The Day the Great Vacuum Experiment Sucked Up Vanessa (the dog)
Peter’s science experiment was a good one. All the kids in Mr. Reed’s fifth grade class were smart but Peter was the best in Science. He built a super-large machine, as tall as a grown-up, that actually worked! He called it his Vacuum-Rama because it was really a brand new kind of vacuum cleaner.
It ran on electricity, of course. Peter’s Vacuum-Rama followed the same Suction Principle of any regular household vacuum cleaner. But Peter’s machine had a different kind of motor that made use of magnets and magnetic energy.
He got the idea from a magazine his dad liked to read. His dad, who was an engineer, helped Peter construct it.
Peter designed the Vacuum-Rama to look like a robot. It had a head, arms, legs, and a stomach in which to deposit the things Peter chose to vacuum up with the hoses that served as arms. It was colossal in size, of course. The Vacuum-Rama was a little smaller than a telephone booth– and a little bigger than a broom closet. But the most amazing thing of all was that it worked!
His Vacuum-Rama had more power than a rug vacuum cleaner–A LOT MORE POWER! If Peter rotated a certain circular knob by hand, he could turn the power all the way up. Its strength then was remarkable. Besides dust and dirt, the Vacuum-Rama could suck up larger objects like chairs and desks and tables.
Sometimes Peter used the Vacuum-Rama like a Dust-Buster. A small hose could be attached which could get into all the corners of a room and other hard-to-reach dirty places. At times like these, the Vacuum-Rama was really nothing more than an extra-large vacuum cleaner that helped you do your housework.
But the Vacuum-Rama was at its best when its power was turned up full blast! It had six arms and all of them worked. There were hoses ten inches in diameter that could create an awful lot of suction! With them the Vacuum-Rama could suck objects a good distance away right off a table like pencils, papers, erasers, cups, keys, and other such things.
Most of this stuff went into the Vacuum-Rama so fast that nothing got broken because Peter had put cushions and pillows on the inside to soften the impact. As a matter of fact Peter could retrieve a lot of the best items later on, which is how he came to be one of the richest kids in school.
What he didn’t need himself, he sold to other kids. The Vacuum-Rama had a big hole in its front side where the objects disappeared and a door in its back which opened with a little latch. All Peter had to do was open the latch to go diving after treasure!
If you couldn’t find an item in a store, you went to Peter and talked to him in a very polite manner. The next day Peter would deliver to you whatever it was you wanted. Anyway, nearly everybody liked the Vacuum-Rama, even the teachers. There was talk of entering the Vacuum-Rama in a National Science Contest, like Peter was a genius or something!
He probably would have won the Grand Prize, too. There was only one problem: Vanessa. The day of the Science Fair was also the day when Vanessa came to visit Mr. Reed’s fifth grade class. Vanessa is a large dog, a beautiful Golden Retriever. Everybody loves Vanessa!
Vanessa’s fur is gold and red in color. She has clean white teeth in a large mouth with a big happy smile on it. Her eyes sparkle like diamonds and she offers her paw to everybody. She’s the most beautiful dog in the world and everyone loves to pet her, especially Julie, because Julie is Vanessa’s owner.
Julie was complaining to Peter about all the work involved in brushing Vanessa’s long red-gold hair every day. Peter the genius piped up right away with: “Don’t worry, Julie. My Vacuum-Rama will take care of brushing Vanessa for you!” Because Peter knew all of a sudden how he could use his Vacuum-Rama to help Julie brush Vanessa’s hair.
Sure enough, Peter promptly attached a hairbrush to a long tube that was one of the six arms of the Vacuum-Rama. Peter turned the engine on at its lowest setting so the suction power was very gentle and just like when Julie was brushing Vanessa.
This was during Math time in the afternoon. Mr. Reed had left the classroom for a minute and Peter was eager to show everyone how his Vacuum-Rama could brush Vanessa. Everything would have been perfect except somebody shoved Jason a little too hard.
Jason tripped and lost his balance and crashed into the Vacuum-Rama which has a great big hole in the stomach area for sucking in all the pencils, erasers, books, and bigger kinds of objects that Peter loved to swipe.
