Klank tries to shake the last of the cow poop off his scoop. “OH, NOW YOU FIGURE THAT OUT.”
“Sorry, Klank.”
“E—I—E—I—O,” sighs Klank.
Mildred agrees with a sympathetic methane poot.
Mr. Chimp sits in his new chair, behind his new desk, in his new office.
He adjusts his tie.
He taps his shoes.
He checks the numbers on his ChimpEdison spreadsheet.
He types a quick e-mail to all ChimpEdison managers.
He orders dinner from the ChimpEdison cafeteria. His favorite—Wild Weed and Nut Salad, with Termites.
Mr. Chimp closes his laptop, leans back, and crosses his feet on his desk.
He looks out his corner-office windows at Midville spread out below him.
He is President Chimp.
He is a success.
Mr. Chimp hoots a small “ooook” that no one hears.
The golden evening sun lights the tops of the buildings and trees with a beautiful glow.
Mr. Chimp thinks, What a wonderful—OWWW! A sharp pinch cramps his left big toe. Mr. Chimp pulls off his shoe. He hops around his office, stomping the pain out of his toe.
Mr. Chimp puts his shoe back on, carefully ties it, and gets back to work.
He stacks his papers. He shelves his books.
Mr. Chimp opens an old file box. It is full of photos and newspaper clippings. Mr. Chimp sits on the edge of his desk. He had forgotten all about these. He leafs through:
GREAT-GRANDPA CHIMP IN HOLLYWOOD
GRANDPA CHIMP IN THE SPACE PROGRAM
GRANDMA CHIMP IN THE NEWS
MOM AND DAD CHIMP IN RESEARCH
Mr. Chimp quickly closes the box and shoves it on the shelf next to his copy of Beyond Good and Evil.
Mr. Chimp feels another pinch. But not in his shoe. In his animal heart.
Mr. Chimp feels a missing. A something not there. He shakes his head.
A rumble rattles the old factory windows.
Mr. Chimp looks up.
A line of dark storm clouds moving in from the west. Trees swaying. The distant forest of the preserve. Trees. Trees. Trees . . .
Mr. Chimp thinks for a second. Or actually—doesn’t think. He acts.
Mr. Chimp bolts out of his office, hop-swing-slides down the back stairs. He jumps on his motorcycle and races to the Midville preserve.
Streets, sidewalks, people blur.
Mr. Chimp jumps off his motorcycle and knuckle-runs through the woods like the devil is chasing him. Bushes thrash, dust whirls in the quickening winds of the approaching storm.
Mr. Chimp kicks off his shoes. He leaps to grab his favorite tree. He scrambles up the trunk, swinging from branch to branch, hand over hand, until he lands with a thump in the woven-branch center of his most favorite tree-house nest.
The towering oak sways majestically. Clouds race overhead.
Mr. Chimp pulls off his tie.
Mr. Chimp rips off his vest.
Mr. Chimp raises his arms and yells the most confused, happy, sad, wild OOOOOOOOK you have ever heard.
T. Edison hunches over the charts on his desk.
He studies the latest news on EdisonChimp production.
He checks the progress of EdisonChimp inventions.
Double-checks the numbers on EdisonChimp profits.
T. Edison jumps up on his desk. He raises his arms and squeaks the weirdest “Yesssssss!” yell you have ever heard.
And then he gives his awkward version of a pro-athlete fist pump.
Which makes the whole scene all that much creepier.
T. Edison stands on top of his desk, hands on hips.
He is a success.
No one can take that from him.
T. Edison looks out his corner-office windows at all of Midville spread out below him, and happily mutters, “Idiots.”
T. Edison notices that his portrait is hanging a bit crooked.
He jumps down from his desk and straightens it, admires it.
A rumble rattles the old factory windows.
T. Edison looks up.
He spots a small black ant on the windowsill outside.
“Now, how did you get all the way up here, little ant?”
T. Edison opens the window.
“Twelve stories high? That is like miles for you.”
T. Edison reaches down, bends a stubby finger close to the ant, and flicks him off the ledge. He watches the ant spin, tumble, fall away to nothing. Then he stalks over to his phone, jabs a button, and barks into it, “Miss Poz! We have an ant problem! Call the exterminator! What? Yes—now!”
Thunder from the moving storm rumbles closer, louder.
A gust of wind blows in the open window and blasts through T. Edison’s office in a mini-tornado.
T. Edison slams his window shut.
But not before the wind has scattered charts, papers, pictures, and a stack of plastic bags with a very distinct blue logo.
“What a mess.”
Frank, Watson, and Grampa Al sit out back at the picnic table.
“Oh no it’s not,” says Grampa Al, still messing around with his rope and knots. “It’s a sheepshank. Simple. . . and perfectly designed to take up slack.”
Frank, slumped over, holds his head in both hands. “No, I mean this whole giant mess of Earth being wrecked, and none of my inventions helping at all.”
Grampa Al drops his knot, and serves Frank an ear of fresh-roasted sweet corn.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Einstein. Remember, our other favorite Einstein said, ‘A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.’ And besides—this corn is delicious!”
