Beware the Fisj Page 9

  “A floating object displaces its own weight in liquid!” shouted Elmer, really getting into the spirit of his lyrics. “Congruent angles have congruent complements. The kangaroo is a marsupial! Isn’t science wonderful? Oh, yes! Yes!”

  The tremendous din went on as the truck pulled up and parked across the road. On the side in red block capitals was written CHUT-TV.

  Bruno’s laughter faded. “Oh, no!” he shouted at Boots. “I forgot to call them off!”

  Two men got out of the truck, holding their ears and scanning the Macdonald Hall campus. Seeing no one there, they crossed the road towards the huge orchestra.

  Cathy and Bruno held their hands up for silence and the noise petered out.

  One of the men spoke. “Do any of you kids know where the world’s largest tin-can pyramid is? We’re here to film it and witness it for the Rankin Book of World Records.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Bruno quickly.

  “Oh, a hoax, eh? Any of you know this guy Walton who phoned us?”

  “Never heard of him either,” said Bruno.

  “You know, Jack,” said the second man, “Tupper expects us to come back with a story. Why don’t we do something on these kids?” He went for his equipment.

  “Good idea,” said Jack. He turned to the band. “What do you kids call yourselves?”

  Cathy stepped forward. “We are Elmer Dynamicdale and the Original Round-Robin Happy-Go-Lucky Heel-Clicking Foot-Stomping Beat-Swinging Scrim-Band,” she said evenly. “Would you like me to repeat that?”

  “If you think you can. How about doing a number? Get this Dynamicdale guy up front.”

  Bruno pushed Elmer and his microphone out in front of the camera.

  “Okay,” called the cameraman, “introduce yourselves and let ’er rip.”

  Cathy leaned towards the microphone clutched in Elmer’s hands. “Hi, fans!” she shouted. “He’s Elmer Dynamicdale, and we’re the Original Round-Robin Happy-Go-Lucky Heel-Clicking Foot-Stomping Beat-Swinging Scrim-Band with the music of the future, our own invention, Science Rock! Here’s Elmer with our biggest hit, Euclid is Putrid!”

  Bruno began waving his arms and the band started again with even more enthusiasm and noise than before.

  Cathy kicked Elmer, which seemed the only way to get him started.

  “Geometry!” bawled Elmer. “The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides! Another wonderful geometric fact! And over three hundred ways to prove it! The median to the base of an isosceles triangle is the perpendicular bisector of the base! And the triangle doesn’t even have to be isosceles for the angle bisectors to be concurrent!”

  “Wow, Jack, what do you think of them?” asked the cameraman, shouting over the racket.

  “Those lead singers are getting weirder every day!” Jack shouted back. “Zoom in on Dynamicdale! Look at the faces he’s making! This’ll get a good laugh on the six o’clock news!”

  “When a transversal crosses parallel lines, co-interior angles are supplementary!” Elmer sang out. “Similar triangles have proportional sides! Wow!” Now he was so excited that he was strutting around in front of the band, waving his microphone wildly. “Congruent figures have equal areas!”

  “Okay, okay!” shouted the cameraman. “We’ve got enough! You can stop now! Please stop!”

  Nobody heard. The din had completely drowned him out.

  “The diagonals of a rhombus are perpendicular!” howled Elmer.

  The two TV men ran for their truck, loaded their equipment and drove away in haste. The noise began to die out.

  “Keep playing!” bellowed Bruno. “There’s a car coming! It must be the developer!”

  The racket swelled again.

  A long, midnight-blue limousine pulled up and parked at the mouth of the driveway to Macdonald Hall. A uniformed chauffeur jumped out and opened the rear door. Out stepped the developer, a short, squat man in a grey business suit. He held his ears and winced. Encouraged, the band played louder.

  “The sine of any angle equals the cosine of its complement!” yowled Elmer, who was now well into trigonometry.

  Both men approached, waving their arms in a plea for silence. The din faded.

  “Hello, sir,” said Bruno with a wide, toothy grin. “How may we help you?”

  “You can tell me what you’re doing here,” said the short, fat man curtly.

