"Harlan Ellison - Paingod & Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

few feet to crease the tassels of the ladies of fashion, and-inserting thumbs in large ears-he stuck out his tongue, rolled
his eyes and went wugga-wugga-wugga. It was a minor diversion. One pedestrian skittered and tumbled, sending
parcels everywhichway, another wet herself, a third keeled slantwise and the walk was stopped automatically by the
servitors till she could be resuscitated. It was a minor diversion.
Then he swirled away on a vagrant breeze, and was gone. Hi-ho.
As he rounded the cornice of the Time-Motion Study Building, he saw the shift, just boarding the slidewalk.
With practiced motion and an absolute conservation of movement, they sidestepped up onto the slowstrip and (in a
chorus line reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley film of the antideluvian 1930’s) advanced across the strips ostrich-walking
till they were lined up on the expresstrip.
Once more, in anticipation, the elfin grin spread, and there was a tooth missing back there on the left side. He
dipped, skimmed, and swooped over them; and then, scrunching about on the air-boat, he released the holding pins
that fastened shut the ends of the homemade pouring troughs that kept his cargo from dumping prematurely. And as
he pulled the trough-pins, the air-boat slid over the factory workers and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth
of jelly beans cascaded down on the expresstrip.
Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and
mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling
clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin workers,
tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and ruling the sky on their way down with all
the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and
sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo
newness. Jelly beans!
The shift workers howled and laughed and were pelted, and broke ranks, and the jelly beans managed to work
their way into the mechanism of the slidewalks after which there was a hideous scraping as the sound of a million
fingernails rasp down a quarter of a million blackboards, followed by a coughing and a sputtering, and then the
slidewalks all stopped and everyone was summarily dumped thisawayandthataway in a jackstraw tumble, still laughing
and popping little jelly bean eggs of childish color into their mouths. It was a holiday, and a jollity, an absolute
insanity, a giggle. But...
The shift was delayed seven minutes.
They did not get home for seven minutes.
The master schedule was thrown off by seven minutes.
Quotas were delayed by inoperative slidewalks for seven minutes.
He had tapped the first domino in the line, and one after another, like chik chik chik, the others had fallen.
The System had been seven minutes worth of disrupted. It was a tiny matter, one hardly worthy of note, but
in a society where the single driving force was order and unity and promptness and clocklike precision and attention
to the clock, reverence of the gods of the passage of time, it was a disaster of major importance.
So he was ordered to appear before the Ticktockman. It was broadcast across every channel of the
communications web. He was ordered to be there at 7:00 dammit on time. And they waited, and they waited, but he
didn’t show up till almost ten-thirty, at which time he merely sang a little song about moonlight in a place no one had
ever heard of, called Vermont, and vanished again. But they had all been waiting since seven, and it wrecked hell with
their schedules. So the question remained: Who is the Harlequin?
But the unasked question (more important of the two) was : How did we get into this position, where a
laughing, irresponsible japer of jabberwocky and jive could disrupt our entire economic and cultural life with a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jelly beans...
 Jelly for God’s sake beans! This is madness! Where did he get the money to buy a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars’ worth of jelly beans? (They knew it would have cost that much, because they had a team of
Situation Analysts pulled off another assignment, and rushed to the slidewalk scene to sweep up and count the
candies, and produce findings, which disrupted their schedules and threw their entire branch at least a day behind.)
Jelly beans! Jelly...beans? Now wait a second-a second accounted for-no one has manufactured jelly beans for over a
hundred years. Where did he get jelly beans?
That’s another good question. More than likely it will never be answered to your complete satisfaction. But