Mad Scientists' Club

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Book: Read Mad Scientists' Club for Free Online
Authors: Bertrand R. Brinley, Charles Geer
Tags: Fiction, Science Clubs
the perspiration off his glasses, "but in a different place."
    "Oh no! Not out in that swamp again!" groaned the Mayor, looking down at his muddy feet.
    "Just a minute. I'm puzzled about one thing," said Mr. Bowden "My paper will want to know why you buried that fake egg in the first place, and why you led us out there on a wild-goose chase."
    "I'm sorry about that," Henry apologized. "But without mentioning any names, I had an idea somebody would try to swipe the real egg. So I made a plaster cast of it the first night we brought it in, and took the real egg right out to the swamp and buried it. I couldn't resist taking you out to where the fake egg was buried, because you never would have gotten the whole story if I hadn't."
    "And the culprit never would have come to light," boomed Mayor Scragg, fixing a baleful glare on Harmon Muldoon.
    "I think the Professor will agree that a scientist can't be too careful about protecting his discoveries," Henry observed.
    It was the professor's turn to wipe off his glasses. "Yes. . . . Hmm. . . . Uh," he stammered. "Unfortunately, history provides us with some classic examples of fraud and deception in the natural sciences -- er -- particularly in the field of paleontology, I may say."
    "Like the Piltdown man?" questioned Mr. Bowden.
    "Er ... like the Piltdown man," agreed Professor Mudgeon.
    As we went down the stairs and out into Egan's Alley, Mayor Scragg was again hovering at Professor Mudgeon's shoulder. "That young Muldoon lad always was a meddlesome boy!" he said, confidentially.
    "Very interesting! Very interesting!" said the professor.
    Henry led us this time to the opposite side of the swamp, near where the White Fork road starts up into the hills. Not far off the road, at the foot of a bluff, he stopped at a point in the middle of a white stretch of sand. He dug into the sand with his hands and unearthed the big egg. It looked just the way it had that first night. Dinky carried it over to the professor to examine.
    "Now I know why it felt so light that next day," he said.
    The professor was enthused, and Mayor Scragg beamed proudly. "Truly a beautiful specimen," said the professor.
    "Looks kind of ugly to me," said the Mayor. "But then, you know best, Professor."
    While the professor was examining the egg, and everybody with a camera was taking pictures of it, I noticed Henry pulling something else out of the hole in the sand.
    "What's that you have there, Henry?" I asked. It looked like one of our miniature transmitters.
    "It's a sort of booby trap I rigged up as a burglar alarm," he said, and showed it to me. It was a little transmitter, all right, but Henry had rigged it with a pressure-type switch.
    "As long as the egg was sitting on top of it, it kept on sending out a steady signal that I could pick up back at the clubhouse," he explained. "But if anyone moved the egg, the transmitter would shut off, and I'd know something was wrong."
    "That was why you were never really worried about the egg?"
    "That's right! I knew the real egg was here all the time, safe and sound. Any time I wanted to check, I'd just tune in this beep on our receiver."
    Then I looked at him hard.
    "Henry," I said, "is that what I saw you putting in your pocket over there when we dug up the fake egg? is that why you knew we were in Stony Martin's garage that night we switched the eggs?"
    "Oh, that?" said Henry. "That was a little different. When I cast the fake egg I did happen to drop one of these transmitters into the plaster. No matter where the egg went I could always follow the beep with our directional antenna. It seemed like a good idea at the time."
    "So you tracked us all the way from Stony's garage out to the swamp, and then slipped over there just to scare the life out of us!"
    "Not exactly. I wanted to make sure you were all right."
    Then another thought struck me. "Come to think of it, Henry, you knew the minute Harmon had swiped that egg, and you also knew where he took it."
    "Just

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