Rivets and Sprockets

by Alexander Key

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  Rivets and Sprockets

  Alexander Key

  To ALL THE BOYS AND GIRLS I KNOW, of all ages and especially the right age, beginning with Zan, and including Jerry, Scotty, Patsy, Nick, Christina, Gloria, Paul, Marty, Herman, lots of Johns and Bills and Franks, a good Joe, a nice Sarah, and all the way down and up the alphabet to Debbie, Cindy, Betsy, and little Alice.

  A. K.

  Contents

  1. They Are in Disgrace

  2. They Put Their Heads Together

  3. They Begin a Journey

  4. They Abble the Professor

  5. They Are Lost in Space

  6. They Search for the Something

  7. They Enter a Door

  8. They Unravel Riddles

  9. They Are Abbled and Plated

  10. They Meet the Something

  About the Author

  1

  They Are in Disgrace

  Sprockets, the Baileys’ little robot, and his brother, Rivets, the Baileys’ least robot, were lying helpless on the laboratory floor, quivering from shock. Their circuits were overheating, and in ten seconds—unless someone speedily turned off their switches—their brains would sizzle and pop, and they would be robot dummies for the rest of their lives. They had done a dreadful thing, much too awful for any proper robot to think about.

  Here is what they did, and why it was so very bad:

  Three days earlier—three days, five hours, fifty-two minutes, and seven seconds earlier, according to the clock in Sprockets’ special brain—Dr. Bailey’s son, young Jim Bailey, had made a great discovery. Jim was in the laboratory, fiddling with a radio he had built from odd parts, when suddenly he exclaimed: “Daddy, I’m getting a message from Mars! Daddy, listen!”

  “I will not,” said the doctor. “And you are not getting a message from Mars. Don’t interrupt me. Can’t you see I’m thinking deeply?”

  The doctor was a tall, thin man with thick glasses on the end of his nose, a thick mop of white hair that flopped in all directions when he thought deeply, and a perpetual frown that came from solving too many puzzles. His greatest puzzle, how to finish his Super-Magna Space Probe, was still unsolved.

  “But, Daddy,” Jim insisted, “I am getting a message, and I’m sure it’s from Mars! I aimed a signal there, and I’m getting a reply. Ask Sprockets. He’s never wrong.”

  “Humph!” grunted the doctor. He looked suspiciously at Sprockets, who had been made by accident at the robot factory and given a brain that no little robot put together from scraps should have had. It was forever upsetting him with its answers.

  “What’s this nonsense about?” the doctor demanded.

  Sprockets and his smaller brother, Rivets—they were about the size of smallish boys with biggish heads—were standing respectfully to one side as proper robots should, wide awake and ticking while they awaited orders. Each was wearing a pair of Jim’s cast-off overalls, neatly pressed; their joints were carefully oiled so they would not squeak, and there wasn’t a speck of dust or rust on them, for Mrs. Bailey was very particular about their appearance. Their eye lights were bright, and the rows of buttons across their foreheads glowed with color. Rivets, whose brain was only semi-positronic, didn’t have as many buttons as Sprockets, but in the short time he had been with the Baileys he had managed very well by keeping his pay-attention button turned on most of the time.

  “Sir,” said Sprockets in his earnest little voice, answering the doctor’s question, “according to my calculations—and I am well educated in several onomies, including astronomy—it is true that Jim is getting a message from Mars. And, sir, it sounds like a perfect dilly. If you will permit me—”

  “Absolutely not,” said the doctor. “If there were anything on Mars, which there isn’t, and if Jim were old enough to have the comprehension to know it, which he isn’t and doesn’t, he couldn’t possibly hear it without my Super-Magna Space Probe, which I haven’t quite properly perfected.”

  “Aw, Daddy,” Jim told him, “Sprockets and I whipped up a do-jigger that takes care of it. It doesn’t work too well, but—”

  Jim stopped. Louder sounds were coming from the radio. Strange and unearthly sounds that simply had to be Martian because they couldn’t be anything else.

  “Bless me!” muttered the doctor. Suddenly he dashed to the radio and began twiddling the knobs. “Miranda!” he called. “Come listen to this!”

  “I’m right here, listening, Barnabas,” said Mrs. Bailey, who had been sitting there all the time, mending the robots’ overalls, which had a way of wearing out at the knees. She was a short, plump little woman with a turned-up nose and quick birdlike blue eyes like Jim’s.

  “Miranda,” said the doctor, and his mop of white hair was standing almost straight up with excitement. “Do you know what this means?”

  “How could I, dear? I don’t speak Martian.”

