’ll be awful mad. But this tarnation Bismuth!—you’re right, owl, we got to do something. Well, let’s go get hold of Freddy.”

  Fortunately there was so much mud on Freddy’s helmet when he was captured that Mr. Bean was able to manage it so that no attempt was made to see what he looked like, by offering to take him down to the farmhouse and lock him up; and after they had got no answers to their questions the other men agreed readily. None of them cared to take charge of a live monster from outer space, armed with goodness only knew what dreadful weapons.

  It was of course dark when Freddy took his helmet off and looked around him, and he didn’t at first recognize the mudhole where he had been captured.

  “It’s the duck pond,” Whibley said. “One of Brother Bismuth’s little jobs. Dammed the brook and then turned it into a new channel down the west side of the woods so that it flooded Mr. Bean’s garden.”

  “Good gracious, that’s outrageous!” Freddy exclaimed.

  Good Gracious, that’s outrageous.

  “That consarned duck, Uncle What’s-his-name, got him to do it,” Mr. Bean said. “Not enough thick muddy duck soup on the pond bottom since the fire. Well, guess Uncle’s got good fresh vegetables in his soup now.” He sizzled faintly with laughter.

  “Must have been a lot of work for Mr. Bismuth, though, Freddy said. “He wouldn’t do it for nothing. Did Uncle Wesley pay him?”

  “Did it out of the kindness of his heart, according to him,” Old Whibley said.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Freddy said. “When you grabbed me here, I was watching somebody dig in the bed of the pond. I thought he was a Martian. Why, that must have been Mr. Bismuth, and I bet I know what he was after!”

  “Guess you’re right,” said the owl. “The jewelry that Alice and Emma kept there. Everybody knew they did; because Wes was always bragging about how valuable it was. Bismuth knew about it—”

  “Yes, sir,” said Freddy excitedly, “and I bet he was scheming to drain the pond and get it from the beginning. And when Uncle Wesley began hollering about the mud being gone, Bismuth jumped in and offered to help by changing the course of the brook.”

  “And he�
�s got the jewelry; we were just down there looking for it,” Whibley said. “Never mind that now. Mr. Bean and I are the only ones that know that Uncle Ben’s space ship is right back here where it started from. Everybody else thinks you came from another planet, and that we’ve captured one of you. Now suppose that you pretend that that’s so.” And he went on and outlined their plan.

  It wasn’t much of a plan. It was to bring Freddy down to the farmhouse as a guest from Venus or Mars or Neptune. “We’re sure that Bismuth has got that jewelry hidden somewhere,” said the owl, “also the money he stole from Miss McMinnickle. You being right in the house, will be able to find it. Maybe even get him to tell you where it is.”

  “Yeah?” said Freddy. “How?”

  “You claim to be a smart detective,” said Whibley. “Well if you’re so smart, figure it out. Don’t make us do all the thinking.”

  “Don’t you make me do it either,” Freddy said. “Well, I’ll try. I’d like to get him put in jail. But what would we do with Mrs. Bismuth and Carl and Bella the Yeller?”

  So they talked about it for a while longer, and when Freddy had at last agreed, they started down to the farmhouse. But first Freddy talked to the space ship on the walkie-talkie. He told them just what had happened. To his surprise Uncle Ben didn’t seem much disappointed. “Good thing,” he said. “Not fuel enough.” Which Freddy took to mean that if they had really been on Mars, there wouldn’t have been fuel enough to get them back to earth.

  But the others were not so well pleased, and Mrs. Peppercorn said that while she’d enjoyed the trip, she’d paid five dollars to go to Mars, and if this wasn’t Mars, she wanted her money back. She was satisfied however when Uncle Ben said he’d take her on his next trip.

  When Freddy told them what had been planned, they didn’t like it at all. “Hey, look, pig,” Jinx said; “you get all the fun, and what are we supposed to do—sit here in the woods and pretend we’re Martians? Because we can’t let people know we’re back, or that this is Uncle Ben’s ship—not while you’re playing tag with old Bismuth.”

