The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy (5 page)

I
opened my envelope and removed the single sheet of paper inside. It told me to take my box of parts to Room 212 in the science building (advising me to use the elevator, like I wouldn't have figured
that
out for myself) and to wait there until Jenny found the instructions on the Internet and brought them to me. If I chose (or was forced to because Jenny hadn't arrived), I could build the robot on my own.

Once I was finished, I was to take it to Henry Chow in Room 117 of the same building so he could read the robot's life story into the tape recorder (which, by that time, should already have been written by Noah and translated into Robotese by
Martin). Then I was to report to Ms. Lollyheart in the headmistress's office and let her know that I was done. After that I was free to swim, read, nap, or do anything my heart desired until it was time for the robot show.

“Good luck!” it said at the bottom. I was definitely going to need it.

I looked up from the assignment sheet and saw Prescott glaring at me, like it was my fault that I was about to screw things up for the whole team. “What?” I mouthed and shrugged. He turned away.

I rolled my box of hardware over to the science building, thinking gloomy thoughts. While I waited for the unlikely appearance of Jenny Kirkland, I removed all the parts and spread them out on the floor. In addition to about a zillion pieces, some large, some small, they had provided two tools for me to work with: a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

I began gathering up all the nuts and bolts and separating them into piles according to size. This didn't really accomplish anything, but it was satisfying.

I thought about Beamer and how he liked to take pieces from kits intended for building a bridge or the Eiffel Tower or something and use them to make abstract sculptures instead. I could do something like that with my pile of hardware. It would even be fun. But then of course my team would lose.
Without a robot we wouldn't have a show. I was the weakest link in a long chain of weak links.

Okay, I told myself,
concentrate!
What did this robot need to do? First and foremost, it had to hold the tape recorder. And since it was supposed to be talking, maybe it ought to have a mouth that could move. What else? Well, Ms. Lollyheart had said that it should “move in expressive and interesting ways.” Did that mean hand gestures, which meant it needed to have hands? Did it mean dancing, in which case there should be legs? And what about those special effects she mentioned? Was it supposed to blow bubbles? Project slides on a wall? (“This is me when I was just a baby robot!”)

I was looking through the parts for anything that reminded me of arms or legs when it struck me that I was totally headed in the wrong direction. I was trying to make a cartoon robot, or something cute out of a movie, like R2D2 from
Star Wars
. But actual, real robots didn't look like people. There was that little vacuum cleaner I'd seen advertised, the one that scoots around your house, bumping into furniture and walls and sucking up your dust bunnies. It's shaped like a hockey puck, but it was still a robot. And what about the machines they use in factories to build cars? Nobody bothers to make them look like little factory workers; they just design machines to do a particular job. If it's supposed to
screw two metal plates together, then all they need is an arm with a screwdriver attached to it.

My job, I understood now, was not to be imaginative; it was to be analytical. The key to the design lay there at my feet, in the parts strewn all over the floor.

And so I started arranging them in different ways, noticing things that came in pairs, and things that were one of a kind. I noted where holes had been drilled in the metal—where a bolt was obviously meant to go—and looked for pieces that had the same patterns of holes. There was a reasonable chance they were meant to be bolted together. It was a combination of logic and instinct—like doing a jigsaw puzzle, only in three dimensions.

I was starting to feel (a) a whole lot smarter than I would ever have expected to be in such a situation, and (b) really hungry.

Just then there was a knock on the door, and my heart leaped. But it wasn't Jenny. It was Ms. Lollyheart, delivering a box lunch: a chicken sandwich (with lettuce and tomato, on whole wheat bread), carrot sticks, two small plums, a bottle of springwater, and (naturally) a brownie. I polished them off in no time, then returned to my junk pile.

The tape recorder, I thought, that's the crucial part. So where was it supposed to go? It had a definite shape. Was there anything that looked like it
was meant to hold that shape? I crawled around in the mess of metal, searching. And there among the pieces I had set aside as coming in pairs was a half box without a top. Beside it was the other half. The holes lined up. I slipped the two half pieces around the tape player, and they fit perfectly. Plus, the little lip around the edge of the box would hold the recorder snugly in place so it wouldn't fall out, while leaving plenty of room for the lid to open. Great! Now all I needed was to find nuts and bolts of the right size, and put the whole thing together.

I began moving pieces around, trying to come up with a rough plan. I felt amazingly focused, extremely sharp, and forgot for a moment that there was anybody waiting for me, that this was a contest we wanted to win. I wasn't worried about any of that. I was just solving an interesting puzzle.

