House of Robots Read online

  “Well,” says Trip, “you should be. This is your fault. If you hadn’t lost E—”

  “I didn’t lose him.”

  “Fine. You drove him away by saying all those mean things about him.”

  “What mean things?”

  “Hmm. Let’s see. Did you or did you not call E ‘Error’ repeatedly and to his face?”

  “Yeah, but that was before—”

  “And did you not state that E is ‘the stupidest robot my mom ever created,’ even though ‘stupidest’ doesn’t make sense, because E is really smart?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I rest my case.”

  Maybe Trip is right. Maybe E wasn’t kidnapped. Maybe my bro-bot ran away from home because I haven’t been a very good bro.

  While I’m thinking about all that, Mrs. Kunkel goes down the hall for “a quick minute”to discuss something with Principal Reyes. We’re supposed to be doing silent reading.

  Well, Cooper Elliot uses the quiet time to cement Trip’s face to a desk. I think he used superglue, too, because it’s a pretty tight seal.

  Trip is beyond embarrassed. Teachers come. The school nurse rushes in. Mr. Kressin, the janitor, brings his jumbo-sized toolbox. I’m afraid he might try to pry Trip free with a crowbar or melt the glue away with a blowtorch.

  They finally set Trip free using some of Mrs. Kunkel’s nail polish remover. His cheek will probably be bright pink for a day or two.

  And yes, he blames me for that, too.

  And you know what? I don’t really blame him.

  The next morning when we ride our bikes to school, Trip’s cheek is back to its normal color and—yay—he doesn’t blame me for the whole face-glued-to-the-desk thing anymore.

  Yes, I did happen to bring him an extra peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich jazzed up with marshmallows, Reese’s Pieces, and sprinkles. It’s one of Mr. Moppenshine’s best recipes.

  “Okay, you’re forgiven, Sammy,” Trip says as we pedal closer to school. “We’re still second-best friends, right? Even though I said all that mean junk yesterday?”

  “Definitely,” I say. “Besides, a lot of what you said was kind of true. I was pretty rough on E at first. Now I’d do anything to get him back. But so far, Drone Malone hasn’t been able to locate that suspicious SUV.”

  “Well,” says Trip as we pull up to the bike rack, “looks like you guys might have some help with your investigation.”

  A black sedan with a swirling red light on its dashboard is parked in front of the school. A man and woman in suits—both of them wearing sunglasses, chewing toothpicks, and looking exactly like detectives on a TV cop show—climb out of the unmarked police car. When a breeze blows by, their jacket flaps flip up and I can see golden badges clipped to both their belts.

  They are detectives. Just like on TV!

  And they want to talk to a lot of kids, including me.

  They want to talk to Cooper Elliot, too. They come into the cafeteria looking for him right when Cooper is (once again) smooshing Trip’s sandwich, the one with peanut butter, banana, marshmallows, Reese’s Pieces, and sprinkles. It’s pretty messy. Mr. Moppenshine would not be happy.

  “You’re buying that young man a new sandwich,” says Detective Gabriel Henderson.

  “Two,” adds his partner, Detective Mary Jordan. “And then you’re coming with us. We need to chat.”

  They “chatted” with teachers, too. They even chatted with Mr. Kressin, the janitor.

  But at the end of the school day, the detectives don’t arrest anybody.

  (Yes, I was kind of hoping Cooper Elliot would be hauled away in chains.)

  Our robo-napper is still at large.

  And probably driving around in a black SUV.

  The next day, Principal Reyes calls an all-school assembly to talk about E and, while she’s at it, bullying and bullies.

  “Why did so many of us like E so much?” says Principal Reyes. “I have a theory: because he was strong and smart but he chose to use all that power and intelligence to do good. To make someone smile. To help Mr. Kressin change a lightbulb. To brighten students’ days by helping them with their spelling.

