New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club

by Bertrand R. Brinley

  "I s'pose if anybody could make it rain, Henry Mulligan could," I said, before I fell asleep again.

  Old Ned Carver didn't know it, but he had started something. Before the month was out he was wishing he'd kept his mouth shut.

  The Mad Scientists' Club meets almost every day during the summer, because we usually have some kind of a project going. When I went out to Jeff Crocker's barn that afternoon to find the rest of the gang, my head was full of crazy notions about how we might make it rain -- like dipping a huge sponge in Strawberry Lake and floating it over Mr. Barnaby's apple orchard suspended from big balloons.

  In the clubhouse I found Mortimer Dalrymple fiddling around with the ham radio outfit and Homer Snodgrass stretched out on the rusty old box-spring mattress in the corner reading a tattered volume of Rudyard Kipling's poetry.

  "Hey, listen to this!" said Homer.

  "'If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself --'"

  "If I had your head I wouldn't want to keep it!" said Mortimer in a loud voice.

  Homer answered him with a raspberry and rolled over to prop his book against the wall.

  "Where's Henry and Jeff?" I asked. "I got important business to discuss."

  "They're out in back, washing Mr. Crocker's car," said Mortimer.

  Jeff Crocker's dad makes him wash the family car once a week. We're all supposed to help, in return for using the barn as our clubhouse, but mostly Jeff ends up washing it himself. Fortunately, he and Henry were just about finished when I found them, and I told them all about the conversation I had heard in the barbershop.

  "I know it's been rough," Jeff said. "All the farmers around here are complaining. My dad says there won't be enough hay to feed the horses this winter if it doesn't rain soon."

  "It's easy enough to make it rain," said Henry. "All you have to do is create the proper conditions." Henry stopped wiping off the car, and I could see he was thinking about the problem. I finished the last fender for him.

  "When are these professional rainmakers coming?" he asked.

  "I don't know. But Homer's father should know, 'cause he's on the Town Council."

  "I suggest we don't do anything until after they've been here," said Jeff, as he spread the rags out to dry. "After all, the town is probably paying them a lot of money, and they might just make it rain."

  "What do you think, Henry?" I asked.

  "I think I've got an idea!" said Henry, and he walked straight down the lane to the main road and went home and we didn't see him again for three days -- which isn't unusual when Henry is thinking.

  The rainmakers came, and we all went out to watch them set up their machines. They had huge blowers that they used to create a white fog of dust particles in the air, and they set them up on the hills all around the valley. They also had two light airplanes operating out of the county airport that they'd send up to seed the rain clouds whenever any appeared.

  Dinky Poore was as inquisitive as usual.

  "What's that white stuff they're blowin' into the air?" he asked Henry.

  "That's silver iodide crystals," said Henry. "They're supposed to make water vapor condense and form into drops of water. The trouble is, you've got to have water vapor to start with, and the air's so dry right now I don't think it'll do any good."

  The rainmakers kept at it for two weeks, but they didn't do much good. They got a spat of rain now and then, but not enough to sneeze at. And every day they had a different excuse: The wind wasn't right, or there weren't enough clouds, or they couldn't get the airplanes into the air in time when a good cloud did appear. All in all, it was an expensive operation, and the farmers were pretty skeptical about it and were grumbling about the cost. Finally, Mayor Scragg and the Town Council held a big public meeting, where everybody had their say, and the general opinion seemed to be that rainmaking was for the birds. And when Charlie Brown declared that the town just couldn't afford any more rainmaking experiments, the whole idea was scrapped.

  That was when Henry Mulligan decided it was time for the Mad Scientists' Club to act. We had a meeting in the clubhouse, and Henry outlined the plan to us.

  "The trouble with most rainmakers," he said, "is that they spread themselves too thin. You can't go firing silver iodide crystals into the air willy-nilly. You've got to hit a particular cloud at a particular time, and you've got to concentrate a lot of stuff in one place, to do any good."

  Henry pulled a long sleek-looking piece of tubing with fins on it from under the table and showed it to us.

