"Bradbury, Ray - Pendulum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

slaughtering! I was being put on exhibition for life within my own executioning
device! The crowd roared thunderous approval, damning me.
Then a little click and a whirring above me, and my glass prison began to move.
It increased in speed. The arc of the pendulum's swing lengthened. I remember
how I pounded at the glass, futilely screaming, and how my hands bled. I
remember the rows of faces becoming blurred white blobs before me....
I did not become insane, as I had thought at first I would. I did not mind it so
much; that first night. I couldn't sleep but it wasn't uncomfortable. The lights
of the city were comets with tails that pelted from right to left like foaming
fireworks. But as the night wore on I felt a gnawing in my stomach that grew
worse until I became very sick. The next day was the same and I couldn't eat
anything. In the days that followed they never stopped the pendulum, not once.
They slid my food down the hollow pendulum stem in little round parcels that
plunked at my feet. The first time I attempted eating I was unsuccessful; it
wouldn't stay down. In desperation I hammered against the cold glass with my
fists until they bled again, and I cried hoarsely, but heard nothing but my own
weak words muffled in my ears.

After an infinitude of misery, I began to eat and even sleep while traveling
back and forth this way . . . they had allowed me small glass loops on the floor
with which I fastened myself down at night and slept a soundless slumber,
without sliding. I even began to take an interest in the world outside, watching
it tip one way and another, back and forth and up and down, dizzily before my
eyes until they ached. The monotonous movements never changed. So huge was the
pendulum that it shadowed one hundred feet or more with every majestic sweep of
its gleaming shape, hanging from the metal intestines of the machine overhead. I
estimated that it took four or five seconds for it to traverse the arc.
On and on like this--for how long would it be? I dared not think of it....
DAY by day I began to concentrate on the gaping, curiosity-etched faces
outside--faces that spoke soundless words, laughing and pointing at me, the
prisoner of time, traveling forever nowhere. Then after a time--was it weeks or
months or years?--the town people ceased to come and it was only tourists who
came to stare....
Once a day the attendants sent down my food, once a day they sent down a tube to
vacuum out the cell. The days and nights ran together in my memory until time
came to mean very little to me....
IT WAS not until I knew, inevitably, that I was doomed forever to this swinging
chamber, that the thought occurred to me to leave a written record. Then the
idea obsessed me and I could think of nothing else.
I had noticed that once a day an attendant climbed into the whirring coggery
overhead in order to drop my food down the tube. I began to tap code signals
along the tube, a request for writing materials. For days, weeks, months, my
signals remained unanswered. I became infuriated--and more persistent.
Then, at long last, the day when not only my packet of food came down the tube,
but with it a heavy notebook, and writing materials! I suppose the attendant
above became weary at last of my tappings! I was in a perfect ecstasy of joy at
this slight luxury.

I have spent the last few days in recounting my story, without any undue
elaboration. I am weary now of writing, but I shall continue from time to