Attack of the Spider Bots

by Robert West

  “Yep,” Jack said as proudly as if he were Indiana Jones finding a hidden door to an ancient temple. “You have passages through your trees.”

  Now even Ghoulie’s eyes grew wide. “Whoa! You’re right.” The tree branches formed an arch around an open space in which there were practically no branches. The branches below were thicker than usual, making it easier to step from branch to branch while holding on to the branches above. “How could that happen? I mean, who — ”

  “Or what,” added Scilla, “would have made a passage through trees?”

  “Good question,” said Jack. “These trees are probably a couple hundred years old. It could have been made any time.”

  “Yeah,” said Ghoulie, “but it had to have been continually used over the years or the branches would have filled in.”

  The passage through the trees wove around, turning one way or another or going up and down, but never so extreme that they couldn’t keep going. Once in awhile, another passage intersected theirs, winding away to who knew where. Finally Jack stopped. Mr. Parker’s house lay across the street. The path through the trees continued across his yard all the way to the house.

  A few minutes later, they quietly dropped from a tree branch onto the roof, not far from a row of attic windows.

  “What if the windows are locked?” asked Ghoulie, on a roll in the complaint department.

  That’s what getting up early on Saturday morning does to you, thought Beamer. “It’s possible,” he said, “but most people don’t bother to lock attic windows. We don’t.”

  He was wrong. Mrs. Drummond was definitely not “most people.” The rooftop SWAT team went from window to window, looking in vain for one she or her robot crew had overlooked. What was worse, Ghoulie was finding all sorts of ways to say “I told you so.”

  Luckily, or perhaps thanks to a nudge from a passing angel, Jack took a shortcut across the ridge of the roof and knocked loose an old vent. They climbed in. It was a tight squeeze. Taking a breath was not an option unless you wanted to become a permanent fixture in the ventilation system. Once Jack was through the opening, he was able to haul himself down a beam in the steep-angled ceiling to the floor. Then he stacked up boxes like toy blocks for the others to climb down.

  The attic was loaded with toys or robots — it was hard to tell which — in every size and shape. Since most of them had missing pieces — heads, arms, feet, rollers, eyes, etc., Beamer figured these were Sol’s rejects.

  It might have made a great playground if it weren’t for the fact that the whole menagerie was wrapped together in about fourteen layers of cobwebs. The rocketeering gang hadn’t gone more than thirty feet before they’d destroyed half a dozen spider civilizations.

  Yep, no question about it — sooner or later those little buggers were going to take over the world. For that matter, the web in his attic might be the headquarters for a spider invasion fleet! Beamer grabbed a robotic arm and began using it like a machete to clear away a path through the webs.

  All of a sudden, the silence was broken by a voice that rumbled like a truck engine: “State your name and purpose!” They whirled around and were suddenly blinded by a light.

  There was only one thing to do: panic! Like rats scurrying from a fire, they scattered about the attic.

  “Surrender or I will be forced to subdue you.” It was a broken-down robot! The machine careened about pursuing them. “You cannot escape.” With every few words, the machine’s deep voice suddenly screeched in a high pitch like the voice of a boy going through puberty. The chase wound all over the attic — up, over, down, and around all the junk and the sticky webs. Before they knew it, they’d been herded like cattle into a corner of the attic. Then the robot shot a gun: a net flew out. They tried to dive out of the way, but the net covered them like a fresh catch of flopping tuna. Okay, Beamer thought, so they were tuna cattle, except that, by now, they were all almost totally wound up in gummy spider silk.Well, one thing was clear — from mammal to fish to insect — they were definitely working their way down the food chain!

  “It’s a robot,” he whispered loudly, “with a light on its head like a coal miner — probably an earlier version of Solomon’s sentry robots.”

  So much for rescuing Mr. Parker! Who was going to rescue them?Assuming they would live long enough to be rescued, that is. For one thing, Beamer had forgotten to tell anyone where they were going. Of course, if he had told them, they’d have never let him go on this cockamamie expedition. For another, the robot was tightening the net — very tightly. Beamer might have to give up breathing again. Just when his ankle was about to become connected to Scilla’s chin, a shadow appeared in front of the robot’s light beam and Beamer heard a click.

  “I always say, when in doubt, try the on/off switch.”

  That was Jack’s voice. Beamer figured that he had managed to dive out of the way as the rest of them were being penned in and circled around behind the robot.

  “Get your toe out of my nose,” Beamer grumbled at Scilla as he slowly unwound his elbows and knees. “Why are you wearing toeless shoes in the middle of December, anyway?”

  “Hey, there’s nothin’ wrong with my toes,” Scilla shot back at him.

  “Now we’ve gotta find our way to Mrs. Drummond’s office,” Ghoulie said.

  “Who said she had an office?” asked Beamer.

  “If she pays the bills and manages the household, like Sol said,” answered Ghoulie, “she’s bound to have some place where she keeps all her household records. And that’s where we’ll probably find whatever we’re looking for.”

  “Yeah, I think I saw it when we were here before,” Scilla said thoughtfully. “She’d left the door open.”

  “Well, then lead on,” Beamer said to her with a sweep of his hand, like a knight addressing a queen, “but we’ve gotta hurry. Those twins could come back at any time.” Beamer was surprised they weren’t home already, but he’d noticed the limousine was not where it was usually parked when he’d checked from the rooftop. He figured they must have gone to a movie or something.

  “Yeah . . . right,” Scilla said sarcastically. “And I could probably find it if we’d come in the front door. But from the attic? — haven’t got a clue.”

  One of those neat pictorial maps like you see in malls would have come in handy — you know, the ones that say, “You are here,” with a map showing where everything else was. They found their way out of the attic and began winding through the hallways.

  It would also have been nice if there hadn’t been video cameras and infrared sensing devices in every corner. You’d have thought they were in the Smithsonian. Jack came to the rescue again. He brought out an aerosol can and sprayed the camera lenses. He also used it to reveal those red beams from the infrared sensors. Beamer had wondered why Jack had so many pockets. Maybe street people thought they had to be ready for every situation. Eventually they found a hallway that they remembered from before. Scilla took the lead and, after only five wrong turns, finally found Mrs. Drummond’s office door down on the first floor.

  Unfortunately, the door was locked — no surprise there, of course. Beamer wondered if Jack was going to pull out a skeleton key, but he didn’t. He did try to pick the lock, but his breaking-and-entering skills weren’t quite up to it.

  Scilla suddenly had to go to the bathroom. Actually, she’d been wiggling like a jellyfish for the past ten minutes, which was probably why she’d made so many wrong turns. She tried the room next door and, to her relief, found it to be the bathroom. Meanwhile, Jack returned to trying to pick the lock while Beamer worked on the hinges.

  A couple minutes later, Scilla opened the bathroom door and leaned against it with a satisfied grin. “Guess what?” she said. “There’s a door from her office into the bathroom . . . and guess what?”

  “Enough with the guesses,” grumbled Ghoulie.

  “It’s unlocked!”

  Mrs. Drummond’s office was small compared to other rooms they’d seen in this h
ouse, but it was still bigger than any two rooms in Beamer’s house. However, Mrs. Drummond was strictly low tech. Nothing resembling a computer, fax machine, copier, or printer was in sight. Both her typewriter and her phone were clearly BPC (Before Personal Computing). Beamer wondered if the electricity was also antique, but the lights worked. Of course, that might have been because the lamps were also antique. Anyway, there was enough light for them to do the grunt work of searching through the filing cabinets and the boxes of records stacked in the large closet. At least there were no cobwebs to worry about — just paper, lots of paper.

  Eventually, Scilla’s bird-like voice echoed from the closet. “Hey y’all, I think I found somethin’.” They found her sitting spread-eagled on the closet floor almost buried in large envelopes. “I don’t know what they are, but they have a lot of big numbers on them,” she said as she handed an envelope up to Ghoulie.

  Ghoulie flipped through the pages and said, “Stock certificates — these are stock certificates!”

  “What’s that?” Jack asked.

  “Well, here’s the name of a railroad company,” Ghoulie said, pointing to the heading. “And this number tells how much stock he has in the company — ”

  “What’s stock?” asked Scilla.

  “I’m not sure, except that my dad has lots of them,” said Ghoulie. “It has something to do with how many pieces of a company you own.”

  “How do you own a piece of a company?” asked Jack.

  “I think I get it,” chimed in Beamer. “It’s like if we all chipped in to buy a box of firecrackers. We’d each own part of the box load, assuming we all put in the same amount of money, that is.”

  “I think these numbers say how much Mr. Parker’s stock is worth,” said Ghoulie, his face all scrunched up figuring.

  “Wait a minute,” Beamer said, pointing to the upper right hand of the page, “This says 1962. That’s prehistoric!

  “You’re right,” Ghoulie said with a shrug. “For all we know, he could have sold them all off by now. Do any of those envelopes have a more recent date?” he asked Scilla.

  She rummaged through them quickly and finally said, “Sorry.” Getting ready to stand up, she plopped the stack of envelopes on the floor creating a cloud of dust that made them all sneeze.

  “Then look around,” Ghoulie said, “and see if you can find more of these — some with less dust on them.” They scattered, looking for anything that had to do with stock, or a railroad company, or money in general. Beamer finally made his way to Mrs. Drummond’s desk. He opened one drawer, then another, and then spotted something on top of the desk. Things on the desk were very neatly arranged. But just edging out the side of a folder was a piece of paper with the name of the railroad. He opened the folder and stared. “Hey guys, I got it!”

  The others crowded around him, staring at the report. Scilla started counting the number of zeroes then the number of numbers before the zeroes. Ghoulie snatched it from her hand. “Hey!” she protested.

  “Uh . . . guys,” Ghoulie said as he took a deep gulp. “This is way beyond millions!”

  “And look at this!” Scilla said, holding up a ledger they had knocked onto the floor when they were scrambling for the stock report. She flipped it open to where her thumb was holding a place. “It’s the household budget, but it doesn’t look anything like my grandma’s budget.”

  “Beamer’s eyes grew even bigger. “Since when does anyone need $50,000 for a month’s worth of groceries?”

  “So that’s it then,” Scilla said in hushed amazement. “She — or they — want his millions!”

  “Sure looks that way,” said Beamer. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Suddenly they heard a key in the lock. Ghoulie hurriedly tucked the report back into the folder as the door opened.

  19

  Triple Trouble

  “I told my sisters they should have called the police on you the first time!”

  “Holy tamole! There are three of them!” Scilla said with a gasp.

  It was another Mrs. Drummond! This Mrs. Drummond, though, walked with a cane.

  “Triplets!” Beamer echoed her. “Run for it!” he cried as he ran for the bathroom door. Before Mrs. Drummond the third could figure out what they were doing, they were through the bathroom and into the hallway behind her.

  “Stop, you children, or I’ll call the police!” she cried out.

  “No you won’t,” Beamer yelled back at her, “unless you want the police to see what you’ve been doing with Mr. Parker’s money.”

  She pulled up short with a look of uncertainty.

  Then she clenched her jaw and went to the nearest wall communicator. “Security! Security!” she said into the wall, “Intruder alert! Close down all exits. Apprehend four children now in the main hallway.”

  “Hurry!” cried Beamer. Abandoning any attempt at secrecy, they galloped up the steps like a herd of goats. In the background, Beamer heard mechanical voices on communicators relaying orders for intercepting them in this hallway or that one. More alarms went off as they rushed past cameras and sensors they didn’t bother to mask. Finally they reached the attic. They saw lights sweeping the grounds outside the windows. Not wanting to squeeze back through the vent, Beamer unlocked one of the attic windows and removed the screen. They poured out onto the roof to find lights sweeping up there too.

  “Watch out!” cried Beamer as a searchlight swept toward them. Scilla and Ghoulie ducked behind a chimney while Jack and Beamer slid to the other side of the roof, hanging on to the ridgeline for dear life.

