Mad Scientists' Club

by Bertrand R. Brinley

  Daphne and Homer had come up with a theory about the robbery. One witness had seen a rider heading up Brake Hill on the strawberry roan. They figured he must have cut off through the countryside, because he wasn't seen going through any other town. And if Elijah Scragg's horse was returned to his pasture the next morning, he couldn't have gone very far. He must have lived somewhere nearby, and he probably would have hidden the money somewhere until the affair blew over. The old Civil War cannon out at Memorial Point seemed like a good hiding place. They got more suspicious about it when they discovered three more stories in the Gazette complaining about vandals who kept trying to chip the concrete out of the barrel.

  "What makes you think there's any money hidden in the old cannon?" Jeff asked.

  "Just a hunch," said Homer. "It seemed like such a coincidence that it got plugged up the same week the bank was robbed."

  "You mean you think the bank robber hid the money in the cannon, and then before he could get it out again the Town Council sent a crew out there to plug up the barrel with cement?"

  "That's what we figure," said Homer, not so sure of himself now. "The money has never been found. We checked on that with old Mr. Willis down at the bank. Daphne's gonna do a story on the whole thing for the school paper and she figures she's got a real scoop."

  "It'd make a better story if somebody could prove the money was really there," Mortimer chipped in.

  "Bet that old robber was mad when he got back and found that cannon full of cement," Freddy observed.

  "He sure put it in a safe place," said Dinky. "I wonder if it's been earning interest?"

  "Just historical interest," quipped Mortimer.

  Jeff rapped his gavel on the packing crate again.

  "Maybe some of you geniuses can figure out how we're going to find out if the money's there!"

  As soon as he said "genius" everybody turned and looked at Henry Mulligan. Henry was just sitting there on the old piano stool, leaning back against the barn wall and staring up at the rafters. There was a reverent silence in the clubhouse. Nobody ever spoke when Henry was doing his thinking.

  Finally Henry let his stool come forward again and looked slowly around the clubhouse. "What kind of gun is it?" he asked.

  "My old man said it was a Parrott gun," said Freddy.

  "It isn't a Parrott gun," Dinky interrupted. "It's a Rodman. I can show you in a book I got at home. It tells all about the Civil War."

  "You're nuts," Freddy argued. "My old man ought to know."

  "A Parrott gun is a lot different," Dinky persisted. "This one's a Rodman."

  "I think I know how we can find out what's in it," Henry said quietly.

  Then everybody shut up. Because Henry was looking up at the rafters of Jeff's barn and had tilted his stool back to the thinking position again.

  Just then somebody burped. Everybody looked around at Freddy Muldoon. He's the champion burper in the Mad Scientists' Club, and everybody naturally looks at him when someone uncorks one. But this time Freddy was looking around too. His face wore a frown.

  "I think that came from outside," he said.

  Mortimer and I made a rush for the door. Sure enough, there was Harmon Muldoon, Freddy's sneaky cousin, just disappearing down the alley and rounding the corner into Vesey Street. We went back inside.

  "Harmon Muldoon's been spying on us again," said Mortimer.

  "I'll bet he heard everything we said," chirped Dinky.

  "That means he probably knows all about the old cannon and the money," groaned Homer. "Now it'll be all over town. Harmon's a big blabbermouth."

  "We'd better get moving if we're going to do anything," Mortimer urged.

  All eyes automatically turned toward Henry Mulligan. Henry was still leaning back against the wall, wiping his horn-rimmed glasses. He stood up and said, "Jeff, I think we'd better go see Dr. Hendricks at the university."

  Dr. Paul Hendricks is head of the Medical School at the State University, and one of the best friends of the Mad Scientists' Club. He was the one who helped Henry figure out where to hatch the dinosaur egg last year.

  "Are you sick, Henry?" Jeff asked. "How can Dr. Hendricks help us find out what's in that cannon?"

  "I'll tell you on the way there," said Henry. "Do you think your mother would drive us over to the university?"

  "I'll ask her," said Jeff. "What do you want the other fellows to do?"

  "I'd suggest they plan to be at Memorial Point about eight o'clock tonight," said Henry, "just after it gets dark. And let's not have a gang-rush out there! Wander out there one at a time, like nothing special was going on. If anybody sees Harmon Muldoon, lead him off the scent somewhere on a wild-goose chase. The less he knows from here on in, the better."

