How to Outsmart a Billion Robot Bees

by Paul Tobin

  “Ahhhhhh! Nate, don’t tell me what you said. Tell me what you meant!”

  “Oh, I see.” Nate adjusted his glasses, referred to an equation he’d written on his pants, and gulped. There was something he didn’t want to tell me.

  I said, “Melville, sting Nate if he doesn’t tell me what he’s talking about.” Melville rose up from my hair (she’d been hiding from the ants, because she thought they were creepy) and went to hover next to Nate.

  Nate said, “Hey! No fair. I’ll tell. Each of the ants was applying micro-thin nuclear components to the tunnel’s walls, ceiling, and floor. With enough of them in place, a nuclear event could be triggered by remote control.”

  “A nuclear event,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You mean a nuclear explosion.”

  “Yes.”

  “Parades are events. Birthday parties are events. Explosions are explosions.”

  “Technically, an explosion could be—”

  “Technically, a sixth grade girl named Delphine Gabriella Cooper could explode in an arm-punching fury if some genius doesn’t do something about the nuclear bomb that she’s apparently standing inside!”

  “Oh. I see. You’re worried about a nuclear explosion.” Nate stopped and looked at me, as if waiting for me to say, “No, you’re entirely wrong . . . I’m not worried about standing at ground zero during a nuclear explosion. Who would be?”

  Instead, I said, “Yes. That’s true.”

  “Oh. Well. It shouldn’t be a problem. I can just realign the atoms so they refuse to enter a critical density stage.”

  “Great. Any way I can help?”

  “Ooo! I was hoping you’d ask!” Nate reached out and took my hand. He wasn’t holding it in a “we’re dating!” manner; it was more of a “this is cool that you’re helping me defuse the scariest bomb in all existence” gesture. I swallowed. Heavily. Nate’s hand was warm. Mine felt cold.

  Nate asked, “Is there any way you could go hold off the Red Death Tea Society’s full scale assault for . . . maybe an hour?”

  “Ooog,” I said. It wasn’t a word. But I pronounced it very clearly.

  “What?” Nate asked.

  “Piffle,” I said. Also not technically a word, but it’s a word that I say. It means bad things. I was not thinking good thoughts.

  Then I said, “Yes. I can do this.”

  “Get Bosper to help if you need him!” Nate called out, as I began trudging back down the tunnel, the way we’d come.

  Nate, scratching a fingernail through the apparently nuclear ant paint that was covering the tunnel wall, said, “Sorry I can’t help, but there are quite a lot of atoms down here, and my nano-bots and I will need to reconfigure a few hundred trillion atoms in order to keep levels below critical.”

  “Okay!” I said. I tried to smile, but to be honest, my panic levels were reaching critical.

  Ssssst!” I whispered, trying to get Bosper’s attention. The terrier jumped and twisted in midair, landing facing me. We were in Nate’s backyard, somewhat under his tree house, next to the garden where Nate’s mom grows a selection of flowers and vegetables and a few other things. Bosper had a stalk of rhubarb in his mouth when he saw me, but he spit it out. He’s very good at spitting.

  “Delphine the red-haired girl!” Bosper said.

  “Ahhh!” I gasped. But it was a whispered gasp. Bosper is not supposed to talk around Nate’s parents. They’re not supposed to know he can talk. But there was no way that Maryrose, Nate’s mom, didn’t hear him.

  But . . . she didn’t. She was on all fours, working slowly along a garden row, pulling weeds from a patch of carrots. She was pulling a few carrots, too, putting them in a basket to be cleaned later. They were nice and ripe, covered in splotches of dirt. There were five of them. Speaking of the number five, that’s how many unconscious members of the Red Death Tea Society were in the backyard. There were three women and two men slumped in various areas. One of them was crumpling a row of rhubarb, fallen atop the plants. Another was draped across the branches of a tree, dangling twenty feet over the ground. Sir William, the robot gull, was perched next to him. Seeing Sir William worried me. If he’d left my house, that meant my family was unguarded. And . . . speaking of family . . .

