Hey, maybe she came to wish me luck, Martin thought. I should say something. After all, she’s a teenager like me. But he didn’t, because she wasn’t. She might be his age, but she was a genius like the rest of the prototypes. He remembered how she had performed an experiment on him to see what he’d do if she swiped his shoes. She seemed to like making fun of him.
“I was hoping you’d do me a favor if you have the time,” William said. “Can you help me with a tool that’s out of reach?”
“Oh, sure,” Martin said. “Come on, Chip.”
William led the way through the empty, impersonal corridors to her office. Following William was rapidly becoming the best part of Martin’s day. Her shiny brown hair looks just like when syrup meets butter, Martin thought, and there isn’t a more beautiful sight than that.
The office was an even greater disaster now than it had been earlier. Martin stepped gingerly around a cardboard box full of old circuit boards. Chip sniffed at them and gave an unhappy whine.
“It’s okay, boy,” Martin told him. “They aren’t anybody you know.”
William waded through the piles and stacks to a shelving unit in the far corner. “Up there,” she said as she stood on her tiptoes in her high-tops and pointed to an object on the highest shelf.
The object she wanted was about a foot square, wrapped in a hard case of dusty green. From its front protruded many short metal bits that gave it a snaggletoothed bulldog’s grin.
“What is it?”
“An antique,” she said. “A typewriter.”
“Is it heavy?”
“That depends on your idea of heavy.”
Martin stretched as far as he could, but he could barely brush the typewriter’s bottom edge with his fingertips. He decided against dislodging it and walking it off the shelf inch by inch; his idea of heavy was an object capable of bashing his head in, and this one looked as if it could. He glanced around. The office chair rolled, so that was no good. He picked his way back through the mess and began moving boxes off the chair by the door.
“What are you doing?”
Martin gestured at the chair. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You’ll get those out of order,” William said. “I have a system.” And she frowned when Martin laughed. “Anyway, you don’t need that chair. Think! You have another way.”
Now it was Martin’s turn to frown. “I don’t need to think, and I don’t need another way. The chair’s my way, so if you don’t want me to move it, it looks like you and that typer thingy are out of luck.”
William nodded as if he’d just confirmed her suspicions about something. Then she went to the door.
“Sim,” she called, “would you come here for a minute and fetch me down the typewriter?”
The bent old bot hobbled to the doorway. His mild blue eyes brightened when he saw Martin. “Oh, hello, new student. Taking a little instruction, I see.”
William’s laugh annoyed Martin much more than it should have.
With some difficulty and adjustment of his gray robes to avoid toppling papers, Sim made his way across the room. Then he reached up one skinny arm. It stretched to an absurd length in a sudden movement that made Martin’s stomach flop over. Foot-long fingers fanned wide and plucked the cumbersome object from the shelf.
“Here you are,” Sim said, turning toward them with the typewriter in his arms. “Where would you like me to put it?”
“Just put it back,” William said. “I don’t need it today.”
The old man lifted it back into place with the same impossibly elastic ease. Then he turned to go. “Pay no mind. I’m just a bot,” he said sadly to Martin as he passed. “It doesn’t matter if I understand what’s going on.”
“So this was another one of your experiments,” Martin fumed when Sim was gone. “Look, if you wanna laugh at me, go ahead and laugh. You don’t need an excuse.”
“I’m not laughing at you,” William said. “I thought we might both learn something. When you couldn’t reach the typewriter, all you needed to do was ask your bot to take it down. Why didn’t you think of that?”
Martin swiveled in place. Chip stood behind him, up to his pasterns in paper stacks. When his dark eyes met Martin’s, his ears folded back in a friendly greeting, and his tail set up a confetti whirl.
“Stop it! Stop him!” William cried. “He’s messing up my system!”
“Oh, forget your system,” Martin said, ruffling Chip’s ears. “A dog’s gotta wag.”
“He doesn’t wag because he’s a dog,” William said. “He wags because you want him to. He’s a modified bot—a super-machine. His programming must be extensive. You’re keeping him from reaching his full potential by encouraging him to be a dog.”
