"Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Iroquois River, and beyond - to Homestead, where many of the pioneer names still lived: van
Zandt, Cooper, Cortland, Stokes . . .
"Doctor Proteus?" It was Katharine again.
"Yes, Katharine."
"It's on again."
"Three in Building 58?"
"Yessir - the light's on again."
"All right - call Doctor Shepherd and find out what he's doing about it."
"He's sick today. Remember?"
"Then it's up to me, I guess." He put on his coat, sighed with ennui, picked up the cat, and
walked into Katharine's office. "Don't get up, don't get up," he said to Bud, who was stretched out
on a couch.
"Who was gonna get up?" said Bud.
Three walls of the room were solid with meters from baseboard to molding, unbroken save for
the doors leading into the outer hall and into Paul's office. The fourth wall, as in Paul's office,
was a single pane of glass. The meters were identical, the size of cigarette packages, and stacked
like masonry, each labeled with a bright brass plate. Each was connected to a group of machines
somewhere in the Works. A glowing red jewel called attention to the seventh meter from the
bottom, fifth row to the left, on the east wall.
Paul tapped the meter with his finger. "Uh-huh - here we go again: number three in 58 getting
rejects, all right." He glanced over the rest of the instruments. "Guess that's all, eh?"
"Just that one."
"Whatch goin' do with thet cat?" said Bud.
Paul snapped his fingers. "Say, I'm glad you asked that. I have a project for you, Bud. I want
some sort of signaling device that will tell this cat where she can find a mouse."
"Electronic?"
"I should hope so."
"You'd need some kind of sensin' element thet could smell a mouse."
"Or a rat. I want you to work on it while I'm gone."
As Paul walked out to his car in the pale March sunlight, he realized that Bud Calhoun would
have a mouse alarm designed - one a cat could understand - by the time he got back to the office.
Paul sometimes wondered if he wouldn't have been more content in another period of history, but
the rightness of Bud's being alive now was beyond question. Bud's mentality was one that had
been remarked upon as being peculiarly American since the nation had been born - the restless,
erratic insight and imagination of a gadgeteer. This was the climax, or close to it, of generations
of Bud Calhouns, with almost all of American industry integrated into one stupendous Rube
Goldberg machine.
Paul stopped by Bud's car, which was parked next to his. Bud had shown off its special
features to him several times, and, playfully, Paul put it through its paces. "Let's go," he said to
the car.
A whir and a click, and the door flew open. "Hop in," said a tape recording under the
dashboard. The starter spun, the engine caught and idled down, and the radio went on.
Gingerly, Paul pressed a button on the steering column. A motor purred, gears grumbled softly,
and the two front seats lay down side by side like sleepy lovers. It struck Paul as shockingly like
an operating table for horses he had once seen in a veterinary hospital - where the horse was
walked alongside the tipped table, lashed to it, anesthetized, and then toppled into operating
position by the gear-driven table top. He could see Katharine Finch sinking, sinking, sinking, as
Bud, his hand on the button, crooned. Paul raised the seats with another button. "Goodbye," he
said to the car.
The motor stopped, the radio winked off, and the door slammed. "Don't take any wooden