New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club (7 page)

        It's
cool as a cucumber inside the cavern, and the temperature stays pretty much the
same all year round. We use the place as a summer clubhouse sometimes, because
it can get pretty hot in Jeff Crocker's barn, and the cavern is a great place
to sleep on muggy summer nights. We've fitted it out with a lot of equipment,
and we get electricity for free from a generator driven by a waterwheel we
installed under the falls. The pool makes a great swimming hole, of course, and
we have a first-class diving board set up at one end of it. The only problem is
we don't get much of a suntan.

        While we
still had the sub in Zeke's junkyard we took all its running gear apart and
cleaned and lubricated all the moving parts. We went over the hull with steel
brushes and rust remover and laid on heavy coats of white lead paint. We cut
away the net cutter and torpedo guards on the bow with a blowtorch and cut out
the torpedo tubes. This gave us a lot of room up front that would have been
wasted space. Colonel March at Westport Field helped us get the plexiglass nose
section from an old B-17 Flying Fortress in a surplus property sale, and with a
little cutting and bending we were able to fit it to the nose of the sub pretty
smoothly. When we got finished, she looked pretty sharp with her forty feet of
gleaming white hull and her clear plastic nose.

        We
weren't finished yet, but we decided to move her to the hideout because too
many people were snooping around the junkyard to look at her, and we had to
throw the tarpaulin over the hull so often that it interfered with our work.
Especially, we had to keep an eye peeled for Freddy's cousin Harmon and his
gang. They kept turning up at the yard, one or two at a time, pretending to be
looking for some piece of junk they knew Zeke didn't have. And one day we saw
the whole gang looking at us through field glasses from the edge of a cliff on Turkey
Hill. Actually, they weren't any trouble to us, because they couldn't mess
around the sub while we were there during the day, and at night we just plain
didn't worry about them. Zeke Boniface has a big German shepherd dog named
Kaiser Bill who roams the junkyard all night long. He isn't mean, but he's
about one hundred and ten pounds of gleaming white teeth, and he has a way of
discouraging people who wander too close to the yard at night.

        We named
the sub
Lady Go Diver
, which was a name Dinky had suggested, and painted
it on both sides of the bow section. On the conning tower we painted the Mad
Scientists' Club symbol, which is a test tube crossed over a telescope
superimposed on a skull. After we had put new batteries in her and tested the electric
motor, we figured we were ready to move her into the cavern under Mammoth Fails
to add the finishing touches.

        Don't
ask me how we got her into the cave. That's our secret. But after we got her in
there we could take our time making the rest of the modifications without a lot
of people nosing around. Without the torpedo tubes in her she could carry four
or five of us easily. We figured on fitting out the bow section as an observer
compartment and installing two big searchlights for underwater illumination,
one in the bow and one in the conning tower. We also were bargaining with the
National Guard Armory down on Vesey Street to get the bulletproof windows out
of an old World War II tank they had, so we could install them in the conning
tower to give us observation in all directions.

        We were
getting along pretty well with the work, when one morning we discovered sandy
footprints on the hull of the submarine leading to the conning tower. There was
sand down inside the controls compartment, too, so we knew somebody had been
there. We always cleaned up carefully after finishing work, because Henry and
Jeff believe in running a taut ship. We checked her over very thoroughly, and
as far as we could tell everything was in working order and nothing was
missing. Whoever had been there had just been a curious snooper, apparently.
All the same, it worried us.

        "It
must have been somebody in Harmon Muldoon's gang," said Dinky Poore.
"Nobody else would have feet that dirty."

       
"Very good thinking!" said Mortimer, with his usual sarcasm.

        "I
bet they're planning an act of sabotage," said Freddy darkly.

        "I
don't think they'd be that foolish," said Henry. "Whoever came in
here was a pretty good swimmer. We know that. And he also had to be pretty
curious. If it was somebody from Harmon's gang, I'd say they were just green
with envy and wanted to get a look inside the sub."

       
"Don't be too sure," warned Freddy. "I wouldn't trust that
Harmon with my pet snake."

       
"Let's stop worrying about
who
it is, and figure out what we're
gonna do about it," said Jeff Crocker.

       
"Maybe Zeke would lend us Kaiser Bill and let him sleep in here every
night," Homer suggested.

       
"That's a good idea," Jeff agreed, "but he needs him down at the
junkyard."

        "I
move that Freddy and Dinky sleep here every night until we're finished with the
work," said Mortimer.

        "I
move that Mortimer Dalrymple take the sub down to the bottom of the lake every
night and stay there until morning," said Freddy Muldoon.

       
"Good thinking!" said Dinky Poore.

        "I
appreciate the humor, but let's use our heads," said Henry. "There's
only one entrance to this place, and it's easy enough to bug it so we know
whether anybody wanders in here."

       
"Now you're talking!" said Jeff. "What do you think we should
do, Henry?"

       
"All we have to do is rig an electric eye across the mouth of the cave and
tie it in to our carrier current intercom system. We can run a line from here
down to one of the power lines on the highway, and I'll hook a monitor into my
receiver at home. If I get an alarm during the night I'll push the panic
button."

        What
Henry suggested doing was very simple, since we already had our own private
intercom net operating through the city power lines. This can be done for free
and it's legal, as long as you don't exceed the maximum power limit with your
transmitter. We knocked off work on the sub and spent the rest of the day
scurrying around to get the necessary equipment together to rig up the alarm
system.

        It was
that very night that the panic buzzer sounded in my room just after I had
gotten to sleep. It was Henry on the line, and he told us somebody had already
tripped the alarm in the cavern. We hadn't bugged the place any too soon. Henry
switched the microphones we'd hidden in the cavern into the net, and we could
hear voices of some of Harmon Muldoon's gang. Stony Martin, who's a loudmouth,
was shouting out phony orders with a thick German accent, as though he was
Count Hugo von Luckner himself. It made me sick just to hear him.

