Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT2

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS3

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 210

  CHAPTER 318

  CHAPTER 424

  CHAPTER 529

  CHAPTER 635

  CHAPTER 742

  CHAPTER 849

  CHAPTER 955

  CHAPTER 1061

  CHAPTER 1167

  CHAPTER 1271

  CHAPTER 1376

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 1967 by Jay Williams & Raymond Abrashkin.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to Frank D. Drake for permission to use the concept of a binary-coded “interplanetary message” which translates into a dot picture, invented by him after Project Ozma.

  This book is for Benjamin Williams.

  CHAPTER 1

  Meeting with a Martian

  The boy with a mop of hair like a bonfire stood on a ledge of rock, shading his eyes and peering at the scene below. There was nothing especially exciting about it. What most people would have seen was a grove of quite ordinary birches and maples through which wound a little stream talking cheerfully to itself. But what Danny Dunn saw was a stretch of reddish soil on which grew tall rubbery-looking plants that swayed forward as if they were alive, while at their feet ran a hissing black river. And this landscape of another planet was so real for him that he stepped back a pace to avoid the groping branches of the alien trees.

  “Ow! Watch it!” yelled the completely human voice of his friend, Joe Pearson. “You stepped right on my foot.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Danny, making room for his friend on the ledge. He shook his head with a sigh as the strange landscape vanished from his mind’s eye. “I was just imagining what I’d see if we had landed on Mars.”

  “Mmph!” Joe grunted. “Do you see any doctors? I think my toe’s fractured.”

  “You’ll live,” Danny replied. “Come on. If we follow the stream we’ll get to that open meadow full of wild flowers. There are bound to be some butterflies there.”

  The boys picked their way down the slope, holding their gauze nets high to avoid tangling them in the underbrush. They were doing a joint project for their science class, but so far an hour’s hunting on this bright Saturday morning had produced only one white cabbage butterfly, the commonest and least attractive butterfly of all.

  As they walked beside the water, Joe said, “You’re really figuring on getting to Mars some day, aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Danny. “Aren’t you?”

  Joe’s long, mournful face grew even longer and sadder. “What for?” he said. “I want to be a writer when I grow up. There aren’t any readers on Mars. No people, no places, no oxygen in the atmosphere, nothing but a few measly bacteria, and they won’t buy books.”

  “We don’t know there’s no intelligent life there, Joe. We may get some surprises. Anyway, think of the adventure of setting foot on another world.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m thinking of it. Launching right off the earth in a little tin case, getting space-sick, and being bombed by meteorites. Then you land a million miles from home and take out a hot dog and discover that you forgot to bring the mustard. Some adventure.”

  “It’s a good thing I know you so well,” said Dan, “or I’d think you were afraid.”

  “You’d be right,” Joe said. “Joe Pearson, Boy Coward, that’s me.”

  Danny laughed. “But it would be a marvelous adventure, no matter what you say. To step out on ground different from anything we can imagine! To see things nobody’s ever seen before. And more than that—maybe to meet people, or living things completely different from people, and try to talk to them, understand them, find out wonderful new things from them. Gosh! I’d give anything for the chance.” His freckles vanished in a flush of ecstasy at the mere thought.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “You’ve talked me into it. Let’s go home and pack.”

  “Not yet,” said Danny. “First we’ve got to collect some butterflies. I’ve set my heart on a tiger swallowtail.”

  Danny’s interest in space exploration was part of his larger interest in the whole world of science, and that was something he had grown up with. When he was only a baby, his father had died and his mother, to support herself, had taken the post of housekeeper for the famous Professor Euclid Bullfinch, inventor and scientist. The Professor had formed a deep attachment to the boy, and they were like father and son. Professor Bullfinch had taught Danny a great deal, so that he knew a lot more about some aspects of science than did most boys his age.

