Free Floors: by Patrick Carman Page A

as he kept typing with one hand and held out the empty breakfast plate to Leo with the other.
    Once in the hallway, Leo let Blop talk all he wanted. It would take all day to run him out of words, which was what Mr. Bump had referred to. Blop preferred to say ten thousand words a day; after that he calmed down considerably. He would roll off into a corner and mumble quietly to himself, as if he were having robot dreams and talking softly in his sleep. Friday was three days away, so Leo would have to keep Blop talking for at least thirty thousand words.
    He had an idea about how he could accomplish the task without having to carry the little robot around allday, and he was thinking about just that when his walkie-talkie came to life.
    “Leo, get to the basement, pronto!”
    It was his dad, who rarely sounded frantic about much of anything lately.
    “I see you have a Phillips screw driver in your bag,” said Blop, who had burrowed his way inside the satchel. And then he carried on about the origins of a great many tools as Leo ran down the maintenance stairs to the basement.

CHAPTER 7

     

T EN T HOUSAND P APER C LIPS
     
    L eo found a cardboard box and a few old rags in the maintenance tunnel on the second floor on his way to the basement. He made a detour into the lobby to make a handoff.
    “You don’t mean it,” said Remi, staring into the box. “You
can’t
mean it.”
    “Oh, but I do,” said Leo. Blop was in the box, staring up at Remi with uncharacteristic silence.
    “You’re the best friend
ever
!” said Remi. Suddenly, standing next to a boring door all day didn’t bother him. He had a robot, a
real
robot, to keep him company.
    “Just keep him talking, and stay away from Ms. Sparks,” Leo instructed. Ms. Sparks knew the routine,but it didn’t make her any less annoyed by Blop’s endless chatter. She’d only go for it if Remi kept the robot outside, like a pet that hadn’t been housebroken.
    “
Best
day in the history of my
life
!” said Remi. They were standing just outside the door together, where Remi had placed the cardboard box on the ledge of a window next to the entryway.
    “Keep your radio on,” said Leo, heading for the basement. “In case I need you.”
    “You got it, partner,” said Remi.
    Blop had begun yammering on about the meaning of friendship in all its facets, but the moment Remi said the word
partner
, the robot made a few noises — a
blip
, a
zing
, a
whir
— and looked at Remi.
    “What do you think of Batman and Robin?”
    Remi lit up like a sparkler on the Fourth of July.
    “It asked me a question!”
    Leo was already in the lobby, his two-way radio buzzing with demands, as he yelled over his shoulder.
    “Get used to it.”

     
    When he entered the basement, Leo thought the police, the fire department, and the county health inspector had all showed up at one time. Every color of light was spinning and flashing on the wall, the siren was going off, and streams of red ticker tape were pouringout of Daisy’s mouth like an endless grocery store receipt.
    “Leo!” yelled Clarence Fillmore. “The hotel is sick!”
    At first this struck Leo as an odd thing to say, but the more he looked at the call center, the more he had to agree: The Whippet Hotel had come down with something really bad.
    “What do we do?” Leo yelled over the blaring siren.
    “We have to convince everyone to stop pulling rip cords,” said Clarence Fillmore, shaking his head in disbelief. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    Every guest room had a red ball hanging from a red rope. On the wall near the ball was a red button. To send a distress signal, a guest had to grab the ball and pull the cord while simultaneously pressing the red button. The rope and the button were too far apart (and the rope too high) for a child to make trouble. Apparently, from the looks of the call center, all the guests in the hotel were pulling their rip cords and pressing the buttons in their rooms at the same