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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
n the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear and feel the sharp, ripping-metal explosion, the violent heave that had tossed him furiously out of bed, the searing wave of heat.
He sat up convulsively and stared, not believing what he saw, at the quiet room and the bright sunlight coming in the window.
His wife was not in the bed next to him. The covers were tumbled and awry2, as though she had just left it, and the memory of the dream was so strong that instinctively3 he found himself searching the floor to see if the dream explosion had thrown her down.
But she wasn't there. Of course she wasn't, he told himself, looking at the familiar vanity and slipper4 chair, the uncracked window, the unbuckled wall. It had only been a dream.
"Guy?" His wife was calling him querulously from the foot of the stairs. "Guy, dear, are you all right?"
He called weakly, "Sure."
There was a pause. Then Mary said doubtfully, "Breakfast is ready. Are you sure you're all right? I thought I heard you yelling—"
Burckhardt said more confidently, "I had a bad dream, honey. Be right down."
In the shower, punching the lukewarm-and-cologne he favored, he told himself that it had been a beaut of a dream. Still, bad dreams weren't unusual, especially bad dreams about explosions. In the past thirty years of H-bomb jitters5, who had not dreamed of explosions?
Even Mary had dreamed of them, it turned out, for he started to tell her about the dream, but she cut him off. "You did?" Her voice was astonished. "Why, dear, I dreamed the same thing! Well, almost the same thing. I didn't actually hear anything. I dreamed that something woke me up, and then there was a sort of quick bang, and then something hit me on the head. And that was all. Was yours like that?"
Burckhardt coughed. "Well, no," he said. Mary was not one of these strong-as-a-man, brave-as-a-tiger women. It was not necessary, he thought, to tell her all the little details of the dream that made it seem so real. No need to mention the splintered ribs6, and the salt bubble in his throat, and the agonized7 knowledge that this was death. He said, "Maybe there really was some kind of explosion downtown. Maybe we heard it and it started us dreaming."
Mary reached over and patted his hand absently. "Maybe," she agreed. "It's almost half-past eight, dear. Shouldn't you hurry? You don't want to be late to the office."
He gulped8 his food, kissed her and rushed out—not so much to be on time as to see if his guess had been right.
But downtown Tylerton looked as it always had. Coming in on the bus, Burckhardt watched critically out the window, seeking evidence of an explosion. There wasn't any. If anything, Tylerton looked better than it ever had before: It was a beautiful crisp day, the sky was cloudless, the buildings were clean and inviting9. They had, he observed, steam-blasted the Power & Light Building, the town's only skyscraper—that was the penalty of having Contro Chemical's main plant on the outskirts10 of town; the fumes11 from the cascade12 stills left their mark on stone buildings.
None of the usual crowd were on the bus, so there wasn't anyone Burckhardt could ask about the explosion. And by the time he got out at the corner of Fifth and Lehigh and the bus rolled away with a muted diesel13 moan, he had pretty well convinced himself that it was all imagination.
He stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building, but Ralph wasn't behind the counter. The man who sold him his pack of cigarettes was a stranger.
"Where's Mr. Stebbins?" Burckhardt asked.
The man said politely, "Sick, sir. He'll be in tomorrow. A pack of Marlins today?"
"Chesterfields," Burckhardt corrected.
"Certainly, sir," the man said. But what he took from the rack and slid across the counter was an unfamiliar14 green-and-yellow pack.
"Do try these, sir," he suggested. "They contain an anti-cough factor. Ever notice how ordinary cigarettes make you choke every once in a while?"
Burckhardt said suspiciously, "I never heard of this brand."
"Of course not. They're something new." Burckhardt hesitated, and the man said persuasively15, "Look, try them out at my risk. If you don't like them, bring back the empty pack and I'll refund16 your money. Fair enough?"
He opened the pack and lit one while he waited for the elevator. They weren't bad, he decided18, though he was suspicious of cigarettes that had the tobacco chemically treated in any way. But he didn't think much of Ralph's stand-in; it would raise hell with the trade at the cigar stand if the man tried to give every customer the same high-pressure sales talk.
The elevator door opened with a low-pitched sound of music. Burckhardt and two or three others got in and he nodded to them as the door closed. The thread of music switched off and the speaker in the ceiling of the cab began its usual commercials.
No, not the usual commercials, Burckhardt realized. He had been exposed to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn't merely that the brands were mostly unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.
