Frank Herbert - The GM Effect

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 79.8KB 8 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The GM Effect

Frank Herbert, 1965

It was a balmy fall evening and as Dr Valeric Sabantoce seated himself at the long table in

Meade Hall's basement seminar room, he thought of how the weather would be sensationalized

tomorrow by the newspapers and wire services. They would be sure to remark on the general

clemency of the elements, pointing out how Nature's smiling aspect made the night's tragedy

so much more horrible.

Sabantoce was a short, rotund man with a wild shock of black hair that looked as though it

had never known a comb. His round face with its look of infant innocence invariably led

strangers to an incorrect impression - unless they were at once exposed to his ribald wit or

caught the weighted stare of his deeply-socketed brown eyes.

Fourteen people sat around the long table now - nine students and five faculty - with

Professor Joshua Latchley in the chairman's seat at the head.

'Now that we're all here,' Latchley said, 'I can tell you the purpose of tonight's meeting. We

are faced with a most terrible decision. We ... ahhh -'

Latchley fell silent, chewed at his lower lip. He was conscious of the figure he cut here - a

tall, ungainly bald man in thick-lensed glasses ... the constant air of apology he wore as

though it were a shield. Tonight, he felt that this appearance was a disguise. Who could

guess - except Sabantoce, of course - at the daring exposed by this seemingly innocent

gathering?

'Don't leave 'em hanging there, Josh,' Sabantoce said.

'Yes ... ahh, yes,' Latchley said. 'It has occurred to me that Dr Sabantoce and I have a

special demonstration to present here tonight, but before we expose you to that experiment,

as it were, perhaps we should recapitulate somewhat.'

Sabantoce, wondering what had diverted Latchley, glanced around the table - saw that

they were not all there. Dr Richard Marmon was missing.

Did he suspect and make a break for it? Sabantoce wondered. He realized then that

Latchley was stalling for time while Marmon was being hunted out and brought in here.

Latchley rubbed his shiny pate. He had no desire to be here, he thought. But this had to be

done. He knew that outside on the campus the special 9 p.m. hush had fallen over Yankton

Technical Institute and this was his favorite hour for strolling - perhaps up to the frosh pond

to listen to the frogs and the couples and to think on the etymological derivations of -

He became conscious of restless coughing and shuffling around the table, realized he had

permitted his mind to wander. He was infamous for it, Latchley knew. He cleared his throat.

Where the devil was that Marmon? Couldn't they find him?

'As you know,' Latchley said, 'we've made no particular efforts to keep our discovery

secret, although we've tried to discourage wild speculation and outside discussion. Our

intention was to conduct thorough tests before publishing. All of you - both the student ...

ahh, 'guinea pigs' and your professors of the faculty committee - have been most

co-operative. But inevitably news of what we are doing here has spread - sometimes in a very

hysterical and distorted manner.'

'What Professor Latchley is saying,' Sabantoce interrupted, 'is that the fat's in the fire.'

Expressions of curiosity appeared on the faces of the students who, up to this moment,

had been trying to conceal their boredom. Old Dr Inkton had a fit of coughing.

'There's an old Malay expression,' Sabantoce said, 'that when one plays Bumps-a-Daisy

with a porcupine, one is necessarily jumpy. Now, all of us should've known this porcupine was

loaded.'

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Frank Herbert - The GM Effect.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！

Frank Herbert - The GM Effect

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: