Sprockets

by Alexander Key

  “Seven years’ work!” stormed Dr. Bailey, his voice rising. “Ruined because of robots!”

  “It was because of marbles, dear,” Mrs. Bailey said sweetly. “I’m really to blame.”

  “Marbles!” screamed the Doctor. “What were they doing with marbles?”

  “I gave some to Rivets,” said Mrs. Bailey. “He did love them so.”

  “I won’t have a robot that plays with marbles!” howled Dr. Bailey. “I won’t have robots at all! They’ve wrecked my Space Probe! They’ve ruined my only chance of talking to that Something on Mars! They’ve unequivocally nullified, negated, and nonplussed the answer to the greatest scientific secret of the century—and given it to the Mongolians! They’ve—”

  “Daddy,” Jim interrupted, “what does unequivocally nullify, negate, and nonplus mean?”

  “Silence!” thundered the doctor, his mop of white hair flying this way and that. “Don’t you know better than to interrupt me when I’m furious? It means they’ve rocked the boat and sunk it, but good. I’m through with robots! Miranda, call the robot factory. Tell them to come and take these worthless mechanical contraptions out of my sight at once!”

  “Now, Barnabas,” said Mrs. Bailey, “you know very well they aren’t worthless. For a scientist so famous in so many ologies and onomies, you—”

  “They are worse than worthless!” roared the doctor. “They are addled, aberrated, destructive, and dangerous. I want ’em torn apart, dismembered, and pulverized! I want—”

  “Barnabas,” said Mrs. Bailey, very severely this time, “what you want is a cup of sassafras tea with honey in it to calm you down.”

  She made him a cup of sassafras tea, double strength, and put a large gob of sourwood honey in it. The doctor gulped it, and it did calm him a lot, though his nose still twitched.

  “Accidents happen in the very best of families,” Mrs. Bailey said. “It’s only fair that Sprockets and Rivets be allowed to speak for themselves. If you’ll turn them on—”

  “You turn them on,” snapped the doctor. “I absolutely refuse to touch them!”

  CLICK! CLICK!

  Sprockets and Rivets got up and stood stiffly at attention, their eye lights blinking worriedly. Their circuits were cool now, but their heads ached from the awful knowledge of what they had done.

  “You poor little dears,” Mrs. Bailey said kindly. “You’ve had a terrible experience. How do you feel?”

  “Horrid, ma’am,” said Sprockets, speaking for them both, as he usually did. “Perfectly ghastly. Words cannot begin to express our shame. But we are everlastingly grateful to you for saving our wits. And we earnestly hope we may be allowed to repair the damage we caused.”

  “R-repair the damage!” the doctor sputtered. “Ha! What madness is this?”

  “I betcha they could, Daddy,” said Jim. “How long would it take you, Sprockets?”

  “Seven days,” Sprockets answered. “If we may be allowed—”

  “Seven days to rebuild a machine that took me seven years to create?” the doctor waved a trembling hand at the tangled wreckage of the Space Probe. “Any robot who would make such a statement has lost his wits! Now I’m convinced you are mad, addled, aberrated, and entirely deranged!”

  “B-b-but, thir,” little Rivets burst out, not realizing his screw was loose again. “My brudder’s not abbled! He’th tho thmart he can fix enyfing!”

  Sprockets gave a tock of dismay. “Oh, sir, please!” he begged quickly. “Our circuits have had a most jellifying jolt, and we’ve hardly had time to recover. If I may be permitted to explain—”

  “You may not!” the doctor snapped. “I’ve had enough of you both. One of you is so abbled—I mean addled—he can’t even talk. And the other is downright deranged. I never want to see you in this laboratory again. Go to your room—and stay there till the robot factory sends for you!”

  With heads down, Sprockets and Rivets trudged dejectedly upstairs to their room next to Jim’s.

  “I’m tho thorry,” Rivets said, when they were alone.

  “It’s too late to be thorry—I mean sorry,” Sprockets told him. “You shouldn’t have spoken when your screw was looth—I mean loose—and I warned you about the marbles.”

  “I gueth I’m not quite wight bwight.”