And little by little, bit by bit, things came to me. Some seemed obvious once I had put them together. The tape recorder, for example, was supposed to go in the back of the robot's box-like head. Others were neat but strange. Like, the robot
did
have a face (though the lips didn't move), and right in the middle of it was an opening that perfectly fit a piece that looked like a nose. Only, for the screw holes to line up, it either had to go in upside down or inside out. What was with that? I shrugged and bolted it on upside down.

The body was made from eight rectangular plates, each about four times longer than it was wide. They overlapped and attached to a small metal ring at the top, then fanned out and were bolted to a larger metal ring at the bottom. The bottom ring had equally spaced attachment points for three little wheels.

I still had a lot of pieces left, and I noticed unused holes near the top of two of the body plates. I decided that's where the arms were supposed to go. There were two pieces that looked like they could be shoulder joints, and they happened to have four screw holes, arranged in a square, matching the plates perfectly.

Unfortunately, I hadn't actually noticed this while I was building the body; I had just put the plates in at random. So now, unless I moved the plates with the holes to their proper location, I'd have one arm coming out of the robot's back and the other out of its side. Not good. I had to unbolt four of the plates and switch them around.

Soon my Tin Man (or “TM,” as I now called him) had arms that moved up and down at the shoulder (though they didn't bend at the elbow). Instead of hands, he had little balls with six knobs sticking out of them, like miniature coat pegs. Each ball fit neatly into (and rotated within) a socket, so I assumed they were supposed to spin around.

All that I had to do now was make the thing move—specifically, to make the head nod, the arms go up and down, the hands spin, and the wheels roll. Four moving parts. And happily, my rapidly decreasing pile of parts included four different motors, little black boxes of varying sizes with battery compartments (and yup, they had batteries in them!). Each had a small plastic gear sticking out on one side. There was also a mess of gears and cords and pulleys. I lay down on my back, on the hard floor, and closed my eyes, trying to imagine how they would work.

I had gears on my bicycle. One was attached to the pedals, and it was attached to a chain that turned another gear attached to the wheel. (In the case of the bicycle, I was the motor.) My robot kit had four motors, eight gears, and four chains. How hard could this be?

I had to remove some of the body plates (again!) and part of the head, so I could get inside the robot to bolt in the motors and attach the gears. But everything seemed to fit. And though I couldn't test it (since I didn't have the remote control), I felt sure I had done it right. TM could roll forward and turn, nod his head, flap his arms, and spin his little hands. I had used every part. All that remained were the pliers and the screwdriver. Surely they didn't count.

But just for the heck of it I looked the robot over
for any place where they might go. There was a small hole at the top of his head. I had assumed it was there to let sound out—but now I realized that since the tape player was facing outward, it really didn't need a sound hole. I slid the thin end of the screwdriver into the head, so that only the blue plastic handle stuck out, like a little antenna. It would wobble around when the robot nodded its head, and make a little tick-ticking noise as the metal end tapped against the two motor boxes inside. Maybe that would count as a special effect—altogether
very
nice!

But what about the pliers?

And then it came to me. The nose! That weird upside-down nose was just a holder for the pliers. I slid one handle in and let the rest hang out, and grinned. My robot was as goofy and cute as a day-old puppy.

I packed TM up in his box on wheels and rolled him down the hall toward the elevator, feeling absolutely brilliant, in the zone, clearheaded, and full of joy and energy. The world even looked different—the sunlight coming in through the window at the end of the hall had just the slightest tinge of blue—crystal blue. And everything was sharp and clear, the way distant mountains look out west, where the air is dry.

As I pushed the
DOWN
button and waited for the
elevator, a sudden surge of pride and well-being washed over me. I had built a robot from scratch. What other surprising things might I be capable of?

I knocked on the door of Room 117 and heard Henry Chow rushing to open it. Judging by the crash, he was in such a hurry that he'd knocked over a chair.

“Henry, meet Tin Man,” I said, and lifted my robot out of the box.

“You get instructions?” he asked in his heavy accent.

“No,” I said, making a mental note to go find Jenny and tell her she could stop her search. “I built it myself.”

His eyes went wide. “Awesome!” he said. “Very awesome!”

“Yes,” I agreed, “it is. And Henry—if I can build a robot, you can make him talk.”

W
ednesday night, after the robot show was over, I slipped into one of the common-room phone booths to call Mom and Dad. The booths are very cozy and atmospheric inside, all paneled in wood (except for glass in the folding doors), and there's a cushioned bench for you to sit on. The phones are the old-fashioned kind, with a dial instead of buttons. I had never actually seen one in real life before, only in the movies.

I dropped some coins into the slot and dialed. It made a satisfying
brrrrr
with each spin of the dial, shorter for the low numbers, longer for the high ones. So much nicer than the
beep
,
beep
of pushbutton phones.