  The stream widened, and the two boys came out into an open field. Among the tall grasses grew purple clumps of ironweed, set off by nodding daisies and the brilliant orange splashes of devil’s paintbrush. Danny pointed eagerly. Above the flowers danced several butterflies. Two of them showed the black tiger-markings on huge lemon-yellow wings.

  “Oh, boy!” Danny whispered. “One apiece. It’s almost too good to be true.”

  He shook out his net. He had made both his and Joe’s out of coat-hangers, mosquito netting, and long, slender willow rods.

  Joe stood the killing bottles on a flat rock. “I’ll go around to the left and work down toward them,” he said. “You swing out toward the stream and come in from there. Make believe we’re Indians and they’re unsuspecting settlers. Ugh?”

  “Ugh, ugh!”

  But in his own mind, as he began stalking his prey, Dan was far away from the western plains. His blue jeans turned into a silvery plastic space suit, his sneakers became flexible boots, and over his head was a complicated helmet containing oxygen, water, and radiotelephone. He stood on the surface of Mars and before him, above the unearthly, reddish lichens, floated one of the queer winged animals they had sighted from the ship the day before. Was it intelligent? Was it trying to communicate with him by the patterns of its movement? Closer he crept, and closer. Suppose one of the great fanged beasts they had seen should appear before he could reach the winged creature? He wondered if his space pistol had enough power to stop its charge. . . .

  “YOW!”

  Something had moved in the grass, something very large—it reared its head up directly in front of him. Even as he yelled, Danny swung the net frantically and brought it down—

  —And stood with his mouth open staring in embarrassment and surprise at a man who stared back at him with the butterfly net over his face.

  “Hey! What’s going on?” the man said, fumbling with the meshes.

  “Gee, I’m sorry. I thought you were a Martian,” Danny blurted.

  “What gives?” Joe panted. At Danny’s, shout, he had sprung straight up in the air and lost his net. Then he had come running.

  “I thought you stepped on a snake,” he said. “Who’s this? What happened?”

  The man had finally managed to pull the net off his head. He revealed a pleasantly ugly face: long, bony chin, large, bony nose, snapping brown eyes, and wide mouth made even wider by a boyish grin. He wore a wrinkled old corduroy suit, and his heavy shoes were covered with dust as if he had walked many miles.

  He got to his feet, picking up a knapsack as he did so, and held out the net.

  “Name’s Badger,” he said. “Hubert Badger. My friends call me Badge.”

  Dan took the net and shook hands. “I’m Danny Dunn and this is Joe Pearson.”

  “Have you been hiking?” Joe asked. �
�Have you come far?”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘far.’ Let’s see, yesterday I walked from Hattertown to Barber’s Mill.”

  “Whew! That’s nearly twenty miles.” Danny’s voice was full of respect.

  “Mm. I left Barber’s Mill about eight this morning. What is it now? Must be about noon.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “Eleven-thirty. I’ve been dozing here for about half an hour so that means I covered ten miles in three hours. Not quite up to my usual pace, but I struck off the main road and took a wagon track in to here. Thought I’d find the stream—it’s marked on my map—and maybe cool my feet.”

  “I thought I liked hiking,” Danny said, “but you really cover ground.”

  “It’s my hobby,” Mr. Badger said seriously. “I enjoy seeing new places, but you can’t see them the way we travel nowadays. We go too fast. Jump in a jet and—zip!— you’ve covered a thousand miles. Get in your car and—whizz!—you’ve done a hundred. But when you walk, you see each house and tree, you’ve got time to study the countryside and to smile at people and maybe say hello.”

  He stretched his long arms over his head, the knapsack dangling from two fingers as if it were a feather.

  “Give me a tramp’s life any day,” he said. “Not that I’m against progress. No, speed’s all right when you need it. But we seem to be more interested in getting places than in being in them. Why, I know people who drive their cars just to cross the street.”

  “Where are you bound for now?” Joe asked.

  “A town called Midston. Should be very close.”

