New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club

by Bertrand R. Brinley

  But somehow I felt uncomfortable about it all, despite our success. I finally realized that it was because I once heard Henry say that you can't tamper with nature without getting into trouble. And it didn't take too long for Henry's observation to prove true.

  Freddy Muldoon and Dinky Poore were manning the launch site out on Blueberry Hill one day when a cloud about ten times the size of the Queen Elizabeth came drifting over. They got all excited and started firing rockets at it as fast as they could mount them on the launcher. They weren't supposed to be out there, and there wasn't any sense in firing at the cloud so soon, because it hadn't even gotten out over the valley yet. But they wanted to show what they could do, so they blasted away at it and finally scored a good hit. The cloud practically evaporated and dumped torrents of rain on the hilltop. Dinky and Freddy fell all over themselves in a mad scramble to get their ponchos on and pedal back into town to brag about what they had done.

  When they got down to the road that leads past Memorial Point, where the old Civil War cannon is, they saw people streaming out of the woods by the hundreds, slipping and sliding down the hill with their arms full of blankets, tablecloths, picnic baskets, baseball bats, musical instruments, and beer kegs. The sudden cloudburst had broken up the annual Kiwanis Picnic and Songfest for the Benefit of Homeless Children and turned it into a rain-soaked rout.

  Joe Dougherty, who is president of the Kiwanis Club and trombone soloist in the town band, was hopping mad. He complained loudly to Mayor Scragg that the whole thing was a deliberate plot by those troublemakers in the Mad Scientists' Club to ruin the annual picnic and sabotage the Kiwanis Club's fund-raising program. He claimed that we had made it rain intentionally, in order to get back at the Kiwanis for refusing to sponsor our project to explore the bottom of Strawberry Lake. Henry and Jeff were called on the carpet by the Mayor, and of course they denied having any such intentions. But that didn't change the fact that the Kiwanis picnic had been flooded out, and a strawberry shortcake the size of a bathtub had to be abandoned in the middle of the clearing at Memorial Point.

  Far from bragging about their prowess as rainmakers, Freddy and Dinky were trying to deny any connection with the episode when Henry and Jeff got back to the clubhouse.

  "We were down by Lemon Creek all the time," said Freddy stoutly. "We didn't even know any Kiwanis picnic was going on."

  Jeff Crocker fastened a gimlet eye on him. "Joe Dougherty claims they heard about five rockets fired just before it started to rain, and he has four hundred witnesses to back him up. Who do you think fired those rockets, Freddy?"

  "Probably my cousin Harmon," said Freddy offhandedly, pretending that he saw something very interesting outside the window. "He's always sneakin' around where he's not supposed to be."

  "It so happens that Harmon was here in the clubhouse with us all the time," said Henry quietly. "And the rest of his gang were assigned to man the launch sites south of town. I don't think it's very fair to try and blame this on Harmon."

  "OK, OK!" said Freddy, thrusting the palms of his hands upwards. "So it didn't work!"

  Our reputation managed to survive the episode of the Kiwanis picnic, but not for long. Mortimer Dalrymple and Homer Snodgrass sat out the Brake Hill watch one day at the edge of Jason Barnaby's apple orchard. It had been three days since any good clouds had been sighted in the valley, but there was a cool wind blowing in from the east that held promise of moisture to come.

  It was about noontime that a big black cloud came riding high over the crest of Brake Hill. It looked like a prime thunderhead, and Homer and Mortimer got the artillery ready. They hit it with two shots and ran for cover among the trees in the orchard. They hadn't yet reached the shelter of a tent they had strung between two of the trees when a deafening roar surround them.

  "What was that?" cried Homer. "Something hit me!"

  No sooner had he said it than a hailstone the size of a pullet egg hit him on the right shoulder.

  "Geronimo!" cried Mortimer. "It's hailing doorknobs. Run for cover!"

  They both dove under the tent while hailstones pelted the orchard all around them and apples came thumping to the ground by the hundreds. The accumulated weight of ice and Baldwin apples on the sagging eaves of the tent finally collapsed it, and the two of them lay flat on the ground holding the canvas about their heads for protection. The cloud was a big one and it drifted on through town, leaving a trail of minor destruction in its path, and finally spent itself in the hills across the valley.

