Stanislaw Lem: The Chain of Chance

Another curve. At one point I had the chilling sensation of being stared at from below, as if someone were lying on his back and watching my every move from underneath the car seat. The sun had fallen on the magazine cover featuring the blonde with the tongue on display. Without taking my eyes from the road I leaned forward and flipped the magazine over. For an astronaut you lead a pretty rich inner life—I was told by the psychologist after the Rorschach test. I couldn’t remember which of us had started up the conversation, he or I. There were two kinds of anxiety, he claimed—one high, the other low, the first coming from the imagination, the second straight from the guts. Was he serious, or was he just trying to console me by implying I was too sensitive?

A hazy, washed-out film was all that was left of the clouds. Gradually a gas station drew near. I was just slowing down when some crazy old sport, his long hair blowing in the wind, raced ahead of me with a lot of racket and show in a broken-down Votan. I branched off toward the pumps, and while the tank was being filled I finished the rest of the Thermos, with its yellowish-brown residue of sugar at the bottom. No one bothered to wipe off the oil and blood spots on the window. After pulling up next to a construction site, I climbed out of the driver’s seat and stretched my bones. Not far from where I was parked stood the glass-walled shopping pavilion where Adams had stopped to buy a deck of cards, imitation of Italian tarot cards dating from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The station was in the process of being expanded; a mound of white, unlaid gravel stood surrounding a trench that had been dug out for a new gas pump. A glass door parted and I went inside the shop, which turned out to be deserted. Was it siesta time, I wondered? No, it was too late in the day for that. I wandered in and out of stacks of gaudy boxes and artificial fruit. A white escalator going to the second floor started moving whenever I came near it but stopped the moment I walked away. I saw a profile of myself on the television monitor installed near the front windows. The black-and-white picture flickered in the sunlight and made me look paler than usual. Not a clerk in sight. The shelves were piled high with cheap souvenirs and stacks of postcards all of the same variety. I reached into my pocket for some change. While looking around for a clerk, I heard the crunching of gravel under tires. A white Opel skidded to a halt, and out stepped a blonde in a pair of jeans who made her way around the ditches and into the shop. Though my back was turned, I could see her on the television monitor. She was standing perfectly still, only a dozen or so steps in back of me. From the counter I picked up a facsimile of an ancient woodcut showing a smoking Vesuvius towering above the bay. On the same counter were some cards featuring reproductions of Pompeian frescoes of the sort that would have shocked our fathers. The blonde took a few steps toward me as if trying to make up her mind whether I was a salesclerk. The escalator began moving without a sound, but the tiny figure in pants kept her distance.

I turned around and started for the exit. So far nothing out of the ordinary. She had a childlike face, a blank expression in the eyes, a delicate little mouth. Only once did I slow down while passing her; it was when she fixed me with those gaping eyes of hers, at the same time scratching the neck of her blouse with her fingernail; then she keeled over backward without uttering a sound or batting an eyelash. I was so unprepared for this reaction that before I could lunge toward her she slumped to the floor. Unable to catch her, I managed only to break her fall by grabbing hold of her bare arms as if helping her stretch out on her back of her own free will. She lay there, stiff as a doll. Anyone looking in from the outside would have thought I was kneeling beside an overturned dummy, several of which stood in the windows on either side of me, dressed in Neapolitan costumes. I grabbed her wrist; her pulse was weak but steady. Her teeth were partly showing, and the whites of her eyes were visible as if she were sleeping on her back with her eyelids half open. Less than a hundred meters away, cars were pulling up to the pumps, then wheeling around again and rejoining the steady stream of traffic roaring along the del Sole. Only two cars were parked out in front—mine and the girl’s. Slowly I got up and gazed down at the figure stretched out on the floor. Her forearm, the one whose slender wrist I had just let go of, swung limply to one side; as it pulled the rest of the arm along with it and exposed the light-blond hairs lining her armpit, I noticed two tiny marks resembling scratches or a miniature tattoo. I had seen similar marks once before, on concentration-camp prisoners—runic signs of the SS. But these looked more like an ordinary birthmark. I had the urge to kneel down again but checked the impulse and headed for the exit instead. As if to emphasize the fact that the scene was over, the escalator suddenly came to a stop. On my way out I threw a final backward glance. A bunch of brightly colored balloons stood in the way, but I could still see her prostrate body on the far television screen. The picture jiggled, but I could have sworn it was she who moved. I waited two or three seconds more, but nothing happened. The glass door obligingly let me pass; I jumped across the mounds, climbed into the Hornet, and backed up so I could make out the Opel’s license plate. It was a German plate. A golf club was sticking up out of a motley pile of junk crammed into the back seat.

After merging with the traffic, I found I now had other thoughts to occupy me. The whole thing had the appearance of a quiet epileptic fit, un petit mal. Such attacks were not uncommon, even without convulsions. She might have felt the first symptoms coming on, decided to stop the car, then once inside the pavilion suddenly fainted. That would explain the blank stare and that insectlike movement of the fingers as she went to scratch the neck of her blouse. Then again, there was always the possibility of a simulation. I couldn’t recall having seen her Opel along the way, but then I hadn’t been that observant; besides, there was no telling how many Opels I’d come across with the same white finish and rectangular lines. I went over every detail in my mind, re-examining each as if through a magnifying glass. A shop like that must have had at least two if not three attendants on duty. Had they all gone out for a drink at the same time? Strange. Though nowadays even that was possible. Maybe they’d ducked out to a café, knowing that no customer would drop in at the pavilion at that time of day. And the girl must have thought it better to have the attack there, rather than at the station, where she had no intention of creating a scene for the benefit of those fellows in the Supercortemaggiori overalls. That all seemed logical enough, maybe even a bit too logical. She was traveling alone. Now what person in her condition would risk traveling alone? Even if she’d pulled out of it, I wouldn’t have let her get behind the wheel again; I’d have advised her to leave the Opel parked where it was and to climb into my car. Anyone in my shoes would have done the same. That’s exactly what I would have done if I had been just a tourist.

The heat was beginning to get to me. I should have stayed behind and let myself fall into the trap—assuming it was a trap. That’s what I was here for, damn it! The more convinced I became that her fainting spell had been real, the less sure I was of it. And not only where her fainting spell was concerned. People just don’t leave a shopping pavilion unattended like that, not when it’s nearly the size of a department store. At least there should have been a cashier behind the register. But even the cashier’s desk had been empty. True, the inside of the store was clearly visible from the little café that stood facing it across the ditches. But who could have guessed that I would be going in there? No one. Anyway, it wasn’t I they were after—unless I was singled out as an anonymous victim. If so, then whose victim? Unless they were all in on it together—the attendants, the cashier, the girl. But that struck me as being too far-fetched. A pure coincidence, then. So we were back where we’d started. Adams had driven all the way to Rome without incident. Alone, too. But what about the others? Suddenly I remembered the golf club in the Opel. Good Lord, those were the same kind of clubs that…