How to Outsmart a Billion Robot Bees

by Paul Tobin

  Nate said, “Could you not scream so loud? It hurts my ears.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Hadn’t noticed I was screaming. Incidentally, the last time we were falling through the air, you had some antigravity cloth. You still have that?” I tried to sound as if such a thing were of little concern. After all, we were only fourteen thousand three hundred and seventy-nine feet off the ground. Well, a little less than that, now.

  “No,” Nate said. “Wow. I should have brought some.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did they tell you who they were?” Nate asked. We were apparently finished with the whole “antigravity cloth” topic. To be honest, I thought it warranted more discussion. I’m not sure if I need to point this out, but we were still falling.

  “You’re screaming again,” Nate said.

  “Oh. Sorry. And, no, they didn’t tell me who they were, not really. The man in the green suit, I’ve seen him before. He was one of the experts who came to test you that one day in school. He claimed his name is Reggie Barnstorm, but that sounds fake.”

  “It is. Sort of.”

  “Sort of?” We were falling through a cloud. It was wet. Was that why Nate was wearing a wet suit?

  “Well, it’s his real name, but he had all his official documents forged to a fake name. The same one.”

  “His fake name is his real name?”

  “Yeah. Apparently, he thinks it confuses people.”

  I said, “I do admit I’m confused.” Sir William flew past us. He was good at flying. As for me . . . ? Not so much.

  “Reggie is the leader of the League of Ostracized Fellows,” Nate said.

  “I guess you’re going to explain that?” We were falling through another cloud. Much like the first cloud, this one was wet. I suppose that makes sense, since clouds have that whole “rain” thing going on, but for some reason I’d always considered that clouds would feel like cotton balls.

  Nate said, “The League of Ostracized Fellows was partly formed as a response to the Red Death Tea Society. They’re ex-members of the Red Death Tea Society who had problems with the Society’s philosophies of world domination through science. So they formed a splinter group, not only to stop Jakob Maculte, the leader of the Red Death Tea Society, but also to lead the world into a new scientific revolution. A peaceful one. Unfortunately, most of the League’s members are, well . . . awkward. They don’t fit into society as seamlessly as I do.”

  I discreetly coughed, which was easy enough to do, because it’s not hard to be discreet when you’re thousands of feet in the air.

  Nate said, “I do respect the League, though. They have a lot of good ideas. The bottom line is, they’re an organization of mostly amiable scientists and undeniable geniuses.”

  “I deny that wearing a bright green suit is the act of a genius,” I told Nate. He only shrugged in reply. Our ideas of fashion do not often agree. I thought it best to let the topic drop. Anyway, I was having fun watching the wind rush through his hair. It almost made him look handsome. Not that I was looking. Well, I was looking, but mostly I was looking at the city of Polt. It was below us. I could see the amusement park. I could see the bike trails along the Farlton River (which Liz and I call the Fart-Long River, which I suppose says something about us, and why we’re friends) and the tops of the buildings all along Trillip Avenue, where the antiques and vintage clothing stores are, and where I love to shop, though it’s not exactly where I would like to fall. There seriously isn’t a very long list of where I’d like to fall from over fourteen thousand feet. Nate and I were definitely going to have to start talking about how we were falling. It was becoming pertinent.

  “The League has a lot of the smartest people in the world,” he said. “Outcasts, mostly.”

  “Why?” I asked. I noticed Nate’s lip tremble. It seemed to be something emotional, rather than any effect of the wind, which I might note was tremendous. I opened my mouth as wide as I could, and the wind swooshed inside, puffing out my cheeks and making them vibrate and wobble, sending me spinning a bit out of control. Nate tightened his grip on my hand and pulled me closer.

