Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder (11 page)

Nothing
, Nilly thought.

Nothing
, Lisa thought.

Which is why they didn't give it a second thought when they noticed a police car parked on Cannon Avenue.

“See you this afternoon,” Lisa chirped.

“Definitely,” Nilly said, practically jumping over his front gate. He ran up the steps, opened the door, and was about to go in when he caught sight of a group of people moving through the tall grass toward Doctor Proctor's front gate. There were two
men in police uniforms, one of them with a Fu Manchu mustache, the other with a handlebar mustache. They both looked very determined, and between them they were holding Doctor Proctor, who was gesticulating and looked very agitated.

“Stop!” Nilly yelled, leaping down from the porch and running over to the fence. “Stop in the name of the law!” The group stopped and turned toward Nilly.

“We
are
the law,” Mr. Fu Manchu said, “not you.”

“What's going on?” Nilly asked. “What do you want with the doctor?”

“He has broken the law,”
Mr. Handlebar said. “And we on the police force don't take that kind of thing lightly.”

The doctor groaned. “They claim that I sold a deadly powder to children in the neighborhood here. As if Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder could hurt so much as a fly!”

The two policemen escorted the professor out his gate toward the parked police car. Nilly ran after them.

“Wait!” Nilly yelled. “Who said Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder is dangerous?”

“The father of two boys who were blasted up into the sky by the darn powder,” Mr. Fu Manchu said, opening one of the car's rear doors for Doctor Proctor. “He called and said we had to arrest this crazy professor. And of course he's right. Blasting kids up into the sky like that … Watch your head there, Doctor.”

“Go home and eat your dinner now, Nilly,” Doctor Proctor said, ducking his head and taking a seat in the patrol car. “I'll get this misunderstanding cleared up down at the police station.”

But Nilly didn't back down. “Numbskulls! Doctor Proctor didn't give them the powder that sent them up into the oak tree!”

“Numb-what?” Mr. Handlebar said gruffly.

“Well then who
did
give them the powder?” Mr. Fu Manchu asked.

“I did,” Nilly said, standing in front of them resolutely, his hands on his hips.

First the two policemen looked at Nilly, then at each other, and then they both started laughing.

“A tiny little guy like you?” Mr. Handlebar laughed. “We're supposed to believe that a pip-squeak like you had something to do with such a serious crime?”

“Well,” Nilly said, puffing himself up like a frog, “if you'd been paying attention, then those sharp
police brains of yours would have noticed that I said the powder had sent them up into an oak tree. You didn't say anything about a tree, so how else would I have known about that?”

“Hmm,” Mr. Fu Manchu said, raised his police cap, and scratched the bald head he had underneath. “You've got a point. So how did you know that?”

“Because I'm telling you what happened!” Nilly hissed. “I'm the one who sold them the powder. And not the normal, harmless powder that Doctor Proctor sells. No sirree, gentlemen …”

Nilly took a deep breath and started a very long sentence: “I sold them Doctor Proctor's Fartonaut Powder, even though the doctor himself decided that it should only be sold to NASA, since the powder is a hyper-explosive special formula that can just be consumed in very small doses by people with at least four years of astronaut training, and even then they need to be wearing padding and be under the supervision of at least two adults!” As Nilly spoke, he got madder and madder, and now he was jumping up and down.

“Hmm,” Mr. Handlebar said. “And who made this … uh, fartonaut powder?”

“I did,” sighed Doctor Proctor from inside the car.

“But it's my fault that Truls and Trym got ahold of it,” Nilly said.

“Hmm,” Mr. Fu Manchu said. “I don't see any way out of this other than to arrest you both. Do you?”

“I agree,” Mr. Handlebar said.

And that's how both Doctor Proctor and Nilly got arrested on the day that, until that moment, had seemed like it was going to be perfect.

Three Fishy Fellas with a Plan

WHEN LISA'S DAD came home that day, Lisa was sitting under the apple tree that had no apples.

“I'm so relieved,” growled the Commandant, wiping the sweat off his brow. “We thought the whole Independence Day celebration was going to be ruined. You know, Lisa, we've been looking
for the special gunpowder for the Big and Almost World-Famous Royal Salute for several days. We were starting to think they'd forgotten to load it on the ship over in Shanghai. But it turns out it was the first thing they loaded onboard, so it's all the way at the bottom. They're going to bring it ashore tomorrow. Phew, imagine what a catastrophe it would have been if the gunpowder hadn't come.”

