Bertrand R. Brinley

by The Mad Scientists' Club

  "They're finished!" said Henry matter-of-factly. "Shut off the compressor, Charlie, and keep your fingers crossed."

  I shut off the engine and stood ready at the pressure tanks to let gas back into the envelope if Henry gave the signal. In a few seconds we had stopped losing altitude and were being blown in toward the side of a hill, swinging and swaying crazily. For one brief moment it looked as though we would surely crash. Dinky Poore's eyes were the size of overcoat buttons, and his face looked like white paste. I guess mine did too, but I couldn't see it. Henry stood leaning against the gondola railing with his arms folded, looking intently at the hill rushing toward us. He seemed to be counting to himself under his breath. He was the complete scientist, intent only on the outcome of his experiment.

  Suddenly our downward plunge slackened abruptly and we felt the rush of warm air past our faces. We were so close to the face of the hill that we could have jumped out if we wanted to. The gondola swung like a pendulum as we changed direction and started to rise again. We were in the updraft.

  "A little gas, Charlie!" Henry shouted, and I opened the valves for a few critical seconds. "That's enough. Knock it off now!" We were climbing steeply, just swinging clear of the treetops. Dinky Poore's eyes started to go back to normal, and we all let out a gasp of relief.

  "We've got to watch it at the top," Henry said quickly. "The hill is a lot steeper there, and we don't want to get caught in the mainstream of this updraft. The trick is to just sneak over the ridge as low as we can."

  The Green Onion was still sailing upward, caught helplessly in the thermal funnel that roared up from the east end of the lake, but there wasn't time to watch her now. We were too busy saving our own skins.

  We were just about a hundred feet from the crest of the hill when we suddenly stopped rising and dipped downward with a jolt. It was like being in a fast-rising elevator when it stops suddenly and the floor drops out from under you.

  "We've slipped out of the updraft," Henry shouted. "We're going to --"

  But the thud of the gondola as it banged against the steep upper slope of the hill bit the words off in his mouth. The Head bounced away from the slope, swayed drunkenly for a moment, then dipped suddenly again, and banged once more against the side of the hill. This time the gondola bounced and slid crazily down the slope. We were too heavy to stay aloft without the help of the updraft.

  Henry grabbed Dinky Poore by the shoulders. "Jump out!" he shouted.

  Dinky scrambled over the side and dug his toes and fingers into the shale of the hillside to break his slide. The Head bounced free of the slope once more and hung there precariously for a few anxious seconds. Then, very slowly, it started to drift perceptibly upward. Henry uncoiled the rope ladder hanging on the side of the gondola and flung one end of it over the side toward Dinky.

  "Grab that and run up the hill!" he shouted.

  Dinky snared one rung of the ladder, hooked it in the crook of his arm, and started clambering over the boulders and scrub growth toward the top of the slope. The Head drifted slowly above him like a huge umbrella, dwarfing his tiny figure with its broad shadow. Henry took his horn-rimmed glasses off and wiped them methodically on the tail of his shirt.

  "I think we've got it made," he said, as he put the spectacles back on.

  Then he took up the slack in the rope ladder and shouted down to Dinky. "Tie it around you and get ready to climb back up when I give you the signal."

  Dinky wrapped the end of the ladder around him and stuck both arms through it, so it was laced across his chest and back. Then he grabbed a rung higher up and stood ready to climb.

  "Shoot the gas to her, Charlie, but not too much," Henry told me.

  I opened the valves and let more gas back into the envelope. The Head responded and started to climb more rapidly. We had topped the crest of the hill and could see Strawberry Lake on the other side of the next ridge. Dinky came up the ladder like a squirrel, and we heaved him over the side and into the gondola. He was grinning like a circus clown and hollering, "Go get 'em, White Cloud!" We rose rapidly into the slipstream again and picked up speed. We had slipped over the ridge without getting caught in the funnel, and were on the homestretch.

  We all looked up now, trying to pick up the Green Onion. She was a tiny speck in the sky far above us, and not much closer to Mammoth Falls. All the time we had been working our way over the ridge, the Green Onion had been going practically straight up. If the wind we were riding held up, we would be 'way out ahead of her in a few minutes. But as it happened, it made no difference.