  "O.K., Major Mulligan!" said Dinky Poore, throwing Henry a highball signal.

  We met that night at the foot of Brake Hill. Everybody was there early except Henry and Jeff.

  "Why do we have to come out here at night?" asked Freddy Muldoon. "It's kind of spooky!"

  "Not so loud!" Mortimer cautioned in a whisper. "We don't want anybody to know what we're doing. And besides, we gotta think about Elmer Pridgin. He's always roamin' around these woods with that old squirrel rifle. I heard he takes pot shots at people."

  "I don't believe it!" whispered little Dinky. "Elmer's all right. People just don't understand him, that's all."

  "He's a little soft in the head, but he wouldn't hurt anybody," said Freddy in a hoarse croak, pushing his pudgy face up close to Mortimer's.

  "Oh yeah! How come he never comes into town? And what does he live on, out there in the woods?" Mortimer hissed.

  "He does, too, come into town!" Freddy argued, his voice getting a little louder. "He comes in every year to vote on Town Meeting day -- and he gets a haircut then, too."

  "Glory be!" said Mortimer. "Is that when he buys his groceries?"

  "He doesn't need any groceries," Dinky chimed in. "He raises his own vegetables out by his cabin. He can snare rabbits with just a piece of string, and he'll skin one faster shall you can tie your shoes. He's smart, Elmer is."

  "Very elucidative!" said Mortimer. Mortimer always likes to use big words.

  "Jiggers!" Homer warned. "Somebody's coming."

  We all dove into the bushes by the side of the road. There were two bicycles coming from the direction of town. Freddy, who's a little slow on his feet, was the last one to get under cover, and when he hit the ground he burped a real loud one.

  "Is that you, Freddy?" came Jeff's voice.

  "No! It's my uncle," Freddy answered. "We brought him along for laughs."

  "All right, let's cut the comedy," Jeff cautioned. "We've got lots of work to do."

  Henry and Jeff pulled their bicycles into the brush and we started up the hill. As usual, Henry had brought along a lot of mysterious-looking apparatus that we all had to carry, and he kept telling us to be careful with it because it was very delicate.

  "Has anybody seen Harmon Muldoon?" Jeff inquired.

  "No sign of him anywhere," Dinky puffed. "Maybe he gave up the ghost."

  "I wouldn't be too sure," Henry observed. "He might be up by the old cannon. Maybe we'd better send scouts up first, and stake out some security, too. What do you think, Jeff?"

  Jeff agreed. We all put down our loads, and Mortimer and Homer went on ahead to scout out the area around Memorial Point. They came back in a few minutes and reported everything clear. We went on up the hill then, with all our gear. It was misty that night, and there was a pale moon darting in and out behind the clouds. The little clearing around the old cannon had an eerie air about it. The tablet the town had erected at the mouth of the clearing, and the statues of the Confederate and Union soldiers, cast long shadows on the sloping hillside. The monstrous gun itself looked like some fat-bellied, prehistoric reptile, squatting on its haunches in the shadow of the trees, waiting to devour any unsuspecting victim that wandered within its reach. In the misty moonlight, the thing looked three times as big a
s it ever had before.

  "Gosh! I wonder what this thing weighs?" Mortimer gulped.

  "The barrel alone weighs forty-nine thousand pounds," Homer explained, "but they made some that weighed twice as much as this one." All of a sudden Homer had become a real expert in such matters.

  Jeff sent Mortimer and Dinky out to stand security guard at points where they could watch the approaches to the clearing from the road and from the path that wound along the ridge of Brake Hill. They were to give the hoot-owl signal if they saw anyone coming. The rest of us got to work setting up Henry's infernal apparatus.

  Henry clambered up on top of the cannon, near the rear, where it bellied out into a huge bottle-shaped bulge about four feet thick. He felt along the top of it with his fingers until he located the breech vent hole. Then he pulled a pencil flashlight out of his pocket and peered down into the hole, cupping his hand around it so the light wouldn't show.

  "What's he doin'?" croaked Freddy. "He can't see through that hunk of iron with that thing, can he?"

