Robot Trouble

by Bruce Coville

  Mrs. Swenson, watching from the observation tower, screamed and grabbed her husband’s arm—even as her son grabbed the edge of the catwalk just in time to avoid plunging to the bottom of the silo.

  With the top open and the morning sun flooding in, the bottom of that pit was easily visible. Dangling from the catwalk, Hap looked past his feet and felt his stomach lurch.

  Korbuscek yanked at Roger, trying to break his grip on the railing. At the same time he tried to maneuver himself into position to stamp on Hap’s fingers.

  His hands slick with his own blood, Hap was having a hard time clinging to the metal catwalk. When Korbuscek’s boot slammed against the railing just a fraction of an inch from his fingers, it took everything he had to keep from flinching away—a flinch that would have sent him hurtling to the bottom of the shaft.

  The observation room had erupted into chaos. The adults were screaming for action. Most were rushing for the door, getting in each other’s way as they scrambled to try to get to the endangered boys.

  Anthony Phillips, however, was pressed against the observation window. He knew there was no way to get to the silo to help his son. All he could do was watch and ache, as a madman tried to murder his child. His long-standing belief in psychic powers dropped aside as he tried to send his own strength across the gap to Roger.

  Hold on, son, he thought desperately. Hold on!

  It was Dr. Remov who ended things. Shouldering his way to the front of the room, he shoved Brody away from the control panel the sergeant was using to communicate with his men, then picked up the microphone. He turned to stare at the battle. He watched intently, waiting for the right moment—the moment that would cause the boys the least jeopardy.

  Hap had managed to get one leg back on the catwalk and was trying to climb up again.

  Korbuscek spotted him and aimed a ferocious kick at his head.

  Now! thought Remov when he spotted the spy raising his foot. Now, while he’s off balance!

  Flicking on the microphone, he spoke a single word.

  Though his authoritative voice was quiet, the word—a word he had embedded in Ramon Korbuscek’s subconscious mind years before—did its work.

  Overwhelmed by a wave of panic, the spy leaped away from the boys he was trying to kill. With a cry of terror, he plummeted to his death on the floor below.

  Epilogue

  A few nights after a second attempt at a launch had gone off without a hitch, the A.I. Gang relaxed in front of a small campfire on the north beach of Anza-bora Island.

  Rachel looked around. It felt good to have all of them here together—even Wendy, who had broken the long-standing tension that had simmered between them when she asked meekly if saving Rachel’s skin might not be accepted in lieu of a long overdue apology.

  Now the Wonderchild was acting as referee while Trip and Roger wrestled on the sand. Not far away Ray was sitting on his basketball, toasting a marshmallow.

  Rachel leaned back. “Look,” she said, pointing up.

  Hap Swenson followed the line of her finger. “What?” he asked.

  Darkness was falling, the stars slowly coming out of hiding.

  Rachel shrugged. “Euterpe’s up there somewhere. Not quite so far away as all those stars. But she’s definitely there. She’s part of the heavens now, like she was meant to be.”

  She settled back on her elbows, her fiery-red hair brushing against the sand. It made her feel good to think of Euterpe circling the earth, singing her cosmic melody.

  The fire crackled. The ocean surged against the shore.

  Rachel smiled. Even the fact that the transmitter discovered during the search of the rocket had been blamed on Ramon Korbuscek—leaving the gang with no more tangible proof of Black Glove’s existence than before—was not enough to mar her mood tonight.

  What she didn’t know, what none of them knew yet, was that the robot they had set to circling the planet still carried within it the device actually installed by Ramon Korbuscek—a device that carried the power to plunge the world into a nuclear nightmare.

  They didn’t know that now.

  But it wouldn’t be long before they found out.

  Thank you for reading Robot Trouble! Please take a moment to review it on the source you purchased it from. I would truly appreciate it.

  If you enjoyed the story, you’ll almost certainly want to read the other two books in the trilogy, Operation Sherlock, which will tell you how the gang first got together, and Forever Begins Tomorrow, where the stakes get higher, the mystery deepens, and the adventures (and laughs) keep coming fast and furious. (You’ll find a sneak preview of Forever Begins Tomorrow right after these notes.)

  If you’d like to know more about me and my work, you can find me on the web at www.brucecoville.com

  You can also order autographed copies of print versions of most of my books there.

  And now… the first chapters of Forever Begins Tomorrow!

  Turn the page to continue reading from the A.I. Gang series

  “Put Some More Colors in Your Paint Box”

  Roger Phillips ran a hand through his fiery red hair and stared at his father in horror. “You have got to be kidding,” he whispered.

  He glanced down at the small computer Dr. Anthony Phillips had just set before him.

  “You’ve got to be,” he repeated weakly.

  “No such luck,” said Dr. Phillips. The barest hint of a smile flickered over his face.

  Roger looked at the machine with an expression he usually reserved for creamed broccoli. “An electronic tutor? Lessons? Homework?”

  “Afraid so,” said his father, struggling to keep his smile in check. “The government insisted.”

  “What government?” demanded Roger. “Don’t tell me the Chinese are out to get me now!”

  “No, I don’t think you’ve come to their attention yet.”

  “You mean our government is doing this?” cried Roger. “In a period of global instability the United States of America is going to waste one of the great minds of our time on homework?”

  Dr. Phillips shrugged. “Typical bureaucratic inefficiency. You’ll just have to live with it.”

  Rachel, Roger’s twin sister, wandered in from the kitchen, where she had been making herself a cup of coffee—a habit her father often warned her would stunt her growth. Secretly Rachel was hoping he was right. She had decided she was tall enough two days ago when she noticed she had passed their handsome friend Hap Swenson by half an inch.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, taking a sip from a steaming mug that said “Love Me, Love My Computer” in dark blue letters.

  “You’ll never believe it,” said Roger. He turned to his father. “You tell her, Dad. I can’t bring myself to do it.”

  “You’ve got a new tutor,” said Dr. Phillips, gesturing to the small computer. “Actually, this one is Roger’s. Yours is still in the Jeep.”

  Rachel’s face fell.

  “Oh, come on,” said Dr. Phillips, his voice tinged with exasperation. “What did you two expect—a permanent vacation? Just because we’re living on an isolated island while I work on Project Alpha, you can’t think your education is going to come to an end! Frankly, I was relieved when Dr. Hwa gave me these computers. I think having too much spare time has been responsible for a lot of the trouble you and your friends have gotten into these last few months.”

  “Who’s in trouble?” exclaimed a metallic voice. “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Shut up, Paracelsus,” said Rachel. “No one’s talking to you.”

  The handsome bronze head sitting on the Phillipses’ coffee table blinked its eyes in preprogrammed astonishment. “No one’s talking to me? What am I, a social outcast?”

  Rachel turned to her brother. “If you don’t stop tampering with his shutoff cues, someone’s going to rearrange your circuits.”

  “Help!” shrieked Paracelsus. “Circuit attack! Circuit attack!”

  Heaving a sigh, Dr. Phillips reached ac
ross the table and deactivated the head. “Sometimes I wish you two had never dreamed this thing up. It’s made normal conversation almost impossible around here.”

  “Shhh!” hissed Roger. “Just because he can’t talk doesn’t mean he can’t hear you.”

  “Roger,” said Dr. Phillips sternly, “I don’t want you acting like that machine—or any other—has a personality. It’s sloppy thinking!”

  “Then I can’t possibly use this electronic tutor. I can’t learn from someone I can’t relate to!”

  Dr. Phillips made no response.

  “Well, maybe if I tried real hard,” said Roger, reading the expression on his father’s face and deciding a momentary defeat was preferable to death.

  “I thought you’d see it my way. Now, let me show you how this works.”

  Though he had figured out the machine within seconds of seeing it, Roger sat quietly through his father’s demonstration. His mind was elsewhere, trying to find a way to explain that he didn’t have time for this stuff when he and his friends were busy protecting Project Alpha from a spy who would stop at nothing to send every bit of top-secret research done on Anza-bora Island to the terrorist organization known as G.H.O.S.T.

  A mile or so from the Phillips home, Ray “the Gamma Ray” Gammand was standing on the foul line in the Anza-bora base gymnasium. He pushed his thick glasses back up onto his nose and stared at his beloved basketball.

  “You can do it,” he whispered, trying to convince the ball it was going to make it through the hoop on his first shot. “All you have to do is think positive!”

  Though Ray would have died of embarrassment if anyone had caught him talking to his basketball this way, he was so attached to the thing the rest of the gang already half suspected him of doing so.

  He was on the court now to work out his frustration over the morning’s appalling news about the electronic tutor. He had had to wait for the maintenance crew to finish their morning game, which had only added to the tension he was feeling. But he was ready to practice at last. Taking a step forward, he tossed the ball. It bounced off the backboard, wobbled on the rim for a heartbreaking instant—then fell the wrong way.

  Ray said his stepmother’s least favorite word. “Ah-ah!” said a husky female voice. “Temper and basketball don’t mix.”

  Ray turned, his cheeks warm. “Hello, Dr. Fontana. I didn’t know you were there.”

  Dr. Marion Fontana, who had come through the side door of the gym, picked up the ball. She was one of the hardware specialists for the artificial intelligence project that had brought the families of the A.I. Gang to Anza-bora Island. She was also a fitness nut, usually to be found jogging with Dr. Bai’ Ling, a raven-haired lady who gave new meaning to the phrase “well designed.”

  “Here,” she said, tossing Ray the ball. “Try it again. But watch your breathing this time. You muffed your last throw by exhaling wrong.”

  Distracted by wondering where Dr. Ling might be, Ray threw the ball far wide of the hoop.

  Dr. Fontana sighed. “Here, watch me.” Retrieving the ball, she made a perfect swish. Then she dashed under the basket, snatched the ball before it could hit the floor, dribbled it down the court, ran through a series of snappy maneuvers, and sank three more baskets before Ray could catch his breath.

  “See?” she said, tossing the ball back to him. “It doesn’t have anything to do with height!”

  Ray, not yet five feet tall and seemingly on permanent hold as far as growth went, looked at Dr. Fontana gratefully. Though he knew she was being too flip when she said height had nothing to do with basketball, he also felt more hopeful about what he could learn to do than he had at any time in the past year.

  “Would you like me to give you a few tips?” she asked, joining him at the foul line.

  Oh, my God, thought Ray, I think I’m in love. If only she wasn’t over forty!

  While the Gamma Ray was getting his basketball lesson, his friend Trip Davis was getting a lecture about the new electronic tutors.

  “Be reasonable, Tripton,” said his mother, Dr. Millicent Davis, in exasperation. “It won’t be that bad!”

  “That’s what you told Lunkhead here the day you took him to the vet to be fixed,” said Trip, stroking the grotesquely overweight cat sprawled in his lap.

  “Tripton Duncan Delmar Davis!”

  Trip winced. His mother never resorted to his full name unless he was in real trouble.

  Her tapping foot confirmed that this was indeed the case.

  Trip looked at his mother.

  Arms folded over her white lab coat, she glared back.

  Trip’s father, the highly respected landscape artist Elevard Crompton Davis, sat across the room, chuckling to himself.

  “Cromp!” snapped Dr. Davis. She pushed back a strand of the ice-blond hair that had escaped from the severe bun in which she wore it. “Talk to your son!”

  Trying to kill the smile on his face, Mr. Davis ambled over to where his wife and son were facing off. “What do you want me to say?” he asked, placing a paint-stained hand on his wife’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know! Tell him how important schoolwork is. Tell him we want him to achieve so we can be proud of him. Tell him we’ll kill him if he doesn’t straighten out.”

  Mr. Davis nodded. Turning to Trip, he said, “Everything your mother just said is true.”

  “Cromp!”

  Mr. Davis sighed. “Look, Tripper, I know you and your friends are keeping busy with all kinds of projects. But you can’t concentrate on nothing but computers. You have to develop all the strands of your knowledge and ability.”

  “Why?”

  Mr. Davis paused. He looked puzzled for a moment, then took his son by the arm and led him to the easel where he was putting the finishing touches on his latest painting. Next to the easel stood a small table holding his “art box,” a wooden container cluttered with tubes of paint and brushes of every size and shape.

  He took the canvas from the easel and put a blank one in its place. To Trip’s astonishment, he then dumped the box of paints and brushes onto the floor.

  “All right, that’s your life,” he said, pointing to the blank canvas. “Hardly touched, yours to do with as you will.”

  Trip nodded, wondering where this was going.

  His father bent over and picked up a single tube of paint and one medium-size brush. He dropped them into the art box, handed the box to Trip, and said, “Now paint.”

  “It’s going to be kind of dull with only one color.”

  Mr. Davis shrugged and tapped his son on the forehead. “Then put some more colors in your paint box. Take it from an artist: It will make your life a hell of a lot more interesting.”

  Trip smiled. “Okay, I get the message, Dad. I’ll give the thing a try.”

  Cromp Davis smiled back at his son. “That’s good,” he said. “To tell you the truth, if you want to live your life in black and white, that’s your problem anyway. But I appreciate you getting me off the hook with your mother. Come on, I’ll help you move this thing into your bedroom.”

  Five minutes later Trip had settled himself in front of the new computer. He was already regretting the promise he had made to his father. Glancing at the array of electronic gadgetry scattered around his room, he fought down an urge to push the machine off his desk and turn his attention to one of the far more interesting projects he was currently in the middle of.

  Shaking his head, he sighed and turned on the new machine.

  Attached to the right side of the computer was a rack of tubes, each about the size of a roll of LifeSavers. Trip recognized them as a refined version of the Watson Double-Vapor Memory System, invented by Dr. Werner Watson, father of his friend Wendy Wendell. He smiled. At least this was a state-of-the-art machine. With their combination of durability and enormous memory capacity, the Watson tubes were a vast improvement on all previous storage systems.

  The rack held two rows of five tubes. It was hinged at the rear, which allowed a u
ser to flip it out to the side and read the labels on the tubes.

  With a sigh, Trip swung the rack open.

  The labels were pretty general: math, science, history, and so on. But he knew that with their memory capacity, each tube could hold a vast library of books and films on its assigned topic.

  Grudgingly, he booted up the machine. The screen blinked into life with gratifying speed.

  Trip blinked. The introductory message he found himself looking at was one of the weirdest he had ever seen:

  “The first series of questions on this tube will help you prepare your computer to effectively meet your needs through all future lessons. It is essential that you answer honestly! Do you understand? Type Y for yes, N for no.”

  What’s this honesty bit? he wondered as he pressed the Y key.

  A new message appeared on the screen. Trip wrinkled his brow. This was even weirder than the last one:

  “Thank you. Are you alone? BE HONEST! Type Y or N.”

  What difference does it make if I’m alone? he wondered, tapping the Y key again.

  When the next message appeared, he understood. After a brief jolt of surprise, he read it eagerly, then looked for a way to print it out.

  Snatching up the paper, he bolted for the door, thinking, Wait till the gang gets a load of this!

  Sherlock

  Hap Swenson glanced up from the rivet he was tightening in Rin Tin Stainless Steel’s jaw and decided that the robotic bloodhound would have to wait. The constant motion of the tiny blond girl striding back and forth in front of him was too distracting for him to do a good job now.

  Hap watched her for a moment longer, studying the way she moved, the way she looked. The first thing anyone noticed about Wendy “the Wonderchild” Wendell was her height—or rather, the lack thereof. She was, in fact, the only person on Anza-bora Island shorter than the Gamma Ray.

  After that you saw the pigtails, the grubby sweatshirt borrowed from her father, and the snub nose lightly dusted with freckles.