Danny Dunn on the Ocean Floor Read online

“Danny,” said Irene. “I really think that’s—”

  Joe threw the ball. Danny reached out for it. It hit his fingers and bounded sideways. With a soggy kind of splash, it fell directly into the crucible.

  “—not a very good idea,” Irene finished with a sigh.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “The Answer to All Your Problems!”

  Professor Bullfinch led his friend, Dr. A. J. Grimes, into the front hall. They made an amusing pair—the Professor short, plump, and rosy, and Dr. Grimes tall and craggy, with a lean face that looked as if he were perpetually tasting something sour. He put his suitcase down and looked about the hall. In a harsh voice, he said, “Good to be here, Bullfinch.”

  The Professor smiled. He could tell—although no one else would have guessed—that Dr. Grimes was laughing heartily, for there were two tiny wrinkles at the corners of his mouth.

  “Good to have you here, old man,” said the Professor. “Let’s go into the lab before we get you settled. There’s something I must check on.”

  Dr. Grimes rubbed his hands together. “One week of rest,” he said, “and then to work. My deep-diving ship, Bullfinch, is going to be the most perfect undersea laboratory ever seen. All I have to do is work out a few—hrmph!—minor details.”

  “Yes, so you wrote me,” said the Professor. “Minor problems! The type of metal to use to resist pressure, the question of space inside the vehicle, the problem of observation—”

  “All very minor,” Dr. Grimes interrupted. “Nothing to them. Within the year I’ll be diving into the Pacific Ocean.”

  “I certainly hope you’ll have the ship ready by the time you dive,” murmured the Professor. “As I remember it, you’re not a very good swimmer. However, I may have the plastic for the observation window ready for you.”

  Dr. Grimes put a lean hand on the Professor’s shoulder. “Now look here, Bullfinch,” he said. “You keep talking as if I were going without you. I’m not. Drat it, man, we don’t always agree but I—well, I just couldn’t go on an expedition like this and leave you home. I’d have no one to argue with!”

  The Professor peered up into his friend’s face with a grin. “You touch me, Grimes,” he said. “But I’m not surprised—I have been expecting this. Yes, and I’ll admit I’ve been thinking about it for some time. Why shouldn’t I go? It might be a pleasant vacation.”

  “Vacation? Don’t be absurd. We’ll be working hard. We might find a moment or two for relaxation, but no more. Well, what do you say?”

  The Professor stroked his chin pensively. Then he said abruptly, “I’ll do it!”

  “Excellent,” said Grimes, and they shook hands.

  “Now, what about Danny?” asked the Professor, leading the way down the hall toward the laboratory. “It would be a wonderful trip for the boy.”

  Dr. Grimes scowled. “You know my views on children, Bullfinch. They are always in the way. And Danny is reckless and headstrong.”

  “I’ll admit he sometimes jumps into things,” the Professor murmured. “But then, he’s a boy, after all. He is essentially very serious, very calm, quiet and reliable—”

  As he said this, he threw wide the door. There came a crash of glass, and something hurtled through the air toward the two scientists. Instinctively, Dr. Grimes held up his hands. The object landed right in them.

  Danny, Irene, and Joe stood wide-eyed in surprise. Danny held a hammer, and there were bits of broken test tubes scattered about from a rack that had fallen to the floor. Dr. Grimes looked down at the thing he had caught.

  “A football!” he sputtered. “Playing football in a laboratory! Is that what you call calm and quiet, or serious and reliable?”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry, Dr. Grimes,” said Danny. “It was an accident.”

  “Do you expect us to believe you were playing football by accident?” cried Grimes.

  “We weren’t playing,” Danny said. “We were trying to break it. I had just hit it with the hammer, and it flew off to one side and knocked over the test tubes and just happened to shoot toward you as you opened the door.”

  Professor Bullfinch blinked in a dazed fashion. “Just a moment, Dan,” he said. “For some reason, the more you explain, the more confused I become. You say you were trying to break the ball? But you weren’t playing with it? Why do you want to break it?”

