"Mel Gilden - Zoot Marlow 2 - Hawaiian UFO Aliens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilden Mel)

Before Cliffy could explode in his face, a second car arrived, this one driven by a tweedy guy wearing
thick glasses. He spoke with Cliffy and Robinson, all the while looking at the top hat and licking his lips.
Robinson helped the tweedy guy unload all kinds of electronic equipment from the trunk and back seat of
his car.
'What's happening, dude?' Thumper said to me. 'They're going to take its temperature.' As if it were
some kind of show, we watched the tweedy guy point things at the top hat, and touch it with probes. He
took readings and made notes. After a while, he got around to throwing sand at the thing, just like
everybody else. Cliffy and Robinson watched him impatiently. Cliffy spent a lot of time on the two-way
radio in his car.
While the tweedy guy was throwing his fourth or fifth handful of sand, loud, mechanical roaring came
at us from across the beach. Big yellow machines were coming our way.
The machines were driven by robots. Surfing Samurai Robots if the trademark rags around their
foreheads meant anything. SSR was the biggest manufacturer of robots in the world. Their advertising
claimed that each of their robots had the agility of a surfer and the loyalty of a samurai. In my experience
it was true. Unthinking manufactured loyalty was one of the things that finally tripped up Heavenly, the
daughter of Knighten Daise, the man who owned SSR.
Surfbots designed by SSR were slick, muscular things that had a rakish grace designed into them. The
robots driving the machines approaching now were big, industrial jobbers with arms like pistons and
heads like toasters. They looked about right for this gig.
'All right, folks, back off, back off,' said Robinson. This time he had help from the slow advance of
the big machines and everybody cooperated. Cliffy and Robinson got into their car, and looked about
ready to leave.
'Howdy, boys,' Bill said to the workbots.
The workbots were not quick, but I guess they were programmed to have some basic social skills
because they waved hands the size of garbage can lids and grunted, 'Howdy,' back to him without being
very excited about the introduction. After that, Bill watched them closely as they worked, but didn't try
communicating again.
Under the tweedy guy's direction, a bulldozer tried to big deep enough to get under the hat. The
bulldozer's engine made a lot of very impressive, powerful growls, but the blade kept slipping. Evidently
the big robot driving the rig had the same problem Thumper and Mustard had had earlier. The force wall
seemed to go to the centre of the earth. Then a crane, shrieking laboriously, tried to lift the hat, but there
was nothing to hook onto, or to catch a rope around.
Under the tweedy guy's direction, the robots tried a few more things, none of them very successful.
After a while, the uniformed cop drove Cliffy and Robinson back the way they'd come, leaving long,
delicate waffle tracks in the sand.
The tweedy guy talked things over with the workbots, which must have been like talking things over
with your refrigerator. People straggled away. Pretty soon, I straggled away myself.



CHAPTER 4
A FIST FULL OF RABBIT
┬л^┬╗
The house smelled funny when I walked into the kitchen. The stench was subtle enough at the moment,
but I had the feeling that under the right conditions, it could grow to be a ripe old monster, with fangs and
particularly with hair. It was an acrid odour that reminded me in an unpleasant way of the laboratory
where Heavenly Daise kept her experimental animals.
In the living room somebody was singing a simple melody over and over again. But he was singing it
fast and breathlessly, singing it as if it mattered. Down at the beach's high tide line, optimistic heavy
machinery was making animal noises from the dawn of time.