  The speck in the sky suddenly grew larger. The Green Onion had slipped out of the funnel and was plunging toward the earth like a wounded pigeon. Henry grabbed the field glasses out of my hand and tracked the balloon in its descent.

  "They're in trouble for sure," he said, after a minute. "Harmon has let too much gas out of the bag. I can tell by the wrinkles in it. That's a bad mistake! When you're caught in an updraft in a free balloon, all you can do is ride it out. If you let a lot of gas escape, you don't have enough lift left to hold you up when the updraft stops pushing you."

  "What's gonna happen now?" asked Dinky.

  "They'll slow down some, because the farther they drop the denser the air gets. But at the rate they're going, they'll dunk in the lake, for sure!"

  Henry called Jeff Crocker on the radio and told him to alert the lake patrol for a possible rescue.

  "Start the compressor again," he told me. "We're gonna have to drop down low over the lake, and if we're lucky we might be able to help them."

  "Nuts to them!" said Dinky Poore. "We wanna win the race."

  "Maybe nobody'll win this race," said Henry. "You start checking the release lines for the life raft. We may have to drop it to them, if we can get close enough."

  We had our life raft rigged so we could cut it loose in a hurry if we needed it ourselves or if we wanted to get rid of its weight. The heavy tarpaulin that formed the walls and floor lining of our gondola would serve us well enough if we had to jettison the raft.

  We all had our eyes fastened on the Green Onion as we settled down over the lake. Harmon and his crew were throwing everything conceivable overboard in a frantic effort to slow the speed of their descent. Shirts, shoes and socks, and even trousers came flying over the side of their gondola to splash in the lake. But it was all to no avail. The Green Onion plummeted into the water like a dead duck.

  The force of the impact toppled the gondola on its side, spilling Stony Martin and Buzzy McCauliffe into the water. Harmon Muldoon clung to the rigging and rode with the balloon as it skidded across the surface of the lake, until the weight of the sunken gondola brought it to a stop. We were heading right for it when I shut off our compressor and we leveled off, drifting slowly about fifty feet above the surface.

  "Cut the raft loose!" Henry shouted.

  We all hit the release lines, and the life raft plopped into the lake about a hundred yards from where the heads of Stony Martin and Buzzy McCauliffe had bobbed to the surface. They both heard it hit the water and started swimming toward it. Henry was uncoiling the rope ladder again.

  "Get ready to let more gas into the bag!" he told me, tersely. "And when I give you the signal, give her plenty. We're going to try and pick Harmon up, and until we get him clear of the water he's going to be plenty heavy."

  Henry threw the ladder over the side and shouted to Harmon to swim for it. We were still about two hundred yards from him. He was clinging to the shrunken gas bag that had been the Green Onion. It was now a small bubble of green silk, still visible above the surface of the water, but it had drifted far to our left. It was touch-and-go whether Harmon could intercept the rope ladder as it bounced and splashed through the water.

  We kept our fingers crossed for the next minute as Harmon swam through the water with strong strokes. Henry paid out all the slack on the ladder that he could, and Harmon got there in time to snag it with an outstretched arm. The effect on The Head was immediate. W
e dipped sharply downward, and I opened the gas valves without waiting for Henry's signal. We must have come within ten feet of the water before The Head shook violently and veered upward, pulling Harmon clear of the water.

  "Good work, Charlie!" Henry cried. "Hang in there, Harmon, and we'll let you down on shore!"

  We could see one of the motorboats of the lake patrol starting out from the far shore to pick up the life raft and its occupants. The Head sailed serenely onward under its added load, with Harmon clinging to the lower rungs of the ladder. When we reached the sandy beach on the west shore of the lake, Henry cut the ladder loose and Harmon plopped onto the sand. A baked bean sandwich hit the beach right beside him, and Dinky Poore hollered over the side of the gondola, "Just in case you don't make it back in time for lunch!"

  We rose rapidly again, clearing the trees and the low hills on the west side of the lake. We could see the fairgrounds dead ahead of us. Henry and I scanned the horizon for signs of the other balloons. We could see three of them still in the air, but they were all far back of us on the other side of the ridge of hills. Unless the sky fell in, we had it made.

