（外文电子版资料）Knight, Damon - Extempore.doc

EXTEMPORE PAGE PAGE 6 EXTEMPORE by Damon Knight Everybody knew; everybody wanted to help Rossi the time-traveller. They came running up the scarlet beach, naked and golden as children, laughing happily. “Legend is true,” they shouted. “He is here, just like great-grandfathers say!” “What year is this?” Rossi asked, standing incongruously shirt-sleeved and alone in the sunlight – no great machines bulking around him, no devices, nothing but his own spindling body. “Thairty-five twainty-seex, Mista Rossi!” they chorused. “Thank you. Goodbye.” “Goodbyee!” Flick. Flick. Flick. Those were days. Flicketaflicketaflick – weeks, months, years. WHIRRR … Centuries, millennia streaming past like sleet in a gale! Now the beach was cold, and the people were buttoned up to their throats in stiff black cloth. Moving stiffly, like jointed stick people, they unfurled a huge banner: ‘SORI WI DO NOT SPIC YOUR SPICH. THIS IS YIR 5199 OF YOUR CALENDAR. HELO MR. ROSI.” They all bowed, like marionettes, and Mr. Rossi bowed back. Flick. Flick. FlicketaflicketaWHIRRR … The beach was gone. He was inside an enormous building, a sky-high vault, like the Empire State turned into one room. Two floating eggs swooped at him and hovered alertly, staring with poached eyes. Behind them reared a tilted neon slab blazing with diagrams and symbols, none of which he could recognise before flicketaWHIRRRR … This time it was a wet stony plain, with salt marshes beyond it. Rossi was not interested and spent the time looking at the figures he had scrawled in his notebook. 1956, 1958, 1965 and so on, the intervals getting longer and longer, the curve rising until it was going almost straight up. If only he’d paid more attention to mathematics in school … flickRRR … Now a white desert at night, bitter cold, where the towers of Manhattan should have been. Something mournfully thin flapped by over flkRRRR … Blackness and fog was all he could fkRRRR … Now the light and dark blinks in the gr