  “Neither of us is quite right bright right now. Oh, my poor aching circuits! I’ve got to think as I’ve never thought before—and I can’t think when my circuits ache. Let me fix your looth—loose—screw.”

  He had just tightened the screw, and oiled Rivets’ tongue and his own, when Mrs. Bailey and Jim came into the room. Jim had some fresh ice packs in his hand, and Mrs. Bailey carried a large box of learning tapes.

  She wiped a tear from her eye, and said, “The robot factory can’t send for you until tomorrow, and that may give us time if we work fast.”

  “Time for what, ma’am?” Sprockets blinked at the learning tapes. The very sight of them made his circuits squirm.

  “Time to be superly-superly educated,” said Mrs. Bailey. “When the doctor sees you again—and I’ll make sure that he does—I want you both to be wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, and simply popping with knowledge. Then he’ll have to change his mind and decide to keep you—that is, if you can think of some way to beat the Mongolians.”

  “B-but, ma’am—”

  “No buts. You’ve only been half educated in a few onomies and ologies. I’m going to give you stacks more, and include some otomies and istics.”

  “Oh–no–no–no–no–no—”

  There was absolutely nothing, aside from being returned to the robot factory, that Sprockets and Rivets hated more than to have learning tapes run through their heads. The thought of it now, with their poor heads splitting, was enough to give them spasms.

  But it was either that or the robot factory; and in three ticks and a double tock they were sitting on their stools, and Mrs. Bailey had turned on their learning buttons and inserted a learning tape in the slot in the back of each robot’s head.

  “Let’s see,” said Mrs. Bailey, “linguistics would help a lot, as would statistics and ballistics. As for the otomies, there’s lobotomy, pneumotomy, monotomy—oh, dear, this is making me abbled! I don’t know why they don’t make a single tape for all the otomies, then I wouldn’t have to worry about them.”

  Neither of the robots could hear her, for new knowledge was screaming through their aching circuits, making them sizzle like frying fish. It was bad enough for Rivets, whose circuits were limited; but for poor Sprockets, who had twenty trillion to sizzle, all at the same time, it was absolutely horrendous. Their heads were blistering, but Jim put fresh ice packs on them whenever Mrs. Bailey put new tapes in their slots. When they finally stiffened from so much education, and passed out completely, they had to be turned off and put to bed.

  It seemed ages and ages before they were turned on and began to tick again.

  “Do you feel wide-eyed and bushy-tailed now?” Mrs. Bailey asked hopefully.

  “I feel wonnerful, ma’am!” said Rivets, bouncing to his feet, his loose screw only slightly loose. “I bet I can count to a hundert!”

  But poor Sprockets could hardly sit up. “I feel practically fused, ma’am. It must be remembered that my mechanism is far more sensitive and complicated than my brother’s, and that it has taken an awful walloping. It will be fourteen hours and eighteen seconds before I can click properly again.”

  “But, Sprockets!” Jim burst out. “The truck from the robot factory will be here before that! What are we going to do?”

  “Would it help if you turned on your cerebration button?” Mrs. Bailey asked.

  “I wouldn’t dare,” said Sprockets. “Then I’d really be fused.”

  Mrs. Bailey wiped a tear from her eye. “We can’t have you any more abbled than you are. Can’t anyone think of anything?”

  Rivets said: “Ma’am, my bwain’s only themi-pothitwonic, but I bet if it could be hooked up to Spwockets, we’d have a whole bwain b
etween us. Then mebbe we could fink what to do.”

  Jim said, “Would it work, Sprockets?”

  “According to my new learning tapes, which include lobotomy,” Sprockets answered, “it would be like lobotomy in reverse. All we have to do is connect Rivets’ pay-attention button to my special perceptors. Then possibly I will have brains enough to cope with the Mongolian question.”

  Jim brought wires and tools and speedily made the connection.

  “Wow!” said Sprockets, as his buttons flashed and a halo of color began spinning about his head. “This is really super!”

  “Hurry up with the answer,” poor Rivets pleaded. “It may be thuper for you, but it ith orful hard on me!”

  “Patience,” said Sprockets. “First I must tune in on the Mongolians and find out what is happening.” Hastily he adjusted his built-in radio and listened.

