Читать книгу Danny Dunn, Time Traveler - Jay Williams - Страница 5

CHAPTER TWO

The Professor Surrenders

Studying alone for a test is almost as hard as ditch-digging. But studying with friends can be as good as a party. There’s only one hitch: you have to keep your mind on your work. And puzzling over the Professor’s secret made this the one thing Danny couldn’t do.

Saturday morning, he met with his two closest friends, Irene Miller and Joe Pearson, for a session on American history. They met at Irene’s house, next door to Danny’s. Irene, whose father was a professor of astronomy at Midston University, was as deeply interested in science as Danny and planned to become a physicist when she grew up. Joe, on the other hand, wanted to be a writer and was notorious in school for his poems, made up to suit every occasion. The three settled down with their books in Irene’s room and started work, but Danny couldn’t keep his eyes away from the bay window. It faced the back yard, and sitting in the window seat, Dan could just see the corner of the Professor’s laboratory jutting from the rear of his own house next door.

At last, he put down his book with a sigh. “If only I could find out what he’s doing inside there,” he said.

Joe stretched out his lanky body in the armchair, and put his open history book on top of his head. “Maybe some of these names and dates will soak down into my mind this way,” he said, sadly. “We’re not going to get much studying done if you keep worrying about the Professor.”

“I’m not worrying about him,” said Danny. “I’m just curious.”

“Uh-huh. And every time you get curious, I get into trouble,” Joe moaned. “Like the time you were curious about what would happen if you made an air conditioner out of some ice cubes and my mother’s vacuum cleaner. I was the one who had to clean up the mess and dry out the vacuum cleaner.”

“I’m sorry about that, Joe,” said Danny. “But it did blow cold air, didn’t it?”

“Oh, sure. Only it would have been better in July, instead of January,” Joe mumbled. He pulled the book down over his face like a tent. “Let’s see…the First Continental Congress was held in Philadelphia on September 74th.”

Irene giggled. “I think there’s something wrong with that date, Joe,” she said. She knelt in the window seat next to Dan and looked down into his back yard. “I wonder why the Professor hasn’t told you anything,” she said. “Could it be some kind of top secret work for the government?”

“I doubt it. We’d have had all sorts of generals and FBI men around. No, I think he’d tell me what it is if I just had a chance to ask him. But you see, he only comes out of the lab for a few minutes at a time and then he’s so deep in thought that he doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what I say.”

“Well, why don’t you just look in his window?” Joe suggested. “I wonder if I could make up a poem about this history? What rhymes with ‘congress’?”

Danny stared at him. “Look in the window?” he repeated, slowly. “Maybe you’ve got something.”

“I haven’t got a rhyme for ‘congress,’” Joe said, shaking his head.

Irene looked worried. “But Danny,” she said, “I don’t think the Professor would like that.”

Danny ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think Professor Bullfinch keeps the lab door locked because he doesn’t want to be disturbed. But I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my just looking. The thing is, it would be disturbing him if I went and stuck my head up against the window. So maybe if I could figure out a way of looking that wouldn’t really disturb him…”

He jumped up. “Hey, let’s go down into your back yard for a minute, Irene,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Good-by, good old First Continental Congress,” Joe said. “Here comes trouble.”

They ran down the stairs and out into Irene’s yard. A high lilac hedge separated it from Danny’s yard, and at the far end the lawns gave place to a pleasant little wood of birches and maples, now just leafing out in the fresh green of spring. Danny went round the lilacs and through the wood to a spot near a thick, ancient maple where the youngsters had once built a tree-house. From here, they could clearly see the back of Danny’s house.

“Look,” he said. “The window of our guest bedroom is up there. If I could make a long periscope and lower it from that window, I could just see into the end window of the laboratory.”

“A periscope? How would you make such a thing?” asked Irene. “You need a pair of prisms to start with.”