  "This is a pretty simple rocket," he said, "but it'll go up high enough to hit most rain clouds. Right here behind the nose cone is a cartridge with a little gunpowder in it and a lot of silver iodide crystals. All you have to do is explode the cartridge at the right time and spray the crystals through the cloud. Grape growers in northern Italy have been using these for twenty years to make it rain on their vineyards. They just wait until a likely-looking cloud comes along, and then they blast away at it."

  "Holy mackerel!" said Freddy Muldoon. "You think of everything, Henry."

  "I didn't think of it," said Henry. "I just read a lot."

  "So do I," said Homer Snodgrass, "but I never seem to read the right stuff."

  "You don't learn much from poetry, that's a cinch!" said Mortimer.

  "You do too! You just don't understand it!" declared Homer stoutly.

  "How high up will that rocket go?" asked Dinky Poore.

  "That depends on how we design it," said Henry. "Most rain-bearing clouds form at about five thousand feet. It's simple enough to calculate the size of the rocket and the amount of fuel we need to lift a cartridge of silver iodide to that altitude. But we can explode the cartridge at any altitude we want to. We just run a fuse through the cartridge to the propellant chamber. When the fuel burns to the top of the chamber, it ignites the fuse. If we want to explode the cartridge at three thousand feet, we use a very short fuse. If we want to explode it at five thousand feet, we use a longer one."

  "Let's try it!" said Dinky Poore eagerly. Dinky's always ready to try anything.

  "First we've got to build the rockets," said Henry. "This is just a preliminary design. We've got to flight test a few before we know whether we have the right design."

  The next few days we were busy as beavers. We'd spend half the night building rockets in our machine shop, up in the loft over Mr. Snodgrass's hardware store, and then we'd pedal out to a spot in the hills west of Strawberry Lake to test-fire them during the day. We fired them in a steep trajectory, slightly off the vertical, so the spent rocket bodies would land in the lake. By watching for a splash as the rocket hit the surface of the water, we could get a pretty precise measurement from launch to impact. From this, Henry could tell us exactly how high the rocket was going.

  After we had fired about twenty rockets of different types, Henry declared himself satisfied that we had the right design. Then we set to work and built about thirty rockets, complete with cartridges filled with silver iodide crystals and with different fuses. We designed them so the fins would fit snugly inside a piece of corrugated rain spout which would serve as the launching tube. We used a mixture of powdered zinc and sulphur as the propellant and fitted each rocket with an electrical squib for an igniter. We could have launched them by lighting a fuse with a match, but Henry said this wasn't safe. In case one blew up, he wanted everyone to be a safe distance away. So we rigged up a firing circuit with dry cell batteries to ignite the squib.

  "Now whatta we do?" asked Freddy Muldoon when we had finished the last rocket.

  Everybody looked at Jeff, who gives most of the orders because he's president, and Jeff looked at Henry.

  "I think we've got to prove we can do what we think we can do, first," said Henry. "Let's set up on Brake Hill near Mr. Barnaby's orchard and stake a lookout there all day long. If any clouds come over, and we can hit one and make it rain, then maybe we can expand our operations."


  "I'm for that!" said Freddy, rubbing his pudgy stomach. "I'll volunteer for lookout."

  "Good!" said Jeff. "The lookout will have to go all the way to the top of the hill to watch for clouds. That'll keep you away from the apples."

  "Let the minutes reflect that I withdraw my offer," said Freddy.

  "Noted, but not approved!" said Homer, who was taking notes. "It doesn't make any difference, anyway. Most of Mr. Barnaby's apples are Baldwins, and they're still too green to eat."

  "You're talking to the champion green-apple eater of Mammoth County!" said Freddy Muldoon.

  The next morning we all packed a lunch and set out bright and early for Brake Hill with a supply of rockets and a couple of launching tubes. Mortimer and Freddy went to the top of the hill with a radio to set up the cloud watch. But Freddy kept sneaking down to snitch apples off the trees on the upper slopes of the orchard. By noontime he had such a stomachache that he was rolling on the ground, and Mortimer had to send him back down the hill to where we were. We just let him lie around and groan all he wanted to.

