New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club

by Bertrand R. Brinley

  "I hope I never get old enough to dress up like that!" said Mortimer Dalrymple.

  We clambered down off the rock and joined the line of people moving down the path toward the road. We passed right by Mrs. Larrabee, who was still being congratulated by the Council members.

  "Well, Big Chief!" she called out to Henry. "What did you think of the dance?"

  "Very nice!" said Henry politely. "You sure picked a good day for it!"

  We woke up Dinky Poore and went on down the hill, muddy and tired and a little bewildered. It looked as though it would be a nice day.

  "I guess you were right again, Henry," said Freddy Muldoon. "Science doesn't know all the answers."

  "Neither does Mrs. Larrabee!" said Henry.

  The Flying Sorcerer

  © 1968 by Bertrand R. Brinley

  Illustrations by Charles Geer

  DINKY POORE DIDN'T usually miss meetings of the Mad Scientists' Club; so when we hadn't seen him around the clubhouse for four straight days, we figured something was wrong.

  "Maybe he deserted, and joined up with Harmon's gang," said Freddy Muldoon, who was probably Dinky's best friend. "He was pretty gloomy all last week, and he hardly opened his mouth."

  "Stow it!" said Mortimer Dalrymple. "Dinky wouldn't do that."

  "I dunno," Freddy persisted. "He was acting kinda cagey, like, and I haven't laid eyes on him all this week."

  "Have you been to his house?" Henry Mulligan asked him.

  "Yeah! But he don't answer. I holler through the back fence, like always, and Mrs. Poore says he ain't there. I think he deserted."

  "Baloney!" said Homer Snodgrass. "You always want to make a big mystery out of everything."

  "Well, I ain't no Pollyanna like you!" Freddy blustered.

  "Go soak your head!" Homer retorted, as Jeff Crocker rapped his gavel on the packing crate and called for order.

  "What do you think, Charlie?" Jeff asked me. "You always know what to do with Dinky when he has one of his moods."

  "Maybe we could send a delegation around to his house, and find out what's wrong," I suggested. "Or is that too practical?"

  "Seems like the least we could do," Mortimer observed. "After all, he might be dead."

  "Hoh, boy!" Freddy snorted, slapping his palm to his forehead. "I hope you never donate your brain to science. It would set civilization back fifty years."

  The upshot was that Jeff appointed Freddy and me as a committee of two to make a formal call at Dinky's house. We went there right after the meeting.

  "Is Dinky sick?" I asked Mrs. Poore, when she answered the door.

  Mrs. Poore looked startled for a moment. Then she said, "Maybe he is! I hadn't thought of that."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Well, I don't know, exactly," she said, "but he's been acting strangely, lately. He gets up early, and I pack him a lunch, and I don't see him again until suppertime -- or sometimes until way after dark. What has he been doing?"

  "That's what we wanted to ask you," said Freddy.

  "Ask me?" Mrs. Poore looked startled again. "Why? Hasn't he been with you?"

  "We haven't seen Dinky all week," I explained.

  "Oh, dear!" said Mrs. Poore, holding the tips of her fingers to her lips. "Don't tell me -- No! -- I never thought of that!"

  Freddy Muldoon screwed his eyes up into tiny slits. "He isn't dead, is he?"

  "Oh! Gracious no!" Mrs. Poore laughed. "Whatever gave you that idea, Freddy?"

  "Just a nutty friend of mine," Freddy shrugged. "Forget it!"

  "Well, do you know where he is now?" I asked her.

  "I've no idea," she said, putting her fingers to her lips again. "I just assumed he'd been with you boys all week. You know how it is...." She hesitated for a moment. "Well, you boys are always busy with some kind of crazy project -- I mean -- well, I just don't worry about Dinky, even if he comes in long after midnight, because I know he's working on something important with all of you, and..."

  "Never mind, Mrs. Poore. We'll find out what he's up to!" Freddy interrupted her. He gave an exaggerated bow and strode off the porch with me following him.

