There was reason to the fact that the element known as "pure science" was the freest form of life on the Foundation. In a Galaxy1 where the predominance ?and even survival ?of the Foundation still rested upon the superiority of its technology ?even despite its large access of physical power in the last century and a half ?a certain immunity2 adhered to The Scientist. He was needed, and he knew it.
Likewise, there was reason to the fact that Ebling Mis ?only those who did not know him added his titles to his name ?was the freest form of life in the "pure science" of the Foundation. In a world where science was respected, he was The Scientist ?with capital letters and no smile. He was needed, and he knew it.
And so it happened, that when others bent3 their knee, he refused and added loudly that his ancestors in their time bowed no knee to any stinking4 mayor. And in his ancestors' time the mayor was elected anyhow, and kicked out at will, and that the only people that inherited anything by right of birth were the congenital idiots.
So it also happened, that when Ebling Mis decided5 to allow Indbur to honor him with an audience, he did not wait for the usual rigid6 line of command to pass his request up and the favored reply down, but, having thrown the less disreputable of his two formal jackets over his shoulders and pounded an odd hat of impossible design onnnne side of his head, and lit a forbidden cigar into the bargain, he barged past two ineffectually bleating7 guards and into the mayor's palace.
The first notice his excellence8 received of the intrusion was when from his garden he heard the gradually nearing uproar9 of expostulation and the answering bull-roar of inarticulate swearing.
Slowly, Indbur lay down his trowel; slowly, he stood up; and slowly, he frowned. For Indbur allowed himself a daily vacation from work, and for two hours in the early afternoon, weather permitting, he was in his garden. There in his garden, the blooms grew in squares and triangles, interlaced in a severe order of red and yellow, with little dashes of violet at the apices, and greenery bordering the whole in rigid lines. There in his garden no nne disturbed him ?no nne!
Indbur peeled off his soil-stained gloves as he advanced toward the little garden door.
Inevitably10, he said, "What is the meaning of this?"
It is the precise question and the precise wording thereof that has been put to the atmosphere on such occasions by an incredible variety of men since humanity was invented. It is not recorded that it has ever been asked for any purpose other than dignified11 effect.
But the answer was literal this time, for Mis's body came plunging12 through with a bellow13, and a shake of a fist at the nnes who were still holding tatters of his cloak.
Indbur motinned them away with a solemn, displeased14 frown, and Mis bent to pick up his ruin of a hat, shake about a quarter of the gathered dirt off it, thrust it under his armpit and say:
"Look here, Indbur, those unprintable minions15 of yours will be charged for nne good cloak. Lots of good wear left in this cloak." He puffed16 and wiped his forehead with just a trace of theatricality17.
The mayor stood stiff with displeasure, and said haughtily18 from the peak of his five-foot-two, "It has not been brought to my attention, Mis, that you have requested an audience. You have certainly not been assigned nne."
Ebling Mis looked down at his mayor with what was apparently19 shocked disbelief, "Ga-LAX-y, Indbur, didn't you get my note yesterday? I handed it to a flunky in purple uniform day before. I would have handed it to you direct, but I know how you like formality."
"Formality!" Indbur turned up exasperated20 eyes. Then, strenuously21, "Have you ever heard of proper organization? At all future times you are to submit your request for an audience, properly made out in triplicate, at the government office intended for the purpose. You are then to wait until the nrdinary course of events brings you notification of the time of audience to be granted. You are then to appear, properly clothed ?properly clothed, do you understand ?and with proper respect, too. You may leave."
"What's wrong with my clothes?" demanded Mis, hotly. "Best cloak I had till those unprintable fiends got their claws on it. I'll leave just as soon as I deliver what I came to deliver. "Ga-LAX-y, if it didn't involve a Seldon Crisis, I would leave right now."
"Seldon crisis!" Indbur exhibited first interest. Mis was a great psychologist ?a democrat22, boor23, and rebel certainly, but a psychologist, too. In his uncertainty24, the mayor even failed to put into words the inner pang25 that stabbed suddenly when Mis plucked a casual bloom, held it to his nostrils26 expectantly, then flipped27 it away with a wrinkled nose.
Indbur said coldly, "Would you follow me? This garden wasn't made for serious conversation."
