Freddy and the Men from Mars Read online

  “If there’s one thing I insist on in a car,” said Freddy sarcastically, feeling of his nose, which had banged hard into the seat-back in front of him, “it’s first-class brakes.”

  Mrs. Peppercorn, who had been straightening her bonnet, which had been knocked over one eye, stopped and sat up straight. “I hear music,” she said.

  Uncle Ben grinned. “Should think you might, ma’am,” he said. “Brakes little tight, seemingly. Made your ears ring.”

  “By golly, it really is music!” said Jinx. “Yes sir—why, listen!” And he began to sing:

  “Boom—be quick! Buy a ticket at the wicket!

  Boom—get your pink lemonade. Get your gum!”

  Boom—get your peanuts, popcorn, lollypops—”

  And then Freddy and Mrs. Peppercorn joined in:

  “Boom—Mr. Boom—Mr. Boomschmidt’s come!”

  It was the marching song of the circus, and as they watched, around the corner ahead of them came the big red limousine, and behind it, two by two, all the animals, with the elephants leading. On the back of old Hannibal rode the six Martians. They had little red handkerchiefs which they waved at the President, who waved back at them from the White House window; and all the Congressmen, who were grouped about the front porch, cheered and waved. There was some pushing and shoving to get in the front row, and one small Senator got knocked down and stepped on. He got mad and next day made a speech on the radio about it, saying that the President ought to have turned his back instead of saluting those Commies. “Waving their red flags right in front of the White House!” he shouted. “What is this country coming to?” But nobody paid any attention to him.

  On the back of old Hannibal rode the six Martians.

  Uncle Ben started his engine, the station wagon gathered its wheels under it and bounded out into the middle of the street, spun around with a series of loud bangs, and ran jerkily alongside Mr. Boomschmidt’s car. Everybody in the station wagon tried to yell Hello—except of course Uncle Ben, who just touched his hat to Mlle. Rose—and Mr. Boomschmidt and Mlle. Rose tried to yell back, but the street was jammed with people, all of whom were cheering madly and waving to the Martians, so nobody could hear anything.

  It was like that all the way north. Even when they took the back country roads, people seemed to get word somehow that the famous Martians were in the vicinity, and they came running across the fields and scrambling over fences and driving their cars cross-country, until the road would be so thick with them that the elephants had to be sent ahead to clear a way for the wagons.

  At night they camped by the roadside. Mr. Boomschmidt put several small tents at the disposal of the party from the Bean farm, and they had pleasant evenings about the campfire, singing songs and telling stories. Mr. Garble seldom took part. He and Freddy had fought more than once, and indeed Mr. Garble was never a person that anyone cared to be friendly with. For that reason it was impossible for either Freddy or Mrs. Peppercorn to talk to the Martians about conditions on their home planet. Mr. Garble wouldn’t let them near the Martian wagon.

  On the road Mr. Garble wanted to keep the Martians out of sight; he didn’t think people ought to see them unless they paid. But Mr. Boomschmidt said that as long as the circus couldn’t stop to give any shows he thought it would be mean to keep all these people from getting a look at them. At last, one evening by the campfire, when the exhausted Martians had gone to bed and most of the sightseers had left for home, Mr. Garble got really angry.

  “You’re making us lose money,” he shouted. “These people are getting the Martians for nothing!”

  “Oh, my gracious,” said Mr. Boomschmidt, “you got them for nothing yourself, didn’t you?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” asked Mr. Garble.

  “Do with it!” Mr. Boomschmidt exclaimed. “Oh, dear me, why I should think it had everything to do with it. Wouldn’t you, Leo?” He appealed to the lion. “Why, here’s Mr. Garble saying that it hasn’t anything to do with it that he got the Martians for nothing.”

  “Hasn’t anything to do with what?” the lion asked.

  “That’s just it,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “He doesn’t say. Do with what, Mr. Garble? Oh, dear me, do please tell us, so we’ll have some idea what we’re talking about.”

  This of course was just Mr. Boomschmidt’s usual way of winning an argument. He got his opponents so confused that they didn’t know finally what they had been talking about. And in the end they were quite likely to agree to something that they had been fighting hard against five minutes earlier.

