Chapter 5 Chapter 3 Evil-1

Nick and Kelly have been working on the giant tetrahedron all week while Guy has been sleeping. Nick failed to come up with anything.Still convinced that the job was not done, he sent Marco to ask for the remaining grains of sand. Security guards from the Joint Commission delivered six lead boxes, and Nick opened them one by one and reached in eagerly.After watching the last one, he sits on the floor and sobs like a child who has lost a special toy. Something has changed the grains of sand in these storerooms.All the crystals had reduced hardness, some had broken down to a soot-like powder.Nick doesn't want the stuff anymore, while Marco and Carolina wonder what the hell happened.Tests showed that all the thorium was gone, mostly melted into tiny beads.

"They've been used up," Marco concluded at last, "by some kind of nuclear or seminuclear reaction. Most of the carbon has been graphitized, mixed with some element from nuclear fission. I wonder if the energy released Where did you go?" He crushed a crystal in the palm of his hand, frowning at the drab black powder.That's enough energy to blow open these boxes like a bomb, and the only thing it does is overload and melt the entire conductor. None of these fission products showed any residual radiation, where did the energy go? No one knows, yes, but something is draining all the grains of sand in the vault.The security guard was very worried about this matter, anxious and uneasy, suspected of fraud or theft.The Joint Commission also requested a full report.The next day, we asked Nick.

At first he was reluctant to say that he looked like he was just waiting outside the lab, but Kelly was inside working on the thing by herself. "You don't need me." He shrugged regretfully. "Ask Kelly or Guy, maybe Guy is awake. They can figure out the substance, but I can't get in. I don't know why." "We're going to write a report," Marco insisted, "tell us what you know." Nick looked gloomily at the laboratory door. "That stuff is half a machine," he said. "We've known it all along. It runs on nuclear power. They're like computers. Each crystal has more circuits than any computer on Earth. That's what I'm doing." known."

"What about the rest?" "That's all Kelly knows," his little bare feet wriggled restlessly, as if the ground was burning, "something is holding these individuals together; ;something came to life." "Resurrected?" Marco asked in a low voice, "How did you resurrect?" "If that substance is like a computer," Nick said, "it's also like a human brain. Their circuits are almost the same. I think that substance is what we call physical energy and some other kind of energy. The transformed interface is a problem in another category.”

"Do you think the lost energy disappeared when passing through that interface?" Marco looked at him in confusion. "I mean the energy lost through the fission reaction?" "Where would that be?" Nick frowned, looking like a little old man. "The laws of nature are certain, but our understanding of them changes. That interface consumes energy in some unusual way." — like a space snake, but it's also just a device." He stopped suddenly and ran towards Kelly who was coming out.She looked like a tired, troubled child again, the magical energy flowing to her from that wondrous interface was completely gone.She took Nick's hand and walked away quietly, standing beside the sleeping Guy and watching for a while.When they got back, Marco stopped Kelly and asked her how the interface was doing.

"It's... hard to say," she said with confusion on her face, "the room had to be very dark and very quiet, and nothing could disturb me. I couldn't even think about anything other than watching the interface glow. I just have to wait and wait and wait for something...something to come up "A message? " "A small part." She gave Nick an unhappy look. "Maybe most of it has been lost, because someone has been on the moon for too long when they find them. Everything is black and broken. But some Something, something wants to come out, while I'm sitting in the dark."

Marco has a question and Nick asked us not to take her any longer.Neither of them slept that week, Kelly sitting in the darkroom hour after hour while Nick waited at the door, piecing together blurred images into one incomplete picture.As Kelly made progress and emerged from the darkroom, Nick decided to share a breathless desert midnight with us. The days are too long and too hot for me. A security intelligence agent has been asking me all afternoon about my missing brother, and I don't know anything about it.I was thinking of having some beer and a good night's sleep by myself when Nick spoke.

"Kelly is about to discover the secret of crystals," I could feel a hint of unconcealed excitement in his blunt words, "I'm researching who made these grains of sand, and I've found them from our childhood games. Some traces about us humans and spaceships in space," he said with a smile, "I guess the sand grains help me connect these things." We all gather around him. "Your theory is not bad." He looked at Marco with admiration for three days, "There is a great galaxy culture, a super-biological universe, and all different biological races are unified in one. They are bound together by a kind of cosmic altruism, and a platonic civilization cannot be found on any other planet, perhaps because it develops so slowly.

