Freddy and the Men from Mars Page 9
“Well, then, I’m a-comin’ too,” said Mr. Bean. “We’ll likely end whizzin’ round the Milky Way for the next million years, but if you was to go without me, and get back safe, I guess I’d never hear the last of it. Lead on there, Clickety What’s-your-name.”
The saucer had a sort of conning tower on top, with a doorway through which they all climbed. Inside, it was roomy and comfortably furnished, with plush settees around the sides, and a big table to which a number of strange things were clamped. It was really very cozy when the hatch was closed and Two-clicks, with a twist of a lever, set the saucer in motion. It rose, whirling slowly, then leveled off, and Two-clicks said something to Mrs. Bean.
Mrs. Webb spoke in her ear. “The captain wants to know if you wouldn’t like to take the—the tiller, I suppose you’d call it. Thing you steer with. He says maybe you’d enjoy taking a little run up and around over Syracuse before steering for the circus grounds. Says he’d like to have you steer.”
Mrs. Bean put her hands up to her mouth. “My land!” she said. “My land!” Then she slid her eyes around towards her husband. Good grief, Mr. B., do you think I ought … Why, I ain’t ever even driven a car!”
Mr. Bean smiled reassuringly at her. “Go ahead, Mrs. B.,” he said. “Guess you’ve steered me without scrapin’ any of the paint off for the past forty years; guess you can steer a little simple contraption like this one. Go ahead.”
So Mrs. Bean, looking out through the little window where the steeples of Centerboro were now visible ahead, seized the tiller firmly and swung it over. The saucer dipped, turned, and headed for Syracuse. For a moment, however, she hesitated. For she remembered suddenly that she had left the pan of johnnycake in the oven. It would be burned to a cinder. Then she put all thought of the johnnycake out of her mind. She giggled delightedly. And then she began to sing.
CHAPTER
14
While all this was going on, Freddy and Red Mike were sitting on the cold floor of Mrs. Underdunk’s cellar. They had been locked into a closet stocked with hundreds of cans of jam. The door was not solid, but was made of a sort of grill of heavy strips of wood, and fastened by a big padlock. Mr. Garble had made Mike give up his kit of burglar tools before locking him in, but he hadn’t searched his prisoner, who had a small flashlight, about as big as a pencil, taped to his forearm. This he got out and began examining their prison.
“If I was outside I could open that padlock,” said Mike.
“How about thinking of something that you can do?” Freddy replied. “Garble will have the troopers here before long, and then we’ll be in real trouble.”
“We can bust the door down,” Mike replied. “But it would be too noisy. Guess we’ll have to saw those crosspieces out.”
“If you had a saw,” said Freddy wearily.
Mike said: “Look.” He rolled up his sleeve. There was a hacksaw blade taped to his arm. “Never know when things like that will come in handy, even in jail,” he said.
“Did the sheriff know about it?” Freddy asked.
“Sure thing. I got the tape from him … Well, let’s get to work.” Holding the ends of the little blade between the forefingers and thumbs of each hand, he began sawing one of the crossbars.
“You go so slow,” said Freddy. “You’ll never get through it.”
“If we go faster, Garble will hear it and come down,” Mike said; and when Freddy objected that Garble could certainly hear it anyway, Mike said: “Look. You saw at just the same rate you breathe in and out. Don’t you see what it sounds like?”
“Sounds like somebody sawing, to me,” said the pig.
“It sounds like somebody snorin’, stupid. Even if Garble comes down, when he opens the door I stop sawing and give a kind of snort and sit up and say: ‘Who’s there?’ Fools him every time.”
It did sound a little like somebody snoring. Unfortunately, Mr. Garble had quietly opened the door at the head of the stairs while they were still talking, and he snapped the light on before Mike could hide the saw blade and pretend to wake up with a snort. Five minutes later Mr. Garble had gone back upstairs, and Mike and Freddy were lying side by side on the floor, tied up with clothesline.
Mike was discouraged. “I wish I was back in jail,” he said. “I always get in trouble if I leave jail.”
“Look,” said Freddy, “there’s a jackknife in my coat pocket. See if you can roll over so you can get your hand in and open it.”