  “Professor,” said Danny earnestly, “I don’t think that ball can be broken. I think we’ve invented an unbreakable football!”

  Professor Bullfinch slowly took the football from Dr. Grimes’s hands and stared at it. Now he could see that the football itself had been deflated, and that it was inside a very thin shell of plastic. This shell, however, was shaped like a football. The Professor pressed it with his fingers. It was as rigid as steel.

  “Perhaps you’d better explain,” he said.

  “Really, Bullfinch,” Dr. Grimes began. “Do we have the time—?”

  “My dear Grimes,” said the Professor. “You are here for a rest. There’s plenty of time. Go on, Danny.”

  Quickly, the boy explained how he had heated the plastic and cooled it again on the window sill, and how he had asked Joe to throw up the football without thinking that it might land in the crucible.

  “When we fished it out,” he said, “it was covered with plastic. We cleaned up the mess and then tried to get the plastic off the ball. There’s one place, near the lacing, where there isn’t any plastic—look, you can see it. Joe had the idea of letting the air out of the ball. So we did, but we still couldn’t get the ball out. We tried hammering the plastic, but, although it’s only about as thick as an eggshell, we couldn’t even scratch it. We jumped on it and pounded it with a chair, and I was just hammering it again when you walked in.”

  The Professor adjusted his glasses. Then, very slowly and deliberately, he put the ball on the ground, supported himself on the edge of the lab bench, and stood on it.

  “Remarkable,” he muttered.

  “I thought we could even make football helmets out of that stuff,” Joe put in. “Or—you know, if you had a suit made of it, you could take a shower without getting wet.”

  Dr. Grimes uttered a snarl. “I have listened to quite enough of this nonsense,” he burst out. “Bullfinch! I refuse to waste any more time on children’s games and toys.”

  But the Professor wasn’t listening. He was staring at Joe, who goggled back at him solemnly. “Say that again,” said the Professor.

  “I said,” repeated Dr. Grimes irritably, “that I refuse to waste any more—”

  “Not you,” said the Professor. “I meant Joe. That if we had a suit of this we could shower without getting wet. Was that it?”

  Joe nodded silently and somewhat nervously.

  “Have you lost your mind, Bullfinch?” Dr. Grimes demanded.

  “I don’t think so,” replied the Professor. “No, I’m sure I haven’t. But I may have found something.”

  “Found something?”

  “Yes,” said the Professor, picking up the football. “The answer to almost all your problems, Grimes.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dr. Grimes’s Plans

  There was silence for a moment, and then Dr. Grimes’s expression slowly changed from annoyance to interest. He looked at the plastic-shelled football in the Professor’s hands, and then he said, “I see. You really think there is a possibility—?”

  Danny had been gazing in perplexity at the two scientists, and now he said, “Professor, I’m sorry if there’s something wrong. It’s my fault for telling Joe to throw the ball to me. But you wanted me to get rid of the plastic anyway…”

  “There’s nothing wrong, my boy,” said the Professor. “On the contrary, it may be very right. Sit down, all three of you.”

  The young people made themselves comfortable, all in a row, on the edge of the lab bench, swinging their leg
s. Then he went on, “You see, Dr. Grimes is planning a remarkable project for the exploration of the ocean floor. He intends to build a bathyscaphe.”

  “A what?” Joe interrupted. “A bathtub on skates?”

  “Not quite, Joe,” laughed Professor Bullfinch. “Bathy—from the Greek word for deep, and scaphe from the word meaning boat. A deep-diving submarine in which men can go three or four miles down into the sea. Actually, the word ‘submarine’ is wrong. It is more like a balloon. But instead of floating up into the air, it floats down into the ocean.”

  The Professor paused and filled his pipe. Then he continued, “The bathyscaphe was developed by Professor Auguste Piccard, the famous Swiss scientist, about 1948. Before that, Professor William Beebe had made his deep-sea descents in an iron ball called a bathysphere, which was dropped at the end of a steel cable. Professor Piccard’s bathyscaphe consists of a ball-shaped cabin underneath a large tank of lightweight gasoline. The gasoline, being lighter than water, makes the ship very buoyant. In order to sink into the sea, heavy ballast, of iron pellets, is taken aboard; the vessel sinks to the bottom; and when its passengers wish to rise, they drop the ballast and float back up to the surface.

