Robot Trouble Page 14

  Suddenly the observation room was flooded with beautiful music.

  He glanced at his watch. Six-thirty. They might as well forget it. They couldn’t change anything now without going through the main computer.

  Roger leaned his head against the fin and tried to will the pain in his wrists out of existence. His hands were slippery with blood, and the bonds didn’t seem any closer to separating than they had an hour ago. What are these damn things made of? he wondered desperately.

  Suddenly he heard a muted clanging sound above him.

  He groaned. It was the door from the catwalk into the corridor; the computer had just sealed off their last possible avenue of escape.

  “That’s it,” he said wearily. “There’s no point in going on. It won’t make any difference even if we do break loose.”

  Hap’s voice when he responded was close to a growl. “Roger, if I go, I plan to go fighting. Stop moaning and get back to work!”

  Roger smiled. Other than the fact that he didn’t want his friend to die, he couldn’t think of anyone better to share a spot like this with than Hap Swenson. “Okay, boss,” he said. “Back to work it is.”

  “Good,” said Hap. He glanced up at the clock. “We’ve got twenty-five minutes and thirty-six seconds left to live. Let’s make the most of them!”

  “All right, Twerpy,” said Rachel. “I got them to build this rocket for you. Now it’s your turn to come through for me!”

  She pushed a little switch on the robot’s neck. “Ready?” she asked, not caring that she was talking to something that couldn’t understand a word she said. She stared at her pennywhistle for a moment, then raised it to her lips.

  But she didn’t play. Lowering the whistle, she dried her sweaty palms on her coveralls and thought, Oh, muse of music, if you’re still around anywhere, I sure need you now. Please—let me get the pitch right just this once!

  Euterpe’s lights had stopped blinking; the robot sat quietly, waiting for new input.

  Rachel put the whistle to her lips.

  The first note was terrible—a squawk that would have offended Euterpe’s ears, if a robot was capable of being offended.

  Rachel licked her lips and tried again.

  Better, but still no response from Euterpe.

  One more try. This time she produced a single pure note.

  Euterpe repeated it.

  Rachel drew a deep breath and let it out in relief. “All right, Euterpe,” she said. “It’s time to jam!”

  She began playing the simple nine-note phrase she hoped would save her life. Don’t get too fancy with this, Twerpy, she thought. The message won’t do any good if no one understands it!

  Trip, Ray, and Wendy spent the last hours before daylight in a previously chosen supply room, waiting for the others to join them.

  “So where are they?” asked Trip angrily, a little before seven. “It’s not enough they got to have all the fun last night. Do they have to leave us sitting here now?”

  “Calm down,” said Wendy, stifling a yawn. “You’re starting to sound like me!”

  “Maybe we missed them,” said Ray. “They might have been running late and gone to the observation room by some other route.”

  “That’s probably it,” said Wendy, heaving herself to her feet. “I bet they’re waiting there now. Let’s go!” She began trotting along the hallway.

  “I wonder if they got a picture of Black Glove,” said Trip, rising to join her. “I bet she was here last night!”

  “You don’t think something might have happened to them, do you?” asked Ray.

  “Not all three of them,” said Wendy. “If it was just one, I’d be worried. But I can’t see B.G. taking out all three of them.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” said Ray. “Hey, listen—they’ve turned on Euterpe!”

  “You mean they turned on the sound system,” said Trip. “Euterpe’s been running her music since we put her in there.”

  “Jeez, get technical, why don’t you?” muttered Ray.

  Wendy stopped. “That doesn’t sound like the music of the spheres to me.”

  Ray shrugged. “So Jupiter is farther away than the last time you heard it. The song changes all the time, remember?”

  “Of course. But this is something different.” She pressed her hands against her forehead. “I know that rhythm. What is it? What is it?”

  Trip and Ray glanced at each other and shrugged. Wendy tended to get like this sometimes.

  Roger was having a hard time keeping his eyes off the clock: 6:51:22 it read now. Less than nine minutes to go before the burst of all-consuming fire.

