Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space

by Raymond Abrashkin

  “About what?”

  Professor Bullfinch dropped his eyes. “Well,” he said, reluctantly, “we were talking about sports, and the conversation got around to baseball, and he said it was just a game for children that they played with a little stick and a rubber ball in England, a game called rounders. And I—er—well, I got angry, and said that it couldn’t possibly be as dull and boring as the English game of cricket. Oh, dear me, I’m afraid it was silly of us both, but in the end he stormed out of the room and we haven’t spoken since.”

  “I didn’t know you were that keen on baseball,” said Dr. Badger.

  “Neither did I,” Professor Bullfinch replied. “He spoke so arrogantly that he put my back up.”

  “But surely this is important enough to make you forget that old quarrel,” said Dr. Badger.

  Joe cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said.

  “Just a minute, Joe,” said Dr. Badger. He clapped his hands together. “We’ve got to make him see reason, Euclid! This project could be one of the most wonderful things that ever happened. If we could make contact with another species—”

  “Listen, Professor,” Joe said.

  “Wait a second, Joe,” said the Professor. “That’s a big ‘if,’ Badge. You know yourself that it might produce nothing at all.”

  “But it’s worth a try,” Dr. Badger answered. “The odds may be against it, but we’ve got to give it a chance.”

  Professor Bullfinch nodded vigorously: “Of course. We’ll talk about it again. I want you to meet a colleague of mine, Alvin Miller, an astronomer here at Midston.”

  He turned to Joe. “What was it you wanted to say?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” said Joe, “except that that machine of yours is making a very threatening kind of noise, and if it’s going to explode I’d like to go home.”

  They all whirled around in horror. They had forgotten the Professor’s new thermoelement. The square gray box was fizzing in an ominous way, and the needle on the dial the Professor had told Danny to watch stood deep in the red warning section.

  Danny, with a yelp, dove for the box.

  “Turn it off!” sputtered the Professor.

  Danny’s hand was outstretched. But in his wild haste, he stumbled. He grabbed blindly for the table-top. His fingers slammed down across the wrong switch.

  “Look!” cried Dr. Badger.

  At the ends of the two slender rods which stuck out of the side of the box, a startling object appeared. It looked like a mass of mushy snow. Twists of steam went up from it, and it grew larger as they looked at it. Then there was a loud crack!, as if a tree had been split open.

  A long tongue of flame shot across the room, and smoke poured from the gray box.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dr. Badger Finds an Answer

  The Professor, who could move swiftly enough when he had to, ran to snatch up a fire extinguisher that was hanging on one wall. He leveled it at the box, and white foam poured out and smothered the fire. The strange white mass had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. The room was full of the choking smell of burned rubber and metal.

  Danny, wiping away the foam which had splashed him, staggered away from the bench.

  “Oh, golly!” he panted. “I’m—sorry— Professor. We were all so busy talking—and I slipped—”

  “It’s all right, my boy,” said Professor Bullfinch. “Thank goodness we’re none of us hurt. It was as much my fault as yours. I was about to remind you about the charger myself, when I first came in, and seeing Dr. Badger drove everything out of my head.”

  Joe had dived under the other lab bench. He now emerged, brushing cobwebs from his hair. “Is it over?” he said. “It’s not going to do it again, is it?”

  The Professor was examining the wreck of his machine.

  “No, Joe,” he said, “it’s not going to do anything at all, any more. I’ll have to rebuild it. Look at this, all of you. The metal has melted like taffy.”

  The front of the box had split open, and the steel had run down in lumps like the wax of a candle, mixed with a mass of wire and fused parts from the inside.

  “That took some heat,” Dr. Badger commented.

  Danny had been inspecting the tips of the long rods, at the other end. “The thermometer is shattered,” he said.

  “I’m not surprised,” said the Professor. “That thermometer was made to show a temperature of a hundred degrees below zero, and I suspect we got something a lot colder than that.”

  Dr. Badger raised his eyebrows. “That big blob of snow—?”

