Renz The Hunt for Giant Blue (Bo & Friends Book 2)

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-3-945090-42-8
Verlag: Sefa Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 28 Seiten

Reihe: Bo & Friends. Smart detective novels for smart children

'Bo & Friends' - Smart detective stories for smart children Second Book Giant Blue, the world's fastest computer that MM's Dad built, has been stolen! The police have no leads. Bo and his friends YoYo, Simon and MM will have to investigate on their own. When they finally come up with something, it is, of all people, one of their own that puts them all in mortal danger...

Ulrich Renz was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1960. After studying French literature in Paris he graduated from medical school in Lübeck and worked as head of a scientific publishing company. He is now a writer of non-fiction books as well as children's fiction books. He now lives in Lübeck, Germany.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Renz, Ulrich

Weitere Mitwirkende

Cotten, Samuel

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

The Blue Giant

“Just like professionals ...” YoYo took off his glasses, as he always did when he had something important to say. With the other hand he adjusted his greenish-red plaid beret, without which he hadn’t gone out in public since the beginning of his Inspector-Hamilton phase. “Outwitted the alarm, cleared everything out, didn’t leave a trace. An absolutely professional burglary. That’s how it’s done, gentlemen!” His eyes were sparkling.

For MM, YoYo’s exuberance was quite off the mark. Restlessly, she slid around on her bicycle seat. “If they are professionals, then that’s even worse,” she said, more to herself than to her three friends who were sitting in front of her on the railing of the supermarket parking lot like chickens on a perch. As always, YoYo occupied the center place. Sitting between Bo and Simon, who towered over him by at least a head, he looked a bit like a ruffled chick. Normally MM would sit on the outside next to Bo, but today she hadn’t even taken the time to get off her bicycle. She hadn’t been able to wait, even for a second, to tell them the news.

“Top pros, top-of-the-line pros …” YoYo could hardly contain himself. As a world expert on everything, he was, of course, a world expert on burglary. “I once read about a burglary where the criminals, disguised as a moving company, drove up in broad daylight with a van and calmly took out everything. In the end, they claimed a receipt from the porter for their time and even got a tip ...”

While YoYo told his stories of the “coolest burglaries in the world” with growing excitement, MM again saw her father in her mind when he came home after lunch, wearing his rumpled shirt that stretched over his stomach with the slipped purple bow tie. She’d known immediately that something bad had happened. Wordlessly, he plopped down in the chair. He stared at the ceiling for what seemed like forever.

“All gone,” he finally said.

“What … gone?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

“Everything. Everything stolen.”

“Giant Blue, too?” She held her breath.

He just closed his eyes and nodded slowly. His face was pale.

“Who?” she asked helplessly. But what answer could she get?

“Oh, Tati –” She wanted to say something comforting, but nothing came into her mind.

From the kitchen came Mom’s voice: “Now don’t worry, Robert, the insurance will cover everything!” She arrived with a bowl of cookies. “By the way, Professor Arnold invited us tonight. Don’t you remember? Try to put on something trendy, will you? And, for heaven’s sake, leave that horrible bow-tie at home!”

For the thousandth time, MM realized that her parents didn’t come from the same planet. Tati’s research, which meant everything to him, was just gimmickry to Mom. She didn’t even know that he had just built the fastest computer in the world – Giant Blue.

For her, only the stuff in her fancy-schmancy boutique clothing store really mattered. With the accusation, “no professor in the world wears such things!” she would come home with piles of new shirts, suits and ties for Dad. He would always thank her with a friendly smile and devoted sigh, but, sure enough, wouldn’t change anything about his outfit – which for years had consisted of baggy, black trousers and suspenders, a white shirt that typically wasn’t very crisp, and the inevitable purple bow tie. He just didn’t have the time to worry about things like clothes. For him, there was only Giant Blue – and the “Swinging Einsteins,” his jazz choir, which consisted entirely of gray-haired or bald-headed professors who met every Thursday evening to rehearse.

“Oh, Tati –” Again MM didn’t get further. Tati ... Somehow this was her name for him since the times when nothing was more fun than scrambling around on his belly roaring “Tati, Tati!” – especially on Sundays, when he just wanted to take his nap. She’d gotten the name from her favorite book at the time, ”Tati, the Wild Boar.”

