Rick Brant 9 Stairway to Danger

by John Blaine

  Scotty grinned. “Now we’ve got a real mystery to solve.”

  “The clue of the squeaky hinge,” Rick agreed. “Except that it doesn’t squeak. Look, we have to assume that the same man, or men, uses both the gate and the board. What’s the board got that the gate hasn’t?”

  Scotty rubbed his chin.“Next question. I don’t know the answer to that one.”

  They were under the roller coaster now. Scotty pushed on an upright and it creaked a little.

  “Not very steady,” Rick observed.“Must have termites.” He traced the path of the coaster with his eyes.

  It rose into the air,then dipped sharply to the roof of the fun house. He recalled that an upper room had been a labyrinth, pitch black inside. It had taken a good five minutes to find one’s way in the darkness, and once or twice during that time the roller coaster had passed overhead, filling the room with a terrible thundering noise.Very scary stuff indeed, until you had been through it a couple of times.

  “The fun house is nearest,” he said. “We’ll give that a try.” He led the way, pondering meanwhile about the hinged board and the gate. He speculated for a moment, then suggested, “Suppose the hinged board was fixed first, then the gate was added later in order to let a car in?”

  Scotty disposed of that theory. “The hinges on the gate are a lot older than the hinge on the fence. That’s not even rusted very much. The gate hinges are thick with rust.”

  Rick gnawed at the problem the way Dismal, theSpindriftIsland pup, gnawed at a bone. He thought of many things and rejected them in the same instant.

  “I’d better stop thinking about it,” he muttered. “The more I think, the more confused I get.”

  Scotty chuckled softly. “Leave it in the oven for a while. Maybe it will turn into pie all by itself.”

  That method usually worked pretty well for Rick. If he stopped worrying about a problem, the solution often came unbidden while he was thinking about something else.

  He shifted his attention to the side of the fun house. There was a painted clown that covered the entire wall, with the words “Fun House” in crooked letters across his pointed cap. Once the clown had been gay with bright colors, but the paint was peeling and one eye was missing entirely. The remaining eye was forlorn and a little sad.

  “Wonder why the place went out of business?” Scotty asked.

  “It ran down the same time the summer residents stopped coming toSeaford ,” Rick explained. “They kept it open for a few years hoping to draw people fromNewark and the other big cities, but it’s too much of a drive for an evening’s fun.” He added, “Besides, I don’t think people care much about Page 20

  amusement parks any more. I’ve heard of two or three closing down recently.”

  They reached the building and Rick put his ear to a bare section of board and listened. There was no sound from inside. “All quiet,” he said in a low voice. “Let’s try the front.”

  They walked to the front of the building, making as little noise as possible. The main doors were closed, locked with a heavy padlock. Rick tried the door into the teller’s booth and it gave slightly. He cast a quick look at Scotty,then pushed a little harder. The door creaked complainingly.

  In a moment the door was open far enough to slip through. Rick stepped into the booth and looked around. He guessed that the door through which he had come was only a convenience, not often used while the fun house was open for business. Usually such booths were reached from inside the building, so there must be another door. It took him a moment to find it because it was only a half door that opened under a little counter. There was no knob. He pushed and it gave.

  Scotty had stepped into the booth behind him. He grunted with satisfaction as Rick found the door under the counter. “Go ahead,” he whispered. “I’m right behind you.”

  “Okay.” Rick’s heart beat faster as he crouched down and swung the door wide. Bending low, he went in,then straightened up in the fun house itself. Scotty joined him and they stood in silence, looking the place over.

  To their right, the giant slide rose from the floor to a sort of gallery. Rick remembered shooting-the-chute down the slide. It gleamed dully under a coating of preservative, probably a plastic spray. Next to the slide was the stairway to the gallery, and beside the stairway a huge door. The door led into a room filled with mirrors, he recalled. They were the kind of mirrors that give a distorted view, making you look twisted, fat or skinny, or like weird twins. To the left of the doorway was another stairway. There had been a sign at the bottom warning that the stairway was a trick giant slide, but the sign was gone.

