Chapter 6 Chapter Four

When it was dark, I woke up.This room has a real window--the department pays me well, so I can have some luxury.I looked out the window, and the capital at night was full of life.The river made a wide bend and skirted the monument.It was summer, and they added fluorescent lights to the water in Washington, D.C., and the river became a winding ribbon of rose, amber, and vivid green, like a burning flame, dazzling.Small pleasure boats sail across the colorful waters.I dare say that every boat has some dogs and men who are having a good time. On land, among the ancient buildings, the bubble-like trapezoidal roofs are brightly lit, and the city looks like a brightly colored fairyland on earth.The whole area is like a basket of Easter eggs - an Easter egg lit from within.

Due to work, I often watch the night view of the capital.While I love this place, I haven't given it much thought in the past.But tonight, I have a feeling that the best days will never come again.It's so beautiful here, it's so beautiful.But it's not the beauty of the city that makes my throat choke, it's the fact that I know, under this brilliant light, that real people are doing their job, making love or arguing, whatever suits them... just go as long as it feels good Do.As the saying goes: Everyone lives and works in their own homeland, and no one can make them feel afraid.

I thought of these mild-mannered, kind-hearted people (and occasionally a scumbag), and I thought of each of them with a gray slug hanging from the nape of their neck, playing with their limbs, making them Say what the slugs want them to say and go where the slugs want them to go. What a scene from hell. I solemnly swear in the bottom of my heart: If the parasite wins, I will not live by myself, and I would rather die than let one of those things control me the way they control Barnes.For an agent, death is as simple as biting a fingernail -- and if you lose your hand, there are a few other ways.On professional issues, the old man was very considerate.

But I knew that the old man had made no arrangements for the situation I had imagined.To make these ordinary folks down there feel safe, not to come out and run into them when things get bad--that's the old man's job, and it's my job. I turn away from the window.Now, I can't do anything.I decided what I needed was a companion.In the room were the "Escort Companies" and "Modeling Agencies" directories that all the big hotels had under those directories.I flipped it over with my thumb, looked at the girl on it, and then snapped it shut.I don't want any random girl to hang out with; I just want a certain girl—and I don't know where she's gone.

I always carry a bottle of "Time Extender" tablets.Most agents carry it with them, because there's no telling when a crisis might come up.In this case, taking a pill can help you get over it. Although the propaganda of the opponents is terrible, the time extension tablet is not addictive, unlike the original hashish. Those purists would definitely say I'm addicted, because I've gotten into the habit of taking a few slices now and then to make a twenty-four-hour vacation feel like a week.I admit I love that mild euphoria.In fact, this is just a side effect of the drug. Its main function is to prolong your subjective time by more than ten times—to cut your time into smaller segments, so that in the same period of time, you spend more time .

What's wrong with this?Of course, I know the scary story of a man dying of old age over the course of a month on the calendar due to constant use of the drug.But I only take it occasionally. Perhaps we should all follow his example.He lived a long and happy life--surely happy--and died happy at last.What does it matter that the sun rises only thirty times?Are there established rules for this kind of thing, and there are scorekeepers? I sat there looking at the pill bottles that I estimated would keep me high for at least two "years" of contentment.I'd crawl into my hole if I wanted to, closing the opening behind me.

I took out two pills and poured a glass of water.Then I carefully put the pills back in the bottle, took the pistol and the phone, and left the hotel, heading straight for the Library of Congress. On the way to Congress Internet Library, I stopped at a restaurant for a quick bite to eat and read the news.There is no news from Iowa, when did Iowa have news? At the library, I found the general catalog, put on the blindfold, and started looking up references.From "Flying Saucer" to "Frisbee", followed by "Saucer", "Skylight", "Fireball", "Theory of Cosmic Diffusion of the Origin of Life", and more than 20 kinds of strange and weird classified documents that I guessed at random.I need something like a Geiger counter① to tell me what works and what doesn't, especially since the keywords I'm searching for are too broad and not clearly categorized - I only know it's categories between and Lost Continent among the myths.