Dad answered, and when he heard my voice, he yelled for Mom to pick up the other line. They were wildly excited that I'd called—you'd think I'd been gone for a year instead of two days.

“How
are
you?” Mom asked, her voice high and squeaky with enthusiasm.

“Great,” I said. “I built a robot yesterday!”

“You what?”

“I built a robot. From scratch.” And I told them about the assignment and how Jenny hadn't found the instructions on the Internet, so I'd had to figure it out myself.

“Honey, that's amazing!” Dad said.

“And we won the contest. The other robot wasn't built right and it rolled off the stage—
smash
, into the orchestra pit! It was pretty horrible, actually. I felt sorry for the other team.”

“It must have been awful,” Mom said. “But what an interesting exercise—having everyone work against their strong suits. Clever, actually.”

“You know, I didn't think so at first, but now I realize that if they'd assigned me to write the robot's story or something like that, I wouldn't have learned anything new. I mean, I already knew I could do that. But who knew I could build a robot? I still can't get over it.”

“Well, we're just as proud as all get-out,” Mom said. “And you should be proud of yourself too.”

“That's what Ms. Lollyheart said. Actually, she gave a whole speech about it after the show was over.”

It was amazing how perfectly I remembered that speech, like I'd had a tape recorder bolted into the back of
my
head too. I swear I could have given it to my parents word for word if I'd wanted to. I didn't though. That would have been a little too weird.

“A whole speech about you?”

“Pretty much. She said I shouldn't put myself down.”

“When have you ever done that?” said Dad, laughing.

“When I got to Allbright and was surrounded by geniuses.”

“Oh, come on, Franny. You're every bit as smart as—”

“Don't worry, Dad. I was just trying to be funny. And after today my self-esteem is in really, really great shape. Ms. Lollyheart told us that they'd been doing the robot exercise at Allbright since the school was founded, and in all that time, only
two
kids had ever built the robot perfectly. Me and some guy who graduated years ago. Is that cool, or what?”

At the other end of the line I could hear Mom sniffling, like she was blowing her nose. Dad sounded like he was choking back tears, but finally he managed to speak. “Wow!” he said. “Yes, that is
cool. You must be walking on air!”

“I'm strangely calm, actually. I just feel really good.”

“I wish I could hug you,” Mom said.

“I'll hug myself and pretend you did.”

“We miss you guys so much,” she said then. “Any chance you and the twins could come home this weekend?”

“Gosh, no!” I said. “Saturday is the last day of orientation. And after that, there are all these weekend field trips and lots of activities. And once classes start, there's going to be homework to do. It's going to be hard to get away for a while. But we'll see you at Thanksgiving. That's only a couple of months away.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Zoë is busy too,” Mom said glumly. “And J. D. hasn't called once. If you see him, would you please remind him he has parents?” I could tell she was upset. “I have to say, it really bothers me that you don't have phones in your rooms.”

“They say phones would distract us from our schoolwork. And they're probably right. I think of all those hours I used to spend talking to Beamer, despite the fact that I saw him at school every day! Maybe that's why I didn't make better grades.”

“Franny, that's not the point. We need to be able to reach you when we want to.”

“You have the numbers of the phone booths,” I reminded Mom. “They're in your parent information booklet. Someone can always run upstairs and get me if I have a call.”

“Oh, sure,” Mom said, with an edge in her voice. I knew what she was thinking: It would be a real pain for the person who'd have to climb three flights of stairs to knock on my door. Mom wouldn't call me on that pay phone for anything less than the house on fire or Dad in the hospital.

“You couldn't reach us all that easily at camp, either,” I said, knowing instantly I had stepped over some line.

“Right,” Dad said, kind of snappish. Now he wasn't happy with me either. “Well, I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I'm buying cell phones for the three of you. This pay-phone business is totally unacceptable.”

“Dad, cell phones are strictly forbidden at Allbright.”

“Sorry, hon. Sometimes parent rules trump school rules. And this is one of those times.”

“But it says, specifically, in the student handbook—”

“Is this Franny I'm talking to? Since when were you such a stickler for rules? Look, they don't want kids taking phone calls in the middle of English class or text-messaging answers to their friends during
tests. I can understand that. But they can't object to kids staying in touch with their parents! Just keep your phone in your room, keep it charged, and check it for messages once or twice a day, in case we're trying to reach you. Every now and then you can use it to actually place a call to Dad and me. This is not negotiable, by the way.”

The conversation kind of petered out after that. I said that my suite mate was waiting upstairs to teach me how to play chess, so I'd better go.

“We really miss you,” Mom said pointedly.

“Don't worry,” I answered. “We'll be home in a couple of months.”

It wasn't till I was climbing the stairs to my room that I realized what I ought to have said, what Mom fully expected me to say: “I really miss you too.”