  The big barrel was somewhere in the dimness to the right of the main entrance. The centrifugal dish that spun people off as it whirled was back under the trick stairs.

  “What’s upstairs?” Scotty asked in a whisper.

  “A labyrinth room,” Rick replied. “Perhaps other rooms, too, but I don’t remember them.”

  “We goingto search?”

  Rick shrugged. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the building. “I don’t think it’s much use. There’s no place here to drive a car in.”

  “Let’s take a look, anyway. There would be room for ten cars behind those stairs and the slide.”

  Rick started to say that the mirror room was behind the stairs,then he realized that one room couldn’t take up all the space. There must be others. He walked across the dusty floor to the entrance to the mirror room and looked in. There was very little light. The main room was bright enough because windows were set high in the walls, but in this inner room there were no windows at all. He wished for a flashlight.

  The mirrors had been removed. He could see in the dim light that the walls were bare.

  Page 21

  “I see a door,” Scotty whispered. He pointed to the rear of the room.

  Rick made out the outline of a door and moved toward it. Scotty was there first, however. He put his ear to the door and listened, then whispered, “No noise. I’m going to try it.” He turned the knob slowly, then pulled on the door. It opened with only a faint creak of rusty hinges. Scotty peered through.

  In a second he was at Rick’s side, lips against his ear. “There’s a car in there,” he said excitedly.

  Rick felt a shiver run down his spine. He stepped forward to see for himself. His nostrils twitched. There was an acrid, familiar smell in the air that he couldn’t place. He peered into the dimness and saw a car. It was a sedan, and it was black. There was no doubt of the color because a vagrant ray of sunlight came through a crack somewhere in the room beyond and fell across the car’s hood. It was a car, but not the right one.

  Scotty sneezed.

  Instantly feet hit the floor somewhere on the other side of the wall, out of range of the door. A man’s voice called, “Who’s there?”

  Rick froze. Then he realized there was no use of trying to run or take cover. Before they could get out of the park the man would get a good look at them. He decided on boldness.

  “Where are you?” he called. “We didn’t know there was anyone here.” He stepped through the door.

  Feet pounded on the boards of the outer room. There was a moment of silence,then footsteps ran toward them. In a second Rick was face to face with the occupant of the fun house.

  He was dressed in trousers and sweat shirt, and his hair was tousled. His thin face needed a shave. A white streak across his chin indicated that an old injury had left a scar.

  “What you kids doin ’ in here?” he asked in a rough manner. “Come out here so’s I can git a look atcha

  .”

  The boys stepped forward a little, hesitantly. The man cast a look over his shoulder,then changed his mind. He crowded forward, forcing them back. “Get out in the other room. I wanna see whatcha look like.”

  Scotty led the way into the main room.

  The man looked them over. “This here’s private prop-pity,” he grated. “ Whaddayawant? Whatcha after?”

  “We work next doo
r,” Rick said. He added, placatingly, “Sir.”

  Scotty spoke up. “We thought it would be fun to look in here. We didn’t know anyone was around.”

  “ Awright,” the man said. “So ya didn’t know anyone was here. Now ya know, so get out. And don’t come back. I’m the caretaker, see? I gotta job, and it’s keepin ’ people out, see? Now go on back where ya came from. Beat it, see? I catch ya in here again and I’ll bump yer skulls together, see? Then I call the cops and turn you in for trespassin ’. This time I’m lettin ’ ya off. Now get goin ’.”

  Page 22

  “Yes, sir,” Rick agreed. His glance warned Scotty not to make any trouble. “We’re sorry. We didn’t mean any harm.”

  “Yeah,” the caretaker said. “Get goin ’.”

  They did so, back the way they had come. As they hurried toward the project, they heard the caretaker moving around in the booth, probably locking up.

  “I would have to sneeze,” Scotty groaned. “But I couldn’t help it. Banana oil always makes me sneeze.”

