Mad Scientists' Club (4 page)

"How long does it take a big egg like that to hatch?" asked Dinky.

"Nobody knows," said Henry, "That's one of the things we aim to find out. It would be an important contribution to paleontology."

"Watch your language!" said Freddy Muldoon. "I heard that."

"Would it take a year?" asked Dinky.

"Nobody knows," said Henry.

Dinky and Freddy weren't about to wait a year, however. They were back out in the swamp the next day to check on the egg, and when they got back into town they ran all over looking for the rest of us. They found Jeff and me at Henry's house, helping him wash the family car.

"The egg's gone!" Freddy cried, as soon as he spied us.

"It 'steriously disappeared!" chimed in Dinky.

"Is that so?" Henry said, cool as a cucumber.

"How do you know?" Jeff asked them.

"We dug it up, and it's not there."

"How could you dig it up, if it isn't there?" Henry asked, still scrubbing a tire.

"Aw, c'mon, Henry. You know what I mean," said Freddy, kicking the tire and getting his dirty fingers all over the trunk of the car.

"I'll bet Harmon Muldoon stole it," said Dinky, jumping up and down. "I'll bet it was him out there in the bushes that kicked those rocks down."

"Maybe we'd better go out there," said Jeff, looking at Henry.

"I suppose so," Henry answered. "Hand me that other brush."

"Well, let's get going," said Dinky, impatiently. "This old car can wait."

"Tomorrow morning'll be time enough," said Henry, as he hosed down the front of the car. "If the egg's already gone, nobody can steal it."

"Tomorrow morning?" Freddy exclaimed. "Aw, nuts! You gonna fiddle while Rome burns, I suppose!"

"Who's burning, besides you?" said Henry, spraying him with the hose.

"O.K., you old fiddler crab!" said Freddy.

The next morning we did make our way out to the sandpit again, but everything seemed to be normal. The markers we had left were still in place and the ground looked undisturbed.

"Somebody's been out here again!" said Dinky. "Freddy and I dug a big hole right there, looking for the egg, and somebody has filled it in."

"Well, let's just see if the egg is here now," said Jeff.

We drew lines out from the markers and started digging at the point where they intersected. The egg was there, all right, just as we'd left it, though it didn't look as though it had made much progress toward hatching. Everyone turned and looked at Dinky and Freddy.

"What's the idea, bringing us 'way out here on a wild-goose chase?" Mortimer snorted at them. "We've got more important things to do."

"If this is your idea of a joke, you two'll never make a living as comedians," said Jeff. "We oughta toss you in the swamp."

Little Dinky started to blubber. "Honest Injun, Jeff. Somebody has been out here. There wasn't any egg there when Freddy and I were here yesterday."

"Scout's honor!" said Freddy, giving the sign.

"Maybe you dug in the wrong place. You guys don't dig things too well, you know," said Mortimer sarcastically.

"Maybe we did. But who filled our hole up?" said Dinky, kicking sand at him. His voice was all choked up, and there was a big tear running down the left side of his face.

"How do I know? Maybe the whole thing was in your head," Mortimer jibed at him.

While they were arguing, I noticed that Henry had lifted the-big egg out of the hole and was examining it closely with his pocket magnifying glass. There was a mysterious smile on his face as he placed it back in the sand.

"What's so funny, Henry? Can you see the dinosaur in there already?" I asked him.

Henry started, as though he hadn't realized anyone was looking at him. "Everything's fine, Charlie. Just fine," he said, and covered the egg up with sand.

But everything wasn't "just fine" as far as Dinky and Freddy were concerned. Dinky moped all the way home; and later he and Freddy told me they were certain the egg had been missing when they had tried to dig it up the day before.

"We think my cousin Harmon has been up to something, and we aim to find out what he's doing," Freddy explained.

"We've got to prove to the other guys that we're not nuts," Dinky added.

I felt sorry for both of them, and I agreed to help out in setting a watch on Harmon's clubhouse. This wasn't difficult, because Harmon's gang always meets on the second story of an old garage in back of Stony Martin's house. It faces Egan's Alley, and across the alley and just a little way down is the old Blaisdell barn. The Blaisdells are an old couple that can't run very fast, and they long ago got tired of trying to chase us out of their loft. Old man Blaisdell just decided to buy more insurance and relax, and we've had the run of the place ever since.

It's a neat place to spy from. There're windows at both ends of the loft, and there's a cupola on top that you can climb up into and look out through the ventilation slits. From it we could keep a good watch on Stony Martin's garage.

That night we saw Stony come out and dump a bucketful of stuff into a trash can in the alley. It sounded like rocks. Then he chipped away at the inside of the bucket with a screwdriver and washed it out with a hose. After he went back inside the garage, Dinky couldn't contain his curiosity any longer. He sneaked across the alley and shinnied up a telephone pole so he could peek inside the lighted window on the second floor. We held our breath, hoping nobody would come out and see him there. Suddenly we saw him swing over onto the sloping roof of the garage and lie flat against it. Harmon came to the lighted window and raised the sash so he could look out into the alley. He took a good look around, then pulled his head in and closed the window again. We breathed easier, but Dinky lay motionless on the roof, pressing himself against the shingles. Pretty soon the light went out, and we could hear them clumping down the stairs inside. Harmon and Stony came out the back door, locked it behind them, and disappeared down the alley.