  As soon as we were over the last ridge of hills we started pumping gas out of The Head at intervals and tightening the yoke up to decrease her size, so that we could lose altitude gradually and glide right in to the fair grounds. With Henry giving the commands, we made a perfect landfall and skimmed in over the heads of the crowd about fifteen feet off the ground. We threw out mooring lines, and about a hundred people tried to get hold of them and tow us up to the officials' stand.

  The band had started playing as soon as we were sighted coming over the hills from the lake. It was still going full-blast with the "Washington Post March" and with the crowd yelling and cheering, and fireworks going off all around us, the noise was deafening. The balloon was being pulled in all directions at once by the crowd, and the pitching and tossing of the gondola got so bad that Dinky started to turn green again. Pretty soon he slipped quietly over the side and disappeared among the press of people surging around us. Finally Chief Putney and Constable Billy Dahr managed to fight their way to the side of the gondola, and escorted us with some semblance of order up to the officials' stand.

  Mayor Scragg was waving his hat and beaming at the crowd, and Daphne Muldoon stood beside him loaded down with flowers. She was blushing, and trying to keep from giggling, and worrying about the wind blowing her hair; but she managed to hold still long enough for them to put a crown on her head.

  When the speechmaking and the band music were all over, we looked around for Dinky Poore. We found him sitting in the back of Zeke Boniface's truck, talking to some reporters from the Mammoth Falls Gazette. One of them asked him if he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up, but Dinky shook his head.

  "No!" he said. "I think maybe I'd like to be a railroad engineer -- or maybe just a movie actor."

  "Something's wrong with him," said Freddy Muldoon. "I had to eat his lunch for him, and he doesn't even want a milkshake!"

  The Voice in the Chimney

  (c) 1961 by Bertrand R. Brinley

  Illustrations by Charles Geer

  DINKY POORE wrinkled his freckled nose and scroonched his eyes up into tiny slits so he could see better. He pointed along the dusty road to where it curved over the brow of Blueberry Hill.

  "Isn't that your cousin Harmon throwing rocks at the old Harkness house? Look! There's a bunch of girls with him."

  Freddy Muldoon shaded his eyes with his pudgy hand and looked where his friend was pointing. The chimneys and gables of the abandoned Harkness mansion stood out against the cloudy sky through a gap in the trees that covered most of Blueberry Hill. In the clearing in front of the tall-windowed old house Freddy could see the figures of his cousin Harmon and a group of girls. Sure enough, Harmon was stones up onto the broad veranda and shaking his fist at the silent walls of the house.

  "Yeah! That's him, all right," he said. "I wonder what that nut's doin' now. Let's sneak around through the woods and see if we can get up close enough to spy on 'em."

  No sooner had he said it than he and Dinky were scrambling over the low stone wall at the side of the road and beating it through the woods to circle around behind the old house that had stood lonely and empty since old Simon Harkness had died there ten years ago.

  Old Man Harkness had been a mean old critter, if you could believe all the stories about him. He was one of those people who seem to take pleasure in causing trouble for others. Because he had a lot of money, everybody put up with him and made excuses for his meanness, but nobody really liked him. Even after he was dead he was still able to cause trouble. Nobody could figure out his will, and the relatives who were supposed to inherit all his money have been fighting over it ever since. That's why the rambling old mansion he built still stands unoccupied on Blueberry Hill and is slowly going to pieces.

  In the summertime a lot of blueberry pickers eat their picnic lunch on the grounds of the old estate, and the kids rummage through the dusty, creaky rooms of the empty house when the oldsters aren't watching. In the wintertime almost nobody goes near it. Billy Dahr, the town constable, is supposed to drive out and check on it once in a while; but he can't possibly watch it all the time, so gradually the house gets torn apart and people steal things out of it.

  When Dinky and Freddy got around behind the house, they crawled up through the bushes to peek through the bars of the ornate iron fence that surrounds it. There was Harmon, with his sister Daphne and three other girls, standing knee-deep in the wiry grass that had once been the most beautiful front lawn in Mammoth Falls.

  Harmon aimed a rock at a second-story window that had a board broken off it, and let fly. The rock fell short and landed with a thud on the veranda roof. Harmon shook his fist at the house and shouted, "Come out and fight like a man, you lousy old ghost!"

  Then he turned around and grinned, and the girls all screamed and pretended to be scared.

