"Alan Dean Foster - Codgerspace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

by one whose perceptual skew had been radically whacked by melted cheese.
"Dear?"
"What is it now?" Eustus Polykrates looked up from his breakfast, his syllables distorted by a mouthful
of milk-sodden Corny Flakes. His wife was standing next to the kitchen sink, eying the bank of telltales
set in the cabinet which monitored the performance of the household and farm machinery.
She glanced back at him. 'There seems to be a problem in the barn."
"Don't be obtuse, woman. What kind of trouble?" From where Polykrates was sitting he couldn't see
the bank of monitors. "We got a Red?"
"I don't exactly know, Eustus. All the red telltales are on."
"All of them?" Polykrates swallowed his Corny Flakes enriched with twenty-three essential vitamins,
minerals, and designer amino acids intended to make you irresistible to the opposite sex, and put down
his spoon. Rising, he walked over to stand next to his wife and join her in staring in bafflement at the
readouts. All red, indeed.
For one telltale to run through yellow to red was always irritating, but hardly unprecedented. A
simultaneous two was not uncommon, especially if the equipment under scrutiny was relational. Three
was an exception, four a crisis. For all to flash simultaneously red was not only unheard-of, it suggested a
systems failure within the monitoring equipment itself rather than a complete breakdown of the farm.
Either way, he had work to do.
"Must be the circuitry again," he muttered. "There's an interweft somewhere, or trouble in the main
line." He glanced out the window toward the rambling plastic structure situated forty meters from the
house. "Barn ain't burned down anyway."
"Don't you think you'd better go and check, dear?" Mrs. Polykrates was a petite, demure woman
whose suggestions were not to be denied. Her relatives imagined her as being composed of equal parts
goose down, syrup, and duralumin rebars.
"Of course." Upsetting to have his breakfast thus terminated. It was the one meal of the day he could
usually relax and enjoy. Lunch was always eaten in haste, and dinner too much a celebration of the end of
the workday to delight in.
Nothing for it but to get to work.
The analytical loop he ran over the monitor box and then the individual broadcast units in the barn
indicated nothing amiss. Power was constant and backup fully charged and online anyway, so the red
lights weren't the result of a sudden surge or fault. Resetting the computer and then the power distributor
did nothing to alter the color of the telltales.
"This," he said as he studied the loop unit and dug at the mole near the back of his neck, "makes no
sense."
"I agree, dear," said his wife as she removed dishes from the sterilizer, "but don't you think you'd
better check it out anyway?"
He was already halfway to the back door, tightening the straps on his blue coveralls, his polka-dot
work shirt glistening in the morning sun.
What he found in the barn was barely controlled chaos capped by extensive bovine irritation.
Polykrates managed fifty-two dairy cows, mostly somatotrophin-enhanced Jersey-Katari hybrids,
with a few Guernseys around for variety. They were lined up in their immaculate stalls, twenty-six to
either side of the slightly raised center walkway. As was routine, all were hooked up to the automilker for
the morning draw. As he strolled in growing confusion down the line, the soft phut of the wall-emplaced
sterilizers echoed his footsteps as they whisked away cow-generated fuel destined for the farm's compact
on-site methane plant.
He checked hoses and suction rings, electrical connections and individual unit readouts. Nothing was
working. No wonder the barn reverberated to a steady cacophony of impatient animals.
He mounted the swivel seat next to the main monitor board from which an operator could manually
oversee all internal barn functions. The telltales there were bright red also.
 A few taps failed to bring the system on-line. Machinery began to hum, then balked. Frustrated, he