‘Kill!’ shouted Ford. He shouted it at his towel.

“杀！”福特忽然放声大吼，这一声命令是冲他的毛巾去的。

The towel leapt up out of Harl’s hands.

毛巾从哈尔手里一跃而起。

This was not because it had any motive force of its own, but because Harl was so startled at the idea that it might. The next thing that startled him was the sight of Ford Prefect hurtling across the desk at him fists first. In fact Ford was just lunging for the credit card, but you don’t get to occupy the sort of position that Harl occupied in the sort of organisation in which Harl occupied it without developing a healthily paranoid view of life. He took the sensible precaution of hurling himself backwards, and striking his head a sharp blow on the rocket-proof glass, then subsided into a series of worrying and highly personal dreams.

倒不是说它自带了什么动力激情之类的，只不过哈尔生怕有这种可能性，所以被吓得丢了魂。第二个惊吓来自福特.长官，他双拳向前从桌子上直冲了过来。事实上福特的目标不过是那张信用卡，可你要爬到哈尔这样的位置，而且是在他待的这种机构里爬到这样的位置，那么你肯定得发展自己对生活的看法，把它打造成一种非常健康的疑神疑鬼。哈尔采取了类似情况中最为明智的防范措施，也就是说使劲往后一闪。结果他的脑袋狠狠撞上防导弹的玻璃，接着便陷入了一系列焦虑，烦恼，同时非常隐私的梦里。

Ford lay on the desk, surprised at how swimmingly everything had gone. He glanced quickly at the piece of plastic he now held in his hand – it was a Dine-O-Charge credit card with his name already embossed on it, and an expiry date two years from now, and was possibly the single most exciting thing Ford had ever seen in his life – then he clambered over the desk to see to Harl.

福特趴在桌上，一切都如此顺利，他不禁有些吃惊。他飞快地瞄了眼自己抓在手里的那片塑料——那是张“随便吃”信用卡，上面已经印上了福特的名字，使用期是两年。这大概是福特这辈子见过的最让人激动的东西了——然后他爬到桌子那头去看哈尔。

He was breathing fairly easily. It occurred to Ford that he might breathe more easily yet without the weight of his wallet bearing down on his chest, so he slipped it out of Harl’s breast pocket and flipped through it. Fair amount of cash. Credit tokens. Ultragolf club membership. Other club memberships. Photos of someone’s wife and family – presumably Harl’s, but it was hard to be sure these days. Busy executives often didn’t have time for a full-time wife and family and would just rent them for weekends.

他的呼吸挺平顺。福特想到，如果没有钱包压着胸口，他的呼吸应该还可以更平顺些。于是他把钱包从哈尔上衣口袋里抽出来。钞票，还挺多。几张信用卡。超高尔夫的会员卡。其他几种会员卡。某人的老婆孩子的照片——想来多半是哈尔的，但如今这种事情真的很难讲。事务繁忙的主管们多半没时间分给全职的老婆孩子，所以常常是周末租些来了事。

Ha!

哈！

He couldn’t believe what he’d just found.

他简直不敢相信他看到了什么。

He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.

一对收据中间夹着张能让人发疯的塑料卡，福特慢慢地把它抽了出来。

It wasn’t insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.

它的长相还不至于让人激动到发疯。事实上它看起来挺无趣的。半透明，比信用卡小些，还稍微厚些。把它对着光你就能看见许许多多以全息影像编码的信息和图像，看上去似乎就埋在表面底下几寸，只不过这张卡并没有几寸厚可以给你埋就是了。

It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant – a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn’t even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If youwere trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.

这是张“我-真是-我”，竟然把它随随便便地丢在钱包里，哈尔可太不聪明了。不过这种傻事是完全可以理解的。如今这世道，随时都要你用各种各样的方式确定无疑地证明你的身份，光这个就能让生活变得极其吃力，更别说你还要面对诸如“作为一个有意识的理性生物应该如何在一个从认识论上看相当模糊的物质宇宙里运转”这种更深层次的存在主义问题。就说提款机吧。提款的人排成长龙，无所事事地等着读取指纹，扫描虹膜，从脖子后头的皮肤取样，然后进行即时（或者说接近即时——在单调乏味的现实里这一步其实长达六七秒钟）基因分析，接下来再回答一箩筐布满陷阱的问题；有的是关于那些他们自己都不记得有过的亲戚，有的是关于他们喜欢的桌布颜色。而这一切不过是因为你过周末想取点闲钱。如果你是想贷款买辆喷气式汽车，签署个导弹协议或者为整个餐馆里的人买单，事情真的可能演变成一场重大考验。

Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

于是就有了“我-真是-我”。这里面记录着你的每一项资料。你的身体你的生活现在都可以存进一张全能读取卡，放在钱包里随身携带，因此也代表了科学技术最最伟大的胜利——它不仅战胜了它自己，也压倒了普通人的简单常识。

Ford pocketed it. A remarkably good idea had just occurred to him. He wondered how long Harl would remain unconscious.

福特把它揣进兜里。他刚想到一个妙不可言的主意。他琢磨着哈尔能昏迷多久。

‘Hey!’ he shouted to the little melon-sized robot still slobbering with euphoria up on the ceiling. ‘You want to stay happy?’

那个西瓜大小的机器人还在天花板上流着口水。“嘿！”他对这个患了快乐症的家伙喊道，“想继续高兴吗？”

The robot gurgled that it did.

机器人咯咯地回答说想。