  We knew we could find out where Dinky was, and what he was doing. It was just a question of how long it would take. Unless Dinky had discovered some new hideout that none of us knew about, it was just a matter of checking all our regular haunts until we found him. Jeff ticked off the spots on our big wall map of Mammoth County in his barn: Indian Hill, Brake Hill, Memorial Point, the old zinc mine, the quarry, Mammoth Falls, the old mill on Lemon Creek, Zeke Boniface's junkyard, the old Harkness mansion, Elmer Pridgin's cabin, Jason Barnaby's apple orchard, and a dozen other places. Then he split us up into two-man teams (in the Mad Scientists' Club nobody goes off on a mission alone), and we set off on our bicycles to look for Dinky.

  Freddy and I had already checked out Zeke's junkyard, and were heading for the apple orchard when we got a call on the radio from Mortimer. He and Homer claimed they could see Dinky, crouched on top of Lookout Rock high up on Indian Hill. They had hollered to him from the road, but he wouldn't answer their call and they were going up after him.

  All of us made for Indian Hill, and when we had scrambled to the summit we found Mortimer and Homer trying to coax Dinky down off the rock. But he wouldn't budge. He just kept scanning the horizon through a pair of binoculars and muttering to himself.

  "What's the matter with you, you little nut?" Jeff shouted at him, when he and Henry had arrived. "Come on down here, or we'll come up and get you."

  "Go away!" said Dinky petulantly.

  "I'm going to count to ten," Jeff warned, "and if you aren't down here I'm coming up to get you."

  "Come ahead!" Dinky pouted. "I'll kick anybody in the face that sticks his head up here."

  We all looked at each other. Dinky was peering intently at the horizon.

  "Let him stay there til he grows up!" Mortimer said disgustedly.

  "If you don't come down, we'll vote you out of the club! How do you like that?" taunted Freddy.

  "Yeah!" Mortimer chimed in. "We already voted you 'most likely to secede.' How do you like that?"

  "Very funny!" Dinky said with a yawn.

  "Dinky, won't you please tell us what you're doing up there?" Henry pleaded.

  Dinky pulled his eyes away from the binoculars and stared at Henry for a moment. "I'm looking for flying saucers," he said matter-of-factly.

  Everybody laughed.

  "Come on, Dinky. Be serious," Jeff prodded.

  "I'm looking for flying saucers!" Dinky repeated.

  "How many have you seen?" asked Mortimer.

  "I ain't seen none yet," Dinky replied. "But I will."

  Everybody laughed again. Then Dinky turned his back on us; but not before we saw a big tear trickle down his left cheek.

  "The kid's daft," said Mortimer. "He really means it."

  "Look! He's crying. He's crying," shouted Freddy, jumping up and down.

  "Shut up! You big fathead!" Dinky blubbered, throwing down a handful of loose pebbles.

  "Wait a minute! Wait a minute!" Henry cautioned. "Let's not get emotional about it. Dinky, if you stay up there in that hot sun much longer you'll see flying saucers all right -- and pink elephants too."

  "I don't care," Dinky sniffled. "I'm gonna stay here till I see one."

  "There ain't no such thing as flying saucers, you nut!" said Freddy Muldoon.

  "Yes there is," Dinky persisted. "You read about them in the paper every day. People are seeing them all over the country -- everybody except me. I bet I'm the only person in the whole world that hasn't seen one."

  "Cool it, man," said Mortimer. "Flying saucers aren't news anymore. They're as old as the hills."

  "Nuts to you," said Dinky. "They're the latest."

  "Oh, yeah? I just betcha people been seein' them things for three thousand years," Mortimer teased. "I betcha that Arabian that invented the Magic Carpet started the whole thing. I been told people called him the first Fl
ying Sorcerer."

  Another handful of pebbles came flying down from the rock, and Henry pulled Mortimer off to one side to talk with Jeff. They whispered together for a minute, and Jeff and Mortimer nodded their heads.

  "Dinky!" said Henry, walking back to the base of the rock. "Will you come down if we promise you that we'll build a flying saucer -- a real one -- just for you?"

  "Honest?" said Dinky, doubtfully.

  "Honest!"

  "Scout's Honor?"

  "Scout's Honor!" said Henry.

  "A real flying saucer that will fly?"

  "A real flying saucer that will fly!" said Henry.

  "That's what I thought you'd do!" said Dinky, and he slid down off the rock.

