经典科幻文学:《基本上无害 Mostly Harmless》 第15章5

At the moment she was not peering at her wrist. Her wrist was turned off. Arthur squatted down quietly beside her to see what she was looking at. It was his watch. He had taken it off when he’d gone to shower under the locAl waterfall, and Random had found it and was trying to work it out.

眼下兰登瞅的不是自己的手腕。她的手腕关着呢。阿瑟静静地在她身边蹲下，看是什么吸引了她的注意。那是他的手表。先前他把表摘掉，去附近的瀑布洗澡，兰登发现了这玩意儿，正试着摆弄它。

‘It’s just a watch,’ he said. ‘It’s to tell the time.’

“只是块手表，”他说，“用来显示时间的。”

‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But you keep on fiddling with it, and it still doesn’t tell the right time. Or even anything like it.’

“这我知道。”她说，“可你老拨弄这东西，而它还是没法显示正确的时间。连边儿都沾不上。”

She brought up the display on her wrist panel, which automatically produced a readout of local time. Her wrist panel had quietly got on with the business of measuring the local gravity and orbital momentum, and had noticed where the sun was and tracked its movement in the sky, all within the first few minutes of Random’s arrival. It had then quickly picked up clues from its environment as to what the local unit conventions were and reset itself appropriately. It did this sort of thing continually, which was particularly valuable if you did a lot of travelling in time as well as space.

她点开自己手腕上的面板，面板立刻自动读取出当地的时间。它早就不动声色地测过这里的重力和轨道冲量，还确定了太阳的位置，并对它的活动进行追踪。所有这一切都是在兰登抵达之后的几分钟之内完成的。接下来，它便很快从周围环境中找出各种线索，摸清当地人的计时习惯，借此对自己进行适当的设置。这一套它会不停地干了又干。如果你不仅常做空间旅行还老是穿越时间，这一点就特别宝贵了。

Random frowned at her father’s watch, which didn’t do any of this.

兰登对她父亲的手表皱起眉头，刚才那些活儿它一样也干不了。

Arthur was very fond of it. It was a better one than he would ever have afforded himself. He had been given it on his twenty-second birthday by a rich and guilt-ridden godfather who had forgotten every single birthday he had had up till then, and also his name. It had the day, the date, the phases of the moon; it had ‘To Albert on his twenty-first birthday’ and the wrong date engraved on the battered and scratched surface of its back in letters that were still just about visible.

阿瑟很喜欢它。他自己是永远也买不起这么一块表的。这是阿瑟二十二岁的生日礼物，来自他心怀歉疚的教父——这位先生把他之前的每一个生日都忘得一干二净，顺带还忘记了他的名字。它能显示今天是几月几号星期几，还有月亮的亏盈。在磨损得很厉害，满是划痕的底壳上勉强能看清当初刻下的字：“给阿尔伯特，祝二十一岁生日快乐。”这句之后是个错误的日期。

The watch had been through a considerable amount of stuff in the last few years, most of which would fall well outside the warranty. He didn’t suppose, of course, that the warranty had especially mentioned that the watch was guaranteed to be accurate only within the very particular gravitational and magnetic fields of the Earth, and so long as the day was twenty-four hours long and the planet didn’t explode and so on. These were such basic assumptions that even the lawyers would have missed them.

最近几年里，这块表实在经历了不少风雨，其中大多数都在保修范围之外。当然了，他也知道保修条款上肯定没有注明诸如：只能在地球特有的重力和磁场下使用，使用场所每天必须是二十四小时，地球如果爆炸则本店概不负责之类。有些前提过于基本，哪怕律师也想不到这上头。

Luckily his watch was a wind-up one, or at least, a self-winder. Nowhere else in the Galaxy would he have found batteries of precisely the dimensions and power specifications that were perfectly standard on Earth.

幸运的是这表是上发条的，或者至少是自动上发条的，大小和电压符合地球标准的电池，眼下整个银河系也找不着了。

‘So what are all these numbers?’ asked Random.

“那这些数字是什么意思？”兰登问。

Arthur took it from her.

阿瑟把表拿过去。