Mad Scientists' Club (5 page)

"Oh, that egg!" said Freddy. "You'll have to talk to Henry Mulligan about that. He's our chief scientist."

"Thank you," Mr. Bowden said politely. "He's the one I came to talk to."

By this time Jeff had gotten hold of one of Freddy's ears and pulled him off to the side. Mr. Bowden explained that the American Museum of Natural History in New York had made fluorine tests on the shell fragments we sent them and were of the opinion that they were from the Jurassic period of the Mesozoic era. They thought the egg was probably that of a large sauropod dinosaur -- possibly a brontosaurus, or maybe even a brachiosaurus. They were quite excited about it and had asked an expert from the state university to come down to Mammoth Falls to examine the egg. That was why Mr. Bowden was here. There would probably be reporters from other papers coming down with the expert.

"Who is he?" Henry asked.

"He's Professor Mudgeon, a very well-known paleontologist," said Mr. Bowden. "He'll be here tomorrow."

"What's all this stuff about the jackass period and all that?" asked Dinky Poore.

"That's
Jurassic
," said Henry. "All it means is that the egg is probably a hundred and fifty million years old, like I said."

The next day we all went over to the town hall to meet Professor Mudgeon, who had agreed to hold a press conference there. Mayor Scragg was there, of course. Whenever there's anything going on in Mammoth Falls that might get into the newspapers, you'll always find him in the middle of it. Today he was in great form, beaming and smiling, and patting Henry on the head as he introduced him to Professor Mudgeon. Henry kept ducking, trying to keep from getting his hair mussed, because he always figures a scientist should look as dignified as possible. Professor Mudgeon didn't look too dignified, though. His suit was a little rumpled, and his shirt collar was a little dirty, and he had bright, shining eyes that twinkled behind his thick-lensed glasses. And he had enough hair to make up for all that Mayor Scragg was lacking, and then some.

"We're very proud of these young men," said Mayor Scragg, mussing Henry's hair again.

"Well, I'm sure you should be," said Professor Mudgeon. "They may have made an important discovery." He had a habit of sucking air in through his teeth with a slurping sound after every statement, and then laughing with his teeth still closed.

After everybody had sat down, the professor gave a brief explanation of why he was there, and told the reporters something about dinosaur fossils. In answer to a reporter's question, he explained the various methods scientists use to determine the age of fossils or bones. When he got to the uranium method, of course, the reporter from the Mammoth Falls
Gazette
had to get up and ask him if this egg was radioactive, and if there would be any danger to the community.

"No! I hardly think so," said the professor, laughing through his teeth again.

"What a dope that reporter is," said Henry, under his breath.

"When do we get to see the egg?" another reporter asked.

"Well, that's up to these young men here," said the professor, looking toward Henry. "I haven't seen it, myself, yet. As a matter of fact, I don't even know where it is."

"We buried it," said Henry, nonchalantly.

"Buried it? What for?"

"To see if it would hatch."

This brought the house down. Even the professor was laughing -- with his mouth open this time. Then a second laugh broke out when the Gazette reporter asked if there was any remote possibility that the egg
might
hatch, and a live dinosaur be born.

"No, of course not!" said the professor, laughing openly again. Then suddenly his face clouded and the scientist in him reasserted itself. "On the other hand, I don't really know," he said seriously. "Things like that are decided by an authority greater than I."

Mayor Scragg was in such an expansive mood that he volunteered the services of both the town police department and the fire department to transport everybody out to a point where we could walk into the swamps. He even lent the professor a pair of leather puttees that he had left over from World War I. All the way out there he kept telling the professor what an important place Mammoth Falls was for geological exploration, and the professor kept saying, "Very interesting. Very interesting indeed!"

A lot of other people who hadn't been invited came trailing along after us, and we noticed Harmon and some of the members of his gang among them. Dinky Poore, of course, had to run out ahead of everybody so he could be the one to show the professor where the egg was; and when the rest of us rounded the end of the little hill where the sandpit jutted into the swamp, he came dashing back through the bushes shouting, "The egg has hatched! The dinosaur has gone!"

Sure enough, when the rest of us got to the little clearing, all we saw were broken fragments of what once had been the big egg, lying in a shallow pit in the sand. Professor Mudgeon stopped at the edge of the clearing and asked everyone to stand back. He looked at the ground very carefully, and then he tiptoed over to the edge of the bog where a series of tiny depressions were visible in the wet sand. He straightened up and drew a large magnifying glass from his coat pocket. Then he bent down and studied the depressions very closely.

They certainly looked like the footprints of some unknown kind of animal. They were shaped a little bit like an acorn with three sharp little points at the top, or maybe more like the profile of a slightly deformed tulip, just opening up. There were smaller prints interspersed among them that looked like an empty acorn shell upside down. They proceeded in a wavering line along the short stretch of shore, and then disappeared in the bushes, where the sand was drier.

After studying them for a while, and shaking his head from side to side, the professor moved over to where the big chunks of broken eggshell lay in the pit and picked up one or two of them. Finally he snorted and rose to his feet.

"Very clever! Very clever!" he said. "But a complete fake!"

Mayor Scragg harrumphed loudly, and a babble of noise and excited questions broke loose from the reporters. Over it all I was sure I could hear the sound of Harmon Muldoon's laughter. To back up his statement, the professor picked up one of the egg fragments, crumbled it to a white powder between his fingers, and tasted it.

"Pure plaster of Paris!" he snorted, spitting it out.

Mayor Scragg had turned purple and his cheeks were bellowing in and out. He glared at Henry Mulligan and the rest of us. Then he looked back at the professor and harrumphed again. Professor Mudgeon had moved over to look again at the footprints in the sand.

"Somebody has done a very clever job of duplicating the footprints of an infant brontosaurus," he said, "but he forgot one thing. The brontosaurus had a long, heavy tail that he could barely lift off the ground, and there is no trace of a tail being dragged along the ground here." Then he turned toward Mayor Scragg. "I'm very sorry, Mr. Mayor. But I must also say that I'm a little disappointed at coming all the way down here to be victimized by a fraud and a hoax!"

"You don't know the half of it!" spouted the Mayor, turning all purple again. "I'm very sorry too, Professor Mudhen, but if you had to live in a town full of teenage Machiavellis you might be able to appreciate what I'm up against."

"Mudgeon!" said the professor.

"What's that?"

"Mudgeon!" he repeated. "My name is Mudgeon!"

"Oh yes! Of course!
Very
sorry!" said Mayor Scragg.

"That's quite all right. I'm used to it," said the professor.

Several of the reporters were now taking photographs of the footprints and the egg fragments. A couple of others were trying to get information out of Henry, but he wasn't talking. "I'm not ready to make any statements," he told them, and walked over to where we were standing.

"What's going on?" Jeff asked him. "Is that our egg, or isn't it?" But Henry just shrugged his shoulders and moved away from us.

"It looks like you guys goofed," said Jeff, turning to glare at Dinky and Freddy and me.

"Yeah!" Mortimer taunted. "You probably took the real egg out of the hole and lugged it back to Harmon's clubhouse. You sure went to a lot of trouble to louse things up!"

"Tell it to the Marines!" said Dinky, not knowing what to say.

We stood there with our arms folded, waiting to see what happened next. None of us knew any more about what was going on than Mayor Scragg did. The Mayor was trying desperately to apologize to the professor, but the professor wasn't paying any attention to him. He was standing in the middle of the clearing, chewing on his spectacles and muttering to himself.

"What I don't understand," he kept saying, "is that my friend Dr. Hoffmeister at the museum was so certain those shell fragments came from the Jurassic period. He might be misled by a photograph, but not by the pieces of shell.... They were subjected to very scientific tests.... I don't understand it. I don't understand it at all."

"Perhaps there never was an egg," suggested a reporter. "Maybe all that the boys found were pieces of shell, and they invented the egg."

"Ah, perhaps so," said the professor. "But then they were extremely clever. Because the weight and the dimensions that they sent to the museum checked exactly with what we would expect for the egg of a brontosaurus."

"Excuse me, Professor!" came a voice from the crowd. "I can show you where the real egg is."

"What's that?"

Harmon Muldoon and Stony Martin pushed their way to the center of the clearing. "We found the real dinosaur egg," said Harmon "I made up this dummy egg and planted it in the quarry to fool these other guys. It sure worked, too. They've spent about two weeks trying to hatch that hunk of plaster."

"Then I suppose you're the one who made these very authentic-looking footprints in the sand?"

"Yes!" said Harmon. "We figured that would give them a real charge."

"Well, you're a very clever young man," said the professor. "Now, supposing you show us the real egg."

"It's back at our clubhouse," said Harmon, and he started to lead the way back up the path.

"Harmon has always been one of the cleverest young lads in Mammoth Falls," Mayor Scragg confided to the professor, as he hurried to keep up with him over the rough ground. "I'll have to remember to tell him so."

The rest of us fell in behind them, and as we trudged back out to the road the members of the Mad Scientists' Club were the most dejected lot you ever saw. But I noticed that Henry had stayed behind and was searching among the broken chunks of plaster in the sand. I saw him put something in his pocket, and when he caught up with the rest of us he was wearing that quiet, mysterious smile again.

It was pretty hot on the second floor of Stony Martin's garage, and Mayor Scragg was already mopping the top of his head with his handkerchief on the way up the stairs. When Professor Mudgeon saw the big egg on the table he sucked a lot of air in through his teeth and lunged toward it with his hands outstretched.

"Ah, yes! This looks like the real thing," he exclaimed. "And such a beauty, too!"

The reporters were crowding around him as he bent over it with his glass. Somehow or other, Henry had managed to worm his way in among them and was standing right at the professor's shoulder.

"The light isn't very good here, Professor. Why don't we take it over to the window."

"An excellent idea," said the professor, "but be very careful. This looks like a very valuable fossil specimen."

"Oh, I'm sure it is," said Henry, as he spun around with the thing held lightly in his hands.

"Wait a minute! I'll carry it!" said Harmon Muldoon, grabbing Henry by the elbow.

"Look out!" Henry cried. The egg popped out of his hands and crashed to the floor, where it practically exploded into a litter of shards and white powder. "Gosh, I'm sorry, Harmon!" said Henry. "I'll clean it up for you."

"Never mind!" said Harmon, looking aghast at the mess on the floor. "I guess you win, Henry." And he crushed a big chunk of the plaster under the heel of his shoe. Something bright among the powder glinted in the faint light from the window Harmon bent down and picked it up. "Hey, that's my ring!" he said. "I lost it when I took it off the other day to mix the ..."

"To mix what?" asked Henry.