  Henry was true to his word. He had us all working like beavers for the next two weeks, building something far better than anything we had dreamed of. Most of us had thought he was kidding when he told Dinky we would build a flying saucer that could really fly. But when we found out what he had in mind, we got pretty excited.

  Henry and Jeff drew up some plans for a real monster of a saucer. It was about twenty feet in diameter and six feet high; shaped like a flat top, or one of those striped Christmas tree ornaments squashed down. Henry explained that we would have to build it on the principle of a dirigible, with a rigid, but very lightweight frame covered with an envelope of balloon silk. Filled with some of the helium we had left over from our last balloon expedition, it would have enough lift to stay aloft with the added weight of a propulsion system and a few other gadgets Henry had dreamed up to make the experiment more interesting.

  We decided to build the thing in one of the old ore car sheds near the entrance to the abandoned zinc mine up in the hills west of Strawberry Lake. Nobody except us ever snooped around there, and besides, Henry figured it would be a good place to operate from once we got the saucer built.

  We had most everything we needed, except material for the frame. Henry figured that bamboo would be the best thing, because it is tough and light and easy to work with. But bamboo doesn't grow in our part of the country.

  "I know where there's plenty of bamboo," said Freddy Muldoon.

  "Where?" asked Jeff.

  "I seen a whole load of new fishin' poles -- great big ones -- comin' in at Snodgrass's Hardware Store."

  Everybody turned and looked at Homer. Homer Snodgrass rubbed his nose and dug the toe of one shoe into the top of the other. "Okay!" he said. "I'll volunteer to work in the store Saturday morning."

  That solved our problem on the bamboo. Saturday morning Dinky and I sat in the shade in the alley back of Snodgrass's Hardware Store, along with Freddy Muldoon. Every time Homer had an excuse to go back to the stockroom to fill an order, he'd throw another fishing pole out the window, and one of us would lug it down the alley to a vacant lot where he hid them in the tall grass. Homer had to work a little overtime, because it took us until two o'clock in the afternoon before we thought we had enough poles to do the job. Homer's dad was so proud of him for working past noontime that he paid him an extra fifty cents.

  With the bamboo poles we constructed two geodesic domes, twenty feet across, and then mated the two together to form a flattened sphere. On top we added a little, fat, circular structure that looked like a tank turret. Henry explained that the geodesic construction, with mutually supporting triangles of bamboo lashed together, would give us the strongest frame with the least amount of material. We didn't need a lot of supporting braces inside, and could use the rest of our bamboo for mounting the propulsion system and the other gadgets we wanted to have on board.

  The propulsion system consisted of two large tanks of pressurized carbon dioxide attached to nozzles which protruded from the underside of the saucer. There were two sets of nozzles; one set projecting horizontally, and the other two pointing down at about a forty-five degree angle. With two solenoid-operated valves for each tank, controlled from a central relay box, we could exhaust spurts of carbon dioxide gas through either set of nozzles as a pair, or actuate them individually in any combination we wanted to. In this way we could make the saucer fly straight ahead, zoom upward at a sharp angle, or execute a few banks and turns.

  "We'll only be able to fly it when it's fairly calm," Henry said, "because we won't have enough power to buck a strong wind, and we'll run out of fuel pretty fast."

  We mounted a bright green light in the turret, and over it we fitted an aluminum cylinder with a slit in it. A little electric motor, powered by a dry cell, would rotate the cylinder just like the reflector for a lighthouse beacon. We installed a ring of clear plexiglass inside the turret, and cemented it to the balloon silk that covered the turret. Then we cut windows through the silk, and we had a first-class spook effect that would make anyone think the saucer was sending out coded signals.

  Around the perimeter of the saucer we mounted twelve spin rockets that burned a mixture of zinc and sulphur. We could fire any of these by sending a signal through the command receiver, and make the saucer spin on its vertical axis. If we wanted to fire them all at once, we could really create a sensation.

  Besides the command receiver, we installed a second receiver for a voice channel and mounted two speakers in the bottom of the saucer -- "just in case we want to broadcast messages to earthmen," Jeff explained.

  "Once we get this thing up in the air, how do we get, it down again?" asked Freddy Muldoon.

