Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (3 page)

“Yes, I know. That's just it,” said the Professor. “Well, Danny?”

“Okay, Professor Bullfinch,” said Danny soberly. “I promise.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Homework Machine Is Born

Irene's father, Dr. Alvin Miller, angrily twisted the dial of his television set.

“Drat this blasted thing!” he exclaimed. “This is the fourth day in a row the picture has begun to skip, right in the middle of a program I wanted to see.”

Mrs. Miller, a small, cheerful-looking woman with round blue eyes, and brown hair just like Irene's, said gently, “Perhaps it's interference from somewhere in the neighborhood.”

“I've checked every house around,” Dr. Miller snapped. “I thought of Professor Bullfinch's laboratory at once, but the Professor has been away for the past three days. And there's nothing there except his computer, which wouldn't disturb the TV anyway.”

“Well, then,” said Mrs. Miller, reasonably, “why don't you just fix it, instead of complaining?

“I can't. I don't know how to.”

“I don't understand it,” said his wife. “You can handle all the parts of one of those enormous telescopes of yours, but you can't fix a TV set.”

“It's hardly the same thing, for heaven's sake!”

“Please, dear.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Just—fiddle with the dials or something, dear, the way you do in the Observatory, and maybe it will clear up.” And Mrs. Miller, who, like every wife and mother, could do at least three different things at the same time, went back to reading her book and sewing buttons on a shirt.

The cause of the trouble was closer than they thought. Upstairs, in her bedroom, Irene bent over her short-wave radio, completely unaware that she was interrupting her father's television program with her amateur broadcast.

“W9TGM,” she said. “W9TGM. This is W9XAG. Come in.”

She snapped a switch, and Danny's voice crackled in her earphones. “W9XAG. This is W9TGM.”

“Hi, Danny.”

“H'lo, Irene. What's up?”

“I've been having some trouble with that grammar homework. Can you help me?”

“Sure, Irene. Wait just a minute.”

She could hear an odd crunching noise and Danny saying, “Shut up a minute.” Then he said, “Go ahead. What's the question?”

“What's a predicate noun?”

“Huh? A what?”

“A predicate noun. What is it?”

“I can't get what you're saying. Joe's eating an apple. And there's some interference.”

“What did you say?”

“I said Joe's eating an apple. He's chewing awfully loudly.”

Irene took off her earphones in exasperation. She went to the bedroom window and opened it. Leaning out, she yelled across the driveway, “Danny! I said, WHAT'S A PREDICATE NOUN?”

Dan stuck his head out his own bedroom window and said, “I'm not deaf. You don't have to yell.”

“Well, what is a predicate noun?”

“Hmm. Well, a predicate noun is—it's sort of a noun like a preposition. No, I guess it's more like a—well, a—” He rubbed his nose thoughtfully. “I guess I don't know what it is,” he confessed, at last.

“Oh, gosh. Maybe Joe knows. Ask him,”

Danny popped inside, and reappeared in a moment with a disgusted look. “He says a predicate noun is a noun from Predicate, North Carolina.”

Then, suddenly, he snapped his fingers. “Hey! I've got a good idea,” he called. “Come on over. We'll ask Minny.”

“Minny? Who's Minny—your mother?”

“Miniac. The computer.”

“Oh, that's right. It would know, wouldn't it?”

She snapped off her short-wave set (but by this time her father had given up trying to get his program and was deep in the pages of a science-fiction magazine) and ran next door to Danny's house.

Danny and Joe met her and ushered her in through the laboratory door. Dan snapped on the lights and went to the silent machine. He turned on the power, waited until the ready light went on, indicating that the machine was warmed up, and then pressed a key that cleared the memory banks and prepared the computer for action.

“All set,” he said. “Now, let's see. We first have to figure out exactly how to ask the question so we'll get the right answer. And then we have to give the machine the address of the information.”

“The address? You mean where it lives?” Joe asked.

“Yes, in a way. We have to tell it just where to look in its memory for the information we want. The address is a number in code for one of the 50,000 pieces of information the machine can hold at any one time.”