When Jason crashed into Mr. Vacuum-Rama the Robot, Jason accidentally turned the control knob up to FULL POWER! It was an instant disaster! It was a horrible moment, frozen forever in the memory of all the students who were there and who saw it with their own eyes.
Before anybody could move, Vacuum-Rama sucked up Vanessa! Julie screamed and fainted. Pandemonium broke out everywhere and when Mr. Reed opened the door he saw a room in complete disarray with students shouting and running every which way!
Jason got down on his hands and knees and tried to unplug the Vacuum-Rama. Vanessa was howling something awful from inside the Vacuum-Rama while Peter was trying to revive Julie. And all the time the Vacuum-Rama kept sucking up papers, pencils, books, coats, and back-packs at an alarming rate while students stampeded this way and that trying to help or trying to get out of the way as fast as they could.
Needless to say, Peter never got to enter the National Science Contest. In fact, he was no longer Peter the Genius. Now he was just plain old kooky Peter. Once again, nobody believed in Peter’s inventions. That was the end of the Great Vacuum Experiment. A Vacuum Company that was thinking of marketing Vacuum-Rama suddenly changed its mind.
Chapter 2
Mr. Reed’s classroom was pretty quiet for a long time after that. I guess the one who suffered the most though was poor Vanessa. They retrieved her from the Vacuum-Rama but she was never the same. Julie’s Golden Retriever became half-crazy with grief and worry after being sucked up into the Vacuum-Rama. The dog simply could not act normal any longer.
Oh Vanessa would be all right for a while . . . but then she’d go a little crazy! Noises scared her and at the slightest sound she would bark herself into a frenzy or she ran and hid under Julie’s desk at school or under her bed at home.
Sometimes she would pee all over the floor, your shoes, the carpet, the bed, and anything else she could find! Worse yet was when Vanessa began to spin around in mad dizzying circles, chasing herself until all you could see was a whirring red-gold ball going faster and faster!
And vacuum cleaners? You couldn’t even think of turning on a vacuum cleaner around Vanessa. Oh no! That Vacuum-Rama suck had put a giant fear of vacuum cleaners into Vanessa! If you turned on an ordinary vacuum cleaner in Julie’s house, Vanessa simple went crazy. She would start barking and chewing anything and everything. She would tear huge chunks out of the couch and then go chew on a shoe or couch or mattress: anything!
Next came her acrobatic performance. She jumped on top of chairs, couches, tables, beds and all kinds of furniture. She would even try to climb up the walls and touch the ceiling with her nose. Vanessa started making so much noise with so many kinds of weird sounds that everybody had to cover their ears!
Vanessa became a howling terror and dashed from room to room faster than anyone could catch her. She darted between people’s legs and ran behind couches. The next minute she was jumping on the furniture, knocking over chairs and lamps in her mad dashes around the house, barking all the time!
Once she got scared, Vanessa was in constant motion jumping up on couches and tables, jumping down, spinning and whirling until it made you dizzy just to watch!
If the front door was left open Vanessa would dash outside where neighbors ran for their lives–although sometimes the kids just stood and watched, unable to move. They were amazed and awe-struck to see a dog behave so! Vanessa’s antics worked like a hypnotic charm upon them and parents had to come to the rescue by sweeping their kids up in their arms and dashing away.
Peter told Julie that he was very sorry that he made her beloved Vanessa just a little bit nutty but Julie told Peter she didn’t mind. In fact, she liked Vanessa even better this way for there was far more action and fun than ever before; indeed, now there never was a dull moment!
Peter rubbed his hand across his chin and grinned. He agreed with Julie and told her that was the reason he had built the Vacuum-Rama: to avoid all those dull moments in life! Julie smiled sweetly and asked Peter what his next project was going to be because she felt sure he would think up another Great Scientific Experiment.
Peter said, well, yes, he did have this idea for skis and a parachute attached to the back of a bicycle . . . but he didn’t get to finish because just then Vanessa came tearing around the corner of the house. She was going faster than lightning and was headed right for them!
Peter and Julie had no choice but to jump out of Vanessa’s way. They fell on the grass and rolled out of Vanessa’s way. Then they sat up, looked at each other, and started laughing. Vanessa was a whole lot of fun this way!