  “Of course, E could have used his incredible power to pick on anyone who was weaker than him, which, by the way, would be everybody at Creekside, including Coach Stringer. That’s what bullies do. They prey on the weak. Why? Because bullies are basically cowards. They’re afraid to pick on someone their own size.

  “But E chose to be something better. Well, boys and girls, I want us all to be more like E. We should treat each other the way E treated us—with kindness and respect. So if you’re bigger than someone, lend that smaller person a hand. If you’re stronger, help them do something they couldn’t do on their own. Be like E.

  “If we all do that, if we treat each other the way E treated us, just think how happy he’ll be when he comes back to school.”

  It’s a very nice talk. Everybody’s fired up and wants to “Be Like E.”

  There’s only one part I don’t understand: How exactly is E coming back to school if he’s still missing?

  After the assembly, some kids come over and give me pats on the back and elbow chucks.

  Trip gets his fair share, too, because everybody knows we’re second-best friends, so they figure E is his second-best robot friend or whatever. This one kid, a guy named Bobby Hatfield who’s usually pretty nasty to me, comes over and says, “No offense,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

  Wait a second.

  Did Bobby Hatfield robo-nap E? Was his “no offense” a confession of some kind?

  Maybe it’s because those detectives visited school, but all of a sudden I’m looking at everybody as if they could be suspects. Well, everybody except Trip, of course. And Principal Reyes. And Mrs. Kunkel. Actually, I don’t think any of the adults did it. They all loved E, even back when I hated him.

  Except, maybe, the adults riding around in that SUV.

  I quickly call home. Maddie, who is monitoring Drone Malone’s flights on her laptop, tells me there’s still “no new news.”

  Then she says, “They might’ve taken E out of the state.”

  “But the SUV had Indiana tags.”

  “Maybe it was a rental car. Maybe they’re all the way out in California. Silicon Valley.”

  Riding home alone on my bike, I guess I miss E more than ever.

  I should’ve never, ever called him Error or any of those other nasty names I made up.

  Maybe it really is my fault he’s gone.

  Yep. Trip may have forgiven me, but if E doesn’t come home soon, I may never forgive myself.

  Most mornings, I get up early and check on Maddie.

  Then I fire up the Breakfastinator and program it to make hot cocoa (with whipped cream) and pour Cap’n Crunch for the two of us.

  While that’s chugging along, I dash outside and grab the newspaper for Mom and Dad. I might stop to hear what Hayseed has to say as he waters the flower beds.

  But this particular morning, something interrupts my daily routine.

  The first strange thing I notice on the front porch is that Dingaling, our doorbell-bot, is covered with a paper bag that totally blocks its motion detectors.

  The next thing I notice is worse: three weird-looking cardboard boxes, one on each of the porch steps.

  I raise a lid and peek inside.

  I can’t help it. I start crying. Right there in front of the whole neighborhood.

  Because E is inside the box. In pieces.

  I go running inside, find Mom, and bring her out to the porch.

  She looks at the boxes—and what is left of E. It’s mostly parts and jumbled wires and bent circuit boards.

  I can tell she’s seriously sad.

  All she says is, “I will try to fix E. If he’s all here.”

  Dad comes out to the porch in his dragon-manga-writer bathrobe from Japan and gives Mom a big hug.

  I’m kind of happy that they have each other, esp
ecially when one of them is having a horrible, awful, really bad morning. Honestly. I take back anything bad I ever said about them, now and in the future.

  Word quickly spreads around Creekside that E is back.

  Well, sort of back.

  Everybody wants to know how E is doing.

  “Not great,” I say, because, hey, I saw the tangled heap of loose parts and snipped wires crammed inside those three cardboard boxes.

  Trip is a little more optimistic. “Sammy’s mom is going to fix E,” he tells everybody. “You’ll see.”

  A lot of kids and teachers are also super supportive.

  “If anyone can fix E,” says Principal Reyes, “it’s the genius who created him in the first place: Professor Elizabeth Hayes, PhD. I guarantee you that, any day now, E will be back in school, not setting fire to anything.”

