New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club (15 page)

        And that
was it. We painted the name around the turret, and The Flying Sorcerer was
ready to confound the populace of Mammoth Falls.

        For the
Sorcerer's first voyage we picked a quiet evening when there was scarcely any
wind at all. It was dusk, and a few puffy white clouds high in the sky
reflected the last rays of the sun as the saucer lifted off from the old zinc
mine and started to drift toward town. We didn't dare fly the thing in full
daylight for fear it would look too phony.

        Homer
and I were stationed in the loft over his father's hardware store, where we
could get a good view of the Town Square. Henry tends to be very scientific
about things, even when we're just pulling a prank; so he insisted we take
notes of people's reactions in a logbook. He figured our observations might
provide some valuable psychological data for the people who have to investigate
flying-saucer reports. While I kept watch at the window, Homer sat cross-legged
on the floor and took down everything I described.

7:48 p.m. I can just barely see the thing against that
bright spot in the clouds. I can't see any lights, so they must not have turned
on the beacon yet. It seems to be moving this way, all right. Hey! It looks
pretty good.

7:57 p.m. There's a man with a straw hat down in the square.
I think he sees it. He's scratching his head. Now he just grabbed another man
and he's pointing up in the sky. The beacon light just went on. You can see it
flashing around. It looks real weird. Now there's a few people coming out of the
Midtown Grill. One man's got a hamburger in his hand. He just dropped it in the
street. There comes Billy Dahr down the steps of the Police Station.... No,
he's running back inside. The saucer's just about over the square now. It's
just hanging up there.

        Just
then Henry called on the radio. He wanted to know if we could see the saucer.
"Yes!" said Homer. "A lot of people in the square have already
seen it. Better get it out of here."

       
"We'll give 'em a little show first," said Henry. "Keep your
eyes peeled."

8:00 p.m. I think Henry just ignited a couple of the spin
rockets. There are a lot of sparks flying out around it. Yeah! It looks like a
Fourth of July pinwheel up there. Now it's zooming straight up in a spiral. He
must have cut in the lift jets. I think Billy Dahr's trying to pick it up in a
pair of field glasses. He's holding something up to his eyes. Now he's backing
up to get a better view. There's a whole bunch of people around him. Oops! He
fell flat on his back in that petunia bed behind the bandstand. I don't think
the saucer's spinning anymore. Tell Henry to shut off the beacon light! I can
just barely see the thing now. I think it's heading back over the lake.

8:15 p.m. There are still a lot of people in the square.
They're walking around talking to each other and pointing up in the sky and
rubbernecking all over the place. Some of them will probably stay here all
night, hoping to see the thing again.

        And that
was the end of the first report on The Flying Sorcerer's appearance over
Mammoth Falls. The rest of the gang back at the zinc mine managed to recapture
it, but only after a pretty hairy chase all over the top of the ridge. As far
as the people in town were concerned, the saucer just went out of sight when
Henry shut the beacon light off. But he had to turn it on again while the thing
was still over Strawberry Lake, so he could tell how to maneuver the craft back
to the mine. The main trouble was he couldn't tell what direction the nozzles
were pointing when he'd give a signal for another squirt of carbon dioxide, and
sometimes he'd just push it farther off course. Fortunately a light breeze came
up out of the east, and the saucer eventually floated toward the mine of its
own accord. It got caught in a slight updraft just as it reached the hills, and
though Henry let a lot of the helium escape in a hurry, the thing just kept
bobbing up and down in the updraft and almost popped over the ridge. Just when
they thought they had lost it, one of the grappling hooks caught in the topmost
branches of a tall ash and Dinky shinnied up to tie a line to it.

        We
decided we wouldn't fly the saucer again until we had added a rudder over the
point where the propulsion nozzles projected from the underside of the body.
This would give it more directional stability, and also tell us what direction
the nozzles were pointing.

        The next
day the
Mammoth Falls Gazette
had the story plastered all over its front
page. MYSTERIOUS OBJECT SEEN IN SKY. MANY RESIDENTS TELL OF SIGHTING FLYING
SAUCER. CONSTABLE DAHR GIVES EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION OF STRANGE CRAFT. AIR FORCE
PROMISES INVESTIGATION. Freddy Muldoon brought some copies to the clubhouse so
we could cut out the articles to keep our scrapbook up to date, and Mortimer
Dalrymple read them all out loud. They were pretty wild.

        One man
claimed the saucer had zoomed off at five thousand miles an hour when it went
out of sight. When a reporter asked him how he could tell it was moving that
fast, he said, "I'm a good judge of speed!" Another man said the
thing was about the size of a house, and it would zoom up to twenty thousand
feet and then come back down again as though it was looking for a place to
land. Several people said that if you looked straight at the thing it made you
feel dizzy, and one man said he was blinded for about five minutes by an
intense beam of light that zapped him right in the eyes. A woman swore she saw
a man jump out of the craft and parachute down to earth, but nobody else would
agree with her. There were many reports of a loud humming noise coming from the
saucer, and some people commented on a strange smell in the air.

       
"Hey! That smell's not a bad idea," said Mortimer. "Let's drop a
load of stink bombs next time."

       
"Maybe we could make the thing cackle and lay a few rotten eggs,"
mused Freddy.

        Even
Henry laughed at the possibilities this suggested. "That's something to
think about," he admitted, "but it's too early for stunts like that.
We don't want to tip our hand yet."

        The next
day's paper carried an interview with Colonel March, the commander at Westport
Field. The Colonel said he had made a full report on the Mammoth Falls
"incident" to the Project Blue Book office at Wright-Patterson Field
in Ohio. "It is their job to investigate all reports of unidentified
flying objects," he told the
Gazette
, "and they have promised
to send a team of investigators here immediately."

