Gertie Milk and the Great Keeper Rescue

by Simon Van Booy

  The moth used its wings for balance, fluttering only when it needed to keep them in the current of air. The creature’s body was warm beneath the fur, and the higher they went, the tighter Gertie held on—even using her legs to grip the insect’s body as if it were a giant cushion.

  After a few minutes, Gertie could see the tower where the B.D.B.U. lived. They came down slowly in circles near the Spitfire on Turweston Passage, and hovered over the ground near the tree of scarves. Gertie let go and slid through the thick fur, tumbling a few feet to the grass with a bump.

  The creature continued beating its wings, watching Gertie through its black bulbous eyes. “Thank you, moth!” she shouted, and the creature waved its comb-like antennae. And then, with a tremendous beating of its wings, it ascended into a gust of wind and disappeared over the cliff.

  But when Gertie turned toward the cottage, she got a horrible shock. It seemed to be moving. She blinked hard and looked again. The walls and the roof were literally moving.

  32

  The Battle to Save the Cottage

  HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF robot hands covered the cottage, and were picking it apart. Gertie could hear them scuttling and snapping bits off as they tried to pull the house down, piece by piece. In the distance, she could see her friends bashing at them with things from the garden. Kolt was holding an oar, while Birdy had some kind of medieval lance. Robot Rabbit Boy was hurling moonberries, which were just bouncing off. But this gave Gertie an idea.

  About five or six minutes later, as the robot hands were lifting off an entire section of roof, there was an almighty thrumming in the sky—like a thousand angry lawn mowers. Kolt, Birdy, and Robot Rabbit Boy turned quickly to see a fighter aircraft diving toward the cottage—all Rolls-Royce Merlin engines roaring like thunder.

  From the cockpit of the aircraft, Gertie could see her friends jumping up and down. The aircraft rattled and shook with the speed of her dive. When she was within a hundred yards, Gertie checked her altitude and airspeed, then pushed hard on the firing button. The Browning machine guns screamed as over a hundred frozen moonberries crackled through the air, exploding upon impact. Any robot hands caught by a direct hit were smashed to pieces, while the others were splattered with winter moonberry juice, which instantly fried their circuits.

  Gertie passed over the cliff, climbed steadily, then banked her aircraft to come round for another pass. Kolt, Robot Rabbit Boy, and Birdy were now waving their hands and paws in the air, cheering her on. Gertie lined up the cottage in her sights, then slowed her airspeed and let rip with another barrage of frozen moonberries, pummeling the robot hands and flooding their electronic brains with every Keeper’s favorite fizzy drink.

  After a fifth run, and then a sixth, Gertie saw the high-tech limbs on one of the walls scramble down to the grass in a bid to get away. Gertie dove upon the cottage from a different direction, cutting off their escape, then firing mercilessly upon the nasty things. Bits of thumb and finger flew into the air. The remaining limbs then turned and scrambled off the cliff to avoid being obliterated by the deadly rain of fruit.

  When Gertie noticed she was running low on fuel, she opened her glass hatch against the rushing wind and waved to her friends. When she noticed the gold, flashing Black Hole Muncher at Kolt’s feet, she brought her aircraft around for an immediate landing.

  The three other Keepers rushed over as she touched down on Turweston Passage. Birdy was most excited. Not only had Gertie saved their home from robot limbs, but he had seen the flying machine in action.

  “I never imagined frozen moonberries could be so useful!” Kolt said. “That was the best food fight I’ve ever seen.”

  The cottage was literally dripping with moonberry juice.

  “Sorry about the mess, Kolt.”

  “Mush.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that, the Slug Lamps have already started licking it off—their tongues will be purple for the next year.”

  As they hurried back to the garden, Kolt showed Gertie how they had imprisoned a few dozen robot hands in some old lobster cages. Some of the limbs had formed fists and were banging against the bars to be let out.

  “This Russian rocket ship is our only chance now,” Kolt said as they rushed over to it. “But the problem is all the rivets are rusted through, which means the moment we arrive in space, it’ll fall apart, and we’ll just be floating there.”

