Freddy and the Flying Saucer Plans (3 page)

He was more careful after that.

When the station wagon stopped in front of the bank, Uncle Ben snatched up from the seat a thin metal cylinder about two feet long and tossed it out of the window to Freddy. “Keep this safe,” he said. “Vaults.” And he pointed to the bank. Then he leaned out and stared hard at the four animals. “You good Americans?” he demanded.

“Why, you know us all, Uncle Ben,” said Freddy. “All except Samuel, here. And he lives on the farm; he's one of us.”

“Why, thanks, Freddy,” said the mole. “You want us to do something, mister? I say you want us to do something?”

“Just forget me,” Uncle Ben said. “You ain't seen me today. Understand? Tighter you keep your mouths shut, better you'll serve your country. Here, Freddy.” He held out an envelope which Freddy took. “So long. You'll hear from me.” And with a series of deafening explosions the station wagon bounded on up the road.

“Funny he didn't stop to see the Beans for a minute,” said Jinx.

“Better do as he asked,” said Freddy. He took the cylinder into the bank. The two squirrel guards who were sitting on the planks that covered the entrance to the vaults jumped up and stood at attention. “Gustav,” said the pig, “you and Archie take this down and put it in safe-deposit hole number”—he consulted a wall chart of the vaults—“number eighteen. It belongs to Uncle Ben. We'll double the guards for a while. I'll get rabbits No. 12 and 24, and I'll also alert the A.B.I., as I believe this cylinder is important to the safety of our nation.”

The A.B.I. was the Animal Bureau of Intelligence, whose director was a robin, Mr. J. J. Pomeroy.

“That Uncle Ben,” said Samuel when Freddy came out, “he's not much of a talker, is he? I say he's not much of a talker.”

“He doesn't usually say even that much,” said Freddy.

“Practically an oration for him, what he said today,” Jinx added. “What's the letter, Freddy?”

Freddy opened the envelope and took out several sheets, closely written. “My goodness!” he said. “Uncle Ben sure gets talkative enough when he gets a pen in his hand.” He glanced through the sheets, then looked down at the mole. “Samuel,” he said solemnly, “this is highly confidential matter. Top secret. Foreign agents would pay a lot of money to know what's written here. But I'm going to let you listen to it because I believe you're a patriotic citizen. I knew your grandfather, and a more upright and honest American I never knew. So I know you won't talk. And I doubt very much that you could be bribed into talking and betraying your government with any amount of money. Am I right?”

“Oh, yeah?” said the mole sarcastically. “I guess if you really trusted me, you wouldn't make such big talk about it. I don't want to hear your darned old letter anyway. I say I don't want to hear it.” And he plunged again into the earth. But this time they watched the little ridge where he tunneled go right up to the fence and under it, and out into the field beyond.

“I thought he'd go if I talked like that to him,” Freddy said. “Pretty proud, moles are. That's why I did it. I didn't want to ask him to leave; this way I figured maybe he'd be irritated and go. He's probably all right, but this is too important to take chances with. Here's the letter:

‘
DEAR FRIEND FREDDY
:

‘Please burn this letter as soon as you have read it. I have just made a deal with Interminable Motors. They will put up the money for my flying saucer—that is, for the first experimental model. They will at first make the saucer itself and some of the fittings and so on, and I will make and install the engine. However, the plans for the engine itself, which is a radically new kind of power plant, I shall not turn over to them until the model has been tested and the Air Force has agreed to buy a number of saucers, as it certainly will.

‘In the meantime, I have made two sets of plans for the engine. The right set I am going to leave in the care of the First Animal Bank. None of these spies who follow me everywhere will know it is there, because I shall start for the Bean home in my station wagon at a moment's notice, and I shall leave it and drive on quickly. They will try to follow me, but no spy has a car that can keep up with the station wagon, and by the time they can locate it with their planes I shall have passed the farm and struck down to the main road and gone through Syracuse.

