They looked over at the big washing machine against the wall and saw Katrinka standing over the open tank, pitching clothes right and left out of the machine and into the air! It was as if she were having the time of her life.
“Look, Patch—Katrinka!” Garry burst out laughing once more. “She’s gone crazy! Something must have flipped in her mechanism again.”
The machine was still making mountains of suds, and they were flooding out of the top like a flow of white lava. Katrinka’s metal wrists clanged against the edge of the machine as she went up and down with her flinging motion, making a rhythmic clatter.
“Hey, can’t we give her some words to make her stop this?” Patch spoke loudly to be heard over all the noise. “She’ll wreck the place!”
“I remember one of the commands,” Garry said. Then loudly he called out: “Atten-tion! Atten-tion!”
“She’s not paying any mind!” Patch said.
“She must be short-circuited again,” Garry said. “Let’s go for Captain Eaton!”
“I hate to wake him up after the hard day he had yesterday,” Patch said, as he returned along the corridor with Garry, “but this is an emergency.”
It turned out that they did not have to wake the captain. He met them, clad in his robe, at the door of the dorm, having already been aroused by the commotion going on down the corridor.
Captain Eaton yawned. “It’s Katrinka, isn’t it? Ben set her for laundry duty this morning, but I guess her wires got crossed again.”