【① A detector invented by German physicist Hans Geiger (1882-1945) to detect single alpha particles and other ionizing radiation. 】 An hour later, I still found more than two dozen choice cards.I handed the card to an innocent woman behind the counter and waited for her to enter the card into the card reader. After a while, she said, "Most of the films you want are in use. The rest will be sent to Reading Room 9-A. Please take the south escalator." 9-A reading room has only one reader.She looked up as I walked in, and said, "Oh! The pervert came himself—how did you find me? I swear I didn't leave any clues."

I said, "Hello, Mary." "Hello," she said, "good-bye. Miss Barkis is still reluctant, and I have work to do." I'm a little annoyed. "Listen, you pompous little man. As strange as it may seem to you, I'm not here for your undoubtedly beautiful, snow-white flesh. I also do a little work now and then, and that's why I'm here .If you can bear with me for a while, I'll get out of here as soon as my film arrives, and find another reading room—one for men only." She didn't retort and became much milder, which proved that she was more gentlemanly than me. "I'm sorry, Sam. When a woman hears the same subject a thousand times, she grows into thinking that there can be no other subject at all. Sit down."

"No," I replied, "thanks, but I'm taking my film to an empty reading room. I do want to do work." "Stay," she insisted, "read the rules on the wall. If you transfer the film to another room, you'll not only have the sorter break a dozen monitors, but you'll give the head of the documentation department a nervous breakdown." "I'll send it back after reading the materials." She held my arm, and I felt a warm current. "Stay here, Sam. I'm sorry." I sat down and smiled at her: "Now, no one can persuade me to leave again. I didn't expect to find you here, but since I found you, I won't let you out of my sight again unless you Tell me your phone number, where you live, and the real color of your hair."