  "What a ninny!" said Dinky.

  "Ditto!" said Freddy.

  Harmon threw another rock. This one bounced off the window jambs and came tumbling back down onto the lawn. Then Harmon ran up onto the front porch of the house, jumped up and down a few times, waved his arms wildly, and shouted again at the weathered shingles and boarded-up windows. Then he turned around with his back to the house, to show he wasn't scared, and stood there grinning at the girls with his hands on his hips.

  "What a jerk!" said Freddy.

  "Ditto!" said Dinky.

  "Harmon, you come down off there!" one of the girls shouted. "You can't tell what might happen."

  "Aw, nuts," said Harmon. "You girls are just scared."

  Then, just to show how brave he was, Harmon ran right up to the front door and gave it a vicious kick. You could see he hurt his big toe pretty good when he did it, and a hollow booming sound echoed through the walls of the old house. A slate shingle shook loose from the roof and cascaded down onto the roof of the porch, where it broke into splinters with a loud crack. Harmon turned and dashed off the front porch; but he wasn't looking where he was going, and he tripped over a loose floorboard and fell headlong down the steps. He skinned one knee pretty good, but he acted as if it was nothing at all and stood there shaking his fist at the house. He didn't turn his back on it any more, though.

  The girls screamed and giggled again, and one of them said, "Let's get out of here. I'm scared!"

  "O.K.!" said Harmon, not one to hang around any longer than necessary. "If you're really scared, we'll go back to town. But I'm coming back out here tonight."

  "How do you like that?" said Freddy Muldoon behind his hand.

  "What a faker!" said Dinky Poore.

  "I've always wanted to haunt a house!" said Henry Mulligan, when Freddy and Dinky told us what they had seen out at the Harkness mansion that morning. We were sitting in our clubhouse in Jeff Crocker's barn. Henry had leaned his chair back against the wall, and with his hands thrust in his pockets he was gazing at the rafters.
We kept our mouths shut until he had let his chair fall forward again.

  "Well?" said Jeff Crocker, who had been whittling himself a whistle from a willow twig all the time Henry had been thinking.

  "Homer Snodgrass is pretty skinny, isn't he?" Henry asked.

  We all agreed that Homer was pretty skinny, except Homer, who wasn't there.

  "I think he'd make a first-rate skeleton!" said Henry.

  And that was how the Mad Scientists' Club got involved in the mystery of the Harkness house. Before the sun had set that afternoon we had lugged half the equipment in our laboratory out to the old mansion and had set to work to make it as hospitable as possible for Harmon's visit that night.

  The Harkness house was an ideal place to haunt. It was built about a hundred years ago, when houses were large and roomy, and it was full of fireplaces and chimneys. Later on the family had installed a central heating system. The huge hot-air furnace that occupied half of one end of the musty basement looked like a giant octopus. Hot-air ducts radiated from it in every direction. They ran through the floors and walls of the old house to every room, and they were big enough for a man to crawl through. There were false ceilings, hidden cupboards, and old-fashioned laundry chutes that ran all the way from the upstairs halls to the basement And a dumb-waiter that still worked hung in a shaft that reached from the kitchen all the way up to the third-floor bedrooms.

  "What a place for ghosts!" said Jeff Crocker, after we had explored the place from top to bottom.

  "I think we can give Harmon a reasonably good reception," said Henry Mulligan.

  Then Henry started giving orders. By the time it was dark we had the place pretty well bugged. Dinky Poore was slung in a seat down the huge central chimney of the house to a point where the main flue from the furnace entered it. From here he could make ghost calls that echoed through the hot-air registers into every room of the house. Homer Snodgrass had to stand while Henry and Jeff stuck strips of luminescent tape on him to form the outline of a skeleton. Mortimer Dalrymple put on a sheet that had been dipped in luminescent paint, and tied it tight around his neck. When the two of them stepped in front of the black-light lamps that Freddy and I were rigging up, they gave off an eerie green glow that looked like something out of this world. Mortimer looked like a headless ghost, since you couldn't see his face at all in the black light; and Homer looked as though he belonged in a grave. Jeff gave him a pair of castanets to practice with, so he could make rattling noises as he went through the movements of a skeleton dance he had invented.