Rick Brant 3 Sea Gold Read online

  SEA GOLD

  A RICK BRANT

  ELECTRONIC

  ADVENTURE, No. 3

  By JOHN BLAINE

  1947

  CHAPTER I

  Trouble at Crayville

  The coast ofConnecticut slid by under the wing of the yellow Piper Cub. There were alternate stretches of green coastal land and sandy beaches. Now and then an attractive little town appeared and passed below. Tothe east, Long Island Sound glittered blue and green in the noonday sun, andLong Island itself was a low bulk on the far horizon.

  Rick Brant, sitting on the passenger’s side of the little plane, stretched and gave a luxurious yawn. He was a slim boy of high school age, with light brown hair and brown eyes that always had a twinkle lurking in them.

  He was at peace with the world today. School had just closed and the long summer stretched pleasantly ahead. He didn’t know yet how the vacation would be spent, but something would turn up.

  He made a lazy check of the instrument panel and the plane’s position,then grinned at the husky, dark-haired boy who was piloting.

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  “Flying Chinese again “Rick accused.

  Don Scott, called “Scotty,” snapped out of his absorbed contemplation of something under the left wing.

  “Chinese? What’re you talking about?”

  “One Wing Low,” Rick said. “Straighten up and fly right, bird-boy.”

  Scotty gave the control wheel a slight turn and leveled off. “Have to watch that. Every time I look out the port window the wing goes down.”

  Referring to left and right as “port and starboard” was a habit Scotty had brought back from his service in the Marines. Although only a year Rick Brant’s senior, he had three years of wartime duty with the Marines behind him.

  “What’s so interesting down there?” Rick asked. He craned to see, but the fuselage blocked his vision.

  “There’s a funny-looking factory of some kind next to that town,” Scotty said. He obligingly rocked the plane up on a wing and pulled around in a tight bank so that Rick could see.

  Rick gazed down through two thousand feet of emptiness to where a small town lay against the shore.

  Directly south of it he saw a plot of ground on the water front that harbored what might have been two enormous beehives, half a dozen swimming pools, and miscellaneous other buildings.

  He reached for the road map by which they were navigating. “Let’s see . . . we’ve passedBridgeport , but we haven’t reachedNew Haven . . .” He made a quick check. “That’s Crayville!”

  Scotty gave him a puzzled look. “All right, it’s Crayville.Why the excitement?”

  “That’s the new sea mine plant down there.”

  “It is?” Scotty looked blank.

  “I saw an item about it in the paper,” Rick explained. “Two men have a new process for mining the sea, and they’re putting up the plant at Crayville. Boy, I’d like a closer look at it.”

  “I’m dense,” Scotty said. “If anyone asked me what mining the sea was, I’d tell ‘em it’s planting mines to blow up ships.”

  “Not that kind.” Rick grinned. “This mine extracts minerals from sea water. It’s not a new idea. There are quite a few plants that extract magnesium and bromine from sea water, but the paper said these guys have some new processes that will get a lot of other stuff out of the water, too.Maybe even gold.”

  Scotty was looking down with new interest. “Some stunt, if they can do it.”

  “They probably can,” Rick said. An idea had been taking form in his mind. “Listen,remember what we said yesterday about getting jobs for the summer?”

  “You thinking of getting jobs down there?”

  “Sure! As long as the professors haven’t anything cooking at Spindrift, we could try to get jobs on some kind of scientific project.”

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  The professors Rick referred to were the world-famed scientists who lived onSpindriftIsland and had their laboratories there. Rick’s father, Hartson W. Brant, was head of the important scientific group that already had contributed so much to the science of electronics.

  It was during one of the experiments, sending a controlled rocket to the moon, that Rick had met Scotty.

  The ex-Marine had rescued him from a possible beating at the hands of Manfred Wessel’s gang, and later had been instrumental in defeating the renegade scientist’s efforts to destroy theSpindriftIsland rocket.