  “We’re having our band practice, sir,” explained Cathy. “Practice makes perfect. That’s what our music teacher says.”

  The developer looked sick. “Do you do this often?”

  “Three times a day,” said Bruno cheerfully.

  “Usually at night,” Cathy added.

  “We’re usually louder,” added Bruno, “but a lot of the kids are away for the day.”

  “What’s more, we are always scientifically accurate,” said Elmer Drimsdale.

  “Listen to how good we are!” yelled Cathy. “One, two, three —” The band erupted once more, with Elmer shouting something about prehistoric reptiles. This time he had not even required kicking.

  Down the highway rolled Miss Scrimmage’s black pick-up truck, with the Headmistress at the wheel.

  “Tyrannosaurus Rex stood six metres high!” howled Elmer as the garbage cans clanged, the trombones moaned and the flutes tweetled.

  From the driver’s seat, Miss Scrimmage gaped in horror at the sight of her teeming front lawn. She was leaning across the seat, hanging her head out the window and screaming wildly, but no sound could be heard over the tremendous noise of the orchestra.

  Crash! Miss Scrimmage’s pick-up veered aimlessly across the highway and plowed into the limousine parked on the soft shoulder. The music died abruptly.

  “Oh, no!” moaned Boots in the silence.

  “Are you crazy, lady?” bellowed the developer. The front of his limousine was mangled beyond recognition. The radiator was spewing water, the hood was crumpled like an accordion, and the windshield was smashed.

  Dropping their instruments, Miss Scrimmage’s girls rushed to her rescue.

  “Yes, yes, girls, I’m perfectly all right,” the Headmistress assured them. “It was only a little accident.”

  “A little accident!” screamed the developer. “That was a sixty thousand dollar car!”

  “Now, now,” shrilled Miss Scrimmage. “None of the children were hurt, and that’s the main thing.” She smiled at her girls and glared at the boys from Macdonald Hall. “Shoo! Get away! Leave my girls alone!”

  That was all the encouragement the boys needed. They picked up their instruments and stampeded across the road towards home.

  * * *

  So it was that when Mr. Sturgeon returned to Macdonald Hall after his Board meeting he found a large tow-truck trying to separate the remains of a limousine from Miss Scrimmage’s pick-up truck.

  Bruno Walton was on the scene to offer an explanation.

  “I think the man in that limo was coming to Macdonald Hall, sir. Miss Scrimmage came barrelling down the road on the wrong side. Boy, did she clobber him! The guy was so mad that he called a taxi and went back to Toronto. He says he’s going to sue Miss Scrimmage blue!”

  The Headmaster was facing away from him, but Bruno could see that he was smiling.

  Bruno was smiling too. He had finally found a good use for Miss Scrimmage.

  Chapter 10

  But Will It Fly?

  “Miss Scrimmage,” said Mr. Sturgeon into the telephone on Sunday morning, “I do not follow your line of reasoning. How can it possibly be the fault of Macdonald Hall that your automobile insurance rates are going up? … And I also strongly doubt that my boys were over on your lawn scaring your girls with loud noise. It has been my experience that nothing scares your girls … Miss Scrimmage, right beside the accelerator is another pedal. It activates the braking mechanism. Its function is to stop your vehicle’s forward movement, thus avoiding an incident such as occurred yesterday. I would
venture to say that any of my boys, without a lesson or a licence, could figure that out … I am not ‘bugging’ you, Miss Scrimmage. You telephoned me. Good day.”

  “William,” said his wife thoughtfully, “the boys were over there yesterday. I told you they were getting the two school bands together. They were even on the early news last night.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Sturgeon with a crooked smile. “That’s the last time I leave Mr. Fudge in charge of the campus. He was probably taking a nap, and they say nothing wakes him up. The point is, however, that even though our boys had no business being over at Scrimmage’s they were not at the wheel of the truck when it drove into that limousine. Miss Scrimmage was.”

  “That car belonged to the land developer, didn’t it? The one who was coming here to look at Macdonald Hall?”

  “It did. Miss Scrimmage seems to have adequately deterred him.” Mr. Sturgeon switched on the television set. “The band was on the news, you say? Maybe it will be on again this morning. It’s almost time for the ten o’clock report.”