Martin turned on her. “What is it with you people? Why do you keep harping on about him not being a dog? Let’s go, Chip. You’re messing up her system.”
William followed him out into the hall. “Maybe he’s an important machine,” she said earnestly. “A much more powerful bot.”
“He’s powerful like he is,” Martin said as he turned the corner. The sterile hallway stretched out before him, its floor tiles yellow-green and bilious. The sense of being back at the school sapped his spirits. Where was that cafeteria, anyway?
William persisted. “But he could be so much more!”
Another corner, and floor tiles that were blue with brown flecks. He was on the right track now. Down the hall, a door stood open, with white wheeled trestle tables beyond it. Martin spotted his knapsack with a feeling of relief. I can’t wait to get out of this place, he thought.
“Chip’s my dog,” he said. “Maybe that’s not good enough for you, but it’s good enough for me. If you think I’m gonna let you change him into some kind of monster battle bot, you’re out of your mind.”
“I don’t know if he’s supposed to be a battle machine,” William said. “We need to find out what he is.”
Chip gave a yelp and dashed past Martin. Martin turned to see what had scared the dog. William was holding a reset chip in her hand.
“No way!” Martin said, snatching the chip from her. “Nobody resets him. He hates it.”
William sighed. “You’ve anthropomorphized him.”
“Whatever.” Martin made his way over to the supplies and tossed the chip into his knapsack. “You had all afternoon to check him out while he was charging, so don’t think I’m gonna feel bad for you now.”
“But I didn’t,” William protested. “I was in class. Rudy told Sim not to release your bot to you, but when Sim heard Rudy praise you for being a credit to your designer, Sim decided he didn’t need to obey the release order anymore. Sim has design flaws. He doesn’t always do what he’s supposed to.”
Martin thought of the schizophrenic welcome the old bot had given him at the tunnel entrance. “Yeah, I kinda noticed,” he said.
“Rudy built him when he was ten,” William went on. “I would have done a better job. So I need to see your bot now.” She hesitated. “Please? It’s very important.”
Martin snorted. “Not to me.” He regretted this statement almost at once.
“Well, isn’t that wonderful!” William snapped. “We ask you for help, and do you want to help us? No, you’d rather coddle a machine!”
“I am too helping,” Martin said. “I’m going out there to find a new place for your school.”
William rolled her eyes. “Oh, right.”
Disappointment bubbled up in Martin’s throat, hot and thick. I knew it, he thought. I knew these geniuses didn’t need me around.
“I get it,” he said bitterly. “Theo doesn’t need me along on this trip. No wonder she won’t tell me anything. She’s just gonna look after the defective kid and give me something to do, and I bet you all think I’ll just slow her down. Well, tell her thanks, but I don’t need a babysitter. I’ll be fine on my own.” He grabbed his knapsack and headed for the door.
“What’s wrong with you?” William dema
nded, tagging after him down the hallway. “We’re all in danger here! Why do you have to make everything into a fight?”
Martin didn’t have a good comeback for that, so he ignored it. He pushed through the double doors that opened onto the valley and walked out into the twilight. William stopped at the doors. As far as Martin was concerned, she might as well have stopped a million miles behind him.
Loneliness swept through him. He didn’t know where to go or what to do. But Chip trotted beside him, ears pricked and tail wagging.
Great, we’re going somewhere, his dark eyes said. You know best. What’s the plan?
Martin thought about the people he loved. Cassie was happy with her school friends, and she had Rudy and Theo to look after her. His friends David and Matt probably whispered about how he had disappeared, but they didn’t need him. They had each other for company. He pictured Dad at his console with his freight bots, and Mom at the kitchen table. Mom, left all by herself. Of course! He had his plan.
“We’ll go rescue Mom,” Martin told Chip. “She hates it in that suburb, and she’d love it outside. Anyway, she shouldn’t be stuck with Dad anymore. She’d hate him if she knew what he did.”
“We’re in danger here every minute,” William yelled after him as he started off. “Every minute! You know that!”