"But those information missiles carrying grains of sand flew like seeds across space to spread that great culture—seeking out a new race that would accept it. This spaceship is indeed faster than light.Kelly couldn't say they were tachyon ships, but she said they couldn't have come here without a purpose. "That's our job, to build the terminal!" His face glowed. "The grains of sand are waiting for our father on the moon. If it's the seeds, then they're the soil, and we're the seedlings, and the grains of sand determine What we look like. We are like a strange plant that grows among the stars until we reach the earth in a starship."

It was 3 o'clock and we were still up, arguing about the meaning of the grains of sand.A cloud hid the moon, and we headed for the nursery against the wind, which smelled of trees and dust.Kelly stood beside Guy for a moment, patting his gray face tenderly. There were tears in his eyes as he wailed and struggled in his sleep.Her face looked exhausted, not at all excited like Nick's.Nick set a plate for Kelly, but she opened it before she ate it. "What offends you, child?" Carolina asked, "Nick is very glad you got the information." "But I'm afraid," she looked at Nick worriedly, "even if we build the terminal, I'm afraid our people won't come."

"Nick said they promised." "Too long," said Kelly, "while I was studying this interface, I ignored how long the grains of sand had been there. Although it looked like new, Nick said it had been on the moon for 600 million years. years, long before humans came along." "Is that bad?" She looked at Nick uneasily. "Kelly's worrying," he grimaced and jokingly pushed her but she didn't cry, "I think she knows more about grit. Now she's worried they won't know each other in 600 million years We are." She nodded reluctantly. "Maybe they really can't," Nick's face turned serious, "it's been too long. Maybe they're extinct now; maybe they evolved so fast that they don't care about us anymore; maybe they've forgotten all about the information missiles.But we're going to build terminals anyway, and that's why we're alive. " "We'll have to try," she whispered, "but I'm terribly afraid." She reached for Ranik's hand, and together they walked toward the laboratory, before disappearing into the darkness.We went back to sleep. Guy woke up at noon the next day.Slowly, like a bear, he pushed open the door to my office, stared in blankly, and called Kelly's name.I called Carolina.We tried to get Guy's attention, but he wouldn't eat or go to the gym with me. He waddled to Kelly's spare room, then wandered the halls of the nursery, and finally made his way to the kitchen.There, he found the chair he was sitting on that day.He took it over and smelled it, murmured something, and walked out twitching.He was stooped, scanning the floor as if his yellow eyes could follow tracks. Walking out of the kitchen, he stopped, as if sniffing the air, and then walked towards the laboratory.We see Nick rushing out to stop him, screaming like a puppy trying to stop a bear, to no avail. "Wait! Please! Kelly's working..." Gai pushed him to the ground with a palm, and then continued to walk towards the door.When we got there, Nick was still lying on the concrete floor with a fly flying over his head.His gray body had turned brown from exposure to the hot sun. Carolina took him in her arms, and I rushed into the lab.Guy stood in the hall, looking around, shaking his head as if the stench of Carolina's lesser creatures had drowned out Kelly's smell.He pricked up his gray ears, turned and crouched, and then suddenly remained motionless. "Stay still, Guy." He ignored me.He has found Kelly.He passed me quickly, heading for the dark room, his ears twitching.I followed him to the door, and he didn't knock, just broke in like a tank. I stepped on the broken door and followed him in.At that moment, I saw that interface glowing rose-colored.In the dark, I found Kelly glowing golden.She sat on a high stool, staring intently at the interior of the tetrahedron, as if unaware of Guy's entry. Howling like a hungry beast, he snatched the tetrahedron from her grasp. The stool overturned, and she fell to the ground unharmed.She looked up at Gai for a moment, the gold quickly fading from her worried face. "Honey Guy, what are you doing?" She grabbed Guy's arm and asked tremblingly, "What did you do to Nick?" Gai swayed from side to side, holding the rose-colored "pyramid" tightly in two gray hands.He looked into the "Jinyu Pagoda", his eyes were wide open, and there was a yellow light in the darkness.His breathing became rapid. "Guy, Guy!" she whimpered, "you hurt little Nick!" After she finished speaking, she rushed out.I stayed for a beautiful photo cover.He slowly pointed his palm at the interface, blinking his eyes constantly.He bent down and licked the shiny surface with his big pink tongue.At last he held it to his ear and shook it like a savage with a clock in his hand. The glowing "pyramid" made no difference to him, and when he did it well, he must have been used as a makeshift tool, and thus empowered. Rukua mission completed, he is no longer empowered, and his movement speed slows down again.As his breath