The Wells Bequest Read Online Free PDF Page B

sitting on a stool moving plastic tubes around. A guy I hadn’t seen before was standing at the desk where Jaya had been. He had reddish-blond hair, shallow eyes, and a tiny mouth that made him look like an angry doll.
    â€œMay I help you?” he asked.
    Make that reddish-blond hair and an English accent.
    â€œYeah, I wanted to know . . . um . . . where’s Jaya Rao?” I asked.
    â€œDownstairs on Stack 5. Why?” He didn’t sound too friendly.
    â€œNothing, really, it’s just . . . she put some objects on reserve for me.”
    â€œI can get those for you. Last name?”
    â€œNovikov.”
    â€œBe right back.” He pushed a wooden cart over to the reserve shelves, loaded it with my robots, and started pushing it back to the window.
    â€œThanks,” I said. “So how do I get to Stack 5?”
    â€œYou don’t. The public isn’t allowed in the stacks.”
    â€œOh well. I just wanted to say hi to Jaya.”
    The guy shrugged unhelpfully, but the girl said, “Are you a friend of hers? I can send down a message if you like.”
    â€œCool. Just tell her Leo says hi,” I said. Would she even remember me?
    â€œHere, why don’t you write her a note?” The girl handed me a blank call slip and one of the stubby little pencils.
    â€œOkay, thanks.” What to write? I bit the end of the pencil.
    â€œAbigail, the pneums are piling up,” said the English guy. He sounded like we were wasting his valuable time.
    â€œAll right,” said the girl—Abigail. “Just give it to me when you’re finished,” she told me.
    I took the robots over to one of the library tables, where I stared at the blank slip for a while. Finally I wrote
Schist, you’re not here! I’m upstairs in the Main Exam Room. I just wanted to say hi. Leo N. (The guy with the robots.)
I folded it over, wrote
Jaya Rao
on the flap, and went back to the desk.
    â€œYes?” said the guy.
    â€œMy note,” I explained, waving it at Abigail, who came over and took it. I watched her tuck the message into a plastic can and stuff the can into one of the pipes.
    â€œWhat are those things?” I asked the guy.
    â€œWhat things?”
    â€œThose plastic cans that Abigail put my note in.”
    â€œYou’ve never seen pneumatic tubes?” His voice dripped with disdain, like I’d never heard of an airplane.
    â€œObviously not,” I said. “What are they?”
    â€œThe pneumatic tubes carry papers and small objects around the building from floor to floor.”
    â€œI figured that’s what they did. But how do they work?”
    â€œI’m sorry, I would love to talk some more, but there are people waiting,” he said.
    Maybe he didn’t want to admit he didn’t know.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    I decided I was done with the Da Vinci knight, so I put it on the returns cart and gave the rest of my call slips to the snobby English page. Then I turned my attention to John Dee’s mechanical beetle.
    I’d looked Dr. Dee up the night before. He sounded really cool. He was an English alchemist, mathematician, and spy in the sixteenth century, back when nobody quite knew the difference between science and sorcery.
    I kind of wish I could have been a scientist then. My sister is always calling my experiments “alchemy,” and she doesn’t mean it as a compliment. But I think I would have had a better time with science back when nobody objected if your invention had extra powers that nobody asked for or if you couldn’t always explain exactly how you’d gotten them to work.
    Dr. Dee’s beetle was the size of my fist, made of carved wood crammed with incredibly complicated clockwork. It kept doing things that shouldn’t have been physically possible—like flying. The wings should be way too small for that heavy body. When I wound it up, though, it leapt out of