Read New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club for Free Online Page B

slowly up it until he had reached the huge
crossbeam that buttresses the roof just over the packing crate. He flung
himself over the beam and shinnied along it to the point where it joined with
one of the roof stringers. There he flipped another switch and our cashbox,
dangling on the end of a fine steel cable, was lowered gently to the top of the
packing crate in front of Jeff. Jeff got up and walked to the safe, drew the
cashbox key from it, and held it up for everyone to see. Then he returned to
his chair, turned the key in the lock of the cashbox, and looked up at Homer.

           
"OK!" he said.
            Homer
pointed the remote control box in his direction and pressed the other button.
The lid of the cashbox flipped open. Jeff dumped the contents out in front of
him and methodically counted the money while the rest of us sat there with our
arms and legs crossed and repeated the count after him.
           
"Three dollars and eighty-seven cents," he announced. "Homer was
pretty near right."
            "I
am right!" came Homer's voice from the rafters. "We never count those
two Indian-head pennies. That's our reserve for bad debts."
           
"OK, OK!" said Jeff. "The matter is closed." He put the
money back in the cashbox and signaled Homer to raise it again to the roof.
           
"Can I come down now, Mr. President?" asked Homer.
           
"Yes!" said Jeff.
            Despite
our shortage of funds we all agreed that we should make the trip to Claiborne
to attend the White Elephant Auction. If we couldn't manage to buy the Japanese
submarine, at least we could find out who did get it.
            "I
move that we take all our money with us and let me handle the bidding,"
said Freddy Muldoon, standing up on his chair to give himself a little better
position to argue from.
           
"That's a great idea!" Mortimer Dalrymple cut in, with his usual
sarcasm. "You're a born loser, so we won't have to argue about how much
money we have any more."
           
"OK, Mr. Bigmouth," Freddy shot back. "Maybe I'm not the world's
best horse trader, but at least I know a jackass when I see one."
            Mortimer
came up out of his chair like a whirling dervish, and Henry and I grabbed him
just in time to prevent mayhem. Freddy stood fast, with his hands on his hips
and that sneering look on his face again, while Jeff rapped his gavel on the
crate. When the commotion had died down, little Dinky Poore stood up, at his
most truculent, and said, "Mr. President, I second the motion, whether
anybody likes it or not!"
            In the
Mad Scientists' Club, when anybody seconds a motion it's almost sure to pass.
The reason is that Freddy and Dinky vote in favor of almost everything, and
Jeff Crocker, the President, only votes in case of a tie. So anybody making a
motion knows that he has three votes to start with. And if somebody is dumb
enough to second his motion, he knows that he's got it made because four votes
are already in the bag. But if Freddy or Dinky makes the motion, it's a little
different of course. You might say that they face an uphill fight.
            In this
case, I felt a little sorry for Freddy, so I voted in favor of letting him
handle the bidding for the submarine. After Henry and Homer and Mortimer had
all voted "no," it was up to Jeff Crocker to decide the issue. He
flipped a coin and it came down "heads" and he figured that was a
good omen. So he voted in favor of Freddy risking our three dollars and
eighty-five cents.
            By ten
o'clock Saturday morning we were all piled into Zeke Boniface's wheezing old
junk truck, Richard the Deep Breather, jolting along on the seventy-five-mile
drive to Claiborne. Dinky and Freddy were crouched down behind the seat of the
open cab, playing mumblety-peg on the wooden truck bed and exchanging
conspiratorial whispers. The rest of us didn't pay too much attention to them.
We were too busy figuring out how we would load the submarine on the