Back then, her father must have already been busy with his supercomputer. She’d always been a bit scared when there was talk of it – a blue giant certainly was very dangerous.

Now she was almost fourteen, and herself well versed in the world of computers. She was, of course, no longer scared of the monster machine, but she still had a great respect for it. Giant Blue was almost a thousand times faster than any previous supercomputer. The secret was in the chips that drove him. MM had not yet understood in detail what exactly was so special about them, but apparently it had something to do with a material that Tati had discovered and called “XXI.” The wonderful thing about this XXI was that it could conduct electricity with no resistance, like a metal that had been cooled down to absolute zero. Giant Blue could therefore do without the cooling apparatus that all previous supercomputers required, which weighed tons and was necessary to bring the chips down to extremely low temperatures.

In the last two weeks it had finally become clear that the XXI chips in Giant Blue were really working properly. She remembered how Tati had come home in the evening after the first successful test run, and had danced with joy. He stretched his arms in the air and stood on his toes, moving his hips and belly to some music in his head, slowly at first, then faster and faster. That evening he could hardly stop, even though Mom shook her head, as she always did when he performed this dance, which he had learned as a child from “Babu,” his beloved Greek grandpa. After dinner, he took a bottle of champagne from the fridge. “This is a cause for celebration!” he beamed, and popped the cork so boisterously that half the bottle foamed out onto the tablecloth. In the process of filling the glasses, a good deal more was lost. What was left, sloshed upon the clinking of the glasses – but that bothered him as little as the disapproving glances of his wife. Even without champagne he was just happy, and MM with him.

Now he was sitting in his chair like a handful of misery. MM realized that he was fighting back tears.

“They knew exactly where to find everything,” he said, “and how to turn off the alarm.” Tati’s stomach heaved. “The locks weren’t broken, and neither were the windows. Totally professional, that’s what the police are saying. Either that, or they have an accomplice among my employees. They immediately called in Niko to the police station for interrogation. Next to me, he is the only one who has a key. I told them that I vouch for Niko without hesitation. Of course, they are interrogating him regardless.”

Of all people, Niko! How could someone think Niko was capable of such wickedness? Niko, he was always so helpful and reliable. He’d worked for Tati for as long as MM could remember – and he’d actually been her first love. As a first-grader, her heart throbbed in his presence when she visited Tati at the Institute. In her eyes, Niko looked just like Winnetou in the movie she’d once seen on television: tall, slim, and tan, with long, dark brown hair tied in a ponytail. And just like Winnetou, he had something mysterious about him. He spoke with a calm, deep voice and rolled his r’s in a strange way. Back then, she always thought he was doing it on purpose and admired him all the more for it. Later, she found out from Tati that his rolled r’s came from the fact that he had a different mother tongue and had only been twelve years old when he came to Germany. She could not remember where he came from originally. The scar that split his left eyebrow was another mystery to her. She had never asked him about it, but when she was little, she was certain that it had come from a buffalo hunt.

At age eight, when she started to get interested in computers, Niko patiently taught her the first steps. He could explain wonderfully – quite unlike Tati, who was absolutely willing, but only brought forth incomprehensible gibberish when it came to computers. He would start speaking of teraflops, Boolean operators and artificial acceleration, as if nowadays you learned all that stuff in kindergarten. Niko, on the other hand, could explain even the most complicated things in such a way that she could catch on to them. Under his guidance, she could now and then tinker with discarded computers. Last year she got to the point where she was able to assemble her own computer, which she christened “Little Blue,” a tip of the hat to Giant Blue. Little Blue couldn’t, of course, come close to competing with Tati’s supercomputer, but nevertheless was still faster than anything you could buy in a normal computer store. Tati had gotten her chips and processors that were not even on the market.

“No crime without a motive, gentlemen!” YoYo’s voice brought her back to the parking lot. “If you know what drives the crook, you can easily find out the rest.”

“Maybe it’s just about money in the end? They resell the stuff somewhere on the black market?” Bo said. As always, he was sitting slightly hunched with his tousled head of hair resting in his hands.

“I don’t think you can sell that stuff,” MM said. “From the outside, Giant Blue looks like a broken refrigerator, full of cables and chips and circuit boards.” Apart from that, it was still covered with the little blue flowers that she had “decorated” it with as a small child.

“Could be science espionage,” Bo said. “Maybe there are some...