"(Brian Plante - Moondance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plante Brian)

MOONDANCE
by Brian Plante

JERRY NOONAN NOTICED the damage to his robot immediately at the start of the
shift. In his RC rig at home in New Jersey, he raised and lowered his arm,
but on the Moon the corresponding manipulator flopped about uselessly. It
also hurt like hell, and he had to turn down the feedback circuit until the
arm felt nearly dead. Some sort of accident had left its metal skin deformed,
and the servo motors were responding erratically. The bastard on the previous
shift had messed him up good.

The job of raising and joining the huge cables that would support the dome
over the Huygens crater was grueling work, and Jerry was damn well not going
to work an entire shift with a bum manipulator arm. He radioed the problem in
to his unit chief and was given permission to take his robot over to the
repair shop. Better to spend a few hours in the shop getting a new arm than
struggling with the thing for a whole shift. Damage among the robots was not
uncommon in a job like the doming of Huy gens crater, and Jerry had been to
the repair shop a few times before, but this time he met Audrey.

"Aww, did the big burly cable-hauler hurt his poor little paw?" a feminine
voice from the inverted funnelshaped repair robot spoke into his earpiece.

Swell, Jerry thought. A lady robot mechanic.

"It was like this when my shift started," he said.

The repair meth circled once around Jerry's barrelshaped body, looking over
the damage before cradling his broken manipulator in its own metal arms.
Jerry could not tell how many legs this meth had under the round bumper
"skirt" of its body, but he noticed how the meth wiggled from side to side
as it moved, a most unusual gait for a robot. It was an incongruously
feminine walls.

"Wow, you really did a number on this arm," the meth said.

"I said I didn't do it," he responded. Even though she handled his manipulator
gently; Jerry pulled away sharply, as if he were hurt. With the transmission
lag, his robot did not mirror the more for another second and a quarter, but
all the lunar robot operators were used to dealing with the time delay. "The
operator before me left it like this. If I could work around it, Id leave it
like it is, so the bastard would have to deal with it on his own shift."

The mech moved forward to scoop up the broken manipulator again, this time a
bit more forcefully, making Jerry wince with pain back home in his RC unit.

"Hey, I just fix them," the meth said. "Nothing personal, okay, buddy?"

"Jerryy. My name is Jerry Noonan."