Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster Read online

  “Never?” Danny gazed up at the Professor in wonder. “You mean it would be a kind of perpetual motion? But I thought that wasn’t possible.”

  “Nevertheless, that’s just what it would be.”

  Professor Bullfinch leaned forward to inspect the plastic. “Look here. The two ends of this coil are touching. It forms a closed ring. When you dropped the cable, it started a charge going through the coil. Now, my boy, a moving charge of electricity flowing around a circuit produces a magnetic field. What we have here is a very powerful ring magnet, so powerful that when I tried to touch it the magnetic field caught and held the metal of my wrist watch.”

  “A supermagnet,” said Danny.

  “That’s right. And it will go on being a magnet, with the current flowing on and on around the circle until I break the current. Like this.” Professor Bullfinch glanced about. He found a pair of heavy rubber gloves and put them on. He seized the coil and pulled its two ends apart. There was a flash and a snap.

  The Professor turned to Dr. Fenster. “As you can see, this means—” he was beginning.

  Dr. Fenster, with a glassy, faraway look in his eyes, was walking towards the door that led to the garden.

  “Ben!” Professor Bullfinch called. “What’s wrong? Where are you going?”

  Dr. Fenster flapped a hand. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

  Without another word, he pulled open the door and walked out into the garden. He was soon lost to sight in the shrubbery, leaving the Professor and Danny staring open-mouthed after him.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Trial of Strength

  Professor Bullfinch slowly closed the door. “If I know my friend Ben,” he said, “he is thinking about something.”

  “But will he be all right?” asked Danny. “He didn’t seem to know where he was.”

  “Oh, he’ll look after himself. We’ll hear from him again when he’s got the problem thought out,” said the Professor.

  He returned to the lab bench and took up the strand of plastic. “I have some thinking of my own to do,” he said. “And some experimentation as well.”

  Danny was about to ask whether he could stay and watch, when there came a shrill whistle from outside. In one of the windows appeared the faces of a thin, sad-looking boy and an attractive girl with her brown hair in a pony tail.

  “It’s Joe and Irene,” Danny said. “I’ll see you at lunch, Professor.”

  Professor Bullfinch waved to the two faces, put a match to his pipe, and returned to his work. Dan went out to join his friends.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked them.

  “Irene’s been collecting beetles for her project,” Joe Pearson said. “And I’ve been carrying the beetle bottles.” He was holding a box with several glass jars in it. “I don’t know why I do it,” he added gloomily. “I can’t stand bugs. I must be crazy.”

  “You’re just kindhearted,” Irene Miller chuckled. “And also greedy. My mother made an angel cake with coffee frosting. I promised him some if he’d help me,” she told Danny.

  “Speaking of crazy,” said Joe, “we just passed a very peculiar-looking character. A little man, not much taller than me, with a white beard. He was muttering to himself and walking around in circles in the field on the other side of those trees. When we passed him, we said hello, and he nodded and said, ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ I was just wondering whether we ought to call the hospital or someplace.”

  “Not necessary. He’s a friend of Professor Bullfinch’s,” said Danny. “He’s sort of absent-minded. He was here just now when the Professor made his newest invention.”

  “What invention?”

  “Well, it’s a kind of magnet.”

  “What’s so special about that?” Joe said. “Magnets have already been invented.”

  “No, this is something new. It’s really a superconductor which offers no resistance to current...”

  “Never mind,” Joe groaned. “I can see I’m not going to understand a word of it.”

  Irene, who was as interested in science as Dan, patted Joe’s shoulder. “You don’t have to listen,” she said. “You can write a poem about it later. Go ahead, Dan. Tell me.”

  Danny explained as best he could. “So you see,” he finished, “it doesn’t just pull things or push them, the way a bar magnet does. Since it’s in the shape of a ring, it produces a circular magnetic field. It held the Professor’s wrist watch so that he couldn’t even move his hand.”

  “It must be very powerful,” said Irene.

