They came crowding out and manned lifters; they got the heavy collapsium-cutter maneuvered3 into place and the shielding down around the cutting-head. After that, there were only four men who could work, each in his own heavily shielded cabin. In spite of the shielding that covered the actual work, there was an awesome4 display of multicolored light; it was like being in the middle of an aurora5 borealis. What was going on where that tiny rotating beam of cosmic rays was grinding at the collapsium simply couldn't have been imagined.
Conn would have liked to stay outside; he could not. Too many things were happening in too many places, and it was all coming in by screen. Rioting had broken out in Storisende and in a dozen other places. He saw, on a news-screen, a mob raging in front of the Executive Palace; yellow-shirted Cybernarchists were battling with city police and Planetary troops, Armageddonists and Human Supremacy6 Leaguers were fighting both and one another. Above all the confused noise of shouting and shooting, an amplifier was braying7: "It's a lie! It's a lie! Merlin has been found!"[Pg 169] Newsmen began arriving—Zareff's men had orders to pass them through the cordon8 that had been put up around Force Command—and they took up his time. It was worth it, though. They could tell him what was going on.
J. Fitzwilliam Sterber called. Rodney Maxwell had been arrested, on a farrago of fraud charges—"I don't know who he's supposed to have defrauded9; the Planetary Government is the sole complainant"—and bail10 was being illegally denied. Sterber's lawyerly soul was outraged11, but he was grimly elated. "You wait till things quiet down a little. We're going to start a false-arrest suit—"
"If you're alive to." Apparently12 Sterber hadn't thought of that. "What do you think's going to happen when the Stock Exchange opens?"
"It's going to be bad. But don't worry; your father must have foreseen something like this. He gave me instructions, and instructed a few more people." He named some of the Trisystem Investments people and some of the bankers. "We're going to try to brace13 the market as long as we can. Nobody who keeps his head is going to lose anything in the long run."
Luther Chen-Wong called from Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. He and Clyde Nichols and a young mathematics professor named Simon Macquarte had been running the colony, in Conn's absence and since Yves Jacquemont had gone to space in the Ouroboros II.
"Well, they caught up with you," he said. Evidently he had figured out what the search for Merlin was all about, too. "What do we do about it?"
"Well, we are just before finding Merlin, here. I hope we find it before things get too bad." He told Luther the situation of the moment. "Have you people started on another hypership yet?"
"We're getting organized to. I don't suppose it's advisable to send any more ships in to Storisende for a while? And are you sure this thing you've found is Merlin?"
"I don't know what it is. It's only big enough for the apparatus14 they'd need to operate a thing like Merlin—Yes, Luther. I am sure we have found Merlin."[Pg 170]
Chen-Wong looked at him curiously15. "I hope so. I can't think of anything else that can stop this business."
Tom Brangwyn was in the room when he turned from the screen.
"We searched Leibert's—Shanlee's—rooms," he said. "We found a bomb."
"What kind of a bomb?"
"Vest-pocket thermonuclear. He seems to have gotten the fissionables by taking apart a couple of light tactical missiles; the whole thing's packed inside a hundred-pound power-cartridge16 case. It was in a traveling-bag under his bed. And you know how it was to be fired? With a regular 40-mm flare-pistol, welded into the end of the bomb. The flare-powder had been taken out of the cartridge, and it had been reloaded with a big charge of rifle-powder. I suppose it would blow one subcritical mass into another. But the only way he could have fired the bomb would have been by pulling the trigger."
And blowing himself up along with it. He must have wanted Merlin destroyed pretty badly.
"Have you questioned him yet?"
"Not yet. I wanted to tell you about it first."
He looked at his watch. Only four hours had passed since the newscast; why, that seemed like months, ago, now.
"All right, Tom; we'll go talk to him. Where's the Colonel?"