  “Oh!” he said finally. “This is bad. It will make the doctor very unhappy.”

  “What’s cooking?” Jim asked. “Has Prof. Vladimir Katz found out about the Something on Mars?”

  “Not yet, but he will soon. It seems, as nearly as I can translate, that the secret on which Prof. Vladimir Katz was working for the Mongolians was not a Space Probe. It was a spaceship, and it has just been launched. The professor is now sixty-two thousand miles out in space, on his way to Mars.”

  Jim looked sick. “Daddy will never get over this,” he said dolefully. “And there’s not a thing we can do about it.”

  “There is just one thing,” said Sprockets. Very carefully, so as not to strain the wires connecting him to Rivets, he reached under his cot and brought forth a small box not much bigger than his hand. When he opened it, purple light flooded the room.

  Jim gaped at it in astonishment. “Is that the present the purple people gave you when you found the quantic moonstone for them?”

  “Yes,” said Sprockets. “It’s their signal box. They said if we ever needed them in an emergency, I was to press the button in this box, think real hard, and they would come.”

  Jim looked doubtful. “Aw, suppose they are way over on the other side of the Universe—a million light years away! How can they possibly hear a signal from a little box?”

  “Distance has nothing to do with it,” Sprockets told him. “It works by thought—and thought is quicker than light. I’m not sure that positronic thought will work, but this is an emergency of the most desperate kind, so we’ll have to try it. Turn on all your buttons, Rivets, and think hard!”

  “B-but how can I fink when I don’t know what to fink about?”

  Sprockets almost groaned. Rivets had never met Ilium and Leli, the purple people, and couldn’t possibly imagine what they were like, or how they talked. “Oh, just close your eyes and think of something purple-purple marbles if you have to. I’ll do the rest. Ready? Go!”

  As Rivets closed his eyes, Sprockets did the same, and pressed down on the button in the purple box. Ilium and Leli! he thought, using the singing language he had learned from them. Sprockets calling! We need your help. Come quickly!”

  Almost instantly from the box, very faintly, came a curious singing that only Sprockets could understand. It was so very, very faint that it must have come from an unimaginable distance, possibly some other universe.

  “We hear you, Sprockets,” came the singing from the box. “We are coming!”

  If there was more, Sprockets was not aware of it. Somewhere in his brain a safety relay buzzed and clicked off, to give his poor battered circuits a rest. It would be fourteen hours and eighteen seconds before it clicked on again.

  3

  They Begin a Journey

  The truck from the robot factory, fortunately, arrived an hour late the next morning. Had it come earlier, the doctor would not have had time to drink three cups of sassafras tea with large gobs of sourwood honey in it, and Sprockets and Rivets might have been taken back to the factory. But the tea calmed the doctor, so much so that he wondered if he hadn’t been a bit hasty in his judgment. After all, he thought, little Rivets had his good points in spite of the marbles; and Sprockets, well, perhaps Sprockets could rebuild the Space Probe.

  But at that moment his thoughts were interrupted by the laboratory clock, which was connected with his observatory on the roof.

  “It is a quarter past ten,” said the clock, very precisely as if it were proud of its ability to keep time. “The day is clear and there are no flying saucers—” Then abruptly it flashed a red light and cried: “Correction! Correction! There is a flying saucer!” And all at once it was screaming: “Flying saucer! Flying saucer! Flying saucer!”

  The doctor upset his teacup, dashed madly upstairs, changed his mind, and dashed madly down again, turned around twice in his excitement, and dashed into the courtyard. He collided with the driver of the truck from the robot factory, who was staring upward, bug-eyed, at a purple flying saucer hovering overhead.

  “Ug!” said the truck driver, pointing. “Flying s-s-saucer! A p-p-purple one!”

  “Naturally it’s a purple one!” snapped the doctor. “Take that truck out of the way so it can land!”

  “B-but I came to pick up a pair of witless and deranged—”

  “We don’t have any! Some addle-pated idiot made a mistake! Return to the factory!” The doctor dashed back into the house and tore upstairs again, calling loudly: “Sprockets! Sprockets! Where are you? Come here this instant!”

