羊毛战记 Part 3 Casting Off 28

　　28,　　Juliette reported to first shift at six, the conversation with Walker playing over and over in her head.,　　There was a sustained and embarrassing applause from the handful of techs present as she entereddispatch. Knox just glared at her from the corner, back to his gruff demeanor ¹. He had alreadywelcomed her home and would be damned if he’d do it again.,　　She said hello to the people she hadn’t seen the night before and looked over the job queue. Thewords on the board made sense, but she had a difficult time processing them. In the back of her mind,she thought about poor Scottie, confused and struggling while someone much larger than him—orseveral someones — choked him to death. She thought of his little body, probably riddled ² withevidence but soon to feed the roots of the dirt farms. She thought of a married couple lying togetheron a hill, never given a chance to make it any further, to see beyond the horizon.,　　She chose a job from the queue, one that would require little mental exertion ³ on her part, andthought of poor Jahns and Marnes and how tragic ⁴ their love—if she had been reading Marnescorrectly—had been. The temptation to tell the entire room was crippling. She looked around atMegan and Ricks, at Jenkins and Marck, and thought about the small army of tight brotherhood ⁵ shecould form. The silo was rotten to the core, an evil man was acting ⁶ mayor, a puppet stood where agood sheriff had been, and all the good men and women were gone.,　　It was comical to imagine: her rallying a band of mechanics to storm the upper levels and right awrong. And then what? Was this the uprising they had learned about as children? Was this how itbegan? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?,　　Caryl, a transfer from third shift, was already working near the pit basin patching rotten cement.,　　She waved with her trowel, and Juliette dipped her chin and forced herself to smile.,　　The offending pump sat idle on one wall, the backup pump beside it struggling mightily ¹¹ andspraying water out of dry and cracked seals. Juliette looked into the basin to gauge ¹² the height of thewater. A painted 9 was just visible above its murky ¹³ surface. Juliette did some quick math, knowingthe diameter of the basin and that it was almost nine feet full. The good news was they had at least aday before boots were getting wet. Worst case, they would replace the pump with a rebuilt one fromspares and deal with Hendricks bitching at them for checking it out instead of fixing what theyalready had.,　　As she began stripping the failed pump down, pelted ¹⁴ with spray from its smaller, leakingneighbor, Juliette considered her life with this new perspective provided by the morning’srevelations. The silo was something she had always taken for granted. The priests said it had alwaysbeen here, that it was lovingly created by a caring God, that everything they would ever need hadbeen provided for. Juliette had a hard time with this story. A few years ago, she had been on the firstteam to drill past ten thousand feet and hit new oil reserves. She had a sense of the size and scope ofthe world below them. And then she had seen with her own eyes the view of the outside with itsphantomlike sheets of smoke they called clouds rolling by at miraculous ¹⁵ heights. She had even seen astar, which Lukas thought stood an inconceivable distance away. What god would make so muchrock below and air above and just a measly silo between?,　　And then there was the rotting skyline and the images in the children’s books, both of whichseemed to hold clues. The priests, of course, would say that the skyline was evidence that man wasn’tsupposed to exceed his bounds. And the books with the faded colored pages? The fancifulimagination of authors, a class done away with for all the trouble they inspired.,The old soldier never lost his military demeanor.那个老军人从来没有失去军人风度 。,The beams are riddled with woodworm. 这些木梁被蛀虫蛀得都是洞
。