Mad Scientists' Club (6 page)

"Never mind," said Harmon, sheepishly. Then he looked hard at Henry. "Hey! This must be the egg that I cast to put out in the swamp. How did it ever get back in here?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," said Henry.

"But the one out in the swamp --"

"Was a fake!" said Henry.

"So you were a step ahead of me all the time!"

Professor Mudgeon cleared his throat. "Excuse me! But I'm thoroughly confused."

"You said a mouthful, Professor!" muttered Dinky, as he stepped up to Henry with his face all red. "Do you mean you had us spend all night carrying chunks of plaster back and forth to that stinkin' swamp?"

"It wasn't my idea for you to switch those eggs," said Henry, calmly.

"Well, that wasn't very scientific," Dinky pouted.

"No!" Henry agreed. "But it was pretty funny."

"Well, you sure had me fooled," Harmon admitted. "I really thought you had found a genuine dinosaur egg out there in the quarry."

"We did!" said Henry.

"You did?"

The reporters pricked up their ears at this, and a barrage of questions hit Henry from all directions. But Mayor Scragg's voice trumpeted over all of them.

"Well, where is it, you young fool -- I mean, won't you tell us where it is, Henry?"

"It's out in the swamp," said Henry, wiping the perspiration off his glasses, "but in a different place."

"Oh no! Not out in that swamp again!" groaned the Mayor, looking down at his muddy feet.

"Just a minute. I'm puzzled about one thing," said Mr. Bowden "My paper will want to know why you buried that fake egg in the first place, and why you led us out there on a wild-goose chase."

"I'm sorry about that," Henry apologized. "But without mentioning any names, I had an idea somebody would try to swipe the real egg. So I made a plaster cast of it the first night we brought it in, and took the real egg right out to the swamp and buried it. I couldn't resist taking you out to where the fake egg was buried, because you never would have gotten the whole story if I hadn't."

"And the culprit never would have come to light," boomed Mayor Scragg, fixing a baleful glare on Harmon Muldoon.

"I think the Professor will agree that a scientist can't be too careful about protecting his discoveries," Henry observed.

It was the professor's turn to wipe off his glasses. "Yes. . . . Hmm. . . . Uh," he stammered. "Unfortunately, history provides us with some classic examples of fraud and deception in the natural sciences -- er -- particularly in the field of paleontology, I may say."

"Like the Piltdown man?" questioned Mr. Bowden.

"Er ... like the Piltdown man," agreed Professor Mudgeon.

As we went down the stairs and out into Egan's Alley, Mayor Scragg was again hovering at Professor Mudgeon's shoulder. "That young Muldoon lad always was a meddlesome boy!" he said, confidentially.

"Very interesting! Very interesting!" said the professor.

Henry led us this time to the opposite side of the swamp, near where the White Fork road starts up into the hills. Not far off the road, at the foot of a bluff, he stopped at a point in the middle of a white stretch of sand. He dug into the sand with his hands and unearthed the big egg. It looked just the way it had that first night. Dinky carried it over to the professor to examine.

"Now I know why it felt so light that next day," he said.

The professor was enthused, and Mayor Scragg beamed proudly. "Truly a beautiful specimen," said the professor.

"Looks kind of ugly to me," said the Mayor. "But then, you know best, Professor."

While the professor was examining the egg, and everybody with a camera was taking pictures of it, I noticed Henry pulling something else out of the hole in the sand.

"What's that you have there, Henry?" I asked. It looked like one of our miniature transmitters.

"It's a sort of booby trap I rigged up as a burglar alarm," he said, and showed it to me. It was a little transmitter, all right, but Henry had rigged it with a pressure-type switch.

"As long as the egg was sitting on top of it, it kept on sending out a steady signal that I could pick up back at the clubhouse," he explained. "But if anyone moved the egg, the transmitter would shut off, and I'd know something was wrong."

"That was why
you
were never really worried about the egg?"

"That's right! I knew the real egg was here all the time, safe and sound. Any time I wanted to check, I'd just tune in this beep on our receiver."

Then I looked at him hard.

"Henry," I said, "is that what I saw you putting in your pocket over there when we dug up the fake egg? is that why you knew we were in Stony Martin's garage that night we switched the eggs?"

"Oh, that?" said Henry. "That was a little different. When I cast the fake egg I did happen to drop one of these transmitters into the plaster. No matter where the egg went I could always follow the beep with our directional antenna. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"So you tracked us all the way from Stony's garage out to the swamp, and then slipped over there just to scare the life out of us!"

"Not exactly. I wanted to make sure you were all right."

Then another thought struck me. "Come to think of it, Henry, you knew the minute Harmon had swiped that egg, and you also knew where he took it."

"Just about."

"But you let everybody poke fun at Dinky and Freddy for claiming the egg had been stolen!"

"I am a little ashamed of that," Henry admitted. "But I didn't want to louse up my plan. If I had admitted that the egg had been stolen, all you guys would have wanted to raid Harmon's clubhouse, and we wouldn't have had nearly as much fun."

"You mean you wouldn't!" I told him, shaking my head.