       
"Let's go, Henry!" said Jeff Crocker. "Everybody out to the
cavern!"

        I jumped
into my pants, threw a shirt on, and shinnied down the drainpipe outside my
window. It was then I remembered that my dad had locked my bicycle in the
garage. He told me I couldn't use it for two days, because I had forgotten to
mow the lawn. I stood there in the darkness by the side of the house, not
knowing what to do except swear at myself. I called the old man a bunch of bad
names too, and kicked the side of the house a couple of times. After I'd cooled
off, I thought about shinnying back up the drainpipe and calling one of the
other kids on the intercom, but I knew they'd all be gone. I even thought about
sneaking into my dad's bedroom and swiping the key to the garage. But I figured
I might wake somebody up, and then I would be in the soup. So I kicked the
house a couple of more times and took off down the driveway heading for Dinky
Poore's house.

        Dinky
lives closest to me and I might just be able to catch him. He also is the
smallest guy in the club, and I wouldn't mind pumping his bike all the way out
to the falls with him riding the handlebars. I darted into the alley behind his
house and clambered up onto the fence. It was pitch dark in his backyard and I
couldn't see if his bike was still there or not. I gave the tomcat call and
waited a few seconds. There wasn't any answer, so I gave it again a little
louder and longer. This time there was an answer. I was peering into the
darkest corner of the yard, when all of a sudden something came flying out of
an upstairs window of the house and crashed against the board fence just below
my hands. I didn't wait around to find out what it was. I just took off down
the alley, heading for Mammoth Falls on foot.

        It must
have taken me half an hour to get to the riverbank below the falls. All the
other kids were sitting around under the big oak tree, where we usually hide
our bikes in the bushes, holding a council of war.

       
"Where on earth have you been?" Henry asked me. "We've been
waiting half the night."

       
"Maybe his mother wouldn't let him out!" Mortimer gibed at me.

       
"Shut up!" I shot back, giving Mortimer a knuckle job on his right
bicep. Then I lied. "I had a flat tire on my bike. I ran all the way
here."

       
"Let's get going!" urged Jeff. "Indian file down the bank, then
one at a time under the falls. Nobody goes into the cave until we've all made
it to the ledge. Then we'll rush 'em together."

        We
stripped down to our shorts and Jeff handed out stink bombs, three to a man.
"If you get a shot at one of them, try to hit him in the middle of the
back. It's hardest to wash off there."

        We
started down the steep path to the river bed with Mortimer leading the way. I
took my usual position at the rear of the file, right behind Dinky and Freddy.
There wasn't any moon out, and it was so dark we had to feel our way along the
path, hugging close to the rocky bank. My heart was thumping and I could hear
Dinky and Freddy breathing heavily. Suddenly there was a loud rumbling noise,
followed by an ear-splitting crash like a clap of thunder. The ground shook
violently and the whole riverbank seemed to heave up about a foot. We grabbed
for rocks and bushes and clung to the bank to keep from falling into the water.

       
"Holy mackerel!" shouted Mortimer. "Half the falls has
collapsed!"

       
"Let's get out of here before something else cuts loose," Jeff
hollered. "Get back up the path, Charlie!"

        I turned
and groped my way back up the path to the top of the bank, with Freddy and
Dinky panting behind me. When the rest of them got to the top, we made our way
along the bank to a point where we could get a better look at the falls. By the
light of our flashlights we could see a huge, crescent-shaped space at the lip
of the falls that hadn't been there before. A regular torrent of water was
spilling over it and crashing onto a pile of rocks at the bottom, right where
the mouth of the cavern had been.

       
"The cavern's blocked off!" cried Mortimer. "If Harmon's gang is
still in there, how are they gonna get out?"

       
"Serves 'em right for nosing around," said Freddy Muldoon, jumping up
and down.

       
"Oh, you're just full of the milk of human kindness," Mortimer
sneered. "We gotta get down there and help 'em."

       
"Wait a minute!" Jeff cautioned. "Nobody's going down there just
yet. We can't tell what might happen. Some more of the ledge might break loose
any minute. We're lucky we weren't all in there when it fell."

        "We
would have been if Charlie hadn't been late getting here," said Dinky
Poore.

       
"Hurray for good old Charlie!" said Freddy Muldoon.

        All of a
sudden I wasn't mad at my old man anymore for locking my bike in the garage.

        "We
can't possibly move those rocks," Henry put in. "They're too big. The
first thing we better do is call the police."

       
"How do we know they're still in there?" said Homer. "We'd look
pretty foolish bringing the police out on a wild goose chase this time of
night."

       
"That's easy enough to find out," said Henry. "We'll tap into
the intercom line and see if we can talk to them."

        "If
they did anything to our submarine I hope they all drown," said Freddy
Muldoon.

       
"What are we gonna do with these stink bombs?" asked Dinky Poore.

       
"Eat them!" said Mortimer. "You might not get any breakfast!
Now, shut up and let the brains of this outfit figure out what we're gonna
do."

        Henry's
foresight had provided a plug-in jack in the intercom line at the top of the
riverbank. The only question was whether the line had been broken by the
rockfall. Henry and Mortimer probed through the bushes and rocks at the edge of
the falls and found the jack. Then they plugged in Henry's handset.

       
"Hello! Hello!" Henry called into the speaker. "This is Henry
Mulligan. This is Henry Mulligan. If you can hear me, sing out!"

        We all
waited, holding our breath and straining to listen for a sound from the
receiver. There was none.