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smooth, projects." She was triumphant in finding a spot to clean her glasses on. "Why not take the beginning of one word, the middle of the next, and the ending of the last word to create a whole new word?" She got her glasses back into place and blinked back at Helen with large grey eyes. "Does that sound like it could work?"

"I guess." Helen's shoulders slumped slightly. She had hoped to get Ms. Miller to accidentally reveal a new clue, or to at least become nervous at the description of the device, but no such luck. "Well, I should be going. Thank you, Ms. Miller."

Helen decided to keep her English teacher on the list as she headed to the eighth grade science room. A robot could hardly be expected to become nervous in the course of simple questioning. That's how they were programmed after all. She crept slowly towards the door to Mr. Fletcher's classroom. Already the smell of weird chemicals tickled at her nose. Helen had only seen Mr. Fletcher once, as she was in the sixth grade and hardly had any cause to come down into the eighth grade wing, but he had left a lasting impression on her. He was a large man with a full white beard and a voice that boomed louder than a crash of thunder when he students became too rowdy.

But Helen was determined not to be intimidated. Still she rapped lightly on the metal door frame. Just to be safe.

"Yes?" A deep voice rang out in the stillness.

Helen shuffled into the foreign classroom. Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest when she saw the jar of eye balls sitting on the edge of his desk just where the eighth graders said it would be. If Mr. Fletcher wasn't an alien, then he had to at least be a sorcerer. "Hi." She swallowed though there had been nothing in her mouth to swallow. "I'm Helen Bradbury from the sixth grade."

Mr. Fletcher had just been getting ready to leave. He had his white lab coat draped over the desk chair like a cloak, and there was one arm in the sleeve of his navy blue jacket. "Ah, a sixth grader. Here to see eyes?" He spun the jar so some of the nicer colored ones could be seen. "These are the eyes of former students who cheated on my tests."

"Wow." Her voice cracked a little and she cleared her throat, taking a mental note to never, ever even seem to be cheating in Mr. Fletcher's class. "A-actually." She started over, "Actually, I came to ask if you knew if any of the teachers were missing a cell phone. Because I found one. And it's small and round and smooth, and it's kind of like a video phone

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