Chapter 05

"Ret's roe rack."

"We can't go back, Scoob." Shaggy seemed far too amenable to searching in the dark for a robot. "Freddy said to look on this side of the park. Now, it's okay just to look for the torpedo man as long as we don't find him."

"Rwhat's that?" Scooby pointed at the high striker game where a player hits the lever at the bottom with a mallet sending a metal slider up toward a bell.

Shaggy started to answer. "That's a carnival game where…"

"Roe. Rhat."

I turned the camera to where Scooby was looking and saw the robot coming out of the shadows and heading to the high striker game.

Shaggy's voice dropped to a whisper. "Uh-oh. It's him!"

We were in plain sight, but the robot didn't even look our way. Instead, it picked up the hammer for the strength game and swung it into the lever. The slider rose about two-thirds of the way up. It topped out at a level named 'pantywaist'.

I found this underwhelming but Shaggy and Scooby were more impressed. "He wins!" Shaggy yelled as he started running. "Let's go, man!" Scooby followed right behind and I tried to stay abreast and keep the camera rolling.

The robot seemed to notice us for the first time and started in pursuit. But I noticed that it wasn't gaining—even on me. This wasn't the superfast robot we had seen earlier or the torpedo-like robot we had seen in the water.

"He's gaining on us!" Shaggy was not looking back or he would have realized this wasn't true. "Head for the rollercoaster!" Why on earth Shaggy always ran to a park ride which was attached to tracks and only came back to where it started was a mystery to me. When sober, he was a logical enough person, except when making this choice. At least in this case (as opposed to the mine ride in Gold City) the roller coaster cars were operational and ready to pull out.

"Shaggy! Go anywhere but the roller coaster, you're running faster than the robot!" I tried. But he ignored me or didn't hear me and jumped into the first car with Scooby right beside him.

As the two sat and pounded on the dashboard in front of them trying to make it go, the robot made its way onto the platform and walked toward the back of the row of cars. It was completely oblivious to me. That seemed to be a theme.

If I couldn't talk sense into them, I at least could help as much as I could. "Shaggy! Pull down the safety bar!"

He seemed to hear this and pulled it down in front of him and Scooby. I then made my way to the platform and pressed the 'go' button and the coaster started rolling. But not before the robot climbed into the rear car. As the coaster began picking up speed, the robot moved from the rear car to the next car in ungainly fashion. It then repeated it to get to the next car, working its way forward to Scooby and Shaggy.

This particular roller coaster appeared to be comprised of two parallel tracks with the roller coasters going in opposite directions. When I had started one, the other empty one had started. Out of nowhere, a hand landed on my shoulder. When I landed, I looked back to see Daphne and Fred.

"What's going on?" Fred was squinting and trying to see what I was looking at. He pointed, "There's Shaggy and Scooby in the front seat of that car!"

I looked at the two roller coasters going in opposite directions and did a quick visual second order differential equation. The two coasters would pass each other when they were both at the apogee point at the top of a rise. Where they would also both be at their slowest. I synopsized the plan into two words. "Jump, Shaggy!"

They had to scramble out from under the safety restraint and had no time to do anything but jump. They did. The scene from the video where I am holding my hands over my eyes is real. I couldn't look. After a couple or seconds passed without a scream or a thud, I forced myself to look. "They made it!" Honestly, I was expecting one or both of them to fall to their deaths. In retrospect, the risk of falling was probably greater than the risk of encountering what seemed to be a pretty harmless robot. It made great video, but it was a stupid plan on my part.

But now we had the robot trapped on the roller coaster. It disappeared out of sight for a moment but all we had to do was stay on the platform and it would come to us. We had it.

Shaggy and Scooby arrived first.

Daphne helped them out. "Nice jump, you guys!"

Shaggy was visibly shaken. "Thanks, but don't ever let us do that again."

I heard the rumbling and looked down the track. "I think that character's train is coming in."

Fred took over. "Everybody, hide behind those crates!"

The coaster came in. Daphne called out, "But it's empty! How could he have gotten out?"

There had to be a rational explanation. I looked around and immediately spotted him. "Look! He's up there!"

Daphne spotted him right after me. "What's he going to do?"

I watched in horror as he tipped forward and fell from the track at least sixty feet in the air. It was puzzling. A moment earlier, he had been moving in a very human manner but, as he tipped over, the movement was machine-like. Things were beginning to come together.

"He's diving off!" Fred yelled.

The figure plummeted into the top of a storage tent in the support area behind the snack shacks. We heart the tent canvas give way and rip and then the sound of a solid collision and things breaking.

Fred broke into a run. "Come on! He could be hurt!"

Shaggy followed and called back, "Let's go, Scooby!"

Although the tent was right next to the rollercoaster, the walking route from the platform to it was circuitous—requiring us to go back through the line area, past the ticket booth, out into the midway, past the row of food stands until we found an opening, and then we had to double back to the tent itself.

We found a dark tent with a hole in the roof and a shattered wooden crate.

Daphne reacted. "He's not here!"

Fred then pointed. "There's where he crashed through the tent."

And I added my two cents. "And you can see where he hit the crate. It's not possible for a human being to withstand that fall and this level of damage and just walk away. It defies all the known laws of physics."

We stood, dumbfounded and unsure what to do next. Shaggy finally spoke. "I wish you could have seen his eyes close up. They were two glowing red lights like the tail lights of a car."

"Reah, rike a rar."

Fred's finger went up yet again. "A car! That's it!"

This didn't sound good.