by Jay Williams
“First thing in the morning, then,” said Irene.
“Yes. First thing. I’ll go phone Joe.”
Irene closed the window. Through the pane, she cast one more glance at the moon, round and gleaming, with the silvery edge of the big cloud closing in on it.
“When the moon is full, he turns into a monster,” she whispered. She shuddered, and turned away quickly. “Joe really shouldn’t watch such childish programs,” she said.
* * * * *
Danny spent a restless and uncomfortable night, worrying about the Professor’s machine, and, when he slept, dreaming of Mr. Elswing turning into a werewolf in the moonlight and gnawing on the dial of a barometer. He awoke feeling as if he hadn’t had any rest at all, splashed cold water on his face, dressed carelessly, and went down to breakfast. He was trying so hard to remember the exact spot where the machine had fallen over that he absent-mindedly asked his mother to give him another fried nozzle.
Irene joined him in front of the house, and they walked up to the corner of Washington Avenue, where they met Joe.
“Bad morning to you both,” Joe grunted. “More trouble, and more trouble. Now it’s clouding over. It’ll probably rain and we’ll get soaked.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad, Joe,” said Irene. “Everybody’s hoping that it will rain.”
“Sure. Me, too. But not when I’m stumbling around outside that weather station. Suppose Mr. Elswing is in a murderous mood today? I remember a movie in which, whenever the weather changes and a storm is coming up, this fellow turns into a bat—”
“Oh, shut up, Joe!” Irene snapped.
Joe looked surprised, but he shut up. They walked on in a rather moody silence, thinking about Mr. Elswing and wondering whether they’d find the missing nozzle, and oppressed in spite of themselves by the gray sky after so many weeks of sunshine.
They came, at last, to the weather station and went quietly around to the side. “Here’s the rock where we set IT up,” said Danny. “But there’s no sign of the nozzle.”
“Are you sure we lost it here, and not on the way home?” Joe asked. “You’d think it would be shining in the grass.”
“I’m not sure of anything,” Danny replied. “Vanderbilt may have carried it off somewhere.”
“Maybe he thought it was a bone, and buried it,” said Joe.
“Tell you what, Joe,” Danny said. “You go round to the other side and search, and begin working your way to the back of the building. Irene and I will search here. We’ll meet you in the rear. If we can’t find it, we’ll just have to backtrack.”
“All right,” Joe agreed. “Only let’s keep quiet so Mr. Elswing doesn’t hear us.”
He left them, and Danny and Irene began combing the ground, moving slowly with bent heads, kicking aside tufts of grass and turning over stones.
“I don’t know,” Danny said, after five minutes of this. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. It could be anywhere. It’s just as likely to be a dozen yards away as right here.”
As he said this, he kicked his foot against a stone. There was a clink! The stone rolled away, and there lay the nozzle, its gray metal gleaming dully in the daylight.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Irene exclaimed, laughing. “Wouldn’t you know it?” She picked it up.
“Sh!” Danny warned, involuntarily glancing at the station.
And there stood Mr. Elswing in the window, with his hands in his pockets.
“Hello, kids,” he said cheerfully.
Danny was opening his mouth to reply. Suddenly, Joe raced into sight around the edge of the building. “Run!” he screamed. “He’s after me!”
Danny and Irene had been tense all morning. This was enough to set them off. Panic descended on them and, without thinking or waiting to ask any questions, they turned and fled.
Across Washington Avenue they tore, heedless of the traffic. They ran through the university grounds, dodging students, and galloped into the woods. They crashed through underbrush and brambles, and finally emerged breathless at the edge of the Professor’s property.
Danny threw himself on the ground. “I— don’t—care,” he gasped. “Let him—catch us. I can’t—run—any—more.”
The other two fell at his side. After a moment or two, when they could breathe again, Danny asked, “By the way, Joe, who was chasing us?”
“Why, Mr. Elswing,” Joe panted. “I saw him through the window over on my side of the building. He yelled something at me, and started to climb through the window. So I ran.”