Watson helps himself to more tomatoes, cucumbers, and baby lettuce. “No kidding. Nothing like fresh from the garden. Fresh from the earth.”
The light of the setting sun paints the fields and trees in a golden light.
But Frank is still crushed. He picks up his fork and pushes Grampa Al’s famous potato salad around on his plate.
“How did we go so wrong? Nothing worked. And we aren’t any closer to saving the preserve. Or our planet.”
Grampa Al finishes off one more ear of corn, then starts on his cherry pie.
“Maybe you didn’t go so wrong. Maybe the world has to catch up with you. Some of the best scientific breakthroughs were called crazy when they first came out.”
Frank rests his chin on one hand and frowns.
Watson eyes Frank’s untouched cherry pie. He pulls his latest simple invention out of his pocket—the telescoping fork.
Grampa waves his hands in the air and continues. “Like the idea that Earth is round! Or the hypothesis that all the planets revolve around the sun! Or that the continents move.”
Watson extends the antenna soldered onto the fork handle. He sneaks it across the picnic table and forks a piece of Frank’s pie.
Frank doesn’t even notice.
Watson inhales the bite of pie, and realizes Frank is really out of it.
The wind picks up, ruffling the grasses and the tablecloth.
“Or one of my favorites . . .”
A small black ant drops on the table. Grampa Al notices. He keeps talking, but reaches down with one finger and gives the ant a crumb of pie.
“. . . that scientists are still debating. About the whole Earth. Called the Gaia theory.”
The ant picks up the piece of piecrust that’s almost the same size as he is, and walks off.
Frank looks up, still feeling terrible, but always interested.
“It’s the idea that all living things on Earth, and Earth itself, are one giant connected SUPERorganism. That regulates itself.”
Thunder rumbles. A front of dark clouds moves in from the west.
Watson licks his fork clean of every last bit of sweet cherry pie. “Whaaaaat? So plants and animals and ants and people and weather and everything are all one thing?”
Grampa Al nods. “Abso-toot-ly.”
Fra
nk perks up a bit. “But what do you mean: it ‘regulates itself’?”
Grampa Al picks up another piece of his rope and starts tying another knot as he explains. “The system of living and nonliving things maintains the conditions to support life. Like raising and lowering its temperature, its oxygen level. . .”
Frank’s mind expands with this Gaia thought. “So if Earth was a person, we humans would be like the worst cold virus.”
Grampa Al laughs. “I never thought of it that way . . . but yes!”
Thunder rumbles louder now.
Watson, the weather geek, eyeballs the clouds and identifies them. “Cumulonimbus. Serious storm clouds.”
The wind rises.
The trees shake.
Grampa Al finishes his knot and holds it up for inspection. Monkey’s Fist. Designed to make the end of a rope easier to throw. Simple. Perfect. He looks up at the approaching clouds. “This is looking like it might be a real doozy. Let’s get inside and batten down the hatches.”
Grampa Al pockets his rope and knots and feels Frank’s forehead.
“And let’s get you some R and R. You are feeling fever hot.”
The advancing clouds blot out the last of the sun.
A sizzling bolt of lightning unleashes a wicked crack smash of thunder.
The first few drops of rain splatter the table.
The guys grab plates and utensils and run for the farmhouse as the storm hits hard.
The high-precipitation supercell thunderstorm, towering ten miles high and spreading twenty miles across, explodes over Midville County with unbelievable force.
Warm air from the east rises into a cloud, carrying moisture up.
Cool air from the west pushes down, condensing moisture into water droplets.
The water droplets fall and smash together to form larger and heavier raindrops.
The falling rain drags the surrounding air with it, creating strong downdraft winds.
Lightning flashes. Thunder cracks. An old dead maple tree catches fire. The nearby field erupts in a wall of wildfire.
The ferocious downdraft wind knocks over a whole stand of fifty-year-old maple trees. Seventy-five-mile-per-hour winds flip a row of camping trailers and flatten a row of rickety wooden buildings.
The sudden deluge of rain fills the stream to overflowing. A muddy torrent of sticks, mud, boulders, and water smashes down bridges, swallows up homes. A field of corn, a row of parked cars, the entire side of a hill are all washed away in a flash flood.
The storm moves slowly from west to east—a collision of hot and cool, low-pressure and high-pressure air.
But also an angry giant, throwing fire bolts, smashing with wind, stomping with water all in its path.
Rain hammers the metal roof.
A blue-white flash of lightning illuminates Klink and Klank, sitting side by side in the driest spot of the old barn—the horse stalls.
Klank stretches out a beat-up ax-handle leg.
Klink flexes his squeaky barn-door-hinge elbow, closes his webcam eye.
Freight-train-loud wind roars through the cracks in the barn walls.
A SMAAAAASH CRAAAACK! peal of thunder rocks the whole world.
Klank butt-jumps sideways, closer to Klink.
“Klink,” says Klank.
Klink opens his eye. “What?”
“Are you ever afraid?”
Klink pretends to think about this for three seconds, because he knows this makes Klank feel better. “No. Because we are robots. We are never afraid. Or mad. Or sad.”
