Mad Scientists' Club (8 page)

Henry clambered up on top of the cannon, near the rear, where it bellied out into a huge bottle-shaped bulge about four feet thick. He felt along the top of it with his fingers until he located the breech vent hole. Then he pulled a pencil flashlight out of his pocket and peered down into the hole, cupping his hand around it so the light wouldn't show.

"What's he doin'?" croaked Freddy. "He can't see through that hunk of iron with that thing, can he?"

"He's looking down the breech vent," Homer explained in a whisper. "That's the hole they used to stick the primer in to ignite the powder charge, but it's probably all rusty and clogged up now."

Henry stuck his left hand out. "Rod!" he ordered. I handed him the gun-cleaning rod we'd brought along. He rammed it up and down inside the hole a few times, but it didn't go down very far. Henry handed it back. "Drill! Three-eighths bit with extension." I stuck a bit in the battery-operated drill we had and handed it to him. Henry wrapped it in a burlap bag to muffle the noise and inserted the long, slender extension in the hole. In a few seconds he broke through the obstruction that had stopped him and asked for the rod again. He pumped it up and down until its full length disappeared down the hole. Henry pulled it out, and his left hand flashed out again.

"Hand me that long case," he said. "And be very careful with it."

I handed him a long black case that was among the paraphernalia he and Jeff had brought. It looked like something you might keep a three-hundred-dollar fishing rod in. Henry laid it on top of the cannon and opened it. From it, he drew a long, squirmy-looking thing that glinted in the moonlight. It bent in his hands as he carefully inserted the end of it into the breech vent and fed it down the hole until he came to the place he'd marked with a piece of tape.

"Clamp!" hissed Henry.

"Clamp!" I hissed back, handing him a felt-lined gadget from among the of instruments he had laid out on a pad. Henry pinched the clamp into place so it held the long, flexible tube suspended in the vent hole just where he wanted it. Then he stopped to mop his brow.

"Anyone coming?" he asked.

"No!" I answered. "Jeff'll let us know. Let's get on with it, Henry."

Henry mopped his brow again and went on with the operation. I kept handing things up to him, and I could see Henry was getting more and more excited as he fitted each piece of apparatus to the Rube Goldberg contraption he was creating on top of the cannon. The long tube he had stuck down the vent hole had two strands to it. Each of them was wrapped in some kind of insulation and had a finely threaded fitting on the end. Henry separated the two strands and screwed a shiny metal cylinder onto one of them. He had me connect a wire lead to it from a dry cell. Then he asked for the large black box that was sitting on the pad, and he pulled what looked like a very fancy camera out of it. He screwed the threaded end of the other strand into the face of it. Then he pulled the pencil flashlight out of his pocket and started checking all the settings. Finally he asked for the other wire lead from the batteries, and hooked it to a terminal on the camera.

Freddy Muldoon, who had clambered up onto the gun carriage to peer at what Henry was doing, could no longer restrain his curiosity. "What's that crazy contraption, Henry? You gonna blow the whole cannon to smithereens?"

Henry was so excited I could see his hands were trembling, and he was exasperated by Freddy's question. But he answered it patiently enough.

"This is what you call a gastroscope," he explained. "Doctors use it to take pictures inside people's stomachs. Now if you'll keep your fat face shut, we might get a few good pictures of the inside of this cannon!"

Freddy grunted and slid down off the carriage, muttering something about cranky geniuses.

Henry took four shots with the camera. After each shot he would adjust the length of the flexible tube where the clamp held it at the top of the vent hole, so he could get pictures from different depths inside the cannon's breech. Each time he took a shot you could see a little flash of light escape from the breech vent.

"How does this thing work?" I asked in a whisper.

"It's really quite simple," said Henry. "This metal cylinder, here, is just a small strobe light. The tube sticking down the hole consists of two optical fibers, insulated from each other. One of them carries the light down to illuminate the interior of the cavity you're photographing. The other one has a small lens on the end of it, and it carries the reflected light back up to the camera. The camera aperture is the same diameter as the glass fiber, and the lens is a regular camera lens. It magnifies the image that the optical fiber sends up, and you have a regular photograph."

"Gee whizz!" I said.

"We'll soon know if there's anything inside there --" Henry said, "providing everything worked all right!"

Just then somebody burped again -- a real rumbler. Jeff Crocker stepped out of the shadow of the trees at the edge of the clearing, where he had been standing guard, and walked over to Freddy Muldoon.

"Listen, Freddy," Jeff warned, "stop that! One more of those and we're going to leave you back at the clubhouse after this."

"That wasn't me!" Freddy insisted. "Honest, Jeff, I didn't even open my mouth."

Jeff swung around in our direction. "Well, who was it then?" he demanded.

"I think it came from over there," said Freddy, pointing in the direction of the east side of the clearing, where the statue of the Confederate soldier stood.

Jeff dashed to that side of the clearing and poked around among the bushes. Then he came back to where we were standing by the cannon. "I've got a feeling there's somebody around here who isn't supposed to be," he said. Then he turned back toward the trees where he had been standing guard. "Wait a minute! I've got an idea."