  “Don’t talk around Maryrose,” I whispered to Bosper.

  “Nobody hears!” the terrier said, burying a carrot. “The dog can be talking and farting and there is no trouble!”

  “There’s lots of trouble!” I said. “Nate’s figuring out how to disarm a very strange nuclear bomb, and there are assassins in the house searching for Nate’s Infinite Engine, and you and I have to fend off the Red Death Tea Society for an hour.”

  “Bosper will be a good dog!” the terrier said. He was digging up the carrot he’d just buried. Sir William came floating down to the lawn, skipping with the landing until he was at my feet. He made the gull sound a few times, apparently trying to tell me something.

  “Ah,” Bosper said. “The bird makes discontent.”

  “Huh? What’s up?” Bosper seemed to have understood whatever Sir William had said.

  “Bees,” Bosper said, “Here comes a big visit!” I realized that Sir William must’ve been tracking more bees by his radar, and now they were on their way here. So, that’s why he’d left my house.

  “How many bees?” I asked Sir William. He made the gull noises again. I looked to Bosper for translation.

  “Seventeen!” Bosper said.

  “Seventeen?” I said. “That’s not so bad. A can of bug spray and a tennis racket, and I’ll be more than a match for—”

  “Seventeen swarms,” Bosper said. “Millions of bumblebees! Who likes pudding?”

  It was at that moment that I first began to hear the dull roar. It was like the sound of the ocean’s waves when you’re a mile away. But the noise was growing, building in intensity until it sounded like the ocean’s waves were only a half mile away. Then a quarter mile away. A hundred yards away. And then I could see masses of blackness in the sky, swarms of bees converging on Nate’s house, millions upon millions of bees like black clouds roiling through the sky, undulating, writhing, twisting, soaring ever closer. The lawn began shaking with the thundering roar of the oncoming bees, and I began to feel like I should run, just run anywhere, simply hide until everything was over and the darkness was gone, because there were so many bees that they were blotting out the light from the sun.

  “The dog is someone who likes pudding!” Bosper said. He was jumping up and down, scurrying about, bounding all around.

  “I’m not sure we can fight this,” I told Bosper.

  “We should not fight the pudding,” he said in a serious tone. Then, in a whisper, he added, “It is our friend.”

  “No. I mean . . . the bees.” I was looking to Bosper, hoping he would come up with some great idea (which might not have been my best moment, looking to a terrier for guidance) when I noticed there was a note on the ground. One of Nate’s notes. With my name on it.

  I leaped for it.

  It read, “Delphine. Tell Sir William to sing. Tell my mom that she should pick the sweet peas. Also, there’s a friend ray in Betsy’s glove box. And watch out for Luria. She’ll probably attack you with bees.”

  There was a drawing of a bee on the note. It was quite well done. It had human hands and was holding a huge bomb over its head, with a word balloon of “We can do this, Delphine!”

  I told the note, “That’s really great that you remind me of the nuclear bomb because it doesn’t make me nervous at all.” Then I crumpled up the note and tossed it at one of the oncoming seventeen swarms of bees.

  The paper arced through the air.

  The bumblebees simply parted around it, so that it traveled through a tunnel of bees, not hitting any of them.

  “Piffle,” I said. I’d been hoping to take down a few of them. Was it so much to ask that a couple of bumblebees would be knocked out? Even momentarily dazed? That way, there would be two less
bees to worry about, leaving only infinite bees to deal with.

  I sighed.

  Time to get to work.

  I told Sir William, “Nate says you’re supposed to sing.”

  I told Maryrose, “You should pick the sweet peas!”

  “Ohh,” Maryrose said, completely oblivious to the bumblebee danger, shuffling along on all fours past the carrots and along the edge of a rhubarb patch to reach the sweet peas. “You’re right, Delphine. These do look ripe.” She began plucking the peas from their stems. She was humming. The noise was a comforting accompaniment to the roaring swell of the millions of buzzing bees.

  And then Sir William began to sing.

  I suppose I should’ve expected something along the lines of the robot gull’s singing voice and what it would do to the bumblebees. After all, I’d been able to knock out two swarms of bees using only my skills as a rock diva, and the robot had far more control of its voice.