‘The wrong set of plans I shall carry with me. Eventually the agents of one nation or another will steal it from me. This will soon become known to all the other spies, and then they will leave me alone and try to capture the set from whoever has it.

‘Surrounded as I am now by these gangs of secret agents, I am unable to start work on the motor. Indeed I am unable to get a moment alone. Even in bed I am constantly being kept awake by attempts to get into the room, by footsteps and the rattling of doorknobs and tapping at the windows. If there was only one gang at work it would have had me before this. It is only the large number of groups, all constantly spying on the others, that has prevented my being kidnapped.

‘It will take whatever foreign government that gets the false plans from me several months to find out that they are false. By that time the motor should have been made and tested; perhaps the Air Force may have ordered some, in which case protection of the plans will be up to the government. In the meantime, guard this set well. The only other true set is in my head.

‘Hoping this finds you as it leaves me, in good health, but nervous, I am

Yours truly,

UNCLE BEN
'”

CHAPTER

3

There was a long silence after the reading of Uncle Ben's letter. Then Freddy gave a sigh. “Well, I guess our trip is off, Jinx. Cy, we might as well get that saddle off—”

He stopped. There was a droning in the east, and three planes came over the horizon. They were some distance apart, but they headed toward the Bean farm. Flying just above treetop level, they circled and dipped above the farm buildings, then went on west.

“Looking for Uncle Ben, do you think?” Cy asked.

“I do indeed,” said the pig. “They'd know he had a workshop here; if they lost him they'd head for the farm.”

Jinx, who had gone out into the road and was looking down toward Centerboro, said suddenly: “Listen!”

A rushing sound, louder than the droning of the planes, which had died away, came up from the east, increased to sustained roar; and then the cars appeared—dozens of them. They seemed to be coming almost as fast as the planes; they were driving very dangerously, cutting out and in and trying to pass one another on the narrow road. The first one braked sharply and pulled off the road by the bank; most of the others—there must have been thirty of them—slowed down fifty yards farther on and turned in at the Bean gate. Freddy put his hat on and pulled it down over his eyes.

Several cars drew up behind the first one. The occupants jumped out and crowded around Freddy. The driver of the first car, a huge man with heavy black eyebrows that were twisted up at the outer corners like a mustache, stood in front of the pig and smiled. It was a terrifying smile, although it was evidently intended to be pleasant.

“Ha, my little friend, you are the western cowboy, no? You ride the pony, you play the music. So? I too, when I am your age, I play the cow-punch, I shoot the six-gun—bang, bang, bang!”

“Sure,” said Freddy. “I like playing cowboy. It's lots of fun.” He realized that the man thought he was a ten- or twelve-year-old boy playing Wild West. He was the right size for it, and nobody, seeing him with his hat over his eyes, could guess that he was a pig.

“Ha, is mooch fun, surely,” the man agreed. “Tell me, you are knowing Mr. Benjamin Bean? You maybe his littly boy?”

Jinx put a paw over his mouth to smother a laugh. But Freddy said: “No, but I know him. He lives here sometimes.” He pointed up toward the gate.

“So? Good, good!” said the man. “I come long way to visit him. We are old friends. Those people up by house”—he shook his head—“no good. All wanting to steal from him something. You jump on horse—go see him, tell him meet me here, right here, ten o'clock tomorrow night, no?”

A thin man with glasses and red hair said quickly: “I too am an old friend of Mr. Benjamin Bean's.
Really
a friend,” he said with a dirty look at the other man.

“That's what you say,” drawled a slim man with a neat pointed beard. “Look, bud,” he murmured confidentially, “tell him to ask for Mr. Penobsky at the Centerboro Hotel tonight. He'll hear of something to his advan—” But he got no further, for a fourth man pushed in and hit him on the nose.