  They watched a cartoon for a few minutes, and then the local newscaster came on the air. He smiled, opened his mouth to speak, and vanished. Once again the fish image monopolized the screen. The audio crackled with static, then a voice said, A certain someone proved to he an asset rather than a liability yesterday. We of the Fish Patrol extend our thanks. There was a wicked laugh. We will crush all who oppose us. Beware the Fish!

  The newscaster reappeared.

  “Mildred,” said Mr. Sturgeon, perplexed. “why does that comment ring a bell? Why do I have the feeling that I should know that voice?”

  “Oh, you’re just tired and overwrought, dear,” soothed his wife. “Have another cup of coffee.”

  * * *

  Sergeant Featherstone stared at the television set in horror as the fish faded away. The “certain someone,” who was obviously Featherstone himself, had been of assistance to the Fish’s operation! But how? How could he have done these fiends a favour? Could it be that he, an officer of the law, had unwittingly become a tool in the hands of the forces of evil?

  But he had done nothing in the past few days beyond acquiring and studying the Fish’s code book. They were bluffing. They had to be. He was getting close. They had found that he could not be scared off by threats of violence, and now they were trying to make him believe that the code book was worthless.

  Oh, yes, he was getting very close.

  * * *

  “Bruno, what are you moping about?” asked Boots. “We’ve been on television, haven’t we?”

  “Yeah,” said Bruno savagely. “In front of Scrimmage’s school as the Scrim-Band! That kind of publicity does nothing for Macdonald Hall!”

  “Well, we got rid of the developer,” pointed out Boots optimistically.

  “If he’s really dead set on building those condos,” retorted Bruno, “he’ll be back. He won’t let Miss Scrimmage stop him.”

  “It’s ready,” announced Elmer.

  “Not now, Elm,” said Bruno, still talking to Boots. “And as for the band practices,” he went on, “I guess we were pretty stupid to think that a little noise would drive a guy away from a multi-million-dollar business deal.”

  “It’s ready,” repeated Elmer.

  “What’s ready?” asked Bruno impatiently.

  “My remote control device,” said Elmer. “It’s ready for testing.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” cried Bruno, jumping to his feet. “How do we go about testing it?”

  “We simply take it outdoors and fly it,” said Elmer.

  “Great,” exclaimed Bruno. “We’ll do it right now. Where’s the best place?”

  “Actually, the only place to test the mechanism properly would be in an area where there are trees. This would enable me to test the manoeuvrability, and more important, to see how my signals travel when there are solid obstacles about.”

  “What about the woods right in back?” suggested Boots.

  Elmer shook his head. “No good. The trees are much too close together. There would be a crash.”

  “Scrimmage’s apple orchard,” decided Bruno. “It’s perfect.”

  “Yes, it would be ideal,” Elmer agreed. “However, I strongly doubt that Mr. Sturgeon or Miss Scrimmage would grant permission, relations being rather strained lately between our two respective schools.”

  “Yes,” agreed Bruno, “but they couldn’t object if they didn’t know about it.”

  “No,” said Boots simply, “we’re not going there again.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” scoffed Bruno. “The old girl guards her young ladies, not her apples. We’re going tonight.”

  “Uh,” protested Elmer uneasily, “I’m not sure I want to —”

  “What a pair of chickens!” interrupted Bruno. “The matter is settled.” To emphasize his point, he switched on Elmer’s PIT system.

  * * *

  Greetings once more from the Fish Patrol, crackled the now-familiar voice from Featherstone’s television set. We announce that Operation Flying Fish will commence tonight at midnight. You never know when the Fish may descend on you. Beware the Fish!

  “But where?” exclaimed Featherstone in frustration as the fish image disappeared from the screen. He knew only one thing. It was up to him to foil Operation Flying Fish as he had Operation Popcan. If only he knew where to begin.

  * * *

  “That is so annoying!” exclaimed Mrs. Sturgeon, switching off the TV. “They just can’t seem to put a stop to it!”

  “Mildred,” said the Headmaster, “I know that voice. I’m sure I do. I just can’t place it.”