Danny’s jaw dropped. “But he couldn’t have,” he said. “He was standing on our side, and he smiled and said hello as sweet as pie.”
Joe scratched his head. “The pie over on my side was nothing but crust,” he said. “I’m sure I saw him.”
“You just thought you did,” Irene said.
“Maybe it was a double exposure?” Joe suggested.
“No, you were thinking so much about him, and about those horror movies of yours, that probably what you saw was Vanderbilt looking through the window, and you thought it was Mr. Elswing. You’ve always been unfair to that poor little pup,” Irene said.
“Poor little pup!” Joe rolled over on his back, and moaned. “Sweet little lap dog! Miniature poodle! Oh, man! I always knew there was something wrong with girls.”
Irene frowned and began to reply. But Danny got to his feet, and said, “Never mind that. Come on, let’s get this nozzle back on the machine. Joe, you put it on. I swear I won’t touch it again—and this time I mean it!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Lemonade Clue
The laboratory in the back of Professor Bullfinch’s house had its own private entrance. As the three made their way to it, Mrs. Dunn stuck her head out the kitchen window.
“Hello, wanderers,” she called. “Anyone for a little snack?”
“In a few minutes, Mom,” Danny answered. “We’ve got some work to do in the lab, first.”
“All right. Oh—Danny.”
“Yes, Mom?”
“Don’t make a mess in the laboratory. I’ve just had a wire from Professor Bullfinch. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
Danny stopped short. “Tomorrow?”
“Yes, he said he might be back in time for lunch, if he could make an early plane. Isn’t that good news?”
“Er—yes. Yes, it sure is,” Danny stuttered. He pulled open the laboratory door and fairly flew inside.
“We’ve got no time to waste,” he told the others. “Give Joe the nozzle, Irene.”
She had been carrying it all this time, and now passed it over. With shaking hands, Joe screwed it back in place. Irene aimed the machine at the sink, once again, and told Joe to turn on the faucet. Then she threw the switch.
Nothing happened. There was no sign of the pale beams, no sign of cloud or moisture.
Danny gave a yelp and sank down in a chair.
Irene wrung her hands. “What’ll we do?” she wailed.
Danny pulled himself together. “I’ll have to break my promise to myself again,” he said piteously. “Help me, Joe. Let’s get it up on the lab bench.”
Between them, they lifted it to the stone surface. The back plate of the machine was held on by six screws. Danny got a screwdriver and unfastened them. He lifted the plate off.
Inside was a tangle of wires, tubes, and oddly shaped pieces of apparatus. Danny looked at it hopelessly.
“Even if I had seen this before,” he said, “I wouldn’t be able to figure out what’s wrong. We’re in trouble.”
“I expected it.” Joe leaned back against the edge of the sink, and folded his arms. “Now what?”
“It’s all my fault,” Danny groaned. “I should never have touched it. This is what always happens—I jump into things without thinking, and then—boom! Why don’t I
ever learn?”
“Aw, take it easy, Dan,” Joe said, looking sympathetically at his friend. “Even the Professor said that scientists have to be curious.”
“Yes. And curiosity killed this cat—I mean, this machine,” said Danny bitterly. “What’ll I tell the Professor? Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”
He rubbed his face hard, as if that way he could start his ideas percolating. “I’ll take another look inside,” he said, but without much enthusiasm. He put his hands on the sides of the machine and pushed it straight, so that the work light would shine more directly into it. Then he said, “Ow!”
“What’s the matter?” Irene asked.
“I cut my finger on something.” He popped his finger in his mouth. Slowly, a strange expression spread over his face. He removed his finger and stared at it.
“Is it bleeding?” Irene said. “I’ll get a bandage.
“Just a second,” said Danny.
“What is it?”
“Well, you’re not going to believe this, but my blood tastes like lemonade.”
“What?” Joe cried.
Irene said, “Oh, I know why. ’Tisn’t blood. Don’t you remember last night when Mr. Elswing came to visit us? You were so startled, you dropped your glass of lemonade and it spilled all over IT. That’s what’s on your finger.”