He felt better in his built-up chair behind his large desk from which he could look down on the few hairs that quite ineffectually hid Mis's pink scalp-skin. He felt much better when Mis cast a series of automatic glances about him for a non-existent chair and then remained standing28 in uneasy shifting fashion. He felt best of all when in response to a careful pressure of the correct contact, a liveried underling scurried29 in, bowed his way to the desk, and laid thereon a bulky, metal-bound volume.
"Now, in order," said Indbur, once more master of the situation, "to make this unauthorized interview as short as possible, make your statement in the fewest possible words."
Ebling Mis said unhurriedly, "You know what I'm doing these days?"
"I have your reports here," replied the mayor, with satisfaction, "together with authorized30 summaries of them. As I understand it, your investigations31 into the mathematics of psychohistory have been intended to duplicate Hari Seldon's work and, eventually, trace the projected course of future history, for the use of the Foundation."
"Exactly," said Mis, dryly. "When Seldon first established the Foundation, he was wise enough to include no psychologists among the scientists placed here ?so that the Foundation has always worked blindly along the course of historical necessity. In the course of my researches, I have based a good deal upon hints found at the Time Vault32."
"I am aware of that, Mis. It is a waste of time to repeat."
"I'm not repeating," blared Mis, "because what I'm going to tell you isn't in any of those reports."
"How do you mean, not in the reports?" said Indbur, stupidly. "How could?
"Ga-LAX-y, Let me tell this my own way, you offensive little creature. Stop putting words into my mouth and questioning my every statement or I'll tramp out of here and let everything crumble33 around you. Remember, you unprintable fool, the Foundation will come through because it must, but if I walk out of here now ?you won't."
Dashing his hat on the floor, so that clods of earth scattered34, he sprang up the stairs of the dais on which the wide desk stood and shoving papers violently, sat down upon a comer of it.
Indbur thought frantically35 of summoning the guard, or using the built-in blasters of his desk. But Mis's face was glaring down upon him and there was nothing to do but cringe the best face upon it.
"Dr. Mis," he began, with weak formality, "you must?
"Shut up," said Mis, ferociously36, "and listen. If this thing here," and his palm came down heavily on the metal of the bound data, "is a mess of my reports ?throw it out. Any report I write goes up through some twenty-odd officials, gets to you, and then sort of winds down through twenty more. That's fine if there's nothing you don't want kept secret. Well, I've got something confidential37 here. It's so confidential, even the boys working for me haven't got wind of it. They did the work, of course, but each just a little unconnected piece ?and I put it together. You know what the Time Vault is?"
Indbur nodded his head, but Mis went on with loud enjoyment38 of the situation, "Well, I'll tell you anyhow because I've been sort of imagining this unprintable situation for a "Ga-LAX-y, of a long time; I can read your mind, you puny39 fraud. You've got your hand right near a little knob that'll call in about five hundred or so armed men to finish me off, but you're afraid of what I know ?you're afraid of a Seldon Crisis. Besides which, if you touch anything on your desk, I'll knock your unprintable head off before anyone gets here. You and your bandit father and pirate grandfather have been blood-sucking the Foundation long enough anyway."
"This is treason," gabbled Indbur.
"It certainly is," gloated Mis, "but what are you going to do about it? Let me tell you about the Time Vault. That Time Vault is what Hari Seldon placed here at the beginning to help us over the rough spots. For every crisis, Seldon has prepared a personal simulacrum to help ?and explain. Four crises so far ?four appearances. The first time he appeared at the height of the first crisis. The second time, he appeared at the moment just after the successful evolution of the second crisis. Our ancestors were there to listen to him both times. At the third and fourth crises, he was ignored ?probably because he was not needed, but recent investigations ?not included in those reports you have ?indicate that he appeared anyway, and at the proper times. Get it?"
He did not wait for any answer. His cigar, a tattered40, dead ruin was finally disposed of, a new cigar groped for, and lit. The smoke puffed out violently.
