Chapter 2 Chapter two
By the standards of the Chinese and American planet, the small town of Ann Arbor already deserves the word ancient.Of course, there are older buildings on the planet: a part of the old city of Margate is still preserved near the landing site.The school sometimes organizes students to visit there, and the time is not long each time, because those shabby houses are still slightly radioactive.Moreover, even in today's capital, people can still find some original buildings.However, the University at Ann Arbor has flourished for a full hundred and ninety years, and most of its buildings are not much later than the original houses.
Something was wrong, but it didn't seem to have anything to do with Hamid's problem.They were walking in the city when they saw two police helicopters flying from Margate and circling over the university.Hamid found his favorite shortcuts blocked by school patrols.It must be something related to tourists. It seems that he can only enter through the main entrance and have to pass through the teaching building.Pooh.It's been ten years, and he still loathes the place, which reminds Hamed of his days as a child prodigy.His parents forced him to study math, and he had no brains.He knew he wasn't the kind of kid his parents wanted; but the house was filled with anger and tears until he finally convinced them of that.
They walked out along the outer wall of the university.There were supports on the walls, and they were beautifully shaped; ivy ran along the stone walls to the trees beside the road, but Hamid ignored them all.It was all too familiar to him...the only thing that was out of the ordinary were the police cars.The students stood in groups here and there, looking at the federal police, but there was no commotion in the air, and they seemed to be just curious.Besides, the federal police had never interfered with university affairs before.
"Keep quiet, do you hear?" Hamid whispered.
"Of course. Of course." Guagua retracted his neck, pretending to be a good dog.They were pretty notorious on campus for a while, but he dropped out that summer, and everyone was preoccupied with other things today, so they walked through the gates without getting any attention from students or police Notice.
Larry's poor rat hole is in the Morality Building.When he got to the front of the building, he was really taken aback.The Daode Building is old and looks dilapidated, but it is not old enough to be honored as a cultural relic.At that time, people tried to build houses with bricks, and this was their failure.The brick body has been decayed, and many cracks can be seen, but it provides a place for vines and pests to move around.Now, this thing doesn't look like a residential house at all, it's more like a pile of reddish rubble.This is one of the places where school administrations house their most obnoxious tenured faculty members, part of what everyone calls the "Forgotten Corner"...but today it's a bit of a misnomer.Today, there are two long lines of police cars parked in front of the building, and there are even armed guards at the entrance!
Hamid walked up the steps.He had an ominous premonition: at this moment, Larry the Lazy would be the most difficult professor on the planet.But it's not all hopeless: Hamid works as a tour guide for the tourists, so he's already familiar with some of the security personnel.
"What's the matter with you, sir?" Unfortunately, he didn't know this person.
"I'm here to see my advisor...Professor Fujiyama." Larry had never been his advisor, but wasn't he looking for Larry's guidance now?
"Oh." The policeman snapped on the throat microphone.Hamid didn't catch much of the conversation, except that the policeman mentioned "that black-and-white alien creature."Unless you've lived in a hole in the ground, it's impossible not to know anything about croaks for the past two decades.
A minute later, an older police officer came out. "Sorry, boy, Professor Fujiyama hasn't seen any students this week. Official business."
From nowhere came the mourning of a funeral.Hamid kicked Quack's front paw; the music stopped abruptly. "I'm not doing it for school, ma'am." He had a sudden inspiration: why not tell her the truth? "It's about the tourists and my gua la la."
The officer sighed, "I was just worried you'd bring this up. Well, come with me." They walked into the dark hallway, giggling smugly.One day, this little trick of Guagua will provoke some bad guy and get the shit out of him, but it doesn't look like it will be today.
They went down to the second basement.Illuminated only by fluorescent lights in sound-absorbing tiles, the light is even darker.From time to time, the wooden stairs under their feet would sag.The building was empty, and the students who usually waited in line were gone, but Hamid knew the police hadn't also kicked out the teachers: there was loud snoring from one office. The "Forgotten Corner"—especially the Daode Building—is weird, and the teachers here have one thing in common: they are all thorns in someone's eyes and flesh.This means that the most incompetent people and the best people are in these small rooms.