  Dan nodded. “I’ve been thinking about things that could be done with it,” he said. “And I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

  “Here we go,” Joe said. “He’s got that look in his eye that means, ‘Help me with this new idea and we’ll all get into trouble.’ The last one was to rig a steam drive to my bike. I’m still finding pieces of it in my back yard.”

  “This is nothing like that,” Danny said. “For instance, if you mounted one of these superconductor magnets on the front of a car, you could never crash into another car.”

  “That’s a terrific idea,” said Irene.

  “I’ll bet it wouldn’t work that way,” Joe said gloomily. “Something would go wrong and you’d have a million cars all stuck together forever.”

  Danny shook his head. “You don’t understand—” he was beginning when there came a sound of running feet. The three youngsters turned.

  Dr. Fenster came galloping along, waving his hat. “Eureka!” he cried. “Where’s Euclid? I’ve got it!”

  “Got what?” said Joe nervously. “Is it something catching?”

  Dr. Fenster glanced at him in surprise. “You’re different,” he said. “You used to be a red-headed, freckled boy and now you’re tall, skinny, and black-haired.”

  He pushed past Joe, leaving him staring open-mouthed, and barged through the laboratory door. Danny and the others followed.

  Professor Bullfinch looked up calmly. “Ah, Ben,” he said, “got it all worked out, whatever it was?”

  “I think so, Euclid. Just one question, first. What’s the total weight of that coil of plastic?”

  The Professor raised his eyebrows. He took a brass scales from a shelf, set it on the bench, and put the hank of dark plastic cord on it.

  “About forty-six grams, or an ounce and a half. Do you want me to be more precise?”

  “No, that’ll do. That stuff has a diameter of less than half a centimeter, or about a sixteenth of an inch, right? Let’s see how tough it is. I just want a rough notion. Can we hang up a piece of it and see how much weight it will support, for example?”

  “Certainly.” Professor Bullfinch looked around the laboratory. There were some hooks along one wall on which overalls and rubber aprons were hanging. He cut off a few feet of the plastic cord and tied one end of it to one of the hooks. He made a loop in the other end.

  “Now, what shall we use for a weight?” he asked.

  “Use me,” said Dr. Fenster. “I weigh about a hundred and thirty pounds. All right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Dr. Fenster promptly put one foot in the loop. He reached up to hold the hook so that he could steady himself. Then, slowly, he let himself down until his weight was all on the foot resting in that fragile-looking loop of plastic. To the watchers, it seemed as though the cord must break. It stretched a trifle, but it held him as if it were heavy rope.

  He got down briskly. “Good,” he said. “That’s all I need to know right now. I think this may provide the very solution I came here to find.”

  “What was that?” asked the Professor.

  “I didn’t know. But now I think I do.”

  “You’re being confusing again, Ben. What does all that mean?”

  “Just what I’ve been wondering,” said a new v
oice. “What on earth is going on?”

  It was Danny’s mother, Mrs. Dunn. She stood in the doorway, a lock of red hair hanging over her eyes.

  “Well,” she said. “You’re quite a little convention in here, aren’t you? Still, I suppose I can find room for all of you around the table.”

  “You don’t mean to say it’s lunch time already?” said the Professor.

  “I’ve been calling you for the past five minutes,” said Mrs. Dunn. “Hello, Joe, Irene. Just run in and phone your mothers. There’s plenty to eat. And I don’t believe I’ve met this gentleman.”

  The Professor introduced Dr. Fenster. The zoologist made Mrs. Dunn a dignified bow.

  “Delighted to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “Your invitation to lunch is gratefully accepted. I can’t seem to remember eating breakfast.”

  “He really is absent-minded,” Joe whispered to Danny. “Imagine not being able to remember eating!”

  “Let’s go, then,” said the Professor, clapping Dr. Fenster on the back. “And after lunch, you can tell us all about this mysterious problem of yours.”

