15 Franny Ketches Up to the Robot

CHAPTER FIFTEEN FRANNY KETCHES UP TO THE ROBOT Franny slid quietly into the library. She knew the robot was in there somewhere.

She could have overlooked the graffiti. Franny had made inaccurate speculations about butts before. Butts are an imprecise science; errors occur. And she might even have been able to find some merit in giant spit wads. She had to admit that they had a sort of charm to them, like a fresh snowfall—a fresh snowfall that smelled like the inside of somebody's mouth. But Franny loved books. She loved everything about them. Most of what Franny knew she had learned from books. A creature this stupid could be in the library for only one reason: to destroy books. And an act that stupid was not going to be tolerated. She moved silently and cautiously. And then she heard it: the sad, sick sound of a page slowly being torn from a book. She crept through the aisles.

She rounded a corner and saw the robot there, happily destroying books. It was clear to Franny that this mechanical imbecile would not stop until it had destroyed all of them. As she studied the horrible creation, she suddenly felt confident that defeating this robot was going to be quite easy. In fact, she felt very confident. Evidently Erin, Lawrence, and Phil had installed an off switch right in the middle of the robot's chest.

All Franny had to do was quietly walk up to it, totally unseen, and flip the switch. "Actually, that was pretty clever of them," Franny whispered, "to install an off switch in such a convenient location." And if Franny had thought it through for just a split second longer, she would have realized that Erin, Phil, and Lawrence were not qualified to come up with something as clever as a chest-mounted off switch that would actually work.

But she hadn't thought it through, and she did flip the switch, which was not wired to turn off the robot, of course, but was wired to squirt a huge gush of ketchup from its newly installed ketchup nozzle.

The books! Franny leapt through the air and dove in front of a shelf full of books, heroically protecting them from the sloppy condiment onslaught but at the same time taking the full impact of the ketchup herself, thus rendering herself totally visible to the robot.