标题: 《Clockwork Lemon 》作者：- A. Bertram Chandler【EPUB】 [打印本页] 作者: zaq 时间: 2013-4-3 16:23 标题: 《Clockwork Lemon 》作者：- A. Bertram Chandler【EPUB】 A Clockwork Lemon by A. Bertram Chandler art: Jim Odbert Captain Chandler writes that as of August1981 he is still working on the Australian novelbut hopes to get it finished before the end of 1981. Then Commodore Grimes will be recalledfrom his Long Service Leave and signed on for another series of misadventures. As the twentieth century lurched towards its close the Power Crisis steadily worsened. Fossilfuels were almost as extinct as the living organisms whose tissues had been convertedmillennia ago into oil and coal. After a series of disasters not unconnected with sabotageand terrorism the use of nuclear fission as a power source had been abandoned throughout theworld. Nuclear fusion was still just around the corner. Solar power would be practicable onlyafter the skies were clear of the dust flung up during the planetwide outbreak of vulcanism. All industry was hard hit. Hardest hit of all were the automobile manufacturers. Desperate andingenious expedients were tried in the endeavour to keep wheels on the road. There were thesailmobiles—but few motorists possessed yachtsmanlike skills. There were the pedalmobiles—but as nutritional standards had been steadily declining few men or women hadthe strength and endurance to propel even a lightweight construction of aluminum and plasticfor more than a kilometre. It was the Japanese who came up with what was hoped to be a solution to the problem. A very oldman the great grandfather of a vice president of one of the major Nipponese automobilemanufacturers remembered a car that had been made in Japan in the late 1920s. It had beenintended for export to what was then British India. It was to be a runabout in which the mem-sahib could do her shopping or make her social calls. It had a clockwork motor. In a countrysuch as India was in those days there would be no shortage of cheap coolie labor to keep thething wound up. And said the centenarian with unemployment rife in every country there wouldbe no shortage of labor for such a task today. Plans and specifications were unearthed in the Patents Office. The original design