  “No, no, no! That isn’t the meaning I mean. I mean, do you realize the imperious import of this discovery?”

  “What’s ‘imperious import’ mean, Daddy?” Jim asked.

  “It means anything from top drawer to battle stations. Don’t interrupt me. Miranda, I must revise my concept of the fourth planet. Miranda, there is Something on Mars! I absolutely must get in touch with that Something and find out what it is.”

  “My goodness,” said Mrs. Bailey, “from the sound of it I hope you never meet it in the dark. And, dear, I don’t think you’d better fiddle too much with Jim’s radio. You might burn out his do-jigger, and then you’ll never—”

  She spoke too late. There was a loud crackling, a flash of sparks, and flame suddenly shot from the tubes. There might have been a bad fire in the laboratory if Sprockets, his hands and feet twinkling as fast as thought, hadn’t snatched up a fire extinguisher and smothered the radio with foam.

  “Barnabas Bailey!” Mrs. Bailey exclaimed. “Look what you’ve done! Honestly—”

  The doctor stood snapping his fingers, quite vexed. All at once he brightened. “Tut,” he said. “Tut, tut. There’s nothing lost.”

  “Except my radio,” Jim said dolefully.

  “A mere detail,” said his father. “Think nothing of it. What has been made once can always be made again, only bigger and better. Jim, you may have the honor of helping me finish my Super-Magna Space Probe. That is, if you and Sprockets can remember how you put together that er-ah—that do-jigger thing. How about it, Sprockets? Do you remember?”

  “Sir,” said Sprockets, lifting his head proudly, “you forget that I have a genuine Asimov Positronic Brain with twenty trillion printed circuits. I remember all.”

  “Of course. Naturally. Then let us get busy. Immediately. It is absolutely emphatically imperative that we talk to that Something on Mars. We must find out the who, the what, and the why of it before some infamous and unspeakable rascal beats us to it.”

  “Sir,” said Sprockets, “are you referring to Prof. Vladimir Katz, who recently escaped from jail?”

  “I am,” snapped the doctor. “And don’t mention that unmentionable name in my presence again.”

  “But, sir, I regret to inform you that that unmentionable one is now in Mongolia, doing something secret for the Mongolian Planetary Monopoly.”

  “What?” The doctor seemed staggered. “How did you learn that?”

  “From my built-in microscopic positronic radio, sir. I can hear any message in the world when I properly tune my circuits.”

  “Great gobbling guns!” cried Dr. Bailey. “If Vladimir Katz is working for the Mongolians,
there’s no time to lose! He’ll find out all about Mars and monopolize it just as sure as purple saucers fly. Everybody to work! Fast!”

  As they trotted behind the doctor, Rivets turned on his whisper button and asked, “Spwockets, who ith that unthpeakable, unmenthunable—oh dear, my thkwew ith looth again!”

  “Sh-h-h!” Sprockets whispered, and gave a quick tock that amounted to a gulp, for poor Rivets had a screw in his head that was always coming loose at the wrong time. It made him sound positively addled, if not actually aberrated—and an aberrated robot was something that no proper robot cared to think about. Sprockets was terribly afraid the doctor might find out about it and send Rivets back to the factory to be exchanged. Never that!

  “I’ll explain about that man some other time,” Sprockets said hurriedly. “Let me fix your screw.”

  Out from the pockets of his overalls came a tiny screwdriver and a can of oil, and in two ticks and a tock he had tightened the loose screw and oiled Rivets’ tongue.

  “We must be on our toes for this job,” he told Rivets. “Is your pay-attention button on full?”

  “All the way.”

  “Careful button?”

  “All the way.”

  “Your hurry-up button?”

  “All the way.”

  “Your balance button?”

  “All the way.”

  “Then you’d better keep them all the way all the time.”

  “But, Sprockets, I may burn out my battery!”

  “Oh, no. You have an atomic battery just like mine, and it will recharge itself every night if you lie down for six hours, fifty-seven minutes, and twelve seconds.”

  “Aw, if I have to recharge, how can I play marbles at night?”

  “A robot shouldn’t play marbles when important work is going on.”

  “But I like to play with marbles!” said Rivets. “It makes me feel almost like a real boy. Didn’t you ever play with marbles?”

  “Certainly not! And you shouldn’t—not in the laboratory.”

  “I will if I want to,” Rivets pouted. “The doctor hasn’t ordered me not to, and you can’t order me without orders to do so. You’re only a robot, too.”

  “Stop that whispering and get busy!” shouted the doctor. “We’ve got to build the do-jigger and beat the Mongolians!”