  Now Mr. Garble made the mistake of trying to set Mr. Boomschmidt right. “The fact that I got the Martians for nothing,” he said slowly, “has nothing—now wait a minute, I want to get this straight—has nothing to do with the fact that we’re losing money by letting these people see the Martians free.”

  “Oh, dear, dear,” said Mr. Boomschmidt.

  “Now really, I don’t think you’ve got it straight at all. Do you, Leo? Because we aren’t losing money, are we? You mean, if we shut the Martians up in their wagon, we’ll have more money at the end of the day than if we let them ride where everybody can see ’em? My, my! If you can show me how we can do that, I’ll say shut ’em up.”

  “Oh, that isn’t it at all,” said Mr. Garble. “I just mean—” And then he stopped. “I mean—” he began, and stopped again. Then he made a dreadful face, put up his hands and pulled out two large handfuls of hair, and turned and walked slowly away.

  “Well, you shut him up anyway, chief,” said Leo.

  “For a little while, I guess,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “But Freddy’s right: we’re going to have more trouble with him. Maybe this Martian show was a mistake.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  The circus was nearly ten days getting up to Centerboro, and in all that time Freddy didn’t find a single chance to talk to the Martians. Mr. Garble chased him away with a stick. But it wasn’t so easy to chase Mrs. Peppercorn away.

  “See here, young Herbert,” she said to him, the first time he warned her away from the wagon in which the Martians were living, “don’t you give me any of your sass. You stand aside and let me talk to these critters.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Mr. Garble, “but we can’t have the Martians annoyed by idle curiosity. If there’s anything you wish to know about them, you may address yourself to me.”

  “Oh, I may!” she said sarcastically. “When I had you in the fifth grade and addressed myself to you, I don’t seem to remember that you ever knew the answers to anything.”

  Mr. Garble turned a little red, for a number of animals had come up to see what the argument was about, and Mrs. Peppercorn had indeed been his fifth-grade teacher, and knew a lot of things about him that were not entirely to his credit. But he stood his ground. “That was a long time ago,” he said.

  “Not so long that I’ve forgotten a lot of pretty silly things,” she retorted. “Remember when you were reading something about ‘the land of Egypt’ and you called it ‘the land of Egg-wiped’?”

  “I did that a’purpose,” said Mr. Garble sullenly. “I was trying to be funny.”

  “Land sakes, you never had to try! Remember that little Ella Tingley you were so sweet on?” She looked around at her audience, which now numbered nearly a dozen—among them Hercules Boomschmidt. “This will amuse you, Mr. Hercules,” she said. She always called him Mr. Hercules, though everyone else just called him Herc. “This here Herbie Garble, he gave Ella a five-cent bag of gum drops. But then I guess he got to wishin’ he’d kept it himself—he wasn’t ever much of a hand for being generous—and he sneaked back in during recess and reached in her desk where he’d seen her put it. But I guess Ella sort of figured what might happen, and she’d set a mouse-trap which it went snap! on Herbie’s finger. Well, sir, he set up the most awful roaring and bawling you ever heard. Ella was watching behind the door and I guess she felt sorry for him, for she came in and put her arm around him, and he
—well, Herbert, you remember, don’t you?—you kicked her. And then—”

  But Mr. Garble, who had been getting redder and redder, was now a deep purple, and he shouted suddenly: “Oh, shut up!” And then he turned and shoved through the ring of laughing animals, which was now two deep, and hurried off.

  Mrs. Peppercorn smiled at her audience. “There’s a lot of things Herbie don’t like being reminded of. And I guess,” she added, “there ain’t anybody knows more about ’em than me. Keep me from talking to his Martians! Just let him try!”

  “You started to tell about after he kicked her,” said Willy, the boa constrictor.

  “That’s the part he didn’t want me to tell,” she said. “Why, Ella, she had kind of a temper, and she picked up a bottle of mucilage and emptied it over his head. Of course his mother washed it out when he got home. But I don’t know, he was kind of sticky all the rest of the year. The other children claimed that he stuck to things. Some said he stuck particularly to small things that didn’t belong to him.

  “There was another funny thing, too,” she added. “They never got that mucilage smell out of him. After all these years, at night when the air gets damp, he still smells of it a little.”

  “Don’t seem to me you ought to talk that way behind his back,” said Andrew, the hippo, mildly.

  “Oh, it don’t?” she snapped. “Well, you bring him back here and I’ll say it to his face. I’ve done that often enough, just the same as all the other teachers he ever had. Miss Plaskett, she had him in the seventh grade, she used to make him turn out his pockets every half hour. She said you’d be surprised what you’d find. She said she wished she had him for a piggy bank—she could quit teaching.”

  Mr. Hercules suddenly began making strange sounds. “Huh!” he said in his deep voice. ‘“Huh—huh!” Although he looked so much like Mr. Boomschmidt, he wasn’t really like him at all. His mind was as slow and heavy as his brother’s was quick, and he had only one expression on his face where Mr. Boom had a hundred. Now his face didn’t change at all, but the animals knew he was laughing. “Huh, huh!” he grunted. “Caught in a mouse-trap! Uh, uh!” He had just begun to laugh about the mouse-trap; in an hour or so he would get to the mucilage and begin to laugh about that. He wasn’t very quick to get a joke but when he did get it, it stayed got. He would be rumbling with laughter about this for a week.

  Now with Mr. Garble out of the way there was nothing to prevent Mrs. Peppercorn from interviewing the Martians. She went over to the wagon which had been fitted up as a house for them. Of course it was only a wild-animal cage with bars on the sides, but there were six little beds at one end, with red coverlets, and on six pegs over them hung six small red nightshirts. In the middle was a doll’s dinner table, Martian size, which was about four inches high, with a red checked tablecloth and dishes and silver and everything. At the other end was their living room, with six little overstuffed chairs, and a table on which was a vase with forget-me-nots in it. There were a lot of other things scattered about; on the wall there were even pictures of the solar system and of the planets and the moon and so on. At one end was a little door, so that the Martians could get in and out. It wouldn’t have been safe for them to walk around the grounds when the crowds were there, but sometimes late at night two or three of them might be seen strolling about, arm in arm.

  One of the Martians got up from his chair and came over towards Mrs. Peppercorn. He walked oddly, she thought, like a dog walking on its hind legs. He was dressed all in red, he even had red gloves on his tiny hands and red cloth shoes on his long feet, and his black beady eyes stared at her expressionlessly over a fluff of red whiskers that hid all but the tip of his extremely long nose. He bowed to her, rubbing his hands together—and looking, she thought, very much like Mr. Metacarpus, the floorwalker in the Busy Bee in Centerboro.

  “Yes, madam?” he said politely.

  “You speaka da Eenglish?” Mrs. Peppercorn demanded in a loud voice. Since she was speaking to a foreigner, Mrs. Peppercorn, like many other people, thought that in order to be understood she would have to shout, and because his English was probably bad, she thought he would understand if she spoke bad English too. Nobody knows why people do this in addressing a foreigner, but it is a fact that they always do. Some people even talk baby talk to them.

  “You speaka da Eenglish?” Mrs. Peppercorn demanded.

  “Yes, madam,” replied the Martian. “I speak English. And I am indeed happy to welcome you to our little home from home, our little corner of Mars in your wonderful America.” His voice was oily, and he bowed in a humble way when he had finished.

  “Land sakes!” said Mrs. Peppercorn. “Why you do speak English real good. Understand you learned it here?”

  “We have made many trips to your beautiful country, yes.”

  “Well, I tried hard enough to get to yours last summer. But our space ship pilot, he got sort of mixed up and landed us back on earth.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the Martian. “I have heard of this. You are, I believe, Mrs. Cornpopper?”

  “Peppercorn, Peppercorn!” said the old lady sharply. “And how might you be called?”

  “It is a little hard to pronounce for an earth dweller,” he said. “In Martian, it is spelled S-i-m-g-h-k.”

  “Goodness!” said Mrs. Peppercorn.

  “The i is silent,” he added helpfully.

  “The whole thing can stay silent for all of me,” she replied. “Well, Mr. Martian, what’s it like on Mars? We’re planning to try again to get there, and we’d sort of like to know what we’ll find. Folks be pleasant to us, you think?”

  “Perhaps they would ask you to join a circus,” he said.

