《The Orb of Probability 》作者： - Nat Schachner【EPUB】

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THE ORB OF PROBABILITY THE YEAR 9678 did not start out as if it would prove particularly momentous. It was no different from a long line of preceding years that stretched far back into the dim and fabulous -recesses of the fourth millennium. In fact, there was a certain dull monotony, a deadly sameness about the years and centuries and millennia as they slipped imperceptibly into eternity that explained, if perhaps it did not justify, the catastrophic experiment that Fran 19 evolved out of infuriated boredom and an atavistic thirst for adventure. He stared with jaundiced eyes at the unending panorama of his Sector. He stood, rather than reclined, in itself a most unusual and strength-taxing effort. But then, Fran 19 was a mistake, a carelessly matched aggregation of genes. In former and less polished times he would have been quietly done to death, as a machine with ill-fitting parts is scrapped. But now even that bit of decision was too much for the Guardians of the Mating Cells. They opened somnolent eyes on that Machine that had perpetrated this grievous error, stirred slightly and perhaps uneasily, as if qualms of outmoded conscience whispered of their duty, and subsided into their original torpor. As a result Fran 19 lived. He was the nineteenth mating of heritable