  Even Cooper Elliot kind of mumbles something halfway nice. “Sorry about your stupid robot, Dweebiac. You should’ve guarded him better.”

  So, okay. Not exactly the sort of sentiment you’d see inside a robot sympathy card, but I’ll take it.

  By the end of the day, Trip and I are getting so much attention, it’s almost as if we’re the most popular kids in school.

  “This isn’t right,” I say as we’re biking home.

  “I know,” says Trip. “We usually don’t get this kind of attention. Something is definitely wrong with the universe. It’s completely out of whack.”

  “That’s not what I mean. It’s not right that somebody did this to E and they’re going to get away with it. We have to solve this crime.”

  “Um, aren’t those police detectives already working on the whole ‘let’s solve the crime’ angle?”

  “Yes, but it wouldn’t hurt if we gave them some help.”

  “Really?”

  “Hey, we say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, don’t we?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well don’t forget the last part: ‘with liberty and justice for all.’ Well, ‘all’ means everybody, including E. We need to give him justice! Liberty, too!”

  Yeah. I’m kind of fired up.

  Plus, I have a plan: a band of bro-bots!

  Every robot Mom ever invented has some kind of special skill.

  So why not use all those skills to solve this crime?

  Yep. That’s my big idea. Call them RoboCops. Or maybe this can be CSI South Bend, where CSI stands for Cyborgs Solve It. (Okay, I know, robots aren’t really cyborgs, because cyborgs are people with machine implants, not machines that act like people, but it’s the best I can do because I’m so busy running my brand-new robot detective bureau.)

  First up is Mr. Moppenshine. Since he’s so good at mopping and dusting, I ask him to dust the brown paper bag we found on the porch for fingerprints.

  “Whoever placed this sack over Dingaling’s motion detectors,” I say, “didn’t want us to know someone was outside dropping off those boxes. If Dingaling wasn’t under the bag, he would’ve started ringing his bell the second someone came near the porch.”

  “Ooh, ooh,” squeals Four, the robot who acts like a four-year-old. “Maybe the bag and the boxes were put on the porch by the same person!”

  (I plan on bouncing all my theories off Four first. I figure if it makes sense to a four-year-old, it’ll make sense to everybody.)

  “That’s it!” says Trip. “You solved it, Sammy!”

  “Not yet,” I say, pacing around the room. “Right now, all we can say for certain is that whoever took Dingaling out of the picture had to be working with whoever made the box drop.”

  “I reckon the bag man come up behind Dingaling,” says Hayseed. “That’s why there was so many dadgum footprints in my flower beds. Looked like a squirrel stampede.”

  “The bag is clean,” Mr. Moppenshine reports after carefully examining the brown paper sack under the microscopic eyes he uses to hunt down dust mites. “Whoever put the bag over Dingaling’s eyes was wearing gloves.”

  “We need to look for tire tracks in the driveway,” I say. “SUV tire tracks.”

  That’s when Maddie sends me an urgent text:

  Drone Malone has SUV with Indiana plate AA999. Pulling into parking garage. ND campus.

  Mom, of course, is super busy in her workshop, trying to put E back together.

  But Dad agrees to drive Trip and me over to campus, once I explain my theory.

  “I think E was stolen by a rival robot engineer who wanted to steal all of Mom’s secrets. They tore E apart, swiped all the information they could, and didn’t bother putting E back the way they found him.”

  “Seriously?” says Dad.

  “This same SUV parked at the end of our driveway one night,” I tell him. “It followed E and me to school. It was even there when Mom and I pulled the X-14 caper to help Trip.”

  Dad nods. I can tell he’s thinking. “We better take Blitzen. This could get dangerous.”

  So we load the small-but-super-strong former linebacker robot into the back of our minivan and head to the Eddy Street Commons parking garage, the structure Drone Malone saw the SUV enter. The garage is located in a shopping and dining complex right across East Angela Boulevard from the Notre Dame campus.