  "He's looking down the breech vent," Homer explained in a whisper. "That's the hole they used to stick the primer in to ignite the powder charge, but it's probably all rusty and clogged up now."

  Henry stuck his left hand out. "Rod!" he ordered. I handed him the gun-cleaning rod we'd brought along. He rammed it up and down inside the hole a few times, but it didn't go down very far. Henry handed it back. "Drill! Three-eighths bit with extension." I stuck a bit in the battery-operated drill we had and handed it to him. Henry wrapped it in a burlap bag to muffle the noise and inserted the long, slender extension in the hole. In a few seconds he broke through the obstruction that had stopped him and asked for the rod again. He pumped it up and down until its full length disappeared down the hole. Henry pulled it out, and his left hand flashed out again.

  "Hand me that long case," he said. "And be very careful with it."

  I handed him a long black case that was among the paraphernalia he and Jeff had brought. It looked like something you might keep a three-hundred-dollar fishing rod in. Henry laid it on top of the cannon and opened it. From it, he drew a long, squirmy-looking thing that glinted in the moonlight. It bent in his hands as he carefully inserted the end of it into the breech vent and fed it down the hole until he came to the place he'd marked with a piece of tape.

  "Clamp!" hissed Henry.

  "Clamp!" I hissed back, handing him a felt-lined gadget from among the of instruments he had laid out on a pad. Henry pinched the clamp into place so it held the long, flexible tube suspended in the vent hole just where he wanted it. Then he stopped to mop his brow.

  "Anyone coming?" he asked.

  "No!" I answered. "Jeff'll let us know. Let's get on with it, Henry."

  Henry mopped his brow again and went on with the operation. I kept handing things up to him, and I could see Henry was getting more and more excited as he fitted each piece of apparatus to the Rube Goldberg contraption he was creating on top of the cannon. The long tube he had stuck down the vent hole had two strands to it. Each of them was wrapped in some kind of insulation and had a finely threaded fitting on the end. Henry separated the two strands and screwed a shiny metal cylinder onto one of them. He had me connect a wire lead to it from a dry cell. Then he asked for the large black box that was sitting on the pad, and he pulled what looked like a very fancy camera out of it. He screwed the threaded end of the other strand into the face of it. Then he pulled the pencil flashlight out of his pocket and started checking all the settings. Finally he asked for the other wire lead from the batteries, and hooked it to a terminal on the camera.

  Freddy Muldoon, who had clambered up onto the gun carriage to peer at what Henry was doing, could no longer restrain his curiosity. "What's that crazy contraption, Henry? You gonna blow the whole cannon to smithereens?"

  Henry was so excited I could see his hands were trembling, and he was exasperated by Freddy's question. But he answered it patiently enough.

  "This is what you call a gastroscope," he explained. "Doctors use it to take pictures inside people's stomachs. Now if you'll keep your fat face shut, we might get a few good pictures of the inside of this cannon!"

  Freddy grunted and slid down off the carriage, muttering something about cranky geniuses.

  Henry took four shots with the camera. After each shot he would adjust the length of the flexible tube where the clamp held it at the top of the vent hole, so he could get pictures from different depths inside the cannon's breech. Each time he took a shot you could see a little flash of light escape from the breech vent.

  "How does this thing work?" I asked in a whisper.

  "It's really quite simple," said Henry. "This metal cylinder, here, is just a small strobe light. The tube sticking down the hole consists of two optical fibers, insulated from each other. One of them carries the light down to illuminate the interior of the cavity you're photographing. The other one has a small lens on the end of it, and it carries the reflected light back up to the camera. The camera aperture is the same diameter as the glass fiber, and the lens is a regular camera lens. It magnifies the image that the optical fiber sends up, and you have a regular photograph."

  "Gee whizz!" I said.

  "We'll soon know if there's anything inside there --" Henry said, "providing everything worked all right!"

  Just then somebody burped again -- a real rumbler. Jeff Crocker stepped out of the shadow of the trees at the edge of the clearing, where he had been standing guard, and walked over to Freddy Muldoon.

  "Listen, Freddy," Jeff warned, "stop that! One more of those and we're going to leave you back at the clubhouse after this."

