Kieran and the Robots
Author Alan Wallach continues the exciting adventures of Kieran Cummerford in the latest adventure.
Chapter I
Kieran was in the workshop listening to the disc recording of Fremod Aguntint reciting words from the Vigandondic language. He was working on a written Vigandondic to English dictionary as his father requested. So he didn’t hear Rajilad enter the workshop. Rajilad was a sort of refugee from another universe, Pimglammam. She was living with the Cummerfords and working in Professor Cummerford’s workshop/laboratory. She had escaped from Pimglammam and had gotten the best of Cran Jelek who tried to take her back by force.
“How is it coming, Kieran?” she asked him. He didn’t hear her because he had headphones on so she repeated the request, this time very loud.
Kieran took off the headphones and turned to her. “Pretty good, but it’s hard work. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. The problem is that as I work and we communicate more and more with the Aguntints, the number of words in the dictionary increases. And the more words we learn, the faster the vocabulary increases.”
Rajilad didn’t smile. She rarely does. “Maybe we can use the language translator in some way to keep pace with the dictionary. Keep in mind that when you finish that, if you ever do, we should also have one from my language into English as well.” Kieran frowned. “We definitely have to find a way to streamline this. Were looking at inventing an Oxford dictionary for three languages in less time that it took to do it for English alone.”
“I can probably take some time from my time warp project to give you some help. It’s coming along but I have to back off sometimes to let things gel in my mind and give me a fresh approach. What are you doing this weekend? Let’s see if we can figure a way to let the computer help us.”
“Except for meeting up with Rikki and Bal to go to one of their movies on Saturday night, I’m not busy at all.”
“OK, let’s work on it Saturday. And if it’s raining, we can spend more time because you won’t play basketball.”
Kieran smiled. “You really know me, don’t you?”
“That’s not so hard. I’ve been living and working with you for almost a year now. So your routine is not so complicated.”
“What are you working on now? The time warp seems to be calibrated and stable. We should be planning some trips, shouldn’t we?”
She agreed with him but as they all knew from experience, careful planning was essential because these trips into the past were fraught with danger. And everyone was busy with their everyday lives so time for planning was limited. In the meantime, she explained that she was trying to figure a way to relocate what was on the other side of the time warp window. Right now, a visit to the past was the past as it is right here. She wanted to visit the past from her universe across the Dardillar, the name in her universe for the Atlantic Ocean. She knew that Professor Cummerford would love to visit Paris in the 1700′s. Sarah Cummerford wanted to visit Vienna in 1800 to go to one of Beethoven’s concerts and maybe even meet him.