Martin turned and gave her a sarcastic wave good-bye. “Yeah, well, you’ve made it pretty obvious that I’m too dumb to know much of anything. But you’re the smartest person on the planet. You’ll be just fine.”
CHAPTER TWO
Martin made good time on the trip home. “I’m getting better at hiking,” he told Chip. Besides, he knew exactly where he was going, and that certainty kept him walking late into the evening. Every day that passed was another day Mom spent trapped under the steel dome of Suburb HM1. Martin couldn’t wait to get her out of there.
He made only one detour. He had left his favorite sweatshirt in his school backpack at the camp he had shared with Hertz, the blue-eyed outdoorsman bot who had tried to adopt Martin’s quest as his own. When Martin saw the high, bare knob of Hertz’s hill rising in the distance, he paused to consult with his dog.
“It’s chilly in the mornings. I could really use that sweatshirt. It’s not that far, and we could take a shortcut through the fields back to the packet line.”
Chip crouched down and tucked his tail between his legs.
“Don’t be silly!” Martin scolded. “Hertz can’t get you anymore. He’s nothing but a big wad of silver Jell-O. The reset chip is keeping him that way, and it’s not like he can do anything about it.”
Martin headed to the high hill that marked the old camp, with his unhappy dog slinking along behind him. But when they got to the camp, Martin’s backpack wasn’t there. Neither was Hertz. They could plainly see the broken weeds where the big bot had flailed in agony, but his oblong of silver gel was gone.
Martin ran from the spot. When he couldn’t run anymore, he trotted. Then he ran again, as far and as fast as he could, sure that the killer bot was on his trail. Not until the next morning dawned, clear and tranquil, did he begin to feel safe again.
“We’re never going back there, Chip,” he said. “Never! Hertz can keep that whole place for himself.” And the thought of the strong, rugged bot striding alone through the empty hills sent a shiver down Martin’s spine.
By noon on the third day, Martin spotted the steel dome of HM1 by noon on the third day, a bright gleam of light on the top of a far off hill. As the afternoon wore on, it grew larger, and its dazzling glare intensified, until Martin couldn’t look straight at it anymore. When the sun sank, its light struck up a ruddy glow from the steel structure, as if Martin’s former home were on fire. And in the fading colors after sunset, Martin reached the cinder-block fence that surrounded the suburb’s dome.
“It’s so weird, Chip,” he said. “It’s all in there. Families, playgrounds, the store, the bowling alley, all stuck inside this big bubble. It’s like a package of army men or something, like a kit with a bunch of parts.”
The German shepherd didn’t appear to be paying attention to Martin. He kept looking back and swiveling his tall ears to take in the sounds of the coming night.
“Okay,” Martin said. “Dad’s gone home. The main thing is to check the loading bay for one of those transmitter things. If there isn’t one, we know an inspection isn’t going on, and that means nobody’s looking at us through all those little glass eyes. We’ll keep quiet in case they’re listening, though, and we’ll head to the factory. Bug hid out there, and nobody heard him for two whole years, so we’ll be fine for tonight.”
Chip licked Martin’s hand, glanced over his shoulder, and gave a breathy little whine.
“Would you quit worrying?” Martin said. “We’ll be back outside with Mom by this time tomorrow. Now, let’s get in fast before that security bot finds us here. I don’t want him setting off some alarm.”
Chip transformed into a rolling dog and carried Martin in on the packet rails. Obeying Martin’s instruction, he picked up quite a bit of speed. It was all Martin could do to hang on.
They whizzed through the long tunnel and through the dark washing room. The sprinklers exploded in a downpour behind them, but the big steel doors were already swinging open, and only a shower of drops caught them as they sped into the loading bay.
The big banks of fluorescent tubes were off for the night. Four small emergency lamps shed a golden glow at the edges of the gloomy space. The shadows of the freight bots were enormous as the bots rolled forward to greet them.
“No transmitter,” Martin whispered, pointing up into the gloom. “Chip, get these guys to back off, and let’s get out of here.”
