The end of Year Two on the Ecological1 Base in the Eighteenth System arrived and went by without Barney's being immediately aware of the fact. Some two hours later, he glanced at his wrist watch, pushed back the chair, got up from the desk and went over to the big grandfather clock to confirm his surmise2.
"Well, well, Brother Chard," he said aloud. "Another anniversary ... and three of them to go. We're almost at the halfway3 mark—"
He snapped the cover plate back over the multiple clock faces, and turned away. Three more years on the Ecological Base was a gruesome stretch of time when you thought of it as a whole....
Which was precisely4 why he rarely let himself think of it as a whole nowadays.
This last year, at any rate, Barney conceded to himself, had to be regarded as an improvement on the first. Well, he added irritably5, and what wouldn't be? It hadn't been delightful6, he'd frequently felt almost stupefied with boredom7. But physically8, at least, he was fit—considerably9 fitter, as a matter of fact, than he'd ever been in his life.
Not very surprising. When he got too restless to be able to settle down to anything else, he was walking about the valley, moving along at his best clip regardless of obstacles until he was ready to drop to the ground wherever he was. Exertion10 ate up restlessness eventually—for a while. Selecting another tree to chop into firewood took the edge off the spasms12 of rage that tended to come up if he started thinking too long about that association of jerks somewhere beyond the sun. Brother Chard was putting on muscle all over. And after convincing himself at last—after all, the animals weren't getting hurt—that the glaring diamond of fire in the daytime sky couldn't really be harmful, he had also rapidly put on a Palm Beach tan. When his carefully rationed13 sleep periods eventually came around, he was more than ready for them, and slept like a log.
Otherwise: projects. Projects to beat boredom, and never mind how much sense they made in themselves. None of them did. But after the first month or two he had so much going that there was no question any more of not having something to do. Two hours allotted14 to work out on the typewriter a critical evaluation15 of a chapter from one of McAllen's abstruse16 technical texts. If Barney's mood was sufficiently17 sour, the evaluation would be unprintable; but it wasn't being printed, and two hours had been disposed of. A day and a half—Earth Standard Time—to construct an operating dam across the stream. He was turning into an experienced landscape architect; the swimming pool in the floor of the valley beneath the cabin might not have been approved by Carstairs of California, but it was the one project out of which he had even drawn18 some realistic benefit.
Then:
Half an hour to improve his knife-throwing technique.
Fifteen minutes to get the blade of the kitchen knife straightened out afterwards.
Two hours to design a box trap for the capture of one of the fat gray squirrels that always hung about the cabin.
Fifty minutes on a new chess problem. Chess, Barney had discovered, wasn't as hairy as it looked.
Five hours to devise one more completely foolproof method of bringing about the eventual11 ruin of the association. That made no more practical sense than anything else he was doing—and couldn't, until he knew a great deal more about McAllen's friends than he did now.
But it was considerably more absorbing, say, than even chess.
Brother Chard could beat boredom. He could probably beat another three years of boredom.
He hadn't forgiven anyone for making him do it.
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1 ecological | |
adj.生态的,生态学的 | |
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2 surmise | |
v./n.猜想,推测 | |
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3 halfway | |
adj.中途的,不彻底的,部分的;adv.半路地,在中途,在半途 | |
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4 precisely | |
adv.恰好,正好,精确地,细致地 | |
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5 irritably | |
ad.易生气地 | |
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6 delightful | |
adj.令人高兴的,使人快乐的 | |
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7 boredom | |
n.厌烦,厌倦,乏味,无聊 | |
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8 physically | |
adj.物质上,体格上,身体上,按自然规律 | |
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9 considerably | |
adv.极大地;相当大地;在很大程度上 | |
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10 exertion | |
n.尽力,努力 | |
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11 eventual | |
adj.最后的,结局的,最终的 | |
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12 spasms | |
n.痉挛( spasm的名词复数 );抽搐;(能量、行为等的)突发;发作 | |
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13 rationed | |
限量供应,配给供应( ration的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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14 allotted | |
分配,拨给,摊派( allot的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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15 evaluation | |
n.估价,评价;赋值 | |
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16 abstruse | |
adj.深奥的,难解的 | |
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17 sufficiently | |
adv.足够地,充分地 | |
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18 drawn | |
v.拖,拉,拔出;adj.憔悴的,紧张的 | |
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