Harlan Ellison Troublemakers

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floor.
The man backed away across the floor of the cave, the seat of his suit scraping the rock floor. His back
flattened against the wedged rock in the cave mouth. He was backed as far as he could go.
He was screaming, the sound echoing back and forth in his hood, in the cave, in the night.
All he could see, all there was in the universe, was thefetl , advancing on him, slowly, slowly, taking all
the time it needed. Savoring every instant.
Then abruptly, at the precise instant he gazed deep into that ring of hate-filled green eyes coming toward
him, he realized that even as he had tracked thefetl , even as he had been tracking Garden so thefetl
had been tracking him!
Thefetl licked his lips again, slowly.
He had all the time in the world . . .
Hisworld.
JEFFTY IS FIVE
This next story, and the one after that are very dear to me. I suppose because there is just a whole lot of
me in each of them. They come out of my own life, the last one straight out of my first big run-in with the
law (and we ll get to that in due measure), and this one because it stars the me who was once five and
has never really outgrown that age, in some very major ways. I m not going to get all dopey and
chickflick about it, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Jeffty (withtwo f s, kindly note) because he s
such a sweet kid, and he embodies all my memories of the books and radio programs and movies and
comics I loved as a kid. The secret lesson in this story, however, is a different matter. When I wrote this
story the ending seemed very clear to me, seemed so obvious I never figured anyone would be confusd
by it. But damned if every college course that teaches this story wound up with the students and the prof
arguing over what happens to Jeffty in the end. And if Itell you, if I explain it to you, well, that would be
delivering the punchline before you hear the set-up. So, Ican t tell you what life lesson for troublemakers
lies in wait for you at the end of this sad and maybe-a-little-complex tale about how the Present always
eats up the Past and leaves you adrift. You cannot know, at your age, what it is like to not be able to run
that fast, jump that high, hit a note that pure, work all night and boogie all day (or boogie all night and
work all day). At your age you can only see the surface of someone my age, and try not to think about
what it must be like to see the night coming on faster than you d care to think about. Look: this story says
some troubling stuff about how fast our world moves, how unfairly it treats innocence, and about what
people sometimes have to do in the name of kindness. I amaching to explain the ending of this story to
you, but I m trapped, like a magician who cannot reveal the trick. Just remember this, because you re
probably too young to know about one giveaway telltale clue. It used to be, up until circuit breakers in
the electrical panels of modern homes, that when a short occurred, all the lights in the house would flicker
and dim for a moment. When they strapped a guy into the electric chair of some penitentiary, and they
threw the switch on him, and the juice went through him, the lights would flicker and dim all over the joint.
You can stick that in the back of your head and you ll catch it when it comes up in the denouement. The
other clue is this: pay attention to the palest creatures in this story, Jeffty s mother and father, who are
decent people. More than that, if I keep babbling, well, I ll just be cheating you. And that I am forbidden
by the Storyteller s Creed to do.
When I was five years old, there was a little kid I played with: Jeffty. His real name was Jeff Kinzer, and
everyone who played with him called him Jeffty. We were five years old together, and we had good
times playing together.
When I was five, a Clark Bar was as fat around as the gripping end of a Louisville Slugger, and pretty
nearly six inches long, and they used real chocolate to coat it, and it crunched very nicely when you bit [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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