"Repent Harliquin! said Ticktockman by Harlan Ellison" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

TV and movie scripter Harlan Ellison is a small, intense,
muscular 'young man, something like a miniature Rod Serling,
who never gets anywhere on time.
Here is a story written to the rhythm of a clock without a
balance wheel, out of whack, out of synch, tock-tick, tick-tock.

Nebula Award, Best Short Story 1965
"REPENT, HARLEQUIN!"
SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN
Harlan Ellison
There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those
who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who
need to know "where it's at," this:
"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly,
but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army,
and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most
cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of
the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood
and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be
manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such
command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.
They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet
such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.
Othersas most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and
office-holdersserve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as
they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to
serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as
heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men,
serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily
resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as
enemies by it."
Henry David Thoreau,
"Civil Disobedience"
That is the heart of it. Now begin in the middle, and later
learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.
But because it was the very world it was, the very world they
had allowed it to become, for months his activities did not come
to the alarmed attention of The Ones Who Kept The Machine
Functioning Smoothly, the ones who poured the very best
butter over the cams and mainsprings of the culture. Not until
it had become obvious that somehow, someway, he had become
a notoriety, a celebrity, perhaps even a hero for (what
Officialdom inescapably tagged) "an emotionally disturbed
segment of the populace," did they turn it over to the
Ticktockman and his legal machinery. But by then, because it
was the very world it was, and they had no way to predict he
would happenpossibly a strain of disease long-defunct, now,
suddenly, reborn in a system where immunity had been
forgotten, had lapsedhe had been allowed to become too real.