Mike managed it after a while. He got the knife and cut Freddy loose. When they were both free, Freddy said: “We can’t cut our way out with this knife. But I’ve got an idea. Maybe it will work and maybe not, but we’ve got to try it, because these Garbles, they’d shoot you as soon as look at you if they thought they could get away with it. And they could. They’d just say they caught us breaking into the house. So now look—this is what we’ll do.”
He had not finished explaining, however, when a voice from somewhere in the cellar said: “Freddy! Is that you?”
Freddy was silent for a minute, then he said cautiously: “Yes. Who is it?”
“It’s me—Chiquita. I wasn’t sure it was you, before. We’re in a sort of cage over by the coal bin. Broiler is with me, and Mrs. Hapgood.”
“Who is Mrs. Hapgood?” Freddy asked.
“Why, she’s a prisoner here, too. She can whistle ‘Dixie,’ and Mr. Garble got her to come here because he said he was going to start a circus, and wanted her for his star act.” There were some whispered cluckings, and then Chiquita said: “Oh, excuse me. Mrs. Hapgood, this is Mr. Freddy.”
“How do you do, I’m sure,” said a very affected voice which Freddy took to be that of the talented hen.
“Very happy,” said Freddy politely. “Let me present my friend, Mr. Mike.”
“How ja do,” said Mrs. Hapgood distantly. She evidently didn’t like having burglars introduced to her. Then she said: “Mr. Freddy, can you do anything to get me out of this dreadful place? I understood I was to be a star, playing before large audiences, but here I am locked in this horrid damp cellar for weeks, with no company but that of these two children. It’s not the sort of thing I’m used to, Mr. Freddy.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” said Freddy. “Chiquita, are you and Little Broiler all right?”
“I am,” said the chicken. “Broiler has got a cold.”
“And no handkerchief, I bet,” Freddy said. “He’s had that cold as long as I’ve known him.”
“Well, I can’t help it if I got the sniffles,” Broiler complained. “I’m sick. I wanna go home.” And he began to wail.
“Oh, stop whining!” said Freddy. “We’ll get you out of here if we can.”
Mrs. Hapgood said: “He’s not very cheerful company. That Mr. Garble sent out and got him and his sister to be company for me. That was after I’d told him I had no intention of staying here in the dark all alone until he got his circus started. But this young one does nothing but snivel from morning till night.”
“Garble says he got them to be company for you, does he?” Freddy said. “Well, he had another reason, too. But we’re wasting time. Sit tight and let’s see if we can’t get out of here.”
So then Freddy opened a big jar of strawberry jam. He smeared a lot on the front of Mike’s shirt, and when Mike lay down on his back close to the door, he poured out the juice so it ran out under the door and made a little red pool on the floor. And then when they were all ready, Mike began to yell at the top of his lungs: “Help! Murder!” And then he topped off with a screech that could have been heard a mile.
He poured out a lot of juice.
Feet pounded overhead, the door flew open, and Mr. Garble, pistol in hand, snapped on the cellar light and dashed down the stairs. He saw the strawberry juice trickling out from under the door; looking in through the slats, he saw Freddy sitting astride Mike, flourishing a knife. Mike was just moaning weakly now, and fluttering his eyelids rapidly. He had an idea that this indicated that he was just about gone.
Freddy hadn’t thought about the possibility of being shot; his tail became completely uncurled, and he felt something like a procession of ants with very cold feet walking up his spine.
But Mr. Garble said: “No. No shooting. Much better to let Uncle Orville have him. That way he’ll just disappear and nobody’ll know. And Uncle Orville can have some good fat bacon for breakfast.”
So he lowered the pistol and began to unlock the door. “Get Smith,” he said over his shoulder to his sister. “We’ll have to get this guy to a hospital.”
When the chauffeur had come and Mike had been carried up the cellar stairs, Mr. Garble went down and locked Freddy in again. “We’ll have a talk with you later,” he said menacingly. Then he returned to the kitchen where, having sent Mrs. Underdunk to phone for a doctor, he had left Mike lying on the floor, watched over by Smith. And he got an unpleasant surprise. For now Smith was lying on the floor and Mike had vanished.
