[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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
Page 78
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
schedules. So the question remained: Who is the
Harlequin?
But the question (more important of the two) was : How did we get unasked 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 then, how many questions ever are?
The middle you know. Here is the beginning. How it starts:
A desk pad. Day for day, and turn each day. 9:00-open the mail. 9
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]