  He said, “Well, being smart can be . . . difficult. I mean, socially.” His lip trembled again. I definitely saw it. He looked sad. I hated seeing him that way. I thought of Polt Middle School, where Nate and I are both in sixth grade. I thought of how most of the other kids don’t like to talk to Nate, how he’s always sitting alone at lunch, how they call him Egghead, and how no one really pays much attention to him. I’m one of his only friends. People ask me why I spend so much time with him, and when I say it’s because he’s smart they look confused, like they can’t understand why that would be interesting. I tell them . . . if you don’t think smart is interesting, then you’re dumb. Being friends with Nate is always an adventure. For one thing, Nate teaches me something new almost every day. Right then, for instance, I was hoping he would teach me why it was okay that we’d jumped out of a helicopter.

  I said, “I get it. So, these guys formed a group of outcasts? What do they do? I mean, besides kidnap me, which is not what I’m hoping they do all the time.”

  “I think they were using you to get to me,” Nate said. He unzipped his wet suit. The zipper was on the back, and he was having trouble with it. I was just about to offer to help when Sir William landed on Nate’s back and tugged the zipper down.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got questions. First, what do you mean they were using me to get to you? Why do they want to get to you? And why are you taking off your wet suit? And . . . you are wearing something beneath that, right? Lastly, and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m going to be mad if you’re not going to do anything about us falling from the helicopter.” I looked way up in the sky toward the helicopter. I’d quit looking down. It had been making me nervous. So I was only looking up. To the helicopter. Trying to decide if it was fourteen thousand feet above us. Because that would be bad.

  Nate said, “The League knows they can’t beat Maculte and the Red Death Tea Society. Not all by themselves, anyway. They’ve run hundreds of predictive models, and the result is always the same: alone, they’ll be wiped out. So, they’re trying to force me to join them. To lead them, actually. Reggie undoubtedly planned to hold you hostage as a way of pressuring me into acceding to their demands of taking a leadership role in the League of Ostracized Fellows. But I don’t want to. They’re always bickering about each other’s inventions, and they’re extremely comfortable being who they are, with being ostracized from society, I mean. I don’t want to be comfortable with who I am. I think it’s the duty of a human being to constantly challenge themselves, to push their limits, to become smarter. That’s the way I want to be. I mean, Delphine, let me ask you, are you comfortable with yourself?”

  “I’m not exactly comfortable with falling from the sky. Maybe I should have asked you about that first? You can skip ahead to it, if you like.” By then, Nate was almost entirely out of his wet suit. Thankfully, he was wearing a shirt beneath it, a blue T-shirt with an image of Einstein and a cartoon word balloon saying “Think!” Also, he was wearing a pair of boxer shorts. They were green with cartoon drawings of toast. Not sure what that was all about.

  He said, “Hold this a second, will you?” He tried handing me the wet suit, but the wind was too strong and it slipped from my grasp. It went up while we continued to fall down. Well, it was probably falling, too, but much slower, caught in the wind.

  I said, “Oops.”

  “Ooo,” Nate said. “We’re going to need that.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I’ll just go up and get it. Since I can fly.”

  “Great!” Nate said.

  I said, “That was sarcasm, Nate.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad. Because we really are going to need that.”

  “Then why did you take it off?” Honestly, my question seemed the height of reason. Speaking of height, we were losing it. We’d had an abundance of it at the start, but our supply was diminish
ing. I was beginning to be able to distinguish quite a lot of objects on the ground. None of them looked soft.

  “It was uncomfortable,” Nate said.

  “So is falling from fourteen thousand feet. You have to adjust.” The ground was rapidly approaching. Honestly, I was a bit bummed out. Nate and I began to spread out our arms and legs, to flatten ourselves as much as possible, trying to slow our descent enough for the wet suit to catch up to us, but it wasn’t working. Luckily, we had an ace in the hole. Or, more exactly, a robot in the sky.

  “Sir William!” Nate called out.

  “Screech?” The seagull was flying some ten feet away from us. He made it look easy, but for all my panicked flapping, I wasn’t even slowing my descent. I guess you have to start practicing to fly really early in life, or something.

  “I need that!” Nate said. He pointed up to the wet suit. Sir William immediately soared upward, faster, faster, climbing higher and higher, until he was only a yard or two away from the wet suit. And then, with a tremendous burst of speed . . .

  . . . he flew right past it.

  “What the piffle?” I said.

