"Keith Fenwick - Skid 01 - A Planet Called Skid" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fenwick Keith)

Bruce had been anticipating a slip that would prove he was caught up some kind of elaborate
hoax. Surely a real spaceship would have something more high tech to sit on. The toilet was so
terrestrial in appearance that Bruce almost found its presence reassuring.
Myfair pressed another button and the toilet bowl disappeared.
"Each button has a symbol for the amenity required," Myfair explained as he stepped outside
and the wall slid shut behind him with the finality of a cell door closing on a condemned man.
Bruce took a nervous drag on his cigarette, waiting for something to happen. Exactly what he
wasn't sure. He still half expected to wake up to find himself lying on a bed with needles and
tubes sticking out of him and a team of doctors poking him about. He wasn't sure whether he
imagined himself to be in intensive care at the hospital, or in some alien laboratory.
Unable to find a suitable receptacle for his cigarette butt Bruce dropped it, grinding it into
the floor with his boot. Seconds later he almost jumped out of his skin as the silence of the
room was shattered by a shrill whirring sound.
"What the hell?"
A trap door flipped open in the seamless wall below the keyboard and a small drone, shaped
like a toaster laid on its side with a bowl on top, rolled out.
The dogs cringed against the wall as the drone shot across the floor and stopped over the
cigarette butt. Emitting a sound like a vacuum cleaner it sucked up the butt and ash then spun
on its axis with an excruciating squeal and bolted back into its hole.
Bruce shrugged his shoulders as if to say nothing else could surprise him. He lit up another
smoke and had a close look at the buttons on the wall. The various symbols etched onto the
buttons made as much sense to him as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics would so he pushed a few
at random. A circle with a dot in the middle evidently meant 'toilet'. A sideways 'L' represented
a bed. An open-ended rectangle caused a shower, complete with running water, to appear in a
corner of the room.
Now that looked like a good idea Bruce thought. For the moment though he continued to push
the buttons randomly, vainly hoping that the door would open. Finally he decided that Myfair
must have locked it from the outside. Not that Bruce had the faintest idea what he would do if
he escaped from the room. He simply would have felt better if he could have got out. He
pressed the bed button. A bed shot out of the wall, joined moments later by the shower cubicle.
Temporarily cowed by the sudden appearance of the bed, and with Punch's heavy tail thumping
a slow steady rhythm on the floor, the three dogs watched Bruce peel off his clothing. Boots
first, then the plastic leggings, swandri, jersey, socks, shirt, singlet, trousers, and under strides.
All dropped in an untidy heap on the floor.
Almost as an afterthought, Bruce reached into his shirt and pulled out his smokes, chucking
them onto the bed for safety then stepped into the shower.
After several moments of standing under the comfortably warm jets of water Bruce
instinctively reached out for the soap, only to realize at the same time that the water itself
contained some sort of detergent.
"Shit hot!" He said, working a lather up all over his body. Then the dogs started barking
furiously.
"Shut up!" Bruce leaned out of the cubicle to see what the dogs were barking at just in time to
see a larger version of the drone that had sucked up his discarded cigarette butt in the process
of doing the same to his pile of clothing. Bruce leapt out of the shower, slipped as his foot
touched the floor, and missed the drone by inches as it bolted back into the wall.
"Bugger."
Bruce stood dripping in the middle of the room, cursing his loss. There was nothing like
nakedness in an alien environment to make a man feel completely inadequate.
"Shut up ya bastards!" He yelled at the dogs who were still barking maniacally at the wall the
drone had disappeared through. He could do without that racket as well.