  By early afternoon a lot of clouds had begun to form on the horizon, and Mortimer reported a couple of big ones being blown in from the east, right toward Brake Hill. We got the launching tubes set up, pointing to where we thought the clouds would come over the brow of the hill, and waited.

  In about an hour a big puffy white one loomed over us, and Henry checked out the firing circuit and then connected the batteries to the squib leads in the rocket nozzles. We waited until the bulk of the cloud had drifted directly over our heads. Then Henry said, "Fire number one!"

  Jeff threw the switch to close the firing circuit, and the first rocket swished into the sky, leaving a billowing cloud of smoke behind. We saw a bright flash, and a few seconds later we heard a sharp report like a large firecracker.

  "That one exploded a little early, about forty-five hundred feet," said Henry. "I counted just four seconds from the flash to the bang. The propellant must have burned too fast."

  We saw the bright silver flash of the spent rocket tube as it plunged down out of the cloud and caught the rays of the sun. We waited a long minute, but nothing happened. The huge cloud continued drifting slowly over us.

  "Fire number two!" said Henry.

  I threw my switch, and the second rocket shot out of its launch tube with a hissing roar. It veered to the right momentarily, then straightened itself and plunged like a dart into the soft underbelly of the cloud. Suddenly the whole cloud turned a brilliant golden yellow as flaming particles shot through it in every direction; it looked as though a bolt of lightning had struck it. Henry was jumping up and down even before the report of the explosion had reached us, and Homer Snodgrass was slapping him on the back.

  "A hit! A hit! A palpable hit!" cried Homer.

  "Let's wait and see! Let's wait and see!" cried Henry, trying to ward off the blows.

  It was then that we heard the putt-putt-putt of Jason Barnaby's rusty old Model-T Ford and turned to see it weaving and bouncing toward us down the lane that led through the apple orchard. Jason's two German shepherd dogs were galloping along beside the old rattletrap, barking their heads off, and we could see a double-barreled shotgun clamped to the windshield. Jason brought the rattletrap to a sputtering halt in a cloud of dust and jumped down from the seat with the shotgun clenched in one fist.

  "What in tarnation are you young rapscallions doin' here?" he shouted at us. "Are you stealin' my apples? What's them fireworks I been hearin'?"

  Freddy, who had been lying on the ground, still writhing in pain, started crawling for the bushes at the edge of the orchard. Dinky Poore's eyes had popped wide open, and he was trembling like a leaf. Jeff Crocker stepped forward.

  "We weren't doing anything, Mr. Barnaby," he explained. "We were just trying to make it rain."

  "Trying to make it rain? If that don't beat all!" exclaimed old Jason, whipping his hat off and slamming it onto the ground.

  His face was redder than any apple in the orchard, and the veins in his neck stood out as though he were going to have a fit of apoplexy. When he bent over to pick up his hat, the startling contrast of the smooth white top of his bald head made Mortimer Dalrymple burst out laughing.

  "What are you laughing at, you young hyena?" Jason shouted. "If you think you can --"

  Suddenly Jason clapped his hand to his bare head. "What's that?" he said. And he looked upward in time to catch another raindrop right in the corner of his left eye. He wiped it off with a fingertip. Then he stuck his tongue out and turned his face upward again. The drops started coming down more rapidly -- big splashy drops that splattered on the leaves of the apple trees and sent a cascade of tiny droplets in every direction. Jason spread his arms out with the palms of his hands turned upward and threw his head back. He held his battered old felt hat out in front of him, as if to catch the precious drops and hold them forever. He opened his mouth and tried to drink in the rain. Several large drops hit him right in the face, and a trickle of water zigzagged down the side of his weather-beaten neck and cut a channel through the dust that covered his skin. Suddenly he started to gyrate and cavort among the apple trees in a wild and spontaneous dance.

  "Whoopee!" shouted old Jason. "It's rain, rain, rain! The rain's a fallin'. The rain's a fallin'."

  And it was. It came down in a regular torrent. We looked upward and saw that the belly of the huge white cloud had broken open and dark streamers of water vapor were cascading toward the earth. We had started a regular cloudburst!

  We scrambled to get all our gear together and pull it under the trees. The two German shepherds were prancing around after Jason and paying no attention to us.