  He found Sprockets asleep on his cot in the robots’ room. Standing beside him were Rivets, who was counting, Jim, who held a watch, and Mrs. Bailey, who had an instruction book on robots in her hand.

  “What’s going on here?” the doctor demanded impatiently.

  “Sprockets is asleep, dear,” Mrs. Bailey told him.

  “Robots never sleep!” snapped the doctor.

  “They do when they’ve had jellifying jolts and their safety relay clicks off,” Mrs. Bailey informed him. “It says so right here in the instruction book.”

  “But I can’t have him sleeping now!” cried the doctor. “Don’t you know the purple saucer has come to visit us?”

  “Of course I know it, dear. Sprockets sent for it.”

  “He sent for it? Bless me, how? Why? What for?”

  “To help solve the Mongolian question, dear.”

  “Then wake him up! Hurry!”

  “Daddy,” said Jim, “Sprockets can’t wake up till his safety relay clicks on again. It’s almost time.”

  “Fifty-wun,” Rivets was counting. “Fifty-two. Fifty-fwee …”

  At the count of “sixty” Sprockets opened his eyes, blinked, and suddenly bounced to his feet. For the first time since the accident he felt really wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, and in full possession of his circuits.

  “Sir,” he said to the doctor, “I hope you will accept my apologies for the trouble I have caused you. Has the purple flying saucer arrived yet?”

  “Of course it’s arrived!” cried the doctor. “Why do you think I’m standing here tearing my hair? Get down there and greet them! You know I can’t sing and twitter their language!”

  “Yes, sir!” said Sprockets, and was gone like a flash, oiling his tongue as he ran. The musical language of the purple people was the most difficult one he had ever learned, and very hard on the tongue bearings.

  Outside, he gave a joyous little tock at the sight of the purple saucer shimmering in the courtyard, and raced up the narrow stairway that had been lowered for him.

  “Ilium! Leli!” he sang to his friends, as they ran to him with outstretched hands.

  They were small, hardly taller than Jim, but very, very slender and beautiful, so that they reminded Sprockets of the slender-stemmed flowers in Mrs. Bailey’s garden. Everything about them, even their curious clothing, had a lovely purplelike glow that seemed one color one moment and another color the next.

  “It is purplishly, glowingly wonderful to see you again,” Leli sang, in the gay manner of the purple people, and she kissed him fondly on the end of the n
ose.

  “We came as quickly as we could,” Ilium told him. “But we were way over in the Globular Cluster beyond the Edge, twelve thought-laps away.” He smiled and added, “What can we do to help you?”

  “It’s about our fourth planet,” said Sprockets. “The red one we call Mars. It’s put us in an unpurplish pickle. Did you know there’s a Something on it?”

  “We didn’t even suspect it.” Ilium was suddenly interested, so much so that his eyes changed color and shone like opals. “It’s such a curiously worn-down place, and it seems lifeless except for the lichens. How did you learn about it?”

  Sprockets told him what had happened.

  “Then we must go to Mars and search for the Something. It is very important, most galactically so. All Somethings on all planets must be investigated. Tell the doctor we will be most spectrumly pleased if he will come with us.”

  “He will be most purplishly delighted to hear it,” Sprockets sang in reply. He turned as Jim, the doctor, and Rivets came up to the saucer’s slender stairway. “This is my new brother, Rivets,” he explained. “He’s only semi-positronic, but he’s the best brother a robot ever had. He helped me signal you when my circuits were jammed.”

  “I thought so!” Leli laughed. “When your signal came, we also received a distinct impression of marbles—purple marbles. We knew it wasn’t you. Anyway, we thought they might be needed, so we brought some along.”

  “He’ll love you for it,” Sprockets sang. “But I’m not so sure about the doctor.”

  Rivets was blinking at him in amazement. “Spwockets, how did you learn to twibble like that? You thound like a mocklingbird!”

  “S-h-h!” Sprockets whispered warningly. “Your screw—”

  But the doctor was far too excited over seeing his saucer friends again to notice anything else. His only difficulty was the matter of the musical language, which was far too fast and full of trills for an Earthman, even the doctor, to learn.