  After the adventure of “The Rocket’s Shadow,” Scotty, who was an orphan, had become an accepted member of theSpindriftIsland family. Later, the two boys had gone with Professor Hobart Zircon and Professor Julius Weiss to High Tibet, to set up a radar transmitter for sending messages via the moon.

  They had succeeded only after overcoming many obstacles thrown in their way by the unscrupulous adventurer, Hendrick Van Groot, and the lost tribe of Mongols whose city was hidden in the Valley of the Golden Tomb, as related in “The Lost City.”

  Since then, however, no experiments of an important nature had been started, and the boys, foreseeing no adventures onSpindriftIsland , had discussed getting jobs for the summer.

  Rick turned the idea over in his mind. His great ambition was to follow in his famous father’s footsteps and become a. leading electronic scientist. Mining the sea was new; it would be exciting and he could learn a great deal.

  “Let’s go down and look it over,” he said impulsively.

  “We might land on that stretch of beach, if it’s packed hard enough,” Scotty suggested.

  In a few moments they were low over the water, running parallel with the beach.

  “It looks okay,” Rick said, after a survey. “Think you can put her in?”

  Scotty was learning to handle the Cub surprisingly well, but he had never made a landing on anything but a good field. His eyes searched for possible obstacles.

  “I think so,” he answered finally.

  Rick tightened his safety belt. “Okay.”

  The Cub banked sharply around as Scotty lined up the stretch of beach. In a moment Rick saw sand below. The beach came up with a slight jar, and then they were rolling to a stop on the hard-packed sand.

  “Nice going,” Rick commented. He stepped out onto the beach as Scotty cut the engine. The sea mine plant was only a few hundred yards away.

  Scotty joined him and they stood looking at what they could see of it over the high board fence. There was no sound from inside.

  “The place seems to be deserted,” Rick said.

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  “It’s Sunday, remember,” Scotty reminded him. “They’re probably sleeping as all sensible people should do on a Sunday afternoon.”

  Rick already was striding up the bank toward the road that led past the plant. His active imagination raced ahead of him. He had visions of great quantities of sea water pouring into the plant in a steady rush, to be reduced finally to gold, silver, magnesium, aluminum, or any one of a thousand other things. And he had a vision of himself taking part in the magic transformation of sea water to valuable minerals.

  “I was wrong,” Scotty remarked as they reached the road. “Look.”

  A man stood at what was evidently the plant gate. He seemed to be trying to peer through a crack in the boards that formed the gate.

  “He must have just come from church,” Rick said. “Those certainly aren’t work clothes he’s wearing.”

  The man was attired in a severe black suit, and he wore a starched collar, black string tie, and a white shirt. A gray hat was pulled down low on his forehead.

  “Lucky break,” Scotty said. “He’s probably one of the owners coming to see whether his plant is still there.”

  Rick cupped his hands to his mouth. “Hello!”

/>   The man’s head jerked up in surprise. Rick caught a glimpse of a face startling even at that distance. It was astonishingly white.

  “Hey! He’s running!” Scotty exclaimed.

  The man had turned and was departing on a dead run. He rounded a corner of the board fence and disappeared. In a moment they heard the roar of a car engine and a black sedan shot out from beyond the fence and vanished in the direction of the town. Rick just had time to notice that the car’s rear bumper hung at an angle. One end of it almost touched the ground.

  “Well, that beats me!” Rick exclaimed. “He took off like a P-80 as soon as he saw us.”

  “Maybe we startled him.”

  “He must have seen the Cub,” Rick pointed out.

  “He probably saw us when we were up high,” Scotty agreed, “but this fence is pretty tall. I doubt that he saw us sit down on the beach, although he must have heard the motor.”

  Rick nodded. A man standing at the gate of the high fence wouldn’t have been able to see them land.

  Perhaps he had thought the plane was just buzzing the beach. But that didn’t explain why the man had run. Rick scratched his head, still bewildered.

  “Do you suppose he was trying to break in?” he asked.

  Scotty grinned. “If he was, he was the silliest-looking burglar I’ve ever seen.”

