"Eric Frank Russell - Mechanical Mice2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

It was a stunner. The thing was a metal box with a glossy, rhodium-plated surface. In general
size and shape it bore a faint resemblance to an upended coffin, and had the same
brooding, ominous air of a casket waiting for its owner to give up the ghost.
There were a couple of small glass windows in its front through which could be seen a
multitude of wheels as beauti┬мfully finished as those in a first-class watch. Elsewhere,
several tiny lenses stared with sphinx-like indifference. There were three small trapdoors in
one side, two in the other, and a large one in the front. From the top, two knobbed rods of
metal stuck up like goat's horns, adding a satanic touch to the thing's vague air of yearning
for midnight burial.
"It's an automatic layer-outer," I suggested, regarding the contraption with frank dislike. I
pointed to one of the trapdoors. "You shove the shroud in there, and the corpse comes out
the other side reverently composed and ready wrapped."
"So you don't like its air, either," Burman commented. He lugged open a drawer in a nearby
tier, hauled out a mass of drawings. "These are its innards. It has an electric circuit, valves,
condensers, and something that I can't quite understand, but which I suspect to be a tiny,
extremely efficient electric furnace. It has parts I recognize as cog-cutters and
pinion-shapers. It embodies several small-scale multiple stampers, apparently for dealing
with sheet metal. There are vague suggestions of an assembly line ending in that large
compartment shielded by the door in front. Have a look at the drawings yourself. You can
see it's an extremely complicated device for manufacturing something only little less
complicated."
The drawings showed him to be right. But they didn't show everything. An efficient machine
designer could correctly have deduced the gadget's function if given complete details.
Burman admitted this, saying that, some parts he had made "on the spur of the moment,"
while others he had been "im┬мpelled to draw." Short of pulling the machine to pieces, there
was enough data to whet the curiosity, but not enough to sat┬мisfy it.
"Start the damn thing and see what it does."
"I've tried," said Burman. "It won't start. There's no start┬мing handle, nothing to suggest how it
can be started. I tried everything I could think of, without result. The electric cir┬мcuit ends in
those antennae at the top, and I even sent current through those, but nothing happened."
"Maybe it's a self-starter," I ventured. Staring at it, a thought struck me. "Timed," I added.
"Eh?"
"Set for an especial time. When the dread hour strikes, it'll go of its own accord, like a
bomb."
"Don't be so melodramatic," said Burman, uneasily.
Bending down, he peered into one of the tiny lenses.
"Bz-z-z!" murmured the contraption in a faint undertone that was almost inaudible.
Burman jumped a foot. Then he backed away, eyed the thing warily, turned his glance at me.
"Did you hear that?"
"Sure!" Getting the drawings, I mauled them around. That little lens took some finding, but it
was there all right. It has a selenium cell behind it. "An eye," I said. "It saw you, and reacted.
So it isn't dead even if it does just stand there seeing no evil, hearing no evil, speaking no
evil." I put a white handkerchief against the lens.
"Bz-z-z!" repeated the coffin, emphatically.
Taking the handkerchief, Burman put it against the other lenses. Nothing happened. Not a
sound was heard, not a fu┬мneral note. Just nothing.
"It beats me," he confessed.
I'd got pretty fed up by this time. If the crazy article had performed, I'd have written it up and
maybe I'd have started another financial snowball rolling for Burman's benefit. But you can't