lessened, he became less reckless.He stood swaying in place, looking listlessly at the "pyramid".Tears rolled slowly from his eyes, leaving trails of tears on his thick body hair.Finally he shook his head and stumbled away.I followed him out of the house. Outside, the strong sunlight hurt my eyes.Carolina held Nick in her arms, rocking him gently.Greenflies were still flying above his head, and Kelly was chasing them away.She turned and looked at Guy reproachfully. "You're evil!" she whimpered. "You're a beast!" Suddenly Guy let out an angry growl, and threw the Mamask at them.Fortunately, Carolina hugged Nick to avoid it, otherwise it would have hit Nick, and it flew into the grass after hitting Carolina.With a scream, Kelly rushed out to retrieve it. Guy trembled and sobbed.Kelly looked sternly away from him.She put the tetrahedron into Nick's hand.Like a tortured animal, Guy ran away with a howl.He fell on the landing, but got up quickly and disappeared behind the gymnasium. Then a security car came, and Carolina put Nick in the back seat, his bony legs dangling.I saw a faint brown streak begin to spread across his temple. After returning to nursery (former nursery) she examined him.We waited with bated breath for the results. "He's conscious," she gave Kelly a reassuring smile, turning to me more seriously. "You'd better stay close behind Guy." The security guards reported Guy running towards the open ledge, and we drove after him.We saw him far ahead when we saw him, a feral gray animal leaping into a shimmering black mirage, hopping from clod to clod on the gravel, going almost faster than our car. "Wait a minute, Guy! Listen!" When we got close enough to him, I leaned over the violently shaking car and yelled, but he wouldn't stop.Instead, he abruptly changed direction to trample on a clod of tall cactus.He jumped in, headbutted, punched, kicked the spiked things and ended up hugging them.He growled in pain after feeling the self-torture. Finally, he stopped his wild crying. As we approached him, he was asleep, perhaps unconscious, lying limp under the thorny plant.His hands and feet hugged it, and he was covered with broken thorns, and there was a purple flower under his gray chin, and the smell of cornfields in his hot hair was stronger than any flower. We waited until an ambulance took him back to the station to the hospital.He lay on the operating table for three hours without anesthesia and the thorn was removed.He didn't show signs of awakening until later when Nick and Kelly visited him in his hospital room. They stood by his bed until he writhed and choked.Kelly leaned in and stroked his arm.His eyes opened, yellow and glazed. "Guy!" Kelly sobbed, "Dear Guy!" His flattened head turned, his gray ears opened and closed, and his dull eyes flicked over her and Nick without interest, or even recognition.A howl escaped from his throat, and after a while he was relaxed again and fell asleep. Kelly collapsed into a ball and we had to take her out of the ward and Nick went with her to daycare.He sat next to her all night. I don't know if he urged her to go back to work on that interface, but I didn't hear it anyway, but she was back in the dark room with a new door installed the next day. For months, Guy was mostly in a comatose state.His body shrunk down to protruding bones and unkempt hair, and I was amazed by his condition and degeneration.Marco fixed the interface, and his energy was drained.The disappearance of the previous cone.In Carolina's view, it left him with more trauma than losing Kelly. In the depths of winter, when Guy began to recover, he asked me to be with him.He had lain and watched me for hours with silent piety.He loves rubbing his skin against me and growling with delight when I gently tickle the back of his ear. Nick and Kelly had visited him several times, but he didn't seem to recognize them.Once Kelly brought the tetrahedron and handed it to him hopefully, his yellow eyes blinked at it, then looked away without interest.Kelly is confused and Nick begs her to stop. With Carolina's help, I taught Guy to speak again.We played games with his teaching toys, went to the gym together, and went swimming together. Through diet and exercise, he gradually regained his lost energy and began to grow again.By summer, he had doubled my weight. He has a curious sense of humor in his recovered mind.He taunted me with his physical strength, holding me down when I came close to winning a tennis match or even a wrestling match with him.He made similar jokes with security guards. In addition, he has other fun. A girl hired to wash glassware in an alien biology lab, her name on her security badge was Veronica.She claimed the famous abach (raider) was one of her ancestors, but the security later told me she was from the Bronx. We didn't realize the harm that this incident could cause.Abaki or not, Veronica seems capable of defending herself, and even has sex against Guy.Marco thinks Guy needs an emotional outlet, while Carolina doesn't seem interested in suppressing a biological specimen's instincts. I wasn't too surprised when Veronica disappeared, because Guy must have been a troublemaker, and he was so confused and