  “You’re screaming again,” Nate said. This time I knew it. I felt justified. It was a good time to scream. An excellent time to scream. Sir William just kept flying up, and up, and up, and . . .

  “Oh,” I said. “He thinks he’s supposed to retrieve the helicopter.”

  “Well, that won’t work. He’ll just break it.”

  “He will? Wait, never mind. There isn’t time for one of your explanations. Can’t you contact him somehow? Bring him back? Call him on the phone?”

  “Seagulls don’t carry phones.”

  “No. I suppose not. Well, it’s been good knowing you, Nate.”

  The ground was only a hundred feet below us. We were above the parking lot for the Cabaret Antique Store. There were a few cars there. A mother was holding her young daughter’s hand, walking across the parking lot. The daughter was looking up at us like we were something she couldn’t quite figure out. I wanted to tell her . . . don’t worry, I can’t figure us out, either.

  Ninety feet. Eighty feet. Seventy feet. And so on. I closed my eyes because I decided it would hurt less.

  There was a loud noise. Something like the roar of a robot elephant. Then, there was a jarring impact that was . . . soft? I kept my eyes closed. I wasn’t falling anymore. I moved my left leg. It did not seem to be broken. I moved my right leg. It worked. I wiggled my butt, which wiggled as requested, though it complained of bee stings. I held up an arm to see if it worked, and it was at that point that something clamped onto my hand and I screamed.

  I opened my eyes.

  “What the heck?” Nate said. He was holding my hand. “I was just trying to help you up! Why did you scream?”

  We were sitting on top of Betsy. Meaning Nate’s car, Betsy. She’s green and has a painting of Albert Einstein on the driver’s door. Her license plate is WAIT4IT, which is something that Nate likes to say.

  “Everybody okay?” Betsy asked. Oh, yeah, I should’ve mentioned that she talks and she’s quite intelligent. I really like her. Even though she’s a car, she has more personality than almost any of my classmates. I feel like I could have her over to my house some night. We could play video games. There’s not really room on the couch for her, though. And I’m not sure my parents would understand me being friends with a car, and, also . . . how was I alive?

  “How am I alive?” I asked Nate. He was jogging across the parking lot, to where the wet suit had flompled onto the concrete. If you don’t think that “flomple” is a word, then you haven’t heard a wet suit land on concrete after a fourteen-thousand-foot drop.

  “Oh, ask Betsy,” Nate said. This is one of the frustrating things about Nate. Sometimes he’s so distracted that when someone asks valid questions, like wondering why they haven’t been reduced to a two-dimensional pancake, his answer is to ask a car.

  “Betsy?” I said. “Can we run over Nate? A little? I mean, I don’t want to really hurt him. Maybe a bump on his head?”

  “No.” Her voice was slightly cold. I should’ve mentioned that Betsy is a bit sweet on Nate. I’m sorry that I keep mentioning facts that I forgot. I was still shaking from the fall and entirely confused by the whole “not being squished on the parking lot” thing. To be honest, my mind was super-flompled.

  “I was just kidding,” I told Betsy.

  “Oh. Okay. Are you still curious about the reverse gravitational muon bombardment?”

  “I don’t even know what you just said.”

  “It’s how I was able to decelerate your fall so that you were not dismantled.”

  “Some sort of force field?”

  “No. That would be silly. It was a compressed deceleration field.”

  “Ha ha,” I said. “Yeah. I’m not even sure why I said that thing about a force field. That really would be silly.” I had no idea why that would be silly, but I didn’t want to look stupid in front of a car.

  Nate came walking back with the wet suit. He sure has skinny legs. Betsy’s tires squealed as she quickly turned around. She was embarrassed, I think, to see Nate in his boxer shorts. Her windows tinted red.

  “Got it,” Nate said, holding up the wet suit in triumph.

  “Okay,” I said, not quite sure why we should be celebrating.