Danny was already inspecting the machine’s metal case, and mumbling to himself. Then he said, “Aha!”
“Aha?” said Joe. “Is that good or bad?”
“Both.” Danny pointed to the side of the case. “This is all smooth metal. I wondered where I could have cut my finger. Now I see —there’s a crack in the metal, right here.”
“A crack?” said Irene. “Ah—when Vanderbilt grabbed the wagon, and it fell over. Right?”
Danny snapped his fingers. “If the case is cracked, something inside may be broken.”
“Here we go again,” Joe muttered.
Paying no attention, Danny peered into the maze of machinery. Wires led from the knife switch on the back plate to a six-volt wet-cell battery inside. Danny reached in, and slid the battery out.
“I was right!” he chortled.
Irene bent over to look at the battery. On the top of it were three plastic caps which covered the openings to the battery cells. When these caps were removed, distilled water could be poured into the battery. One of the caps was cracked almost in two.
“You see,” Danny went on, “when the case fell off the wagon, it must have hit the rock and cracked. This cap broke at the same time, and the acid spilled out of the cell of the battery. I’ll bet you anything, that’s why the machine won’t work.”
“It’s worth trying,” said Irene. “Is there another battery around?”
“Look on those bottom shelves,” Danny directed. “I’ll unhook the cables.”
He did so, and Irene quickly found another battery and brought it over. Danny fastened the cables to it, and put it back in place. Without bothering to refasten the back plate, he closed the switch.
“There!” said Irene. “The tubes are glowing.”
“You’re right. We’re back in business.”
“Now, I wonder—” Irene began.
She was interrupted by a muffled cry from Joe.
He was waving his arms helplessly. The two rays met at his head, and from the neck up he was lost in a thick, white fog.
“Get me out of here!” he yelled. “Where am I?”
Danny opened the switch, and the fog thinned and faded away, leaving Joe’s hair wet and his face dripping.
“Welcome back, Chief Rain-in-the-Face,” Danny laughed. “Stay away from the sink, from now on.”
“Well, it’s working, anyway,” said Irene. “What about that crack, Dan? How can we fix it?”
“Professor Bullfinch isn’t due home until lunchtime, at the earliest,” Danny replied. “So tomorrow we’ll take the machine to Mr. Krantz, the welder, right after breakfast. He can fix it.”
“Yes, and this time we’ll tie it down on the wagon,” said Joe, mopping his face with his handkerchief.
“I’ll bring over a roll of wire.” Irene put a hand on Danny’s arm. “Dan,” she said, “I want to ask you something.”
“What?”
“You are going to tell the Professor what happened, aren’t you?”
Danny bit his lip. Then he said bravely, “Of course I am. There’s no use trying to duck out on it. Maybe when he finds out we can make midget rainstorms with it, he’ll forgive me.” But in his heart, Dan knew that the Professor would be disappointed in him for not using self-discipline—and knew, too, that this disappointment would be justified.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mr. Elswing Really Splits
Mr. Krantz, WELDING, BRAZING & METALWORK CO., was a fat, red-faced man who was continually wheezing, clucking, panting, and chuckling as if he were a kind of engine himself. When the three friends came into the shop, he was welding a seam in a steel tank. He snapped off the torch, pushed up his dark goggles, and surveyed the young people who stood in a row, with IT on the wagon in front of them.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “H-t-t-t! Danny Dunn and Company. And who’s this other one, the feller on the wagon? Looks familiar.”
“We need a little patching done, Mr. Krantz,” Danny said.
“Oho! Aha! Another one of your inventions, hey? I remember the last one. Didn’t I make you a clamp so you could hook your telescope on your Ma’s piano stool, so you’d have a revolving base for it? So you could follow the stars, hey? And you kept turning and turning it until the top came off the piano stool and down it fell, and I had to repair the telescope too? What is it this time?”
“Nothing like that, Mr. Krantz.” Danny grinned. “This is just a metal housing for a kind of box that has a crack in it.”