Zareff was surrounded by a dozen screens, keeping in touch with the Lester Dawes and the gunboats and combat cars, and the gun positions with which he had ringed Force Command. It was only a little army, maybe, but he was a busy commander-in-chief.
"You take care of it. Tell me what you get from him. I can't leave now. There's a report of a number of aircraft approaching from the west now...."
They found Judge Ledue, and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton, who were just sitting around wishing there was something to do to help. They gave Franz Veltrin and Sylvie Jacquemont the job of keeping the representatives of the[Pg 171] press amused. Then they went down to the room in which General Mike Shanlee was held under guard.
Shanlee, wearing a bathrobe and nothing else, was lying on a cot, sleeping peacefully; three of Zareff's men were sitting on chairs, watching him narrowly.
"All right; you can go," Conn told them. "We'll take care of him."
Shanlee woke instantly; he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the cot.
"You have my name and rank," he said, and his voice no longer quavered. "My serial17 number is—" He recited a string of figures. "And that's all you're getting out of me."
"We'll get anything we want out of you," Conn told him. "You know what a mind-probe is? You should; your accomplices18 used one on my father's secretary. She's a hopeless imbecile now. You'll be, too, when we're through with you. But before then, you'll have given us everything you know."
Kellton began to protest. "Conn, you can't do a thing like that!"
"A mind-probe is utterly19 illegal; why, it's a capital offense20!" Ledue exclaimed. "Conn I forbid you...."
"Judge, don't make me call those guards and have you removed," Conn said.
"You can stop bluffing," Shanlee told him. "Where would you get a mind-probe?"
"Out of the Chief of Intelligence's office, here in his headquarters. I should imagine it was to be used in interrogating21 Alliance prisoners, during the War. I think Colonel Zareff would enjoy helping22 to use it on you. He used to be an Alliance officer."
Shanlee was silent. Conn sat down in one of the chairs, at the small table.
"General Shanlee, would you describe General Foxx Travis as a man of honor and integrity? And would you so describe yourself?" Shanlee said nothing. "Yet both of you have lied, deliberately23 and repeatedly, to conceal24 the existence of Merlin. And we found that bomb in your room. You were willing to blow up this headquarters and everybody, yourself included, in it, to keep us from getting at[Pg 172] Merlin. Well, you know that we can make you tell us the truth, maybe when it's too late, and you know that we are going to get Merlin. We're cutting the collapsium off that thing above now."
Shanlee laughed. "You're supposed to be a computerman. You think that little thing could be Merlin?"
"The controls and programming machine for Merlin." He turned to Kurt Fawzi. "You always claimed that Merlin was here in Force Command. You had it backward. Force Command is inside Merlin."
"What do you mean, Conn?"
"The walls; the fifty-foot walls, shielded inside and out. Merlin—the circuitry, the memory-bank, the relays, everything—was installed inside them. What's up above is only what was needed to operate the computer. Isn't that true, General?"
Shanlee had stopped his derisive25 laughter. He sat on the edge of the cot, tensing as though for a leap at Conn's throat.
"That won't help, either. If you try it, we won't shoot you. We'll just overpower you and start mind-probing right away. Now; you feel that suppressing Merlin was worth any sacrifice. We're not unreasonable26. If you can convince us that Merlin ought not to be brought to light.... Well, you can't do any harm by talking, and you may do some good. You may even accomplish your mission."
"He can't talk us out of it," Kurt Fawzi seemed determined27 to spoil things by saying. "Conn, I'm coming around to Klem's way of thinking. They just don't want anybody else to have it."
"No, we don't," Shanlee said. "We don't want the whole Federation28 breaking up into bloody29 anarchy30, and that's what'll happen if you dig that thing up and put it into operation."
Nobody said anything except Fawzi, who began an indignant contradiction and then subsided31. Tom Brangwyn lit a cigarette.