Larry's office was at the end of a long corridor that should have been called a half-basement.Two policemen guarded the door, one on the left and the other on the right, and the rest remained unchanged.There is a brass nameplate on the wall: Professor L. Lawrence Fujiyama, Department of Theory of Heaven and Man.Incredible office hours swaggered next to the name tag.In the center of the door is a picture of a piggy, with the caption: "If a student pretends to need help, pretend to help him."
When they got to the door, the officer stood aside: Hamm had to figure out his own way in.He knocked quickly on the door, and there were footsteps inside, and then the door opened slightly, and Larry asked, "What's the code?"
"Professor Fujiyama, I need to talk to you—"
"Wrong answer!" Larry slammed the door shut.
The police officer put his hands on Ham's shoulders and comforted him: "It's a pity, young man. You know, the master who is much more famous than you has also been rejected by him."
Hamid shook her hand away.The black and white guy under his feet let out bursts of sirens.Hamm raised his voice over the noise: "Wait, I'm Hamid Thompson! You're a student of Tianren 201."
The door opened again.Larry came out. He glanced at the policeman, then at Gualala, and said, "Why didn't you say so sooner? Come in." Hamid and Quack hurried past him to enter the door, and Larry rushed to the police officer. She smiled innocently: "Don't worry, Susie, it's business."
Fujiyama's office is long and narrow, and there are two long rows of instruments piled up in the room. In this way, the remaining space is only about as wide as an aisle.Larry's students (those who had the guts to come down into this burrow) had a guess: If Larry had lived on Old Earth, he might have made a home in the Information Storage.There were tons of trash on the shelves at least, and a lot of small parts protruding into the aisle.Archeology was one of Larry's specialties, so the place looked like a museum—or maybe it really was.Most of the machinery is silent, but there are ticking or glowing ones from time to time.There's hilarious inventions in the pile, models of early colonies... and writing stuff from out of bounds.The heating and water pipes almost hid the ceiling.Every time he visits this place, Hamid thinks of the cabin of a submarine.
Larry's desk was at the back of the room.The table was piled high with scrap metal, including a flat-screen monitor and a beautiful jet-black sculpture.In celestial class, Larry introduced them to his collection management theory: late in and early out, buy a clean sheet every year, put the date on it, and spread it on top of the previous year's clutter .Most people thought it was just another joke by Larry the Lazy.But Hamid found that the corner of the bed sheet was really exposed under the pile of garbage on the table.
The lamp cast a long shadow on the table.At first glance, the walls around Larry seemed to be leaning towards him.Posters plastered the walls.Larry had been placed in the hole, and the posters had done their bit: it was an offense to any sane member of society.A pile of...something...was thrown on the chairs for the visitors.With a wave of Larry's hand, they all moved to the floor; then he motioned for Ham to sit down in the chair.
Larry also sat down behind his desk: "Of course I remember you, celestial class. But why mention that? Aren't you the master of Gualala, the son of Hussein Thompson?"
I'm not some Hussein Thompson's son! "Sorry, I didn't think of that much just now. I came here today for a quack thing. I hope you can give me some advice."
"Ah!" Fujiyama showed his famous big-mouthed tadpole smile, looking innocent and sinister, "Then you have come to the right place. If you want to give advice, I have a lot of suggestions here. By the way, I heard You dropped out of school and went to the tourist bureau?"
Hamid shrugged, trying not to look defensive: "Well, yes. Because I was a senior at the time, and I knew more about American thought and literature than most graduates... Besides, the tour group will leave after half a year. Who knows when the next tour group will come? We have taken them to see everything we have that they might be interested in. To be honest, even the things we don’t have , and put on a show for them to see. If you want to meet the next tour group, I'm afraid you have to wait a hundred years."
"Uh-huh."
"Anyway, I learned a lot. I also know almost half of the tourists. But..."
There are 10 million people in Central America, and at least one tenth of them have the dream of flying outside the boundary area; among these one tenth, at least one tenth will leave the reptile world at all costs , enter a civilization that spans thousands of worlds.Ten years ago, China and the United States learned the news that this tour group was about to come to this world.Hamid has been preparing since then, hoping to get the qualification to go outside with his skills.Ten years is equal to half of Hamid's life, equal to the whole time after he got rid of mathematics.
There are countless others like him.Every department of American thought and literature on the planet has been overwhelmed in the past decade.There's a lot more going on behind the scenes than that.The government and some big corporations have their own secret programs, and ordinary people have been kept in the dark.A few dozen others are willing to take big risks, betting on things that are not generally thought to be of interest to outsiders.Some people here are really stupid: they set their sights on becoming the world's top athletes, chess masters, whatever.In fact, anyone with a little brain knows that among the countless people in Feiyue Realm, the masters here are not even high-ranking.No, if you really want to hitch a ride, you'll have to come up with something that's out of the ordinary.There are not many choices, and basically we can only start from the perspective of our hometown on the earth-as for the specific method, it will be an eye-opener for others.Jilly Weinberg, for example, also in American Thought and Literature, was smart but not a great genius.When the tour group arrived in orbit, she walked around the tourist office and told the tourists that she was a real American cheerleader and a high-class hooker who dealt with big shots.This strategy has been used by many people, both men and women, but others are not as direct as Gilly, so they are not as successful as her: she used this method to earn a ticket to enter the world of leap.Funniest of all, the one who funded her departure from Central America was one of the few non-human members of the tour group, a bug from the planet Roslyn Marr, who couldn't survive even a second under aerobic conditions.
"I guess I'm on good terms with three of the tourists, but there are at least five guides who do a better job than me. And, you know, those tourists resurrected the four who originally came from Earth on the Chuka-American. As long as these four people are willing, tourists will definitely take them away.” These men and women spent their childhood and youth on the earth, and then it took 20,000 years, across a distance of 2,000 light-years, to come to this planet.It seems that China and the United States have nothing else to export. "It would be nice if they come again in a few years, after I graduate... Maybe I will have made something by then."
Larry interrupted his self-pity: "Have you ever thought of using gua la la to attract the attention of those tourists?"
"Think about it a few times." Hamid glanced at the ball of fur curled up at his feet.Quack was too quiet.
Larry caught his gaze. "Don't worry, it's fiddling with those ultrasound imaging machines." He pointed to the row of instruments behind Hamid, with a purple light on it, bouncing between some invisible partitions.
Hamm laughed. "It's going to be a struggle to get it out later." He had several ultrasonic amplifiers in his apartment, but Quack rarely got a chance to play with a high-definition ultrasonic device. "Yeah. From the beginning , I just hoped they would be interested in Quack, and I told them I was his trainer. But when they saw that he didn't come from the earth, they completely lost interest...Professor, there is something wrong with those guys! You Throw the babes from Highbound on their heads and they won't bat an eyelid But give them a Bruce Springsteen cover of Elvis Presley and they'll build a space base on Selene Make an exchange!"
Larry just smiled.This is how he always laughs when a student speaks without thinking and digs his own academic grave.The look calmed Hamid down. "Well, I get it, sometimes, they're weird for a reason." No normal person in the upper circles is interested in China and the United States.This is a full nine light-years trapped within the reptilian world.U.S. and Chinese technology is nothing more than archaic; and, given their positions, China and the U.S. will never be able to develop competitive technology.The hapless planet of Hamid has only one good card: it is a direct colony of Earth, and its people are among the first colonists to set off from Earth.This tragic voyage lasted 20,000 years. During such a long time, the earth has already become a legend in the minds of most human beings.
