Robert Sheckley - The Eryx

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.

Why was that? I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t even know what they looked like. They’d grabbed me back then, seventy-three days ago. Stuff had still been happening back then. I’d been home. I’d received an urgent fax. Office of the President. “We need you urgently.” I’d come. In fact, they’d sent men to bring me to this place. Men who didn’t answer any of my questions. I’d tried to find out. What’s this all about? They’ll tell you more in-side, that’s all they’d told me.

And then I’d been inside. They’d given me a suite of rooms, told me to get some rest, there’d be a meeting soon. I’d gone to sleep that first night, and been awakened by sounds of shooting. I’d gone to the door. It was locked. I could hear men shouting, struggling out in the hall. And then there’d been silence. And the silence had gone on and on.

At first I’d thought I was pretty well off. The others had gotten killed, I suspected. Those blank-faced men who’d brought me here. All dead, I was sure of it. I was the only one remaining. But what for? What did they want me for?

I’d heard noises outside my suite of rooms. Sounded like someone was building something. What they were doing was cutting down my mobility. Reducing my three-room suite to a room, a bathroom, and a glassed-in outside area. Why had they done that? What was it all about?

The hell of it was, I had a feeling about what it was all about. I thought I knew. But I didn’t want to admit it to myself.

The time of the tests had come. That had been a few weeks ago. They had poked instruments down through the ceiling. Stuff that looked at me, stuff on the end of wires that recorded me. I’d gone a little crazy during that time. I knew they’d gassed me a couple of times. When I came to, I found cuts and injection marks on my body. Bruises. They’d been experimenting with me. Trying to find out something. Using me as a guinea pig. But for what? Just because I’d started the whole mess? That wasn’t fair. They’d no right to do that. It hadn’t been my fault.

I invented an imaginary playmate after a while. Some-one to talk to. They must have thought I was crazy. But I needed someone to talk to. I just couldn’t go on talking in my head all the time.

“So listen, Julie, the way I figure it, it all began back then when Gomez and I went out to Alquemar. I don’t think I ever told you about Alquemar, did I?”

I had, of course. But Julie was always obliging.

“No, you never mentioned it. What’s Alquemar?”

“It’s this planet. It’s quite some distance from Earth. A long way. But I went there. Gomez and I. That’s where we found the discovery that changed everything.”

“What did you find?” Julie asked.

“Well, let me bring you back to those faraway days. ...”

I was hanging out in this bar in Taos when I ran into Gomez over a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. We started to talk, as strangers will on a sleepy morning in a sleepy little town in New Mexico with nothing much to do with the long day ahead but drink a lot of beer and dream a lot of dreams.

Gomez was a short, barrel-chested guy from Santa Fe. A painter. He’d come to Taos to sketch tourists, make a few bucks. He’d taken a degree in art history at the University of New Mexico. But his interest was in alien artifacts.

“Is that a fact?” I said. “I’m interested in that stuff myself.”

You gotta remember how it was back in those days. Exploration of space was brand spanking new. It had begun with the Dykstra Drive, the faster-than-light drive that made space exploration possible. You used the Dykstra only between the stars, out in deep space. When you got in close, you used the ion engines for maneuvering. That’s where you burned up the fuel. And fuel cost money.

So the search was on. For intelligent life. Yes, that was the big one. But that was on a level above the one I was operating on. Or wanted to be operating on. I wanted to make some money in artifacts. It was a big market Especially in the first ten years or so of the rush to space, when everybody was crazy to own some piece of shit from an alien planet. Put it up on the mantel. “See that doohickey? It came from Arcturus V. I’ve got papers to prove it.” Humans are crazy about conversation pieces. The fad ran down after a while, but there was still plenty of demand. By the time I got into the racket, collectors had become a whole lot more discriminating. The stuff you brought in had to be of artistic merit, as they phrased it. How do you judge artistic merit? I don’t. That’s why I had Gomez along. If Gomez, with his credentials, said it was good, dealers were apt to believe him.

I was qualified. I’d pushed ships for NASA for a couple of years, until a difference of opinion with my superior put me out of work. I was looking for a way to get back in. Gomez was a couple of years younger than me, but he had similar ideas.

Gomez was young, wanted to travel, and he was more than willing to sell his services cheap for the privilege of going out into deep space. An appraiser is important on a scavenging expedition. You need someone who has an idea of the current market, has some idea what dealers will pay for “genuine alien artifacts.” You also need a guy to prepare and sign the provenance, the statement that gives whatever is known about the origin of the article. Although he was young, Gomez’s reputation in the field was excellent. If Gomez swore it was real alien goods, dealers would know they weren’t buying something faked in a factory in Calcutta or Jersey City.