"Would you mind letting me have one of those?" Shanlee said. "I haven't had a smoke since I came here. It wouldn't have been in character."[Pg 173]
Brangwyn took one out of the pack, lit it at the tip of his own, and gave it to Shanlee with his left hand, his right ready to strike. Shanlee laughed in real amusement.
"Oh, Brother!" he reproved, in his former pious32 tones. "You distrust your fellow man; that is a sin."
He rose slowly, the bathrobe flapping at his bare shins, and sat down across the table from Conn.
"All right," he said. "I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you the truth, which will be something of a novelty all around."
Shanlee puffed33 for a moment at the cigarette; it must really have tasted good after his long abstinence.
"You know, we were really caught off balance when the War ended. It even caught Merlin short; information lag, of course. The whole Alliance caved in all at once. Well, we fed Merlin all the data available, and analyzed34 the situation. Then we did something we really weren't called upon to do, because that was policy-planning and wasn't our province, but we were going to move an occupation army into System States planets, and we didn't want to do anything that would embarrass the Federation Government later. We fed Merlin every scrap35 of available information on political and economic conditions everywhere in the Federation, and set up a long-term computation of the general effects of the War.
"The extrapolation was supposed to run five hundred years in the future. It didn't. It stopped, at a point a trifle over two hundred years from now, with a statement that no computation could be made further because at that point the Terran Federation would no longer exist."
The others, who had taken chairs facing him, looked at him blankly.
"No more Federation?" Judge Ledue asked incredulously. "Why, the Federation, the Federation...."
The Federation would last forever. Anybody knew that. There just couldn't be no more Federation.
"That's right," Shanlee said. "We had trouble believing it, too. Remember, we were Federation officers. The Federation was our religion. Just like patriotism36 used to be, back in the days of nationalism. We checked for error. We made[Pg 174] detail analyses. We ran it all over again. It was no use.
"In two hundred years, there won't be any Terran Federation. The Government will collapse37, slowly. The Space Navy will disintegrate38. Planets and systems will lose touch with Terra and with one another. You know what it was like here, just before the War? It will be like that on every planet, even on Terra. Just a slow crumbling39, till everything is gone; then every planet will start sliding back, in isolation40, into barbarism."
"Merlin predicted that?" Kurt Fawzi asked, shocked.
If Merlin said so, it had to be true.
Shanlee nodded. "So we ran another computation; we added the data of publication of this prognosis. You know, Merlin can't predict what you or I would do under given circumstances, but Merlin can handle large-group behavior with absolute accuracy. If we made public Merlin's prognosis, the end would come, not in two centuries but in less than one, and it wouldn't be a slow, peaceful decay; it would be a bomb-type reaction. Rebellions. Overthrow41 of Federation authority, and then revolt and counterrevolt against planetary authority. Division along sectional or class lines on individual planets. Interplanetary wars; what we fought the Alliance to prevent. Left in ignorance of the future, people would go on trying to make do with what they had. But if they found out that the Federation was doomed42, everybody would be trying to snatch what they could, and end by smashing everything. Left in ignorance, there might be a planet here and there that would keep enough of the old civilization to serve, in five or so centuries, as a nucleus44 for a new one. Informed in advance of the doom43 of the Federation, they would all go down together in the same bloody shambles45, and there would be a Galactic night of barbarism for no one knows how many thousand years."
"We don't want anything like that to happen!" Tom Brangwyn said, in a frightened voice.
"Then pull everybody out of here and blow the place up, Merlin along with it," Shanlee said.
"No! We'll not do that!" Fawzi shouted. "I'll shoot the man dead who tries it!"[Pg 175]
"Why didn't you people blow Merlin up?" Conn asked.