  “The bathyscaphe has allowed men to go farther down into the ocean than ever was possible before. Professor Piccard, in his vessel the Trieste, descended to nearly two miles. Then the French diver, Captain Cousteau, with his companions Huout and Willm, reached a depth of two and a half miles in one called the F.N.R.S. 3. Not long ago, Professor Piccard’s son, Jacques, along with a U.S. Navy Lieutenant named Don Walsh, went down seven miles in the Trieste.”

  “And Dr. Grimes is going to build one of these bathyscaphes?” asked Danny. “Gosh, what an adventure that would be!”

  “He has the promise of enough money for the project from the Academy of Scientific Research,” said the Professor. “Money has always been the biggest problem. It’s hard to make people see the importance of diving into the ocean depths.”

  “Why?” said Joe. “I should think they’d want to find all that buried treasure that must be lying around down there.”

  “Trivial!” cried Dr. Grimes, snapping his fingers. “The thing we must understand is that the sea is our next frontier—just as the old West was a hundred years ago.”

  “Isn’t that what people are always saying about outer space?” asked Irene.

  “Yes, my dear,” said the Professor. “Men have been working hard to get into outer space, but right here, at our very doorstep, lie uncharted regions that we know almost nothing about. Three-quarters of our earth is under water, yet we know less about some of it than we do about the moon. And in the seas and oceans, and in the rocks and mud at their bottoms, lie oil, precious minerals, and food enough for the whole planet. Why, just think,” he exclaimed, his eyes shining with enthusiasm, “almost everything mankind needs is in the sea! Life came out of the sea in the first place! The big job for science now is to go into the depths and study that wonderful world.”

  Dr. Grimes had been pacing up and down with his hands behind his back. He put in, “I want to build more than a bathyscaphe. I want to build a real undersea laboratory.”

  “Exactly,” the Professor nodded. “You see, when you go down as far as two miles, the pressure of the water is about two and a half tons on every square inch of surface. An ordinary submarine cannot go much farther down than about a thousand feet. Deeper than that, it would be crushed flat. The little round cabin of the present bathyscaphes is very small and made of very strong steel—it’s about seven feet in diameter, and its walls are over three inches thick. There isn’t much room in it, as you can imagine. What Dr. Grimes wants to build is something with enough space for several men and plenty of equipment. Something shaped like this, for example.” He tapped the football. “Ordinary plastics, Plexiglas for instance, are not as strong as steel. But this plastic may be what we are looking for.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” said Dr. Grimes sourly. “We’ll have to test it. And what about duplicating the formula?”

  “Ah, yes,” said the Professor. “Danny, do you think you can remember the temperature at which you reheated it? And how long you let it cool?”

  “I think I can remember,” Danny said. His eyes were dancing with excitement. “It means that we’re really partly the discoverers of the plastic, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, I imagine it does, in a way,” agreed the Professor.

  “Then—then maybe we can go with you in the ship you build. Can we, Professor?”

  The Professor glanced sidelong at Dr. Grimes. “I must say this certainly changes matters, Grimes. But we have a great deal to do before we have to face that decision. We must get to work at once!”

  He clapped his hands together. “A laboratory on the ocean floor. One that can move freely about, like a submarine, but two miles down! What marvelous things are waiting to be discovered, I wonder?”

  Danny, Irene, and Joe stared at each other. Then Joe said in a gloomy voice. “I’ll bet I know the answer to that, if Danny goes along. Trouble!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Sea Urchin

  Professor Bullfinch had not exaggerated. Many weeks of testing followed, and the two scientists became more and more excited as the properties of the plastic became apparent. It was stronger than any known steel, while at the same time as light and transparent as Plexiglas. Experiments showed that a relatively thin shell of it could withstand enormous pressure and yet float like a cork.

  In the end, they decided upon making a totally new kind of undersea vessel. Professor Bullfinch explained that they need not follow the design of the bathyscaphe, but instead would combine some of its features with those of a submarine: it would be roughly cigar-shaped, would carry ballast to take it down, and when free of ballast would bob up to the surface again. Unlike a submarine it would have very little machinery, most of its space being arranged for comfortable observation of the sea bottom, and most of its equipment designed to study, photograph, and collect specimens. To help it descend, it would have tanks which could be pumped full of sea water. It would also have small, electrically-driven propellers so that it could move horizontally through the water. In addition, Professor Bullfinch and Dr. Grimes developed some interesting new equipment which they hoped would allow them to gather samples of fish and plants, and the mud and ooze of the ocean floor.

  This new vessel, Professor Bullfinch proposed they call a mesoscaphe. “The name,” he said, “means middle ship and was created by Professor Auguste Piccard to describe another type of diving vessel which he considered making. However, it also describes our ship, which is somewhere in the middle between all the other types.”

  “But we can’t simply call it a mesoscaphe,” Danny objected. “That sounds like some kind of prehistoric monster. It ought to have a real name.”

  “Mermaid,” suggested Irene.

  Dr. Grimes began growling to himself.

  “What about Seafood?” said Joe.

  At this, Dr. Grimes threw down the pencil with which he was making notes and said that unless the laboratory were cleared at once of juvenile visitors, he would leave the project.

  “I suggest,” said the Professor quietly, “that we table the question of a name until we actually have the ship.”

  More weeks followed, during which models were built to scale and tested in special tanks in which the pressure was slowly increased until the models exploded. In this way, they were able to calculate the thickness the hull of the mesoscaphe would have to have to endure the thousands of pounds of pressure of the deep. At last, the final plans were approved, and work began on the actual ship. It was decided that Dr. Grimes’s original plan of diving in the Pacific Ocean would be followed, and a small town off the western coast of Mexico was chosen as the expedition’s base. It was called Nomata.

  As Danny said later, it took almost as long to persu
ade Dr. Grimes that the young people should be allowed to go along, as it did to build the mesoscaphe itself. Even after Dr. Grimes grudgingly agreed that they could come, he refused to consider the possibility of their making any actual dives in the ship. The parents were a little less of a problem; Mrs. Dunn, the Pearsons, and the Millers had a family conference with Professor Bullfinch and the three children. Although Mr. and Mrs. Pearson were at first opposed to the idea of Joe going, Mrs. Dunn persuaded them that it would be a splendid way for the boy to begin learning another language. The Millers had cousins who were planning to vacation in the town of Mazatlan, only a few miles from Nomata, and they promised to drive over and keep an eye on the three, every few days.

  The mesoscaphe was to be shipped in the hold of a freighter by way of the Panama Canal, and it was decided that the two scientists and the three young people would travel by the same ship. With them would go the man who had been chosen to pilot the undersea laboratory, a famous English diver and submarine captain named Reginald Beaversmith.

  Captain Beaversmith was a tall, untidy man, whose bronzed face was crisscrossed with tiny wrinkles from sun and wind. He had seen much action at sea during the war and later had learned skin diving from the noted French diver, Captain Cousteau, in the Mediterranean. When the whole group had at last begun the voyage, on a freighter called the S.S. Acapulco just one year after the discovery of the wonderful plastic, he passed many days with the three young people, sitting on deck in the sun and telling them stories of his adventures.

  On one such day, they were sitting together up near the bow of the ship, Captain Beaversmith on a winch, and Danny, Joe, and Irene sprawled on deck. They had passed through the Panama Canal the day before. The fresh wind whipped spray over them from time to time, and all about them wheeled the blue waters of the Pacific. The Captain was saying, “It was a day very much like this. We surfaced near the islands, and there, anchored just off the reef was a Japanese destroyer…” He stopped, scratched his chin, and chuckled. “Sorry, chaps,” he said. “Does this sound vaguely familiar? I have a feeling that I may have told it to you before.”