What a Trip! (3 page)

“Agreed!” the men chimed together.

Frankie blinked. “So we're going around the world?”

“Around the world,” said Fogg.

I gulped. “Now that's what I call a field trip!”

Chapter 5

“Passepartout isn't going to like it,” Frankie said as we strode back every single one of the one thousand one hundred fifty-one steps to Mr. Fogg's place. “He was all about having a peaceful life serving tea and toast and keeping the water at the right temperature.”

Fogg seemed to understand what Frankie meant, then said, “We shall be leaving in twenty-two minutes.”

With that, the man disappeared into his room.

When Frankie and I burst into the little Frenchman's room, he was in his pajamas and slippers, reading quietly in a chair. We had to break it to him about what we were doing and how it had happened.

“Aye-yi-yiiii!” he yelped. “Around the world! Around the world? But we are not packed—”

Fogg stepped in at that moment, holding a giant carpetbag. “We will not pack. We shall buy what we need along the way.”

“What, no carry-on luggage?” I said.

“But I wanted rest! Quiet! Peace!” Passepartout said.

“You can rest in quiet peace eighty days from now when we are back in London,” said Fogg, “for I intend to win this wager.”

He flew past us, went to his safe, and took out a chubby wad of money and stuffed it in the bag. Then he turned, checked his watch, smiled slightly, and said, “We're off.”

Nineteen minutes later, we were at a big train station in London and rushing after Fogg, who was calmly striding toward a train that was blasting out steam and already starting to roll down the tracks.

The next thing that happened was strange.

Just as Mr. Fogg was about to hop onto the train, he spotted a poor woman holding a small child in her arms, huddled against the station wall.

Without a word, Fogg trotted over and gave her a giant silver coin. “Here, my good woman,” he said. “I'm glad I met you!”

Then he shot back and hopped onto the moving train.

“Ah, my master,” whispered Passepartout, his eyes twinkling. “Perhaps he is not such a robot ….”

A moment later, the train blasted out of the station and we were chugging toward the coast of England.

“Do you believe this?” I said when we settled into our seats. “We're going around the world. I mean, I know about the world pretty well from TV, but the real thing is supposed to be even better!”

Frankie looked out the window at the countryside whizzing by. “I guess if we had to drop into a book, this isn't a bad one. We'll see the sights at least. Hey, look.”

She had pulled that old watch out of her pocket and was glancing at it. “It just started ticking again.”

“You probably knocked something loose when we scurried for the train,” said Passepartout. “And now, my new friends, prepare to see Paris, my beloved City of Light. It is just a few hours away. I guarantee you will love it!”

But by the time we got to the coast of England and took a boat to France and then another train straight to Paris, it was the middle of the night. We were in the train station the whole time, and we left Paris in twenty minutes, anyway.

Passepartout pressed his nose up against the window as we left the Paris station. “Oh, dear, dear. This trip around the world is fast. Good-bye, Paris!”

“What's next?” I asked.

“Rome,” said Frankie, peeking into the book. “Which I think is the Paris of Italy. Where they make all that Italian food. It's the official home of the meatball—”

“What a coincidence!” I said. “I love meatballs! And most other types of food.”

But we didn't get any meatballs or anything.

Whoosh!
A bunch of lights flashed by the window.

“What was that?” I asked.

Passepartout sighed. “Rome.”

“We're going fast, all right,” said Frankie as the train chugged and rattled through the countryside. “But we're not exactly seeing the world.”

I chuckled. “Not stopping anywhere does solve the whole problem of how to pack the souvenirs!”

Soon it was Saturday, which from the book we realized was the third day of our trip, and we were all the way down at the very bottom of Italy.

It was there, in a city named Brindisi (Brin-DEE-zee, according to Passepartout), that we got onto a steamer called the
Mongolia
.

“The
Mongolia
will take us from Italy across the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal to India,” Mr. Fogg said when we tumbled out of the train and zipped over to the Brindisi harbor.

He was right.