  “Won’t we have space suits on?” Gertie said, remembering that she’d seen them in a case at the back of the Sock Drawer.

  “Yes, but they don’t have much oxygen.”

  Gertie checked the tub. Inside, the insect was happily perched on a robot finger, napping.

  “We’ll just have to hold our breaths then,” she said, but secretly hoped Birdy might think of something. “Whom are we returning the ant to?”

  “A Doctor Brady, who lives on some space station.”

  “Who is Doctor Brady?”

  “No idea . . . except I do remember there was a Brady who invented pollination drones to replace honey bees killed by pesticides.”

  “Is there a chance the space station is the Losers’ headquarters?”

  “Oh dear, I hadn’t thought of that,” Kolt said, “but it makes sense, if it’s where the hands have been coming from.”

  “My brother might be there!”

  “Whatever that’s worth . . .” Kolt said.

  Gertie knew he was right. This might have been her brother’s idea. She didn’t know. She felt further from him than she ever had and it scared her.

  “Listen,” Kolt said, “returning the ant and getting rid of these annoying hands is easy—it’s the bomb that’s our real dilemma.”

  “Because we need a black hole,” said Birdy.

  “Not only a black hole,” said Kolt. “I’m afraid there’s more.”

  “What now?”

  “Dollop butter.”

  “We also need a spaceship that can get us out of the black hole’s gravitational pull, as we don’t want to get pulled in. . . .”

  “How strong is the force of attraction?” asked Birdy.

  “Quite strong.”

  “Like how strong?” Gertie wanted to know.

  “It’s sort of the strongest force in the known universe times a million.”

  They all spun around with grave expressions to the rusting tin-can spaceship, which Gertie thought looked like an expensive garbage can that had been rolled down a mountain and then left to decay in a pit of slime.

  “Maybe I could try and use Newton’s laws, to calculate the pull of a black hole?” Birdy said, noticing some faded charts and diagrams on the sides of the rocket ship. He pointed them out and they all went for a closer look. When Gertie leaned in to examine some dirt on one of the diagrams, three aluminum panels fell to the grass with a clatter.

  “How is it going to resist the gravitational pull of a black hole if it can’t even resist the force of us looking at it!” Gertie said.

  “Wait a minute . . .” said Birdy, who was still studying the faded charts, “these are Newton’s three Laws of Motion, and there’s an equation that represents Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation . . . plus some kind of formula for something called the speed of light from a guy called Einstein, which is 3.0 x 108 m/s . . .”

  “I returned his slippers once, old Albert Einstein. He gave me half his sandwich and a glass of milk. Such a nice man. Did you know he could play the violin?”

  “Focus!” Gertie cried. “What about Skuldarkian seawater? To give us the thrust we would need.”

  “Couldn’t hurt to try,” Kolt said. “I’ll fill up the rocket’s tanks. Gertie, go to the Sock Drawer and bring back four space suits, please, and hurry. Robot Rabbit Boy, stand guard on those lobster traps!”

  “Lavender!”

  “Birdy, come with me inside this rocket. We’re going
to power it up with Skuldarkian seawater and get you working with the onboard computer.”

  “Okay,” said Birdy. “But what’s a computer?”

  “Ooh, well, just imagine a picture that can change every few seconds, and that’s connected to a nonhuman brain with the ability to calculate things quickly with total precision, but without any emotion whatsoever.”

  “But how is Birdy going to help us if this is the first computer he’s ever used?” Gertie said, still looking at the dilapidated wreck of their spacecraft.

  “Are you still here?” Kolt snapped.

  “Are we really going to travel through time and into space in this bucket?”

  “It was your idea!” Kolt said. “Now please go and get the space suits while Birdy and I tap into this old Soviet computer and get the thing functioning again. If the mainframe has an artificial intelligence option in the form of a remote transmitter, we might even be able to reprogram the robot hands we trapped. . . .”

  “Reprogram them to do what?” Birdy and Gertie asked together.

  “To hold this piece of space junk together so I can put my key in the time machine and we can disappear in a cosmic mist, travel to the twenty-seventh century, and save humanity, again.”

  33

  The Oppenheimer-Bruno Biosphere

  WITH ABOUT NINETY MINUTES left on the Black Hole Muncher before it exploded, there was no time for Birdy and Kolt to go searching for the rocket’s manuals in the maze of bedrooms under the cottage.

  Kolt poured forty gallons of Skuldarkian seawater into the fuel cell, and the old rocket ship came alive with flickering light panels and a banging from the engine—which Kolt said was the old space-timing belt. With the interior computer powered up, Birdy went to work. Their only hope was for Birdy to use his existing knowledge of math and physics and look for patterns in the faded chart of numbers on the rocket ship’s old panels, then try different passwords to unlock the computer’s operating system.

  The bomb clock now read sixty-eight minutes and fourteen seconds.

  “I can’t guess the password!” Birdy said.

  “Try Chicken Kiev,” said Kolt.

  But it didn’t work.

  “How about Tetris then?”

  “Zilch.”

  “Snow?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, how about Rachmaninoff?”

  “What if we just try password?” Birdy suggested.

  Kolt scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous, no one is going to use password as their password.” But when Birdy tried it, the computer made a pleasant ding and Birdy entered the mainframe.

  “Must be some kind of scientist humor!” Kolt said. On the screen was an electronic drawing of the rocket itself, and in one corner a robot hand.

  “Look,” said Kolt, “the computer has remotely picked up the robot hands’ frequency.”

  Birdy moved the cursor with an old control wheel, and then Kolt showed him how to click on the hand icon. Once inside the robot limb’s brain, Birdy figured out the pattern of code, then reprogrammed the hands to hold the ship together, with each hand grasping a main panel.

  Kolt was stunned. “So we can open the lobster cages? They won’t run away?”

  “I don’t know,” Birdy said. “But I’ve done my best.”

  Kolt gave the signal and Robot Rabbit Boy flipped up the latches, one by one. Immediately, the horrible things began scampering toward the rocket, as Birdy had programmed them to do.

  When Gertie got back with the space suits, Kolt gushed with praise for the new Keeper. “Birdy has hacked into the ship’s computer and the robot hands’ mainframe, reprogramming them to hold the ship together.”

  “I really like computers!” Birdy said. “It’s like having a pet super brain.”

  “Eggcup.”

  “That’s nice!” Gertie said. “But how long before the bomb goes off?”

  “Butter fly.”

  “Sixty-one minutes now!” Kolt gasped. “That’s just over an hour to travel through time into space, return a robot ant, potentially outsmart the Losers, find a black hole, locate a new ship to escape the black hole’s gravitational pull, have lunch, get rid of the most powerful bomb ever made, and make it back—I don’t suppose you remembered to get Bubble Wrap, did you, Gertie?”

  “No!” Gertie snapped. “Did you even tell me to get Bubble Wrap?”

  “What’s Bubble Wrap?” asked Birdy.

  “A dollop of mashed potato?”

  “Well, there’s no time now! We have to go!” said Kolt.

  The robot hands were in place, holding the space rocket together. Kolt carefully carried in the bomb. Then the four Keepers climbed into their space suits, and got into the old vinyl seats of the rocket.

  Thankfully, Gertie had managed to locate a baby space suit for Robot Rabbit Boy, who was perhaps wondering why only his helmet was decorated with teddy bears floating in zero gravity beside asteroids made of fruit and birthday cake slices.

  “Don’t lower your helmet visors until I put my key in the time machine,” Kolt instructed. “You don’t want to start the flow of oxygen until we’re seconds away from our destination—which is a space station the Losers might be using as a hideaway, or it might be deep space if they’ve laid yet another trap for us.”

  “What are these Losers like?” Birdy said. “I’m worried.”

  “They’re more pathetic than scary,” Gertie said. “Though I don’t think I’ve ever seen their leader, Cava Calla Thrax.”