  The bees wavered when Sir William first began singing. And by “singing” I mean emitting a noise like when you flip through a huge pile of papers, or when talented card dealers shuffle the deck.

  The noise was, “Flapp flapp flappity-flap.” And then it was the same noise, but much quicker. And then the same noise, but much lower in tone. And then even faster and faster until Sir William was racing all along the yard, “singing” in a voice that was similar to the snarling drone of the oncoming bees.

  And they began to waver.

  They were flying erratically. Losing altitude. Swerving around. Veering sharply in one direction and then another.

  “What’s happening?” I asked Bosper. The terrier had one of his ears against the ground and a paw over his other. Dogs hear at different audio ranges than humans. It was clear that Sir William’s “singing” was not to the terrier’s liking.

  Thousands of bumblebees were falling to the ground like plump fuzzy raindrops.

  Millions of them, even.

  But I didn’t know what was happening. Bosper hadn’t answered me. The bees were struggling to regain the air. Crawling all over one another. Fighting to reach me. It was a yard-deep wave of bees, an insect tsunami that was advancing across the lawn. They were moving slower than they had been in the air, but they were definitely getting closer, and being stung by millions of crawling bees isn’t really all that much different from getting stung by millions of flying bees.

  “Bosper,” I said. “What’s happening?” But the poor terrier couldn’t speak, too overcome by the noise coming from the robot gull. Then, a bee stung me. It had reached my foot. Crawled up my leg. Stung my shin.

  “Piffle!” I said. The crawling swarm surged closer, and I realized I’d been standing there like some terrified nitwit rather than a sixth grade girl on whom the entire city of Polt was depending, a girl who needed to hold off the Red Death Tea Society for another fifty-three minutes so that Nate could deal with the threat of the nuclear bomb in the tunnel beneath my feet. So I ran as fast as I could through the edges of the crawling bees, darting through an area where they weren’t very deep, like just the shallowest advance of a wave, all the while trying not to think of the depths of the bumblebee ocean. I was stung five or six times and screamed in pain a similar number of times, give or take an extra ten.

  I ran right for the tree with Nate’s tree house.

  My speed enabled me to run a good five feet up the trunk, far enough that from there I was able to jump up and grab the lowest branch. The sudden addition of my weight jiggled the branch, and then the unconscious man in the tree, the assassin from the Red Death Tea Society, fell off his branch and disappeared below, sinking into the seemingly infinite bees that were covering Nate’s lawn.

  Hand over hand, I began moving along the branch. My feet were hanging just a few inches above the bees, and even then just because I was holding my feet up, shimmying along the branch as it stretched out toward the street, across Nate’s fence, and to the sidewalk. The bees were surging below me, trying to fly up to me, but something about Sir William’s singing was keeping them grounded. Still, they tried to build themselves into a big-enough pile to reach me, and they almost did, but I managed to stay one step ahead of them, or rather one frantic branch-swinging grab ahead of them.

  “Made it!” I said, dropping to the sidewalk. The bees were already turning my way, beginning to crawl in my direction, but I had a relatively straight run to the curb where Betsy was parked. I very much needed that friend ray from her glove box.

  “Arrgh!” I said. And, “Piffle!” And, “Seriously?” I said these assorted things because I was being stung by a few advance bumblebees as the giant swarm readjusted. I’d only given myself a few moments. More bees were on the way. Millions of them. I flung open Betsy’s door and frantically grabbed the friend ray from the glove box.

  “Great!” I said. I’d made it. Everything was going great.

  Then the noises changed.

  Sir William quit singing.

  For a second there was complete silence.

  Then the bees started to take to the air again. First one. Then another. Then about ten million of them. The roar of their wings and the clicking irritation of their voices washed away the silence. The combined swarm was as big as an ocean liner. With stingers.

  “Piffle!” I said. “Sir William? Why aren’t you singing?” I whispered this, to tell the truth, because I was rather nervous. Also quite terrified. And seeing as how nobody else was around, I didn’t expect any answers to my question.