Klank nods his dented vegetable-strainer head. “Yeah. That is what I thought”
The storm wind blasts open the hayloft shutter with a mad BAAAAAM!
“YIIIIIKES!” Klank wraps Klink in both his irrigation-hose arms.
Klink hands Klank his stuffed teddy bear.
Klank unwraps his arms, strokes the soft fur, and rocks back and forth.
“Now power down, and stop worrying,” says Klink.
“OK,” says Klank. He pats his teddy bear, rocking it in his arms.
The storm howls and rages and shakes the whole barn. Lightning flashes. Thunder crashes.
Klank tries to power down and stop worrying.
But he can’t stop the thinking and the feeling . . . that this is the end of the world.
“Klink?”
Klink does not open his eye. “I am not answering you.”
“You just did.”
WHOOOOOOOOOOOO! The wind howls and blows through the stalls.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake. What?”
Klank pats his teddy bear more slowly. “Why are we here?”
This time Klink doesn’t wait three seconds. He instantly answers, “Because this is both the driest spot in the barn to protect our electronics . . . and it is closest to the power outlet.”
The rain slows, then hammers even harder on the creaking roof.
Klank, now more upset, pets his teddy bear faster. Harder.
“Noooo. I mean why are we here? In this world?” He pats his teddy bear. “What are we doing? What is our dream?”
Klink blinks. For the first time in his robot life, he doesn’t have an answer.
“I do not think this is a good question for a robot to answer, It can only lead to more questions. That cannot be answered.”
A blast of downdraft air suddenly blows open the barn window. Lightning explodes. Thunder cracks. The rain splashes in.
Klank jumps . . . and rips the head of his teddy bear right off.
Klink closes and bolts the window against the storm.
He wheels back to Klank, standing frozen-still in the stall.
Klink knows what he has to do.
He sits Klank down gently.
And in the middle of the crashing storm howling all around them, he reaches behind Klank’s head, and powers him. . . OFF.
Rain hammers the metal roof.
Crashing thunder rattles the night.
Fierce winds scream like mad, wild animals and tear at the farmhouse.
Frank Einstein, fever hot, doesn’t hear any of it.
Frank Einstein, fever hot, sleeps and worries and dreams.
A vast cloud of deep-space gas spins, spirals, forms a solid orb.
A planet.
Deep blue water covers most of the planet. Lush green jungles and forests cover the land. A layer of gases wraps and cushions the spinning globe.
Mountains rise and fall and split.
Huge pieces of land, continents, driven by currents deep below the planet’s surface, drift apart.
The oceans teem with crazy fish life.
Insects, birds, and animals swarm the land.
A field. A garden.
An ear of corn pops out of the rich black soil. He shakes the dirt out of his corn-silk hair and dances a little jig.
“Ahhhhhh. . . earth, water, sun, and air!”
Lady Tomato drops off a vine and joins Mr. Corn.
“Juuuust right.”
“Thanks, Gaia!”
Zoom out into space.
Earth nods, and gives a wink.
A tiny black speck appears on the planet.
It quickly turns to more specks, a stain, a rash.
The dark rash spreads across the land, clouds the air, fouls the oceans.
Earth hacks and coughs.
Earth spins, hot and feverish.
Earth wobbles.
A piece of rope snakes through outer space. It loops itself into a perfect lark’s head knot around Earth. The knot tightens. Earth sneezes.
The black rash flies off into space.
“Simple,” says Watson from somewhere, everywhere. “Simple.”
Earth, rid of its bug, sighs.
Dreaming, Frank zooms in on the teeny specks that made the rash.
A virus?
A worm?
No, the specks are humans.
Every one of the millions—human.
Dreaming Frank looks closer.
And
every one of the humans has the face of. . . Frank Einstein.
Frank sits bolt upright in bed.
Rain hammers on the farmhouse roof.
Thunder crashes. The winds still howl.
Frank scratches his head
“This gives me an idea. . .”
Frank Einstein jumps out of bed, runs down to the kitchen, and finds what he is looking for—a coil of rope.
Frank Einstein, still in his pajamas, bends over the kitchen table.
With the thunderstorm crashing around him, he works on his new invention with only his hands, and one idea.
No robots.
No complicated equations.
No tricky mechanics.
No detailed instruction.
Just the rope, a few knots,
. . . and one blazingly simple idea.
Frank works.
The storm blows itself out.
Morning.
First faint light of dawn.
An absolutely clear blue sky.
Birdsong.
Frank holds up his invention.
The most amazing, beautiful, and ultimate Bio-Action Gizmo to save the planet.
But now, how to activate the invention?
Frank sits. Frank scratches his head. Frank thinks.
Frank knows what they have to do.
He wakes up Watson.
They run to the barn to get Klink and Klank . . . and to save the world.
Sunrise in the Midville preserve.
A red-winged blackbird sings.
One bright, puffy white cloud sails across the intensely blue sky.
A gentle morning breeze, smelling of fresh pine, waves the trees.
But the Midville preserve looks like the site of a massive battle:
Full-grown trees, splintered and snapped in half.
Gigantic boulders smashed into the hillside.
Scars of bare earth, exposed by landslides along the stream.