Hiro stares at the miniature TV in the upper left corner of the card. It zooms1 toward him until it's about the size of a twelve-inch low-def television set at arm's length. Then the video image begins to play. It's very poor eight-millimeter film footage of a high school football game in the sixties. No soundtrack.
"What is this game?"
The Librarian says, "Odessa, Texas, USA. L. Bob Rife2 is a fullback, number eight in the dark uniform."
"This is more detail than I need. Can you summarize some of these things?"
"No. But I can list the contents briefly3. The stack contains eleven high school football games. Rife was on the second-string Texas all-state team in his senior year. Then he proceeded to Rice on an academic scholarship and walked onto the football team, so there are also fourteen tapes of college games. Rife majored in communications."
"Logically enough, considering what he became."
"He became a television sports reporter in the Houston market, so there are fifty hours of footage from this period -- mostly outtakes, of course. After two years in this line of work, Rife went into business with his great-uncle, a financier with roots in the oil business. The stack contains a few newspaper stories to that effect, which, as I note from reading them, are all textually related -- implying that they came from the same source."
"A press release."
"Then there are no stories for five years."
"He was up to something."
"Then we begin to see more stories, mostly from the Religion sections of Houston newspapers, detailing Rife's contributions to various organizations."
"That sounded like summary to me. I thought you couldn't summarize."
"I can't really. I was quoting a summary that Dr. Lagos made to Juanita Marquez recently, in my presence, when they were reviewing the same data."
"Go on."
"Rife contributed $500 to the Highlands Church of the Baptism by Fire, Reverend Wayne Bedford, head minister; $2,500 to the Pentecostal Youth League of Bayside, Reverend Wayne Bedford, president; $150,000 to the Pentecostal Church of the New Trinity, Reverend Wayne Bedford, founder4 and patriarch; $2.3 million to Rife Bible College, Reverend Wayne Bedford, President and chairman of the theology department; $20 million to the archaeology5 department of Rife Bible College, plus $45 million to the astronomy department and $100 million to the computer science department."
"Did these donations take place before hyperinflation?"
"Yes, sir. They were, as the expression goes, real money."
"That Wayne Bedford guy -- is this the same Reverend Wayne who runs the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates?"
"The same."
"Are you telling me that Rife owns the Reverend Wayne?"
"He owns a majority share in Pearlygate Associates, which is the multinational6 that runs the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates chain."
"Okay, let's keep sifting7 through this," Hiro says.
Hiro peeps out over his goggles8 to confirm that Vitaly is still nowhere near the concert. Then he dives back in and continues to go over the video and the news stories that Lagos has compiled.
During the same years that Rife makes his contributions to the Reverend Wayne, he's showing up with increasing frequency in the business section, first in the local papers and later in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. There is a big flurry of publicity9 -- obvious PR plants -- after the Nipponese tried to use their old-boy network to shut him out of the telecommunications market there, and he took it to the American public, spending $10 million of his own money on a campaign to convince Americans that the Nipponese were duplicitous schemers. A triumphal cover on The Economist10 after the Nipponese finally knuckled11 under and let him corner the fiber-optics market in that country and, by extension, most of East Asia.
Finally, then, the lifestyle pieces start coming in. L. Bob Rife has let his publicist know that he wants to show a more human side. There is a personality journalism12 program that does a puff13 piece on Rife after he buys a new yacht, surplus, from the U.S. Government.
L. Bob Rife, last of the nineteenth-century monopolists, is shown consulting with his decorator in the captain's quarters. It looks nice as it is, considering that Rife bought this ship from the Navy, but it's not Texan enough for him. He wants it gutted14 and rebuilt. Then, shots of Rife maneuvering15 his steerlike body through the narrow passages and steep staircase of the ship's interior -- typical boring gray steel Navy scape, which, he assures the interviewer, he is going to have spruced up considerably16.
"Y'know, there's a story that when Rockefeller bought himself a yacht, he bought a pretty small one, like a seventy-footer or something. Small by the standards of the day. And when someone asked him why he went and bought himself such a dinky little yacht, he just looked at the guy and said, 'What do you think l am, a Vanderbilt?' Haw! Well, anyway, welcome aboard my yacht."
