Danny Dunn and Heat Ray Read online

  “Maybe so. Do I turn here?”

  “Yes,” said Danny, as they drew into the parking lot near the cluster of main buildings of the university.

  As they got out of the car, Mr. Pippit said, “Know the quickest way to the president’s office?”

  “I know where it is,” Danny replied. “I don’t know if my way of getting there is the quickest way. It’s a kind of short-cut I took once when I had to meet Professor Bullfinch—”

  “A short cut? Fine!” Mr. Pippit tossed away his cigar and rubbed his hands together. “Show me.

  Danny led the way to a side door. The offices of the university were part of a new wing which had been built on to the original College of Arts and Sciences, and Danny often followed the maze of corridors and hallways through the old building in order to visit scientists he knew, whose offices were in the opposite wing. But today, his mind was still running on his argument with Mr. Pippit, and he kept wondering how he could open the subject again without seeming to be impudent, and how he could convince the other that theoretical science was as important and valuable as engineering. The result was that he took the wrong stairway and suddenly realized that he was lost.

  “What’s the trouble?” asked Mr. Pippit, as Danny stopped.

  “Why I—I’m not—” Danny stammered.

  “Know where you’re going?”

  “Yes,” Danny said desperately. Without stopping to think, he pulled open the nearest door. A stair led downward. He started down it with Mr. Pippit at his heels.

  They emerged in a long, low-ceilinged basement room. It was lighted by a single dim bulb. Crates were piled along one wall, and at the far end was an open door. Danny realized that he ought to go back up the stairway, or at least confess that he didn’t know where he was. But in his own way, he was every bit as headstrong as Mr. Pippit, and he didn’t want to admit to this man who had no use for theoretical scientists that he was lost. So he plunged on, through the open door into another basement room as dim and dusty as the first.

  Another door opened before them, on the right. This led through a long, cement corridor and finally into an echoing room full of machinery. Danny looked around in the hope of finding someone who could tell him how to get up to the daylight again, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. Only the gleaming machines, which whirred and pounded and hummed to themselves.

  “Doesn’t look like the president’s office,” growled Mr. Pippit.

  “We—have to go this way,” Danny said. He went forward between the dark metal shapes, squeezing past their oily bulks, then along an iron catwalk which clattered underfoot. He came to a row of thick pipes covered with dirty asbestos wrappings, and climbed around them. Behind him, Mr. Pippit panted and grumbled, tripping now and then and bumping into things. Another room; this one full of cobwebby boxes, cleaning equipment, pails, and cardboard cartons. Then a spiral iron staircase appeared.

  Danny began to climb. Mr. Pippit slipped on the greasy bottom step and said, “Drat, drat, DRAT!”

  “It’s only a little way farther,” Danny said, by now past caring what happened.

  “Double drat!” Mr. Pippit snarled.

  The stair ended at a landing with a heavy, gray metal door. Danny pulled it open. He was standing in a corridor he recognized. There were the glass doors marked Admissions Office, and a short distance beyond them, a neat little sign projecting from the wall which said, Office of the President. Danny uttered a long sigh of relief.

  “Here we are,” he said, in the most casual tone he could manage.

  He turned to Mr. Pippit. He gasped, and a chill breeze seemed to blow gently across his spine, freezing his cheerfulness.

  Mr. Pippit was a wreck. His handsome gray suit was streaked with dust and splotched with oil. His hands were black with dirt and there was a smudge of grease across his face where he had wiped away the perspiration. His hair stuck up in untidy wisps that made his round head look even larger.

  But it was obvious he did not know what he looked like. He didn’t even notice Danny’s startled look. Glancing about, he saw the sign and snapped his fingers.

  “Good!” he said. “Hard work, but worth it. A great short cut.”

  He put out his hand and Danny shook it automatically.

  “Many thanks,” said Mr. Pippit. “See you again. Remember, come visit me when you know something about rockets.”

  Without another word, he marched across the hall and entered the president’s office.