Joe gave a long whistle. Danny thought for a moment and consulted a list of figures. Then, turning to the microphone, he said, “This a question on English grammar. 11875. Give me the definition of the grammatical term, ‘A predicate noun,' with one example. Reply by typing out (1) definition, and (2) example.”

He then pushed a blue key labeled START.

There was a humming sound. Sparks of light winked along the front panel of the console. A green light flashed, and the typewriter clattered to life.

It wrote: “Predicate noun: (1) The noun or nouns in a sentence which express what is said of the subject of the sentence. (2) You are a fool.”

“Hey!” spluttered Joe. “Watch your language.”

“It's not talking to you, Joe,” Irene giggled. “That was just the example.”

“Hmf! Well, I wish it would choose better examples.”

Danny pulled the paper from the typewriter. “Okay, Irene,” he said. “There's the answer to your problem.”

Irene took the paper, while Danny snapped down several switches. He was just about to turn the power off, when suddenly he stopped, frozen, his hand in mid-air.

“Wait a minute,” he said, half to himself.

Irene looked at him. She had known Dan for only a short time, but she was already familiar with the wild light that shone in his eyes, and the strange, thoughtful grin that spread over his freckled face whenever he had a new idea.

“Danny!” she said warningly.

“Mm?”

“You've got one of your crazy ideas, haven't you?”

“Well… it's not so crazy.”

“Oh, help,” said Joe. “The last time he said that, we built an automobile out of a power lawn mower.”

“It worked, didn't it?” said Danny.

“Sure. And we wrecked Mrs. Hanson's flower beds, and busted Jimmy Nelson's bike, and I almost got concussion—”

“Well, this is nothing like that,” Danny said.

Irene said firmly, “Danny. You promised Professor Bullfinch that before you jumped into anything you'd count to a million by thousands.”

“Oh, yes. That's right.”

“Start counting, boy,” said Joe.

Danny looked stumped for a moment. Then he said, “Okay. If you're both going to pick on me, I'll do it.” And with a sly smile, he added, “Counting to a million that way is the same as adding a thousand each time. And multiplying is just adding a number to itself a certain number of times. Right? Okay, so I'll count to a million by thousands by multiplying. One thousand times itself equals one million. There. I counted to a million by thousands.”

Irene frowned. “I think,” she said, “that that isn't exactly what the Professor had in mind.”

Danny beckoned to her and Joe. “Listen,” he said, lowering his voice. “Never mind that. This is a really great idea. Why can't we use Minny as a homework machine?”

“What?” Irene cried.

“A homework machine?” said Joe. “What's that?”

“Simple. Minny can answer problems in grammar like that one we just asked. She can answer any kind of arithmetic problem. She can give information, like for social studies. I'll bet, if we set her up properly, she could even write simple compositions. Let's use her to do… He caught himself and glanced at Irene. “I mean, to help us with our homework, the way she just helped you.”

Irene's eyebrows slowly rose. She and Joe looked at each other. Then she said to Danny, “Do you think it would work?”

“Why not? We can try it.”

“All right. I'm game,” Irene whispered.

“Me too,” said Joe, in a whisper. Then he said, “Hey, Dan. Why are we all whispering?”

Danny glanced round. “I don't want Minny to hear us,” he exclaimed. “After all, maybe she hates homework as much as we do!”

CHAPTER SIX

“Who Cares?”

Miss Arnold's class had grown in the past two years, as new families moved into the town and sent their children to school. Dan had heard her tell the principal that she wished she could give more time and attention to each student, but that was no longer possible. There were thirty-seven boys and girls now, where there had once been twenty, and sometimes Miss Arnold couldn't help feeling that there were too many pupils in the world—at any rate, in her part of it.

She said, with a sigh, “So you see, writing five-tenths this way—.5—is just the same as writing it 5/10. And five-tenths is the same as one-half. Why is that, George?”

