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1、【英文读物】McGonigals Wormchapter 1When it happened, it happened unnoticed. Though it affected all chordata on Earth (with apossible exception to be noted in a moment), nobody knew of it, not even the Prince of allchordata, Man himself. How could he have known of it so soon?Though his lifeline had sudden
2、ly been cut, it was a long lifeline and death would still be far off. Soit was not suspected for nearly twenty-four hours, nor accepted even as a working theory fornearly three days, and not realized in its full implications for a week.Now, what had occurred was a sudden and worldwide adynatogenesis
3、 of all chordata, not,however, adynatotokos; this distinction for many years offered students of the phenomenonsome hope.And another hope was in the fact that one small but genuine member of chordate was notaffected: an enteropneustron, a balanoglossida of the oddest sort, a creature known asMcGonig
4、als Worm. Yet what hope this creature could offer was necessarily a small one.The catastrophe was first sensed by a hobbyist about a day after it occurred. It was just thatcertain experiments did not act right and the proper results were not forthcoming. And on thesecond day (Monday) there were prob
5、ably a hundred notations of quite unusual and unstatisticalbehavior; but as yet the pattern was not at all suspected.On the third day a cranky and suspicious laboratory worker went to a supply house with theangry charge that he had been sold sterile mice. This was something that could not be ignored
6、,and it is what brought the pattern of the whole thing into the open, with corroborationdeveloping with explosive rapidity. Not completely in the open, of course, for fear of panic if itreached the public. But throughout the learned fraternity the news went like a seismic shock.When it did reach the
7、 public a week later, though, it was greeted with hoots of laughter. Thepeople did not believe it.The cataloguing of evidence becomes tiresome, said Director Concord of the newly originatedPalingenesia Institute. The facts are incontrovertible. There has been a loss of the power toconceive in sea sq
8、uirt, lancelet, hag fish, skate, sea cat, fish, frog, alligator, snake, turtle, seal,porpoise, mouse, bat, bird, hog, horse, monkey, and man. It happened suddenly, perhapsinstantaneously. We cannot find the cure. Yet it is almost certain that those children already inthe womb will be the last ever b
9、orn on Earth. We do not know whether it is from a natural causeor an enemy has done this to us. We have, for ten months, tested nearly everything in the worldand we have found no answer. Yet, oddly enough, there is no panic.Except among ourselves/ said Appleby, his assistant, whose province is its s
10、tudy. But thepeople have accepted it so completely that their main interest now is in the world sweepstakes,with the total sums wagered now in the billions.Yes, the betting on the last child to be born in the world. It will prove one point, at least. The oldlegal limit on posthumous paternity was a
11、year and a day. Will it be surpassed? The Algerianclaimant on all evidence has nearly three months to go. And the betters on the Afghan have notyet given up. The Spanish Pretender is being delayed, according to rumor, medically, and thereare some pretty angry protests about this. It is not at all fa
12、ir; we know that. But then acomprehensive set of rules was never drawn up to cover all nations; Spain simply chose not tojoin the pact. But there may be trouble if the Spanish backers try to collect.And there is also a newly heard of Mexican claimant.I give little credit to this Juanita-Come-Lately.
13、 If she was to be a serious contestant, why was shenot known of before?The Algerian claimant, however, was the winner. And the time was an unbelievable threehundred and eighty-eight days. So the last child on Earth, in all likelihood, had been born.There were now about thirty institutes working on t
14、he problem, most of them on aninternational basis. Thirteen years had gone by, and one hope had died. This was that thosealready in the womb at the time of catastrophe might themselves prove to be fertile. It was nowseen that this would not prove so, unless for some reason it was to be quite a delay
15、ed fertility.The Cosmic Causes Council had by no means come to a dead end. It had come to so many liveends as to be even more bewildering.The point, said Hegner in one of his yearly summaries, is not whether sterility could have beencaused by cosmic forces. Of course it could have been. It could hav
16、e been caused in twenty ways.The miracle is that fertility had ever been possible. There must have been a shield built in forevery danger. We know but scantily what some of them are. We do not know which has failed orwhy.And could the failure have been caused by an enemy? asked an interlocutor.It could have been, certainly. Almost by definition we must call