"We'd built it; we'd worked with it. It was part of us, and we were part of it. We couldn't. Besides, there was a chance that it might survive the Federation; when a new civilization arose, it would be useful. We just sealed it. There were fewer than a hundred of us who knew about it. We all took an oath of secrecy46. We spent the rest of our lives trying to suppress any mention of Merlin or the Merlin Project. You have no idea how shocked both General Travis and I were when you told us that the story was still current here on Poictesme. And when we found that you'd been getting into the records of the Third Force, I took the next ship I could, a miserable47 little freighter, and when I landed and found out what was happening, I contacted Murchison and scared the life out of him with stories about a secessionist conspiracy48. All this Armageddonist, Human Supremacy, Merlin-is-the-Devil, stuff that's been going on was started by Murchison. And he succeeded in scaring Vyckhoven with the Cybernarchists, too."
"This computation on the future of the Federation is still in the back-work file?" Conn asked.
Shanlee nodded. "We were criminally reckless; I can see that, now. Let me beg, again, that you destroy the whole thing."
"We'll have to talk it over among ourselves," Judge Ledue said. "The five of us, here, cannot presume to speak for everybody. We will, of course, have to keep you confined; I hope you will understand that we cannot accept your parole."
"Is there anything you want in the meantime?" Conn asked.
"I would like something to smoke, and some clothes," General Shanlee said. "And a shave and a haircut."
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outlaws
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| 歹徒，亡命之徒( outlaw的名词复数 )； 逃犯 | |
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harangue
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| n.慷慨冗长的训话，言辞激烈的讲话 | |
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maneuvered
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| v.移动，用策略( maneuver的过去式和过去分词 )；操纵 | |
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awesome
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| adj.令人惊叹的，难得吓人的，很好的 | |
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aurora
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| n.极光 | |
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supremacy
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| n.至上；至高权力 | |
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7
braying
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| v.发出驴叫似的声音( bray的现在分词 )；发嘟嘟声；粗声粗气地讲话（或大笑）；猛击 | |
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cordon
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| n.警戒线，哨兵线 | |
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defrauded
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| v.诈取，骗取( defraud的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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bail
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| v.舀（水），保释；n.保证金，保释，保释人 | |
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outraged
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| a.震惊的，义愤填膺的 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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brace
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| n. 支柱,曲柄,大括号; v. 绷紧,顶住,(为困难或坏事)做准备 | |
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apparatus
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| n.装置，器械；器具，设备 | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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cartridge
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| n.弹壳，弹药筒；(装磁带等的)盒子 | |
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serial
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| n.连本影片，连本电视节目；adj.连续的 | |
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18
accomplices
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| 从犯，帮凶，同谋( accomplice的名词复数 ) | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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offense
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| n.犯规，违法行为；冒犯，得罪 | |
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21
interrogating
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| n.询问技术v.询问( interrogate的现在分词 )；审问；（在计算机或其他机器上）查询 | |
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22
helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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conceal
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，隐蔽 | |
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derisive
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| adj.嘲弄的 | |
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unreasonable
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| adj.不讲道理的，不合情理的，过度的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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federation
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| n.同盟，联邦，联合，联盟，联合会 | |
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bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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anarchy
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| n.无政府状态；社会秩序混乱，无秩序 | |
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subsided
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| v.（土地）下陷（因在地下采矿）( subside的过去式和过去分词 )；减弱；下降至较低或正常水平；一下子坐在椅子等上 | |
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pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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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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34
analyzed
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| v.分析( analyze的过去式和过去分词 )；分解；解释；对…进行心理分析 | |
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35
scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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collapse
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| vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷 | |
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38
disintegrate
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| v.瓦解，解体，（使）碎裂，（使）粉碎 | |
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crumbling
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| adj.摇摇欲坠的 | |
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40
isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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41
overthrow
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| v.推翻，打倒，颠覆；n.推翻，瓦解，颠覆 | |
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42
doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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44
nucleus
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| n.核，核心，原子核 | |
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45
shambles
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| n.混乱之处；废墟 | |
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46
secrecy
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| n.秘密，保密，隐蔽 | |
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47
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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48
conspiracy
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| n.阴谋，密谋，共谋 | |
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