Mr. Krantz put his hands on his knees and bent over. “Just a kind of box, hey? I remember this—I ought to, ’cause I made it myself. It was for the Professor. What’s happened to it?”
“It sort of... fell over,” Danny said reluctantly.
“Mmhm. Way, way over. Well, I shouldn’t ask too many questions. My business is to weld. Right? Don’t touch anything, and leave me alone with this for a few minutes.”
Humming and snorting to himself, Mr. Krantz unfastened the loops of wire with which they had bound IT to the wagon, and lifted the metal case to his workbench. While Dan and his friends watched in silent interest, he put flux on the crack and then took up a brazing rod and his torch. With the torch, he melted brass down into the crack, and in a moment or two had made a smooth, neat line which sealed up the housing and made it as good as new.
“There she is,” he said. He put IT back in the wagon, and then picked up the wire. “You don’t mind if I fasten it back in place for you? Good. Not like you had it, all messy, but this way—”
He bound the wire two or three times around IT, through the handles and under the wagon. Then he coiled the leftover wire into a large loop and twisted it at the top. “Now,” he said, “you’ve got a kind of extra handle on top. You can hold it to steady the thing, and also to carry it if you have to. That way, you won’t be so apt to let it—er—fall over.”
He refused to take any pay for the job, saying that it was an honor for him to work for the great inventor, Danny Dunn, and then, gurgling with amusement, he returned to his welding.
The three dragged the wagon down the street. Mr. Krantz’s shop was near the Washington Avenue gas station, and when they came to the corner they saw that a great many people were making their way along the avenue toward the airfield.
Danny went into the gas station, where one of the attendants was standing, watching the crowd with his hands in his pockets. “Excuse me, Mr. Collodi,” he said, “but what’s going on? Is there a fire or something?”
“
Nope.” Mr. Collodi pushed back his cap with a greasy hand. “They’re going to watch the seeding.”
“Oh, I see,” said Danny. “Thanks a lot.”
He started to turn away. Then, “Huh?” he cried. “What seeding?”
“The cloud-seeding,” said Mr. Collodi. “It’s been so dry lately, you know, and now it’s been cloudy for a couple of days, I heard a fellow say they’re going to scatter some stuff from a plane to make it rain. They call that cloud-seeding. They got a plane from Eastbridge, I hear.”
Danny swung round to the others. “Let’s go watch!” he said.
“You mean, they actually put raindrop seeds up there and hope they’ll grow?” Joe asked.
“Don’t be silly, Joe,” said Irene. “They throw out tiny particles of dry ice, or make silver iodide smoke, so that the moisture in the clouds may condense around the little cold particles. If it does, those cold droplets sometimes begin to fall, and they may collect other drops, and so it rains. It’s pretty much like what happens with our machine.”
“Say!” Mr. Collodi put in. “That sounds interesting. Maybe I’ll go watch it myself.”
He yelled to another man in the office, “Hey, Gil! Take over, will you?” Then he said, “Come on, kids. I’ll give you a lift. If you’re going, you don’t want to have to lug that wagon of yours all that distance.”
“Let’s go,” Danny urged. “It won’t take more than a few minutes.”
“But suppose the Professor gets home first?” Irene said. “We ought to take IT back to the lab.”
Danny paused. Then he said, “His telegram said that he’d get home for lunch if he made the early plane. But we’ve got almost an hour before lunchtime. Come on. We’ve never seen a cloud-seeding.”
They followed Mr. Collodi to his panel truck, which was parked beside the office, and he boosted the wagon with the machine in it into the back of the truck. The three squeezed into the cab, and Mr. Collodi drove off.
The crowd was growing, and when they got to Midston Airport, Mr. Collodi parked his truck at the gates. The friends thanked him and took their wagon. They pushed their way past the weather station building and then past the airport office. Opposite this the hangar stood, with two or three private planes parked alongside it. Here the crowd had thinned somewhat, and they made their way to the edge of the field, Danny hauling the wagon, while Joe and Irene held the loop of wire to support IT.