Mad Scientists' Club (20 page)

We set up the two black cardboard cylinders Henry had brought with him.

"These are Army parachute flares," Henry explained. "They'll go up about a thousand feet and drift with the wind. We can track them with compasses to get a good idea where they come down. I've rigged a little radiosonde transmitter inside each of them. If the flare burns out before they reach the ground, we can still get a compass reading on where they land, with the directional radio receivers."

"Do you think we're going to find this pilot, Henry?" Jeff asked.

"If my calculations are correct, we should find him," Henry answered. "I checked with Westport Field, and the wind is still the same as it was when he bailed out this morning. This flare should at least tell us what direction he drifted. Then I'll have to calculate how far he went before he hit the ground."

A few minutes later Dinky Poore was 'way up in the big oak tree to the north of us with a night compass, and Jeff Crocker sat at the foot of it with one of our directional radio receivers. In the other big tree to the south, Mortimer Dalrymple and Freddy Muldoon were stationed with the same kind of equipment.

Henry walked over to the big rock where he had set up the first flare and pulled off the safety clip. We ducked behind a tree when the flare shot off with a swishing roar, straight up into the sky.

It exploded in a shower of sparks, and a bright red, glowing thing dangled there on the cords of a tiny parachute. It lighted up the whole of the hill and the valley to the west of us, and half the lake could be seen as clear as daylight. The wind began to blow the flare, and it swayed and danced in the sky, getting brighter all the time as it drifted off to the west a little bit north of the lake.

It kept getting smaller and smaller. When it finally went out, Henry ran over to the map and jotted down the last reading he got on his compass. Then he got on the walkie-talkie and talked with Jeff and Mortimer. Both of them said they were still getting a beep from the little transmitter in the flare.

When we were all together again, Henry took down the compass readings each team had gotten, and with a protractor and a ruler he drew these bearings on the map.

"I still don't see how all this bunk is gonna help us; find the pilot," grumbled Dinky. "Why don't we go out and start searching?"

"We'll search," said Henry, "but if the experiments work, we'll know
where
to search."

Then Henry really started to work. He sat on a flat rock with a pencil and slide rule and reams of paper. Pretty soon the ground all around him was littered with paper, but he came out with a point where the pilot was likely to have come down. It was a point in the hills about six miles west of town, where we all knew there was an old abandoned quarry.

Dinky Poore was sent shinnying up a tall spruce to place a flashing road lantern at the very top of it. Henry said we would use this as a reference point to shoot a back azimuth to, so we could check our bearings on the way. Freddy Muldoon was given the job of staying on Brake Hill with the ham outfit so we could keep in touch with Homer back at the clubhouse. We packed our bedrolls, walkie-talkies, emergency rations, and first-aid supplies on our backs and took off.

The sharp edge of a cliff silhouetted against the stars served as a good landmark to guide us until we got down off of the hill and into the woods. Then we could no longer see it. Moving through woods at night without losing direction isn't easy, but Jeff and Henry had it all figured out.

"The important thing," Jeff said, "is to keep checking your direction all the time. When you shoot a compass bearing, pick out a landmark as far away from you as possible. This reduces the chance of making an error. It's just like drawing a straight line on a piece of paper. If you use a long ruler, it's easy. If you use one only two inches long, it's pretty hard to make the line straight."

"What if it's so dark you can't see any landmark at all?" Dinky asked him.

"I'll show you in a few minutes," Jeff said. "We're getting into pretty deep woods right now."

Sure enough, we got into a place so pitch black we couldn't even see each other. Then Jeff gave us a demonstration. He called it "leapfrogging." He sent Mortimer ahead with a flashlight. After he was two or three hundred yards ahead of us, Jeff would holler to him to move either right or left. When his light was right in line with the compass bearing we were supposed to follow, we would all take off to the place where he stood. Then Jeff would send him out ahead of us again.

Sometimes we'd sight back to the light we'd left on Brake Hill, if we could see it. If we couldn't, we'd call Freddy on the radio and have him turn on the radiosonde transmitter so we could tune in on the beep our directional receiver. This way we could check on how close we were keeping on course.

We had a little problem when we got to the creek that tumbles out of Strawberry Lake. We couldn't afford to get our equipment all wet by swimming across, so Jeff found a place where the bank on our side was pretty steep. He slung a length of rope over the bough of a big tree that stuck out over the water, and had us shine our flashlights on the other shore. Then he tore down the bank like Tarzan and swung out over the creek. He landed with a squishy splash just at the water's edge on the other side, knee-deep in mud. But he was all right, and we now had a good stout rope stretched across the stream, as well as a piece of clothesline that Jeff had tied securely to his belt.

Jeff tied the big rope good and taut to another tree on his side and we ferried all our stuff across by hanging it on a loop from the big rope and pulling the clothesline back and forth.

