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

“That’s a lie.”
“It’s true. You unnerve her. She wants to belong, she wants to conform, I’m going to turn you off.”
“Then do it already, and stop arguing with me.”
“I’m not going to turn you off.”
“You’re an idiot!”
“Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman.
“Get stuffed.”
So they sent him to Coventry. And in Coventry they worked him over. It was just like what they did to
Winston Smith in 1984, which was a book none of them knew about, but the techniques are really quite ancient, and so
they did it to Everett C. Marm, and one day quite a long time later, the Harlequin appeared on the communications web,
appearing elfish and dimpled and bright-eyed, and not at all brainwashed, and he said he had been wrong, that it was a
good, a very good thing indeed, to belong, and be right on time hip-ho and away we go, and everyone stared up at him
on the public screens that covered an entire city block, and they said to themselves, well, you see, he was just a nut
after all, and if that’s the way the system is run, then let’s do it that way, because it doesn’t pay to fight city hall, or in
this case, the Ticktockman. So Everett C. Marm was destroyed, which was a loss, because of what Thoreau said earlier,
but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and in every revolution, a few die who shouldn’t, but they
have to, because that’s the way it happens, and if you make only a little change, then it seems to be worthwhile. Or, to
make the point lucidly:
“Uh, excuse me, sir, I, uh, don’t know how to uh, to uh, tell you this, but you were three minutes late. The
schedule is a little, uh, bit off.”
He grinned sheepishly.
“That’s ridiculous!” murmured the Ticktockman behind his mask: “Check your watch.” And then he went into
his office, going mrmee, mrmee, mrmee, mrmee.
Madness is in the eye of the beholder.
Having done exhaustive research on sociopathic behavior for a two-hour NBC dramatic special recently, I
won’t give you the faintest murmur of an objection that there are freaks and whackos walking the streets; they’re as
liable to shoot you dead for chuckles as they are to assist you in getting your stalled car moving out of the
intersection. One reliable estimate of the number of potential psychomotor epileptics undetected in our midst is
250,000 in the United States alone. And if you’ve read Michael Crichton’s THE TERMINAL MAN you know that the
“brain storm” caused by psychomotor epilepsy can turn a normal human being into a psychopathic killer in
moments. No, I won’t argue: there are madfolk among us.
But the madness of which I speak is what the Late George Apley might have called “eccentricity.” The
behavioral pattern outside the accepted norm. Whatever the hell that might be. The little old man sitting on the park
bench having an animated conversation with himself. The girl who likes to dress as an exact replica of Betty Boop.
The young guy out on the sidewalk playing an ocarina and interspersing his recital with denunciations of the city
power and water authority. The old lady who dies in her two-room flat and the cops find sixty years’ worth of old
newspapers plus two hundred thousand dollars in a cigar box. (One of the wooden ones, the old ones you simply
can’t find any more because they don’t make them. They’re great for storing old photos and comic character
buttons. If you have one you don’t want, send it along to me, willya?) The staid businessman who gets off by wearing
his wife’s pantyhose. The little kid who puts a big “S” on a bath towel and, shouting, “Up, up and awaaayyy!”
jumps of the garage roof.
They’re not nuts, friends, they’re simply seeing it all through different eyes. They have imagination, and
they know something about being alone, and in pain. They’re altering the real world to fit their fantasies. That’s
okay.
We all do it. Don’t say you don’t. How many of you have come out of the movie, having seen Bullitt or The
French Connection or Vanishing Point or The last American Hero or Freebie and the bean, gotten in your car, and just
about done a wheelie, sixty-five mph out of the parking lot? Don’t lie to me, gentle reader, we all have weird-looking
mannerisms that seem perfectly rational to us, but make onlookers cock an eyebrow and cross to the other side of
the street.
I’ve grown very fond of people who can let it out, who can have the strength of compulsion to indulge their