In the world of Leap, there are millions of star systems known to have human-like intelligent life, and most of them are able to communicate in real time.In this vast ocean, human beings are but a small wave-occupying about four thousand worlds.And even among these four thousand human worlds, there is little to no interest in a first-generation Earth colony in the Reptiles.But with such a large base, this little interest is enough: you can always find some guys who are willing to fly in the reptile world for 20 years, such as a few rich weirdos, or a certain historical foundation, a certain religious movement, etc. of.So China and the U.S. should really thank God for the existence of this small group of idiots.In the past 100 years, except for a few merchant ships occasionally, only two tour groups have visited China and the United States.Those few trades have brought substantial progress to the living standards of China and the United States, but for many people, including Hamid, their significance goes beyond that: they are almost the only thing that Chinese and Americans know about the outside world. way.Over the past century, two hundred people have successfully staged the Great Escape to the Leap World.The first to go out were government employees and scientists on government missions.Investments in these people were all in vain: of all those who left, only five returned to China and the United States.Larry Fujiyama and Hussein Thompson are among them.
"Yeah, I guess I knew they were weirdos. But look at them, most of them don't even want to know if we're doing it right. We're trying to show them 21st century America. But the two of us We all know what America was like at that time: heavy industry has all moved to Earth's space orbit, and North America is crowded with half a billion people. We've got at most mid-twentieth-century America here—maybe earlier than that ...I've had a hard time figuring out the history of Earth. But apart from a few really respectable people, they don't care much if the dates are correct. It seems that as long as they come here with us, their purpose is to Reached."
Larry opened his mouth as if to make a comment; but in the end he just smiled and shrugged. (One of his many maxims is "If you can't figure it out yourself, you don't figure it out anyway".)
"It's been several months now, have you discovered the usefulness of gua la la?"
"It's the bug who runs the whole tour, and he just informed me that someone wanted to buy it. That guy is always a bargainer, and he—wait, you know him well, don't you? Oddly enough, this time he reported I made a one-off price: he is responsible for paying the federation, and then I will be sent to Roslyn Marr," Roslyn Marr is the closest civilization in the Leap World, "plus some FTL privileges."
"So you're ready to kiss your pet goodbye?"
"Basically. I told them they needed someone to take care of Quack: of course that was me. It wasn't all a lie, by the way. We grew up together, and Quack wouldn't take anyone else without my help. But They're not interested in it. You see, Worm says no one will hurt Croak, but...do you believe him?"
"Ah, the bug's slime is basically clean, I'm sure he hasn't heard of anyone trying to harm Gua Lala... He's quite upright and will definitely do some background research on the buyer first. He told Who is your buyer?"
"Someone called Ravna & Claws, well, that's probably not a name, and I don't know." He handed Larry a piece of tissue paper with an offer on it, with the Ravna & Claws logo on it : It looks like a pretty paw, "This name is not on the tourist list."
Larry nodded and typed what was on the paper into the flat-panel monitor. "I know. Well, let me see..." He fiddled with the monitor.The flat panel display is set to teaching mode, with images visible on both sides.Hamid found that Larry was searching the federal internal network.Larry raised his eyebrows. "Aha! Ravna & Talon just arrived last week, not part of the tour group at all."
"A trader acting alone..."
"It's not that simple. Their ship stays behind Jupiter - that's what the bug asked for. The Federal Space Network took some pictures." A blurry picture appeared on the monitor, a long wasp-waisted ship Spaceships, it seems, are standard technology outside of this zone.But there are some weird fins on it, almost like the wings of a glider.Larry typed in some algorithms and the image cleared up, "Well, look at the aspect ratio of these fins. This guy is equipped with high-performance FTL equipment. It's useless down here, of course, but it can be in many, many places." They're hot..." Larry whistled, a few bars from "Nightmare Waltz," "I think it's a senior trader."
Someone from Beyond the Limits.
Notes:
Notes: