New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club by Bertrand R. Brinley, Charles Geer Read Free Book Online Page B

to operate.
            Our
hideout was made to order for the job we had in mind. It's a real cool cavern
hidden from view behind the huge falls where Frenchman's Creek plunges over a
precipice about a mile northwest of Strawberry Lake. These are the falls that
gave the town its name, and they're a big tourist attraction. But very few
people know about the cavern. Almost nobody ever visits it because you have to
swim under an overhanging ledge of rock to get to the entrance. Once you get
through the narrow opening you're in for a surprise. The cavern widens out into
a high-ceilinged chamber with a floor of fine white sand that must have been
deposited there when the creek bed was a good deal higher than it is now. The
floor of the chamber drops off suddenly after about sixty feet, and there's a
deep pool of clear green water dividing the chamber in two. It must be fed by
subterranean streams and connected with the lower level of the creek, because
the water in it is always the same level as the creek. The place would be a
real mecca for sightseers if the town would ever build a covered walkway to the
entrance, like they have at Niagara Fails, but they've never had the money.
            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