  But I got one.

  “He isn’t singing because I shot him,” Luria said. I gasped. I screamed. I spun around so quickly that I almost fell over. Luria was standing in the middle of the street, holding one of those strange glass pistols. She was wearing a black dress with hints of green. Black sandals with green stockings. A gray cloche hat. Her silky red hair looked dramatic against the black of her dress. Her wide mouth was curved into a smile, bunching up the freckles on her cheeks. Her green eyes were glinting whenever the sunlight managed to filter through the dense cloud of the bees overhead. She began walking closer.

  Did I mention the gun?

  “Shot him?” I asked. It came out as a whimper. She’d shot Sir William? I quickly turned toward where I’d last seen the robot and . . . he was still there.

  Except he didn’t have a head.

  He was crumpled on his side, one wing beating feebly, and his head had completely vanished. It was gone. The disintegrator ray had simply erased the robot’s head from existence.

  I turned back around, ready to unleash a volley of my most remarkable swear words at Luria, as angry as I’ve ever been and already stomping in her direction before I noticed that her glass handgun, the disintegrator pistol, was now aimed at . . . me.

  Me.

  I gulped.

  And flung myself to one side.

  A huge swath of the asphalt just vanished, revealing packed soil beneath. I barely had time to register it before I heard the hum of the gun charging again. I leaped up and over Nate’s fence, even as Luria’s disintegrator pistol was erasing the fence from existence.

  “Ackk!” I said. I turned to run for the house, but the bumblebee swarm was blocking my path and I really didn’t think they were going to give me permission to pass. Bumblebees are rude that way.

  So . . . there I was. You know that saying about being between a rock and a hard place? Well, I was between millions of bees and a disintegrator pistol, and that’s much worse.

  Luckily, I had the friend ray.

  “Hah!” I said, pointing it toward Luria and pulling the trigger just as she walked through the gap in the fence. A brilliant kaleidoscope of colors washed over Luria in waves, in concentric circles of various colors.

  “Hah!” I said again. “Now you’re my friend and you have to do what I say!” I should point out that I don’t really believe friends have to do what you say. That’s nonsense. Friends just have to be friends. I was only caught up in the moment. That said, I suppose I could argue
that while friends don’t need to do what you say, they do need to do what you say if you’re saying, “Don’t attack me with millions of bumblebees or shoot me with a disintegrator pistol.” Really, I think you can expect at least that much out of a friendship.

  Luria watched all the colors playing over her. She frowned at me. She raised an eyebrow.

  “Really?” she said. “A friend ray? How cute. Did you really think that would work?”

  “I really did,” I admitted. Then I rolled to the left because she was trying to shoot me. After that, I rolled to the right because she was still trying to shoot me. Then I leaped over a patch of potatoes in Maryrose’s garden, because Luria was extremely insistent about shooting me, while I wasn’t very much into that at all.

  The final result of all my rolling around and leaping was that I ended up quite dirty and tremendously winded and splayed out on my back at the edges of the garden, where Maryrose had been growing some tomatoes. Several of the tomatoes had squished beneath me, making me look like an accident victim, but it was unfortunately no accident that Luria was standing over me, aiming the pistol at my heaving chest.

  “Good-bye,” she said.

  And pulled the trigger.

  Which is when Bosper bit her on the rump.

  “Squaaa?” she said, her shot going wide.

  “Grrrr!” Bosper said.

  “The dog?” Luria screamed.

  “Who’s a good boy?” Bosper said. The words were muffled because he was very busy with the biting.

  I scrambled to my feet, trying to think of what to do. Bosper lost his grip and he fell to the lawn. Luria immediately tried to shoot him, but he was too quick for her, jumping here and there, scrambling to one side or the other, all the while talking about mathematical concepts that I simply could not understand, lecturing Luria about triangles and swath arcs, and other things, explaining that he was too mathematically talented to ever fall into the range of her shots. And while I didn’t understand the math, I did understand how close I’d come to being nonexistent, and how very lucky I was to have a friend like Bosper.

  Wait.