  “Well, whoever it is,” she said, “I hope they catch him and punish him severely. I’m sick of this.”

  Mr. Sturgeon frowned. “I’m positive I know that voice . . .”

  * * *

  At half-past eleven that night Sergeant Featherstone left his motel room and got into his car, intent on searching for Operation Flying Fish.

  He wasn’t going to the Chutney town dump, he decided. That was the last place they’d use as a base of operations after he’d been there to spoil Operation Popcan for them. And so, for lack of inspiration, he turned off Main Street in the opposite direction.

  The door of room 14 opened and the cadaverous man hurried out and got into his car. The tires squealed as he started out in pursuit of Featherstone.

  * * *

  The midnight solitude of Miss Scrimmage’s apple orchard was disturbed as three shadowy figures, laden with parcels, eased themselves over the wire fence and crept into the cover of the trees.

  “Here’s a good spot,” said Bruno, dropping his burden.

  Elmer, too frightened to speak, nodded.

  Boots was also nervous. “Any sign of Miss Scrimmage? Or her shotgun?”

  Bruno did not reply. “Okay, Elmer, set it up.”

  Obediently Elmer got to work. In fifteen minutes he had assembled a large console with operating buttons and a tall antenna. In his hands he held a metal sphere studded with Christmas tree lights.

  “You’re going to fly that?” asked Bruno. “That’s not an airplane.”

  Elmer flicked a switch on the console to turn on the green and red bulbs. “This will fly,” he replied with great satisfaction.

  “Well?” said Bruno impatiently. “Let’s see it.”

  “Do you have to have it lit up like that?” asked Boots. “We don’t want old Scrimmage over here, you know!”

  Elmer placed the ball inside a black tube attached to the console. “I must see it if I’m going to guide it,” he explained patiently. “And now the test.”

  “Wait!” said Bruno suddenly, pulling the ball out of the tube. “It’s bad luck to launch a ship without a name.” With a marking pen he carefully printed M.H. Flying Fish on a clear patch of the metal.

  “M.H.?” questioned Boots.

  “Macdonald Hall, of course,” said Bruno. He returned the little craft to the tube. “And now
the test,” he mimicked.

  Elmer flicked a switch and turned a dial. There was a clunk, and the M.H. Flying Fish rocketed out of the tube and hovered among the branches of the trees, humming as it awaited instructions.

  “Hot gazoobies!” cheered Bruno as he and Boots stared at the ball, which illuminated the portion of the orchard where they stood.

  Skillfully Elmer manipulated the controls, putting his craft through a series of manoeuvres in, around and over the trees.

  Suddenly there was a rustling in the darkness behind them and a voice called, “Halt!”

  The three boys wheeled in horror.

  Cathy Burton appeared from behind a tree. “Just kidding,” she grinned. She glanced behind her. “Come on out, Diane. I told you it had to be them.”

  Diane appeared at her side. “What are you guys doing? What is that thing?”

  “It’s our ship,” replied Bruno. “Elmer’ll explain it to you.”

  Elmer shook his head violently, unable to speak in the presence of the girls.

  “Oh, it’s Elmer!” said Cathy. She strode over to the console. “Hey, decent! What does this thing do?” She grasped one of the dials and twisted it as far as it would go.

  “No!” cried Elmer.

  The M.H. Flying Fish shot up and away into the sky. Elmer frantically hit buttons, but to no avail. The hum of the motor was gone. The distant lights could no longer be seen.

  “Our ship!” cried Bruno. “Bring it back!”

  “I can’t,” said Elmer sadly. “It’s out of range.”

  “Oops,” said Cathy. “Sorry.”

  “Cath-y!” moaned Bruno in anguish. “That was going to make us famous, and you lost it!”

  “Sorry,” repeated Cathy. “Maybe you can build another one.” She smiled brightly. “Anybody want something to eat?”

  “I want to go home,” groaned Elmer miserably.

  “Yeah,” muttered Boots. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Are you very mad?” asked Cathy penitently.

  Bruno shrugged. “It’s gone. I guess killing you won’t change that.”

  The three boys picked up their equipment.