"Oi Diddle Diddle!" , uma novela de Robert Silverberg ; publicado pela primeira vez (como por "Calvin M. Knox") em Astounding Science Fiction , Fevereiro de 1959 , disponível no Internet Archive . A história foi reimpressa na coleção de 1975 de Silverberg, Sunrise on Mercury e outras histórias de ficção científica , e em duas antologias de 1969 editadas por Harry Harrison , a saber Blast Off e Mundos da Maravilha . Se você leu no Reino Unido, eu acho que Blast Off é o lugar mais provável.
He saw by the sly looks on their faces that they were completely hooked. There hadn’t been a really good gag at Lunar Base Three in a couple of months, not since a computer man had programmed one of the heavy-duty robot drudges to give hotfoots. Mason could hardly wait until the first quart of milk came from the synthetic cow.
[. . . .]
Maury Roberts and Nat Bryan stuffed the waste-paper bale onto the intake platform, while Sam Brewster’s hand hovered over the electronic keyboard that controlled the entire operation. He thumbed a switch. The machine hummed. The bale of paper moved ponderously forward, into the jaws of the shredders.
From there the shredded cellulose proceeded to the first stomach to be mangled and pulped into a soggy semiliquid; then on to the second stomach for further breaking-down, then to the wringer in the third stomach, then to the fourth, where digestion proper could begin. Translucent feed lines spurted enzymes into the system at the properly programmed intervals. Counters clicked; gears meshed. The effect was imposing.
According to Mason’s computations, the process, vastly accelerated over its natural counterpart, would take about three hours from waste-paper to milk. The time was 0540 hours when the first few drops of yield came filtering through the udder. At 0650, after Maury Roberts had run some quick chemical tests and after the yield had been refrigerated, the six bleary-eyed experimenters gravely toasted each other with milk that was milk to the last decimal point.