saddened by it that he asked me to help find her.When I went to security, I learned that she had been evicted from The Highlands for selling marijuana without a federal license, and Carolina took note of some new symptoms triggered by her grief.For the first time in his life he couldn't sleep; his fur faded; his ammoniacal smell intensified: he began smashing furniture; he absently snapped or twisted lamps or chairs to pieces, without realizing it. . He has never learned to read.One day he handed me a note smuggled in by a coffee shop kid, stained paper reeking of cheap perfume: Veronica still loves her "Papa Bear" (pointing to cover). She lost her badge and couldn't come and see him.She works at the Thunderbird Bar down the road and has a room at the Starway Hotel, if her "Papa Bear" remembers his tiny golden lock... Guy asked me to go with him to the security office, and I tried to decline, but he carried me there. When he asked permission to visit Miss Veronica, the security guards sneered indignantly, and though they didn't make it clear, they seemed to think that any relationship Guy had with a human woman was sinister and unnatural. Nature.He would be damned if he compromised his security principles to spoil a hairy half-human, the operation commander said.He refused to accept Guy's request and assigned special guards to guard Guy on the plateau. While escorting us back to the nursery, the new guards wanted to know where Guy and the girl lived together.Guy was far more alert than I expected. He feigned ignorance and tried not to mention Thunderbird or Starway. Despite the presence of security, he left the High Terrace that night.How he got there has never been fully understood.The guards put him on a bed in a windowless room, and then stood outside to watch.The next morning, they found a hole in the wall and an empty bed in the room. We worry about Guy.Because of his inhuman appearance, he is dangerous no matter where he goes.Even though the government is suppressing news about a biological invasion in space, the facts that have been leaked are enough to spark a hysterical anti-heretical act. Carolina has been telling us what she knows about the invasion, and it's enough to make us uneasy.As a senior exobiologist, she was listed on a special list of classified reports.Officials flocked to Skygate to consult her about the dangers posed by extraterrestrial beings, and she was often called to advise high-ranking officials.In fact, sometimes she herself felt confused and troubled. Earth Observatory began to report anomalous fogs over the sea, thin but strangely thick, their appearance unanticipated.Officially they are created by the very movement of the cold ocean tide, a bunch of crap.Several fishing boats were reported missing in the fog, but inspectors later glossed over the unexplained problems. The news about flying snakes is equally confusing.The cosmic beings watching over our rocket home have explored the Moon and surveyed the Earth Observatory, and are now jumping into our atmosphere. In the eyes of the inspectors, they appear too often to be completely ignored. The Cosmos has issued an official opinion that they are not harmful.That may be true, they seem gamey rather than hostile, though their true intent is never quite clear.They are obviously interested in human activities, and they are also obviously attracted by energy conversion.For example, Nick's flying board can convert energy into motion.They began to jump out of space to escort our spacecraft, like dolphins escort ships. Whatever the motive, the results were unfortunate, and the escorted spacecraft, which had run out of energy, often crashed. The word "heretic" came into vogue that year, and it represented another cosmic being, moon child, space snake, and cultured lesser beings or imaginary invaders, etc., and it was a "heretic," we Follow his life. He has been missing for two months.His disappearance was only reported locally to prevent panic. Tianmen Security Department organized a secret search - based on our clues and Kelly's guess.Marco and I searched in vain several times, Gai was not easy to find. Knowing about his seven-week "free life" is pretty much all we can guess, Veronica becomes the narrator of "I'm in Love with a Monster," and her horror story is at least half true.Later, I saw Guy himself watching the show, quietly, laughing softly.Although he would never say it to security, he confirmed a few details to me. The story of him and Veronica spread throughout most of North America.They lived and traveled in a rented, perhaps stolen, caravan. Disguised by a tiger-skin jacket and stripes painted on his own fur, he competes like a professional wrestler, competently winning and losing as Veronica and her friends wish.He inadvertently defeated many opponents. By never revealing it to the tax office, they made a handsome fortune.Tax officials intercepted nearly $6.5 million in Veronica's unexplained World Bank deposits when she attempted to leave the country the following year. Suddenly one day, a grotesque farce in the parking lot of a building on the Hudson in Manhattan turned into a disaster.Veronica must have passed the excess of jewelry to