"Thomas A. Easton - When life hands you a Lemming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

When Life Hands You a Lemming...
by Tom Easton
_Analog,_ May 1989

The image boys in executive row weren't too pleased when I drove my antique Escort to work. Within
an hour the Vice-President in Charge of Making Grown Men Feel Like Little Boys had me on her
carpet, and if she wasn't shaking her finger at me, she might as well have been. My uncle Brian would
have called her a motherly old cow.

She looked the part, too, as she said: "You know the company policy, Cal. Machines scare the beasts,
they look out of place next to the haybins and hitching posts, and we're selling Roachsters to replace
cars. We expect our employees to drive them, _not_ automobiles, antique or not."

I nodded. General Bodies was a genetic engineering shop, and the Roachster was its biggest product. I
knew the policy.

"You usually do drive a Roachster, Cal. Why didn't you today?"

"Archie ran away," I said. Archie was my Roachster. I had named him because I liked him better than I
had ever liked an automobile--even the Escort--though he _was_ an ugly thing. He was cheap, safe,
and--until now--reliable. And he had personality.

A Roachster was a cross between a lobster and a cockroach. Its cockroach ancestry gave it speed. Its
lobster ancestry gave it enough size so a little gene-tinkering had made it grow to about twenty feet long.
Bulges in the shell were passenger and luggage compartments once GB cut door and window holes. The
controls plugged directly into its nervous system. Its wheels were more bulges; they spun on built-in hubs
and were powered by the creature's legs, running on top of them. It ate garbage and hay, which were a
lot cheaper than gasoline. And when two of them got too close on the highway, they would stop to
stroke each other with their feelers. Collisions were impossible.

"Oh, God," she said. Her censuring mood evaporated. Now she was the worried business executive.
"You think it went into the sea too?"

I shrugged. That was where too many of the things had been going ever since we had put them on the
market six years before, though only in the last year or so had the problem gotten bad. We had failed to
remove some basic urge from the Roachster's lobster genes, and on dark nights they would chew through
their tethers and the walls of their stables and leave. They had been seen cruising the highways until they
caught the scent of the ocean. Then they left the road and rolled cross-country to dive into the foaming
brine. None had ever been seen again. And sales were down.

"We need to drop everything else," she said quietly, as if she were thinking aloud. "And find an answer to
this. I'm sure the Committee will agree." She looked me in the eye and raised her voice. "I'll take it up
with them later today. For now, Cal, that's your new assignment. Focus on this, this 'lemming effect.' And
solve it." She gave me a big grin, proud of having named the problem, as if that was half the solution. She
didn't know that we had been using the same term in the shop for the past six months.

In my office-lab a few minutes later, I cut up a potato and dropped the chunks down the sink drain.
There was an aggressive crunch, a gurgle or two, and a bubbling noise. I told myself that we needed to
make the pig a little quieter, though the old mechanical models had never been famous for silence.
I opened the cabinet under the sink and peered at the barrel-like body covered with short bristles. Small