  A cast-iron straitjacket wouldn't have held Jason Barnaby still after that one. He barged into Mayor Scragg's office and thumped loudly on the Mayor's desk, complaining that half his apple harvest had been ruined. He forgot all about the fact that he wouldn't have had any apples at all if we hadn't brought rain to his orchard in the first place. Abner Larrabee's wife, who is a social leader in town, wailed piteously in a letter to the editor of the Mammoth Falls Gazette that her prize peonies had been stoned to death just before they reached the full glory of their bloom. She complained bitterly about "wanton boys who create mischief with their teenage pranks" and wondered when the Mayor was going to do something about the problem of juvenile delinquency.

  The episode of the hailstorm seemed to dampen some of the enthusiasm for our project around town, but the more rain-thirsty farmers kept urging us to continue. The editor of the Gazette wrote an editorial in our defense, in which he pointed out that our intention had been to do the community a worthwhile service. And Henry admitted in an interview for the paper that we didn't know all the answers yet about how to cope with nature, but that any scientist knew that he faced certain risks whenever something new was being tried. He promised that we would try to learn all about hail clouds and avoid mistakes in the future.

  A few days after the hailstorm, the town of Mammoth Falls awoke to find itself shielded from the sun by a low and heavy overcast. The temperature had dropped, and the hot spell seemed to be over. Everybody could smell rain in the wind, and the town looked forward to the end of the long summer drought. But still no rain came. For three days the overcast continued, and the atmosphere was heavy. The cattle were restless, and chicken farmers complained that the hens cackled all night and laid no eggs.

  On the fourth day we held a meeting with all the members of Harmon Muldoon's gang, and everybody was in favor of giving nature the needle. We decided to launch six rockets simultaneously from different launch sites scattered around the valley to see if we could make the overcast give out with some rain. We set up the radio net, and Henry gave a countdown from the control center in our clubhouse. Five of the rockets fired perfectly and exploded within seconds of each other in the dense cloud cover. We later found out that Dinky Poore and Freddy Muldoon at the sixth site had an argument over who was going to push the firing button; after they both decided to let the other one push it, neither one would agree to do it. So the argument ended up in a stalemate.

  "What's the matter?" asked Henry, when he was finally able to get them on the radio.

  "Nothin'!" said Dinky. "That stupid Freddy is just too dumb to push the button!"

  Anyway, it rained all through that day and long into the night. Spirits were high in Mammoth Falls, and we were once more in the good graces of everyone. It was the first continuous rain of the summer, and the Gazette that afternoon offered a one-hundred-dollar prize to anyone who could correctly predict the number of inches that would fall. The next morning it was still raining, with no sign of a letup. It looked odd to see umbrellas on the streets and people wearing rubbers. But nobody was grumbling about it, as they usually do when it's wet and nasty out. The downtown merchants were doing a good business despite the weather, and everyone was wearing a smile.

  The smiles turned a little sour, though, by the time it had rained for four days straight. It's a funny thing, but no matter how badly people want rain, it doesn't take much of it to satisfy them -- and not much more to make them gripe about the weather. By the end of the week everyone w
as asking when the rain would let up, and a lot of people were complaining about their cellars flooding. In Ned Carver's barbershop the talk was about nothing else but the rain, and about the mud slides that were occurring in the hills. The Gazette was offering a two-hundred-dollar prize to anyone who could predict the exact hour the rain would stop.

  It just kept raining. It didn't seem that the sun would ever come out again. By the tenth day there was serious concern in Mammoth Falls, and the Town Council was holding a special meeting to decide what to do about Lemon Creek. It was up over its banks already, in some places, and a couple of the back roads that crossed it had been closed. Nobody could remember a flood in Mammoth Falls, but if the rain kept up, it looked as though we would have one.