There were jingles19 with an insistent20, bouncy rhythm, about soft drinks he had never tasted. There was a rapid patter dialogue between what sounded like two ten-year-old boys about a candy bar, followed by an authoritative21 bass22 rumble23: "Go right out and get a DELICIOUS Choco-Bite and eat your TANGY Choco-Bite all up. That's Choco-Bite!" There was a sobbing24 female whine25: "I wish I had a Feckle Freezer! I'd do anything for a Feckle Freezer!" Burckhardt reached his floor and left the elevator in the middle of the last one. It left him a little uneasy. The commercials were not for familiar brands; there was no feeling of use and custom to them.
But the office was happily normal—except that Mr. Barth wasn't in. Miss Mitkin, yawning at the reception desk, didn't know exactly why. "His home phoned, that's all. He'll be in tomorrow."
"Maybe he went to the plant. It's right near his house."
She looked indifferent. "Yeah."
A thought struck Burckhardt. "But today is June 15th! It's quarterly tax return day—he has to sign the return!"
Miss Mitkin shrugged to indicate that that was Burckhardt's problem, not hers. She returned to her nails.
Thoroughly26 exasperated27, Burckhardt went to his desk. It wasn't that he couldn't sign the tax returns as well as Barth, he thought resentfully. It simply wasn't his job, that was all; it was a responsibility that Barth, as office manager for Contro Chemicals' downtown office, should have taken.
He thought briefly28 of calling Barth at his home or trying to reach him at the factory, but he gave up the idea quickly enough. He didn't really care much for the people at the factory and the less contact he had with them, the better. He had been to the factory once, with Barth; it had been a confusing and, in a way, a frightening experience. Barring a handful of executives and engineers, there wasn't a soul in the factory—that is, Burckhardt corrected himself, remembering what Barth had told him, not a living soul—just the machines.
According to Barth, each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl29, the actual memory and mind of a human being. It was an unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing graveyards30 and implanting brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man's habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn't hurt the man and it didn't make the machine into a monster.
But they made Burckhardt uncomfortable all the same.
He put Barth and the factory and all his other little irritations31 out of his mind and tackled the tax returns. It took him until noon to verify the figures—which Barth could have done out of his memory and his private ledger32 in ten minutes, Burckhardt resentfully reminded himself.
He sealed them in an envelope and walked out to Miss Mitkin. "Since Mr. Barth isn't here, we'd better go to lunch in shifts," he said. "You can go first."
Burckhardt offered her the envelope. "Drop this in the mail for me, will you? Uh—wait a minute. I wonder if I ought to phone Mr. Barth to make sure. Did his wife say whether he was able to take phone calls?"
"Didn't say." Miss Mitkin blotted34 her lips carefully with a Kleenex. "Wasn't his wife, anyway. It was his daughter who called and left the message."
"The kid?" Burckhardt frowned. "I thought she was away at school."
"She called, that's all I know."
Burckhardt went back to his own office and stared distastefully at the unopened mail on his desk. He didn't like nightmares; they spoiled his whole day. He should have stayed in bed, like Barth.
A funny thing happened on his way home. There was a disturbance35 at the corner where he usually caught his bus—someone was screaming something about a new kind of deep-freeze—so he walked an extra block. He saw the bus coming and started to trot36. But behind him, someone was calling his name. He looked over his shoulder; a small harried-looking man was hurrying toward him.
Burckhardt hesitated, and then recognized him. It was a casual acquaintance named Swanson. Burckhardt sourly observed that he had already missed the bus.
He said, "Hello."
Swanson's face was desperately37 eager. "Burckhardt?" he asked inquiringly, with an odd intensity38. And then he just stood there silently, watching Burckhardt's face, with a burning eagerness that dwindled39 to a faint hope and died to a regret. He was searching for something, waiting for something, Burckhardt thought. But whatever it was he wanted, Burckhardt didn't know how to supply it.
Burckhardt coughed and said again, "Hello, Swanson."
Swanson didn't even acknowledge the greeting. He merely sighed a very deep sigh.
"Nothing doing," he mumbled40, apparently41 to himself. He nodded abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned away.
Burckhardt watched the slumped42 shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was an odd sort of day, he thought, and one he didn't much like. Things weren't going right.
Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn't anything terrible or disastrous43; it was something out of his experience entirely44. You live your life, like any man, and you form a network of impressions and reactions. You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight extra tug45 to make it latch46.
It isn't the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong—the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids47 underfoot.
It wasn't just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt's life; it was that the wrong things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn't come into the office, yet Barth always came in.
Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite his wife's attempt to interest him in a game of bridge with the neighbors, all through the evening. The neighbors were people he liked—Anne and Farley Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding, too, this night and he barely listened to Dennerman's complaints about not being able to get good phone service or his wife's comments on the disgusting variety of television commercials they had these days.
Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for continuous abstraction when, around midnight, with a suddenness that surprised him—he was strangely aware of it happening—he turned over in his bed and, quickly and completely, fell asleep.
II
On the morning of June 15th, Burckhardt woke up screaming.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could still hear the explosion, feel the blast that crushed him against a wall. It did not seem right that he should be sitting bolt upright in bed in an undisturbed room.
His wife came pattering up the stairs. "Darling!" she cried. "What's the matter?"
He mumbled, "Nothing. Bad dream."
She relaxed, hand on heart. In an angry tone, she started to say: "You gave me such a shock—"
But a noise from outside interrupted her. There was a wail48 of sirens and a clang of bells; it was loud and shocking.
The Burckhardts stared at each other for a heartbeat, then hurried fearfully to the window.
There were no rumbling49 fire engines in the street, only a small panel truck, cruising slowly along. Flaring50 loudspeaker horns crowned its top. From them issued the screaming sound of sirens, growing in intensity, mixed with the rumble of heavy-duty engines and the sound of bells. It was a perfect record of fire engines arriving at a four-alarm blaze.
Burckhardt said in amazement51, "Mary, that's against the law! Do you know what they're doing? They're playing records of a fire. What are they up to?"
"Maybe it's a practical joke," his wife offered.
"Joke? Waking up the whole neighborhood at six o'clock in the morning?" He shook his head. "The police will be here in ten minutes," he predicted. "Wait and see."
But the police weren't—not in ten minutes, or at all. Whoever the pranksters in the car were, they apparently had a police permit for their games.
The car took a position in the middle of the block and stood silent for a few minutes. Then there was a crackle from the speaker, and a giant voice chanted:
"Feckle Freezers!Feckle Freezers!Gotta have aFeckle Freezer!Feckle, Feckle, Feckle,Feckle, Feckle, Feckle—"
It went on and on. Every house on the block had faces staring out of windows by then. The voice was not merely loud; it was nearly deafening52.
Abruptly55 the noise stopped and the truck stood silent. It was still misty56 morning; the Sun's rays came horizontally across the rooftops. It was impossible to believe that, a moment ago, the silent block had been bellowing58 the name of a freezer.
"A crazy advertising59 trick," Burckhardt said bitterly. He yawned and turned away from the window. "Might as well get dressed. I guess that's the end of—"
The bellow57 caught him from behind; it was almost like a hard slap on the ears. A harsh, sneering60 voice, louder than the arch-angel's trumpet61, howled:
"Have you got a freezer? It stinks62! If it isn't a Feckle Freezer, it stinks! If it's a last year's Feckle Freezer, it stinks! Only this year's Feckle Freezer is any good at all! You know who owns an Ajax Freezer? Fairies own Ajax Freezers! You know who owns a Triplecold Freezer? Commies own Triplecold Freezers! Every freezer but a brand-new Feckle Freezer stinks!"
The voice screamed inarticulately with rage. "I'm warning you! Get out and buy a Feckle Freezer right away! Hurry up! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry, hurry, hurry, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle...."
It stopped eventually. Burckhardt licked his lips. He started to say to his wife, "Maybe we ought to call the police about—" when the speakers erupted again. It caught him off guard; it was intended to catch him off guard. It screamed:
"Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Cheap freezers ruin your food. You'll get sick and throw up. You'll get sick and die. Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle! Ever take a piece of meat out of the freezer you've got and see how rotten and moldy63 it is? Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Do you want to eat rotten, stinking64 food? Or do you want to wise up and buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle—"
That did it. With fingers that kept stabbing the wrong holes, Burckhardt finally managed to dial the local police station. He got a busy signal—it was apparent that he was not the only one with the same idea—and while he was shakingly dialing again, the noise outside stopped.
He looked out the window. The truck was gone.