  CHAPTER 4

  On the Track of a Legend

  Lunch was what Mrs. Dunn called a pick-up meal. “I just pick up whatever’s around the kitchen and put it on the table,” she said. What she had picked up today was a gigantic chicken salad, cold baked ham, hot biscuits with homemade strawberry jam, and an apple pie with bits of cinnamon stick under the juicy crust.

  “I haven’t eaten so much,” puffed Dr. Fenster, pushing his chair away from the table, “since a three-day feast the Pygmies once gave me.”

  “What did you have?” Joe asked.

  “It began with roast elephant,” said Dr. Fenster.

  “I don’t know whether to say ‘yum’ or ‘ugh,’” Joe said.

  “It was delicious,” Dr. Fenster assured him.

  “Oh, Joe!” said Irene. “How can you talk about eating right after a meal like that?”

  “I’m talented,” he replied cheerfully. “That reminds me. You owe me some angel cake with coffee frosting.”

  “Oog! He’s hopeless,” Irene groaned.

  Mrs. Dunn giggled and began to clear the table. Dr. Fenster lit a long, thin cigar, and the Professor tamped down the tobacco in his pipe with a calloused thumb.

  “Now, Ben,” he said, digging out his matches, “let’s hear your story.”

  Dr. Fenster settled himself more comfortably in his chair.

  “Well,” he began, “you know I am always in touch with people all over the world, from whom I often hear of new or strange animals. Sometimes, the natives of a place will have legends or tales about weird beasts, and sometimes it turns out that there’s a good deal of truth behind them. Many scientists tend to pooh-pooh such tales, but I think myself that the people who live in a place know better than any outsider what’s there. For instance, way back in 1860 the Wambutti people in the Congo told explorers about a zebra-striped, long-eared creature that lived in the jungles. Nobody believed them. But eventually the beast was discovered. It’s the okapi, a relative of the giraffe. The same thing has been true of other animals—the monster dragon-lizard of Komodo, the pygmy hippopotamus of Liberia, and the great black Ituri boar.

  “Well, now I’m on the track of just such another legend. And I hope it may turn out to be just as real an animal.”

  He tapped the long ash off his cigar. The others waited in silent fascination. He regarded them gravely, and continued:

  “You know that the River Nile rises in Uganda, in Central Africa, and flows almost four thousand miles north to its outlet in Egypt. About a quarter of the way from its source, it winds among swamps—nine thousand square miles of them—watery, wild, with few people living there, an area that’s almost unexplored. I have passed through the region several times, and last year I spent a week in the town of Malakal with an old friend of mine, Ibrahim Ajay. There I heard for the first time the stories about the lau.

  “The Nuer people who live in the swamps say that the lau is a serpent, bigger than any other. Its body is as big around as a horse. Its color is brown, like the mud, and on its head are long tentacles. It reaches out with these to seize its victims. And the Nuer say, ‘If a man sees the lau first, the serpent dies, but if the lau sees the man first, the man dies.’”

  “Goodness!” exclaimed Mrs. Dunn. “It sounds frightful. But surely, it’s just a legend? You don’t really believe there is such a beast, do you?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Fenster solemnly, “I do.”

  “Because of what you said before—that the natives of a country know best what animals live there?” said Danny.

  “Right. Reports of the lau go back for many years. In 1923, H. C. Jackson, Deputy Governor of the Upper Nile Province, said that the Nuer people had told him about the creature. The great naturalist, J. G. Millais, heard about it; so did the Government Administrator at Rejaf; so did the explorer, Captain William Hitchens. And my friend Ibrahim told me that he had seen the track of the lau near the village of Yakwak. It was a huge channel deep in the mud and wide enough, he said, for four men to lie down in.

  Joe snorted. “But how can you believe that stuff about, ‘If a man sees the lau first, the lau dies, but if the lau sees the man first, the man dies?’” He said. “It’s like the old myth about the Gorgon who turned people to stone if they looked at her. Gosh, you don’t believe she ever existed, do you?”