Chapter 3
Doctors say that a knock on the head can make a person crazy, can even make a person forget who they are. That’s called “Amnesia” because when a person has “Amnesia” they can’t remember anything, not even their own name! Sometimes the person will get better but sometimes they keep acting kind of weird.
That Vacuum-Rama moment to Vanessa was like a person getting a knock on the head. It drove that dog’s brains up a tree and made Vanessa plumb loco. Dogs don’t have that much brain-power to begin with, you know, so when they receive a Really Big Scare they don’t remember how to act politely.
Sure, everyone makes a big deal out of how smart their dog is but that’s really just a lot of affection. They joke how their dog is a member of their family or how the dog and its owner are beginning to look alike, like man’s best friend can change its appearance or something, which is silly.
They believe their dog can think and dream and talk but it can’t do any of those things of course. That’s just wishful thinking when people try to give their dogs human qualities dogs really don’t have. For god’s sake, a dog barks when it gets really excited—and that’s the only “talking” it can do!
A dog can’t ever learn to talk or recite the letters of the alphabet like you and me, can it? A dog can’t sing, hold a job, eat with a fork, or tell a joke. You get the point: Vanessa only had a teensy-weensy amount of brains in the first place and those were scared clean out of her by the Vacuum-Rama!
Yes, the day Peter’s Great Scientific Experiment sucked up Vanessa (the dog) was a very sad day for all of us. I gotta admit, however, to a small secret. It was one of the funniest sights I ever saw, watching all that golden-red hair being sucked into the Vacuum-Rama and Vanessa stiffly putting out her front legs like she was trying to put on the brakes!
That machine just kept sucking her in farther and farther: shiny nose, muzzle, big black eyes, head, shoulders, body, legs, and finally a long waving tail. Then Vanessa disappeared completely from sight inside the huge stomach of Vacuum-Rama the Robot–though we could hear the din of a terrific howling and Vanessa’s frantic scratching as she tried to climb back out!
It was plain from the start that she was still in one piece but the fright had done something awful to her. You can imagine! With an ordinary dog and an ordinary vacuum cleaner, what happens? If you so much as point the vacuum cleaner at the dog, it starts to act very weird. Once you turn the motor on, the loud noise scares the dog! Lots of kids have pushed a vacuum cleaner’s sucking hose too close to their dog’s tail on purpose just to see what happens. This frightens the dog to infinity!
A dog is not smart enough to understand how a vacuum cleaner works. All the dog knows for sure is that it doesn’t want its fur sucked off! You can imagine!
If you have a pet dog and if you take the vacuum cleaner’s long hose and try to catch your dog’s tail with it, doesn’t your dog get to moving pretty fast? But suppose you caught your dog’s tail and the vacuum cleaner sucked it up and then all the rest of the dog as well? How would your dog act then? Crazier than crazy that’s how and that’s exactly what happened to poor Vanessa!
Chapter 4
Peter’s Dad took apart the Vacuum-Rama so Vanessa was the only dog ever sucked up by the Vacuum-Rama. Vanessa acted the part, running around at breakneck speed and jumping up and knocking people down to tell them about her adventure. She barked herself hoarse averaging about 4,000 barks an hour plus plenty of other noises: whining and growling and a few sounds just too hard to describe with ordinary words.
She peed on every bush, tree, rock, car, house, and person in a ten-block area. She chased cats, cars, and bicycles. She chewed holes in nearly every object that was chewable. Peter’s Great Vacuum-Rama Experiment was much too much for her. She got Dog Amnesia. The poor dog lost her mind and she was never quite the same ever after.
Even so, everybody says that Vanessa was the star of the show. Students in Mr. Reed’s class still talk about the day the Great Vacuum Experiment Sucked Up Vanessa (the dog) for no one who was there will ever forget that sight!!
Some of Peter’s classmates even signed a letter asking the Science Fair to give Peter another chance but the Science Fair people never sent a reply. Peter’s great moment in the sun had disappeared forever–as fast as Vanessa’s gold-and-red hair had disappeared into the Vacuum-Rama. “That’s life!” he thought to himself, and smiled.
P.S. Peter and Julie became great friends!
This account was written by a 5th grade boy in Mr. Reed’s class who saw everything!
