"So - we jumped! Hadda do it! BOY were we scared. Cousin Esure just held his nose and stepped right over the edge. He's a cool one. Samantha turned her back and took a deep breath and fell backwards - singin' all the time. 'Dream The Impossible Dream' it was, that oldie. Too right! You could hear her voice getting quieter and quieter as she fell further and further down."

Mr Mouse shivered. "That left me - so I shut my eyes and went. Off the edge. Just like that! I tell you, I thought I'd never stop falling! Down and down and DOWN AND DOWN!!"

He had what you call a captive audience - Dot and Wiz were gazing at him with their eyes and their mouths wide open (NOT good manners - Dot's Gran always says if the wind changes when your mouth's like that, you stay that way forever!)

Wizzie shook himself, like someone trying to get a bad thought out of his head. Or her head, of course - poor Dot had gone very pale, which always makes her freckles stand out even more!

Wiz swallowed hard. "So... what... how... how did you not hit the Zanobots?"

"Dunno, really" said Mr Mouse, shaking his head and twirling his whiskers. One of them got caught in a little claw and pulled. "Ow!" he went. "That hurt! Anyways, I just missed them - I was flippin' from side to side like someone on a crazy skateboard!"

He giggled. "I think Mr smartypants Mallow's not as clever as he thinks he is - the little things seemed to have a kind of programme that means they can just miss you. It's like... like when you see divers on TV in a big shoal of fish under the water - the fish all go zooming past, but somehow they never seem to hit the diver, no matter how fast they're going or how panicky they are. Amazing!! But like I said, I was duckin' and divin' too - reckon that saved me in the end."

"What did these Zanobots look like?" asked Dot.

"Well I couldn't see them just then, dummy" said Mr Mouse (he's so RUDE sometimes!) "I mean, the darn things are a ten billionth of a metre long, babe! Hey!"

Wiz doesn't like Mr Mouse when he's sassy like that either. He made a play bite at the little mouse, who stepped back to get out of the way and sat down on his bottom with a bump, right on the 'Enter' key on Dot's laptop.

Kind of embarrassing for Mr Sassymouth too, because up came a picture of... a Zanobot!

It was like a little digger, with a kind of ferrety head and face on the front. It wore an eyepatch on one eye like a pirate and a flat cap, in a chequered red, blue and green pattern. Behind the ferrety head, though, was a kind of truck, but with those "caterpillar" tracks you see on tanks, not wheels. Out of each side came a metal robot arm, one with a kind of grab on it like a metal hand, the other with a sort of scoop. On top of the truck was a clear plastic dome, with lots of electronic circuit things inside it.

It was coloured a very bright orange and yellow. As Dot and Wiz watched, the ferrety face in the picture gave them a long, slow wink. Then it twirled round to show them its back end - which had a sign on it saying 'Zanobots Do It Smaller Than Anyone!!'

Mr Mouse got up and put his baseball cap straight - it had fallen over one eye when he sat down on his bum with a bump.

"Yeah, well" he said quickly, moving away to one side as Wiz did another play bite at him "Found that picture later, see... it was in Wakkipedia. They've got everything for anyone who's net-voyaging!"

"So, you're missing all these Zanobots OK - but you're still falling?" asked Wiz. "It sounds HORRIBLE!"

"It WAS!" said Mr Mouse, twirling his whiskers again - more carefully this time. "But you couldn't see much 'cos of all the Zanobots - there were millions and millions of them, all round you. Couldn't even see where Samantha and Cousin Esure were!"

"Scary!" said Dot.

"Yeah, too right" replied Mr Mouse. "You could kind of see the cliff as it went by, though - it was a sort of greasy, grungy black and brown colour, and the Zanobots seemed to be living there - anyway they kept coming out of little holes in it, more and more of them. Guess they thought we were a problem to be fixed - that's what they're going to be for, like I said. And old Mallow did say the whole thing was a Not Allowed, so we must have seemed bad news to those Zanobot guys!"

"How long were you falling?" asked Dot.

"Felt like an hour" said Mouse grimly. "But I guess it wasn't more than a minute. That was bad enough though, I'm telling' you! But then suddenly... suddenly, it just - stopped!"