  Rick stopped dead in his tracks and stared at his pal, eyes wide.“Banana oil! Of course! Scotty, that car”

  Scotty got it, too. “You’re right! They use banana oil in automobile lacquer. That car must have been repainted, and only a few hours ago! Otherwise we wouldn’t have smelled the stuff.”

  Rick increased his stride. They weren’t done with the amusement park, not by a long shot. Repainting a car in the back of the fun house could only mean that there was some good reason for changing its color.

  Covering maroon paint with black was as good a reason as any. Especially if the maroon paint had been scraped in an accident-a hit-and-run accident!

  “Wonder who the other guy was?” Scotty asked.

  “What other guy?” Rick had seen only the caretaker.

  “There were two,” Scotty said. “Remember how the boards sounded after I sneezed? Those were the footsteps of two men. Then there was a little delay, and I think that was when the second man got under cover somewhere so we wouldn’t see him. What’s more, the caretaker told us to step forward,then he looked over his shoulder and changed his mind. Someone else was in that room, all right.”

  It made sense. Now that Scotty had pointed out the caretaker’s actions, it made a lot of sense. Rick nodded. “And the second man didn’t want to be seen, either.”

  “We woke them up,” Scotty guessed. “We were quiet until I sneezed. They heard that and started to investigate.”

  Rick reached the board they had pried loose and stepped through it, Scotty close on his heels. “Maybe we’d better put a hinge on it,” Rick said jokingly. “We’ll be going back in again, won’t we?”

  “You bet we will,” Scotty agreed. “And not in broad daylight, either.” He turned and pushed the board into place, and as he did so, Rick let out a yip.

  “Got it!Scotty, I know why they hinged the board at the front fence! For a man on foot, that’s easier and faster, especially if he doesn’t want anyone to see him going into the park!”

  They shook hands solemnly. “That’s it,” Scotty agreed. “The quickest way would be for a car to drop a man off right at the fence. He could be inside in a matter of seconds, and if he took the precaution of not getting out of the car until the highway was clear, no one would ever know, even if he went in and out by day-light.”

  “And that,” Rick concluded, “means that our friend isn’t a caretaker after all, and that he has no more Page 23

  business in there than we have!”

  CHAPTER V

  A Problem in Cybernetics

  “We’ve got to be sure of our ground,” Rick said. “We don’t want to get Captain Douglas to send a cruiser without more proof than we have-not when he’s so shorthanded.”

  Julius Weiss and Parnell Winston nodded agreement. “It wouldn’t do to call for help without more proof than the odor of banana oil and a hinged board,” Winston agreed.

  “But how can you get any sort of proof?” Weiss asked.

  Rick knew the answer to that one. “If we can show that the amusement park has no caretaker, isn’t that reason enough for Captain Douglas taking a look?”

  Winston grinned.“Plenty.”

  Rick picked up the telephone and dialed the operator. “I want to place a call toNew York ,” he said.

  “No, I don’t know the number, but it’s a business firm: Michael Curtis Investigations.”

  Scotty handed him a pencil and a pad of paper. Rick wrote down the number as the operator recited it after calling Information. There was a pause,then the number rang. A girl’s voice answered.

  “Is Mr. Curtis there?” Rick inquired.

  “I’m sorry. Mr. Curtis is not in. Can I help you?”

  Mike probably was working on a case, Rick thought. “Can you get in touch with him?” he asked.

  “I can try, if it’s urgent.”

  “It is,” Rick said definitely. “Take a message for him, please.”

  “All right.”

  Rick dictated slowly. “Urgent you find out present status Seaside Play land, amusement park, locatedShore Road ,Seaford . Especially need to know if caretaker employed there.Park now out of business. Sign it Rick Brant.”

  The girl read the message back, promised to do what she could, then rang off. Rick turned to his friends.

  “That’s that. Mike is out, which means he’s probably on a case, so we can’t expect too much speed. I could go intoNew York and sniff around myself, I suppose, but it’s probably faster to wait for Mike. He knows how to get such dope in a hurry.”

