Robot Trouble

by Bruce Coville

  Robot Trouble

  The A.I. Gang, Book Two

  Bruce Coville

  To my mother, who gave me the gift of music.

  Contents

  Two Spies

  The Scroungers

  Laughter Here, Terror There

  Robots

  The Music of the Spheres

  The Warning

  Suspicion

  The Trap

  The Brain Ceil

  Robo-Dieaster

  Rachel and Hap

  Dr. Remov

  Rift in the Ranks

  The Intruder

  Computer Talk

  Twerps in Space

  The Missile Silo

  Down for the Countdown

  Rude Awakenings

  Variations on a Theme

  The Robot Brigade

  Epilogue

  Preview: Forever Begins Tomorrow

  A Personal History by Bruce Coville

  Two Spies

  This entire mess is the fault of those brats who call themselves the A.I. Gang! thought the shadowy figure slipping into the secret room hidden beneath the Anza-bora Island computer center. If they had minded their own business, everything would be fine.

  The figure crossed to the far side of the room and thrust a pair of black-gloved hands into a cage mounted on the wall. The birds inside began to flutter and scuffle. After a moment the hands closed over one of them and drew it from the cage.

  “This is insane!” muttered the mysterious figure, deftly strapping a capsule to the bird’s leg. “I’m on an island equipped with the most advanced technology in the world. Yet to communicate with my Executive Council, I am forced to resort to the most primitive methods imaginable. If those A.I. brats don’t watch out—”

  The words were interrupted by a soft cooing. The black-gloved figure glanced at the pigeon, then laughed. It was only a bird. How could it know that the person holding it was Black Glove, chief operative of G.H.O.S.T.? Or that G.H.O.S.T. was trying to steal the secrets of the world’s most advanced computer project? Or that those secrets were guarded by an electronic blanket that shielded Anza-bora Island from the outside world—a blanket that could have been pierced by the transmitter Black Glove had mounted inside the Project Alpha computer, if those kids hadn’t found and removed it!

  No, the pigeon only knew that it wanted to be free to fly home.

  Black Glove wrapped the bird in a towel, then stuffed the towel into a gym bag. It was late and the computer center should be empty. Still, there was no point in taking any chances.

  On the next floor up the spy spotted a light in an open office—one of the Project Alpha scientists working late. Quickly the black gloves were stripped off and hidden in the pocket of a white lab coat.

  The researcher glanced up from her work and nodded pleasantly as Black Glove passed her doorway. And why not? In day-to-day life Black Glove was a well-known island personality. No one suspected that the friendly smile they knew so well masked a deadly, now desperate, enemy.

  Outside the computer center the spy unwrapped the pigeon. A moment later the bird was soaring toward the clouds. Cutting an arc across the sky, it headed east, toward home—G.H.O.S.T. headquarters.

  Black Glove felt an uncomfortable shiver. The Executive Council of G.H.O.S.T. could be most unpleasant when it was angry. And it was sure to be angry when it got the message the pigeon carried:

  Transmission of data delayed by unexpected circumstances. Seeking new route to get information off island. B.G.

  Black Glove faded into the shadows, thinking furiously. There had to be some other way to get information off Anza-bora, a way those nosy kids couldn’t interfere with.

  Of course, the fact that the kids thought their enemy had fled the island on a stolen boat should help slow them down. But even so…

  Reentering the computer center, Black Glove vowed two things. First, there would be no rest until the new information path was established. Second, this time no one would be allowed to stand in the way. Not even the A.I. Gang.

  Not even if they were just kids.

  Not even if that meant it would cost them their lives.

  Heading back to the secret room, the spy patted the pockets of the white lab coat, then shivered with a wave of cold terror.

  One glove was missing…

  Ramon Korbuscek moved slowly toward the abandoned building. It was a windmill, ruined by one or another of Central Europe’s seemingly endless wars.

  Someone with extremely good eyes might have been able to see him picking his way through the shadows that surrounded the windmill—but probably not. Nor would they have heard him, for Korbuscek moved as silently as a hawk floating on the wind.

  Associated with no government, loyal to no single organization, he was one of the deadliest free agents in the world.

  He paused to study his destination. One crumpled blade rested on the ground. The others, battered and torn by time, weather, and war, cast eerie, broken shadows around him.

  A moment later the spy slipped beneath the crumpled blade. He whistled a five-note tune as he entered the building. A pair of rats scurried away from his feet. Pigeons cooed and whirred above him.

  All else was silent.

  Korbuscek frowned and whistled again.

  From the darkest shadows on the opposite side of the mill came an answering whistle—not the same tune, but a variant of it, chosen months earlier as a signal for this meeting.

  Korbuscek moved slowly across the floor, careful to avoid the gaping holes, many of them large enough to drop him through to the basement.

  A woman emerged from the shadows. “I have your orders.” Her voice was low and husky. Her hand trembled as she held out a brown envelope.

  “And my money?”

  The woman frowned. She was well aware of how much Korbuscek would make for this job, and she considered the fee outrageous. But her superiors decided these matters with no thought for her opinions.

  “Your usual rate,” she said gruffly, passing him another envelope.

  “What’s the job?” asked Korbuscek, relaxing a little.

  The woman shrugged. “The orders are in the envelope. All I know is that you’ll be going to Anza-bora Isl—”

  Before she could finish the sentence, Korbuscek grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her to the floor.

  A shot rang out above them, then another.

  Without a word the two separated. Scuttling into the deepest shadows, Korbuscek pressed himself against a worm-eaten beam and held his breath. Three more shots were fired. But there was no cry of pain.

  When enough time had passed that he was sure his contact had managed to escape, Korbuscek allowed himself a brief smile. As little as he cared for her, he would not have wanted his baby sister to be captured by these particular enemies.

  Moving as silently as he had come, he left the mill, eager to read his orders.

  The Scroungers

  Ray “the Gamma Ray” Gammand raced up to the abandoned house the A.I. Gang used as a secret headquarters. Thudding to a stop, he checked his watch, then let out a sigh.

  He was late again.

  He tucked his beloved basketball between his knees, then took off his thick glasses and wiped them on his shirt while he caught his breath. Trying to act casual, he opened the door and stepped in.

  Unfortunately, he tripped over an untied shoelace, dropped his basketball, and stumbled into the living room.

  “Somebody’s la-ate!” sang the handsome bronze head sitting in the middle of the coffee table.

  “Shut up, Paracelsus,” said Ray.

  “Nobody loves me,” sighed the head, which had been created by the Phillips twins, Roger and Rachel. The twins were constantly programming Paracelsus with new remarks direc
ted at their friends’ behavior. By setting it to respond to things they expected the other kids in the gang to do, they could make its comments remarkably appropriate.

  “Glad you could make it, Ray,” said Trip Davis. Tall (over six feet!) with sandy-brown hair, slender and intense, Trip was sitting against the wall on the opposite side of the room. To his right, in a chair that barely let her feet touch the floor, was Wendy Wendell the Third, a pint-sized dynamo the gang sometimes referred to as “the Wonderchild.”

  Straddling the workbench across the room from Wendy was Hap Swenson. As usual, the handsome, sturdy blond had a screwdriver in his hand and was poking away at some gadget—probably one that the Wonderchild had designed.

  Sitting between Hap and Trip were the red-haired Phillips twins, who Ray thought of privately as “Volume One” and “Volume Two.” This was because the twins carried so much information in their heads that between the two of them they were a virtual walking encyclopedia.

  Ray sighed as he finished his inventory. That was it—all five of them. He was last again.

  “So what’s the big emergency?” he asked.

  “No emergency,” said Wendy. “Just a new idea. Rachel wants us to add an optical scanner to our system. Problem is, we have to build the darn thing!” She took a bite from the enormous burger clenched between her hands and smiled blissfully. “Should be fun,” she added, speaking with her mouth full.

  Hap looked up from whatever he was tinkering with, scratched his blond head, and said, “You guys have got me again. Just what the heck is an optical scanner?”

  Ray relaxed. If they hadn’t explained that to Hap yet, he couldn’t be too late. Their greaser-techie friend was the only member of the gang who didn’t come from a scientific family, and they often had to fill him in on the reasoning behind their plans. The amazing thing was, he was such a whiz with tools that once they had explained something to him, he could almost always build it.

  “A scanner is a device that will let us teach the computer to read,” said Rachel.

  “I wish someone would teach me to read!”

  “Shut up, Paracelsus,” said several of the kids simultaneously.

  Seeing the puzzled expression that remained on Hap’s face, Rachel’s twin took up the explanation. “Basically, the scanner will photograph a page of printed material, then translate it into symbols the computer can understand.”

  “Which means we’ll be able to feed information into Sherlock several times faster than we do now,” put in Trip, who, because of his full name—Tripton Duncan Delmar Davis—was also known as “3-D.”

  As for “Sherlock,” that was the gang’s pet project—a computer program designed to sort clues and solve crimes.

  Trip stood up and began pacing across the floor. His lanky frame towered over Ray, who was barely more than five feet tall. “It will be like going from a tricyle to a ten-speed as far as our programming goes,” he added.

  “But Sherlock won’t actually understand what it reads,” objected Hap. “Will it?”

  “Of course not,” said Rachel. “At least, not yet. That’s what the information programming project is all about—turning that material into usable data for the computer. But right now we’re wasting an enormous amount of time typing the raw stuff into the computer. The best thing would be if we had this stuff on CD-ROM or something, but, unfortunately, we don’t, and with the communication blockade we can’t get it without a lot of explanation. The scanner is our next best bet. It should save us a huge amount of time.”

  “Which means,” said Wendy, tugging on one of her blond pigtails, “we might even win the race!”

  The “race” Wendy was referring to had begun shortly after the head of Project Alpha, Dr. Hwa, had gathered a handful of the United States’ top computer scientists at the deserted Anza-bora Island Air Force Base. Their mission: to create a “conscious” computer—a computer that could not only think, but be aware that it was thinking; aware, in fact, of its own existence.

  Actually, the gang had started “Operation Sherlock” almost as a way of getting even for the disruption the Anza-bora project had created in their lives. With the exception of Hap, whose father had been chief mechanic for the island’s recently abandoned Air Force base, the kids had all been uprooted from their homes almost without notice when their parents decided to join the project.

  Even worse, it had been without explanation. Security on the project was so tight no one not actually involved in the work was supposed to know what it was about. When some clever guesswork on the gang’s part tipped them off to the real reason their parents had come to Anza-bora, the kids decided to try to take a shot at the same goal.

  Their initial idea had been somewhat less ambitious. It started when someone attached a small microphone to Rachel’s collar during the first meeting of the top island staff and their families. The microphone had self-destructed as soon as the kids discovered it, but the incident had spurred the gang into launching “Operation Sherlock”—their attempt to develop a detective program that would help them sort and interpret the clues they gathered about the “bug.”

  It was Roger, who—without vote or discussion had somehow become the gang’s unofficial leader—who had first floated the idea that they should go all the way and compete with their parents to create a program that truly demonstrated A.I.—“artificial intelligence.”

  What none of them liked to talk about was the fact that since the bug had been planted on Rachel at that first meeting, each one of them had at least one parent who was a prime suspect. None of them liked living with the knowledge that one (or both) of their parents might be a spy.

  Even before Sherlock was operational the kids had managed to thwart a plan to blow up the island. In the process they had accidentally discovered a device designed to transmit all the work the Project Alpha scientists did to somewhere off island.

  Unfortunately, like the bug on Rachel’s collar, the transmitter had self-destructed before they could show it to anyone. As a result, their warnings about a spy among the project’s top scientists were not being taken seriously by anyone except cranky, lanky, freckle-faced Dr. Stanley Remov.

  The gang had responded to the official disbelief in the only way they could—by stepping up work on their own project.

  In the process, they had learned to pull together as a team.

  For that reason, no one was really surprised when only four days after the meeting where the scanner was proposed, they were nearly ready to install it.

  “I just need two more parts,” said Hap, “and I’ll have her up and running.”

  He tapped a few letters into the keyboard sitting next to his workbench. The keyboard was attached to the terminal (now wildly modified and upgraded) that had been left in the house when the Air Force abandoned the island.

  The terminal was attached to the island’s incredibly powerful mainframe, which was housed a mile or so away in the computer center.

  “Good morning, Hap,” said a crisp voice from across the room. “What can I do for you?”

  Hap smiled. He still got a kick out of the way the others had programmed the computer’s vocal simulator to sound like Basil Rathbone, the actor who had played Sherlock Holmes in so many old movies.

  Hap typed in a series of classified codes that Wendy had wrangled out of the computer and called up an inventory of all the spare parts on the island. He scanned the list, then entered the codes for the items he needed.

  “Those parts can be found in Warehouse Two, aisle seven, level six,” reported Sherlock.

  “You know what that means,” said Roger.

  “Scrounging time!” replied Trip with a smile.

  “Major scrounge,” agreed Ray.

  As a team, Trip and Ray were unbeatable at turning up hard-to-locate parts. “Beg, borrow, or temporarily reposition” was their motto, though the only things they ever actually took without permission were items the Air Force had abandoned when it left the island.

 
Items such as those in Warehouse Two.

  “Take Rinty with you,” suggested Roger, gesturing to the mechanical mutt the gang had started building as a test project a few weeks earlier. “You never know. He might come in handy.”

  Warehouse Two was dark, and aside from the noise Ray had made tripping over a box when they first came in, so quiet that it was almost eerie.

  “Aisle seven should be that way,” whispered Trip, shining his flashlight to their right.

  Clink!

  It was nothing, really; the tiniest of sounds. But when Ray heard it he felt his stomach twist into a hard little ball. Tiny as it was, that sound had no business at all in a warehouse that was supposed to be abandoned! He switched off his flashlight and grabbed Trip’s arm.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “I heard,” replied Trip, clicking off his own light. He licked his lips nervously, straining to see through the sudden darkness.

  “What do you think it was?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t like it.” Trip paused, then added, “I wish you weren’t so clumsy!”

  Ray felt himself blush. He hadn’t meant to stumble over that box! In fact, he had been making an extra effort to be quiet.

  “It’s coming this way,” whispered Trip. “Do me a favor and don’t move!”

  “I’m frozen in my tracks!”

  Clink!

  The sound was closer this time. Trip pressed himself against the wall, fervently wishing he had never returned Ninja Experiments with Invisibility to the library.

  His wish intensified when a thin beam of light struck the floor in front of the boys.

  Pretend you’re a box! Ray ordered himself, flinching away from the light. Maybe no one will notice you.

  The sound drew closer.

  Why did I volunteer for this scrounging mission? wondered Trip miserably. I could be home eating spinach.

  Trip hated spinach. But at the moment facing a plateful of the disgusting green stuff seemed infinitely preferable to being caught by whoever was prowling the warehouse.

  Nervous as he was, the worst Ray was expecting was an angry member of Sergeant Brody’s security force. As he was wondering just how much trouble they were going to be in an ear-piercing blare shattered the stillness. Ray looked up, and began to scream. A monstrous creature with curved fangs, flashing red eyes, and a face that made sudden death seem preferable to being captured was heading straight for him, clawlike hands stretching and grasping ahead of it.