CHAPTER

2

Mr. Benjamin Bean was Mr. Bean’s uncle. He was a very fine mechanic. He spent a good deal of his time at the Beans’, working in the shop which he had set up and equipped in the loft over the horse stable. It was here that he had made the parts for the space ship in which he and Mrs. Peppercorn and some of the animals had tried to reach Mars. Here too he had put together the small atomic engine which he had installed in his station wagon, making it probably the fastest and most powerful automobile ever constructed. Although because of its speed, and the kangaroo-like jumps which it made on the open highway, few people but Uncle Ben cared to ride in it.

The year after the space ship had been lost, a flying saucer containing a number of Martians had landed in Centerboro. The Martians were small, and had four arms and three eyes; but they were pleasant, friendly people, they had traveled for a while with Mr. Boomschmidt’s circus, and had spent a good deal of time at the Beans’. They liked life on earth, and would probably have stayed much longer but for one thing. The saucer had attracted a good deal of attention. It could travel at almost the speed of light, and so would far outclass even the swiftest of modern bombers. Any nation that had even a small fleet of flying saucers could rule the world.

As soon as pictures of the Martians and the saucer, and some accounts of its flight speed, began to appear in the newspapers, spies and secret agents of every nation on the globe swarmed into Centerboro. The hotel was jammed, every rooming house was crowded, there wasn’t a vacancy in any of the motels for fifty miles in any direction, and hundreds camped in tents on the fairgrounds, after the circus had gone. There were spies of every nationality, and many in very queer costumes—turbans and fezzes and long bright-colored robes. All day long the lounge in the hotel looked like a meeting of the United Nations.

The saucer, which was parked part of the time at the farm, and the rest on the Centerboro fairgrounds, was the center of a milling crowd of spies. When it left to go from one place to the other they jumped into cars and followed. They climbed all over it, banged on the door, peeked in the portholes, and mobbed the Martians whenever they went in or came out. Some of them had sheaves of big bills in their hands which they offered for “just a peek inside.” Others took dozens of photographs of the Martians and the saucer from every possible angle, hoping that their governments might be able to spot something in the pictures that would give a hint of how the saucer worked.

Late one night a gang, thought to be Communists, came armed with machine guns and grenades and tried to blow in the door with nitroglycerine. Fortunately, by this time a detachment of troops had been sent by the War Department to guard the saucer, the secret of which was felt to be too important to be allowed to fall into foreign hands. The gang was discovered just as it was approaching the saucer, and all the members were captured and sent to prison.

There were so many spies that none of them was able to accomplish anything. Had there been a few, a direct attack on the saucer might have been successful. But with a hundred or more of them, each small group opposed to all the others, they were constantly falling over one another; a hundred eyes watched every move of every member of the crowd, which even by three or four o’clock in the morning was as dense about the saucer as in the daytime. And at last the Martians got tired of it. They no longer had any freedom of movement; they could never escape from the crowds which followed them everywhere. So they went back to Mars.

Before the Martians attracted so much attention, however, they had given the Beans and some of the animals rides in the saucer; they had even shown Uncle Ben all over it and explained how it worked. With the knowledge thus gained, Uncle Ben had decided to build a saucer of his own. He had at first intended to build another space ship, like the one that had been lost. But the saucer was much faster than the ship, and also could move much more slowly, and even stop in the air, so that it could be used for travel from place to place on the earth’s surface, almost like a helicopter. The ship was only good for interplanetary travel, whereas there were a number of ways in which the saucer could be used on earth. By saucer, for instance, a letter mailed in New York could be delivered in ten minutes in London.

Unfortunately Uncle Ben had used up nearly all his money in building the ship. So he spent several months drawing up plans and instructions for building a saucer, and then several more trying to interest some of the big airplane companies in putting up the money to build it. As long as the plans were in his head, he had no trouble with the spies, who, now that the Martians had flown back home, didn’t know that anybody on earth knew how the saucer worked. But as soon as he began talking to the airplane companies the secret leaked out. Perhaps some of the officers in the companies talked. But from that moment Uncle Ben was a marked man.

He began to realize that wherever he went he was being followed, at first by one man, then by a dozen, then by fifty. His rooms were searched, sometimes six or eight times a day. Before long, wherever he went, he was surrounded by a crowd; spies were everywhere; if he went into a building, faces peered at him over the edge of the roof; if he went to a movie, even if there were only half a dozen people in the place when he went in, in ten minutes there wasn’t an empty seat left in the house.

Of course there was safety in numbers. One or two efforts were made to kidnap him; but if one gang tried it, there were always six other gangs lurking in the background, ready to foil the attempt. For no nation wanted any other nation to get the secret.

One evening he was walking back to his hotel in Chicago from a movie, followed by the usual crowd of spies—twenty or thirty on foot, and the rest in a string of taxis and private cars. Three men rushed out of an alleyway, grabbed him, and started to drag him toward a black car which was drawn up at the curb, with one door open. But the moment they laid hands on him, the crowd of followers surged forward. No firearms were used. With clubs and blackjacks they laid out the three assailants, and then they laid into one another. The passengers in the taxis and cars leaped out and joined the fight. Probably each gang thought it was a good idea to eliminate, at least for a few days, some of the others. For a few minutes there was a magnificent eighteen-nation free-for-all. Then suddenly, just before the police arrived, the fighting stopped. The fighters slunk away down side streets, and when the police cars rolled up they saw only a dozen or so unconscious figures lying in the road. These were put into ambulances and carried off to hospitals. But Uncle Ben had ducked out among the fighters and got back to his hotel.