  “It is,” said Danny. “Only about a mile away through those trees.”

  “Good. I take it you’ve been butterfly hunting. Any luck?”

  Danny looked at his friend. “Well—we almost had a couple of tiger swallowtails,” he said, ruefully.

  Mr. Badger shook his head. “I’m sorry. My fault, I can see. I must have scared you out of a year’s growth, sitting up suddenly like that. But—why on earth did you think I was a Martian? I’ve been told I look like a lot of things, but that’s going a little too far.”

  Dan reddened. “Oh, it was just in my imagination,” he replied. “I was sort of pretending that I was on another planet, and thinking about what kind of life I’d see there, and then—well, there you were.”

  “I see.” Mr. Badger began struggling into the straps of his knapsack. “Don’t tell me you really think there’s life on another planet somewhere?”

  “Of course there is!” Danny cried. “Do you know anything about astronomy?”

  “Uh—astronomy?”

  “If you did, you’d know that our solar system is stuck ’way out in an arm of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and there are millions of other suns in that galaxy alone. Some of them—say, maybe, a million—are G-type suns like ours, or have about the same heat and mass. Well, when you start thinking about other galaxies with the same type of stars in them, you get up into the billions. And that means that some of them must have planets circling them on which conditions could be right for life to develop. Why, gosh! when you start thinking about that many stars and planets, and the fact that the laws of physics and chemistry are the same for all of them, common sense tells you that some have got to have planets with intelligent life on them.”

  Mr. Badger looked down at Danny’s glowing face.

  “Hmm. You certainly make out a good case,” he began.

  Before he could go on, there was a startling interruption. A voice—clear, sharp, and with a metallic tone—spoke.

  “Calling Space Pilot Dunn!” it said. “Do you read me? Over.”

  Mr. Badger’s eyes bulged. The voice came from right beside him. But except for himself and the two boys there was not another soul to be seen.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Thermoelement

  Mr. Badger had no time to recover. For Danny’s response to this ghostly voice was even more surprising.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said.

  Mr. Badger clutched at his brow. “I’m going mad,” he said, hoarsely.

  Danny grinned at him. At the same time, he hitched forward a small metal case which he wore fastened to his belt, and spoke to it.

  “I read you loud and clear,” he said. “Over.”

  “Aha! A radio,” said Mr. Badger.

  “A walkie-talkie,” Joe explained. “Danny built a pair of them. His mother has the other one.

  Mrs. Dunn’s voice was saying, “Lunch in half an hour, Dan. There’ll be hot buttermilk biscuits and chicken gravy.”

  “Oh, boy!” said Danny.

  Mrs. Dunn went right on, as if she were reading her son’s mind—and Joe’s. “Yes, you may bring Joe home with you. I’ll phone Mrs. Pearson. But don’t be late. Over.”

  Mr. Badger looked at Danny with amusement. “Sort of a hot line direct to the President, eh?” he said.

  Danny nodded. “I got a watch for my birthday,” he explained, “but I always forgot to look at it. And finally, Mom got mad and said I’d have to learn to come home in time for lunch or dinner or chores, or there’d be real trouble. So I earned some money by gardening and babysitting, and bought some kits, and made the walkie-talkies.”

  “That’s pretty good,” said Mr. Badger. “Better than I could do. Wasn’t it awfully complicated?”

  “It was,” Danny admitted. “I’ve got a friend—a girl named Irene Miller who lives next door, and she’s keen on science, too. She helped out. Between us, we figured out how to do it.”

  “We’d better get going, Dan,” Joe reminded him.

  Mr. Badger held out his hand. “Well, it’s been nice meeting you boys. Maybe we’ll bump into each other again, one of these days. Meantime, I’ll remember what you told me. I can see I ought to give astronomy a whirl.”

  The boys collected their equipment and went off.

  “He was a nice guy,” Joe said, as they hurried through the woods. “It must be fun to be a tramp and just wander around, seeing the world. Except when there are hot biscuits and chicken gravy for lunch,” he added quickly.

