Gertie and Robot Rabbit Boy rushed over and tried to sit him up. After a moment he opened his eyes, which were swirling like spirals.
“There’s something wrong with Birdy!” Gertie called out.
But Kolt seemed calm. “He’s got mushroom-eye, I expect. He must have licked one. . . . Don’t worry, it passes quickly.”
Once Birdy’s eyes were back to normal, Kolt told them to fold their parachutes back into the yellow packs. Then the four Keepers bounced over the glowing mushrooms, and followed the Cave Sprites into the dark mouth of another tunnel.
They chased the glowing balls around several sharp bends, then came to the end of the passageway, where a massive steel door loomed ten feet high. It was bedroom 782 SE.
“Whoa!” said Gertie. “What kind of door is this?”
“The kind that stops robots and high-tech space junk from escaping.”
“What about that rocket and those escape pods in the garden?”
Kolt smiled. “Those space rockets are like the Renaissance ships we were on, Gertie, extremely primitive— the stuff in here is more high-tech than the Time Cat. It’s where I got those Narcissus body suits. You know? The ones that make you disappear because they reflect your surroundings so perfectly?”
Gertie took out her Keepers’ key and rattled it into the lock. With one turn, the door opened and a white mist escaped from the cracks.
“It’s just the hygiene seal,” Kolt said, ushering everyone forward. “In we go . . .”
The Cave Sprites zoomed in first, though the room was already lit by white light in the walls.
“Follow Monday!” Kolt told everyone. “She’ll lead us to the item we need to return.”
The floor was shiny steel and there were metal shelves with every kind of space contraption Gertie could imagine. She stopped and picked up something that looked like a steel pipe, except that its surface was mirrored.
“What’s this?”
“Oh,” Kolt said, turning around to examine it, “that’s organic dynamite.”
“Huh?”
“Just your average thermodynamic hydrogen manipulator.”
Gertie put it down very, very gently.
“Don’t worry, it’s not dangerous here, unless you put it in your mouth of course.”
“In my mouth?”
“It can change the temperature of water in a microsecond, which means that if you wanted to split a mountain, you would simply wait for it to rain, then touch any wet surface with the rod, push the snowflake button, and all the water molecules in the mountain would freeze, splitting the rock into thousands of pieces.”
“Breaking a whole mountain?” asked the newest Keeper.
“Simply put, Birdy, yes. I’m sure you already knew that water expands when it freezes, and so will smash, crack, or shatter anything that tries to stop it, even solid rock, anything.”
“So why can’t I put it in my mouth?”
“Because it would freeze you, or if you pressed the flame button it would dry you into a shriveled, waterless lump, like a piece of food that fell on the floor, rolled under something, and wasn’t discovered for three hundred years.”
Bedroom 782 SE was twenty times the size of the Sock Drawer.
“What’s that over there?” said Birdy, pointing to a golden cube with neon-colored tubes and flashing wires running along its surface.
But Kolt was too busy following the Cave Sprite. “Probably something useless—let’s try and keep up with Monday, gang.”
The young sprite soon led them into a scene that can only be described as an electronic nightmare—a sort of tech battlefield. Scattered across the floor were dozens and dozens and dozens of robotic hands—exactly the same ones that had been popping up all over the island of Skuldark.
Some of the hands were wriggling their fingers or tapping idly, while others were palm up and not moving at all. A few of the hands were scampering about holding wires, bumping into things, or wrestling with other robotic hands that appeared to have lost all sense of purpose.
Kolt stood with his mouth open. “What on earth is this charade! I’ve never seen anything like it!”
“I thought all lost limbs went to that other bedroom?” Gertie asked. “The one we visited where the arm was playing tennis, remember? It was the first night I arrived?”
“Yes, I remember,” Kolt said. Then he bent down to inspect a hand. “These must be high-tech or especially dangerous to be in this bedroom. . . .”
Suddenly, one of the robot hands began charging toward Birdy. The young Keeper froze as a gray matted paw appeared from nowhere, booting the hand through the air and onto a low shelf.
“Fly eggcup fly!”
“Thanks, Robot Rabbit Boy—what a scary adventure this is!”
Kolt chuckled. “Just you wait . . .”
29
A Black Hole Muncher
BIRDY SHUDDERED. “IT GETS weirder than this?”
“Fly, butter, mush mush?”
Kolt was still examining the dead robot hand. “Looks like it perished in hand-to-hand combat.”
“Ha ha,” Gertie said, “please don’t tell me we have to return these creepy looking things as well as the robot insect—there are hundreds!”
“Actually, the Cave Sprite seems to think it is one of the hands that has to go back. Maybe the robot insect is trapped inside?”
“Like a tiny pilot!”
“Let’s pick up a few and have a look.”
“Do we have to?” Gertie said. “Isn’t there a pair of space tongs in here or something?”
“Grab the live ones by the wrist, you two. They might be capable of crushing your bones to powder if you get too close to the fingers.”
“What are they even used for?” asked Birdy.
“Didn’t I tell you? Robot hands were invented in 2048 so that doctors could perform operations on people remotely.”
“From far away?”
“Yes, in space actually.”
“So they would send the robot hands instead of going themselves?”
“No, the hands would be built where the patient was. Then the doctor would have a 3-D image of the patient, and would perform virtual surgery, while robotic versions of the doctor’s hands would be working on the real patient, recreating every movement exactly.”
“That’s impressive,” said Birdy, still marveling at all the different gadgets that surrounded them. “Can we keep one?”
“Gross!” Gertie said. “No way! We already have enough upstairs, we’re trying to get rid of them.”
“The hands worked very well,” Kolt went on, “unless the Wi-Fi went down mid-operation, then they would just have to make it up—which wasn’t ideal as all they could do by themselves was play Rock, Paper, Scissors.”
“Let’s spread out,” Birdy said.
As they fanned out looking for the item to return, Kolt kept talking.
“Hands were initially used as medical tools, but then companies started preprogramming them to build things,” Kolt explained. “For instance, one hundred thousand robotic limbs could be sent by drone to the South Pole with raw materials. Then four months later, you’ve got a polar ice station fit for human habitation.”
“Who could build so many robotic hands?”
“Other robots of course,” Kolt said. “Though it takes humans to program them. Robot hands for medical use were eventually replaced by nanobots—tiny machines that perform surgery while actually inside your body.”
“Did it hurt?”
“No, because nanobots are so small, a million of them would fit into a grain of sand. Though the mosquito drones are my favorite, as they were programmed to bite as many people as possible, and by doing so vaccinate them. That led to the eradication of the word’s most deadly disease, malaria.”
Gertie gri
maced. “I wouldn’t want little things in my blood, hammering around on my body parts!”
“But you wouldn’t even feel them, Gertie! Imagine reading a book while having heart surgery.”
“Why is this room so far from the other bedrooms?” Birdy wanted to know.
“Because some of the things in here are highly explosive and troublesome.”
“Like the robot hands!” Gertie said scornfully.
“Exactly, now let’s find this bug.”
“What year are we visiting to return the robot insect?” Gertie asked.
“The B.D.B.U. said it was the twenty-seventh century, 2618 to be exact.”
“Which country?”
“Space actually.”
“Space?” said Birdy. “Wow.”
Gertie surveyed the strange scene before her, as a couple robot hands wrestled like lobsters. “I suppose there are only so many games of Rock, Paper, Scissors you can play before you go insane.” But then she had an idea. “Maybe we could train them to look for keys?”
“Interesting concept, and Birdy seems good at mathematics,” Kolt said, looking around, “which would come in handy.”
But Birdy had wandered back to the golden cube with neon wires he’d seen on the way through the room.
Suddenly he called out to them, “Come and look at this! I think I’ve found something!”
“Is it the robot insect?” Kolt said as they dashed to the sound of Birdy’s voice. But what they found made the previous scene look like a robot-hand kindergarten. Birdy had discovered the mother lode. Fifty or sixty dead hands surrounded by cuttings of wire, metal shavings, black scorch marks, and a large gold cube wrapped with flashing neon wires and tubes.
A few of the dead robot hands were in pieces—and there were burn marks on the fingers.
The most disgusting part of all, Gertie thought, was that a few of the hands had apparently got stuck inside the golden casing when the flashing cube was welded together. Dead gold fingers stuck out from the box in mid-escape.
“I thought you should see this,” Birdy said, “because there’s a clock on it that seems to be counting down.”
But Kolt was already reeling in horror. Gertie had never seen him so afraid.
“IT’S A BOMB!” Kolt screamed. “A BOMB, A BOMB, A BOMB, A BOMB, A BOMB, A BOMB!”
“So not the insect?” said Gertie, confused.
“What is a bomb exactly?” Birdy said calmly.
“LAVENDER POTATO?”
“A very, very, very, very unpleasant explosive device! But this is no ordinary bomb,” Kolt cried, now frantic at the sight of what Gertie thought resembled a jewelry box gone wrong. “It’s a homemade BLACK HOLE MUNCHER!”
“A what?” Gertie said.
“A bomb so powerful that it can disrupt the force of even the most intense gravitational pull—a planet killer!”
“Planet killer!” Gertie thought out loud. “But why is it on Skuldark?”
“Hard to say,” Kolt said. “I truly have no idea how it got here.”
“The hands must have built it!” said Birdy. “Which is why there are scraps of wire and metal pieces lying around.”
Kolt surveyed the debris. “Brilliant thinking, they built it here all right, which is why some of them got stuck in the cube as it was being welded.”
“But who would intentionally lose a bunch of these hands with instructions to build a bomb?” Birdy wanted to know.
“Losers!” Gertie said. “With the help of their evil supercomputer, Vispoth.”
Suddenly, the gravity of the situation began to sink in, and Gertie felt panic spread through her arms and legs like freezing water.
“Um, maybe we should see what the time is on the clock?”
They all looked together.
“Three hours and forty-five minutes,” Birdy said.
“We have to get it out of here now!” barked Kolt. “I mean off Skuldark! Far away! This kind of mechanism would not only rip a hole in the cliff—it would send most of our island to the bottom of the sea!”
“This little gold box could do that?” gasped Birdy.
Kolt nodded. “The explosion would be so huge, pieces of the cottage and Fern Valley would even get propelled into space by the force of the blow.”
“I never thought the Losers would actually try and kill us!” Gertie said, feeling shock and anger that her brother could be involved in such a scheme. Then she imagined Slug Lamps floating around in space like lumps of Jell-O.
“Well, the Losers wouldn’t see it as murder, Gertie—to them we were simply caught in the crossfire as they tried to rid the universe of the technology that allowed them to build such a destructive device. That’s Loser logic for you. It’s a brilliantly devious plan, sending hands one at a time, each programmed to do a certain task.”
Suddenly, on one of the robot hands, an ant crawled leisurely into the palm, as though it were out for a stroll.
“Bug!” screamed Gertie.
Kolt grabbed the hand by the wrist and turned it over. “That must be it!” But the hand wasn’t dead after all. The fingers went mad with wriggling.
“Quick! Someone go and find a container we can lock this in,” he said.
Birdy scrambled over to a shelf crammed with items.
He returned within a few seconds with a clear plastic tub. Kolt placed the hand inside it gently, then put the lid on.
“Look at that!” he marveled, as they stared at the robotic hand through the clear top of the tub. The limb had now gone very still, as if wondering why it was in a box. The insect was on the edge of a finger staring at them.
“I’ve never seen a robotic ant before,” Gertie said. “It looks just like a real one.”
“It’s not just any robotic ant,” Kolt pointed out with a nervous smile, “but the first mechanical insect that will ever go down in history as having saved Skuldark and the entire human race. If it wasn’t for that little guy hitching a ride on one of the hands, we would never have come down here and found the Black Hole Muncher.”
Birdy whipped a magnifying glass out of his pocket to study the robotic creature.
“Where did you get that?” Gertie asked.
“From my bedroom. It was sitting on the desk.”
She turned to Kolt. “How come I didn’t get one of those?”
“You got a microscope, Gertie, it’s upstairs beside the fax machine.”
Birdy looked at the insect through the curved glass. “Its toes are flashing blue.”
Kolt was still trying to fit together the pieces of the Losers’ plan. “Since Vispoth knows the location of Skuldark from when they stole the B.D.B.U., it must have programmed the hands to come here—but not the ant—that was an accident, a very lucky one for us.”
Then they noticed Gertie was sniggering.
“What’s so amusing?” demanded Kolt. “We’re standing here with an army of evil hands, a robot ant, and a Black Hole Muncher that’s going to explode in . . .” Kolt read the numbers on the countdown clock. “Three hours, thirty-nine minutes, and nine seconds—and you’re laughing?”
“It’s just that the Losers have been defeated this time by an ant!”
“Not yet, they haven’t, not until we get this bomb somewhere it can safely explode.”
“Like where?” asked Birdy.
Kolt pointed upward. “We have to go to space in the twenty-seventh century anyway, so hopefully we’ll be able to find a black hole where it can detonate safely.”
“With the Time Cat?” Gertie said, trying to imagine it.
“I’m afraid not, as there’s no ground for the car to move on. . . .”
“Correct!” said Birdy. “It’s Newton’s third law, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—so if you can’t push on the ground, it can’t push back and yo
u can’t move.”
“But we can use the time machine to get us to the future, right?” Gertie wanted to know.
“Precisely, but we’ll need some kind of spacecraft from down here to get us around once we arrive in 2618.”
30
The End of the World (Maybe)
KOLT PICKED UP THE Black Hole Muncher and swiftly led his fellow Keepers toward a section of bedroom 782 SE where lost spacecraft were stored. From a distance, most of the ships didn’t look like vehicles at all, just silver-and-gold blobs. One reminded Gertie of an oversized Slug Lamp, while another looked like an orange seashell with black spiral patterns running along the outside.
“I’ve got the time machine and a Keepers’ key ready in my pocket,” Kolt told them, “so all we need is something super-fast that’s capable of manufacturing oxygen and gravity—with solar sails and maybe a hydrogen exchange booster.”
“No space suits?” said Gertie, worried she was going on yet another dangerous mission without the chance to change her outfit. Kolt didn’t hear or was pretending not to.
When they arrived at the space vehicle Kolt had used before, it was clear the Losers had thought through their plan very carefully. The floor was littered with more dead robot hands, along with wires, glass, shards of metal—and even giant jewels broken into thousands and thousands of pieces. Kolt stared in disbelief at the glittering fragments. “Without diamonds,” he sighed, “there’s no way to control our use of the speed of light—these spaceships are space junk.”
“Didn’t you tell me once that the Tunnels of Bodwin lead to space?” Gertie asked.
“Yes, but that’s space around Skuldark, not space around Earth in the twenty-seventh century.”
Kolt carefully put down the Black Hole Muncher and picked through the useless debris that the robot hands had ripped from the spaceships and destroyed.
“It’s no good,” he said. “We’re done for, I can’t fix this, I don’t have the tech knowledge.”
“We can’t give up,” said Birdy. “I want to find out who I am. I can’t get blown up on my second day here.”
Then Gertie had a suggestion. “Could Johnny the Guard Worm tow the bomb out to deep sea and let it explode there?”
Gertie Milk and the Great Keeper Rescue Page 18
