羊毛战记 Part 5 The Stranded 63

　　63,　　• Silo 18 •,　　Lukas sat at the little desk constructed from an embarrassment ¹ of wood and stared down at a bookstuffed with a fortune in crisp paper. The chair beneath him was probably worth more than he’d makein a lifetime, and he was sitting on it. If he moved, the joints ² of the dainty thing twisted and squeaked,like it could come apart at any moment.,　　He kept his boots firmly planted on either side, his weight on his toes, just in case.,　　Lukas flipped ³ a page, pretending to read. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be reading, he just didn’twant to be reading this. Entire shelves of more interesting works seemed to mock him from withintheir tin boxes. They sang out to be perused ⁴, for him to put away the Order with its rigid ⁵ writing,bulleted lists, and internal labyrinth ⁶ of page references that led in more circles than the great stairwellitself.,　　Each entry in the Order pointed ⁷ to another page, every page another entry. Lukas flipped througha few and wondered if Bernard was keeping tabs on him. The head of IT sat on the other side of thesmall study, just one room of many in the well-stocked hideaway beneath the servers. While Lukaspretended to shadow for his new job, Bernard alternated between fiddling ⁸ with the small computer onthe other desk and going over to the radio mounted on the wall to give instructions to the securityforces in the down deep.,　　After a moment, Lukas dared to break the silence. “Hey, Bernard?”,　　“Hm? ”,　　“Hey, why isn’t there anything in here about how all this came to be?
”,　　Bernard’s office chair squealed ¹⁷ as he swiveled it around to face Lukas. “I’m sorry, what?”,　　“The people who made all this, the people who wrote these books. Why isn’t there anything in theOrder about them? Like how they built all this stuff in the first place. ”,Coughing at a concert can be a real embarrassment.在音乐会上咳嗽真会使人难堪。,Expansion joints of various kinds are fitted on gas mains. 各种各样的伸缩接头被安装在煤气的总管道上了 。