  “Was frozen air, I think,” said the Professor, solemnly. “If so, you can imagine how much heat was transferred back into that battery box!”

  Dr. Badger clapped his hand to his head.

  “Don’t move!” he said. “Don’t say anything.”

  The others stood as still as if they had, indeed, turned to ice, staring at him.

  “I’ve got it!” he went on, in a low, tense voice. “By George, this may be the very thing I’ve been looking for—the answer to my problem.”

  Professor Bullfinch was the first to break the silence.

  “I must be very slow today,” he said, “but I really don’t see how this accident can have anything to do with Project Gnome. Unless, maybe, you plan to freeze Sir Edward Pomfret solid and then use his telescope while he’s trying to thaw out.”

  Dr. Badger thrust his hands deep into his pockets and began striding up and down. He stopped abruptly, and wheeled to face the Professor.

  “Do you think you could do that again?” he demanded.

  “Do what? I haven’t done anything yet,” said the Professor, in surprise.

  “Build another of those gadgets and reproduce that same effect?”

  “Oh, no!” wailed Joe. “Wasn’t once enough?”

  “Sh!” Danny said, throwing his arm around his friend’s neck. “He doesn’t mean right this minute.”

  Professor Bullfinch looked thoughtful. “I’d have to experiment,” he answered. “I’m not sure just what happened—something to do with a transformation in the fuel cells of my battery and an excessive charge through the new metals and crystal of the thermoelement. I might be able to. Why?”

  “You know what the main problem has been in listening for signals from outer space, don’t you?” said Dr. Badger.

  “Amplifier noise,” the Professor said. “Is that what you mean? Oho! I see.”

  “I don’t,” Danny put in, boldly. Professor Bullfinch had always encouraged him to ask questions when he didn’t understand something and had always tried his best to give the boy a complete answer.

  Now he turned to Dan and said, “You know what happens when you turn up the volume on a radio? The sound of the broadcast gets louder but so does the crackling and humming of the amplifier itself. That’s even more true when you’re trying to listen for a signal from a distant star. The amplifier itself makes more noise than the signal coming across millions of miles of space.

  “The very best amplifier ever developed— one which makes no noise at all—is a device called a maser. However, in order to operate, the maser has to be chilled to minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature very close to absolute zero. This has been done so far with tanks of liquid helium, but it’s an expensive process and involves a lot of apparatus.

  “What Badge is getting at is that we might be able to use this new thermoelement instead.”

  “Exactly,” said Dr. Badger. “Professor Bullfinch thinks the air itself froze around the ends of the thermoelement. Air turns into a liquid at a temperature of minus 318 degrees Fahrenheit, at normal atmospheric pressure. But what we saw was a kind of solid mass, remember? Thus we had a temperature lower than that. I strongly suspect that the thermoelement will produce temperatures low enough to keep a maser happy. If that’s the case, this little gadge
t—the battery case and its rods and crystal—would replace all the complex machinery we now need.”

  “I understand.” Danny nodded. “You think that if you give one to Sir Edward what’s-his-name, in England, he’ll let you use his radio telescope for your project, in exchange.”

  “Precisely. There isn’t an astronomer in the world who wouldn’t welcome one of these things, especially in observatories where they haven’t yet installed masers because of the cost.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” Professor Bullfinch said enthusiastically. “Look here, Badge, I’ll phone Dr. Grimes at once. He’s the man to advise us about the best way to proceed. He’s a real organizer, and he’ll be able to get the American Science Foundation behind us. Come along. I want to introduce you to Mrs. Dunn and explain that you’ll be staying for a while. You certainly can’t leave now, not until we get this thing settled. And we’ll have to get in touch with Pomfret.”

  He grabbed Dr. Badger by the arm and hustled him toward the door.

  “I’ll clean up the lab, Professor,” Danny called after him. “And I’ll bring Dr. Badger’s knapsack in, in a few minutes.”