  Rick recalled the severe black suit and the stiff collar and laughed. “How many burglars have you seen?”

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  he asked.

  “I had a platoon full of ‘em,” Scotty said. “Let’s see if anyone’s at home.”

  Actually, there were two gates, Rick saw. One was normal size, cut into the fence, the other composed of two whole sections of fence that could be swung back to admit the biggest trucks. Rick applied his eye to a crack in the door but could see no sign of life.

  “Nobody home,” he said. “We’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

  Scotty gave him a quizzical look. “I recognize the tone of voice. You’ve already sold yourself on the idea of working here,”

  “Why not?”Rick said, grinning sheepishly. “So what if I do make up my mind in a hurry?Proves I have a mind to make up.”

  “It’s okay,” Scotty assured him. “I’ve always wanted to work in a sea mine.” He looked longingly in the direction of town. “What do you say we rustle up a little chow? My stomach tells me it’s time to eat.”

  “You and that stomach,” Rick jeered. “You should hire it out to the Bureau of Standards inWashington as a stand-in for their time clock.”

  “I’m a healthy, growing boy,” Scotty said with dignity. “Can I help it if I need lots of vitamins? Come on, let’s stake the plane down and set up the alarm.”

  They walked swiftly back to the plane and took four steel stakes and a coil of wire out of the baggage compartment. Working with the speed of long practice, they pushed the stakes into the sand in the form of a square around the plane,then strung them with two strands of wire, forming a low fence.

  Rick took the ends of the wires and led them into the plane through the door, which he left partially ajar.

  He connected them to clips on a black metal box. Then, careful not to touch any part of the plane, he reached through the door and flipped a switch.

  This washis own adaptation of the standard electric fence, plus an automobile burglar alarm. If anyone touched the fence they would get a harmless but frightening shock. If they jumped the fence and touched the plane, a loud horn would be set off, continuing its ear-splitting blast until someone came to disconnect it.

  “Come on,” Scotty said impatiently. “I’ll faint from weakness and you’ll have to carry me.” He leaped over the fence and started for the road.

  Rick hastened to fall in step. Now that Scotty had mentioned it, he felt hungry, too. “I’ll bet we could get jobs,” he mused. “They must have a lot of electrical equipment. We could help with that.”

  “Sure,” Scotty said. “Can’t you see me with my grandchildren on my knee? I’ll tell ‘em: ‘Yep, Grampy worked in a sea mine once. I’ll never forget it. You should’ve seen us drill the shafts. Straight down a hundred fathoms. The fish used to watch us go by, and their jaws’d be hanging open. Some of ‘em worked for us. We hired sculpins to pull up the bags of gold.’”

  “How did you keep the water from filling up the shafts again, grandpop ?” Rick asked, in a high voice like a small boy’s.

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  “I thought you’d ask that, son,” Scotty said, stroking an imaginary beard. “We had a boy, name of Brant, working for us with a sea scoop. When the shaft’d start to fill, he’d scoop it out. He was good at it, too. Strong back and a weak mind, is why. If he’d been smart like me, he’d ‘a known you can’t drill holes in water, and he’d likely been drowned. Itdon’t pay to know too much.”

  “You’re the living proof of that,” Rick said in his normal voice and ducked as Scotty swung.

  “Remember,” he cautioned, “you’re weak from needing food. Don’t wear yourself out.”

  At the mention of food, Scotty became serious again. “That’s gospel, son. Let’s shake a leg.” He lengthened his stride toward the little town up the road.

  As they reached the outskirts, Rick looked around him, agreeably surprised. From the air, Crayville hadn’t looked like much, but here, on the edge of the town, there were neat little houses, with neatly cropped, green lawns. But, as they entered the town itself, the air of well-being gave way to one of neglect. A big frame structure with a faded sign that proclaimed it The Mansion House dominated the central green. There were a few stores, and a dilapidated motion-picture house.

  Closer to the water front, they began to see signs of the town’s chief industry. Nets, lobster pots, barrels, and rusted fishing equipment. The houses had a dried, weather-beaten look, and the atmosphere was a combination of odors-salt water, tidal marshes, fishing boat engines, and fish long departed from this world.

  Scotty remarked on the fact that they hadn’t seen a sign of life. “I know what the principal industry is here,” he added. “It isn’t fishing, it’s sleeping.”

  They reached the water front and saw that a boardwalk ran along it, a sort of entryway to piers that thrust out into the water. Scotty pointed to a fifty-foot boat tied up near by. “Looks like a tug,” he remarked.

  “It’s a dragger,” Rick told him. “They tow big nets from those things. This town supplies a lot of fish-flounders mostly-to theNew York markets.”

  Suddenly Scotty lifted his head and sniffed. Rick grinned. He always maintained that his friend could scent food farther than a bird dog could scent quail.

  “Now what?”

  “Clam chowder,” Scotty said longingly. “It can only be clam chowder.” He inspected the dock area.

  “Doesn’t that sign say restaurant?”

  “It did once,” Rick agreed. “Let’s give it a try.” The appetizing aroma of sea food sharpenedhis own appetite.

  As they hurried toward the door, Rick took a closer look at the sign. He was able to make out Zukky’s Restaurant. It was open for business, all right, and it seemed to be crowded.

  “This is where the town is spending its Sunday,” Scotty said. “Let’s go in.”

  The mingled aromas of smoke, sawdust, beer, and sea food struck their noses forcibly as they pushed through the door and stepped down the two steps to floor level. Booths were lined against one wall, and Page 6

  the floor was crowded with tables. A number of men glanced up as the boys entered and Rick guessed that they must be fishermen. Their faces were as weatherbeaten as the restaurant sign, and they wore nondescript clothes.

  Towering over four other men seated around one table Rick saw a man who looked more like a lumberjack than a fisherman. He was young and blond, with massive shoulders that stretched the fabric of a bright red shirt. The big man met Rick’s eyes and grinned. At least one friendly face in the crowd, Rick thought. The expressions of the other fishermen ranged from disinterest to
scowls.

  Scotty spotted a counter and swung his leg over a vacant stool. Rick took the stool next to him. The counterman came toward them and made a pretense of wiping off the counter with a much-used dish towel.

  “Yeah?”His eyes swung from one to the other, and the toothpick in his mouth followed suit.

  “Two clam chowders,” Scotty said, not bothering to consult Rick.

  “Yeah.”He turned toward the kitchen, seeming to resent the need of moving.

  Rick looked into the dingy mirror behind the counter and could see almost the whole restaurant. A pudgy man with a round, red face was moving from table to table, stopping to talk with the fishermen. It was so noisy that Rick couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he seemed violent about it, thumping the table now and then to emphasize a point.

  “They ought to rent this place out to make movies,’* Scotty said. “I can imagine pirates striding through the door and yelling for clam chowder.”

  Rick grinned. It did look like the setting for a grade B thriller. “Looks like the local hangout, all right.

  Say, do you suppose anyone here could tell us where to find the sea mine owners? They must live near by.”

  “Herecomes Greasy Joe,” Scotty said. “Ask him.”

  The counterman walked gingerly toward them, balancing two steaming bowls of chowder. He put them down, reached under the counter and brought out a handful of crackers which he dropped on the counter between them.

  “I beg your pardon,” Rick said. “Could you tell me where we might find the owners of the sea mine plant?”

  The counterman had turned to leave, but now he swung back, glaring. “What did you say?” he demanded.

  He sounded ugly. Rick ignored the tone and tried again. “Where can we find the owners of the sea mine?’*

  He realized all at once that the noise behind him had ceased, replaced by an ominous silence. In the mirror, Rick saw the beefy, red-faced man moving toward the counter.

  Scotty spoke into the silence. “Well? What about it?”

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  “What do you want with those guys?” a voice behind them demanded.

  The boys turned on their stools. It was the man Rick had seen in the mirror. His close-set, pale eyes switched rapidly from one boy to the other, and his jaw was thrust forward belligerently.