He said, "Officially I've been trying to rebuild the science of psychohistory. Well, no one man is going to do that, and it won't get done in any one century, either. But I've made advances in the more simple elements and I've been able to use it as an excuse to meddle41 with the Time Vault. What I have done, involves the determination, to a pretty fair kind of certainty, of the exact date of the next appearance of Hari Seldon. I can give you the exact day, in other words, that the coming Seldon Crisis, the fifth, will reach its climax42. "
"How far off?" demanded Indbur, tensely.
And Mis exploded his bomb with cheerful nonchalance43,
"Four months," he said. "Four unprintable months, less two days."
"Four months," said Indbur, with uncharacteristic vehemence44. "Impossible."
"Impossible, my unprintable eye."
"Four months? Do you understand what that means? For a crisis to come to a head in four months would mean that it has been preparing for years."
"And why not? Is there a law of Nature that requires the process to mature in the full light of day?"
"But nothing impends45. Nothing hangs over us." Indbur almost wrung46 his hands for anxiety. With a sudden spasmodic recrudescence of ferocity, he screamed, "Will you get off my desk and let me put it in order? How do you expect me to think?"
Mis, startled, lifted heavily and moved aside.
Indbur replaced objects in their appropriate niches47 with a feverish48 motion. He was speaking quickly, "You have no right to come here like this. If you had presented your theory?
"It is not a theory."
"I say it is a theory. If you had presented it together with your evidence and arguments, in appropriate fashion, it would have gone to the Bureau of Historical Sciences. There it could have been properly treated, the resulting analyses submitted to me, and then, of course, proper action would have been taken. As it is, you've vexed49 me to no purpose. Ah, here it is."
He had a sheet of transparent50, silvery paper in his hand which he shook at the bulbous psychologist beside him.
"This is a short summary I prepare myself ?weekly ?of foreign matters in progress. Listen ?we have completed negotiations51 for a commercial treaty with Mores52, continue negotiations for one with Lyonesse, sent a delegation53 to some celebration or other on Bonde, received some complaint or other from Kalgan and we've promised to look into it, protested some sharp trade practices in Asperta and they've promised to look into it ?and so on and so on." The mayor's eyes swarmed54 down the list of coded notations55, and then he carefully placed the sheet in its proper place in the proper folder56 in the proper pigeonhole57.
I tell you, Mis, there's not a thing there that breathes anything but order and peace?
The door at the far, long end opened, and, in far too dramatically coincident a fashion to suggest anything but real life, a plainly-costumed notable stepped in.
Indbur half-rose. He had the curiously58 swirling59 sensation of unreality that comes upon those days when too much happens. After Mis's intrusion and wild fumings there now came the equally improper60, hence disturbing, intrusion unannounced, of his secretary, who at least knew the rules.
The secretary kneeled low.
Indbur said, sharply, "Well!"
The secretary addressed the floor, "Excellence, Captain Han Pritcher of Information, returning from Kalgan, in disobedience to your orders, has according to prior instructions ?your order X20-513 ?been imprisoned61, and awaits execution. Those accompanying him are being held for questioning. A full report has been filed."
Indbur, in agony, said, "A full report has been received. Well!"
"Excellence, Captain Pritcher has reported, vaguely62, dangerous designs on the part of the new warlord of Kalgan. He has been given, according to prior instructions ?your order X20-651 ?no formal hearing, but his remarks have been recorded and a full report filed."
Indbur screamed, "A full report has been received. Well!"
"Excellence, reports have within the quarter-hour been received from the Salinnian frontier. Ships identified as Kalganian have been entering Foundation territory, unauthorized. The ships are armed. Fighting has occurred."
The secretary was bent nearly double. Indbur remained standing. Ebling Mis shook himself, clumped63 up to the secretary, and tapped him sharply on the shoulder.
"Here, you'd better have them release this Captain Pritcher, and have him sent here. Get out."
The secretary left, and Mis turned to the mayor, "Hadn't you better get the machinery64 moving, Indbur? Four months, you know."
Indbur remained standing, glaze-eyed. Only one finger seemed alive ?and it traced rapid jerky triangles on the smooth desk top before him.