  "Good question!" said Mortimer. "That shows you're thinking."

  "When I want an answer from you, I'll ask a more stupid question," Freddy retorted.

  "It so happens that is a very good question, Freddy," Henry interrupted. "Because we're going to have to depend on a good deal of luck to get the thing back down and we may lose it entirely. When and where we try to fly it will depend a lot on wind conditions. What I hope to do is launch it from here, give it a little push from the propulsion tanks, and let it drift out over the lake toward town. It should drift at about a thousand feet. The zinc mine, here, is about five hundred feet above the elevation of the town; so we'd have to try and bring it down gradually, by letting some of the helium escape as we head it back in this direction."

  "Pretty hairy!" said Freddy, scratching his head.

  "And that's not all of the problem," said Henry. "We want to make it do a few stunts while it's floating over town; but we have to make sure we have enough carbon dioxide left in the tanks to push it back here. We can save fuel if we have a light wind blowing back in this direction. But if we have a crosswind, we just won't be able to fly it."

  "Why not let Freddy ride in it?" Mortimer suggested. "He has a lot of extra wind."

  Henry ignored the comment, and Freddy curled his lip in disdain.

  "Then there's the problem of capturing the thing when it gets back here," Henry continued. "We might have to chase it all over the hillside, even if we get it back down to the right altitude; and it might get fouled up in the trees. It might even miss this ridge of hills and keep on going toward Claiborne."

  "If that happens, we could let all the helium out through the escape valve and let it crash wherever it wants to," said Jeff. "We could probably get to it before anyone else could, because we'd know about where it is."

  "Seems to me they bring dirigibles down with handlines that they drop over the side. Why don't we do something like that?" I suggested.

  "We'll have to," said Henry. "I guess we could coil a couple of ropes on the underside of the saucer, and cut 'em loose with the same command signal that opens the helium escape valve."

  "We'll stand a better chance of snatching it if we weight the ropes with some grappling hooks, and string a few hundred yards of wire between the trees up on the ridge there," said Jeff.

  "Now everybody's thinking," said Mortimer.

  "Yeah! Everybody but you," sneered Freddy Muldoon.

  "I've been thinking too," said Mortimer, "and I've thought up a name for this flat balloon. I move we christen it The Flying Sorcerer as a tribute to my wit."

  "I
like The Flat Balloon better," said Freddy.

  "It's my saucer," said Dinky Poore, "and I vote for The Flying Sorcerer, because it sounds a lot cornier."

  And that was it. We painted the name around the turret, and The Flying Sorcerer was ready to confound the populace of Mammoth Falls.

  For the Sorcerer's first voyage we picked a quiet evening when there was scarcely any wind at all. It was dusk, and a few puffy white clouds high in the sky reflected the last rays of the sun as the saucer lifted off from the old zinc mine and started to drift toward town. We didn't dare fly the thing in full daylight for fear it would look too phony.

  Homer and I were stationed in the loft over his father's hardware store, where we could get a good view of the Town Square. Henry tends to be very scientific about things, even when we're just pulling a prank; so he insisted we take notes of people's reactions in a logbook. He figured our observations might provide some valuable psychological data for the people who have to investigate flying-saucer reports. While I kept watch at the window, Homer sat cross-legged on the floor and took down everything I described.

  7:48 p.m. I can just barely see the thing against that bright spot in the clouds. I can't see any lights, so they must not have turned on the beacon yet. It seems to be moving this way, all right. Hey! It looks pretty good.

  7:57 p.m. There's a man with a straw hat down in the square. I think he sees it. He's scratching his head. Now he just grabbed another man and he's pointing up in the sky. The beacon light just went on. You can see it flashing around. It looks real weird. Now there's a few people coming out of the Midtown Grill. One man's got a hamburger in his hand. He just dropped it in the street. There comes Billy Dahr down the steps of the Police Station.... No, he's running back inside. The saucer's just about over the square now. It's just hanging up there.

  Just then Henry called on the radio. He wanted to know if we could see the saucer. "Yes!" said Homer. "A lot of people in the square have already seen it. Better get it out of here."

  "We'll give 'em a little show first," said Henry. "Keep your eyes peeled."