  Henry and Jeff and I were sitting in the drugstore across from the Town Hall having a malted milk when Mayor Scragg and some members of the Council came in to get a sandwich. The Mayor cleared his throat with a loud harrumph, as he always does when he's about to say something, and came over to where we were sitting.

  "This is a fine mess you've gotten us into, Mulligan!" he said tersely.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Mayor, but I don't think it's our fault," said Henry, staring into his malted milk.

  "Well, you made it rain, with your crazy scientific gimmicks! Isn't there some way you can stop it?" pleaded the Mayor.

  Henry shook his head dubiously; then he looked at the Mayor sideways. "We haven't gotten that far yet!" he said, staring into his malted again.

  The rest of the Council members burst into laughter.

  "Well, supposing you read up on it," said the Mayor gruffly. "It looks as though we're going to have a serious flood."

  "Nobody has ever figured out a way to make it stop raining," said Henry with an air of serious concentration. "That's one of the troubles with scientists. They know some of the answers, but not all of them. It just goes to show that you can tamper with nature, but you can't control her. She always strikes back."

  "There must be something we can do!" said the Mayor, turning away.

  "Yes, there is!"

  "What's that?"

  "You can pray!"

  "Not a bad idea!" said the Mayor. "Supposing you start in!" And he went back to his table to munch his sandwich.

  Somebody took Henry seriously, because the following Sunday there was a general day of prayer in all the churches in town. But it didn't do any good. Monday morning dawned with a leaden sky and brought the fifteenth consecutive day of rain on Mammoth Falls. The Civil Defense Corps had put out a call for volunteers to sandbag the banks of Lemon Creek so it wouldn't flood the business section. Some of the outlying streets north of town were already under water. We got all the members of Harmon Muldoon's gang together, and between us we had enough workers to take over one whole section of the dike building. Everybody in town who had a truck of any description was pressed into service, and by late afternoon Mayor Scragg had declared a state of emergency.

  The work at the creek bank went on all through the night under the glare of searchlights which the Air Force had brought in from Westport Field. By midnight, Lemon Creek was a raging torrent of muddy, turbulent water. Even if we managed to contain the water within the sandbag dikes, there was danger that the swollen stream would wash away the principal bridge at the end of Main Street. Seth Emory, who is Director of Civil Defense, and Police Chief Harold Putney made a survey of the entire line of dikes and predicted that if it rained again on Tuesday the water would rise more rapidly than we could fill sandbags. A flood was almost certain, unless the rain let up.

  In desperation, Mayor Scragg got on the telephone at his command post near the bridge. He called the State University and the United States Weather Bureau and got their expert meteorologists out of bed. When he asked them if they knew of any way to make it stop raining, they both said he must be some kind of a nut and slammed the phone down in his ear. The Mayor, muddy and rain-soaked, turned away from the phone to confront Mrs. Abner Larrabee and the members of her Garden Circle, who had him hemmed in.

  "Mr. Mayor," said Mrs. Larrabee, in the tone of voice women use when they think things have gone far enough, "what do you intend to do about the rain?"

  Mayor Scragg buried his face in his hands and sobbed loudly, twice. Then he looked up, and a fiendish gleam leaped into his eyes. With magnificent self-control he said, "Mrs. Larrabee, I intend to give you authority to stop it!"

  "Excellent!" said Mrs. Larrabee. "Then I have an announcement to make."

  "Yes, Mrs. Larrabee," sighed the Mayor. "What is your announcement?"

  "The ladies of the Greater Mammoth Falls Garden Circle, of which I am president, and the ladies of the Mammoth Falls chapter of the Friends of the Wildwood, of which I am also president as well as corresponding secretary, have invited the members of the Daughters of Pocahontas and their husbands to join them in an ancient Indian sun dance. It is a ritual dance of the Pawnees, and one in which they had great faith."

  "Yes, Mrs. Larrabee!"

  "We intend to perform the dance at six a.m. tomorrow morning at Lookout Rock on the top of Indian Hill. It's a most appropriate place, don't you think?"

  "Yes, Mrs. Larrabee!"

  "We would like you and all the Town Council members to be there. We think the whole community should support us."

  "I'm sure they will, Mrs. Larrabee."