Only now did he notice that Lisa was hardly paying attention. She was sitting there under the tree with her head in her hands, looking downhearted.

“Is there something wrong, pal?” he growled.

“Something terrible happened,” Lisa said glumly. “They arrested Nilly and Doctor Proctor. Just because Truls and Trym ate a little fartonaut powder.”

“I know,” the Commandant said.

“You know? How did you find out?”

“Because the police asked if Nilly and Doctor
Proctor could be kept in the most escape-proof cell in all of northern Europe, apart from Finland. And that's where they are.”

“You mean … you mean … ,” Lisa began, frightened.

“Yup,” her dad said. “They're in the Dungeon of the Dead.”

“The Dungeon of the Dead! But Nilly and the professor aren't the least bit dangerous!”

“Well, the police don't agree. Mr. Trane explained to the police that the professor is a raving lunatic who'll invent an atom bomb if he isn't locked up immediately.”

“Mr. Trane? And they believed him?”

“Of course they believed Mr. Trane,” grumbled the Commandant. “After all, he's the one who helped us invent the hardest and most secret material in the world. Which is used in the doors of the most escape-proof cell in the world …”

“Yeah, yeah, Dad, I've heard of all that,” Lisa sighed. “But what do we do now?”

“Now?” The Commandant noisily sniffed the aroma coming through the open kitchen window. “Eat Wiener schnitzel—at least that's what it smells like. Come on.”

AS LISA WENT inside, the scent of Wiener schnitzel wafted out over the yard, where a light breeze caught it and carried the scent over Cannon Avenue, down to the fjord, to Akershus Fortress, in over the high stone walls, and past the towers and the black, old-fashioned cannons that were aimed out over the fjord. The guards standing outside the Dungeon of the Dead inhaled the scent with-out noticing it, and the part they hadn't inhaled continued in through the bars to a corridor that led to a stone stairway going deep down, down to
a very thick and very locked iron door.

An exceedingly small amount of schnitzel scent seeped through the keyhole into a room that was shaped like the inside of a cannonball. A bridge ran across the center of the room and led to another iron door, even thicker and even more locked than the first. And with a keyhole so narrow that only a couple of Wiener schnitzel gas molecules made it into the corridor behind. The darkness in that corridor was penetrated only by laser beams that ran back and forth, up and down. The grid of laser beams was so dense that not even a tiny
Rattus norvegicus
could hope to sneak through without triggering the alarm. And the alarm was connected to the guardroom, where the guard on duty was stationed. And also to the main panel at police headquarters. And also to the command center for the Norwegian antiterrorism police. And to the command-command center for the anti-antiterrorism police. And I'm sure you can
understand, triggering an alarm like that would result in a lot of running and yelling and maybe shooting, and definitely the rather rapid arrest of the little rat or spider that was trying to do something so foolish as to break out of the Dungeon of the Dead.

At the far end of the corridor—and by now there was hardly any scent left—was the final door. And it was made out of a material that hardly anyone knows exists, but that is so hard, so ingeniously invented, and so secret that the author of this book had to promise the Norwegian government that he wouldn't say anything else about the material in this story. The point—as you may already have surmised—is that the Dungeon of the Dead is absolutely impossible to escape from.

And there, behind that last door, sat Doctor Proctor and Nilly. The walls and ceiling were white, windowless, and sort of rounded, so it made them feel like they were sitting inside an egg. Each one
was sitting on a cot on either side of the egg cell, which was lit by a single lightbulb that hung from the ceiling. There was a small table between the cots, and a toilet and a sink that were both attached to the wall, and a bookshelf with one single book on it:
King Olav—The People's King
. Nilly had already read it four times. The book had a lot of pictures in it, and Nilly had gathered from the text that the best thing about Olav was how good-natured he'd been. But there's a limit to how many times anyone sitting in jail wants to read a book about being good natured. And not just any old jail, but the most escape-proof jail in all of northern Europe, aside from Finland.