Jerry Davis - The Moon at Noon

VIP免费

2024-11-18 0 0 19.11KB 5 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jerry%20Davis%20-%20The%20Moon%20at%20Noon.txt

THE MOON AT NOON

The Freud simulation program told Mike that he had a

subconscious desire to be caught. That was ludicrous, though ---

being caught would mean the end of his career, which was a job he

enjoyed. It would also be the end of his marriage, as his

socially-conscious wife would be embarrassed out of her mind. His

kids would be harassed at school, taunted with jeers about their

crazy father, and for this reason alone Mike took precautions. He

had to be cautious, even though being cautious was the very

opposite of what he was doing. What did the Freud simulation know,

anyway? It was only a program.

His rubber-walled car would do no more than 35 miles per hour

down the crowded expressway --- to go faster would not be safe.

Mike often wondered why 35 miles per hour was considered safe, and

36 miles per hour was not. His car puttered like a motorboat,

burning natural gas, and inched its way from one lane to another

as he progressed toward the next off ramp. Zeiter Park Exit, the

sign read. Center City. His car made putt-putt sounds as it crept

down the long, safe exit ramp.

As he came to a stop, he did so gently so as not to trigger

the air-bag in his steering wheel --- which had gone off several

times before. For some reason it had a hair trigger, and when he'd

first bought the car Mike thought it was a factory defect. No,

said the factory representative, it was made that way on purpose.

Just to be safe. That, and the webbing that made up the seat belt

system, was now standard in all cars by law. As was the crash

helmet on his head.

Mike found a parking place on the street beside some bushes

in Zeiter Park, right between two other rubber-walled cars. Rubber

walls with a titanium-steel passenger compartment imbedded within,

the mandatory norm and ultimate in safety and protection. Four way

anti-skid disc brakes and pneumatic collapsible bumpers on front,

back and sides. Titanium roll bar. Non-breakable Plexiglas

windshield. It was --- all of it --- state of the art, and

required by law.

As was the helmet on his head.

Mike got out of the car, pulled a bundled pack out of the

back seat, and stepped up onto the soft, rubberized surface of the

park sidewalk. He felt like a spaceman stepping out onto a hostile

planet. The helmet he wore was not only a crash helmet for driving

a car, it also doubled as the mandatory helmet to be worn by

pedestrians, along with the mandatory knee and elbow pads, and of

course the bullet proof vest to protect him from muggers. Mike,

like most people in the last few years, had saved money by buying

the whole outfit as a single suit, called a safety suit, which

contained all the safe elements required by law for those who

would go out in public. As a bonus, this suit also contained an

emergency transponder that would radio for help if he should fall

down and break his leg or hip, as if that were possible. This was

not currently required by law, but Congress was in the process of

considering it.

A few joggers ran past, each wearing a safety suit, and a few

young couples lay under trees on blankets, groping each other's

suits in frustration. Mike carried his bundle far up the hill,

staying on the sidewalk, and at one point crossed the street

(safely, at a crosswalk), and headed away from the park.

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jerry%20Davis%20-%20The%20Moon%20at%20Noon.txt (1 of 5) [10/15/2004 2:41:38 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jerry%20Davis%20-%20The%20Moon%20at%20Noon.txt

Up a long, steep hill he hiked, up to the top where one of

the bigger skyscrapers in town stood, a black and polished bank

building called Haben Tower. Inside he went, face blank, eyes

straight ahead as he passed the security monitors. He walked

straight to the elevators and pushed a button and waited. He was

alone, he'd timed it right. Most people at this time were busy in

their offices, all their visitors and visitations having been

taken care of earlier that morning. The elevator arrived and he

alone stepped inside. He pushed the button for the top floor, and

stood stoically as the doors slid shut and the elevator began to

rise.

This is my civil disobedience, he told himself. I have a

right to do this. I have an obligation to do this. I've gone too

far to back down now.

Mike took deep breaths, conscious that his hands were

shaking.

The ride lasted a long time. It was a slow elevator. Fast

elevators were dangerous. Mike had plenty of time to open the pack

and pull out the rubber Ralph Nader mask. He pulled off his

helmet, put on the mask, and put the helmet back on. With the

helmet on, he was sure, no one would look twice at the mask.

There was a pastel tone from the elevator's speaker grill and

the doors slid open. Several executives in black and white safety

suits stepped in as he was stepping out. One gave him a startled

glance but said nothing, and Mike dared not look back as he walked

away from the elevator. Hopefully the man had doubted his own

eyes. Mike continued down the hall and around a corner to the

stair well. A security monitor was right there, electric eye

focused on him as he tried the door. It was unlocked, of course

--- it was a fire exit --- and he pushed it open and stepped

through. He walked up the one remaining flight of stairs and faced

the one remaining door at the top of the building. This one was

locked, as it was not safe beyond. Mike, fortunately, had a pass

key which he'd swiped from a janitor two weeks before. Within

seconds he was out in the sunshine on the roof, with all of Center

City in view.

Now he had to work fast, for there would be security guards

after him within the next few minutes. He opened the pack, pulled

out the aluminum and nylon contents, and then began removing his

safety suit. After that was off, he removed all the rest of his

clothes --- everything, including the helmet. The only thing that

remained was the Ralph Nader mask. He stood naked on the roof,

shoving his clothing into the pack, and with that done he began

pulling out the telescoping aluminum struts and unfolding the

nylon wings of his hang glider. He had eight wing nuts to fasten

and twelve buttons to snap. He worked quickly but with precision,

as he'd practiced this over fifty times in his garage. He had done

it in secret, as hang gliders were strictly forbidden, and mere

possession of one was a felony --- now he was doing it bare-ass

naked on the top of a public building, in full view of the world.

The wings spread out and caught the faint breeze, glittering

with all the colors of a butterfly. Mike finished the last few

snaps and stashed his pack with his safety suit and helmet in a

net at the top of the harness. He looped the padded harness around

him and stood near the building's edge, nerving himself. He

thought of the words written by his hero, the great 1960's pop

philosopher Ashleigh Brilliant, "Should I abide by the rules until

they're changed, or help speed the change by breaking them?" The

door behind him burst open and a half-dozen security guards rushed

out onto the roof, and Mike, startled, ran for the edge of the

building. "Speed the change!" he shouted out loud, his voice

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jerry%20Davis%20-%20The%20Moon%20at%20Noon.txt (2 of 5) [10/15/2004 2:41:38 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jerry%20Davis%20-%20The%20Moon\%20at%20Noon.txtTHEMOONATNO...

展开>> 收起<<

Jerry Davis - The Moon at Noon.pdf

共5页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Jerry Davis - The Moon at Noon

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: