Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine

by Abrashkin Abrashkin

  “Danny!” she said warningly.

  “Mm?”

  “You’ve got one of your crazy ideas, haven’t you?”

  “Well… it’s not so crazy.”

  “Oh, help,” said Joe. “The last time he said that, we built an automobile out of a power lawn mower.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” said Danny.

  “Sure. And we wrecked Mrs. Hanson’s flower beds, and busted Jimmy Nelson’s bike, and I almost got concussion—”

  “Well, this is nothing like that,” Danny said.

  Irene said firmly, “Danny. You promised Professor Bullfinch that before you jumped into anything you’d count to a million by thousands.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s right.”

  “Start counting, boy,” said Joe.

  Danny looked stumped for a moment. Then he said, “Okay. If you’re both going to pick on me, I’ll do it.” And with a sly smile, he added, “Counting to a million that way is the same as adding a thousand each time. And multiplying is just adding a number to itself a certain number of times. Right? Okay, so I’ll count to a million by thousands by multiplying. One thousand times itself equals one million. There. I counted to a million by thousands.”

  Irene frowned. “I think,” she said, “that that isn’t exactly what the Professor had in mind.”

  Danny beckoned to her and Joe. “Listen,” he said, lowering his voice. “Never mind that. This is a really great idea. Why can’t we use Minny as a homework machine?”

  “What?” Irene cried.

  “A homework machine?” said Joe. “What’s that?”

  “Simple. Minny can answer problems in grammar like that one we just asked. She can answer any kind of arithmetic problem. She can give information, like for social studies. I’ll bet, if we set her up properly, she could even write simple compositions. Let’s use her to do… He caught himself and glanced at Irene. “I mean, to help us with our homework, the way she just helped you.”

  Irene’s eyebrows slowly rose. She and Joe looked at each other. Then she said to Danny, “Do you think it would work?”

  “Why not? We can try it.”

  “All right. I’m game,” Irene whispered.

  “Me too,” said Joe, in a whisper. Then he said, “Hey, Dan. Why are we all whispering?”

  Danny glanced round. “I don’t want Minny to hear us,” he exclaimed. “After all, maybe she hates homework as much as we do!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Who Cares?”

  Miss Arnold’s class had grown in the past two years, as new families moved into the town and sent their children to school. Dan had heard her tell the principal that she wished she could give more time and attention to each student, but that was no longer possible. There were thirty-seven boys and girls now, where there had once been twenty, and sometimes Miss Arnold couldn’t help feeling that there were too many pupils in the world—at any rate, in her part of it.

  She said, with a sigh, “So you see, writing five-tenths this way—.5—is just the same as writing it 5/10. And five-tenths is the same as one-half. Why is that, George?”

  George Bessel, a plump, tow-headed boy whose nickname was Fatso, got reluctantly to his feet. At once, two or three girls began giggling, and George glanced angrily at them.

  “Uh—” he said.

  “Do you know, George?” Miss Arnold asked, gently.

  He fidgeted, in despair. “I used to know,” he said. “But I guess I forgot.”

  “Very well. You may sit down.”

  Sue Parker was waving her hand urgently. She always waved her hand whenever anyone couldn’t answer a question.

  Before Miss Arnold could call on her, however, a small white object, sailing down one of the aisles just above the floor, caught the teacher’s eye. She strode forward and picked it up just as it landed next to Irene Miller’s desk. It was a bit of paper, folded into a glider.

  “Who threw this?” she demanded.

  A dead silence fell upon the class.

  Then Eddie Philips said, “Danny Dunn threw it, Miss Arnold. It’s a note.”

  Danny’s face was flaming. Ellen Tresselt, who sat behind him, whispered to her neighbor, Victoria Williams, “I know who it was for, too.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Victoria whispered back.

  A wave of tittering went through the class.

  “A note? Is that true, Dan?” Miss Arnold asked.

  Danny nodded. He had banked on Miss Arnold not noticing the little glider because of Sue Parker’s waving hand. He thought to himself, “Next time I’ll make it out of dark paper, for camouflage.” Aloud, he said, “Yes’m.”

  Miss Arnold crumpled the glider in her hand. “I’m not going to read this, Danny,” she said, “and I’m not even going to ask who it was for.”

  She glanced down at Irene, who was staring studiously at the top of her desk, pretending not to be listening. Like all good teachers, Miss Arnold knew more about her pupils than they thought she did.

  “However,” she went on, “I must say I’m surprised at you, Danny. School will be over in ten minutes, and anything you have to say to anyone could certainly wait until then. Or, on the other hand, there are the United States mails. I’d prefer not to have my students flying their letters by air mail during class.”

  She walked back to her desk and turned to face the pupils. “Particularly during a period in which so many of you seem to be doing so poorly,” she went on. “Will you all write down the homework assignment for tomorrow, please?”

  A groan went through the class. Miss Arnold tightened her lips.

  “There’s no occasion for all this weeping and wailing, either,” she said. “In the first place, you all know that the class has grown a good deal in the last couple of years. That means I can’t work with each one of you as much as I used to. It means high school will be overcrowded, too. It also means that there will be more competition for college admissions. It’s not easy to get into college these days.”

  She looked at them and sighed. “I want each of you to have a good chance at the best kind of education,” she continued. “People are finding out more and more about the earth—about science, and about each other. That means there’s more and more for you to learn. Above all, you have to know how to study these new things. There’s no substitute for homework as a way of learning how to study. So I suggest that instead of complaining you all buckle down and work.”

  She flipped open the arithmetic book and said, “You will all do problems one through twenty, on pages 57 and 58.”

  There was another heartfelt groan from everyone but Danny, Irene, and Joe. Miss Arnold turned to the blackboard and firmly wrote down the assignment.

  While her back was turned, Irene glanced at Danny. He winked at her. Soundlessly he shaped the words “Who cares?” with his lips.

  He looked over at Joe, who sat two rows away, and did the same thing. Joe nodded and voicelessly said, “Minny.”

  Eddie Philips, secretly watching the three of them, scowled. He had told Miss Arnold about the glider because he was jealous and hoped to get Dan into trouble. Now, seeing their winks and smiles, he felt anger churning around in him like a stomach-ache.

  “I wonder why they’re grinning at each other like that,” he muttered to George Bessel, who sat in front of him. “You’d almost think they didn’t mind all that homework. I’ll bet Danny has something up his sleeve.”

  He narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Maybe,” he added, “just maybe I’ll follow him after school and keep an eye on him. I’ll get that smart aleck yet. Wait and see.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Homework Paradise

  Danny closed his copy of The Study of Science with a sigh, and blinked at Joe and Irene. They were all seated at the console of Miniac, in Professor Bullfinch’s laboratory. It was three days later.
/>   “That’s the last book,” Danny said. “Now Minny knows everything in all our school books.”

  “Phew!” said Joe, wiping his forehead, “You know, that was hard work—storing all that information in the machine. I didn’t realize there was so much to know. Maybe it’d just be easier to do our homework every day.”

  “I don’t think so,” Danny said. “Sure, it was hard work. But now we’re free forever.”

  “Till next term,” Irene corrected him.

  “Well, that’s almost forever. The next step is to program tomorrow’s assignment.”

  He pushed back his chair and got up.

  Joe said, “What’s all this programming you’re always talking about?”

  “Wait a sec,” Danny said. “I’ll just get some refreshments for us. We can use ’em. Irene, you get out tomorrow’s homework.”

  He went down the hall to the kitchen, while Irene arranged their notebooks on the desk and Joe stretched and yawned. Danny returned in a few moments with a plate of chocolate graham crackers and three bottles of Coca-Cola.

  Irene said, “The biggest piece of homework we have for tomorrow is twenty problems in arithmetic.”

  “That’s easy,” said Danny.

  He fed the end of a roll of typewriter paper into the electric typewriter and cleared the memory banks for action.

  “Now,” he said. “Programming is telling the machine exactly what questions you want answered and how you want them answered. In order to do that right, you have to know just what sequences of operation you want the machine to go through.”

  “Uh-huh.” Joe nodded. “What does that mean?”

  “Look. Suppose you want to jump across a ditch—”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would I want to jump across a ditch?”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m just giving you a for-instance. All right, first you have to figure out how far it is across the ditch. Then you have to look in your memory to see how far you can jump. Then you have to compare the two to see if you can jump this ditch. Those steps are the operations your mind has to go through. The order in which you think of them is their sequence. See?”

  “I guess so.”

  “All right. If we want Minny to give us the right answers to an arithmetic problem, or a history question, we first have to analyze the operations the machine has to go through, and the order in which it does them. Then we put this down on a piece of paper together with the addresses of all the information or the parts of the machine that will be used to solve the problems. That’s programming. ”

  “I see.” Joe rubbed his nose soberly. “I think I understand that all right. But I still can’t figure why I’d want to jump across a ditch. Why couldn’t I just walk around it?”

  “Oh, forget it,” Danny groaned. “Come on. Let’s start the problems going.”

  They first set up and fed into the machine the twenty arithmetic problems. Then the five questions that had to be answered on South American countries. And then the ten problems in English grammar. Danny pressed the START key. Lights began twinkling on the control panel. The machine settled down to a steady humming, and the three friends lolled back in their chairs and ate cookies.

  “Gosh!” said Joe, sipping his Coca-Cola. “This is the life!”

  “It sure is. We ought to put a sign on the door: ‘Happy Homework Hunting Ground,’” said Danny.

  Irene peered over at the typewriter, which had just stopped rattling. The red light was on.

  “There’s your arithmetic, Joe,” she said. “Now I guess it’ll start on social studies.”

  “Good old Minny,” Joe chuckled.

  “I’ll write a poem in her honor.” Joe was known throughout the school for his poems. “You know, we ought to enter her in one of those TV quiz shows. We could make a fortune.”

  “Um. I somehow have a feeling that Professor Bullfinch wouldn’t like that,” Danny said, laughing.