  Nate told me, “We don’t have to worry about falling from the helicopter now.” I looked around. I was standing in the middle of a parking lot. Nobody else was in sight, excepting the mother and the young daughter, with the daughter trying to explain to her mother that Nate and I had fallen from the sky and that a talking car had caught us. The mother, not even looking our way, was telling her daughter that she wouldn’t let her drink any more coffee if she was going to be having hallucinations.

  A bumblebee buzzed past me, and that gave me a momentary panic, but the bee flew quickly on, out of sight.

  I said, “Nate, we aren’t falling anymore, so I’m not exactly worried. What could you have done with a wet suit, anyway?”

  “It’s one of my inventions. It can . . . well, I guess it doesn’t matter now.” He frowned, clearly disappointed that he couldn’t show off his new invention, meaning that he was grumbling when he grabbed some clothes from Betsy’s trunk, and he was peevish as he slid into his pants. He managed to make buttoning his shirt into an orchestra of sighs. Still, it was nice to have him look normal again, nice to see his flopping brown hair, his brown eyes, his nose that I kindly claim is not too big, the glasses that he made himself and that I honestly think are stylish, his normal checkered shirt, and the pants where he’s scribbled endless equations and technical drawings. Yes, it was very nice to have him look his regular ol’ self again. What I’m really trying to say here is that I was glad his legs (which I will describe as “skinny” and “pale” . . . because that’s the simple truth) weren’t showing anymore.

  Beep. The noise was from one of the buttons on Nate’s shirt. I only know this because the button glowed red at the same time.

  “Uh-oh,” Nate said. He looked down at the button. It was the third button on his shirt. All his buttons were buttoned. He’s the only one I know who always buttons all the buttons. He tells me that everything has its purpose, and that if you don’t use a button, it simply goes to waste. I haven’t argued against him on this because the argument would serve no purpose and my time would simply go to waste.

  I said, “Uh-oh? Is something wrong?” Nate looked up to me, then back down to his button.

  “Here,” he said, holding open Betsy’s passenger side door. “Get in. We have to leave. Right now.” He tossed the wet suit in the backseat and ran around to the driver’s side. Betsy opened the door for him and he got in. Whenever we’re in the car, the windows display images so that, to any onlooker, it seems like two adults are driving the car, rather than two sixth graders. It’s just easier that way. Sometimes the projected images have us look like regular people, but Nate occasionally progra
ms the illusions so that we look like, oh . . . Oscar Wilde or Napoleon or Cleopatra or, in one memorable instance, two polar bears. I’m not sure why Nate ever thought that last one was a good idea. It’s not like onlookers would think, “Oh, for a second there it looked like two sixth graders were driving that car, but luckily it’s just a couple of polar bears.”

  Anyway, Betsy actually drives herself. Nate and I are just passengers.

  Nate seemed frantic as we got into the car, and he told Betsy, “Full speed home,” and she sped away so quickly that I nearly tumbled into the backseat before I could get my seat belt on.

  “Sorry, passenger Delphine Cooper,” Betsy told me. “We will be traveling at high velocity.” The parking lot was already a blur. Betsy is fast. Nate has told me that he installed a collider engine into the car. I’m not sure what that means, and he only chuckled when I said that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in a car that had a collider, because I don’t want to collide with anything. His chuckle was the type you hear when someone thinks you’ve told a really good joke. I hadn’t been joking.

  “What’s going on, Nate?” I asked as we sped out of the parking lot.

  “My button glowed red and beeped. That means a member of the Red Death Tea Society is close by. In fact, I think maybe several members, since the button is still beeping.”

  It was. His button was going beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep beep beep. I have to say, I’d never before considered that a button could be ominous, but there it was, being all ominous.

  I said, “Well, that’s bad news.”

  “Yeah.” Nate’s button was still sounding the alarm. Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep beep beep. “Lately they’ve been sending me letters about how they’ll stop at nothing to erase my ‘menace,’ or at least turn me to the tea side.”

  “Letters? Actual letters? Like, in the mail?”

  “That’s right. They’re on parchment. Lettered in red.”

  “I’m starting to wonder if I’m hallucinating this entire day. This could all be a dream. Maybe I hit my head when the bee was in my house?”