  He almost wished the time would move even faster, bring this tortured waiting to an end.

  Hap refused to look at the clock. “Keep working!” he snapped when he felt Roger begin to slow down.

  “Why?” asked Roger wearily.

  But he resumed rubbing his bonds against the rocket’s fin.

  Rachel, too, was checking the time.

  Six minutes until liftoff.

  She had lost track of how many times she had played her message. There had been no response.

  What’s the matter with you people? she though desperately. Are you deaf? Can’t you understand?

  Of course, it would help if Euterpe would just repeat her notes instead of turning the simple rhythm into a small corner of variations on her theme.

  Rachel set down the whistle and laid her head against Euterpe. No need to play any longer. The robot would continue creating variations without her input for several minutes—probably until the moment of liftoff.

  Though she tried to suppress the image, she could not help imagining the moment, the press of gravity as she began a trip into space from which she would never return. Her spirit finally broke. Leaning her head against Euterpe’s hard metallic body, she began to weep.

  Wendy, Ray, and Trip emerged from one of the smaller buildings onto the airfield.

  Euterpe’s music was being broadcast through the huge speakers mounted at the ends of the field. Somehow the atmosphere reminded them of a holiday, or a fair.

  Suddenly Wendy grabbed Trip’s arm. “I’ve got it!” she cried. “I’ve got it!” She clutched his sleeve even tighter. “Don’t you hear it?”

  “Hear what?” asked Trip, mystified.

  “What Euterpe is playing!”

  Trip sighed. “Yeah, it’s the music of the—”

  “It’s not the music of the spheres!” she yelled. “Listen! She’s going up and down, all over the place with them, just like when she jams with Dr. Weiskopf. She’s playing variations on a theme. One theme, over and over. One nine-note theme. Three short notes, three long notes, three short notes.”

  “My God!” cried Ray. “It’s an SOS!”

  “You got it, baby,” said the Wonderchild. “Someone is stuck inside that rocket!”

  From his assigned patrol route Ramon Korbuscek heard the strange music being broadcast from the rocket. Without actually translating it, he knew at once that something was wrong.

  His senses instantly became more alert. A cold sweat broke out on his chest. If anything should interfere with the launch, he had to make sure the device he had planted in the rocket could not be found.

  He knew enough about the way the launch was set up to expect it to proceed as scheduled, since it would be almost impossible to abort the mission at this point. But on the off chance that something did happen, he wanted to position himself to be first to reach the rocket.

  Looking around to make sure he was not being observed, he sprinted toward the closest tunnel that could lead him to the missile silo.

  “Where’s the nearest computer that connects to the main terminal?” asked Trip.

  “The control room,” said Wendy. “I saw one when I was in there last night.”

  “Well, let’s move!” yelled Ray.

  Starting a dash across the airfield, the three friends came face-to-face with a pair of Sergeant Brody’s guards, one male, on
e female.

  “Where do you kids think you’re going?” asked the woman. “You should be under cover by now!”

  “Take us to the control tower,” said Wendy, clambering into their Jeep.

  “No can do, Short Stuff,” said the guard. “The building is sealed until after the launch.”

  “But it’s our launch!” said Wendy.

  The guard shrugged. “Orders are orders.”

  “This is a matter of life and death!” cried Ray.

  The woman smiled. “Yeah, it always is with you kids. Why aren’t you in the observation room where you can get a close-up look? I would think—hey, get back here!”

  The kids were running as fast as they could for the nearest building. The guards started after them.

  “We’ll have to split up!” cried Trip.

  Wendy and Ray peeled off in opposite directions.

  The two guards, faced with chasing kids headed in three directions, opted to aim for Trip and Ray.

  “I hate it when a woman is a male chauvinist,” muttered Wendy. Pulling the robot control device from her pocket, she twisted a dial and pressed a series of buttons.

  An instant later every security robot within a thousand yards was rolling in her direction.

