Alfred Bester - Hobsons Choice

VIP免费
2024-11-25 0 0 28.78KB 8 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///G|/rah/Alfred%20Bester%20-%20Hobsons%20%20Choice.txt
Hobson’s Choice
This is a warning to accomplices like you, me and Addyer.
Can you spare price of one cup coffee, honoTable sir? I am indigent organism which are hungering.
By day, Addyer was a statistician. He concerned himself with such matters as statistical
tables, averages and dispersions, groups that are not homogeneous and random sampling. At night,
Addyer plunged into an elaborate escape fantasy divided into two parts. Either he imagined himself
moved back in time a hundred years with a double armful of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, best-
sellers, hit plays and gambling records; or else he imagined himself transported forward in time a
thousand years to the Golden Age of perfection.
There were other fantasies which Addyer entertained on odd Thursdays, such as (by a fluke)
becoming the only man left on earth with a world of passionate beauties to fecundate; such as
acquiring the power of invisibility which would enable him to rob banks and right wrongs with
impunity; such as possessing the mysterious power of working miracles.
Up to this point you and I and Addyer are identical. Where we part company is in the fact
that Addyer was a statistician.
Can you spare cost of one cup coffee, honorable miss? For blessed charitability? I am beholden.
On Monday, Addyer rushed into his chief’s office, waving a sheaf of papers. “Look here,
Mr. Grande,” Addyer sputtered. “I’ve found something fishy. Extremely fishy . . . In the
statistical sense, that is.”
“Oh, hell,” Grande answered. “You’re not supposed to be finding anything. We’re in between
statistics until the war’s over.”
“I was leafing through the Interior Department’s reports. D’you know our popu’ation’s up?”
“Not after the atom bomb it isn’t,” said Grande. “We’ve lost double what our birthrate can
replace.” He pointed out the window to the twenty-five-foot stub of the Washington Monument.
“There’s your documentation.”
“But our population’s up 3.0915 percent.” Addyer displayed his figures. “What about that,
Mr. Grande?”
“Must be a mistake somewhere,” Grande muttered after a moment’s inspection. “You’d better
check.”
“Yes, sir,” said Adclyer scurrying out of the office. “I knew you’d be interested, sir.
You’re the ideal statistician, sir.” He was gone.
“Poop,” said Grande and once again began computing the quantity of bored respirations left
to him. It was his personalized anesthesia.
On Tuesday, Addyer discovered that there was no correlation between the
mortality/birthrate ratio and the population increase. The war was multiplying mortality and
reducing births; yet the population was minutely increasing. Addyer displayed his discovery to
Grande, received a pat on the back and went home to a new fantasy in which he woke up a million
years in the future, learned the answer to the enigma and decided to remain amid snow-capped
mountains and snow-capped bosoms, safe under the aegis of a culture saner than Aureomycin.
On Wednesday, Addyer requisitioned the comptometer and file and ran a test check on
Washington, D.C. To his dismay he discovered that the population of the former capital was down
0.0029 percent. This was distressing, and Addyer went home to escape into a dream about Queen
Victoria’s Golden Age where he amazed and confounded the world with his brilliant output of
novels, plays and poetry, all cribbed from Shaw, Galsworthy and Wilde.
Can you spare price of one coffee, honorable sir? I am distTessed individual needful of chariting.
On Thursday, Addyer tried another check, this time on the city of Philadelphia. He
discovered that Philadelphia’s population was up 0.095 9 percent. Very encouraging. He tried a
rundown on Little Rock. Population up 1.1329 percent. He tested St. Louis. Population up 2.0924
percent. . . and this despite the complete extinction of Jefferson County owing to one of those
military mistakes of an excessive nature.
“My God!” Addyer exclaimed, trembling with excitement. “The closer I get to the center of
file:///G|/rah/Alfred%20Bester%20-%20Hobsons%20%20Choice.txt (1 of 8) [2/13/2004 11:43:17 PM]
Alfred Bester - Hobsons Choice.pdf

共8页,预览1页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：8 页 大小：28.78KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-11-25

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 8
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注