        The
investigators, headed by a professor of psychology from Columbia University,
showed up that very day, in fact. But they were very secretive about their
investigation. They wouldn't make any statements for publication, except to say
that there was nothing unusual about the "Mammoth Falls sightings,"
as far as they could tell. One member of the team, a professor of physics, said
that meteorological records showed there had been a temperature inversion in
the Mammoth Falls area the day the phenomenon was seen, and that "aerial
mirages are not uncommon under such conditions." This explanation, of
course, satisfied no one.

        The team
spent three days in town interviewing eyewitnesses, many of whom, we were sure,
hadn't seen anything at all. The day after they left town we flew The Flying
Sorcerer again.

        On its
second voyage the saucer performed well, and Mortimer broadcast some weird
sound effects over the speakers to satisfy those people who had thought they
heard a loud humming noise coming from the craft. But as soon as the thing was
sighted somebody called the Air Force at Westport Field to report it. The Air
Force claimed there was nothing on their radar, but after they had several
calls they agreed to scramble two chase planes to investigate.

        We
didn't know what was going on, of course, but we did hear the jets screaming
overhead as they passed over town on their takeoff. We guessed what it meant,
and Homer called Henry on the radio in time to get the beacon light on the
saucer turned off before the planes could circle back on their search pattern.
Henry headed the craft for the hills at full thrust. From the zinc mine he
could see the two jets catch the last rays of the sun as they banked to return,
and he figured there wouldn't be time to get The Flying Sorcerer back to the
hills before they would sight it. But darkness was closing in fast, and there
might be a chance if he could bring it in low over the lake where it was almost
dark as night.

        The idea
was a good one, but in his excitement Henry let too much helium escape and The
Flying Sorcerer plopped into the lake before it reached the far shore, with its
carbon dioxide fuel exhausted. It floated like a cork, though, and when we
managed to make our way through the dense woods on the western shore a couple
of hours later, we found it sitting like a duck on a pond about two hundred
yards out in the lake. Jeff and Mortimer swam out and took it in tow, and when
they brought it to shore we nudged it into one of the deep coves that reach
back among the fingers of the hills in that area. We camouflaged it as well as
we could with branches and leaves, and left it there until we could figure out
how to get it back in the air again.

        What we
didn't know at the time was that the pilot of one of the chase planes had
caught sight of it just before it settled into the murky shadows below the
horizon, and had managed to train his gun cameras on it. The pilot figured he
had the first picture of a flying saucer ever taken by an Air Force plane, and
the Information Officer at Westport Field lost no time in getting the photo
spread across the front page of the
Gazette
the next morning.

        If we
thought we were causing a stir before, it was nothing compared to what happened
now. Colonel March didn't have to request an investigation this time. All sorts
of amateur "investigators" of flying saucers and psychic phenomena
descended on Mammoth Falls, and the Project Blue Book officials set up a field
office in the Town Hall. The pilot who took the picture found himself taking
lie detector tests. Then he was sent to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for a
mental examination, so none of the amateur investigators or the press could
talk to him. Lieutenant Graham, the Information Officer, got bawled out for
releasing the picture to the newspaper before the Air Force could authenticate
it. Colonel March found himself right in the middle. He was being harassed by
reporters for a statement, and the Pentagon was telling him to keep his mouth
shut.

        Nobody
knew what had happened to the saucer after the pilot lost sight of it, and
rumors were flying around town that the thing had crashed in the hills and
little green men had been seen trying to thumb rides from motorists. There was
scarcely anybody on the streets after dark, and Lem Perkins refused to make
milk deliveries until after the sun came up. There was a regular panic among
housewives when some dolt started a rumor that all the hens in the area were
laying radioactive eggs, and Mayor Scragg had to ask the Department of
Agriculture to test all the eggs in the stores. Effajean Lightbody, who is
president of the Mammoth Falls Woman's Club, wrote a letter to the
Gazette
asking the Mayor to put a curfew into effect after eight P.M.; and Abner
Sharples, who wants to be Mayor, told the Lions Club that if he was running the
town he'd ask the Governor to send in the National Guard so people could sleep
at night.

        During
the daytime a lot of adventurous volunteers were scouring the hills west of
Strawberry Lake, hoping to find a crew of Martian astronauts waiting for an
invitation to the White House, but nobody found anything. Harmon Muldoon,
Freddy's cousin, led a group of searchers to the old zinc mine but we had moved
all our radio gear out of there, and the place looked as abandoned as ever. We
figured we'd just lay low for a while and let human nature take its course. It
did, the very next day.

        Freddy
and I were helping Henry mow his back lawn, when Mrs. Mulligan called from the
kitchen door to say Henry had an important visitor. She acted all flustered and
excited.

       
"I'll bet I know who that is," Henry said with a nervous little
laugh. "You guys better come in with me."

        We went
inside to find Colonel March sitting in the big Boston rocker in Mrs.
Mulligan's living room. He looked pretty haggard and his uniform was a little
crumpled, but he was just as cheerful as ever. Mrs. Mulligan was darting about
the room picking up papers and wiping the dust off things with her apron.
"Excuse me," she said, "I'll just be a minute!" And with
that she swept a handful of peanut shells off an end table into her apron
pocket and disappeared into the kitchen.

        "I
was just driving by and thought I'd drop in and say 'hello,'" said the
Colonel as he got up to shake hands.

       
"Hello!" said Henry.

        "You
won't be able to drive much farther," said Freddy Muldoon. "This is a
dead end street."

        The
Colonel chuckled indulgently and tweaked Freddy's left ear as he settled back
into his seat. Then he looked straight at Henry and said very casually,
"What have you been up to lately?"

       
"Nothing much," said Henry.

       
"Nothing much?"