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

unusually foul mood before returning home to inflict his misery on his patient and long-suffering wife who
was having an affair of some passion with a local refurbisher of household appliances and was therefore
even less tolerant of her mate's irritating peccadilloes than usual. During the ensuing row, the nagging
emptiness in the pit of his stomach was subsumed by haranguing of a more spectacular nature.
Meanwhile the certain cheese sandwich remained behind, its forthcoming ominous intervention in
human affairs assured.
The O-daiko did not rest. The vast manufacturing facility of which it was the heart and, if it could be
called such, the soul, was shut down once a week for an interval of not more than five hours and not less
than three, for regular maintenance. But not the O-daiko. It functioned around the clock.
Except for that brief period the plant, perhaps the most significant facility of its kind on Shintaro,
operated three consecutive shifts. It was truly a facility to be proud of, and those citizens of Shintaro (a
member of the Keiretsu Commercial League) who kept it running smoothly considered themselves
fortunate to be a part of its operation.
Tunbrew Wah-chang's night-shift counterpart did not bother to check his day-shift colleague's work.
They had separate assignments, different itineraries. Furthermore, as Wah-chang was the senior of the
two in work experience, it would have been presumptuous of his replacement to seek error in his
counterpart's work, not to mention wasteful and time-consuming. Wah-chang was a superlative
technician. When he reintegrated a process, it stayed reintegrated.
The presence of the cheese sandwich (self-toasting), however, had not been factored into even the
most extreme equations, and therefore the consequences could not have been predicted. Wah-chang's
replacement could hardly be blamed for a failure to foresee the impossible.
Even so, those effects would have been minimal save for the unique sequence of events which
occurred. Those included (but were not limited to) the specific three varieties of cheese (i.e., Cheddar,
momatsui, and baby Swiss), which when taken as a tripartite unit were of just the right consistency to
melt at just the right rate to precipitate the crisis.
Had the sandwich been left in a less critical region, say, the tech supervisors' lunchroom, it would not
only have been noticed immediately but, because such rooms were contamination-sealed against the
escape of far smaller impurities, would have been rendered harmless in its oozing.
Tunbrew Wah-chang, however, relishing his privacy, was fond of eating his lunches in less crowded
venues such as the service tunnels. Not only did he find therein a reassuring paucity of the turgid
testosteronic prose which so often dominated conversation in the company lunchroom, it was usually
cooler in the tunnels. It was also strictly against corporate policy, not to mention sensible repair practice,
but as a senior technician his movements within the plant were not questioned. The solace and solitude he
thus found suited his nature. Also, he did not have to endure the snide remarks and sideways smirks of
his colleagues, some of whom were certain his wife was having an affair.
So for weeks he had been carrying his midday meal into the depths of the facility, enjoying it in private
and doing no one and no thing any harm. If only the emergency service call hadn't made him forget the
sandwich.
When it had come through on his belt communicator, he'd been sitting in the tunnel atop the O-daiko
optical circuitry nexus, squatting comfortably above several hundred million credits' worth of critical
instrumentation. Disgusted and angry at having his quiet time interrupted, he'd gathered up his food but
overlooked the sandwich. Its proximity to vital instrumentation, therefore, was greater than if it had been
left just about anywhere else in the plant, or for that matter, on Shintaro.
At the start of the lunch break the bioengineered heat-generating bacteria inherent in the sandwich had
been activated by unwrapping and exposure to the air, with the result that as the bread lightly toasted
itself, the cheese began to melt. A small portion (probably the momatsui but possibly the Cheddar) oozed
out between the layers of wheat-nut bread and spilled over the side, to impact on a service hatch which
protected the highly sensitive circuitry beneath the tunnel floor. Normally this, too, would not have caused
any upset. Except that this particular hatch cover contained a small hole which had gone without repair
for some years. Ordinarily that would not have mattered, as the tunnels themselves were effectively