There was a caretaker's tool shed a few feet back in the woods, and we could hear the door of it creak as Jeff opened it. In a minute he was back in the clearing, trailing a long length of garden hose behind him. "Go back in the shed and turn the water on full!" he whispered to Homer.

The next thing we knew, a high-pressure stream of water shot out of the end of the hose. To our amazement, Jeff directed it straight at the statue of the Confederate soldier. The full force of the stream hit the statue square in the side of the face. The Rebel cap flew off its head and landed in the bushes at the edge of the clearing. The statue lost its balance and toppled to the ground.

What happened next we couldn't believe. No sooner had the statue hit the ground than it bounced to its feet, let out a Rebel yell, and high-tailed it down the hill toward the road. By the time we came to our senses, it had disappeared in the dense undergrowth of the lower slope.

Jeff was laughing so hard he dropped the hose and rolled on the ground. We all got a good soaking before Homer could dash back to the shed and shut off the water.

"That guy can run as fast as my cousin Harmon," said Freddy Muldoon.

"That
was
your cousin Harmon!" Jeff blurted out from where he was sitting on the ground. "He's been waiting here for us ever since it got dark."

"How'd you know he was there?" I asked.

"I stumbled over the real statue when I went back in the bushes over there," Jeff explained. "I knew there were only two statues up here, so one of the Rebels had to be a fake"

"Pretty sneaky!" said Freddy Muldoon.

"Reminds me of 'The Purloined Letter,'" Henry observed. "Here we are, with scouts staked out for security, looking under rocks and bushes for snoopers, and Harmon was standing right in the middle of us all the time. I always did say Harmon was smart. You've got to give him credit."

"Yeah! And that means he heard everything we said and knows everything we did," said Homer.

"Except," said Henry, tapping his camera, "he doesn't know what we have on this film!"

Before we left Memorial Point, Henry put us all to work rigging up some more of his infernal apparatus. From his duffel bag he took two round objects about the size of overcoat buttons and taped them to the underside of the cannon, where they couldn't be seen.

"What are these things, Henry?" asked Freddy.

"They're silicon infrared detectors," said Henry. "They're very sensitive to small changes in temperature. If anybody comes near the cannon, the heat of his body will be enough to set up a small electric current in them. We can use that current to trigger a circuit and start a radiosonde beacon sending out a signal. If we keep a receiver turned on back at the clubhouse, we can record that signal on a graph. If anybody comes nosing around here, we'll know when he came and how long he stayed."

"How'll we know who it is?" asked Dinky.

"I brought along some infrared film," Henry explained. "We can rig up a camera in the same circuit and get a pretty good picture even in the dark -- probably good enough so we can recognize who was here."

"Jeepers!" said Freddy. "You scientists think of everything."

We wired the circuit so the radio beacon and the camera were hidden in a tree back of the cannon, and went back to the clubhouse.

Mortimer developed the pictures Henry had taken as soon as we got back to our lab. We all crowded around Henry as he peered at the negatives over a light box. The first two didn't seem to have anything at all on them. But the third negative showed something leaning against the wall of the cannon's chamber that looked like the leather handle on an old satchel.

"We'll have to enlarge this one and get a good, clear print," Henry said. "I think I see something interesting here."

Mortimer stuck the negative in the enlarger and turned out all the lights in the lab. He blew it up as big as he could, and we all held our breath as he brought it into focus. When he got it good and sharp, we could all see what Henry was talking about. The outline of the handle was very clear, and right beneath it, on the top of the satchel, was a metal name-plate. You could make out the initials easily. They were E.M.S.

The next morning we were all at the clubhouse early for a strategy meeting. Mortimer was over in the corner where we have all our ham radio gear set up, checking the ink trace on the oscillograph we had hooked up to our receiver. He pointed to a place where the needle had made a jagged line on the graph paper. "Someone was out there by the cannon about midnight," he said excitedly.

"I'll bet Harmon went back out there after we left," said Jeff.

"Let's go out there and see if we got a picture of him," said Henry. "Maybe we can tell who it was."

Just then the needle on the recorder started to jiggle again. We all looked at it for a minute, and it gave me a funny feeling. There was somebody up by the cannon, thinking he was all alone, and here we were, about five miles away, practically watching his every move on a piece of paper.

Mortimer turned up the volume on the receiver. We could hear the
beep, beep, beep
of the radio beacon every time the visitor moved near the cannon.

"Let's get out there!" said Homer. "We ought to find out who it is."

"Maybe we should have bugged it with a microphone," Mortimer declared, "so we could listen in on what they're saying."

"Maybe it's just a couple of old cows having a bull session," said Dinky to Freddy Muldoon.

"That's all right," observed Freddy, with the back of his hand to his face. "Mortimer digs that stuff. He could understand what they're saying!"

It was still early morning when we got out to Memorial Point and hid our bicycles in the brush. We split up into two groups for the climb up the hill, so we could approach the clearing from both sides.