L. Bob Rife says this while standing17 on a huge open-air platform elevator along with the interviewer and the whole camera crew. The elevator is going up. In the background is the Pacific Ocean. As Rife is speaking the last part of the line, suddenly the elevator rises up to the top and the camera turns around, and we are looking out across the deck of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, formerly18 of the U.S. Navy, now the personal yacht of L. Bob Rife, who beat out both General Jim's Defense19 System and Admiral Bob's Global Security in a furious bidding war. L. Bob Rife proceeds to admire the vast, flat open spaces of the carrier's flight deck, likening it to certain parts of Texas. He suggests that it would be amusing to cover part of it with dirt and raise cattle there.
Another profile, this one shot for a business network, apparently20 made somewhat later: Back on the Enterprise, where the captain's office has been massively reworked. L. Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth, is sitting behind his desk, having his mustache waxed. Not in the sense that women have their legs waxed. He's having the curl smoothed out and restored. The waxer is a very short Asian woman who does it so delicately that it doesn't even interfere21 with his talking, mostly about his efforts to extend his cable TV network throughout Korea and into China and link it up with his big fiber-optic trunk line that runs across Siberia and over the Urals.
"Yeah, you know, a monopolist's work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent."
"Isn't the government still strong in Korea? You must have more trouble with regulations there."
L. Bob Rife laughs. "Y'know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport. Remember when they busted22 up Ma Bell?"
"Just barely." The reporter is a woman in her twenties.
"You know what it was, right?"
"Voice communications monopoly."
"Right. They were in the same business as me. The information business. Moving phone conversations around on little tiny copper23 wires, one at a time. Government busted them up -- at the same time when I was starting cable TV franchises24 in thirty states. Haw! Can you believe that? It's like if they figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the Model T and the airplane were being introduced."
"But a cable TV system isn't the same as a phone system."
"At that stage it wasn't, cause it was just a local system. But once you get local systems all over the world, all you got to do is hook 'em together and it's a global network. Just as big as the phone system. Except this one carries information ten thousand times faster. It carries images, sound, data, you name it."
收听单词发音 |
1
zooms
|
|
| n.嗡嗡声( zoom的名词复数 )；隆隆声；（车辆等）疾驰的声音；变焦 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
2
rife
|
|
| adj.(指坏事情)充斥的，流行的，普遍的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
3
briefly
|
|
| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
4
Founder
|
|
| n.创始者，缔造者 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
5
archaeology
|
|
| n.考古学 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
6
multinational
|
|
| adj.多国的，多种国籍的；n.多国籍公司，跨国公司 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
7
sifting
|
|
| n.筛，过滤v.筛( sift的现在分词 )；筛滤；细查；详审 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
8
goggles
|
|
| n.护目镜 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
9
publicity
|
|
| n.众所周知，闻名；宣传，广告 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
10
economist
|
|
| n.经济学家，经济专家，节俭的人 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
11
knuckled
|
|
| v.（指人）指关节( knuckle的过去式和过去分词 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
12
journalism
|
|
| n.新闻工作，报业 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
13
puff
|
|
| n.一口(气)；一阵(风)；v.喷气，喘气 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
14
gutted
|
|
| adj.容易消化的v.毁坏（建筑物等）的内部( gut的过去式和过去分词 )；取出…的内脏 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
15
maneuvering
|
|
| v.移动，用策略( maneuver的现在分词 )；操纵 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
16
considerably
|
|
| adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
17
standing
|
|
| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
18
formerly
|
|
| adv.从前，以前 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
19
defense
|
|
| n.防御，保卫；[pl.]防务工事；辩护，答辩 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
20
apparently
|
|
| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
21
interfere
|
|
| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
22
busted
|
|
| adj. 破产了的，失败了的，被降级的，被逮捕的，被抓到的 动词bust的过去式和过去分词 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
23
copper
|
|
| n.铜；铜币；铜器；adj.铜(制)的；(紫)铜色的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
24
franchises
|
|
| n.（尤指选举议员的）选举权( franchise的名词复数 )；参政权；获特许权的商业机构（或服务）；（公司授予的）特许经销权v.给…以特许权，出售特许权( franchise的第三人称单数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
| 欢迎访问英文小说网 |