face with a grin. “You touch me, Grimes,” he said. “But I’m not surprised—I have been expecting this. Yes, and I’ll admit I’ve been thinking about it for some time. Why shouldn’t I go? It might be a pleasant vacation.”
“Vacation? Don’t be absurd. We’ll be working hard. We might find a moment or two for relaxation, but no more. Well, what do you say?”
The Professor stroked his chin pensively. Then he said abruptly, “I’ll do it!”
“Excellent,” said Grimes, and they shook hands.
“Now, what about Danny?” asked the Professor, leading the way down the hall toward the laboratory. “It would be a wonderful trip for the boy.”
Dr. Grimes scowled. “You know my views on children, Bullfinch. They are always in the way. And Danny is reckless and headstrong.”
“I’ll admit he sometimes jumps into things,” the Professor murmured. “But then, he’s a boy, after all. He is essentially very serious, very calm, quiet and reliable—”
As he said this, he threw wide the door. There came a crash of glass, and something hurtled through the air toward the two scientists. Instinctively, Dr. Grimes held up his hands. The object landed right in them.
Danny, Irene, and Joe stood wide-eyed in surprise. Danny held a hammer, and there were bits of broken test tubes scattered about from a rack that had fallen to the floor. Dr. Grimes looked down at the thing he had caught.
“A football!” he sputtered. “Playing football in a laboratory! Is that what you call calm and quiet, or serious and reliable?”
“Gosh, I’m sorry, Dr. Grimes,” said Danny. “It was an accident.”
“Do you expect us to believe you were playing football by accident?” cried Grimes.
“We weren’t playing,” Danny said. “We were trying to break it. I had just hit it with the hammer, and it flew off to one side and knocked over the test tubes and just happened to shoot toward you as you opened the door.”
Professor Bullfinch blinked in a dazed fashion. “Just a moment, Dan,” he said. “For some reason, the more you explain, the more confused I become. You say you were trying to break the ball? But you weren’t playing with it? Why do you want to break it?”
“Professor,” said Danny earnestly, “I don’t think that ball can be broken. I think we’ve invented an unbreakable football!”
Professor Bullfinch slowly took the football from Dr. Grimes’s hands and stared at it. Now he could see that the football itself had been deflated, and that it was inside a very thin shell of plastic. This shell, however, was shaped like a football. The Professor pressed it with his fingers. It was as rigid as steel.
“Perhaps you’d better explain,” he said.
“Really, Bullfinch,” Dr. Grimes began. “Do we have the time—?”
“My dear Grimes,” said the Professor. “You are here for a rest. There’s plenty of time. Go on, Danny.”
Quickly, the boy explained how he had heated the plastic and cooled it again on the window sill, and how he had asked Joe to throw up the football without thinking that it might land in the crucible.
“When we fished it out,” he said, “it was covered with plastic. We cleaned up the mess and then tried to get the plastic off the ball. There’s one place, near the lacing, where there isn’t any plastic—look, you can see it. Joe had the idea of letting the air out of the ball. So we did, but we still couldn’t get the ball out. We tried hammering the plastic, but, although it’s only about as thick as an eggshell, we couldn’t even scratch it. We jumped on it and pounded it with a chair, and I was just hammering it again when you walked in.”
The Professor adjusted his glasses. Then, very slowly and deliberately, he put the ball on the ground, supported himself on the edge of the lab bench, and stood on it.
“Remarkable,” he muttered.
“I thought we could even make football helmets out of that stuff,” Joe put in. “Or—you know, if you had a suit made of it, you could take a shower without getting wet.”
Dr. Grimes uttered a snarl. “I have listened to quite enough of this nonsense,” he burst out. “Bullfinch! I refuse to waste any more time on children’s games and toys.”
But the Professor wasn’t listening. He was staring at Joe, who goggled back at him solemnly. “Say that again,” said the Professor.
“I said,” repeated Dr. Grimes irritably, “that I refuse to waste any more—”
“Not you,” said the Professor. “I meant Joe. That if we had a suit of this we could shower without getting wet. Was that it?”
Joe nodded silently and somewhat nervously.
“Have you lost your mind, Bullfinch?” Dr. Grimes demanded.
“I don’t think so,” replied the Professor. “No, I’m sure I haven’t. But I may have found something.”
“Found something?”
“Yes,” said the Professor, picking up the football. “The answer to almost all your problems, Grimes.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Dr. Grimes’s Plans
There was silence for a moment, and then Dr. Grimes’s expression slowly changed from annoyance to interest. He looked at the plastic-shelled football in the Professor’s hands, and then he said, “I see. You really think there is a possibility—?”
Danny had been gazing in perplexity at the two scientists, and now he said, “Professor, I’m sorry if there’s something wrong. It’s my fault for telling Joe to throw the ball to me. But you wanted me to get rid of the plastic anyway…”
“There’s nothing wrong, my boy,” said the Professor. “On the contrary, it may be very right. Sit down, all three of you.”
The young people made themselves comfortable, all in a row, on the edge of the lab bench, swinging their legs. Then he went on, “You see, Dr. Grimes is planning a remarkable project for the exploration of the ocean floor. He intends to build a bathyscaphe.”
“A what?” Joe interrupted. “A bathtub on skates?”
“Not quite, Joe,” laughed Professor Bullfinch. “Bathy—from the Greek word for deep, and scaphe from the word meaning boat. A deep-diving submarine in which men can go three or four miles down into the sea. Actually, the word ‘submarine’ is wrong. It is more like a balloon. But instead of floating up into the air, it floats down into the ocean.”
The Professor paused and filled his pipe. Then he continued, “The bathyscaphe was developed by Professor Auguste Piccard, the famous Swiss scientist, about 1948. Before that, Professor William Beebe had made his deep-sea descents in an iron ball called a bathysphere, which was dropped at the end of a steel cable. Professor Piccard’s bathyscaphe consists of a ball-shaped cabin underneath a large tank of lightweight gasoline. The gasoline, being lighter than water, makes the ship