  Then she turned to check that they had the box with the robot ant, and that the Black Hole Muncher was safely strapped to a cargo frame at the back of the rocket ship.

  “Now everybody link up,” Kolt said seriously, “and close your helmets. This is going to be the most dangerous mission we’ve ever undertaken—so summon every ounce of your courage. We’ve got less than an hour to save our home and get rid of this stupid bomb.”

  “And robot ant.”

  “Mush room.”

  The Keepers checked and double-checked the straps of their launch seats, then joined arms. Kolt fed his key into the time machine. With a quick pop, several jerks, and a lingering green mist, they disappeared from the Garden of Lost Things, leaving behind a rash of empty lobster cages, a damaged cottage covered in fruit juice, and a light patch of grass under the rocket ship, home to earthworms, cliff ants, and a family of long-legged spiders.

  When Gertie opened her eyes, she had a pounding headache and felt like throwing up. She was also looking through a dirty spaceship window at a tiny blue speck in the distance.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  “Earth 2618,” Kolt said, the inside of his glass visor misting up. “Don’t talk, Gertie—uses oxygen!” Then he looked out the window.

  “No . . . sign . . . space . . . station . . . you?”

  The others went to look, but it was just stars.

  Then an enormous panel from the spaceship floated past the window with a robot hand still clinging to it. Gertie looked behind her to check the cargo. The bomb was still safely strapped down with no signs of damage—but the plastic lid had come off the tub, freeing the hand and lost insect, which were both floating about the cabin. The ant was now sitting up very straight in the palm of the robot hand, like some miniature insect god.

  When Kolt noticed what had happened, he unstrapped himself, and floated out of his seat.

  “Blast!” he yelled inside his helmet, swimming his arms and legs without going anywhere.

  Birdy opened the front of his visor slowly, sending Kolt into paroxysms of panic. “EXHALE! EXHALE!” he cried to the young Keeper, waiting for the swelling to begin as water in Birdy’s body began to vaporize in the vacuum of space. But Birdy just smiled. Kolt opened his visor too with a look of pure delight.

  “You pressurized the cabin! How?”

 
“I asked Robot Rabbit Boy to seal the cracks with crushed moonberries I knew would freeze into a sealing paste in the vacuum of space,” Birdy said.

  “Brilliant!” said Gertie. “You’re going to be a great Keeper.” Then she sniffed. “Space smells like . . . burnt metal, weird!”

  Kolt was more than impressed with Birdy’s thinking ahead. “I’ve been a Keeper a long time, and it didn’t even occur to me that moonberries would be useful in outer space.”

  Birdy looked confused. “I thought that’s why they were called moonberries?”

  “Ha ha, very funny,” Kolt said, taking deep breaths of the metallic air while trying to glide over to the floating hand with the ant on it. “Any rocket power?”

  “None,” Birdy said. “And the robot hands will only last another seventeen minutes before they cease to function.”

  “If only we’d given them gloves! There are so many just laying around in the Sock Drawer, I’m sick of looking at them.” Kolt sighed.

  “What about the bomb?” asked Gertie. “If we can only survive in this old ship for another seventeen minutes, is that long enough to get rid of it?”

  “We need a nice round, juicy black hole,” said Kolt, “and a sparkly new spacecraft with a mini-refrigerator and massage seats, and of course a space station to return the mechanical insect. . . .”

  They all looked at the creature, which was just sitting there rubbing his face with his tiny feet, perhaps wanting to look presentable after realizing they were trying to take him home.

  Suddenly the old spacecraft’s radio crackled to life.

  “This is Oppenheimer-Bruno Biosphere Station I-8-PP, please identity yourselves, over.”

  Gertie pointed to the radio excitedly. “We’re not alone up here after all!”

  “Which is good news?” Birdy asked apprehensively.

  “Great news!” cried Kolt. “This is the space station where we’re supposed to be.” He pushed a black button and spoke clearly into the microphone.

  “Hello I-8-PP! We’re the Skuldark Express . . . Ant Station Rocket Power Moonberry, requesting assistance, over!”