attract attention, and two beggars broke into the caravan.Guy catches one of them, but the other escapes, and he sees Guy naked, and word spreads that the Moon Child is in town. Because of her survival instinct, Veronica fled.She leaves Guy alone, naked to the public.The beggar who had been caught seemed to be following her all the time, as if taking Guy's place as her bodyguard.Gay fought alone and with his bare hands, throwing four people out of the parking lot and injuring a dozen others, but was eventually conquered. If Gai was not too difficult to be dismembered, he would definitely die.Riot police captured him and later took him by boat back to Tianmen where he was locked in a guarded room.When we opened the door, his body odor was so strong that Carolina decided he was still alive.The space doctors disagreed with her judgment, and they allowed her to keep Guy in his hospital room.After weeks of tossing between death and slumber, Guy could sit up again, clamoring for steak. The next autumn.Carolina accepted a secret mission and left Tianmen for three months. On the day she returned, Marco and the security guards were busy, so Marco asked me to pick her up at the airport.She looked tired and preoccupied.I asked her what was the matter, and she remained silent until we were in the car alone. "About the fog," she told me later. I, who was timid about inquiring about confidential matters, drove without commenting, although I most wanted to know more.But she frowned indecisively. "Don't talk about it," she said finally. "The government is anxious about it, and I've been called to lead a secret research team. We've been tasked with figuring out what the fog is and what to do about it," she breathed sleepily, "but I'm afraid our report will not cure any anxiety." I wait again.She gazed across the desert emotionally, as if every twisted juniper was a heretic in disguise.When I had to brake and steer to avoid a speeding security car, her eyes returned to me, absent-minded. "We tried our best." The lowered voice further explained their failure. "The army demanded an all-out effort. They spared no effort to give us the manpower, material resources and all the materials we needed. We tried everything. We drew the report Where the fog occurred: photographed everything we found; examined them with various radioactive instruments; dropped telemetry instruments on them with rockets and parachutes; Observers and those who think wildly." "So—?" I couldn't hold back the question as she paused again, "What the hell is that fog?" "We don't know yet. The photos are mostly blank, just white blobs, the wireless instrument didn't find anything unusual, the telemetry never worked. The surface biological samples had a foul smell when we sent them back to the lab, and we There were no specimens from the deep surface, but objects that interfered with the line were found." "Don't ask me what it is." She glanced at me sadly and wandered back to the desert. "The military is not happy about it. Those negative results became the main content of our report. We were asked to draw conclusions, but Nobody likes our opinions. If you want to hear..." I said I wanted to hear it. "I think that fog is a sign of life, life from another biological universe. Which one, I can't tell. Surface life specimens die and decay too quickly to tell us much, but there is evidence that surface life is made of tiny Composed of vesicles, probably filled with hydrogen gas. They are brittle and will dry out to death." I asked about something deeper. "No one knows what's down there," her uneasy voice dropped to just audible, "but it must not just be small enough, it must be tough enough to remove our tools from the wiring, it's full of Enmity can encircle every ship that encounters it, something smarter and more cunning than us." "You mean, it's intelligent?" "Call it what you will," I turned my gaze back from the road and saw her trembling, "this mist spreading in the dark has unnerved us. Reports say it has infested ships and nobody It receded from the light. I think the sun and the dryness killed those tiny globular cells. When the fog cleared, what was left in place was some red, foul-smelling slime." She had some kind of ominous premonition, and sat quietly for a while. "Another thing," she said suddenly, "is that the fog doesn't like to be pryed into. During the day, it clears away from where our parachute-carrying vessel or surface experiment ship is, and that experiment ship was in the dark." Encountered it. Every cloud of fog we tried to study quickly melted into the sea.” When we saw the nursery building, she was eager and beaming. "That's it," she said. "If you want to know what the fog is, that's all I know, theories we've gleaned from our reports, that it's clearly an alien invasion of some sort. Whatever Where are the invaders now, they have all mutated or more likely metamorphosed to adapt and survive in Earth's oceans." "Why are they invading?" "Let's talk about something more cheerful," she cut me in firmly, "How's Nick and Kelly? " We found Nick and Kelly working as hard as ever on the intergalactic terminal project.Against our advice, they were determined to persuade