The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy Page 5

  She raised her eyebrows in an expressive way, and paused for a moment to let what she’d said sink in.

  “You will have two days to complete the exercise. At four P.M. on Wednesday, you need to be finished and ready to roll. By then, each team must take the contents of one of these boxes”—she opened a lid and showed us what looked like the sale bin at a hardware store—“and use them to create a robot. It’s important to use every item in the box. You will lose points for every piece you leave behind.

  “Now, I know some of you hotshots could build a perfectly good robot out of these materials completely on your own, without needing any directions. But chances are that, left to your own devices, you won’t figure out how to use all of the pieces and use them correctly. So we have put the instructions on the Internet. Naturally, we didn’t want to make this too easy, so don’t waste your time looking it up on Google.”

  “Aw, shucks!” said Claire. She was a National Science Fair runner-up, and you could tell she was cool with any computer challenge you might throw at her. Ms. Lollyheart smiled patiently.

  “Now, one of the items in the box is a tape recorder. It’s there because your robot is going to tell us the story of its life. One member of your team will be in charge of writing that story. He or she will then pass it on to another member, who will translate it into a special robot language. This language needs to be more or less intelligible to the audience. Be clever—you can do it. And no Pig Latin, please. You’re better than that.

  “Another team member will read this material into the recorder. So that’s five tasks I’ve mentioned so far: the computer research, building the robot, writing the story, translating it, and recording it.

  “Of course, your robot will not just stand still as it talks but will move in expressive and interesting ways. A sixth team member will program it to do these things.” She held up an intimidating remote control device with multiple switches and an antenna.

  “This is going to be a performance, so the seventh team member will compose the sound track—original music, folks, not your favorite rock tune. And team member number eight will create a backdrop. Number nine is in charge of lighting and any special effects you may devise (You will, of course, be under the supervision of someone on the theater staff. They aren’t allowed to help you, but they will make sure you don’t destroy the equipment or electrocute yourself).”

  There was a ripple of nervous laughter.

  “And the team leaders?” asked Prescott. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Your job is to run the show. You’re sort of like the conductor. You cue the lights and music, and run the robot.”

  “But, Ms. Lollyheart!” Prescott whined. “What if somebody on the team screws up—like they can’t find the instructions on the Internet, or they build the robot wrong? Then that messes it up for the rest of us.”

  “Exactly,” Ms. Lollyheart said, giving him a tight smile.

  She paused for a really long time to let this sink in. Then she continued. “Now, the actual presentation will take place over in the arts building, at the Willard Theater. The eighth-grade robot show is at four; we need to be out of there by five so the next group can come in. Okay? Is everybody clear on the assignment?”

  “The music and the backdrop,” Trey asked, “what are we supposed to use to make them? I mean, will we have access to musical instruments and art materials and stuff like that?”

  “Of course. All that information is in your assignment envelopes—where you are to go and when, what materials are available for your use, everything.” She pulled out a fat bunch of envelopes held together with a rubber band. “Now, team members number one need to get on your computers ASAP and try to find those instructions. On Prescott’s team, that will be Jenny Kirkland—here, Jenny.” She held out an envelope, which Jenny came forward to accept, a stricken expression on her face. She was the political activist who had set up the after-school tutoring program. If she had any special computer skills, she certainly hadn’t mentioned them.

  “And the computer search for Adriana’s team will be done by Daniel Ellis.” (In case you forgot, he’s the history guy with the Cathars.)

  At least he and Jenny would be evenly matched. That’s what I was thinking when she called my name—to build the robot!

  “But…!” Prescott sputtered, beside himself with exasperation (and by now everyone was rolling their eyes and exchanging glances every time he opened his mouth). “Don’t I at least get to assign my own team members to their various jobs? I mean, no offense, Franny, but I’m sure we could put you to better use doing something—”

  “No, Prescott, I’m afraid not,” Ms. Lollyheart said. “That’s what makes this exercise so interesting: I choose the teams, I make the assignments. Now, for Adriana’s team, the robot builder will be Edward Rodriguez.”

  And so it went. Ms. Lollyheart had rigged this contest so everyone would fail. She had chosen the artists and writers to do the technical jobs and the techies to do the creative stuff. Cal, who could have made up a wonderful robot language, was assigned to lighting. Henry Chow, who had a heavy Chinese accent, was to read the translated story into the tape recorder. And nothing could be more hopeless than asking me to build a robot!

  It was perfectly clear what they expected us to learn from this exercise—we each have our strengths and our weaknesses, in any society we all depend on one another, yadda, yadda, yadda. I was shocked that they were wasting two whole days spelling out the obvious. And this was an Allbright tradition? Cheez Louise!

  “One last thing before you go. You probably think you know what this exercise is about, but please, trust me, you are only partially right. It is about many things. It may be years before you really understand it. We have had former students, out working in the business world or in government, who have written us to say that memories of the robot exercise came back to them at the strangest times—and rather often, too. It gave them a window through which they could view the workings of the world.

  “All right, you’ve heard enough from me. You have your assignments. Go forth, my children, and create.”

  7

  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 wou
ld 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 heav
y 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.”

  8

  Wednesday 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.”