  Freddy referred this problem to Mr. Bean and Whibley. Neither of them had thought about it; nor did a solution occur to either of them now. Freddy didn’t have any ideas either. So after a short consultation, he said: “We think that you’d better do nothing for twenty-four hours. We’ve got a plan, but we have to see how the first part of it works first. By tomorrow we can tell what will be the best thing for you to do.”

  Of course this didn’t fool Jinx, who knew Freddy. “Oh yeah?” he said. “The same old wonderful plan you always have. I can tell you what it is in two words: stall ’em along.”

  “That’s three words,” said Freddy. “Anyway, Mr. Bean says to do nothing for a day. You want to argue about that?”

  “No,” said Jinx. “No. But see that you think of something before tomorrow.”

  So Freddy spent that night in his own bed in the pig pen, but he sent Cousin Augustus down to the house with instructions to tell all the animals to stand by to help him, and that he’d be disguised as a visitor from another planet.

  The next morning he got out his make-up kit. It contained grease paints and false whiskers and such things which he used in disguising himself when being a detective. He thought for a while about what an inhabitant of another planet would look like, and decided finally that, as the creature wouldn’t look like anything you’d ever seen before, it certainly ought to look as little like a pig as possible. So he painted his face blue and stuck a heavy black beard upright on top of his head, and he took the rat tail mustaches that he had worn as Snake Peters, the cattle rustler, and made eyebrows with them. He wore his space suit, but he left his helmet off.

  After breakfast Mr. Bean came up to bring him down to the house. He walked out of the door and Mr. Bean took one look and started back. “Great earth and seas!” he exclaimed, and dropped down on the bench outside the door.

  It wasn’t easy to make Mr. Bean jump, and Freddy grinned and said: “Will I do?”

  “Don’t grin!” said Mr. Bean. “Too horrible. Do?” he said. “If you were any more so you’d scare me and Mrs. Bean away along with the Bismuths. You’d scare folks away for miles around. This here country would be a desert and waste. I dunno, Freddy; I dunno. Mrs. Bean has got strong nerves, but when she sees you comin’ in the door …”

  However, when Mr. Bean did bring Freddy in and introduced him as a man from Neptune, Mrs. Bean didn’t even blink.

  “H’m,” she said; “pleased to meet you. I suppose, Mr. B., this is the gentleman who came in that flying saucer? Suppose there’s no use my asking him if he had a nice trip.”

  “I haff—a—nize—trip—hat,” said Freddy, speaking very slowly in what he imagined might be a Neptunian accent. “I spik your lengwitch,” he added.

  “Lengwitch?” said Mrs. Bean. “Oh, yes—our language. Well now, that’s very nice; we can have a good visit, Mr.—Mr.…”

  “Captain Neptune, he says it is,” put in Mr. Bean.

  “I see. Well, Captain, we’ll try to make your visit a pleasant one. Have you had your breakfast?”

  “He doesn’t eat breakfast,” said Mr. Bean, who was afraid that if Freddy sat up to the table and ate he would give himself away.

  “I like try—earthy breakfiss,” said Freddy, with a reproachful glance at Mr. Bean.

  “Good,” said Mrs. Bean. “You just sit down in that rocking chair and I’ll fix you some. Though goodness knows,” she added, “there’s little enough to fix it with. Those Bismuths finished up all the bacon and all the pancake flour this morning.”

  But pretty soon Freddy sat down at the table and ate hot biscuits and maple syrup and apple pie and coffee. And when he had finished Mrs. Bean said: “Now Mr. B., you go do your chores and the Captain and I will have a nice long chat.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  Mrs. Bean asked Freddy a great many questions about life on Neptune, and from his answers she got the picture of a world very much like the earth. Neptunians lived in cities and worked in offices and factories, and in the countryside they had farms, where they kept animals: cows and horses and dogs.

