Casper Candlewacks in the Time Travelling Toaster by Ivan Brett Page A

exasperated.
    Flanella stuck up a podgy hand. “I don’t.”
    “Me neither,” snarled Chrys.
    Betty had pottered away into the garden to pick up the pieces of her wheelchair, leaving the other three sitting round the kitchen table, looking at the Time Toaster.
    “We can assume Betty wants us to use it,” said Casper, nodding to himself at every logical step, “and that she had a Time Toaster saved up for this very occasion.”
    “Can I just say…” Flanella chipped in, “erm… what’s a Time Toaster?”
    Casper explained for the third time.
    “Cool…” Flanella licked her lips. “Useful for when you want toast.”
    “But what do we need it for?” said Casper, desperate to get back to the point.
    “Escape?” mused Chrys. “Maybe she knows we’ve lost, so it’s time to scram.”
    “No,” Casper bit his lip. “Not Betty. She’s no coward, and at her age she’s got nothing to lose.”
    “Then it’s got to be a way to help us defeat Briar and his stupid robot.” Chrys scratched her head. “Maybe we’re s’posed to send it back in time.”
    “If we send it back in time, wherever we send it, it’ll cause havoc. And, anyway, I don’t remember reading about a giant robot in any history books. No, we’ve got to take that mechanical monstrosity down here and now.”
    They thought for a while about that, then Flanella asked what a Time Toaster was again. Casper got her to write it down on Malcolm so she wouldn’t forget.
    Casper tried a new approach: listing all the ways you could take down a giant robot. Chrys suggested napalm strikes and precision nukes, which wasn’t helpful because they hadn’t got either. Casper thought that they could build another giant robot, and the two might fall in love and stop all the fighting, but Flanella said Malcolm didn’t know how to build robots.
    Finally, Flanella said, “Shame the robot’s ankles aren’t a bit thinner.”
    Casper frowned. “Why does that matter?”
    “We could’ve fitted a Tickle Tag on it. Made it go all tickly and fall over.”
    “But those things were designed to work on humans.”
    “Malcolm says the tickle is an electrical signal. Malcolm says metal is a good conductor.” She blinked. “But I don’t know what that means.”
    “So what you’re saying is, if we could get a Tickle Tag round the robot’s ankle, and if Briar set the tickle signal off, it could work on the robot as it does on a person?”
    Flanella tapped away at Malcolm for a few seconds. “He says yes.”
    “That’d be perfect! Just like with the workers, a Tickle Tag would immobilise the robot! And we’ve even got one spare after you took mine off.”
    The Tickle Tag lay limp on the table, white with metal buckles. Was it as simple as just clipping it to the robot? No. “You’re right, though. We’d have to fit it round the robot’s ankle, but it’s far too small.” Casper sighed. Another dead end.
    After some more tapping, Flanella said, “Actually, best place for the Tickle Tag would be somewhere inside it. Where there’s no armour and just pure squiggly circuit bits.”
    Chrys hadn’t had much practice looking impressed, but she gave it a good go. “So all we’ve got to do is get inside the robot and you can do your work?”
    “That’s a problem in itself,” groaned Casper. “We can’t just slip down its throat.”
    “Oh, Malcolm got some snaps,” piped up Flanella. She brought up a series of photos of tonight’s assault on her screen, slowly increasing in mayhem to the point where guards flooded out to reclaim the workers and she’d had to run. One picture particularly interested Casper, though.
    “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a mark on the robot’s backside.
    “Could you zoom in, please, Malcolm?”
    Malcolm zoomed in, close enough to show a small door cut into the robot’s casing with a little wooden doorknob. Some sort of goods entrance or something. Surely it was large enough for a Casper-sized boy to crawl