"Philip Jose Farmer - Dayworld" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

House on corner of Bleecker Street and Kropotkin Canal (formerly the
Avenue of the Americas)



VARIETY, Second Month of N.E. 1330 D5-W1 (Day-Five, Week-One)
Time Zone 5, 12:15 A.M.


1.


When the hounds bay, the fox and the hare are brothers. Today, Jeff Caird, the fox, would hear the
hounds.
At the moment, he could not hear anything because he was standing in a soundproof
cylinder. If he had been outside it, he still would have heard nothing. Except for himself and a
few organics, firefighters, and technicians, he was the only living person in the city.
A few minutes before entering the cylinder and closing its door, he had slid back a small
panel in the wall. Behind the control panel in the wall recess was a tiny device he had long ago
connected to the power circuits. He had voice-activated the device, thus ensuring that "destoning"
power would not be applied to the cylinder he now occupied.
Though power was absent, the city monitoring computer would receive false data that power
had been turned on in his cylinder.
His cylinder or "stoner" was like those of all other healthy adults. It stood on one end,
had a round window a foot in diameter in the door, and was made of gray paper. The paper, however,
was permanently "stoned," and thus was indestructible and always cool.
Nude, his feet planted on athick disc set in the middle of the
cylinder, he waited. The inflated facsimile of himself had been deflated and was in the
shoulderbag on the cylinder floor.
The figures in the other cylinders in the room were nonliving things whose molecules had
been electromagnetically commanded to slow down. Result: a hardening throughout the body, which
became unbreakable and unburnable, though a diamond could scratch it. Result: a lowering of body
temperature, though it was not so low that it caused moisture to precipitate in the ambient air.
Suddenly, in one cylinder in the room and in hundreds of thousands of others in the silent
city, automatically applied power surged from the discs and through the statuelike bodies. Like a
cue stick slamming into a group of billiard balls, the power struck the lazy molecules of the
body. The balls scattered and kept on moving at the rate determined by Nature. The heart of the
destoned person, unaware that it had been stopped, completed the beat. Exactly fifteen minutes
after midnight, the people of Tuesday's Manhattan were no longer uneatable and unrottable
pumpkins. For the next twenty-three hours and thirty minutes, they could be easily wounded or
killed.
He pushed the door open and stepped into a large basement room. He bent slightly from the
waist, causing the ID badge hung from a chain around his neck to swing out. As he straightened up,
the green disc surrounded by a seven-pointed star settled back against his solar plexus.
The sourceless light had come on when destoning power had been applied. As he did every
Tuesday morning, he saw the shadowless light-green walls, the four-foot-wide TV strips running
from ceiling to floor, the thick brown carpet with a swirling green pattern, the clock strip, and


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