  They rushed to work.

  Never before had the Bailey laboratory been in such a bustle. Rivets helped Sprockets, Sprockets helped Jim, Jim helped the doctor, and the doctor tore about fitting this to that and that to this, and sometimes getting so tangled in the Super-Magna Space Probe that it took everyone to untangle him. The Super-Magna Space Probe, on which the doctor had been fussing for seven years, was a vast tangle of wires and tubes and glass that, quite naturally, looked like nothing on Earth, since it was concerned only with matters far away from Earth. All it needed was Jim’s do-jigger—a very big do-jigger—to make it work.

  They toiled that night until the doctor and Jim tottered to bed, too exhausted to lift a finger. The robots were far from exhausted, though their batteries were getting low. But Rivets, instead of recharging, crawled happily about the laboratory floor, playing with his marbles.

  “It’s such fun!” said Rivets. “Please come play with me. Won’t you, huh?”

  “No!” said Sprockets. “I’ve got to recharge, and so have you. If you had a cerebration button and an imagination button like mine, you’d realize how important it is.”

  “Aw, you’ve got too many buttons to have any fun.” Suddenly Rivets blinked his eye lights curiously. “Who is Prof. Vladimir Katz?”

  “A most unpleasant man.” Sprockets gave a little tock at the thought. “He steals secrets for the Russians and the Mongolians. The doctor and I had a very bad encounter with him in Mexico, before you were made.”

  “Was that the time you found the purple flying saucer?”

  “Yes. Now you’d better recharge.”

  “I wish I could meet the purple flying saucer people. Do you think they’ll ever come back?”

  “Maybe. Now please put your marbles away and recharge. And promise you’ll do it every night.”

  Reluctantly, Rivets did as his brother asked.

  The do-jigger took form the next day, and grew and grew twistily. By the end of the third day it looked not unlike a glass octopus stuffed inside a huge goldfish bowl, and strangled in miles and miles of wire. It needed only to be properly connected to the Super-Magna Space Probe, and the doctor would be able to signal to the Something on Mars.

  The doctor, all eagerness, his nose twitching and his mop of hair flopping with excitement, scurried up a stepladder with his hands full of tools. Sprockets and Rivets, all their buttons glowing and most of them on full, including their balance buttons, carefully raised the big do-jigger as the doctor directed.

  “Up!” said the doctor. “Up! Up! Careful!”

  Up went the do-jigger, and down came Sprockets’ foot just as something—a lot of somethings, round and hard—fell rolling on the floor.

  They were marbles from Rivets’ pocket.

  On the instant both robots were slipping and sliding in spite of all their buttons, and their circuits were overheating as they fought to balance the do-jigger and not let it drop. A robot must never, never destroy property or do anything to hurt his master. But not to do so now was utterly impossible, and in the next instant their feet were flying out from under them and the do-jigger was flying away from them.

  “Watch it!” screamed the doctor. “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

  With a horrible sound of breaking glass, the do-jigger smashed into the Super-Magna Space Probe. Had the power been on, both Sprockets and Rivets would have been melted on the instant. Instead, they could only lie twitching in the wreckage, their eye lights blinking ninety to the second while their circuits snapped and crackled from shock.

  At this moment it was exactly three days, five hours, and fifty-two minutes since Jim had been in touch with Mars. With every tick, the robots’ circuits were getting hotter and hotter from the shock of having done something so dreadful. Unless someone speedily turned off their switches, their brains would sizzle and pop, and they would be robot dummies for the rest of their lives.

  Dr. Bailey was too shocked himself to do anything but sputter and tear his hair.

  Jim was so shocked he could only gulp and say, “Grief and Moses!” over and over.

  But Mrs. Bailey, who had a private opinion about the Space Probe, and who was quite motherly as well as practical, said: “Oh, the poor little frightened dears! I hope they aren’t hurt!” It took her just seven seconds to pull them from the wreckage and reach for their switch boxes.

  CLICK! CLICK!

  Their twitching and ticking stopped. Both robots were turned off, and barely in time. They lay motionless and helpless, with only their thoughts to trouble them. But it was such a blessed relief to feel their circuits cooling that for the moment nothing else mattered.

  2

  They Put Their Heads Together

  For long minutes the robots were aware only of the comforting ice packs that Mrs. Bailey had placed on their foreheads. Usually, when they were turned off, Rivets spent his time trying to count to a hundred without making a mistake, while Sprockets added—and sometimes multiplied—large imaginary numbers full of sevens and nines. But today, as their circuits cooled, all they could do was listen, for Dr. Bailey was losing his temper.

  “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.”