  “I’ll bet he wouldn’t,” said Irene. “By the way, what are we going to do when he gets home, Dan?”

  Danny thoughtfully ate a cookie. “I’ll have to ask his permission for us to go on using the machine. But maybe it’ll be all right. Anyway,” he added, “what’s the use of worrying about it now? We may as well enjoy Minny while we have her.”

  The typewriter, which had been working away industriously, stopped, and the red light went on. “That’s the first of the social studies pages,” Danny said. “It can be yours, Irene. I’ll take the next one, and Joe can take the third.”

  He pulled out the paper, and at once the typewriter began again.

  “It’s like magic,” Joe said. “A fairy godmother named Minny, who comes along and gives you a wish. So you wish that all your homework should be done for you. And presto! there it is.”

  Danny snickered. “When you come right down to it, Joe, it isn’t any more magic than a million other things all around us. I mean, in fairy tales the prince is always getting magic sandals that let him fly through the air, or magic eyeglasses that let him look through walls, or a magic servant who can show him what’s happening a hundred miles away… well, we’ve got ’em all, nowadays: X rays, airplanes, television—”

  “Yes, but this is a different kind of magic. A machine that thinks.”

  “There are thinking machines all over this house—everybody’s house,” Danny replied. “For instance, refrigerators that know how to keep themselves at the right temperature, and defrost themselves when it’s necessary. Or machines that count and add, just like Minny does—the speedometer on your bike, for instance.”

  “Yes, and ovens that know how to keep themselves hot and turn themselves off when the food’s cooked,” Irene put in. “Or record players that feel the size of a record, put the needle on in the right place, and stop when the record’s over.”

  “They’re all machines that can think in one way or another,” said Danny. “Take a thermostat, for instance, like that one.”

  He pointed to a dial with numbers on it, on the side of the console. Joe reached out to it, saying, “You mean this gadget?”

  “Hey, don’t touch it!” Danny cried.

  “What’s the matter? Is it poisonous?”

  “Worse than that. The Professor’s new switches have to be kept at a certain temperature—98.6°F.—to work properly. As long as that dial is set at that temperature, the machine works. If, for some reason, the inside of the case got too warm, the rising heat would expand a piece of metal inside the thermostat. That would start the refrigerator motor and cool things off. When the temperature was just right, again, the motor would shut off.”

  Joe inspected the dial. “Gee, what would happen if it didn’t work?”

  “It’s impossible for it not to work,” Danny said. “You can tell by looking at it if it’s set properly. And I guess good old Minny could tell us if something wasn’t right.”

  “You keep talking about the computer as if it was alive,” Irene said. “It’s just a machine.”

  “So’s a ship just a machine,” said Danny. “But sailors always call their ships ‘she.’ Minny’s so smart that—well, gosh, sometimes I feel she really is alive.”

  The typewriter stopped, then clicked a few times again.

  “You see?” Danny said. “She heard me, and she’s impatient to get finished.”

  All three laughed. Danny reached over lazily and pulled the second copy of the social studies homework out of the typewriter.

  “Man!” Joe sighed, tipping up his Coca-Cola bottle to get the last drops. “This is the way to do your homework. This is heaven!”

  “You said it,” Dan agreed. “Does that make us angels?”

  They all laughed, but they might not have been so happy if they had seen the two scarcely angelic faces that peeped in at them through one of the laboratory window
s that faced a thick clump of lilac.

  They were Eddie Philips and George Bessel. Eddie was grinning wickedly. And George, ducking down so he would not be seen, said in a soft voice:

  “Boy, wait till Miss Arnold hears about this!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Is It Fair?”

  At about five o’clock the very next afternoon, the doorbell of the Professor’s house rang. Mrs. Dunn, who was in the midst of telephoning a list of parents about a coming Parent-Teachers meeting, looked up in annoyance.

  “Danny!” she called. “Will you answer the door, please?”

  Danny was performing a very interesting experiment. He was mixing together all the chemicals in his chemistry set that began with “S,” just to see what would happen. However he put his important research aside and ran downstairs to open the door.

  Miss Arnold stood on the steps. Her lips were pressed tight together, and there was a dangerous look in her eyes.

  “Oh, hullo, Miss Arnold,” said Danny. “I guess you want to see my mother.”

  “Yes, Dan, I do.”

  “About the P.T.A., I suppose?”

  “No. About the H.O.M.E.W.O.R.K.”

  Danny gulped. “Oh,” he said, in a very small voice.

  He led the way into the living room. His mother, who had recognized Miss Arnold’s voice, came out to greet the teacher.

  “Why, Miss Arnold,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not so pleasant,” said Miss Arnold, shaking hands. “I have something serious that I must speak to you about.”

  “Do sit down.” Mrs. Dunn motioned her to a chair. “Danny, why don’t you run up to your room—”

  “No, I’d rather have him stay. What I have to say concerns him.”

  “Oh, dear. I hope he hasn’t done anything wrong?”

  “I’m not sure, Mrs. Dunn.” Miss Arnold leaned forward. “I have reason to believe that Danny is letting a machine do his homework for him.”