  Dr. Fenster ran his fingers through his beard. Then he said, “Do you know what a metaphor is?”

  “Sure he does,” Irene put in. “He’s a poet.”

  “Splendid. Well, then, suppose I told you, ‘I saw something so horrible yesterday that it froze my blood.’ You wouldn’t think my blood really turned to ice, would you?”

  “I suppose not,” said Joe. “You mean the Gorgon didn’t really turn men to stone, but just scared them stiff.”

  “Just so, scared them stiff as stone. Now let’s put it another way. If you were walking through the jungle and you met a cobra, and you came very close to it without seeing it, it might bite you and then you’d be dead. But if you saw it first, you’d kill it before it could harm you. Right?”

  “I get it. Of course!” Joe said. “It’s just a kind of poetic way of telling about something.”

  “Then you think the lau may be a poisonous snake?” said Danny.

  “Not necessarily,” Dr. Fenster answered. “Just dangerous. Not even a snake—it might be an enormous crocodile. Or a creature like a crocodile, a giant lizard for instance—”

  “Or a dinosaur!” Danny said. “It might be a dinosaur still alive in the swamps.”

  Dr. Fenster shrugged. “I don’t know. But I feel sure it’s something. Something new which has not yet been discovered. And I hope to discover it.”

  Professor Bullfinch had been listening intently with his chin on his hand. He said, “There’s only one thing I don’t understand, Ben. You said you came here to see me because you had a problem. How on earth can I help you find a strange animal? I don’t know anything about animal catching. I’ve never even been to Africa.”

  “Yes, but you are full of ideas. I came to toss questions at you and see what you’d come up with. The problem is that it is very difficult to move about in the Nile swamps at any time, and almost impossible at night. Yet I want to be able to keep a large section of swampland under constant observation, day and night.”

  “Big searchlights?” Danny suggested.

  “The lights might scare the creature away.”

  “What about a television camera, one that can see in the dark?” said Irene.

  “Exactly my thought,” said Dr. Fenster. “Not one, but several such cameras. The problem is one of weight. I’d need special small cameras. But heavy cables, lots of them, long enough to do the job, would weigh far too much. And that’s where this new plastic of you
rs comes in, Euclid. As soon as I understood what it was, I began to see the possibilities.

  “It is a superconductor of electricity. It’s very strong and tough. And it weighs almost nothing. That means that from a base camp I could set out hundreds of feet of it, to the cameras. It would have to be insulated, of course.”

  “Not necessarily,” said the Professor. “But a protective coat of some kind of paint—”

  “And the miniature TV cameras—?”

  “Yes, that would be perfectly possible.”

  “Another serious problem is that the ground is covered with fifteen-foot-high papyrus. I’d somehow have to get the cameras up above the stuff. Cranes, or poles, would be too heavy to carry in and too hard to set up, since the ground is so soft.”

  They frowned at each other. Then Danny cried, “I know! You could hang them in the air.”

  “Eh? I don’t follow,” said Dr. Fenster.

  “On balloons!” Danny grinned.

  “By George, I believe the lad’s got something,” said Dr. Fenster. “What a good idea! Since our electrical cables won’t weigh anything to speak of, it could be done.”

  He stood up, leaned across the table, and shook hands with Danny. “Well done. I could use a bright boy like you on this expedition,” he said.

  Danny’s eyes glowed. “Really?” he said. “Do you mean it?”

  “Why not?” Dr. Fenster tugged at his beard and laughed. “You all ought to come. You especially, Euclid. I need your inventive brain. And what a time I’d show you! Never been to Africa? A fantastic place. An unforgettable experience!”

  “You’re not serious, Ben?” said the Professor.

  “Never been more serious in my life.”

  “But the expense—”

  “Now, now, Euclid. You know I have more money than I know what to do with. It won’t cost you a penny.”

  “Gosh!” said Joe. “Are you really that rich?”

  Dr. Fenster nodded. “I’m even rarer than most of the animals I search for. I’m the only millionaire zoologist there is.”