Читать книгу The Case of the Monster Fire - John R. Erickson - Страница 7

Chapter Two: A Robot on the Porch!

Okay, I had been up most of the night working on reports. Drover was sprawled across the floor like spilled milk, sleeping his life away. Slim had managed to build a cup of coffee without blowing up the kitchen and had chunked up the fire in the wood stove, and now he was sitting in his big easy chair, like a king in his castle, with a loyal dog at his feet. But then…

Suddenly Earoscanners began picking up something outside the house. I made adjustments on the antennas until we were getting a clear signal. Data Control chewed on that and sent the alert:

“Tires on gravel, possible intrusion of unidentified vehicle, activate Warning System and prepare to launch!”

We don’t get much time to respond to these Morning Intrusions, and we never know who it might be. It doesn’t matter. We have to give a professional response, ready or not, and that’s what I did. The instant DC’s message flashed across the screen, I went into Stage One Barking. It’s wired into the system, don’t you see. It’s automatic, and loud.

WOOF!

Slim had just taken a slurp of coffee, and my woof goosed him so much, he spilled hot coffee on his shirt, shorts, and naked legs.

“Ow! Moron!” He flew out of the chair, spilling more coffee on the threadbare carpet, and glared at me like…I don’t know what, and screeched, “What’s wrong with you!”

What was wrong with me was that I was a highly-trained professional cowdog in charge of First Response Security. An unidentified vehicle had just entered our airspace. We’d picked it up on Earoscanners and were tracking its every movement. Data Control had sent down a Stage One Alert and was assembling the Firing Data.

That’s what was wrong with me.

“Meathead! You scalded my legs!”

Oh brother. I didn’t scald his legs. He scalded his own skinny legs with his own coffee, and if he’d been wearing pants instead of sitting around half-naked, he wouldn’t have scalded anything.

Oh, and did we have time for this silly discussion? An intruder, possibly an enemy agent, was creeping up on the house!

I can’t be blamed for the lack of discipline on this ranch. We should have been scrambling jets and launching dogs. We should have been into Stage Two or Stage Three Barking. We should have been doing SOMETHING to defend his house and my ranch from Enemy Intrudement. Instead, he was yelling at the Head of Security and calling him a meathead.

In many ways, this is a lousy job. They don’t pay us enough to put up with this. Oh well.

So there we were, carrying on a silly conversation in the midst of a crisis, but things kind of took care of themselves. By that time, Slim could hear the sound of tires crunching gravel outside. His eyes grew wide and he muttered, “Good honk, somebody just pulled up!”

Duh.

He rushed to the front window and peeked through the dusty, barf-colored curtains that had been there since the Civil War. “Oh great!”

Apparently it wasn’t good news, because he was transformed into some kind of wild man. Maybe he didn’t want to fight the intruder in his undershorts.

Wait, that doesn’t sound right. I didn’t mean to say that the intruder was showing up in his undershorts. That would be ridiculous. Intruders don’t do that. I meant to say that Slim…let’s just skip it.

As we’ve discussed before, Slim is usually not a ball of flames first thing in the morning. Sometimes we need to check his pulse to be sure he isn’t a corpse. Remember that only minutes before, I had mistaken him for a mummy.

Give him two cups of coffee and thirty minutes of solitude, staring at flies on the wall, and he’ll come around, but this deal had wrecked his train. He became an explosion of arms, legs, and desperate expressions.

He made a dash down the dark hallway and vanished into his bedroom. There, he tripped over the boots he’d left in the middle of the floor. I didn’t see this with my own eyes but heard it, and knew the story: He never puts a boot into the closet if he can leave it in the middle of the floor.

Then I heard him say, “What in the cat hair is that old man doing over here at this hour of the morning?”

Who?

Bam Bam Bam!

Yipes, somebody was banging on the door! Well, we’d gotten an Alert from DC and our procedures were very clear: Make no assumptions about intruders until we see some ID and clear them through Security. As far as I was concerned, we had come under attack.

I went straight into Sirens and Lights. “On your feet, Drover, battle stations, Red Alert, we’ve got Charlies on the porch!”

You know, I get a kick out of waking him up. Hee hee. I mean, he started running before he got his eyes open, before his feet even hit the floor, and all four legs were pumping air.

“Help, murder, mayday, Charlies on the porch!”

“On your feet, soldier, and load up Number Three Warning Barks!”

He finally scrambled to his feet, got traction, and ran smooth into the coffee table. Down he went. “Help, they got me! Dog down! Oh my leg!”

There was more banging on the door, then a booming voice. “Slim? You in there?”

That raised the hair along my backbone, I mean, no more laughing at Stubtail. We’re talking about a deep, snickister voice that didn’t even sound human!

“Drover, the Charlies must have sent some kind of robot probe to break down the door!”

“Help!”

“The only thing between us and destruction is us!”

“Help!”

“Take weapons and ammo and three of your best men, and crawl to the door!”

“I don’t have three men.”

“Perfect. You’ll be harder to see.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Move out and set up a firing position.”

“Yeah, but…”

“If they bust through the door, let ‘em have it, give ‘em the full load. Any questions?”

“This leg’s killing me!”

“That’s not a question and nobody cares. On your feet, let’s get this job done and go home.”

“Can we go home first?”

“Negatory. Boots on the floor!”

“Hank, you might have to help me up. This old leg’s really giving me fits.”

Oh brother. “Okay, stand by for Assisted Lift.” Using my nose and enormous neck muscles as a prying device, I managed to get his front end off the floor, then went to work lifting his bohunkus. “Okay, trooper, that’s four on the floor. Get out there and unload some ordinance!”

“How ‘bout you?”

“Fine, thanks. Go git ‘em!”

He took two steps toward the door, stopped, glanced back at me, and…you won’t believe this. Drover is such a little chicken liver! I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

You know, my biggest problem in this job is that I’m a foolish optimist. I keep hoping to see progress in the men, a little sign that says I’m not wasting my life. I place too much faith in my fellow dogs and my heart gets broken every day. I keep hoping I can turn their lives around, but they keep turning mine around and upside-down and backwards.

I should have known he would weenie out of this mission. Do you know why? Because he’d done it a thousand times before, that’s why.

Okay, let’s get this sad situation out of the way. The King of Slackers marched two steps toward his combat assignment, cut a hard right turn, and went streaking down the hall to Slim’s bedroom, where he vanished. I didn’t see him slither under the bed, but I knew he did.

This was so predictable and so sad. You give your men a chance to prove themselves and this is what you get. Now, I would have to convene a court-martial and he would have to stand with his nose in the…

BAM BAM BAM!

“Slim, get out of bed!”

Holy smokes, we had problems bigger than Drover. Had you forgotten the intruder? If you don’t start paying attention, we’re going to drop you from the next assignment. One Drover on this team is all we can stand.