Jimmy woke up to find Grandpa standing next to his bed. It was barely light outside.
“What time is it?” mumbled Jimmy.
“Six o’clock,” said Grandpa cheerily.
“Six o’clock!” grumbled Jimmy. “Six o’clock in the morning? What’s going on?”
Grandpa smiled. His eyes were red, his face was pale and his usually wild white hair sat flat on his head. But his moustache was bobbing up and down excitedly. “Come with me,” he whispered.
Still in his pyjamas, Jimmy followed Grandpa downstairs, through the kitchen, out to the garden and over to the shed. With every step, he felt more nervous. He could feel the goose bumps on his arms, and a shiver ran down his spine as Grandpa reached for the door handle.
As he stepped through from the natural light of the morning sun to the fluorescent glow of Grandpa’s workshop, his vision blurred for a second. But as his eyes grew used to the brightness, he saw a huge lumpy plastic sheet with something big underneath it standing in the middle of the shed.
“Jimmy,” said Grandpa proudly, “I’d like you to meet Cabbie.” With a flick of his moustache and a flash of his eyes, Grandpa tugged the plastic sheet off Jimmy’s new robot racer.
Jimmy stared at it.
‘New’ wasn’t really the right word. For a while, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. It appeared to be Grandpa’s taxi, but with dull grey, metal patches welded onto it. The longer Jimmy stared, the worse it got. The front of the taxi looked like someone had hit it two or three hundred times with a hammer. The roof of the taxi appeared to have three upside-down dustbin lids bolted to it. And where the back doors used to be, on either side was a tangle of pipes and wires and tubes.
“What do you think?” asked Grandpa excitedly.
Jimmy tried to think. He looked at the car. He looked at Grandpa. He looked at the car again.
I can’t go outside in that! he thought, his heart sinking. I’ll be laughed out of Smedingham when it breaks down after twenty metres.
He thought about sitting next to Horace Pelly on the start line with all the other children from school laughing at him. The image of Horace braying like an over-excited donkey made him shudder. He turned back to Grandpa, not quite sure what to say.
“I, er—” Jimmy began.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” said Grandpa, beaming. “Introduce yourself.”
Jimmy looked sideways at Grandpa and wondered what he was talking about. For a second he thought that all those long hours locked away may have made Grandpa imagine things.
“Say hello to Cabbie!” Grandpa insisted, pointing at his creation. “He’s fully programmed with an intelligence-compiling processor, so the more you talk to him, the more he learns.”
“Has it got ... personality technology?” asked Jimmy nervously.
“Er ... yes, probably,” replied Grandpa, smiling uncertainly. “And Cabbie is not an it,” he added, giving Jimmy a pat on the back. “He’s a he. So say hello to him.”
Jimmy looked at the machine and coughed. “Hello, Cabbie,” he said quietly.
They waited. Nothing happened, and Jimmy’s heart sank.
“I don’t understand it,” said Grandpa, reaching for a screwdriver and chewing the handle thoughtfully. “He should have said hello back. Maybe he will when he’s ready.”
Jimmy looked disappointedly up and down his racer. He knew he shouldn’t feel so let down. He couldn’t expect Grandpa to build a racer like the real ones – they just didn’t have the money. Grandpa was a genius – but he wasn’t a magician.
“Right!” said Grandpa, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. “It’s nearly seven a.m. The race starts at eight in Smedingham ... which doesn’t give us long to get you ready. Come on, Jimmy,” said Grandpa, heading out of the shed towards the house.
Jimmy shuffled after him.
“You make breakfast,” called Grandpa, “while I find a nice surprise for you.”
Jimmy tried to smile.
What next?
* * *
Back in the house, Grandpa disappeared into the cupboard under the stairs while Jimmy put the kettle on and made yet another plate of jam sandwiches. He was beginning to feel sick and his hands were shaking. He had been feeling nervous about the race, but now he’d seen Cabbie he was terrified.
What am I going to do? he thought. I can’t tell Grandpa that I don’t want to drive that old rustbucket, not after all the hard work he’s put in. I’ll have to give it a go...
But then Horace Pelly’s horsey face crept into his mind again, the boy laughing himself to death and making fun of Jimmy in front of Max and all his friends.
Grandpa was now deep in the cupboard under the stairs, muttering to himself. Occasionally something would come flying out: an old Christmas tree, a broom with no bristles, a chair with three legs.
“Aha!” came his voice from the depths of the cupboard and Grandpa suddenly appeared in the kitchen doorway with dust and cobwebs strung from the corners of his moustache to his ears. He was holding a battered crash helmet. “This was mine when I was just seventeen,” he said, carefully placing it on the kitchen table. “And now it’s yours, Jimmy.” Grandpa patted the crash helmet fondly. A cloud of dust and flakes of paint landed on Jimmy’s jam sandwich.
“Thanks, Grandpa,” said Jimmy with as much enthusiasm as he could find.
Grandpa placed the helmet ceremoniously on Jimmy’s head like he was crowning the next king of the world.
“Come on then, Jimmy,” said Grandpa. “Let’s go and win that race.”
“What about my breakfast?” asked Jimmy.
Grandpa looked at the kitchen clock. “No time!” he said. “You can eat jam sandwiches any day of the week, but you’ll only get one shot at qualifying for the Robot Races. Come on!”
They hurried back to the shed. Grandpa opened Cabbie’s door and Jimmy climbed in.
There were buttons, switches, levers and dials covering every centimetre of the dashboard, on the doors to his left and right and even over the roof above his head. Jimmy’s eyes widened as he looked around. Cabbie might look like a scrapheap on the outside, but on the inside it was like being in the cockpit of a robo-rocket.
“How do I—” he began, looking up. But Grandpa had already climbed onto his rusty old bicycle and was pedalling furiously out of the shed door, heading for the main road.
“I’ll see you at the finish line!” he called over his shoulder.
Jimmy glanced back down at the hundreds of buttons, knobs and levers that lined every inch of Cabbie. “But ... but I don’t even know how to make it go!” he said to himself.
“Go?” said an excited electronic voice from somewhere behind the dashboard. “Of course! Why didn’t you say so?”
From all around Jimmy came a whirring noise which grew higher and louder as the racer powered itself up. A red button was flashing right in front of Jimmy.
“Am I supposed to press this?” Jimmy asked nervously, not sure if he should expect an answer from the voice or not. There was no reply. Jimmy shrugged, then reached out a finger, took a deep breath and gently pressed the button.
“Whoopeeeeee!” cried the voice and, with a deafening roar, Cabbie lurched forward at an incredible speed, hurling Jimmy back into his seat. He just had time to do up his seat belt before they crashed through the shed doors, out into the garden, through the neighbour’s fence and onto the road.
They bounced down the kerb and Jimmy had to turn the steering wheel sharply to avoid hitting the wheelie bins belonging to Mrs Cranky across the street.
“Come on,” encouraged Cabbie. “Put your foot down. Do you want to be in this race or not?”
For a second, Jimmy’s foot hovered over the accelerator pedal as he thought how crazy this all was. He’d never even tried to drive a car before and now he was at the wheel of a real robot racer.
“Here goes,” he said. He squashed his foot to the floor and Cabbie’s engine roared.
“AAAAAAAAAGGGGHHH!” Jimmy yelled as they exploded out of the shed.