the Universal Organization to build it. Most of the time, Kelly locked herself in a dark room alone day and night, delving into the bits and pieces of information that were only half left.Nick's desk is the floor of the room next to Kelly's.He worked lying down, often calling Kelly in so he could show her the difficulties that arose and tell her what to search for. The following summer, as those questions began to take shape, Marco helped select a team of experts to write detailed descriptions and prepare the finest drawings of cosmic organization.Most of the experts have worked with the "Triple Es," the exo-Earth engineers and lead builders of several planetary observatories.They were used to large space projects, but were still taken aback by the scale of the Tachyon Terminal that Nick had requested. After ten days of non-stop conversations with Nick, the experts held a meeting in Tianmen Hudson and invited Marco and I to attend.Kelly stays behind, trying to fill in the gaps in the plan.Nick sat at the long table between me and Marco.Against the engineers, in his blue swimming trunks, he looked too young, too small, too fragile. The seven engineers are no-nonsense, mature space veterans.With blueprints under their arms, laptops and stacks of materials, they shuffled files around and frowned at Nick while they waited for their spokesperson to start.The speaker was Michael Bell, an energetic man who had tested his own hardware in orbit around several planets. "I'm going to tell you why we're here." His eyes were cold, green eyes uneasily moving from Nick to Marco and then to me. “We have a lot of space expertise,” he nodded to his fellow engineers—three sitting side by side—for approval. “We’ve done some hard work. I think we have the ability to say what is Doable and what not. I believe we can all agree that this so-called tachyon terminal is impossible." Those around him nodded solemnly. "It can be done!" Nick insisted. "It has to be done." "Look at it," McCabel groped through a pile of papers, and brought up a model structure of the terminal station: the six outer towers and their landing pads ascended like spiral stairs, surrounding the taller central signal tower. "Ten miles high?" He pursed his lips and shook his head. "Installed on deck and on tachyon ships, half a mile in diameter. We've never heard of such mechanical operating rules, and we're asking for details on how to make them." unknown material on Earth." "Please, sir," Nick stood up pale and trembling, "we'll explain the rules of operation, and we'll show you how to make new materials." "Look at the scale!" McCabel shook the frame with his hands. "They reduced a large cone-shaped object to a small tree knot. We still have a hard time estimating that they weigh 3.7 billion tons, and the construction materials are unknown to us." of." "We know it won't be easy, sir," Nick said too quickly, as he usually did.When he's too anxious to remember the slow reflexes of ordinary people, "That's why we want the Universal Organization to take over. All nations must be unified as one." "The Cosmos!" snorted McCabel. "The Cosmos is dying. Its builders mistakenly took other planets for lunch, and it looks like we're going to be a free lunch for other biological universes." "But, sir, disputes with other cosmic beings are exactly why the terminal must be established. Let's prepare for the very moment when spaceflight begins by launching the information missile. Don't you understand? Don't any of you understand? ?" Nick held his breath and looked around in despair—all over the suspicious faces. "The extraterrestrial cosmic beings need help to increase mutual understanding. The signal light at the terminal station can help. We must build it as soon as possible. Without it, our own cosmic beings will probably kill each other. Can't you see huh, sir? Building the terminal is going to be the means by which we save life on Earth, Venus, and all other life, don't you... don't you understand?" He spoke desperately, slowed down, stopped.I could hear muffled knocking coming from the dining room.The slowly flowing air is mixed with the smell of fish, and it is cool.Nick was gobbling and choking, and I thought he was going to cry. A pencil fell to the ground and rolled around a few times.Tall, fat engineers were whispering together, and one of them handed McCabell a piece of paper. After squinting, he cleared his throat and frowned at Nick again. "We have a constructive comment," "If you want to think about it," he said. "Yes, sir!" Nick said hastily. "Of course." "In our opinion, these plans are not thorough enough," he nodded to the fat engineer. "We are talking about this terminal that can berth the starship of the fleet. In our opinion, only need to send a ship和很少的人员。 你们不能改变计划吗，” “我希望我能，”尼克不快地耸耸肩，“终端站在我们看来是大规模的，但从整个宇宙来看就不是了。星与星相隔遥远，超光速粒子信号灯必须具有一定的能量以完全够接收船只或其它终端站的讯号，较弱的信号灯不好。无论如何，我们不能改变计划。” "Why not?" “您看，先生，我们自己没有设计任何东西。我们的认识不足。我们只是把信息导弹详尽记录的6千万年前的东西说了出来。” “我认为机器说明该简单些。” “我恐怕你不明白，先生。行星太多，上万上亿，总是有太多的生物形态在发展，可需要或想要加入这伟大的银河系文化的太少了，星际航船不能全部都探访到。只有那些修筑了终端站的才被认为值得作星际访问，只有这样才能获得跨银河系成员资格。” 迈卡贝尔皱着眉，把接下来的讨论交给他的工程师同事们。他们开始问及造塔建筑材料、信号灯操作原则、超光速粒子推进力及转换到超光速粒子状态的最低能量等技术性河题，尼克的回答把我弄糊涂了，我想工程师们也糊涂了。