At that the man with the glasses pulled a blackjack from his pocket and slugged the big man, and in ten seconds the rest of the men had joined the fight. Jinx ducked between the thin man's legs, jumped over a man in a turban who had just been knocked flat, and skittered through the fence; and Freddy grabbed up his guitar, scrambled on to Cy's back, and cantered up the road and through the gate.

The barnyard was full of cars, and Mr. Bean was on the back porch looking down angrily at the crowd of men who pressed up close to the railing. “I tell ye, consarn ye, that Uncle Ben ain't here,” he shouted. “I ain't seen him for months.”

“You're
sure
he isn't here?” one man asked. And another: “Couldn't he have come today, maybe, and you not see him?”

“Look!” Mr. Bean roared, bringing his hand down with a smack on the railing. “What kind of a lot of numbskulls and ninnyhammers are you, anyway? Don't ye understand plain English? I tell ye, he … ain't … HERE!”

Some of the men, by twos and threes, had drifted away and were poking around in the stable and the cow barn. One was even trying to crawl through the little revolving door in the henhouse. Looking at the stable, Mr. Bean saw a face appear at one of the windows of Uncle Ben's workshop. “By cracky!” he exclaimed. “This is too much!” He dashed into the house and brought out his shotgun.

The big man who had interrogated Freddy had just driven up and got out of his car. Mr. Bean went down off the porch and up to him. He just said one word: “Git!” And the man got. He went straight back to his car, got in, and whirled off down the road to Centerboro.

The sight of the gun sent the other men scurrying back to their cars. As Freddy said afterwards, they probably all had pistols in their pockets, but they had nothing to gain by starting something. If one of them pulled a pistol the sheriff would probably be put on his trail, and that would badly hamper his work as a spy.

Mr. Bean turned to Freddy, who had just ridden up. “Feller up in Uncle Ben's shop,” he said. “Chase him out.”

Freddy had two guns in his holsters; one was a cap pistol and the other a water pistol. Sometimes, in his detective work, he carried a real pistol; but in the ordinary run of cases, where there was not likely to be any shooting, he carried the water pistol, loaded with a generous charge of strong perfumery. For most crooks would rather face bullets than be drenched with cheap perfume—first, because if they go into hiding it's easy to smell them out, and second, because they can't stand the remarks that their friends, and even people who pass them on the street, make about how lovely they smell. For Freddy's perfume was nothing that you could get rid of by taking a few baths. It clung for weeks.

The pig jumped out of the saddle and went into the stable and up the stairs. The man who was looking over some papers on the work bench was the man with the neat little beard who had been down by the bank. He turned as Freddy appeared.

“Well, boy, what are you doing here?” he asked.

He still thinks I'm a kid playing cowboy, Freddy thought. Well, maybe that's a good disguise. And he said: “Oh, they let me play up here. But what are you doing here, mister?” He pulled out the water pistol. “Mr. Bean says for you to come down.”

The man smiled a tight little smile. “Dear me,” he said, “I suppose I should have explained to the estimable Bean, but there was such a crowd down there … You see, I'm a friend of Benjamin's—Mr. Benjamin Bean, that is. He asked me when I was coming by to stop and pick up some papers from his workshop. I think these are the ones, so I'll just take them along.”

“No, you'll put them down or I'll shoot you,” said Freddy.

“My dear little boy,” said the man, rolling up the papers to stuff them in his pocket, “you must mind your manners. My friend Benjamin will be very cross with me if I stop here and let a little boy with a water pistol keep me from doing his errand. And he will be even crosser with you. Now just let me by.”

Freddy didn't know what the papers were. They couldn't be important or Uncle Ben wouldn't have left them on the bench. But this man was no friend. Probably nobody had called Uncle Ben Benjamin since the day he was baptized; the Beans and the animals called him Uncle Ben, and his friends called him Ben. So Freddy said: “Put the papers down,” and pointed the gun and just touched the trigger so that a few drops of perfume sprinkled the man's necktie.