by Jim Benton
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE NEW ROBOT IS A SMASH HIT
Franny walked happily into her classroom. She was thinking about maybe rescuing more kids from stupid hobbies.
She was surprised, as anyone might be, to find that most of her classroom had been smashed to smithereens. (Note: For anybody doing the conversion, there are ten smithers in an ounce, and ten smithereens in a smither.)
Erin climbed from underneath a smoldering chunk of desk. “Thank goodness,” she said. “Another mad scientist to help us.”
Franny raised one eyebrow. “ ‘Another’ mad scientist? What do you mean by ‘another’? You’re not a mad scientist.”
Lawrence and Phil climbed out from their hiding places. “Sure we are,” Phil said. “You should have seen us yesterday.”
“That’s right,” Lawrence added. “And we finished the robot last night.”
“You finished it?” Franny shouted. “You’re not qualified to do that. What made you think you could create and activate something that complex and dangerous?”
The three of them just looked down at their feet.
Then it suddenly occurred to Franny. She was what made them think that.
“I have a very bad feeling about this,” Franny said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FOOLS + TOOLS = BUSTED-UP SCHOOLS
Franny scribbled some computations on the robot’s blueprint. She reviewed the notes that Erin, Lawrence, and Phil had given her, and tried to include in her calculations what they could remember about the extra work they had done during the night.
They could hear the robot starting on a new rampage somewhere else in the school.
Franny finished her computations. “Egad,” she gasped.
“What? What is it?” Lawrence squeaked.
“I designed the robot with two heads because, as you know, two heads would make it twice as smart as a regular robot.”
Phil tried to look like he understood.
“But you guys, well, you don’t know the first thing about robots, or electronics, or science, or machines, or maybe anything.”
Erin scowled a bit, but this was no time to argue.
“You see, because you know nothing, you actually made this robot twice as stupid as a regular robot.”
“So will that make it easier to stop?” Lawrence asked hopefully.
“Hand me my backpack,” Franny said sternly.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
STUPIDER AND STUPIDER
Franny took another dose of her invisibility formula. “It can’t smash what it can’t see,” she said, trying her best to sound optimistic. And she faded from their sight.
Most monstrous fiends, even though they are often horribly destructive, have a plan. Either they want something, they hate something, or they’re just trying to escape capture. So it’s easy for a scientific mind to figure them out and stop them.
This thing is different, Franny thought. This robot is pure stupidness. It has two whole heads full of stupid. Pure stupidness does things for no good reason.
What would a pure-stupid creature do in a school? Franny thought.
Franny ran past a door on which the robot had left some graffiti. It was badly spelled, badly drawn, and not at all clever. “In addition,” Franny said, “it’s probably inaccurate. If the principal really did have a rubber butt, surely by now they would have flown her to consult with a medical expert in Switzerland.”
Franny ran past gigantic spit wads that the robot had left dangling from the ceiling and dripping down the walls.
“Spit wads,” she said. “Can you imagine wasting perfectly good spit this way? Spit, like most secretions, is hours of fun for a child with a microscope. Only an idiot would squander it this way.”
Spitty robot footprints led right up to the library door, and Franny actually felt an unfamiliar wave of fear wash over her.
“Not the books,” she said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FRANNY KETCHES UP TO THE ROBOT
Franny slid quietly into the library. She knew the robot was in there somewhere.
She could have overlooked the graffiti. Franny had made inaccurate speculations about butts before. Butts are an imprecise science; errors occur.
And she might even have been able to find some merit in giant spit wads. She had to admit that they had a sort of charm to them, like a fresh snowfall—a fresh snowfall that smelled like the inside of somebody’s mouth.
But Franny loved books. She loved everything about them. Most of what Franny knew she had learned from books. A creature this stupid could be in the library for only one reason: to destroy books. And an act that stupid was not going to be tolerated.
She moved silently and cautiously.
And then she heard it: the sad, sick sound of a page slowly being torn from a book. She crept through the aisles.
She rounded a corner and saw the robot there, happily destroying books. It was clear to Franny that this mechanical imbecile would not stop until it had destroyed all of them.
As she studied the horrible creation, she suddenly felt confident that defeating this robot was going to be quite easy. In fact, she felt very confident.
Evidently Erin, Lawrence, and Phil had installed an off switch right in the middle of the robot’s chest.
All Franny had to do was quietly walk up to it, totally unseen, and flip the switch.
“Actually, that was pretty clever of them,” Franny whispered, “to install an off switch in such a convenient location.”
And if Franny had thought it through for just a split second longer, she would have realized that Erin, Phil, and Lawrence were not qualified to come up with something as clever as a chest-mounted off switch that would actually work.
But she hadn’t thought it through, and she did flip the switch, which was not wired to turn off the robot, of course, but was wired to squirt a huge gush of ketchup from its newly installed ketchup nozzle.
The books! Franny leapt through the air and dove in front of a shelf full of books, heroically protecting them from the sloppy condiment onslaught but at the same time taking the full impact of the ketchup herself, thus rendering herself totally visible to the robot.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HERE, LET ME GIVE YOU A HAND
Crash! The robot smashed Franny with its giant hand.
Erin, Lawrence, and Phil heard it and rushed into the library.
“We’ll save you, Franny!” they shouted. They folded their arms just like they had seen Franny do. “It’s mad science time,” they said.
The robot swung at Franny again. She tried to dodge, but it caught her hard. SMASH!
“Uh, got some mad science coming right up,” the kids said, looking at each other helplessly. The robot’s hand came down with another mighty crash. BASH! Franny didn’t think she could last much longer.
Then Franny did what she did best. She thought, and she thought fast.
“Maybe, maybe a mad scientist is exactly what we don’t need,” she said. SMASH! She took another powerful slam from the robot’s hand.
She looked over at her friends, and then it suddenly came to her. Franny knew exactly what they needed.
“What we need is a philatelist!” she yelled.
“A what?” Erin shouted back.
“A philatelist is a stamp collector,” Phil said. “Like me.”
“Phil!” Franny yelled. “The eyes!”
Phil knew exactly what Franny meant. A pair of stamps would cover the robot’s little square eyes perfectly. Phil pulled out a pair of stamps from his pocket and with a lick and a slap, had them across the robot’s eyes.
Now blinded, the robot missed Franny entirely. And its metal hands were too big and clumsy to remove the stamps.
“Now what we need is an accordionist!” Franny shouted, and Lawrence leapt into action. Grabbing one of the robot’s heads in his right hand and the other head in his left, Lawrence began flexing his powerful deltoid and trapezius muscles, built up by ye
ars of music lessons.
The robot reeled and fell under Lawrence’s mighty accordionist blows.
“Now what we need is . . . ,” Franny began, but Erin was already one step ahead of her.
“An Irish dancer,” Erin said, and began hammering out a merciless hail of rhythmic stomps on the fallen robot, sending gears and wires in all directions.
When the dust finally settled, the four of them stood there looking at the pile of broken, flattened, robot parts.
It was over. They had won. They had been saved by philately, accordionism, and Gaelic choreography.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
NOW YOU’RE COOKING
Later, back at the lab, Franny and Igor were completing Franny’s newest project. She had explained what had happened that day, and Igor wondered if Franny knew just how extremely lucky she was to have friends that were not mad scientists.
Franny put down her welding torch. “At last, it’s complete,” she said.
“Igor,” Franny said, handing him a piece of paper, “run downstairs and get these items. Quickly; I’ll need them for this next experiment.”
Igor began to read the list as he ran: Sugar, flour, milk . . .
Franny picked up the phone and paused to look at her newest creation.
She dialed the phone. “Billy?” she said.
Igor walked in with the ingredients, bowls, and cookie sheets Franny had requested.
“How would you like to come up to the lab and, um, share some of your techniques with me?” Igor heard Franny say.
Erin’s dance had stamped the robot into nice, flat pieces that Franny had spent a long time cutting and welding into what was probably the best pastry oven in the world.
Franny K. Stein, mad scientist, was going to bake pretty, pretty cookies.
“He’ll be right over,” Franny beamed, and Igor smiled.
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2004 by Jim Benton
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Book design by Dan Potash and Lucy Ruth Cummins
The illustrations for this book are rendered in
pen, ink, and watercolor.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benton, Jim. The invisible Fran / [written and] illustrated by Jim Benton. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Franny K. Stein, mad scientist ; #3) • Summary: When Franny Stein, self-styled mad scientist, creates a robot to show her school friends the joys of science, she ends up learning something from them instead.
ISBN 0-689-86293-8 • 1. Science—Fiction. 2. Robots—Fiction.
3. Individuality—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Benton, Jim. Franny K. Stein,
mad scientist ; #3.
PZ7.B447547In 2004
Fic—dc22 • 2004007425
ISBN 978-1-4424-9518-0 (eBook)