When the professor had finished examining the big egg he announced he was satisfied that it was genuine. He also asked the Mayor if the museum and the university could have the permission of the town authorities to conduct further excavations in the old quarry, in the hope that further fossil remains might be uncovered. Never one to stand in the way of the forward march of science, or the possible establishment of a tourist attraction, the Mayor assured him that the town would be most cooperative.

"What are you going to do with this egg?" asked one of the reporters.

Professor Mudgeon looked at Mayor Scragg, and Mayor Scragg turned and looked at Henry.

"What
do
you do with a dinosaur egg?" he asked.

"Usually they go into museums," said Henry.

"Unless the International Egg Syndicate happens to get hold of them," said Mortimer Dalrymple,
sotto voce
.

"I'm certain the American Museum of Natural History would be very pleased to have it," said Professor Mudgeon, suggestively.

"I suppose they would," mused Henry. "On the other hand, would you mind if we tried to hatch it first? They might rather have a live brontosaurus."

"Ohhh ... I'm sure they would," said the professor, amidst the general laughter. Then with a gallant bow he added, "Why don't you proceed with your experiment, Professor Mulligan. The museum and I will be happy to wait our turn."

"After you, Professor!" said Henry Mulligan, indicating the path leading back to the cars.

"After
you
, Professor!" said Professor Mudgeon, waving Henry before him.

While they were gesticulating, Mayor Scragg stepped ahead of both of them and walked grandly up the path, beaming broadly.

We checked on the egg, off and on, for several weeks. Then one day Dinky and Freddy came tearing up the driveway to Jeff's barn on their bicycles.

"The egg has hatched! The egg has hatched!" Dinky was shouting, long before he was in earshot.

"Honest Injun! May my mother have pneumonia if I'm telling a lie!" cried Freddy.

We all got on our bikes and pedaled out the White Forks road as fast as we could.

"See, there!" shouted Dinky, as soon as we had gotten to the stretch of sand by the bluff. He was pointing to a shallow pit where the egg lay, broken into three pieces. Down by the water's edge were the same footprints we had seen before. But this time there was a definite line in the wet sand about as thick as a clothesline, waving among the tracks.

"Look! There's his tail! There's his tail!" Freddy shouted, while he jumped up and down.

We searched the bushes and the shores of the swamp for several hundred yards on either side of the little beach, but we could find no more footprints.

"It couldn't have gone into the water," Dinky blubbered. "Dinosaurs couldn't swim."

"That's right," Henry nodded. "They went into shallow water when they got too heavy to stand upright on dry land. But they were heavy enough to sink, even in loose mud. That's why so many of their skeletons were preserved as fossils."

Henry spent a long time studying the egg fragments and the footprints. Then he professed himself stumped.

"I don't know what to think," he said finally. "I'd like to think that we had hatched a live dinosaur, but if we can't find it we'll never know. It could just as well be that Harmon ended up a step ahead of us this time, after all."

The Secret of the Old Cannon

(c) 1961 by Bertrand R. Brinley
Illustrations by Charles Geer

WE ALL WONDERED why Homer Snodgrass had been spending so much time at the library with Daphne Muldoon. We knew he was sweet on her. But what can you do in a library except look at books? Anyway, they'd been there 'most every night until the library closed, and we hadn't seen Homer around the clubhouse for three weeks.

The next time we had a meeting of the Mad Scientists' Club, Jeff Crocker, our president, said that if Homer didn't show up at the next regular meeting we would take a vote on whether we should revoke his membership. We never did take the vote, though. I had just finished reading the minutes of the last meeting when all of a sudden Homer burst through the door of Jeff Crocker's barn.

"I've got something important to bring up before the club," he said, kind of all out of breath.

Jeff Crocker rapped his gavel on the old packing crate we use for the president's podium, and told Homer to sit down.

"We've got to go through the old business yet," he said. "If there's any time left when we get through, you can have first turn, Homer."

Homer slouched back on his stool and pretended to look out of the window as if he wasn't interested in any old business.

Then we had a long discussion about how we might raise some more money, but it was pretty evident that we weren't going to get a hot idea because there wasn't any smoke coming out of anybody's ears.

Finally Homer couldn't stand it any more, and he stood right up and blurted out, "I know where you can get a whole bunch of money! Not just a little bit -- a whole bunch!"

Jeff rapped his gavel hard on the packing case and shouted at Homer, "I thought I told you to wait until we got around to new business!"

Homer sat down again, but right away Jeff thought better of it.

"What was that you said about money?"

"I didn't say a thing," said Homer, and he turned around and looked out of the window again.

"I make a motion that Homer Snodgrass tell us what he's thinking about," said little Dinky Poore.

"I second the motion," said pudgy Freddy Muldoon.

Then it took a lot of coaxing to get Homer to stop looking out of the window, and Jeff had to apologize for making him wait so long. Finally Homer stood up.

"Well, Daphne Muldoon had to do this story for the school paper, and she asked me to help her with it," said Homer.

Mortimer Dalrymple began to snicker, and Homer turned around and glared at him, and Jeff had to rap his gavel on the podium again.