  “No pigs?” Mrs. Bean asked.

  “Peegs?” said Freddy. “I not know ze peeg.”

  “Dear me,” said Mrs. Bean, “you have indeed missed something. I am sorry our pig Freddy is away; you’d enjoy meeting him.”

  “He is small animals—so?” Freddy asked, indicating a creature about a foot long.

  “Oh, no. Quite large and pink. Much too fat, of course. That’s because he is so greedy. He’s a very hearty eater.”

  “But is smart, ze peeg?” Freddy inquired. It seemed to him that Mrs. Bean might have thought of something nicer to say about him than how fat and greedy he was.

  “Oh, he’s smart all right,” Mrs. Bean said, “but not as smart as he thinks he is. But he’s a good pig, and we love him. He writes poetry.”

  “Po’try foolitch,” said Freddy, shaking his head, and hoping that she would have something nice to say about his rhyming ability.

  “Many people think so,” she said, “but I don’t agree. Of course, Freddy’s no Shakespeare, but he’s made some nice little verses. Like the one—let me see, how does it go?” She thought a minute, then recited:

  “I am smart and I am bright.

  When I do things, I do ’em right.

  There isn’t anything I won’t try.

  Oh, golly, I’m a brilliant guy!”

  Freddy sat up straight and stared at her. He had never written those verses. It was true that he often praised himself in his poems, but never quite as shamelessly as that. Mrs. Bean must have got him mixed up with somebody else.

  He had come very near saying so, but remembered in time that he was Captain Neptune. “Good po’try,” he said. “Is more?”

  “Lots,” she said, and recited another verse.

  “People often praise some man

  Who I know I’m smarter than.

 
; What’s he got that I ain’t got?

  I admire myself a lot.”

  Freddy was becoming more and more astonished. He had never written any such verse. He wanted very badly to tell Mrs. Bean so, to assure her that she was doing him a great in justice in quoting as his such conceited lines. Why they didn’t even scan.

  Luckily at that moment Mrs. Bismuth and the two little Bismuths came into the kitchen for their mid-morning snack of cookies and milk. When she saw Freddy Mrs. Bismuth gave one of her loud emotional yells and fell fainting into a chair, and Carl and Bella gave smaller yells and ran out of the room.

  Freddy had for the moment forgotten that he was made up to represent a Neptunian, and he was rather hurt at the effect his appearance seemed to produce. “These peoples crazy peoples?” he asked.

  “Well, they’re a little shy of strangers,” said Mrs. Bean apologetically. “Excuse me, I shall have to revive poor Ambrosia.” But instead of getting smelling salts, she went to the cupboard and brought out a large plate of cookies. These she began passing to and fro under the nose of the unconscious Mrs. Bismuth. And first Mrs. Bismuth gave a sniff, and then several more inquiring sniffs, and then her eyes opened and she sat up and a hand came out and seized a cookie. “Carl! Bella!” she called. “Where is your honored pa? Tell him, cookies!”

  Within a minute the kitchen was full of Bismuths, wolfing down cookies and pouring milk from a big pitcher into glasses. And until the plate and the pitcher were empty, nobody paid any attention to Freddy.

  Then Mrs. Bean said: “Ambrosia! Children! I want you to meet Captain Neptune. He commanded that flying saucer that landed in the Big Woods. We’ve asked him to stay with us.”

  “Where’s he going to sleep?” Bella asked, and Carl said: “He ain’t going to sleep in my front room.”

  “Now, now, children,” said Mrs. Bismuth; “nobody’s going to take your nice rooms away from you.”

  Well, Freddy knew that unless the Bismuths gave him one of the three rooms they occupied, there would be no place for Captain Neptune to sleep. And he knew that the Beans would never let a guest sleep in the barn. Which meant that they would give up their own room and probably sit up all night.