For the next four days we steamed across the blue Mediterranean. Frankie and I were getting tired reading page after page, so it felt good when we arrived on the south shore of that big sea for our first real stop.

“Suez!” called out one of the ship guys.

“Finally, some sight-seeing,” said Frankie.

Another bunch of ship guys slid a ramp out from the steamer to the dock where we were stopping to refuel.

Together with Passepartout, Mr. Fogg went straight to the office where they stamp passports, so he could prove to his friends in London that he'd been there.

“According to the book,” I said, as Frankie and I stepped down the plank to the dock, “Suez is a port in Egypt. Egypt is the home of the pyramids. I love those things. I always wanted to climb to the top, then slide down—what's the matter?”

Frankie pointed to two men pacing the dock below. One was like an official British man in a blue uniform.

The other guy was small and wore a wrinkled suit that had probably been white in the age of the pyramids.

“Check him out,” said Frankie.

“I'm checking,” I said.

The man's beady little eyes darted from one passenger to the next. He also had a strange mustache under his nose. It was all gunked up with wax, and the ends were twisted into two points. He tried not to attract any attention, but he jumped when he saw Mr. Fogg.

“It's like he knows Mr. Fogg or something,” I said. “Could he be another character in the story?”

“Check the book.”

I flipped it open. “Okay, here we are in Suez on day seven of our trip. We're on the dock … wait … sorry, the pages are getting too blurry to read.”

This is another thing that happens in the books we get dropped into. If the words get blurry, it means we're getting too far ahead in the story, and we have to stop reading. We're not supposed to jump ahead to stuff that hasn't happened yet—just like you shouldn't skip anything when you actually read a book.

“Well,” I said, closing the book, “if he is a character, he's a suspicious one. We should find out what he's up to … but how …?”

Suddenly Frankie grinned. “Hey, Devin, are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“Where to find cheeseburgers at this time of day?”

“No, I'm thinking we go into sneaky mode and listen in on the dude's conversation.”

I grinned. “You think good, Frankie. Entering sneaky mode … now!”

We crept up behind the guys pacing the dock and hid behind a carriage hitched to a horse. The man in the blue uniform was talking. “Are you certain?”

“I tell you,” replied the mustache man, “I've found him. And a good job I've done of it, too. I searched the steamer's list of passengers, and found my man. Now I need you to issue me a warrant for his arrest.”

Frankie tugged my robe. “The guy in white is some kind of detective. Shhh …”

“I tell you,” said the detective, “the bank robber is right on this ship. Mr. Fogg is our bank robber!”

I nearly exploded. “What?”

“I'm sure of it,” the detective went on. “Phileas Fogg, gentleman of London, has stolen fifty-five thousand pounds from the Bank of England!”

Chapter 6

Frankie and I turned to each other and gasped.

“A police detective!” she hissed. “And he thinks Phileas Fogg is the guy who robbed the Bank of England!”

“So
that's
why we got so much information about the robbery back at Fogg's club in London,” I said. “It didn't really seem like part of the story. But now it all makes sense. Wait, there's more. Shhh!”

“But, Detective Fix,” the officer in blue was saying, “Phileas Fogg appears an honest man and a gentleman.”

“Great robbers always resemble honest folks,” said the detective. “It's easy for gentlemen to make their escape that way. But I can't arrest him outside England unless he's in an English colony, such as Egypt. And I can't do it without an arrest warrant.”

The other man pointed down the dock. “Here comes his servant now.”

“Good. I shall interrogate him!” said Detective Fix. He whirled around quickly and purposely bumped into Passepartout on the dock.

“Oh, sir, I beg your pardon,” said the detective, twirling the ends of his mustache. “Are you traveling with Mr. Phileas Fogg?”

“Why, sir, yes I am!” said Passepartout, giving a bow.

“And where is your master traveling to?”

The servant chuckled to himself. “Why, Mr. Fogg is going around the world. In eighty days! Our next stop is Bombay, India! After that China, then Japan!”

Fix nodded at this information. “Is he rich, then?”

“He carries a great deal of money,” said Passepartout.

“Oh, man!” I whispered. “Don't tell him that!”

“A great deal of money, eh? Does he, really?” Fix's eyes lit up. “Well, perhaps I'll meet him on board. Because I'll be going to Bombay also.”

Then the detective wandered away, practically twisting his mustache ends right off.

“I knew that mustache was up to no good,” said Frankie. “We need to tell Passepartout the truth.”

Clack! Clack!
The carriage suddenly rode away and there we were, huddled on the dock like a couple of scared monkeys.

“Ah, Frankie and Devin!” said Passepartout. “Are you quite all right?”

“We're okay,” I said. “But Mr. Fogg may not be. That man you were talking to is a police detective. And he thinks Mr. Fogg is the one who robbed the Bank of England—”

“I don't understand a word you're saying,” said Passepartout. “Do you often say silly things?”

“Like what, for instance?” asked Frankie.

“Like … blah, blah, mumble, mumble? By the way, Fix seems like a friendly, delightful fellow, doesn't he?”

We stared at him. Just then, the ship's whistle blew loudly. It meant that the
Mongolia
was ready to leave.

As all three of us made our way to the plank, Frankie turned to me and whispered. “We've had this problem before. You try to tell a character something that they're not supposed to know yet, and it's all blah, blah, mumble, mumble to them. It makes you sound like an idiot.”

“Even more than usual,” I groaned. “But that's not the worst part. What if Detective Fix tries to stop Fogg?”

Suddenly, Frankie stopped cold. “Whoa, I just thought of something.” She shoved her hand into her pocket and pulled out the old watch. “Oh, man!”

“What's the matter?”

“You said that according to the book, we're on the seventh day of the journey, right?”

“It says right here, seven days.” I tapped the page.

“This strange old watch has gone exactly
seven minutes
since it started ticking again.”

“The watch is ancient,” I said. “It doesn't keep time.”

“No!” Frankie said loudly. “Devin! It just hit me! The watch
does
keep time. But it's not the time here in the story. It's the time back in Palmdale. It's the eighty minutes of our trip at the library. It's the same eighty minutes that the repair guy told Mrs. Figglehopper he needed to fix the gates! You know what this means?”

Now, I was
trying
to understand what she was saying. I saw her lips moving and heard the words. It's just that this whole business about time was always tough for me. I'm personally always late for stuff.

I guess I looked like I wasn't getting it.

“It means,” said Frankie, “that this watch is showing how much time we have left before that repair guy completely messes up our zapper gates. Usually, no time passes while we're in a book. But the guy fooled with the wires, so it's different now. If he fixes the gates before we get back, we'll be trapped here—forever!”

It was starting to dawn on me. “So you're saying if we're late, if this trip takes more than eighty days—”

“Eighty minutes on this watch,” said Frankie.

“—not only will Fogg lose the bet but the zapper gates will get fixed and we'll be trapped here forever?”

“That's what I just said!”

“Which means—”

“We stay in 1872!”

“Where there are no—”

“Cheeseburgers or cable!”

“So then we've got to—”

“Stop Fix!”

“Before he—”

“Stops us!”

“Or even before!” I cried. “And we have only seventy-three minutes left to do it in!”

“Seventy-three days,” said Fogg calmly as he passed by, striding up the plank. “Seventy-three days.”

“You see!” whispered Frankie. “Minutes equal days!”

I shook my head. “This is so very confusing—”

“Come along!” said Passepartout. “They are serving lunch on the ship. And we cannot be late for lunch.”

I grinned. “Now,
that
I understand!”

The whistle blew, and the
Mongolia
was ready to steam out of the Suez harbor on its way to Bombay. We ran with top speed back to the ship.

A moment later, we headed out to sea.

Chapter 7

While the
Mongolia
traveled down the Red Sea between Egypt and Arabia, Frankie and I strolled the deck, trying to get a handle on our problem.