  Page 24

  Mike Curtis, private detective, was an old friend who had worked with Rick and Scotty during the Sea Gold adventure. Mike had learned the identity of the mysterious and ruthless figurewho had not stopped at attempted murder in trying to take over the Sea Gold plant.

  “We might as well get to work,” Scotty said. “Need any hired hands?”

  “Just by coincidence, we need two.” Parnell Winston smiled. “Come on, I’ll give you assignments.

  Know what we’re up to?”

  “In a general way,” Rick told him. “’Dad described the thing to us, but there’s plenty more I’d like to know.”

  “You can ask questions as we go along.” Winston showed them a workbench. “That’s yours. You’ll find most of the tools you need. If any are missing, borrow from the technicians.”

  The new scientist found a sheaf of sketches and handed them to Rick. “Your father tells me I can turn over a project to you two and then forget about it.”

  “That would sort of depend on the project,” Rick said with a grin. “What is this one?”

  Winston replied with a question. “Did Hartson tell you about possible military uses for this thing?” As the boys nodded, he went on, “Well, such uses require that the control unit used by the soldier be compact, waterproof, rugged enough to take a beating, and cheap to produce.”

  Rick leafed through the drawings. “Just to give us an idea before we start studying these, can you tell us how the control unit will work?”

  “Very easily.The unit will be a microwave radio, operating on a wave length of one centimeter. That means, of course, that it will be useful only on a line of sight, since a centimeter wave acts like light. The operator will speak code words into the unit and the machine will respond. For the sake of ruggedness, compactness, and simplicity, we’ll use a printed circuit and transistors in a plastic case.Any other questions?”

  “Just one,” Rick said. “Is this a variable circuit? Will we need to tune the unit?”

  “No. We’ll use a fixed circuit for this machine. If the machine is acceptable to the Military, it will be a simple matter to vary the circuit as required.”

  “Good enough,” Rick agreed. “We’ll get busy. I suppose all the dope we need is in these papers?”

  “It’s all laid out for you,” Winston told them. “If you run into trouble, call me, or Julius.”

  Julius Weiss was back a
t work again on a complex-looking circuit, built into an aluminum frame about the size of a portable typewriter case.

  Scotty found stools and they sat down. The ex-Marine rubbed his chin. “Where do we start?”

  “By studying these papers,” Rick said. He proceeded to lay them out on the bench.

  He had never had an assignment quite like this one before, but as he went through the design he saw that it was not going to be a very hard job. It would require precise, painstaking work, but they could do it.

  Page 25

  The first step was to lay out the design of the printed circuit. Instead of using wires, this little control radio would use lines of silver, actually silver ink, printed onto a sheet of plastic. The condensers, resistors, and other parts would be glued into the circuit as required.

  “Not too bad,” Scotty said. “We can do it in a couple of days if we really plug away. But what’s this transistor stuff? We’ve never used transistors before. They must be tubes, because the places in the design where they go are the places where we’d use tubes.”

  “They act like tubes,” Rick agreed, “but that’s all. They’re nothing like tubes.” He searched for a simple explanation. “You know how a vacuum tube works? Electrons flow from the cathode and are made to do certain things. Well, to make them flow, the cathode has to be heated. You might even say that the electrons are ‘cooked’ off the cathode. That takes a lot of power, and it produces a lot of heat. Also, the cheapest way to make a tube is to use glass, either with the air taken out, or with some inert gas like krypton put in. Glass breaks, so that kind of tube isn’t very rugged. There are metal tubes, but they cost more, and they’re still subject to failure.”

  “I know about that,” Scotty said. “But where does the transistor come in?”

  “Well, if you take certain elements in the form of crystals-I mean, with crystalline structures-you find places where there are either too many electrons or too few. The electrons can move inside the stuff just the way they move through empty space in a tube, and it’s easier to make them move. It doesn’t take so much power. Now, if you apply a little current at the right point, between the part which has too many electrons and the part that doesn’t have enough, you can control the flow of electrons. Just the way the grid in a vacuum tube does. Is that clear enough?”