  The Robot Brigade

  “Three minutes and fifteen seconds,” said Hap.

  “Will you stop that!” cried Roger. “I don’t need an announcer to let me know when I’m going to fry!”

  “I’m just trying to motivate you.”

  “I’m plenty motivated! The damn thing won’t cut!”

  “Well, lean into it!” said Hap, dragging his weight against the fin as he continued to saw at the cords holding him to Roger.

  To his amazement, they separated with a sudden snap that dropped both of them to the floor.

  “We did it!” cried Roger, starting to laugh. “Hap, we did it!”

  “You bet we did!” said Hap, rubbing his wrists. “Now start working on your feet.”

  “Here,” said Roger, handing him the knife he had just pulled from the pocket of his coveralls. “It’s faster.”

  Hap smiled as he took the knife and sliced through the cords. Then he glanced at the steel ladder that led to the top of the silo. “What do you think would happen if we climbed up to the catwalk?”

  Roger shrugged. “It might mean there would be something left of us to bury.”

  “Well, let’s go! At this stage of the game, every little bit counts.”

  The observation room was in an uproar. “Something is going on out there!” cried Trip’s father. “And I want to know what it is!”

  “Abort the launch!” cried several people. “Stop it now!”

  Dr. Hwa was trying to calm the group. “There is no way to stop it,” he said over and over.

  Staff Sergeant Brody looked out the window and groaned. He had suspected this whole thing would be a pain in the neck from the moment two months ago when he first heard the kids were planning to launch a rocket. But even his wildest nightmares had not prepared him for what he saw now: a virtual herd of his security robots racing across the airfield at top speed, with that wretched Wendy Wendell riding on the shoulders of the one in the lead!

  “Come on, Deathmonger!” cried Wendy, kicking the robot as if it were a balky horse. “Come on, we don’t have all day!”

  “What we’ve got is about two and a half minutes!” cried Trip, who was straddling the shoulders of the robot on Wendy’s right.

  “How long will it take to get into the system?” asked Wendy.

  “About ninety seconds!” yelled Ray, who was riding the robot to her left.

  “Then we’ll just have to move a little faster!” cried the Wonderchild. Reaching into her coveralls, she pulled out the control pack and punched a sequence of buttons. She barely had time to grab Deathmonger’s neck before the robot shot forward so fast it nearly sent her flying. Her cap blew off, leaving her pigtails to flap in the wind.

  The control tower loomed ahead of them.

  “How long?” asked Wendy.

  “Two minutes, three seconds,” said Trip.

  Ignoring her own hatless state, she cried, “Then hold on to your hats! We’ve got to force the door!”

  The robot brigade hurtled forward, then crashed into the solid metal of the doors. They didn’t give immediately, but the robots continued to crush in from the rear.

  The doors began to bulge.

  Seconds later they sprang apart. The robots surged through like water through a bursting dam.

  “Come on!” cried Trip, scrambling off his “steed” and sprinting down the hallway. “No time to waste!”

  His long legs pumping like pistons, he took the stairs three and four at a bound. No time now to worry about offending his shorter friends…

  “Do you suppose we could grab the top of the silo when it opens for the launch?” asked Hap.

  Roger shook his head. “The flaps are too far away. Even if we stood on the nose of the rocket—which I doubt we could do—we couldn’t reach them.”

  The boys were halfway up the side of the silo, clinging to the steel ladder. Another few rungs brought Roger face-to-face with the launch clock.

  “Two minutes, fifteen seconds,” he said. “Hap, it’s been a privilege.”

  “The pleasure was all mine, buddy. Now here’s another idea. What if we climb onto the rocket and try to jump off just as it’s lifting out of the silo?”

  Roger laughed. “That is the craziest idea I ever heard in my life.”

  “Do you have a better one?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s try it.”

  Roger took a last look down at the base of the rocket. In less than ninety seconds the missile silo would be a raging inferno.

  Suddenly Hap’s idea didn’t seem quite so crazy.