  "But will you be there, Mr. Mayor?"

  "Yes!" said the Mayor wearily. "I might as well be. My house will probably be under water."

  "And the members of the Council?"

  "Yes, Mrs. Larrabee. They will be there."

  This was something we couldn't afford to miss. Tired as we were, we dragged ourselves to the top of Indian Hill in the pale gray light of the morning. We had worked all night on the dikes, and there was nothing more that could be done. If the creek rose any higher, the sheer weight of the water would burst the sandbag walls.

  It was a motley crowd that assembled in the grassy clearing behind Lookout Rock that morning. A persistent drizzle was still falling from the leaden overcast above, and most people were huddled under umbrellas. Mrs. Larrabee was circulating among them, trying to persuade everyone to take down their umbrellas and join in the dance. Meanwhile, Abner Larrabee, with the help of a couple of other henpecked men, was trying to coax a sodden mass of newspapers and twigs into flame.

  The Daughters of Pocahontas had been using this clearing as a meeting place for years, and they had arranged a lot of fieldstones in a circle for seats. At one side of the circle was a sort of gateway, where you were supposed to stop and pick up a twig to throw on the council fire in the center as you entered the sacred circle. At the side opposite the gateway was a large slate slab, suspended across two rocks, which served as a kind of throne for whoever was the high muckety-muck of the council. In the center was a ring of smaller stones to mark the spot for the council fire, and this is where Abner Larrabee was striving to get a blaze started.

  We clambered up onto the top of Lookout Rock, which was directly behind the throne, to watch the proceedings -- all except Dinky Poore, that is. He curled up at the base of the rock in a poncho and fell fast asleep.

  A lot of shouting went up from the women when the first flicker of flame shot up through the stack of kindling Abner was fanning. Raincoats came off, and somebody started beating a drum, and all of a sudden there were about three dozen people inside the circle in full Indian regalia. The crowd of onlookers pressed in closer, and before we could even start laughing, Mrs. Larrabee was reciting a mystic chant in some language we couldn't even understand. She was standing in front of the throne with her face turned up to the sky and her arms thrust out to her sides with the palms facing forward, toward the east. A rhythmic clapping from those seated in the circle punctuated her chant, and every once in a while they threw in another shout.

  Pretty soon the men in the group stood up and started stamping their feet in time to the clapping. The beat got faster and faster, and then the chant turned into a s
ong, which everybody was singing. Mrs. Larrabee stepped forward to the council fire, where she raised her arms up high and pointed her fingers toward the sky, and one of the men leaped up with a large hoop in his hands and started gyrating wildly about the circle, doing all sorts of fancy stunts with the hoop. Then all the men moved in to form a ring around the fire and started to dance in a circle, stamping their feet hard on the ground and throwing their heads back every time they shouted. The women all joined hands and started moving in a larger circle in the opposite direction.

  Henry sat on the rock with his chin propped on his knees and stared at the dancers. "Not very scientific!" he said.

  Suddenly someone screamed, and all the men started beating on the fringes of Mrs. Larrabee's Indian dress, which had caught fire from being too close to the flames. But the dance went on without interruption, in an ever-increasing cadence, and nobody seemed to notice that it had stopped raining.

  "Holy mackerel! There's the sun!" shouted Freddy Muldoon, standing up on the rock and pointing across the valley. We all jerked our heads around and, sure enough, you could see the top of it shining through a rift in the clouds on the eastern horizon. Mrs. Larrabee heard the shout and brought her head down out of the clouds. She shouted too, and stretched her arms out straight toward the east. The song changed to an even weirder tune, and all the dancers flung themselves about the circle in wild abandon. Then the dance stopped suddenly, and they all knelt down and bowed toward the east, placing the palms of their hands flat on the ground.

  There was a lot of cheering and back-slapping among the spectators, and Mayor Scragg stepped forward with the members of the Town Council and shook Mrs. Larrabee's hand. The full light of the sun had broken through the rift in the clouds now, and it shone on the faces of the dancers, which were all smeared with some kind of reddish-brown paint.