  Mrs. Peppercorn frowned and stared at him suspiciously. “You get funny with me, young man,” she said, “and you’ll get your ears boxed.”

  “Oh, ma’am!” he said. “How can you imagine I would attempt to poke fun at so talented a lady? No, no, madam; I and my fellow Martians consider ourselves most fortunate in having been asked to join a circus. We wish to travel and see your country, to observe your manners and customs—and what better way could we have found?”

  “Well, I expect maybe that’s so,” said Mrs. Peppercorn. “If you don’t mind being stared at, and probably poked and prodded, by a lot a zanies who’re never so happy as when they’re peekin’ through somebody else’s keyhole.”

  “Curiosity towards other worlds is only natural,” said the Martian. “It was curiosity that brought us here, just as it was curiosity that made you try to reach Mars last summer. I’m told you took a pig with you. That seemed to us, back on Mars—excuse me, tee-hee”—he tittered behind his hand—“that seemed funny. Hardly an animal that we would choose for company on a long trip—”

  “Now just stop right there,” said Mrs. Peppercorn. “Nobody’s going to miscall that pig when I’m around. He’s the most famous pig in the country, and he’s my friend, and I’m proud of it. You mean to say that up on Mars you’ve never heard of Freddy?”

  “Freddy?” The Martian shook his head.

  “Freddy,” he said thoughtfully. “No … no, can’t say I have. Though, wait!” He slapped his forehead with his hand. “Yes, we have heard of an obscure detective of that name. Up in York State, wasn’t it? Tried to set himself up in the poetry business, didn’t he? Of course! How we laughed! The poetic pig! Oh, dear, ma’am,” he said suddenly, “I’m afraid I’ve offended you. Do not be angry, I beg. We are so ignorant of your earthly ways. I’m sure he must be a wonderful poet.”

  “Well, well, don’t overdo it,” said Mrs. Peppercorn impatiently. “He’s a good poet, I don’t deny. Good, sound rhymes, maybe a little ordinary by the highest standards. I expect he just tries to do too much. He flies his own plane, he runs the First Animal Bank, and as a detective—well, there ain’t anybody can touch him in the whole country. I give him that. But you can’t do that and be a poet, too. No, sir, my idea of poetry is something that everybody ain’t done before. You don’t u
se the old rhymes, like ‘love’ and ‘dove’ and ‘eyes’ and ‘sighs.’ You make words rhyme that nobody has ever rhymed before. Like, say, in ‘The Night Before Christmas.’ It goes like this:

  “‘’T was the night before Christmas, and all through the house

  Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’

  “Well, sir, that’s the kind of rhymes Freddy uses. But the way I’d write it, it goes like this:

  “‘All through the house ’T was the night before Christmas.

  Not a creature

  Would meet yer,

  Neither Mr. nor Miss Mouse.’”

  “Phooey!” said the Martian. The five other Martians, who had been dozing in their chairs, sat up with a jerk. “You can’t make such horrible verses in this house,” one of them muttered angrily.

  But Mrs. Peppercorn went right on. “Now, what have you got?” she said. “Instead of one ordinary rhyme: ‘house’ and ‘mouse,’ you’ve got two brand new ones: ‘creature’ and ‘meet yer,’ and ‘Christmas’ and ‘Miss Mouse.’

  “Now let me recite for you my poem about the universe. It isn’t very long, only about seven thousand verses, and every one of ’em as bright and clear as a new penny.

  “Some stars are large, some stars are small,

  And some are quite invisiball …”

  Two hours later when the dinner bell rang over in the big dining tent, all six Martians were asleep in their overstuffed chairs, and Mrs. Peppercorn was on line 5,226 of her long poem. And she hadn’t found out a single thing about what life was like on Mars.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Mr. Boomschmidt was so happy about all the money the circus had taken in in Washington that Freddy put off warning him against Mr. Garble. And after all, what was there to say? Millions of people would pay fifty cents to see real live Martians. They’d drive hundreds of miles just to get a look at the creatures. The half-dollars would drop into the cash box as fast as you could keep the line of people moving, and the show could stay in one place for months. To warn Mr. Boomschmidt against Mr. Garble would be to warn him against making a lot of money. Mr. Boom would just laugh.