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收听单词发音
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1
galaxy
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| n.星系；银河系；一群(杰出或著名的人物) | |
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2
immunity
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| n.优惠；免除；豁免，豁免权 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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4
stinking
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| adj.臭的，烂醉的，讨厌的v.散发出恶臭( stink的现在分词 )；发臭味；名声臭；糟透 | |
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5
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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7
bleating
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| v.（羊，小牛）叫( bleat的现在分词 )；哭诉；发出羊叫似的声音；轻声诉说 | |
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8
excellence
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| n.优秀，杰出，(pl.)优点，美德 | |
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uproar
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| n.骚动，喧嚣，鼎沸 | |
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10
inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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11
dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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12
plunging
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| adj.跳进的，突进的v.颠簸( plunge的现在分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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13
bellow
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| v.吼叫，怒吼；大声发出，大声喝道 | |
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displeased
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| a.不快的 | |
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15
minions
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| n.奴颜婢膝的仆从( minion的名词复数 )；走狗；宠儿；受人崇拜者 | |
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16
puffed
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| adj.疏松的v.使喷出( puff的过去式和过去分词 )；喷着汽（或烟）移动；吹嘘；吹捧 | |
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theatricality
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| n.戏剧风格，不自然 | |
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18
haughtily
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| adv. 傲慢地, 高傲地 | |
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19
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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exasperated
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| adj.恼怒的 | |
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strenuously
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| adv.奋发地，费力地 | |
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democrat
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| n.民主主义者，民主人士；民主党党员 | |
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23
boor
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| n.举止粗野的人；乡下佬 | |
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uncertainty
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| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
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pang
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| n.剧痛，悲痛，苦闷 | |
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nostrils
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| 鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 ) | |
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27
flipped
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| 轻弹( flip的过去式和过去分词 )； 按（开关）； 快速翻转； 急挥 | |
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28
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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29
scurried
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| v.急匆匆地走( scurry的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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authorized
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| a.委任的，许可的 | |
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investigations
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| （正式的）调查( investigation的名词复数 )； 侦查； 科学研究； 学术研究 | |
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32
vault
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| n.拱形圆顶，地窖，地下室 | |
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crumble
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| vi.碎裂，崩溃；vt.弄碎，摧毁 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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frantically
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| ad.发狂地, 发疯地 | |
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ferociously
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| 野蛮地，残忍地 | |
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confidential
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| adj.秘（机）密的，表示信任的，担任机密工作的 | |
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enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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puny
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| adj.微不足道的，弱小的 | |
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40
tattered
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| adj.破旧的，衣衫破的 | |
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41
meddle
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| v.干预，干涉，插手 | |
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42
climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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nonchalance
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| n.冷淡，漠不关心 | |
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44
vehemence
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| n.热切；激烈；愤怒 | |
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45
impends
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| v.进行威胁，即将发生( impend的第三人称单数 ) | |
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46
wrung
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| 绞( wring的过去式和过去分词 )； 握紧（尤指别人的手）； 把（湿衣服）拧干； 绞掉（水） | |
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47
niches
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| 壁龛( niche的名词复数 )； 合适的位置[工作等]； （产品的）商机； 生态位（一个生物所占据的生境的最小单位） | |
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48
feverish
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| adj.发烧的，狂热的，兴奋的 | |
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49
vexed
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| adj.争论不休的；（指问题等）棘手的；争论不休的问题；烦恼的v.使烦恼( vex的过去式和过去分词 )；使苦恼；使生气；详细讨论 | |
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50
transparent
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| adj.明显的，无疑的；透明的 | |
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51
negotiations
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| 协商( negotiation的名词复数 )； 谈判； 完成（难事）； 通过 | |
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52
mores
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| n.风俗，习惯，民德，道德观念 | |
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53
delegation
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| n.代表团；派遣 | |
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54
swarmed
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| 密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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55
notations
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| 记号，标记法( notation的名词复数 ) | |
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56
folder
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| n.纸夹，文件夹 | |
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57
pigeonhole
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| n.鸽舍出入口；v.把...归类 | |
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58
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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59
swirling
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的现在分词 ) | |
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60
improper
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| adj.不适当的，不合适的，不正确的，不合礼仪的 | |
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61
imprisoned
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| 下狱，监禁( imprison的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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62
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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63
clumped
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| adj.[医]成群的v.（树、灌木、植物等的）丛、簇( clump的过去式和过去分词 )；（土、泥等）团；块；笨重的脚步声 | |
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64
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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