  He got a couple of old rags from one of the cupboards, and thrust one into Joe’s unwilling hand.

  “Uh—I think I hear my mother calling me,” Joe said.

  “Come on, start mopping up this dried foamite,” Danny grinned. “I want to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Our trip this summer.”

  “Oh. Oh, sure,” said Joe. Then he stopped work and goggled at his friend. “What trip?”

  “Well, look. Suppose they get this Zero-maker working the way they want it. And suppose Sir Edward Pomfret agrees to let them use his telescope for Project Gnome. Professor Bullfinch will certainly go to England with Dr. Badger, and maybe Irene’s father will go, too—the Professor said he wanted to introduce them to each other.”

  “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “Week after next we have final exams. After that, vacation starts. What are you planning to do this summer?”

  “Hack around. Go swimming, and fishing, and play some baseball, and write some poems. With you, I guess. No?”

  “No,” said Danny firmly. “Don’t you want to be in England when they try for a message from another planet?”

  “I might have known it,” Joe said, gloomily. “You’ll get mixed up with some Martians and there’ll be trouble.”

  “No trouble at all. All we have to do is start working on our parents. Going to England would be an important part of our education, wouldn’t it?”

  “Hmm. Well, I have always wanted to see where Shakespeare came from,” Joe admitted.

  “Okay. We’ll have to talk to Irene and make some plans. I don’t know about anybody else,” Danny said, setting his jaw stubbornly, “but if Professor Bullfinch is going abroad, he’s not going without me!”

  CHAPTER 5

  Joe the Persuader

  The next couple of weeks were crammed with work for grownups and children alike. Professor Bullfinch plunged into experiments with his thermoelement, which by now he had taken to calling by Danny’s name, the Zero-maker. Dr. Badger, after a few days’ stay, went back to Boston and soon the air was thick with telephone calls and telegrams between Washington, Midston, Boston, and England.

  As for Danny and his friends, they had more than enough to do getting ready for their exams, and could barely find time to think of anything else. But in the end, the last examination question had been answered and the last groans groaned, the final marks had been handed out and the final day had been greeted by the national freedom anthem of schoolchildren:

  No more pencils, no more books,

  No more teachers’ dirty looks.

  That very evening, there was a buffet dinner in Professor Bullfinch’s house. Irene and her parents were there, as well as the Pearson family, Dr. Badger, and Dr. Grimes. The last was an old friend of the Professor’s, and was director of the American Science Foundation. Partly—at least from the point of view of the children—the dinner was in honor of the end of school. But actually, it was in celebration of Dr. Badger’s great news.

  “It’s definite, then?” Professor Bullfinch said, balancing a plate of cold turkey on his knee, while he tried to butter a roll.

  Dr. Badger, his mouth full, nodded. Then he swallowed convulsively, and said, “I had the letter yesterday. I brought it along to show you.”

  He put his plate on the floor, and fished an envelope out of his inner pocket. From it, he took a letter which he unfolded and read aloud:

  “I was very pleased to hear of the final results of the tests of Professor Bullfinch’s cryostat. I was especially gratified to know that the first model will, through his generosity, be given to us for installation at Grendel Observatory. I have made all arrangements for you to commence Project Gnome on the 27th July, and the radio telescope will be reserved for your continuous use (barring any emergency requirements) for two weeks from that date. With cordial best wishes, I am,

  Yours,

  Pomfret.”

  “Splendid!” said the Professor.

  Dr. Miller, a rather untidy man with a worried, absent-minded look, said, “It certainly sounds as if you’d sold Sir Edward the idea. Wonderful! And you’ll have two solid weeks to listen for signals.”

  “Two solid weeks of nonsense,” growled Dr. Grimes, who was tall and skinny. Much frowning had left deep furrows on either side of his mouth. “Life on other planets, indeed!”

  “Now, Grimes, don’t be contrary,” said Professor Bullfinch heartily. “We wouldn’t have this chance if it hadn’t been for your help. You furnished me with the materials for the Zero-maker in the first place.”

