Chapter 5:

Meet Ralph

Mr. Mac came running in. “Maya! Are you okay?!” He had his fists up, ready to defeat any closet monsters that may have come after me.

I pointed at the face. “It’s a—it’s . . .” The face stared back at me silently, and I realized I didn’t actually know what it was. Mr. Mac followed the direction of my finger, and when he saw what was looking at us, the worry melted off his face, and he burst out laughing.

“Oh, Maya! I admit it. When I asked you to clean the closet, I thought you might find him in here. But I sure didn’t mean to scare you. And once you got going, I completely forgot about him.” Now he was laughing so hard that tears were coming down his cheeks.

“About who?!” I didn’t see anything funny about this.

Mr. Mac walked around to the back of the shelf, kicking empty boxes to the side. Behind the shelf was a tricycle and a scooter and a big trash bag labeled WINTER COATS. He moved those aside, and I followed in the path he made. Finally, we were staring right at the . . . thing.

Mr. Mac bowed low to the ground and swept his arm out to the side formally. “Miss Patricia Maya Robinson, please allow me the pleasure of introducing you to . . .” He cleared his throat dramatically. “Ralph.”

I stared. I squinted. At first, it was hard for me to understand exactly what I was looking at. I had never seen anything like it.

The first thing I could make out was a large metal bucket turned upside down, with two enormous round shiny circles where eyes would be. This was the “face” I had seen—not a face at all. Or at least, not a human face. The shiny eye circles were rimmed with tiny lights, and beneath them was a thin LED panel that stretched across the front of the bucket to make a wide mouth. I gasped. This was the face of a—

“A robot,” said Mr. Mac, as though he could read my mind. He laughed. It wasn’t the kind of laugh you make when something is funny. It was the kind of laugh that comes out when you feel pure joy in your heart. “Ralph is a robot.”

Was he ever.

I took a step back to get a better look. Beneath the metal bucket head that made him look kind of ridiculous, Ralph was sort of fancy. He had a barrel-shaped body. On the front of him was a panel with some gauges and buttons and meters of different colors. His metal arms hung at his sides, and when I peered at them closely, I could see that they had a million tiny hinges that would allow them to bend and stretch flexibly. At the end of each was a three-fingered hand. I held out my own index finger, middle finger, and thumb, slowly opening and closing them to imitate his three-fingered grip. Ralph’s legs emerged from the bottom of his robot belly. I knelt down to get a closer look.

“Amazing,” I murmured. Ralph had feet, sort of, but they were made of treads. The kind of treads you see on a tank—a rugged surface that could move across the ground even if it was bumpy or rough. It looked so familiar. . . .

I ran back to where I had been working, grabbed the National Geographic I had put aside, and flipped to a page with a close-up of one of the Mars rovers. You could see that the wheels were covered with thick, durable tire treads, allowing the rover to travel effortlessly across the surface of the Red Planet. I looked back at Ralph’s feet. They were covered with treads. His legs were hinged at the ankles and knees, so it seemed he could go up or down a flight of stairs, but I imagined that the treads would allow him to move quickly across a flat or bumpy surface.

“This is genius,” I said. “Really genius.” I turned to Mr. Mac. “Who . . . Who made this?” He looked very seriously back at me and didn’t answer right away. I stood up and walked around behind Ralph to see if he had some brand name stamped on him, a model number, some kind of label or something. I burst out laughing. The only thing on Ralph’s back was his name, scrawled by hand in wide letters with permanent marker. RALPH. He really was a hodgepodge, this robot—a fancy high-tech body with a goofy metal bucket for a head. Feet that had clearly been designed by a brilliant mind, but with his name written in the same marker I would use to label any old school project. I looked back at Mr. Mac, awaiting an answer. He cleared his throat.

“Well . . . Ralph was built by . . . my son, Christopher. Do you remember I told you he went off to California to go to school? Well, the school he went to was Stanford University.”

“I’ve heard of Stanford! They have some of the world’s best scientists.” I was trying to play it cool. When I said I had heard of Stanford, what I meant was I was kind of obsessed with the place. And MIT, and Georgia Tech. Any famous university with a big robotics lab. When I started getting into science, Auntie Lou had shown me some pictures of the laboratories and the things that went on there. It was a world of telescopes, lasers, incredible robots, experiments—basically, my dream world. Auntie Lou encouraged me by taking me to the library and getting me kits and books and videos on my birthday. In so many of them, Stanford was mentioned. Articles about scientists working on this or that extraordinary thing that seemed straight out of a sci-fi movie. If Christopher had gone to that university, he must really be about his business. “Did he build Ralph for a school project?”

“No, not exactly,” said Mr. Mac. “Ralph was a hobby, you know? A fun personal challenge. Christopher worked at a robotics lab where he was always messing with fancy gadgets and doing complicated experiments. But he used to come home on school breaks, and he would help me out here in the store. He wanted to keep his mind sharp and give himself something challenging to do, so he started building Ralph on the side when business was slow. It was great for me, too, because I got to watch him, and I was able to see the incredible things my boy had been learning out there at that university. I was so proud.”

I circled Ralph and looked again at his name. “Does RALPH stand for something? Like, um . . . Robotic . . . Assistance . . . um . . . Laser . . .”

Mr. Mac laughed. “Nope. Just Ralph. You see, Christopher was kind of lonely sometimes as a kid. He had a tough time making friends. So as an adult, he envisioned a robot that could be his buddy. A loyal friend.” My stomach jumped when Mr. Mac said that. I could definitely relate.

“And when he was young, he had loved the book The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary.”

I nodded. “I know that book! I read it last year. And the mouse in the book is named Ralph!”

“Exactly.”

“Wow.” Ralph was really spectacular. Except for one small detail I couldn’t figure out.

“Mr. Mac, how do you turn him on?”

Mr. Mac ran his finger over Ralph’s name, letter by letter. “That, Maya my dear, is something I’m afraid I don’t know. I don’t even know if Christopher ever finished building him. I never actually saw Ralph in action. Christopher was always tinkering and poking around, adding new features, adjusting this, that, or the other. I’m not even completely sure he works.”

Hm. I stood closer to Ralph and peered right into his shiny eyes. He was about six inches taller than me. I knocked on his chest and heard a hollow metal clang. “Hello? Anyone in there?”

When I knocked, his head shifted forward slightly, in a way that reminded me of someone falling asleep on a train. A tiny notebook slid down from where it must have been sitting on top of Ralph’s head, and hit me on mine. “Ouch!” I picked it up from the floor and blew the dust from the cover.

“That’s Christopher’s notebook!” exclaimed Mr. Mac. “That’s where he used to make his plans and drawings and notes about how Ralph was constructed.” He reached out, and I handed him the notebook. He began flipping through the pages, shaking his head in astonishment. “This boy. My boy.” He fell silent.

Suddenly, a piercing beep broke the silence. It was the phone alarm, letting us know that it was time for me to go home or I would be late for dinner and get in trouble. Mr. Mac looked up, startled by the noise, his daydreaming moment with the notebook suddenly broken. Then he looked at me very carefully. He was thinking.

“Maya,” he said. “You are a brilliant girl. You always have been. And you have always loved science and technology. Would you . . . Would you be interested in taking Ralph home with you?”

You know what? I’ve never said yes to something so fast in my life.