Computer Clues

by Judy Delton

  Mr. Duff ruffled Molly’s hair. “That’s because you have an alarm clock in your stomach and you were hungry,” he laughed.

  But Molly wasn’t that hungry. She was psychic—she knew what other people were thinking or doing before they told her. She knew that for sure.

  “For supper I made one of my—” But Molly stopped her dad in midsentence. She closed her eyes and concentrated. “You made homemade pizza!” she cried.

  Her dad nodded. “I’ll bet you smelled it,” he said.

  Molly shook her head. “I have ESP,” she said mysteriously. “I didn’t smell it or see it.”

  Molly was learning a lot more in Pee Wee Scouts than how to use a computer. She was learning to read minds.

  “I think you smelled it baking,” said Mr. Duff.

  “I did not!” said Molly.

  Molly and her mom and dad ate almost all the big pepperoni pizza. Molly found she was hungrier than she had thought. Using the computer, and thinking so hard, took a lot of energy.

  CHAPTER

  6

  ESP to the Rescue!

  At dinner Molly told her parents about her topic. “Barns,” she said.

  “I love old barns,” said Mrs. Duff. “They remind me of staying at my grandparents’ farm in Norwood. Sometimes we’d sleep overnight in the hayloft.”

  “I need to find out about barns around here,” said Molly. “And all I can find are barns in Idaho.”

  “I can help with that,” said her dad. “Right after the dishes.”

  “Good,” said Molly.

  When they finished eating, Molly said to her mom, “I’ll bet you’re going to ask me to clear the table.”

  “Why, yes!” her mom said. “I was going to ask you to do that so we can have some ice cream.”

  “With chocolate sauce,” Molly continued.

  “Yes,” said her mother. “You’re way ahead of me tonight!”

  “Molly is psychic,” said her dad. “She has ESP.”

  “Did you learn about that in school?” asked Mrs. Duff.

  “In Scouts,” said Molly. “We knew what our new badge would be even before Mrs. Peters told us.”

  Molly cleared the table and got the ice cream from the freezer. She was eager to get back upstairs to finish her report. She ate her dessert quickly. Then her mom said, “Why don’t I do the dishes while you two work on your report?”

  Molly and her dad went up to Molly’s room.

  “Now, I think we have to look under ‘Minnesota.’ Then ‘barns,’ ” said Mr. Duff. He was almost right. They had to try several words before they found any information they could use.

  “You can’t give up when you’re looking for something,” said Mr. Duff. “If it isn’t under one thing, you have to try another. It takes a while sometimes.”

  But sure enough, historical barns turned up under “Minnesota’s historical buildings.” There was one very old cattle barn at the fairgrounds that had been built in 1900 and was still in use. It was made of concrete, and it was gray, not red.

  Molly also found a building at the fairgrounds that used to be a barn, back when there was a private farm on the land. Now it was used as a pavilion and snack bar during carnivals and fairs and some ball games in the summer. It didn’t look much like a barn anymore, but Molly knew that was what it used to be.

  Molly thanked her dad for helping her. She decided to write her report, now that she had found the right place on the Internet.

  Molly took a lot of notes and wrote down lots of barn facts. She learned that there were a poultry barn and a horse barn and a sheep barn. There was even a barn that used to house the animals and their owners when people brought their prize pets to the fair from out of town. Then she opened a blank page on the computer. She began her report by writing down the most important information.

  When she finished writing, she had several pages. She pressed the SAVE key and the PRINT key. There was her report, all ready to be turned in on Tuesday. She stretched her arms and yawned. Then she turned off the laptop.

  There was a rap on her door.

  “Molly, I have to use the laptop for a little while tonight to check the stock market,” said her mom.

  “Okay,” Molly said. “My report is finished.”

  “You work fast!” said her mom. She picked up the laptop and carried it downstairs. Molly took a warm bath and crawled into bed, with thoughts of barns and ESP all jumbled together in her head. Just as she was nodding off for the night, her mom stuck her head in the door to say good night.

  “By the way,” Mrs. Duff said. “One of our documents is missing from the computer. Dad and I can’t seem to find it. I don’t imagine you know anything about that, do you?” When Molly didn’t answer, her mother headed back downstairs.

  Molly had completely forgotten about all those words that had disappeared from the screen. She was wide awake now. How in the world could she get those words back onto the laptop? Should she march downstairs and confess what had happened? Should she admit she had been careless? Or should she try to put the whole thing out of her mind and go to sleep? But how could she sleep when she was so worried?

  What if those words were very important, and they were gone forever? Would her family lose money on the stock market? Would the tax people come and arrest them and put them all in jail? Where in the world did those words go? Molly couldn’t think of any place she could start looking. They could be in the basement or in the attic, or even floating in the air over the house. They could be hiding in some cloud over the ocean. Even in the ocean itself.

  If Molly really had ESP, she would be able to concentrate and get the words back, no matter where they had gone. It was worth a try. Molly buried her head in her pillow and closed her eyes very tight. She could see some of the words in her mind’s eye, marching along the screen. She thought and thought about them but nothing happened. Tears came to Molly’s eyes. Her parents would never trust her with the computer again. She would have to go back to using books and a pencil and paper and snail mail—the old-fashioned way of writing to people.

  Molly pictured all the Pee Wees reading and writing in cyberspace, while she was sharpening a yellow pencil in Mrs. Peters’s basement.

  She decided to give her search one more try. “Come back, come back, come back!” she yelled. It seemed as if it must be midnight, but Molly’s little alarm clock showed it was only nine. When she was just about to give up on her ESP, her dad called to her.

  “Molly, are you asleep? Can you come down here a minute?”

  They must know what she had done. Maybe it was her dad who had ESP, not Molly. Maybe he knew she had erased those words.

  Molly went downstairs.

  “Molly, one of our files is missing, and we can’t seem to get it back. We have it saved on a backup disk, so it’s not really lost. But I thought we should talk about being careful not to press the DELETE key in the wrong place when you are using the computer.”

  Then they did know! They did have ESP! But if the words were on this little disk, why were they so worried?

  “I did it!” cried Molly. “I wanted to get all those words off the screen and I pushed the DELETE button by mistake.”

  Her dad frowned. “I’ll show you what to do when that happens,” he said. He turned the laptop on and showed Molly how to press the ESCAPE button and clear the screen without losing any important words.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Mrs. Duff. “You can’t learn everything about computers in a few hours.”

  Molly sighed. “I guess not,” she said.

  “We just wanted you to know that we have the words saved on this disk,” Mr. Duff said. “We know what a worrier you are, and we were afraid you wouldn’t be able to sleep if you thought you had done something wrong.”

  “I’ll be really careful next time,” said Molly, giving her parents a hug and going back to bed.

  As she crawled into bed, she remembered something. Just at the moment she was concentrating the hardest on
those lost words, her dad had called her downstairs to tell her about the disk that the words were on. Her concentration had paid off. She did have ESP after all!

  The next morning on the way to school, Mary Beth asked Molly what her report was on.

  “Barns,” said Molly. “And I’m all done with my report.”

  Mary Beth didn’t seem interested in barns. And she didn’t have any questions to ask Molly about them. She probably thinks they’re boring, thought Molly.

  “Ferris wheels were fun to look up,” said Mary Beth. “Lots of people get sick on them. Especially when they stop at the top.”

  Once they got to school, the girls forgot about computers. School didn’t mix with Pee Wee Scouts. And it wasn’t half as much fun.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Snail Mail Out—E-mail In

  After school the Pee Wees talked about their computer reports again. Some of the Scouts had not started their projects yet, but some of them were finished.

  “There’s piles of stuff about jugglers,” said Rachel. “I could even order tickets on the computer to see a juggler next year at the fair!”

  “Molly’s report is about barns,” said Mary Beth. No one said anything. “And mine is about Ferris wheels.”

  Everyone wanted to hear about Ferris wheels. Molly didn’t need ESP to tell she had a boring subject for her report. Even Ferris wheels were more exciting than barns.

  Roger was pretending to be a fortune-teller. “You will be a race car driver and lose all the races,” he said to Sonny.

  “I will not!” shouted Sonny. “I’ll win them all!”

  “Will not,” said Roger.

  “Will too,” said Sonny. “You don’t know how to tell fortunes. Fortune cookies are better. I had one that said I was going to be really rich.”

  “Hey, I have more talent than a fortune cookie!” said Roger. “I had a teacher in my other school who was a mind reader. She called me a troublemaker and she didn’t even know me yet!”

  “She probably had ESP,” said Molly to Mary Beth. “If she could tell that Roger was a troublemaker.”

  The Pee Wees changed the subject and began to talk about their own reports. Rat’s knees! Who wanted to listen to stuff about snakes and dairy farming? But even those things sounded more fun than barns. At least Molly would get a badge. That was what counted.

  At the next Pee Wee meeting, Mrs. Peters collected the reports that were finished. “Molly, you got my favorite subject—old barns! Did you have a good time doing it?”

  Molly nodded. She didn’t tell Mrs. Peters about erasing Dad’s file. And she didn’t tell her how ESP had helped solve the problem. Molly thought it was best to keep some things to herself—at least for now.

  “Well, we are on the way to our computer badge!” said their leader with a smile. “When we are finished, you will all be computer experts!” Tim was frowning. “Well, at least you’ll be on speaking terms with the machine,” she added.

  “Now, today we are going to learn all about E-mail. It is just like writing a real letter and mailing it, but it’s much faster. The E stands for electronic. We mail these letters electronically. If we write a letter on paper, we have to find an envelope and write the address on it. Then we have to seal it and buy a stamp and go to the mailbox and mail it. And we often have to wait several days until it gets to where it’s going. Sometimes it even goes to the wrong address.”

  “That can’t happen with E-mail,” said Rachel. “When my dad was in Israel, I wrote him an E-mail, and he got it just like this.” Rachel snapped her fingers. “If I had mailed it snail mail, it would have taken over a week to get there. He would have been back home before it even reached him!”

  The Pee Wees were impressed.

  “How could a letter get there just like that?” said Sonny, snapping his fingers the way Rachel had.

  Mrs. Peters smiled and turned on the computer. She clicked the mouse on the “Internet” symbol. When a row of small pictures came on, she clicked on a symbol that said “E-mail.”

  “This is all you do,” she said, showing the Pee Wees how to use the mouse to place the arrow correctly. “Now we will click on ‘new message.’ ” She did. Something that looked like a piece of stationery appeared on the screen. There was also a little picture of an address book.

  “I’ll put the little arrow on ‘address book’ now and click once,” she said.

  The Pee Wees watched. A list of names came on the screen. They looked just like the names in Molly’s address book at home.

  “Now, you choose who you want to write to and click on that name. It will pop to the top of the sheet and the machine will send your letter to that address automatically.”

  She clicked on the name “Mrs. Duff.” Molly’s mother’s name appeared in the address box. “All I do is write a letter.”

  “Dear Mrs. Duff,” she wrote. “We are at our Scout meeting and we are learning E-mail. We decided to write to you at your office. Are you working hard? Have a nice day. Love from the Pee Wees.”

  “Now,” said Mrs. Peters, “our letter is finished. What do we need to do next?”

  Hands waved. “We have to print it out, like our reports,” said Tracy.

  “No, we don’t have to print it out,” said their leader. “Then it would be a regular letter needing a stamp. What we do is mail this, right from the machine!”

  “Wow!” said the Pee Wees.

  “It’s like magic!” said Kenny.

  “We just put the little arrow on this picture of an envelope with wings,” she said, “and click once. Then we click on the word ‘send.’ ”

  As the Pee Wees watched, she did this. A little picture of an envelope with wings sailed across the screen from one side to the other. They read words that said, “Sending message.”

  “And now,” said Mrs. Peters, “Mrs. Duff is reading her letter.”

  “Naw,” said Roger. “No way.”

  But in a few minutes, as the Pee Wees watched, a note appeared on the screen. It said, “Receiving one message.” And then, just like magic, there was a new letter. It was a letter from Molly’s mother.

  “Dear Pee Wees,” it said. “I just got your letter. I am glad you are learning how to use E-mail. I am working hard, but I wish I was outside. It is a fine, sunny day. Have a good time. Love, Mrs. Duff. P.S. Molly, don’t forget to clean your room when you get home!”

  The Pee Wees giggled. Molly’s face turned red.

  “Was that ever fast!” said Patty.

  “An E-mail letter can go anywhere in the world in just a few minutes,” said Mrs. Peters. “It doesn’t even cost as much as a stamp.”

  “I want to write to my uncle!” said Roger.

  “I do too,” said Tim.

  “You have to be sure they have a computer that’s hooked up to the Internet,” said Jody.

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Peters. “That’s the only catch. You have to write to someone who has a computer. But every day more and more people are getting hooked up to the Internet.” She showed them how easy it was to answer a letter using E-mail.

  Then she let each of the Pee Wees write an E-mail letter to Mr. Peters at his office. After they finished, and Mr. Peters had written back, they had cupcakes and sang their Pee Wee song. Before they left for the day, their leader said, “This week I want each of you to write and send an E-mail letter all by yourself.”

  “Who should we send it to?” asked Jody.

  “You can write to whomever you like. I want you to press the PRINT button afterward so you can bring a copy of your letter to our meeting next Tuesday.”

  “Do we bring a copy if we get a letter back from someone?” asked Lisa.

  “Yes, I think that would be a good thing. It would help us understand how easy and fast it is to communicate,” Mrs. Peters said. “And it’s fun.”

  “Mrs. Peters, I could just print out some of the E-mails I’ve sent before and bring them. I send E-mail all the time,” said Rachel.

>   Mrs. Peters frowned. She didn’t like shortcuts. “I want you to write and send a new one, Rachel. With the current date on it.”

  Rachel nodded.

  The Pee Wees’ heads were swimming with E-mail talk. Molly was thinking about who she would write to.

  “Do we get extra credit if we send more than one letter?” asked Rachel.

  “Send one, or however many you want, but you don’t get extra credit. This isn’t school. You just get your badge,” their leader answered.

  No extras was fine with Molly. One badge would be all she’d need. She only hoped she wouldn’t erase any of her parents’ E-mails while she was using the laptop!

  CHAPTER

  8

  Molly’s Secret Admirer

  On the way home, all the Pee Wees could talk about was who to write to.

  “Maybe I’ll write to my dad’s friend in Africa,” said Roger.

  “Hey, no E-mail goes that far!” said Sonny. “Not to the jungle with all those trees and wild animals. Some animal would jump up and eat it!”

  “Animals don’t eat E-mail,” scoffed Kevin.

  “I might write to my dad at work,” said Mary Beth. “But that isn’t very exciting.”

  “We don’t get extra credit for being exciting,” said Tracy. “We get our badge if we write to Africa or to the woman next door.”

  Molly thought she might write to Jody. Kevin would be her second choice. True, her mother had said she was too young to have boyfriends. But when someone was as nice as Jody and Kevin, it was good to plan ahead. People should marry someone they’d known a long time. When her aunt got divorced last year, her dad said it was because she had hardly known the man when she married him. Molly didn’t want to make that mistake. No sirree bob. She would plan ahead. She would send her letter to Jody.

  At the corner, the Pee Wees separated and went to their own houses. Molly remembered her mother’s E-mail about cleaning her room. She did that first. Then she sat down and turned on the laptop. Molly liked the cozy hum it made while it was warming up. A computer wasn’t a book, but Molly was liking it better every day.