The rest of us went across hand over hand, with the clothesline hooked to our belts as a safety line and the loop slung under our armpits so we couldn't fall if our hands slipped off the rope. We all made it in good style except Dinky. He's so skinny that he slipped right out of the noose when he lost his grip, and we had to pull him out of the water with the clothesline. He was sopping wet and mud from head to foot, and he wanted to go home. But Jeff made him take all his clothes off and we pinned a big blanket around him.

"The best thing to do is to keep moving around when you're all wet, so you can build up plenty of body heat," said Jeff. "Let's move out now. We've got to keep going."

"This stinky old blanket scratches!" said Dinky, sobbing a little bit.

"Scratch it right back!" said Mortimer.

It was just about midnight when we crawled to the top of a low ridge that we figured must be in the area the pilot had drifted to.

We found a small clearing, where we set our gear down and held a council meeting to decide what to do next. First of all, Jeff insisted that we build a fire in the middle of the clearing and bank it up well with a rock and dirt firewall so it couldn't spread. This would give us a reference point to guide us while we did our scouting, and also would make it easy to get back to the clearing. Besides, Dinky could dry his clothes out and get dressed.

"There's a quarry back there, and we don't know much about it," Jeff said. "Let's get organized before we start."

We decided to tie ourselves together, two and two, with lengths of rope, the way mountain climbers do, and be extra careful. We left Dinky to watch the fire and listen for radio calls from Freddy. Then we set off through the woods.

"When you come to the quarry, don't go too near the edge," Jeff warned. "A piece might crumble off and dump you right to the bottom. Henry and I will go along the left rim. You two go to the right. If you see anything, or find a way down to the bottom, call us on the walkie-talkie."

Roped together, Mortimer and I crept along through the underbrush. At the edge of the quarry we could see Jeff and Henry on the other side, shining their flashlights down into the pit. It was so dark we couldn't see much, but it looked as though it was about eighty feet deep and covered with scrub growth on the bottom.

Henry called over the walkie-talkie that he would throw a road flare into the pit. The flare exploded into a big hissing ball of red light that cast eerie, dancing shadows on the quarry walls. We could see that the west end of the quarry was completely blocked off by a huge stagnant pond of rain water that had collected there.

"Look! Look!" shouted Mortimer.

I followed his pointing finger to the quarry wall on the opposite side. Right below the point where Jeff and Henry stood on the rim we could see the torn shreds and dangling cords of a parachute hanging from a scrub pine that grew out of the face of the wall. Huddled among the limestone boulders at the bottom we could dimly make out a dark shape.

"The pilot!" we shouted at the tops of our lungs. "The pilot's down there!"

The next fifteen minutes went so fast I can't remember all that happened, but Jeff told us to go get Dinky and all the rope we could find and come back to the quarry.

We made a safety line out of the rope and sent Dinky over the edge. We could hear him scrambling around over the boulders at the bottom. Suddenly he shouted up to us. "It's him, all right! It's the pilot!"

"How is he? Is he alive?"

"I don't know," Dinky answered. "It's scary down here!"

We pulled the rope back up, and Jeff went down to the quarry floor. Then we took off to get the rest of our gear. We doused the campfire at the clearing and carried everything to the rim of the quarry.

"The pilot's still alive," Jeff shouted up to us. "But he's pretty bad off. He's unconscious, and I don't want to move him 'cause he might have a broken back. It's foolish to try and get him out of here."

We decided to move everything to the bottom of the quarry and leave Mortimer up on the rim, where he could keep radio contact with Freddy. While Henry and I worked with the rope sling, Mortimer tried to reach Freddy on the walkie-talkie. A woman answered.

"What's your destination?" she asked.

"Where's Freddy?" Mortimer asked.

"What do you mean, where's Freddy? Who is this? Number Seven?"

"Who are you?"

"This is the Ajax Taxi Company. What do you want?

"Please get off the air, lady. This is an emergency!"

"You get off the air. We've got a license for this radio."

"Forget the walkie-talkie!" Henry said excitedly. "Hook up the portable ham transmitter. Tune it to one four five point two megacycles. That's the emergency frequency that they're working on. Get the Town Hall direct and tell them exactly where we are."

The next hour and a half we worked like beavers. Henry and Jeff went to work on the pilot while Dinky and I set up camp on the quarry floor. Messages kept coming through on the radio from Search and Rescue Headquarters at the Town Hall.

The pilot had a fracture of the leg. Jeff and Henry made a splint from branches of scrub trees and my shirt. They moved the rocks away from him so he could lie flat on his back, and covered him with blankets. He was in deep shock. Jeff told us to build fires at three widely separated points in the quarry to serve as location markers in case Colonel March wanted to fly a plane over the area to fix our location.

"We can do better than that, Jeff," Henry said. "I've got a surplus weather balloon in my knapsack and a thousand feet of nylon thread. We can fly the balloon with a flashlight tied beneath it, and they'll be able see it all the way from town."

Henry's knapsack was a regular McGee's closet. He could always pull something out of it you never knew he had.

We had just sent the balloon up when a message came through that they might try to send a small helicopter in before daylight if it was possible to land anywhere nearby. Jeff sent back word that we would clear an area on the quarry floor and let them know when we were ready.