  “That’s something else again,” said Dr. Grimes. “The cryostat has many practical uses, and the Foundation was delighted to see it developed. But I fear you won’t be any more successful in getting a message from some bug-eyed monster on another planet than Drake was with Project Ozma.”

  “I don’t believe they will be bug-eyed monsters,” Dr. Badger said. “If there is advanced life on another planet, in conditions much like ours, it’s not impossible that those beings should look a great deal like us. And Drake really didn’t have a chance to do a thorough job, you know. It was a little like standing on the tip of Mount Everest and yelling at the top of your voice in the hope that somebody in New York City would hear you. I am planning to cover a whole series of star-targets. I may not be successful, either. But it won’t mean we’re wrong.”

  “I can see that,” said Joe’s father. Mr. Pearson, a businessman who held an engineering degree, was deeply interested in science. “You mean that there are so many possibilities that even if you cover a hundred of them, there’ll be thousands left.”

  “Millions,” corrected Dr. Badger.

  “Is it worth trying, then? The odds are so great—”

  “Of course it’s worth trying,” Professor Bullfinch said stoutly. “We’d never learn much if we didn’t try tackling the impossible.”

  Dr. Grimes snorted. “Wild dreams, Bullfinch. I don’t believe you’ll get anything but static. However, I have something to tell you.”

  He put his plate aside, and cleared his throat impressively. “Perhaps the rest of you don’t know it, but Professor Bullfinch has turned over the patent rights for the thermoelement to the American Science Foundation so that any money which comes in may be used for research. We have decided, therefore, to pay all the expenses of Project Gnome.”

  While the grownups were exclaiming with pleasure over this announcement, Danny, Joe, and Irene, at the other end of the room, put their heads together.

  “What do you think?” Danny whispered. “Shall we try them now?”

  Irene’s dark eyes flashed. “Let me start,” she said. “And then we’ll leave it to Joe. You and I
know more about science, Dan, but he’s a better talker than we’ll ever be.”

  Joe tried hard not to look flattered.

  Mrs. Miller, a plump, lively woman, was saying, “I think the whole thing sounds terribly thrilling.”

  Irene, with an innocent air, said, “Daddy, are you going along with them to England?”

  “Well, my dear, I—” Dr. Miller began.

  “Of course he is,” Dr. Badger put in. “Your father’s one of our leading astronomers, Irene. When I first met him, I invited him to take part in the project.”

  “You’re very kind,” said Dr. Miller.

  “It’s too bad Mother can’t have a trip abroad, too,” Irene said, as if to herself.

  “It’s too bad we can’t all have a trip abroad,” said Joe, loudly and suddenly.

  He stood up in the center of the room.

  “I’ve been thinking about things, you know,” he said, “and it seems to me that travel is the one thing that is left out of education for kids.

  “For instance, we’re supposed to study languages, like French, but what’s the fun if we don’t have a chance to go abroad and speak those languages? And we study current events, the United Nations, and all, but we don’t go to strange countries and meet foreign people.

  “And, gosh!” he went on, “what about social studies and geography—what’s the good of them unless you can visit other places and see the geography and study the social—er— societies?

  “And then all those classics we read in school. Wouldn’t it be better if we could see the country they came from? I mean, like England, for instance—the land of Dickens and H. G. Wells, and that rotten book Silas Marner— and that good book The Hobbit—and—so on.

  “England!” he exclaimed, waving his arms. “Sure! What about history? The land of the Pilgrim Fathers. And knights, and Henry VIII and his wives, and no taxation without representation.

  “See what I mean?” he shouted, his hair falling into his eyes and his face getting redder and redder. “If we went to England it would be just like going to school. Even more so. It would be like having classes all summer. You want us to become educated, don’t you? And what about seeing the land of Shakespeare? You remember what Shakespeare said about England? ‘This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars; This other Eden, demi-Paradise… This precious stone set in the silver sea…’ Uh—uh—