As soon as they were out of sight, Dinky scrambled down the pole and came running pell-mell toward Blaisdell's barn. We met him halfway down the ladder from the loft.

"They've got our egg!" he said in a breathless whisper. "I saw it sitting on a table up there."

We dashed across the alley and Dinky shinnied up the pole again. He jumped onto the roof of the garage and let himself down over the eaves onto the windowsill. The window was unlocked, and it took him only a second to scramble inside. Then he groped his way down the stairs in the dark and unlatched the alley door. I slipped inside and went upstairs with him while Freddy kept watch behind one of the trash cans in the alley. Dinky's flashlight picked out the table against the wall, and sure enough, there was the big egg sitting unprotected in the middle of it. We looked around for something to wrap it in and found a pile of burlap bags in one corner. I pulled a couple of them off the top of the pile and felt something hard under the next bag. Pulling it aside, I shined my flashlight onto what looked like a couple of small wash basins. Dinky stood beside me, breathing hard.

"What are those, Charlie? They look like big hunks of plaster."

"I think I know," I said. "And I think they can tell us a lot about what's been going on."

We got the big egg off the table and fitted it into the depression in one of the chunks of plaster. It fitted perfectly.

"These are plaster molds," I whispered. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Yeah! That's what Stony was throwing away in the ash can. Old chunks of plaster of Paris."

"Yes! But don't you see? These are two halves of a plaster mold made from our dinosaur egg. What would they make a mold for?"

"To make another egg," said Dinky.

"Exactly! And that's what's out in the swamp right now: a fake egg made out of plaster of Paris and painted up."

"I wonder why they'd do that?" Dinky hissed.

"So they could claim they found the egg, instead of us, and get all the credit. That Harmon would do anything; but this time he's gonna get fooled."

"Whatcha gonna do?"

"We're going to beat them at their own game," I said. "We're gonna switch eggs on them, and they'll never know the difference."

We wrapped the egg in a couple of burlap bags and beat it out of there, being careful to leave the door unlocked. It took us about two hours to get out to the right place in the swamps, find the fake egg in the darkness, and put the real egg back in its place. Then it took us another two hours to get back to Egan's Alley. Our hearts were thumping pretty loudly when we tiptoed up the creaky stairs of Stony's garage again; but it was well after midnight, and we figured we were pretty safe as long as we didn't make any noise. Since we found the door still unlocked, we were pretty sure nobody had discovered the egg was missing.

When we got to the top of the stairs, we groped our way carefully to the table. I reached out for the edge of it and almost screamed out loud when my hand came down on what felt like another human hand.

"It's about time you got back," said a voice. "What took you so long?"

Dinky jumped back clear to the top of the stairs and snapped his flashlight on. My heart had stopped, but it started beating again when I saw that the figure sitting at the end of the table was Henry Mulligan.

For a minute I had all sorts of wild thoughts. What was Henry doing here in Harmon Muldoon's clubhouse? Was he in cahoots with Harmon for some reason? How did he know what we were up to?

"Jeepers, Henry, you scared the daylights out of us," said Dinky.

"What on earth are you doing here?" I asked, when I could find my voice.

"Never mind," said Henry. "Put the egg back, and let's get out of here!"

"This isn't the real egg," said Dinky. "We found the real one here and took it back out to the swamp."

"I know all about where you've been," Henry said quietly. "You just had to prove you were right, didn't you? Now put the egg down and let's scram."

I propped the egg up on the table, just where we'd found the other one, and we cleared out of there. At least Dinky and Freddy had vindicated themselves. And even though we didn't know exactly what Harmon was up to, we figured we were a step ahead of him. The big question, though, was Henry Mulligan's strange behavior. And it became even stranger during the next several days.

He seemed to spend hours and hours in the clubhouse, fiddling around with our ham radio set, and he wouldn't even talk about dinosaurs or let anyone go out to check on the egg. "The egg is all right," he would say. "Don't worry about it." Finally, one day, we talked him into going fishing, and we all got on our bicycles and rode 'way up into the hills to a favorite stream of ours. Henry didn't catch any fish, though. He almost never does. Somehow or other it seems that really smart people just don't attract fish. I think they just get bored with it all and aren't patient enough.

By early afternoon, Henry had talked us all into going back to town. When we got back to his house there was a man sitting on the porch waiting to see him. He introduced himself as a science reporter for one of the big city newspapers.

"I'm Mr. Bowden from the
Globe-Democrat
," he said. "I'd like to ask you a few questions about this big egg you found."

"What big egg?" asked Freddy Muldoon.

"The big egg that's supposed to be a dinosaur egg," said Mr. Bowden.