Smith opened his eyes and sat up dazedly, just as Mrs. Underdunk came back.
“The doctor will be here—” she began, then broke off. “Why, this is Smith!”
“He struck me,” said Smith, feeling of his nose. “Almost dead, he was, and he jumped up and socked me!”
Mrs. Underdunk stood staring at him for a moment. “You’re a fool, Smith,” she said. “Look at this.” She bent and pointed to two strawberries which had fallen off Mike’s shirt. “Jam. You’re a bright pair, I must say. I’ll go tell the doctor not to come.”
“But maybe Smith needs him,” said Mr. Garble.
Mrs. Underdunk said sharply: “If you think I’m going to pay out my good money for him, you’re greatly mistaken. He can pay for his own doctor. Maybe it’ll teach him not to let himself get punched in the nose.” She glared at her brother.
Mr. Garble said: “I know who Mike is. He’s one of the prisoners at the jail. I’ll have to go head him off before he gets back there and tells the sheriff, or the sheriff will come up here and make us release Freddy. They’re great friends.”
“He can’t make us release a burglar,” his sister snapped.
“No, but he can arrest him and take him to the jail. And then he’ll be tried. Maybe you want to hear what he will say when he comes to trial, but I don’t.”
“No,” said Mrs. Underdunk thoughtfully, “I don’t either. You’d better go.”
Then, when her brother had gone, she went and stood over the chauffeur, who was sitting up and trying to wiggle his nose. “Get up, Smith,” she said harshly. “Go get that crate from the barn—I know we’ve still got it—and put that pig in it and ship it to my Uncle Orville as soon as the express office opens in the morning.”
Locked in the jam closet in the cellar, Freddy groaned. He had heard Mrs. Underdunk, and he knew that crate. It was the one in which he had been packed up once before, for shipment to Mr. Garble’s uncle, who had a stock farm in Montana. “And this time,” he said to himself, “it looks as if I was going to get there.”
CHAPTER
15
Mr. Garble didn’t overtake Mike before he got to the jail. But Mike had lost his latchkey, and was pounding on the door, trying to wake the sheriff up, when Mr. Garble appeared with a pistol in his hand.
“Stop that racket!” Mr. Garble commanded in a low voice. “Now turn around and walk right back out of the gate.”
But he was too late, for as the burglar turned, the door opened and the sheriff stuck his head out. “Hey, you!” he exclaimed. “Come back here!” And then, as Mike faced around again: “Why, it’s you, Mike! What in time—”
“Arrest that man, sheriff,” Mr. Garble shouted, for it was now of course impossible to keep Mike from telling the sheriff his story.
“Arrest him!” the sheriff exclaimed. “I can’t—he’s already arrested; he’s one of my prisoners.”
“He was my prisoner just a few minutes ago,” protested Mr. Garble. “Caught him breaking into my sister’s house—him and that educated pig of Bean’s. Burglary, that’s what it was. And I want him arrested.”
“Burglary, hey?” said the sheriff. “Well, that’s Mike’s business, burglary. What do you expect him to be doin’? Though I admit he ain’t supposed to do any burgling when he’s in jail.”
“Look, sheriff,” said Mike, “this Garble kidnapped a couple of Freddy’s friends and locked ’em up in his cellar. They ain’t anybody you or I would be real palsy with—just a couple of chickens—but I suppose some folks could get fond of ’em; anyway Freddy is, and I went with him to rescue ’em.”
“Well, and where’s Freddy?” the sheriff demanded. “Can’t we get this over with? I want to go back to bed.” He yawned. “Excuse me. See here, Garble, can’t you come back after breakfast and we’ll talk this over?”
“Freddy escaped too,” said Mr. Garble quickly, for he didn’t want the sheriff interfering with his plan to ship the pig off to Montana. “And all this talk about a rescue,” he said, “is a lie. Look here—look at what’s all over this man’s shirt, sheriff. They broke in the house for just one purpose—to steal strawberry jam. Who were they rescuing in my sister’s jam closet? What did opening quart jars of jam, and getting smeared all up with the stuff, have to do with any kind of rescue work?”
The sheriff frowned. “Why, Mike, that’s a serious charge,” he said. “That reflects on the kind of meals we been serving you here at the jail. Why, you’ve always had all the jam and pickles and stuff you wanted—even mustard pickles with your breakfast. Toast and jam between meals, too. Don’t you like our jam? I make it all myself. And I always use only the best materials.”
“Sure, I like it,” said Mike. “I wasn’t stealing jam at this guy’s house. Like I told you, me and Freddy … Oh, gosh, sheriff, let me come in and change my shirt, will you? This sticky stuff all over my stomach makes me all goose flesh.”
So the sheriff let him in, and after some more argument, Mr. Garble went home. “But you haven’t heard the last of this,” he said threateningly. “When my sister hears about the way you’ve—”
“G’night, Herbie,” said the sheriff, and slammed the door in his face.
When Mike had changed his shirt, he told the sheriff his story. Of course he thought that Freddy had escaped too, because Mr. Garble had said so. The chickens would have to be rescued, but both Mike and the sheriff felt that the rescue could wait until after breakfast. But as it wouldn’t be breakfast time for several hours, they both went to bed.
They got up again about the time when Mrs. Bean was steering the flying saucer up Salina Street in Syracuse. One of the Martians sat before a sort of box with buttons and dials on it, like a radio, and controlled the height and speed. Most of the time they stayed up high enough to keep clear of wires and things such as flagpoles that projected from the buildings, but for a few blocks they dropped down into the early morning traffic, and drove right along among the cars, about a foot above the pavement. People were going to work, and it was lots of fun to see them stop and drop their jaws and stare. Of course this was not surprising, for though many people in Syracuse had seen flying saucers in the night sky, very few had seen one driving up Salina Street through traffic, and even stopping for a red light.
“Good land, there’s Amos Walnutt!” Mrs. Bean exclaimed. This was when they were coasting along about fifteen feet above the pavement. She called Click-two-squeaks’s attention to Mr. Walnutt, who was her sister’s husband’s uncle, and the Martian brought the saucer down to hover just above and in front of the old gentleman. He looked up in alarm, saw Mrs. Bean and Mrs. Peppercorn waving to him from the window of the incredible vehicle, and forgetting all about the rheumatism which had made him lame for the last ten years, he gave a loud yell, dropped his cane, and sprinted off down the street.
He forgot all about the rheumatism which had mad
e him lame for the last ten years.
“Well! … Gracious!” Mrs. Bean said. She looked rather put out. “What’s he want to do that for? I haven’t changed so much in the two years since I’ve seen him that he has to start screaming when he sees me unexpectedly.”
“Didn’t know you were keeping company with spiders, likely,” Mr. Bean remarked.
The Martians were making a sort of fizzing noise which Mr. Webb said was their laughter. “Sounds a good deal the way you do when you laugh, Mr. B.,” Mrs. Bean said.
“There’s said to be some spider blood in the Bean family, way back,” said Mr. Bean, and began fizzing, as if to prove it.
“Spiders in the Bean family tree, eh?” said his wife. “I’m not surprised.”
Click-two-squeaks had taken the saucer up again, for while they were motionless so close to the street, old Mr. Walnutt was not the only one who had panicked. At first, people had just stared, but when they realized what they were looking at, they ducked around corners and dived into doorways, and cars stopped and their occupants scrambled out and ran.
“Guess you better head back for Centerboro, Mrs. B.,” said Mr. Bean. “ ’Tain’t seemly for you to be startin’ a riot at your time of life. Anyway, I guess these spider-boys are anxious to see what those Martians of Herb Garble’s look like.”
When this was interpreted through the Webbs to the Martians, Click-two-squeaks patted Mr. Bean on the head with his feelers, which Mr. Webb said indicated that he appreciated his thoughtfulness. “He thinks Mrs. Bean better let him steer now,” said the spider, “because he’s going to drive—my goodness, I think he said a hundred miles a minute! Anyway, I guess she wouldn’t want to steer at that speed.”
Mrs. Bean certainly didn’t, and she was glad to turn the tiller over to Click-two-squeaks. It was a good thing she did. They covered the fifty-odd miles from Syracuse to Centerboro in about fifteen seconds.