Эрикс

THE ERYX

ROBERT SHECKLEY

I WOKE UP AND LOOKED AROUND. EVERYTHING WAS JUST about the same.

“Hey, Julie,” I said. “You up yet?”

Julie didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She was my imaginary playmate. Maybe I was crazy, but at least I knew Julie was someone I’d made up.

I got out of bed, showered, dressed. It was all the same as it always was. And yet, I had the feeling something had changed.

I didn’t know what annoyed me the most about the setup. I had given up being annoyed. I had one room and a bathroom. Outside of my room was a glassed-in porch. I could walk out on the porch and sun myself. They seemed to have the sun going all day long, every day. I wondered what had happened to the rainy days I’d known back in my youth. Or maybe there were rainy days but I just wasn’t seeing them. I had suspected for a long time that my room and its glassed-in enclosure were inside some other sort of a building, a really big building where they controlled the light and the climate, made it just like they wanted it. Evidently the way they wanted it was with hazy sunlight all day long. I couldn’t see the sun even when I was outside. Just a white sky and light glaring from it. It could come from klieg lights, for all I knew. They didn’t let me see much.

I had spotted the cameras, however. They were little units, Sonys, I suspected, and their tiny black matte heads rotated all of the time, keeping me in sight. There were cameras inside my one room, too, up in the corners, behind steel netting that I couldn’t tear away even if I wanted to, which I didn’t, and cameras even in my bathroom. I hated that. During my first days here, I’d screamed at the walls, “Hey, what’s it with you guys, don’t you got any sense of privacy? Can’t a guy even take a dump without you watching?” But nobody ever answered me. No one ever talked to me. I’d been here seventy-three days, I made notches on the plastic table to keep count. But sometimes I forgot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a lot longer than that. They’d allowed me writing materials, too, but no computer. Were they afraid of what I might do with a computer? I didn’t have any idea. They gave me reading material, too. Old stuff. Moll Flanders. Idylls of the King. The Iliad and Odyssey. Stuff like that. Good stuff, but not exactly up to date. And they never showed themselves.