  That’s the way things went for awhile — ducking between roof lines and behind chimneys — until they reached the big tree. Not surprisingly, the house security system did not expect intruders to be exiting along a passage through the trees. Few lights swept the trees.

  Did Solomon Parker know that a “treeway” led to his house? Why would anyone make all these passages? Did they go up to every house or just some of them and why? How many mysteries could one street have?

  When they finally made it to the tree across the street, they gave a collective sigh big enough to bring snow down on their heads. They stood there at the intersection of several branches, gasping for air and looking like ice cream sundaes.

  Beamer showed his dad the folder they had found, while Ghoulie and Scilla looked on in hushed excitement. Jack had already headed back to wherever he was living, afraid that Beamer’s mom would turn him back in to Social Services. As Beamer expected, he had to take a pretty good tongue-lashing, not only for being late to dinner but for breaking into someone’s house.

  “But — ” Beamer started to say several times. He wondered what it would be like being grounded until he was thirty.

  “No, get it into your head,” Mr. MacIntyre said with his finger about to poke a hole in Beamer’s sinuses. “Something like this could put you in juvenile hall!” Finally his father’s eyes turned back to the paper. “But I see your point. We’ll have to get this to a lawyer right away.”

  “What about Ghoulie’s mom?” Beamer asked, still breathless with excitement. “She’s a lawyer.”

  “Yes,” said Ghoulie, “a pretty good one too.”

  “We can begin with her, anyway,” said Beamer’s mom. “Now if you all wouldn’t mind, it’s time for Beamer to go to bed . . . without his dinner.” Beamer groaned and headed for the stairs while the other kids made a swift exit.

  And so the legal machine started to grind, as Beamer’s dad put it. Exactly how a machine with no gears and bolts or other metal parts ground anything, Beamer had no idea.

  The full story came out piece by piece. Just as Beamer expected, Solomon’s shares in the railroad had grown until, for all practical purposes, he owned a railroad company. But since he had never answered mail or messages or telegrams from the company, the railroad had gone on without him. Mrs. Drummond had kept the truth from him while collecting the share in the profits the company regularly sent to Mr. Parker. Right away,
Mrs. Drummond accused the Star-Fighters of breaking and entering. Nobody made them go to jail just yet, but there was the possibility that, if she won her case, they just might. Wearing an orange jumpsuit and hammering rocks the rest of his life didn’t sound like a great career move to Beamer.

  Mrs. Drummond had most of Solomon’s money firmly in her hands and could afford to pay bogus doctors to declare that he was wacky and high-priced lawyers to help her handle the stocks. Things were looking bad for both Solomon Parker and the Star-Fighters.

  Then Old Lady Parker got wind of what was happening to her brother. She had little love for Solomon but tremendous loyalty for the family name. She wasn’t going to let anyone swindle a Parker. Like a force of nature, she blew into the halls of justice and got a judge to freeze her brother’s accounts. That meant Mrs. Drummond could no longer use his money. Finally, with Mrs. Drummond’s high-priced lawyers no longer blocking the way, evidence began stacking up against her and her sisters.

  Yep, all of Mrs. Drummond’s claims about Mr. Parker’s sanity and about her right to control his money were finally overturned. At the same time, her breaking and entering charges against the Star-Fighters were also dismissed, and Beamer no longer had to worry about how he would look wearing a bright orange suit.

  On the day they heard the news, Scilla started singing “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead” until the boys and, eventually, Beamer’s mom and dad joined in. It was like having Christmas before Christmas, except that the good news was the only present. They drank hot cider and eggnog and munched on Dr. Mac’s Christmas cookies until way past bedtime. It was too bad Jack couldn’t be with them, but he wasn’t about to drop in where adults were hanging around. He’d visited the tree ship a couple times since the break-in, and each time they’d told him the latest about the Parker case, but they had no way of contacting him on their own. Then, like a dragon stripped of her treasure hoard and with only one fiery breath left, Mrs. Drummond hurled her last fireball! She had the tree ship condemned!