經典科幻文學:《基本上無害 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.

眼下蘭登瞅的不是自己的手腕。她的手腕關着呢。阿瑟靜靜地在她身邊蹲下，看是什麼吸引了她的注意。那是他的手錶。先前他把表摘掉，去附近的瀑布洗澡，蘭登發現了這玩意兒，正試着擺弄它。

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

“只是塊手錶，”他說，“用來顯示時間的。”

‘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.’

“這我知道。”她說，“可你老撥弄這東西，而它還是沒法顯示正確的時間。連邊兒都沾不上。”

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.

她點開自己手腕上的面板，面板立刻自動讀取出當地的時間。它早就不動聲色地測過這裏的重力和軌道衝量，還確定了太陽的位置，並對它的活動進行追蹤。所有這一切都是在蘭登抵達之後的幾分鐘之內完成的。接下來，它便很快從周圍環境中找出各種線索，摸清當地人的計時習慣，藉此對自己進行適當的設置。這一套它會不停地幹了又幹。如果你不僅常做空間旅行還老是穿越時間，這一點就特別寶貴了。

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

蘭登對她父親的手錶皺起眉頭，剛纔那些活兒它一樣也幹不了。

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.

阿瑟很喜歡它。他自己是永遠也買不起這麼一塊表的。這是阿瑟二十二歲的生日禮物，來自他心懷歉疚的教父——這位先生把他之前的每一個生日都忘得一乾二淨，順帶還忘記了他的名字。它能顯示今天是幾月幾號星期幾，還有月亮的虧盈。在磨損得很厲害，滿是劃痕的底殼上勉強能看清當初刻下的字：“給阿爾伯特，祝二十一歲生日快樂。”這句之後是個錯誤的日期。

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.

最近幾年裏，這塊表實在經歷了不少風雨，其中大多數都在保修範圍之外。當然了，他也知道保修條款上肯定沒有註明諸如：只能在地球特有的重力和磁場下使用，使用場所每天必須是二十四小時，地球如果爆炸則本店概不負責之類。有些前提過於基本，哪怕律師也想不到這上頭。

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.

幸運的是這表是上發條的，或者至少是自動上發條的，大小和電壓符合地球標準的電池，眼下整個銀河系也找不着了。

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

“那這些數字是什麼意思？”蘭登問。

Arthur took it from her.

阿瑟把表拿過去。