They made their way to the hall with the raveled red rug and the door marked AUTHORIZED ENTRANCE ONLY. Then the German shepherd covered the keypad with his paw and broke its code. Martin pushed the door open, and they stepped into the nighttime world beneath the suburb, the unlit access space that held the tanks and conduits linked to the houses on the level above.
Chip lit his eyes, and their twin beams shone out into the massive basement, flickering across its concrete columns and cement floor. Booming, hissing industrial noises surrounded them as they walked. A tiny flame at the ceiling attracted their attention. A tool bot clung there, welding a metal pipe.
Fifteen minutes later, they reached the factory and hurried through its well-lit passages to the managers’ break room. The big television still blared, and Bug’s little colored disks still lay on the brown tabletop. The custodial bots appeared to be dusting around them.
“Poor Bug,” Martin said at the sight of the crazy man’s solitaire game. “He wasn’t hurting anybody with his jokes and wild ideas. Do you think he’s still alive?”
Chip made a circuit of the room, sniffing. Then he laid his ears back and leaned into Martin, who stroked his ruff.
“Yeah, I know. You can’t tell. I bet Bug was right. I bet they put him on the game shows. You know, it’s a pretty creepy government that kills you just for having a big mouth.”
Chew your way to health! babbled the television. It’s a vitamin and a gum.
Martin found the remote and changed the channel.
The break room cooker offered him the choice of hot pastrami on rye with a pickle on the side, pepperoni pizza and carrot sticks, or a jumbo Caesar salad. The fridge held nothing but low-calorie soda.
“I can’t believe Bug was stuck eating this stuff for two years,” Martin said. “And no candy, either. I don’t know how he stood it.”
Martin ordered up several pizza slices and flipped channels on the television. There was nothing on. He wandered around the factory, looking for a good place to sleep, but jaunty music played over the speakers, and a bot in the corridor startled him by turning on its vacuum. Martin returned to the break room.
At ten o’clock, the television picture winked out with an indefinable crackle that Martin had always associated with dying. He spread out his b
edroll in the corner and tried to turn off the break room light. It didn’t have a switch. None of the factory lights did. A custodial bot rolled in, wadded up his empty pizza trays, and began wiping down the counters.
“Mom and Dad are in bed now,” Martin said, grabbing his knapsack and stuffing the bedroll into it. “And we’re not getting any sleep down here till the cleaning brigade is done. I need to charge my game cartridges if I’m gonna take them with me this time. Now’s a perfect time to go grab them.”
They left through the factory lobby with its polished granite tiles, climbed the wide marble steps to the suburb level, and crept out into the park. Street lamps shone down on the asphalt path, but the rest of the park was in shadow. The empty space stretched away from them, devoid of sound or movement. Not a cricket chirped in the darkness.
Martin looked up. The night felt close, and the air seemed stale. The steel dome above him blocked out the stars. Nighttime in the suburb. He hated it here.
“Mom’s gonna love it outside,” he whispered to Chip. “I wish I could talk David and Matt into coming too, but I don’t wanna make their parents mad. Besides, Matt would try to bring his whole collection of celebrity batting helmets with him. We’d need a rolling dumpster just to haul them around.”
Orange streetlights illuminated the curving row of houses before him. Not forty feet from Martin stood his own house and his own front door. It looked so ordinary, it took his breath away.
Chip opened that door, and they sneaked into the front hall. A tiny night-light was on, and everything was quiet. Foraging by the light of the open fridge, Martin grabbed a strawberry-kiwi soda and a bag of barbecue puffs. Then he tiptoed down the hall to his room.
Mom had been in here, putting things away. Martin’s bed was made, and he could see the surface of his desk. But his faithful beanbag chair was still in a heap by the rug, and his box of game cartridges lay within easy reach. Martin shut the door and flipped on his plasma lamp.
The purple-and-green paisley shapes of the plasma lamp swirled around the darkened room, fat and slow on the walls, thin and hurried in the corners. They looked like clouds, he realized. They weren’t quite as good as clouds, but they were something that changed, anyway.