  “Yep,” said Danny. “I wonder if we’ll ever see him again. He’s a sort of explorer, in a way. But I wonder why he bothers to explore around here, where everything is so—well, so usual.”

  Professor Bullfinch’s house was on the outskirts of the town of Midston, not far from the University where he was a member of the department of science. The boys left their nets and bottles on the back porch and went into the kitchen. Mrs. Dunn, looking rosy from the heat of the oven, was setting plates out on the long table. She greeted them with a smile. They went to wash their hands at the sink, and as they were finishing Professor Bullfinch walked into the room.

  Euclid Bullfinch was a comfortable, round-faced man, bald and mild-looking, with nothing in his appearance to proclaim the fact that he was an eminent scientist. Behind his glasses, however, his blue eyes sparkled with intelligence and a never-ending, lively curiosity. With his hands stuffed into the pockets of his old tweed jacket, he sniffed the air appreciatively.

  “Hello, Dan. Hi, Joe,” he said. “I wonder if this is the way heaven smells? Now, let’s see. A little careful analysis and experimentation should tell me what’s cooking.”

  He strolled over to the stove and picked up the lid of a saucepan. “Hah,” he said, dipping a finger into the contents of the pot. “Chicken—?”

  “Professor,” cried Mrs. Dunn. “You’re worse than the boys. You can do all your analyzing and experimenting at the table. Sit down, everyone. Lunch is ready.”

  They tucked in joyfully, and for a time there was no sound except the clinking of knives and forks, the gurgle of milk going into glasses, the munching of jaws, and an occasional request, mumbled through a full mouth, for another helping.

  At last, the Professor pushed his chair back and began to fill his pipe. “Excellent, my dear Mrs. Dunn,�
� he said. “But it’s wicked of you to feed me so well. I’m almost too stuffed to get back to the laboratory.”

  “What are you working on now, Professor?” Joe asked.

  Professor Bullfinch held a match carefully over his pipe and soon his head was wreathed in smoke, so that it looked like a benevolent moon appearing from behind a cloud.

  “A most interesting new project,” he said. “Do you know what a thermoelement is?”

  “Cousin to a thermos bottle?” Joe ventured.

  The Professor chuckled. “Well, in a way. A distant cousin,” he said. “I won’t ask Dan because I gave him my special fifty-cent lecture on the subject a day or so ago. A thermoelement is a curious kind of thing: it’s a machine that pumps heat from one place to another, but it has no moving parts except those which are too small to be seen.

  “You know, I’m sure, that the tiny particles which make up matter are constantly moving. This motion is energy, or heat. When the particles in a bit of matter move rapidly, the stuff is hot. If they move very slowly, it’s cold.

  “Now suppose you want to cool off a cup of hot coffee. What you might do is transfer some of the energy—the fast motion of the molecules of hot coffee—into something else.

  So you could put a lump of ice into the cup. The fast-moving coffee molecules bang into the slow-moving ones of the ice and speed them up a bit. The hot particles lose some of their energy and the cold ones gain a little. Some of the heat has been moved over into the ice, and the coffee gets cooler.”

  “I see that,” Joe nodded. “I don’t know why, but I do understand. So what’s a thermo— what you said?”

  “Well,” said the Professor, “let’s take it step by step. If you wanted to cool a whole lot of coffee, you’d try moving the heat out of it with a machine that would force the action to speed up. You’d have to move the heat to somewhere else—you’d pump it from one place to another. Most of our heat-pumps, refrigerators or air conditioners for instance, are big, complicated pieces of machinery. In them, a liquid is moved in pipes around the outside of the box. The liquid is made to boil, so that its molecules move very fast, and the things inside the refrigerator transfer their heat energy over to this liquid. The heat is then carried by the liquid to another place outside the box. So the heat is pumped from the inside to the outside, and the inside gets very cold.