"Pervert." She said softly, her nose twitched, "You never want to know about these things." She turned her head exaggeratedly, stared at her reading machine again, and ignored me.But I could see that she was not unhappy. The conveyor pipes creaked and my film dropped into the basket.I picked up the film and set it on the table next to the other machine.One of the reels rolled onto Mary's stack, knocking hers over.Mary looked up. I picked up what I thought was mine, glanced at it—wrong.This side of the film is the same, the only difference is the serial number and the dot matrix for the sorter to identify.I turned it over, read the label, and placed it on my stack. "Hey!" said Mary, "that's mine." "That's what blind people think." I said politely. "It's mine—I saw it when the label was facing me. I was about to read this volume." As stupid as I am, I'll see it sooner or later.Qing Li would not come here to study the history of footwear in the Middle Ages.I picked up three or four rolls of her film and looked at the labels. "So you've got everything I'm looking for," I said, "but you haven't done a thorough job. I found some things you didn't." I handed her what I found. Mary looked at it for a while, then piled all the films into a pile. "The two of us have half, or do we all watch it all?" "Half for each of us, we will pick out the useless ones first, and we both will read the rest." I said, "Let's get started." Even after I'd seen the parasite on poor Barnes's back, and even though the old man had solemnly concluded that a "flying saucer" had landed, I still didn't expect to find so much evidence in a public library.Damn Digby and his valuation formula!Digby was essentially a Floccinaucinihilipilificator—an eight-dollar word meaning a worthless bastard who dismissed as non-existent anything that his foul mouth hadn't bitten on himself. 【① This is a word invented by the author, and you will know the meaning of the word after reading it. 】 The evidence is beyond doubt; spacecraft from outer space have visited Earth not once, but many times. Many records date long before humans achieved space travel; some even date to the seventeenth century - and much earlier.However, the "science" of that era was Aristotle, and it is almost impossible to seriously evaluate the quality of the reports at that time.Data from the first systems originated in the United States between the 1940s and 1950s.The second batch came in the 1980s, mostly from Siberia, Russia.These reports are difficult to evaluate because there is no direct evidence from our agents to corroborate them. I noticed some cases, start excerpt date.The cycle of strange objects in the sky is about thirty years.I noted this cycle, and the statistical analysts might figure something out—if I told the old man about it, he'd be able to use his crystal ball-like brain to see something out of it. The "flying saucer" is closely related to the phenomenon of "mysterious disappearance".There are at least three documents that suffice to prove that when the pilot tracked the "flying saucer", he neither landed nor crashed anywhere.Officials attribute such incidents to crashes in the deserted wilderness, which were not found-this is an "easy skip" or "happy skip" explanation. I developed a seemingly impossible hunch to see if there was also a thirty-year cycle in the phenomenon of mysterious disappearances.If so, does this cycle match that of UFOs in the sky?At first glance, it seems to be the case, but I'm not sure - there are too many data, but the periodic fluctuations are not obvious.Many people go missing every year for other reasons, ranging from amnesia to falling out with their mother-in-law. Fortunately, the most important records record a considerable period of time.I write it down for use by professional analysts. It didn't take me too long to see that several groups of reports seemed to share geographical and even political commonalities.I'm thinking about a hypothetical scenario: put yourself in the shoes of an intruder, if you were searching on a strange planet, would you spend the same amount of time researching everything, or would you choose one that looked interesting? (whatever the criteria for being interesting or not) to conduct research on?Focus on that? This is just a guess.I am prepared to stay up all night to complete the analysis if necessary. Mary and I didn't speak three words all night.Finally, we stood up, stretched, and I lent Mary some change, paid to take the rolls of records from the machine, (why don't women bring change?) and unplugged my machine at the same time. "Any thoughts?" I asked. "I felt like a sparrow building a nice nest only to find it was exposed to the downpour." I went on to recite the old ballad, "We'll do the same thing again—unwilling to learn, and rebuild our nest in the rain." "Oh, no! Sam, we've got to do something, right away. We've got to convince the President. I've got the idea; they're not going to leave after they come in this time, they're here to stay." "Possibly. Actually, I also think their purpose is to stay." "So what should we do?" "Baby, you will soon know that in the country of the blind, the one-eyed dragon also has a big role to play." "Stop being cynical, we're running out of time." "Yes, there's no time. Pull yourself together and let's get out of here." At dawn, we left the library, which was almost empty. I said, "I see—let's get a keg of beer, and take it to my hotel room, and we'll talk it over." She shook her head. "Not going to your hotel room." "Hell, it's work." "Let's go back to my apartment. It's only a few hundred miles away. I can make you breakfast in my house." "That's the best offer I've heard all night. But I'm serious—why not go to a hotel? We can have breakfast there and save half an hour of travel time." "Don't you want to go to my apartment? I won't bite you." "I'd rather you bite me—so I can bite you. No, I was just wondering, why did you take a 180-degree turn?" "Hmm—maybe I want you to see the bear traps I've set up carefully around the bed; or maybe I want to show you my culinary skills." She dimpled with a smile. I hailed a taxi and went to her apartment. After we entered her apartment, she made me stand there while she carefully searched the apartment before she came over to me and said, "Turn around. I want to touch your back." "why……" "Turn around!" I shut my mouth and turned away.She rubbed my back carefully and said, "Now you can touch my back." "Great!" The wall of the mouth was joking, but the hands were actually very serious about touching it.I understand her intentions.There's nothing but girls under her clothes—girls, plus all sorts of deadly hardware. She turned around, and took a deep breath. "That's why I don't want to go to your hotel room. We're safe now. For the first time since seeing that thing on the TV manager's back, I actually feel we're safe. The apartment is sealed Yes. I turn off the air every time I leave and seal it as tight as a vault." "How about the air conditioner? Can that kind of thing come in through the air conditioner vent?" "Possibly—but I didn't turn on the air conditioning, just a spare cylinder. Leave it alone. What would you like to eat?" I'd say eat Mary herself, with lettuce and toast, but it's better not to. "Can I have two pounds of steak? Hot." We shared a 5-pound steak.I swear, I only ate half of it.We read the news while munching on a steak.Still no news from Iowa.