This is normally very bad for a video camera. But when the sun is roughly a third of a billion miles away it doesn’t do any harm. In fact it hardly makes any impression at all. You just get a small point of light right in the middle of the frame, which could be just about anything. It was just one star in a multitude.

这对摄影机通常非常不好。不过既然太阳是在约莫三分之一个十亿英里之外，所以机器并没有受到任何损伤。事实上根本没有拍下多少东西，只在画面中央有个小光点，压根看不出那究竟是什么。无数恒星中的一颗，仅此而已。

Tricia fast-forwarded.

崔茜卡按下“快进”。

Ah. Now, the next bit had been quite promising. They had emerged out of the ship into a vast, grey, hangar-like structure. This was clearly alien technology on a dramatic scale. Huge grey buildings under the dark canopy of the Perspex bubble. These were the same buildings that she had been looking at at the end of the tape. She had taken more footage of them while leaving Rupert a few hours later, just as she was about to reboard the spacecraft for the journey home. What did they remind her of?

啊，这儿，接下来的部分相当有希望。他们走下飞船，来到了一栋灰色的巨大建筑，模样活像个机库，这显然是外星科技的特大规模运用。巨大的灰色建筑物矗立在深色的有机玻璃泡泡保护下——这些也就是她在带子结尾看到的那些楼。她在鲁伯特待了几个钟头，离开时又拍了些它们的画面，就在她重新登上飞船准备回家之前。这些录像让她想起了什么来着？

Well, as much as anything else they reminded her of a film set from just about any low-budget science-fiction movie of the last twenty years. A lot larger, of course, but it all looked thoroughly tawdry and unconvincing on the video screen. Apart from the dreadful picture quality she had been struggling with the unexpected effects of gravity that was appreciably lower than that on Earth, and she had found it very hard to keep the camera from bouncing around in an embarrassingly unprofessional way. It was therefore impossible to make out any detail.

恩，别的不说，它们最先让她想到的绝对是电影布景——过去的二十年里，差不多每部低成本科幻片都是这模样。当然了，它们的体积要大得多，可在电视上看来实在是又假又俗气。除了画面质量，她还要对付意料之外的重力作用。鲁伯特的重力比地球上低许多，崔茜卡尴尬地发现，自己很难不让摄像机非常业余地晃来晃去。由于这种种原因，画面上根本看不清任何细节。

And now here was the Leader coming forward to greet her, smiling and sticking his hand out.

接着是首领走上前来迎接她，满脸笑容地向她伸出一只手。

That was all he was called. The Leader.

他就叫这个。首领。

None of the Grebulons had names, largely because they couldn’t think of any. Tricia discovered that some of them had thought of calling themselves after characters from television programmes they had picked up from Earth, but hard as they had tried to call each other Wayne and Bobby and Chuck, some remnant of something lurking deep in the cultural subconscious they had brought with them from the distant stars which were their homes must have told them that this really wasn’t right and wouldn’t do.

格里布隆人都没名字，很大程度上是因为他们想不出任何名字来。崔茜卡还发现，他们中的好些人本来想借用地球电视节目里的人名，可这些人刚开始管对方叫鲍伯和查克，深埋在他们文化潜意识中的某些残渣就开始发难，这些从遥远的家乡一路跟过来的小东西突然钻出来，告诉他们这样不对，真的不行。

The Leader had looked pretty much like all the others. Possibly a bit less thin. He said how much he enjoyed her shows on TV, that he was her greatest fan, how glad he was that she had been able to come along and visit them on Rupert and how much everybody had been looking forward to her coming, how he hoped the flight had been comfortable and so on. There was no particular sense she could detect of being any kind of emissary from the stars or anything.

首领的模样跟其他人没什么差别。或许稍微没那么瘦。他告诉崔茜卡自己是她的超级粉丝，还说他多么喜欢她的节目，她能来鲁伯特做客他是多么高兴，每个人都多么期待她的到来，他多么希望旅途还算愉快等等等等。她完全觉察不出任何他可能身为什么星球大使之类的迹象。