  Sooner or later, Danny knew, there was going to come a roar from that office, either when Mr. Pippit met the president, or more likely, when the president’s secretary stared at him in amazement. Before that happened, Danny decided, it would be best if he were far, far away. He began walking rapidly toward the main hallway, but before he had left the building he was running as fast as he could.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Laser

  As soon as he had wolfed down his lunch, Danny ran next door to the Millers’ house. Mrs. Miller, a small, plump woman with bright and happy blue eyes, answered his knock.

  “Hullo, Dan,” she said. “Irene’s been expecting you. Go right up.”

  Irene’s room looked as though two people with different tastes shared it. It was a rather long room with large windows, and one half of it was very feminine, with a pleasant maple dresser, a four-poster bed covered with a patchwork comforter, a pair of frilly armchairs, and a large framed reproduction of a Degas pastel drawing of ballet dancers. The other half contained two big bookcases crammed with books, an amateur radio receiver and broadcasting set, and a long workbench strewn with such odds and ends as an electromagnet, a dismantled phonograph turntable, and a model planetarium. It was much neater than Danny’s room, however, and much easier to be comfortable in.

  Irene looked up from a book. “Hi,” she said. “What time is it—brillig?”

  “Yep,” Danny said, dropping into the other chair. “And the slithy toves are gyring and gimbling in the wabe. Still reading Alice in Wonderland?”

  “I never seem to get tired of it. How did things go with Mr. Matthews?”

  “Up in the air,” Danny grinned.

  “What? You mean nothing was settled?”

  “No, I just couldn’t resist the joke. Everything was fine, except for Mr. Pippit.” And he told her of his adventures.

  “Oh, dear. And so you ran off before he could discover how dirty he was?” Irene gave a shriek of laughter, clapping her hands to her cheeks. “I know I shouldn’t laugh at the poor man, but I can’t help thinking of his face when he found out how he looked.”

  “Yes, that was what I was thinking of,” said Danny, “only it wouldn’t have been so funny for me. Anyway, I found out from Mr. Matthews what holds a plane up. It’s a difference in air pressure above and below the wing, and it depends on the speed with which the plane moves forward.” He explained in detail, sketching the same airfoil pattern for Irene that the pilot had drawn for him.

  “I see.” Irene rested her chin on her fist. “Now the question is, how do we demonstrate this for the science fair?”

  They sat in deep thought for a few minutes, and Danny said, “Mr. Matthews kept saying we ought to think of air as a kind of fluid. If we could take a model plane, for instance, and somehow put it in a tank of water—”

  “It would get awfully soggy,” said Irene. “Why couldn’t we just fly a plane model?”

  “You wouldn’t see how the air lifts it, then.” Danny stared at the drawing he had made. “What we need is a wing—an airfoil. And then some way of showing the air moving at it, and lifting it—I know!” He clapped his hands. “A wind tunnel! We’ll make a wind tunnel.”

  “You mean, like the kind they use in aeronautical laboratories?”

  “Something like that.” Danny seized a pencil and began to make a sketch of the plan as he spoke. “A long box, open at each end, with a window in one side so you can look in. There are some long panes of glass in our basement, and we could cover the window opening
with one of them. Inside, we put a model of an airplane wing, mounted on a wire so that it will move easily, up or down. We put an electric fan at one end of the box, and when we turn it on the air makes the wing rise.”

  “I see. Good. We ought to make the box, or tunnel, out of sheet metal, folded into shape. It will be sturdier that way.” Irene hummed to herself for a moment, studying his sketch. “You know what we need? Something to make the air visible.”

  “Huh? How?”

  “I mean people ought to see how the air actually flows over and under the wing. We could do it with smoke. If we could make a thick smoke and let it blow through the electric fan, people could see the way the air currents move.”

  “A dandy idea,” said Danny. “What makes smoke—without setting fire to the whole thing?”

  “Burning kerosene-soaked rags in a tin can?”

  “Woof! Smelly.”

  “What about burning sulphur? That would give a nice yellow smoke.”

  “Might be poisonous, too. Tell you what: let’s go over to my house and ask Professor Bullfinch. Maybe he’ll have a suggestion.”

  Irene hesitated. “Gee, I don’t know, Dan. We really ought to do all the rest of the research ourselves. It doesn’t seem right somehow, to keep asking grownups for information.”

  Danny lay back in his chair. “No, I don’t agree,” he said, crossing his ankles. “Once I was watching the Professor prepare a problem to be fed into a computer. I said to him, ‘Golly, Professor Bullfinch, you must know everything.’ He laughed. He said, ‘I know a little bit about several things, but nobody can know everything. I don’t even think it would be much fun to know everything. But there are two important things everyone should know. They are: ‘where to go for information, and what to do with the information when you get it.’

  “We could look in some chemistry books and try a lot of experiments, but that would take a lot more time than asking the Professor would. If he makes a couple of suggestions, we can try them out. Scientists use computers for the same reason—to save time. Going to people isn’t any worse than going to the books people write, or the computers they invent.”

  “All right, you’ve convinced me.” Irene got to her feet. “Let’s go. Stop making yourself so comfortable. Now who’s wasting time?”

  “It’s just that this chair is so nice,” Danny said. Nevertheless, he got up.

  “Why, you’ve got an armchair just like it in your room,” Irene said.

  “I know. But whenever I want to sit in it, I have to take all the books off it, and that’s too much trouble.”

  Professor Bullfinch had a private laboratory built on to the back of his house and connected with it by a short hallway. The laboratory was divided into two rooms, a small one full of books and notebooks which served as a study, and a larger one in which were stone-topped lab benches and a variety of equipment used for research and experiment. When the two young people entered the laboratory by the back door, Professor Bullfinch was fussing over a curious-looking apparatus.

  Professor Bullfinch did not look in the slightest like the scientists one sees in television shows: he was neither young and crisp, nor bearded and dignified. He did not wear a white smock, but a tweed jacket and brown slacks. He was rather tubby, with a round, merry face and a bald head, and behind his glasses twinkled a pair of kindly eyes that somehow missed nothing that went on around him. He straightened up from the machine he had been working on, dusted his palms together, and smiled.

  “Hello, Dan,” he said. “How are you, Irene? Looking for me, were you? Or just passing through?”

  “We were looking for you, Professor, for some information,” said Irene.

  Danny was already bending over the workbench, examining the Professor’s apparatus. “Gosh, what’s this?” he said. “I can’t figure it out. Some kind of slide projector?”

  There was a square black box, with a second, larger box near it, the two connected by a heavy cable. The smaller box had a tube projecting from one end of it, with what appeared to be a lens on it.

  “It does look a bit like a projector,” the Professor admitted. “Actually, it’s a laser.”

  “A lazer?” Danny blinked. “Something to make people lazy? Or something to make lazy people wake up?”

  “No, no. The word laser stands for ‘light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.’ Some scientists call it the ‘death ray.’”

  “A death ray?” Irene’s eyes opened wide. “Is it really?”

  “Oh, dear, no. It’s just a sort of joke we have.” He lifted the black box and they could see that it was really only a cover for what looked like a red glass rod, around which four long, odd-looking lamps were arranged. “Here, in the center, is an artificial crystal of calcium fluoride,” he explained. “It’s one of the largest ever made in the laboratory. Around it I have four mercury vapor lamps which make an extremely bright light. The inside of the case is highly polished, to increase the light. The other box contains my own invention, a new kind of high-voltage power source. Power is carried to the lamps by this cable.