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收听单词发音
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1
croaked
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| v.呱呱地叫( croak的过去式和过去分词 )；用粗的声音说 | |
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awry
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| adj.扭曲的，错的 | |
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instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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slipper
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| n.拖鞋 | |
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jitters
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| n.pl.紧张(通常前面要有the) | |
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ribs
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| n.肋骨( rib的名词复数 )；（船或屋顶等的）肋拱；肋骨状的东西；（织物的）凸条花纹 | |
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agonized
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| v.使（极度）痛苦，折磨( agonize的过去式和过去分词 )；苦斗；苦苦思索；感到极度痛苦 | |
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gulped
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| v.狼吞虎咽地吃，吞咽( gulp的过去式和过去分词 )；大口地吸（气）；哽住 | |
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inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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outskirts
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| n.郊外，郊区 | |
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fumes
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| n.(强烈而刺激的)气味，气体 | |
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cascade
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| n.小瀑布，喷流；层叠；vi.成瀑布落下 | |
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diesel
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| n.柴油发动机，内燃机 | |
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unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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persuasively
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| adv.口才好地；令人信服地 | |
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16
refund
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| v.退还，偿还；n.归还，偿还额，退款 | |
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shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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jingles
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| 叮当声( jingle的名词复数 )； 节拍十分规则的简单诗歌 | |
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insistent
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| adj.迫切的，坚持的 | |
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authoritative
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| adj.有权威的，可相信的；命令式的；官方的 | |
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22
bass
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| n.男低音(歌手)；低音乐器；低音大提琴 | |
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23
rumble
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| n.隆隆声；吵嚷；v.隆隆响；低沉地说 | |
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24
sobbing
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| <主方>Ⅰ adj.湿透的 | |
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whine
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| v.哀号，号哭；n.哀鸣 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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exasperated
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| adj.恼怒的 | |
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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29
snarl
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| v.吼叫，怒骂，纠缠，混乱；n.混乱，缠结，咆哮 | |
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30
graveyards
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| 墓地( graveyard的名词复数 )； 垃圾场； 废物堆积处； 收容所 | |
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31
irritations
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| n.激怒( irritation的名词复数 )；恼怒；生气；令人恼火的事 | |
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32
ledger
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| n.总帐，分类帐；帐簿 | |
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makeup
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| n.组织；性格；化装品 | |
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blotted
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| 涂污( blot的过去式和过去分词 )； （用吸墨纸）吸干 | |
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disturbance
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| n.动乱，骚动；打扰，干扰；(身心)失调 | |
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36
trot
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| n.疾走，慢跑；n.老太婆；现成译本；(复数）trots:腹泻（与the 连用）；v.小跑，快步走，赶紧 | |
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37
desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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39
dwindled
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| v.逐渐变少或变小( dwindle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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40
mumbled
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| 含糊地说某事，叽咕，咕哝( mumble的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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41
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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42
slumped
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| 大幅度下降，暴跌( slump的过去式和过去分词 )； 沉重或突然地落下[倒下] | |
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43
disastrous
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| adj.灾难性的，造成灾害的；极坏的，很糟的 | |
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44
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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45
tug
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| v.用力拖(或拉)；苦干；n.拖；苦干；拖船 | |
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46
latch
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| n.门闩，窗闩；弹簧锁 | |
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47
skids
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| n.滑向一侧( skid的名词复数 )；滑道；滚道；制轮器v.（通常指车辆） 侧滑( skid的第三人称单数 )；打滑；滑行；（住在）贫民区 | |
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48
wail
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| vt./vi.大声哀号，恸哭；呼啸，尖啸 | |
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49
rumbling
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| n. 隆隆声, 辘辘声 adj. 隆隆响的 动词rumble的现在分词 | |
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50
flaring
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| a.火焰摇曳的，过份艳丽的 | |
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51
amazement
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| n.惊奇，惊讶 | |
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52
deafening
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| adj. 振耳欲聋的, 极喧闹的 动词deafen的现在分词形式 | |
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53
uproar
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| n.骚动，喧嚣，鼎沸 | |
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54
shrieked
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| v.尖叫( shriek的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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55
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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56
misty
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| adj.雾蒙蒙的，有雾的 | |
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57
bellow
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| v.吼叫，怒吼；大声发出，大声喝道 | |
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58
bellowing
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| v.发出吼叫声，咆哮（尤指因痛苦）( bellow的现在分词 )；（愤怒地）说出（某事），大叫 | |
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59
advertising
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| n.广告业；广告活动 a.广告的；广告业务的 | |
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60
sneering
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| 嘲笑的，轻蔑的 | |
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61
trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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62
stinks
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| v.散发出恶臭( stink的第三人称单数 )；发臭味；名声臭；糟透 | |
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63
moldy
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| adj.发霉的 | |
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64
stinking
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| adj.臭的，烂醉的，讨厌的v.散发出恶臭( stink的现在分词 )；发臭味；名声臭；糟透 | |
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