“Right.” Danny’s face was glowing with the excitement he felt when he was involved in a new project, and he carried his friends along with him so that they generally forgot everything else. “You’ve got an old pair of field glasses, Irene. They have prisms in them. Go get ’em. I’ll be able to take them apart easily and put them together again—I did it with a pair of my mother’s bird-watching glasses once.”

Irene scampered off.

Joe said, “What else do you need? A periscope sounds like a complicated kind of thing. Do you need a submarine to go with it?”

“No, it’s simple. Just two prisms mounted at each end of a long tube. I think I can use some old copper pipe we have in the garage.” Danny frowned, pensively. “It’ll have to be pretty long, though. We’ll have to measure the distance from the window to the ground.”

“Now, listen,” Joe protested. “If you think I’m going to climb up the side of your house with a ruler—”

“No, there’s an easier way. And it’s very interesting, too. I’ll show you.”

Danny took out his pocketknife and after searching about found a straight, thin sapling. He cut it off near the ground and trimmed the twigs from it.

“My hand span, from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger when my fingers are stretched out, is exactly six inches,” he said. “I measured it once so I’d never need to carry a ruler with me. So now I’ll make this stick four spans long—just two feet.”

He cut it off and led Joe out of the shadows of the trees onto the lawn. He stood the stick on end and asked Joe to hold it upright. Then he knelt down and in the same way measured its shadow.

“Aha!” he cried. “A two-foot stick throws a three-foot shadow.”

“Fine. Congratulations,” said Joe. “I’m sure this is a great discovery, but I don’t get it.”

“Now we measure the shadow of the house,” said Danny. He ran to the corner of the house and, on his knees, began spanning the edge of the long shadow cast across the grass.

Irene ducked through the lilacs with the field glasses in her hand. She gaped at Dan and said, “What on earth are you looking for?”

“Sh!” said Joe. “Don’t interrupt him. He’s measuring shadows.”

Irene stared at him, and he stared back. Then he raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “You’re right,” he said. “It does sound kind of nutty, doesn’t it?”

“Thirty feet,” Danny said triumphantly, standing erect.

“Listen, Dan,” said Irene, as they went back to the edge of the woods. “I was just thinking—”

“Wait a sec.” He flapped a hand at her. “A three-foot shadow comes from a two-foot stick. So a thirty-foot shadow would come from a twenty-foot house. Right?”

“Right,” said Irene. “But listen—”

“I measured the shadow to the edge of the eaves. That’s where the top of the guest-room window comes. Now we subtract the distance from the ground to the sill of the laboratory window. About five feet. So the tube of the periscope has to be fifteen feet long. You see? It’s easy.”

Irene sighed. “It’s marvelous,” she said. “But don’t you think it would be a lot easier if you just looked through these field glasses right into the window?”

Danny opened his mouth and closed it again. Joe began to laugh.

“Oh, well,” Danny said, ruefully. “I’ve heard that girls are more practical than boys.”

Irene grinned, and handed him the binoculars. “You can have the first look, for saying such a nice thing,” she said.

Danny peered at the laboratory window for a long moment, while the other two fidgeted. Then he said, “I can see a tall metal box. It has a square plate in it, something like a television screen.”

“Let me look,” Irene said.

“In a minute. I can see some other stuff—something that looks like a computer, with dials and buttons. Oh!”

“What? What is it?” Irene was almost dancing with impatience.

“The Professor!” Danny lowered the binoculars. “He was looking right at me. He shook his fist.”

“What?” Irene snatched the field glasses. “That doesn’t sound like him at all.”

She lifted the binoculars to her eyes. Then she snorted. “I see him all right, but he isn’t shaking his fist,” she said. “He’s waving. Now he’s bending over the table and doing something with a big piece of paper. Now he’s at the outside door—he’s opened it. He’s holding up the paper. It’s got writing on it.”

“Writing? What does it say?”

Irene giggled.

“It says, ‘I surrender. Come on in,’” she replied.