  "That wasn't me!" Freddy insisted. "Honest, Jeff, I didn't even open my mouth."

  Jeff swung around in our direction. "Well, who was it then?" he demanded.

  "I think it came from over there," said Freddy, pointing in the direction of the east side of the clearing, where the statue of the Confederate soldier stood.

  Jeff dashed to that side of the clearing and poked around among the bushes. Then he came back to where we were standing by the cannon. "I've got a feeling there's somebody around here who isn't supposed to be," he said. Then he turned back toward the trees where he had been standing guard. "Wait a minute! I've got an idea."

  There was a caretaker's tool shed a few feet back in the woods, and we could hear the door of it creak as Jeff opened it. In a minute he was back in the clearing, trailing a long length of garden hose behind him. "Go back in the shed and turn the water on full!" he whispered to Homer.

  The next thing we knew, a high-pressure stream of water shot out of the end of the hose. To our amazement, Jeff directed it straight at the statue of the Confederate soldier. The full force of the stream hit the statue square in the side of the face. The Rebel cap flew off its head and landed in the bushes at the edge of the clearing. The statue lost its balance and toppled to the ground.

  What happened next we couldn't believe. No sooner had the statue hit the ground than it bounced to its feet, let out a Rebel yell, and high-tailed it down the hill toward the road. By the time we came to our senses, it had disappeared in the dense undergrowth of the lower slope.

  Jeff was laughing so hard he dropped the hose and rolled on the ground. We all got a good soaking before Homer could dash back to the shed and shut off the water.

  "That guy can run as fast as my cousin Harmon," said Freddy Muldoon.

  "That was your cousin Harmon!" Jeff blurted out from where he was sitting on the ground. "He's been waiting here for us ever since it got dark."

  "How'd you know he was there?" I asked.

  "I stumbled over the real statue when I went back in the bushes over there," Jeff explained. "I knew there were only two statues up here, so one of the Rebels had to be a fake"

  "Pretty sneaky!" said Freddy Muldoon.

  "Reminds me of 'The Purloined Letter,'" Henry observed. "Here we are, with scouts staked out for security, looking under rocks and bushes for snoopers, and H
armon was standing right in the middle of us all the time. I always did say Harmon was smart. You've got to give him credit."

  "Yeah! And that means he heard everything we said and knows everything we did," said Homer.

  "Except," said Henry, tapping his camera, "he doesn't know what we have on this film!"

  Before we left Memorial Point, Henry put us all to work rigging up some more of his infernal apparatus. From his duffel bag he took two round objects about the size of overcoat buttons and taped them to the underside of the cannon, where they couldn't be seen.

  "What are these things, Henry?" asked Freddy.

  "They're silicon infrared detectors," said Henry. "They're very sensitive to small changes in temperature. If anybody comes near the cannon, the heat of his body will be enough to set up a small electric current in them. We can use that current to trigger a circuit and start a radiosonde beacon sending out a signal. If we keep a receiver turned on back at the clubhouse, we can record that signal on a graph. If anybody comes nosing around here, we'll know when he came and how long he stayed."

  "How'll we know who it is?" asked Dinky.

  "I brought along some infrared film," Henry explained. "We can rig up a camera in the same circuit and get a pretty good picture even in the dark -- probably good enough so we can recognize who was here."

  "Jeepers!" said Freddy. "You scientists think of everything."

  We wired the circuit so the radio beacon and the camera were hidden in a tree back of the cannon, and went back to the clubhouse.

  Mortimer developed the pictures Henry had taken as soon as we got back to our lab. We all crowded around Henry as he peered at the negatives over a light box. The first two didn't seem to have anything at all on them. But the third negative showed something leaning against the wall of the cannon's chamber that looked like the leather handle on an old satchel.

  "We'll have to enlarge this one and get a good, clear print," Henry said. "I think I see something interesting here."

  Mortimer stuck the negative in the enlarger and turned out all the lights in the lab. He blew it up as big as he could, and we all held our breath as he brought it into focus. When he got it good and sharp, we could all see what Henry was talking about. The outline of the handle was very clear, and right beneath it, on the top of the satchel, was a metal name-plate. You could make out the initials easily. They were E.M.S.