Canyon Chaos Read Online Free

and, beside them, huge pieces of paper were pinned to the wall: hundreds of drawings of electrical circuits and strange shapes with blades and teeth and wires and labels and all kinds of calculations.
    Right in front of Jimmy, there was a desk piled high with rolls of paper, books, folders, a row of neatly sharpened pencils and a shiny metal hand that looked like the glove from a suit of armour. With a quick wink, Grandpa clipped two wires to the base of the shiny metal hand on the desk and flicked a switch on a control panel. The hand clenched into a fist.
    “Wow!” said Jimmy.
    Grandpa wiggled the joystick on the control panel. The fist unclenched and the fingers of the metal hand wiggled, too, as though they were scratching an invisible itch.
    “That’s amazing!” said Jimmy. “What—? I mean, whose—? And how come there’s a whole building under the garden that I didn’t know about?”
    “When I was younger,” explained Grandpa, “I was what they used to call ‘a bit of a whizz-kid’.”
    “What do you mean?” asked Jimmy. “What did you do?”
    “I invented things,” said Grandpa, smiling modestly. “Well, one thing in particular.”
    “What?” Jimmy stared at Grandpa.
    “There it is!” said Grandpa, pointing at the roof.
    Jimmy looked up. Grandpa was pointing at something moving across the ceiling. It looked like a biscuit tin on tank tracks. When it got to the edge of the ceiling it trundled slowly down the wall and onto the floor, whirring and humming to itself.
    “It’s still working!” cried Grandpa happily. “No wonder it’s so tidy in here!”
    “But whatis it?” asked Jimmy.
    “Just a little old-fashioned robot,” said Grandpa. A little door opened in the top of the biscuit tin and a mechanical arm reached out. It seemed to be waving at Jimmy.
    “A robot?” gasped Jimmy, his mouth hanging open in amazement. “A real one?”
    “Yes, but it’s pretty basic. Well,” laughed Grandpa, “it was the first one ever invented.”
    “You...” began Jimmy. “You invented the world’s first robot?”
    “Well, yes,” said Grandpa. “Yes, I suppose I did.”
    “How come?” said Jimmy, fizzing bubbles of excitement rising in his throat. “Why didn’t you tell me!”
    “I’m telling you now,” Grandpa said. “Many years ago,” he began, settling on a wooden stool at the desk, “before I became a taxi driver, me and a friend of mine worked together, imagining and inventing all kinds of things which we thought the world might want or need.”
    “What kinds of things?” asked Jimmy.
    “We were working on a highly advanced Lie Detector,” explained Grandpa. “It could even tell if you were going to lie before you’d opened your mouth.”
    “Incredible!” said Jimmy.
    “Ah, but there was a problem,” said Grandpa. “My friend and I couldn’t agree about the wiring of the biorhythmical transmodulation simulator. I thought I was right. He thought he was right.”
    “Who was right?” asked Jimmy.
    “Who knows?” replied Grandpa. “We stopped working together. He went off in a huff and took our laboratory assistant with him.”
    “You had an assistant?” asked Jimmy.
    “Yes,” said Grandpa. “Name of Hector. Anyway,” said Grandpa after a moment, “I carried on working on the Lie Detector and one day a man came to see me. He said he was from a secret department in the secret wing of the Secret Services.”
    “The Secret Services? You mean, like a spy?” said Jimmy.
    “Sort of,” said Grandpa. “He was in the technology and gadgets department. He had heard I was good with electronics and computers and he wanted me to work on a top-secret project.”
    “The Lie Detector?” asked Jimmy.
    “No,” said Grandpa. “A robot.”
    Jimmy looked down at his feet. The biscuit-tin robot was rushing round his trainers, whirring away and cleaning them with a brush on a stick.
    “Yes, just like this little chap here,” Grandpa continued, grinning down at the