  It’s nine o’clock at night and dark out.

  “Funny,” says Dad as we ease up Eddy Street. “This is the garage where your mother parks sometimes. Her office in Fitzpatrick Hall is only about a ten-minute walk away.”

  “They came back to steal her files on E!” says Trip.

  “You guys,” says Dad. “Maybe we should call the police.”

  “We’ll be okay,” I say. “We have Blitzen.”

  I thumb the “on” button on his remote.

  “I will mow them down,” he says. People or grass, Blitzen’s all about the mowing.

  We slowly pull into the gloomy garage. Our headlights bounce up and down as our wheels roll over a speed bump.

  “The bad guys probably knew Mom had a reconnaissance drone,” I say. “That’s why they always parked in garages instead of outdoor parking lots.”

  “They were sneaky,” says Trip.

  “Like ninjas,” adds Dad.

  And then we see it.

  The black SUV with the ND vanity plate.

  Two shadowy figures emerge from the darkness and start walking toward the parked SUV.

  Both of them are carrying cardboard cartons!

  Dad slams on the brakes.

  I slide open the van’s side door.

  Blitzen rumbles out and hits the concrete running. “Blue, ninety-two! Blue, ninety-two!” I think he’s calling an audible. (It’s a football thing.)

  Blitzen races across the oil-stained garage floor, barreling straight for the two silhouettes toting the cardboard cartons—the same kind of boxes E was packed in.

  “Yikes!” shouts one of the bad guys, jumping sideways.

  Blitzen keeps charging. Misses his target. Slams into a pillar. He bounces off it like a Roomba vacuum cleaner and tears across the garage, heading for another concrete column maybe twenty yards away.

  He caroms off that and, like a pinball, keeps rolling across the garage floor, slamming into concrete columns and orange safety cones. I guess to Blitzen they look like tackling dummies.

  I search for his remote and shut him down so that he doesn’t have to go on the injured reserve list.

  Meanwhile, Dad jumps out of the car and strikes one of the jujitsu poses he’s always drawing for his Hot and Sour Ninja Robots manga books.

  “Eeeyaa!” he screams.

  The two shadows with the boxes freeze.

  “I must warn you, my nefarious friends,” says Dad, sounding like Hotsi-hiroki from his comics, “I know kung fu, karate, and several other Asian words.”

  He strikes his best attack pose.

  The two villains suddenly relax, put their boxes down, and step into the dusty light.

  “Oh, hey, Mr. Rodriguez.”

  “What’s up?”

  It’s Wendy Ga
rland and Joshua Chun. The two grad students who help Mom do all her research.

  Dad turns to me. “Sammy?”

  “Um, what are you guys doing here?” I ask.

  “Dr. Hayes needed some of E’s files that she had in her office,” says Joshua Chun. “How about you guys? What are you doing here?”

  “Wondering why you two were tailing E and me in that black SUV all the time,” I say, still trying hard to sound like a cop on TV.

  Wendy Garland shrugs. “Same old, same old. Recording data. Monitoring field results.”

  “Taking E to school was the final test before he could be totally certified for his ultimate real-world function,” says Joshua Chun.

  And E knew about the two research assistants following him around, I finally realize. That’s why he did that eyebrow wiggle. He was lying when I asked him about the SUV.

  “We were also monitoring his vision-action-language loop as a form of cognitive dialogue while testing the theory of real closed fields and polynomial arithmetic for motion planning,” adds Wendy Garland.

  Trip looks at me. I look at Dad. Dad’s looking at Trip.

  None of us have any idea what the egghead just said.

  Only one thing’s clear: These two brainiacs weren’t the ones who robo-napped and then stripped down E.

  So that means somebody else did.

  Early the next morning, McFetch jumps into my bed and starts licking my face. I think Mom made his tongue out of a recycled sponge.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” I ask.

  The robo-dog has dragged along the paper bag I found on Dingaling’s head. McFetch starts sniffing it furiously and wagging his tail.