Probably each gang thought it was a good idea to eliminate, at least for a few days, some of the others.

He was more careful after that.

When the station wagon stopped in front of the bank, Uncle Ben snatched up from the seat a thin metal cylinder about two feet long and tossed it out of the window to Freddy. “Keep this safe,” he said. “Vaults.” And he pointed to the bank. Then he leaned out and stared hard at the four animals. “You good Americans?” he demanded.

“Why, you know us all, Uncle Ben,” said Freddy. “All except Samuel, here. And he lives on the farm; he’s one of us.”

“Why, thanks, Freddy,” said the mole. “You want us to do something, mister? I say you want us to do something?”

“Just forget me,” Uncle Ben said. “You ain’t seen me today. Understand? Tighter you keep your mouths shut, better you’ll serve your country. Here, Freddy.” He held out an envelope which Freddy took. “So long. You’ll hear from me.” And with a series of deafening explosions the station wagon bounded on up the road.

“Funny he didn’t stop to see the Beans for a minute,” said Jinx.

“Better do as he asked,” said Freddy. He took the cylinder into the bank. The two squirrel guards who were sitting on the planks that covered the entrance to the vaults jumped up and stood at attention. “Gustav,” said the pig, “you and Archie take this down and put it in safe-deposit hole number”—he consulted a wall chart of the vaults—“number eighteen. It belongs to Uncle Ben. We’ll double the guards for a while. I’ll get rabbits No. 12 and 24, and I’ll also alert the A.B.I., as I believe this cylinder is important to the safety of our nation.”

The A.B.I. was the Animal Bureau of Intelligence, whose director was a robin, Mr. J. J. Pomeroy.

“That Uncle Ben,” said Samuel when Freddy came out, “he’s not much of a talker, is he? I say he’s not much of a talker.”

“He doesn’t usually say even that much,” said Freddy.

“Practically an oration for him, what he said today,” Jinx added. “What’s the letter, Freddy?”

Freddy opened the envelope and took out several sheets, closely written. “My goodness!” he said. “Uncle Ben sure gets talkative enough when he gets a pen in his hand.” He glanced through the sheets, then looked down at the mole. “Samuel,” he said solemnly, “this is highly confidential matter. Top secret. Foreign agents would pay a lot of money to know what’s written here. But I’m going to let you listen to it because I believe you’re a patriotic citizen. I knew your grandfather, and a more upright and honest American I never knew. So I know you won’t talk. And I doubt very much that you could be bribed into talking and betraying your government with any amount of money. Am I right?”

“Oh, yeah?” said the mole sarcastically. “I guess if you really trusted me, you wouldn’t make such big talk about it. I don’t want to hear your darned old letter anyway. I say I don’t want to hear it.” And he plunged again into the earth. But this time they watched the little ridge where he tunneled go right up to the fence and under it, and out into the field beyond.

“I thought he’d go if I talked like that to him,” Freddy said. “Pretty proud, moles are. That’s why I did it. I didn’t want to ask him to leave; this way I figured maybe he’d be irritated and go. He’s probably all right, but this is too important to take chances with. Here’s the letter:

‘DEAR FRIEND FREDDY:

‘Please burn this letter as soon as you have read it. I have just made a deal with Interminable Motors. They will put up the money for my flying saucer—that is, for the first experimental model. They will at first make the saucer itself and some of the fittings and so on, and I will make and install the engine. However, the plans for the engine itself, which is a radically new kind of power plant, I shall not turn over to them until the model has been tested and the Air Force has agreed to buy a number of saucers, as it certainly will.

‘In the meantime, I have made two sets of plans for the engine. The right set I am going to leave in the care of the First Animal Bank. None of these spies who follow me everywhere will know it is there, because I shall start for the Bean home in my station wagon at a moment’s notice, and I shall leave it and drive on quickly. They will try to follow me, but no spy has a car that can keep up with the station wagon, and by the time they can locate it with their planes I shall have passed the farm and struck down to the main road and gone through Syracuse.

‘The wrong set of plans I shall carry with me. Eventually the agents of one nation or another will steal it from me. This will soon become known to all the other spies, and then they will leave me alone and try to capture the set from whoever has it.

‘Surrounded as I am now by these gangs of secret agents, I am unable to start work on the motor. Indeed I am unable to get a moment alone. Even in bed I am constantly being kept awake by attempts to get into the room, by footsteps and the rattling of doorknobs and tapping at the windows. If there was only one gang at work it would have had me before this. It is only the large number of groups, all constantly spying on the others, that has prevented my being kidnapped.

‘It will take whatever foreign government that gets the false plans from me several months to find out that they are false. By that time the motor should have been made and tested; perhaps the Air Force may have ordered some, in which case protection of the plans will be up to the government. In the meantime, guard this set well. The only other true set is in my head.

‘Hoping this finds you as it leaves me, in good health, but nervous, I am

Yours truly,

UNCLE BEN’”