  “The device was developed from an instrument invented by Professor Townes of Columbia University in 1954, which amplified microwaves. Another name for it is ‘optical maser’—a name many scientists prefer. It is rather difficult to explain simply, but what happens is that the lights, flashing on around the crystal, cause the electrons in the atoms in it to bounce around like mad. Eventually, when they are ‘pumped up,’ as you might say, to the proper state, a flash of light escapes through a little opening in the silver which coats the end of the crystal. It’s something like water under pressure coming out of a hose. The interesting thing about this beam of light is that it is parallel—that is, it is concentrated so that the same amount that starts from the crystal arrives at the end of the beam. Do you see? Now, by means of a rather complicated lens system which I developed, this light, which is red, is still more concentrated and produces intense heat. Up to now, optical masers have only been operated in short bursts, but by means of a special cooling system I can operate this one continuously. This is a new development in the field, and I must admit I am feeling rather proud of myself.” And Professor Bullfinch grinned modestly, and rubbed his bald head with one hand.

  Danny had been pondering the Professor’s words, and now he said, “Well, golly! If it produces heat—why, it’s a sort of heat ray, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, actually it is,” said the Professor. “I have just finished testing it because I am expecting some important visitors and I want to demonstrate how it works. Now, what was it you wanted to find out from me? I hope it isn’t anything complicated, because I’m afraid I really haven’t much time now.”

  “We don’t know how complicated it is,” said Irene. “We want to make a thick white smoke—but not too thick.”

  “Thick, but not too thick.” Professor Bullfinch looked puzzled. “You mean a smoke screen?”

  “Not exactly. We’re going to make a wind tunnel to demonstrate how a plane flies,” Danny said. “We want to show, by means of smoke, the movement of the air currents.”

  “I see. Well, you might try placing an open beaker full of ammonia next to another open beaker full of hydrochloric acid. The fumes from the two will blend to form a fairly good white smoke. If you paint the inside walls of your wind tunnel red, or blue, the smoke will show up nicely. Naturally, you’d better leave both ends of the tunnel open, and be sure no one is standing in the path of that smoke.”

  “It sounds great,” Danny said. “Let’s try it right now. You must have hydrochloric acid in the laboratory, Professor. I’ll go get some ammonia from Mom, in the kitchen.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I have enough time for—” Professor Bullfinch began.

  But Danny was already at the door, his head full of nothing but the idea and how it might work. He pulled the door open and charged recklessly through.

  There were two men standing in the hallway, and one of them was just reaching out
his hand for the knob of the laboratory door.

  “Look out!” Irene screamed, but she was too late.

  Danny crashed headlong into them, and all three went down in a heap. For a moment, all that could be seen were arms and legs waving in the air. Then Danny pulled himself free and scrambled to his hands and knees. At the same time, one of the men sat up straight, red-faced and glowering.

  “You again?” he snapped.

  It was Mr. Pippit.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Professor Loses His Temper

  For a moment, Danny was tempted to escape. Then, coming to his senses, he began to babble his apologies. Mr. Pippit cut him short.

  “Never mind that. Help Mr. Richards up. He’s lying on my leg.”

  Mr. Richards, the president of Midston University, was tall and fat, and Danny had knocked all the wind out of him. Puffing and panting, he was trying to sit up. Danny took his arm, and an instant later Professor Bullfinch was at his side. Between them, they helped him rise. Mr. Pippit jumped up spryly and began dusting off his trousers.

  “Expected a hearty greeting,” he crackled. “But didn’t expect to be swept off my feet.”

  “Are you all right, Mr. Richards?” Professor Bullfinch asked anxiously.

  “Yes, yes, quite all right. An accident, I’m sure,” said the president. He looked ruefully at Danny. “Dear me, Daniel, you’re as lively and impulsive as ever, I see.”

  “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Richards,” Danny stammered.

  “I’m sure you are. I’m not concerned for myself, but for our distinguished visitor.”

  “Distinguished visitor my foot,” said Mr. Pippit. “Don’t care for flattery. Never have. This boy has already ruined one suit for me. Led me on a wild chase through the cellars. Now he bowls us over like tenpins. What’s he doing here? Why?”

  Professor Bullfinch raised his eyebrows. “You’ve met Danny already?”

  “Showed me the way to Midston. Took a short cut to Richards’ office. Almost never came to the surface again. Didn’t expect to find him at an important conference like this.”