George Bessel, a plump, tow-headed boy whose nickname was Fatso, got reluctantly to his feet. At once, two or three girls began giggling, and George glanced angrily at them.

“Uh—” he said.

“Do you know, George?” Miss Arnold asked, gently.

He fidgeted, in despair. “I used to know,” he said. “But I guess I forgot.”

“Very well. You may sit down.”

Sue Parker was waving her hand urgently. She always waved her hand whenever anyone couldn't answer a question.

Before Miss Arnold could call on her, however, a small white object, sailing down one of the aisles just above the floor, caught the teacher's eye. She strode forward and picked it up just as it landed next to Irene Miller's desk. It was a bit of paper, folded into a glider.

“Who threw this?” she demanded.

A dead silence fell upon the class.

Then Eddie Philips said, “Danny Dunn threw it, Miss Arnold. It's a note.”

Danny's face was flaming. Ellen Tresselt, who sat behind him, whispered to her neighbor, Victoria Williams, “I know who it was for, too.”

“Who doesn't?” Victoria whispered back.

A wave of tittering went through the class.

“A note? Is that true, Dan?” Miss Arnold asked.

Danny nodded. He had banked on Miss Arnold not noticing the little glider because of Sue Parker's waving hand. He thought to himself, “Next time I'll make it out of dark paper, for camouflage.” Aloud, he said, “Yes'm.”

Miss Arnold crumpled the glider in her hand. “I'm not going to read this, Danny,” she said, “and I'm not even going to ask who it was for.”

She glanced down at Irene, who was staring studiously at the top of her desk, pretending not to be listening. Like all good teachers, Miss Arnold knew more about her pupils than they thought she did.

“However,” she went on, “I must say I'm surprised at you, Danny. School will be over in ten minutes, and anything you have to say to anyone could certainly wait until then. Or, on the other hand, there are the United States mails. I'd prefer not to have my students flying their letters by air mail during class.”

She walked back to her desk and turned to face the pupils. “Particularly during a period in which so many of you seem to be doing so poorly,” she went on. “Will you all write down the homework assignment for tomorrow, please?”

A groan went through the class. Miss Arnold tightened her lips.

“There's no occasion for all this weeping and wailing, either,” she said. “In the first place, you all know that the class has grown a good deal in the last couple of years. That means I can't work with each one of you as much as I used to. It means high school will be overcrowded, too. It also means that there will be more competition for college admissions. It's not easy to get into college these days.”

She looked at them and sighed. “I want each of you to have a good chance at the best kind of education,” she continued. “People are finding out more and more about the earth—about science, and about each other. That means there's more and more for you to learn. Above all, you have to know how to study these new things. There's no substitute for homework as a way of learning how to study. So I suggest that instead of complaining you all buckle down and work.”

She flipped open the arithmetic book and said, “You will all do problems one through twenty, on pages 57 and 58.”

There was another heartfelt groan from everyone but Danny, Irene, and Joe. Miss Arnold turned to the blackboard and firmly wrote down the assignment.

While her back was turned, Irene glanced at Danny. He winked at her. Soundlessly he shaped the words “Who cares?” with his lips.

He looked over at Joe, who sat two rows away, and did the same thing. Joe nodded and voicelessly said, “Minny.”

Eddie Philips, secretly watching the three of them, scowled. He had told Miss Arnold about the glider because he was jealous and hoped to get Dan into trouble. Now, seeing their winks and smiles, he felt anger churning around in him like a stomach-ache.

“I wonder why they're grinning at each other like that,” he muttered to George Bessel, who sat in front of him. “You'd almost think they didn't mind all that homework. I'll bet Danny has something up his sleeve.”

He narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Maybe,” he added, “just maybe I'll follow him after school and keep an eye on him. I'll get that smart aleck yet. Wait and see.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Homework Paradise

Danny closed his copy of The Study of Science with a sigh, and blinked at Joe and Irene. They were all seated at the console of Miniac, in Professor Bullfinch's laboratory. It was three days later.

“That's the last book,” Danny said. “Now Minny knows everything in all our school books.”