  "One thing we forgot to bring was umbrellas," said Mortimer.

  "Not even Henry can think of everything," said Dinky Poore.

  "You don't need no umbrellas!" came a voice from under the trees. "Get under that tarpaulin in the back of the Model T and I'll ride you home."

  We were soaked to the skin, but we laughed and shouted as we bounced back through the orchard in Jason's ancient pickup.

  "Tarnation! If that don't beat all!" muttered Jason, as he wrestled with the wheel. "I think I'll crack open a jug of hard cider when I get back to the house."

  It didn't take long for the word to get around town that we had made it rain on Jason's apple orchard. Old Jason drove us right into town and stopped off at Ned Carver's barbershop on his way home. In a small town the barbershop is better than the telephone exchange when it comes to rapid communication. Mayor Scragg was among the first to hear about it, and he stopped off at Henry's house that night and patted him on the head and called him "Big Chief Rainmaker."

  Charlie Brown, the treasurer, was a little dubious, though. If we could make it rain every time a cloud came over, he wanted to know how much it was going to cost the town to keep us in business. Jeff assured him that we weren't interested in draining the town treasury. All we wanted to do was help the farmers save their crops, and if the farmers were willing to pay for the rockets and the zinc and sulphur we needed, the Mad Scientists' Club was at their service.

  After that, we were flooded with requests from farmers to set up rocket launchers on their property and try to make it rain. We couldn't take care of everybody, and we didn't want to play favorites, so we held a meeting in the clubhouse to figure out what to do. Dinky Poore made his usual suggestion about writing to the President for help and was voted down as usual. Freddy Muldoon thought we could take care of everybody if we just ran fast enough from one farm to another.

  "Great idea, Pudgy!" said Mortimer. "Only I don't see any Olympic medals hanging on you. By the time you get through breakfast, it's time for lunch. You sweat faster than you can run, and we wouldn't want you to drown."

  "OK, wise guy!" Freddy shot back. "At least when I step on a scale, something happens. I thought maybe I could stick around here and man the radio."

  After a lot of discussion we made a revolutionary decision. For the first time i
n the history of the Mad Scientists' Club we decided to ask Harmon Muldoon's gang to help us out.

  "This is a community project," Henry pointed out, "and there's no reason to be selfish about it."

  "Nuts!" said Freddy. "My cousin will hog all the credit. Besides, he doesn't know anything about rockets."

  "We can teach them all they have to know," said Jeff. "As far as the credit goes, everybody already knows who Big Chief Rainmaker is."

  Then we all stood up and gave Henry the Indian sign, and that was the end of the meeting. Jeff Crocker was appointed ambassador plenipotentiary to conduct negotiations with Harmon Muldoon, because he can beat anybody in Harmon's gang at Indian wrestling. He didn't have to put the arm on them, though. They jumped at the opportunity to get into the act.

  We set up several launching sites at strategic locations that gave us a chance to cover most of the farms in the valley on fairly short notice. With Harmon's equipment added to ours, we had a pretty good radio net operating from our clubhouse to Jeff Crocker's barn. We couldn't be everywhere at once, even with six two-man teams manning the launch sites, but we didn't have to worry about cloud watchers. Every farmer in the valley was bombarding us with phone calls each time a wisp of cloud appeared on the horizon.

  We didn't keep count, but we must have fired about two hundred rockets during the next two weeks. We didn't make it rain every time, of course. Sometimes we might fire ten rockets before we got a good hit on a cloud. And sometimes we might get a good hit, and still nothing would happen. But we did manage to hit the jackpot often enough to make the difference between a dry year and a drought. Most everybody in town seemed to agree that Henry's idea had saved the farmers from a real crop failure. People he didn't even know would wave at Henry on the street and say, "Hi, Big Chief!"

  The rest of us basked in Henry's reflected glory, of course, and we seemed to get more smiles from the storekeepers than usual. Even Billy Dahr, the town constable, looked as though he was glad to see us when one of us passed him on the street. And Jeff Crocker's dad was no exception. He was seen one day washing his own car, and he told a curious neighbor that he thought Jeff needed a rest.