  Rachel lifted the whistle to her lips and began to play again. If no one had decoded her message by now, it wouldn’t make any difference what Euterpe broadcast.

  She played a song Dr. Weiskopf had taught her, a beautiful but mournful ballad lamenting life’s short sweetness. As she played, she felt a strange sense of peace filter through her.

  Euterpe picked up the tune, playing counterpoint to the simple melody.

  I just wish we’d put in a window, thought Rachel as she ran her fingers over the whistle’s holes. Euterpe doesn’t need one, of course. But if I’m going to die in space, I sure would love to get a chance to enjoy the view before I go.

  Trip Davis stood at the keyboard, trying to keep his fingers from trembling.

  “Sherlock” he typed, trying to call up their secret program.

  The screen flashed green. Then a question mark appeared.

  Trip typed in his personal code, cursed as he realized he had misspelled it, and tried again.

  The clock on the wall gave him seventy seconds.

  The doors on the top of the missile silo, visible from where he stood, were beginning to open. The sight jolted him into hitting another wrong key. He cried out in anguish. He was going to kill his friends with typing errors!

  Taking a breath, he forced himself to slow down. Then he typed in the code word correctly.

  The terminal lacked a voice synthesizer. The response appeared on the small screen: “Good morning, Trip. How are you today?”

  Trip began typing in the commands that would abort the launch.

  “Forty-five seconds!” cried Ray, rushing up behind him.

  Trip jumped and typed the wrong character. “Be quiet!” he screamed.

  Wendy, barreling into the room right behind Ray, had all she could do to keep from pushing her tall friend away from the keyboard.

  Trip felt the sweat pouring down his brow. There. That was it!

  He pushed the entry key.

  For an agonizing moment, nothing happened.

  “Ten,” said Ray, counting down with the clock on the wall. “Nine, eight, seven—”

  A siren began to wail.

  Mission a
borted! flashed the screen. Mission aborted!

  Trip sank to his knees in front of the keyboard.

  Across the airfield, the reaction to the siren was instant and almost unanimous.

  Rachel, unable to believe it at first, threw her arms around Euterpe. “We’re safe!” she cried ecstatically.

  Hap and Roger, clinging to the side of the rocket and bracing themselves for the thrust of launch, looked at each other and began to whoop with delight.

  The adults in the observation tower, who were close enough to the silo actually to see Hap and Roger clinging to the rocket’s smooth metal sides when the launch doors had opened, broke into wild cheers.

  But for one of those adults it was a false joy, masking a ferocious rage. Smiling and cheering with the others, inside Black Glove was thinking: I can’t believe they’ve done it again. What does it take to stop those kids?

  One other adult was not happy. Ramon Korbuscek, desperate to retrieve the device he had planted inside Euterpe, threw open the door to the missile silo and stepped out onto the catwalk. He stopped in shock when he saw Roger climbing down from the side of the rocket.

  What is he doing up here? I can’t have any witnesses now. None!

  Unaware that he could be seen from the observation room, and unable to see Hap from where he stood, Korbuscek flung himself at Roger. Even now it shouldn’t be too difficult to explain one body lying at the base of the rocket. A simple slip in the dark could have caused it.

  Roger, backing down from the rocket and thinking he was safe at last, let out a bellow of fear when someone’s arms wrapped around his chest and muscled him toward the edge of the catwalk.

  “Hey, let go of him!” cried Hap, coming around the edge of the rocket.

  Another one! Fueled by desperation, Korbuscek wrenched Roger closer to the edge.

  He had nearly pushed him over when the redhead grabbed the catwalk’s iron rail. But Roger’s bloodied palms began to slip as Korbuscek pulled at his arms. Only the adrenaline charging through his body gave him enough strength to cling to the railing until Hap made it onto the catwalk. The husky blond launched himself at the raging spy, distracting his attention from Roger.

  Still holding Roger with one arm, Korbuscek lashed out at Hap, landing a backhanded punch that sent him to his knees, then slipping over the edge of the catwalk.