Stanislaw Lem: The Conditioned Reflex

Pnin pondered a blowup of the Gap; black dots marked the place where the landslide had obliterated the road and its abutments.

“The station is reasonably accessible by day—just a few traverses along the outcrop I mentioned earlier—but almost impossible at night. We’re not back on Earth, you know…”

Pirx understood; the Russian was alluding to the fact that the side of long lunar nights was not illuminated by Earth’s generous lamp.

“Infrared doesn’t help?”

Pnin grinned.

“Infrared goggles, you mean? But how, my friend, when the surface temperature drops to minus 160 degrees within an hour after sunset? Theoretically, I suppose, radar might work, but have you ever tried climbing with a radarscope?”

Pirx admitted he hadn’t.

“And I wouldn’t advise you to, either. It’s an exceedingly complicated way of committing suicide. Radar is fine on level terrain, but not when you’re scaling—”

Langner and the professor came in: time to shove off. A half-hour flight and a two-hour hike still lay ahead of them, and sunset was only seven hours away. Only? thought Pirx, for whom seven hours seemed like an ample amount of time.

Dr. Pnin insisted on accompanying them to Mendeleev. The visitors politely protested, saying that it was not really necessary, but their hosts merely shrugged off their protests. Ganshin asked, as they were getting ready to leave, if there were any messages they wanted relayed to Earth. It would be their last chance: once they were inside the terminator, all radio communication would be suspended.

Pirx was tempted to send Matters’s sister “Greetings from the Far Side” but lost his nerve. They thanked their hosts and went below, where, again, the Russians insisted on escorting them to their ship. Pirx broke down at this point and complained about his g -suit. The Russians offered him one of theirs, which he gladly exchanged, leaving the old one to hang in the Tsiolkovsky pressure chamber.

The Russian suit was unconventional in a number of ways. For one thing it had three, instead of two, visors: one for high Sun, one for low, and one—shaded dark orange—for dust. The air-valve arrangement was different, and it was rigged with inflatable boots that cushioned the impact of rocks and gripped even the slipperiest surface; they called it the “high-mountain model.” Even the coloring was different: half in black and half in silver. When you stood with the black side facing the Sun, you broke out in a sweat; with the silver you were braced by a delicious coolness.

Pirx found the idea had one basic flaw in it: a man couldn’t always be pointed in the direction of the Sun. So what was he supposed to do? Walk backward?

The others chuckled and called his attention to a color alternator located on his chest. If he adjusted the knob, the colors could be reversed: black in front, silver in back, and vice versa. The mechanics of it were interesting. The suit’s outer ply was made of a clear, tear-resistant nylon fabric; between it and his body was a thin air barrier filled with two different kinds of dye, or rather semiliquid substances—one aluminized, the other carbonized. Pressure came from the air respirator.

It was time to leave for the launchpad. Earlier he had been too blinded, having just emerged from the Sun, to notice anything inside the pressure chamber. Now he had occasion to observe that one of the walls operated on the same principle as a piston. “The advantage being,” said Pnin, in reply to his question, “that you can let in or out any number of people at one time, with no appreciable air loss.” Pirx, on hearing this, felt a slight twinge of envy; the Institute’s chambers were antiquated boxes by comparison, at least five years behind the time, a five-year lag in technology being tantamount to a whole epoch.

The Sun’s course seemed to have been arrested. Walking in inflated boots for the first time was a strange sensation, a little like floating on air, but the feeling was gone by the time they reached the ship.

Professor Ganshin bumped helmets with him and shouted a few parting words, there was a flurry of handshakes in heavy gloves, and the threesome followed the pilot into the belly of the ship, which had shifted slightly from the added weight.

The pilot waited until the others were a safe distance away before igniting the engines. The inside of Pirx’s suit resonated with the sullen rumble of gathering thrust. Gravitation increased, but they felt nothing on takeoff. Stars swung in the ports; a rocky wilderness dipped below the rim and vanished from view.

They were flying low. The only one with any ground visibility was the pilot, whose eye was fixed on the fleeting landscape below. The ship hung vertically, like a helicopter, the blast of pulling engines and a vibrating hull being the only signs of surging speed.

“Stand by for landing!” Pirx couldn’t tell if the voice in his headset had been the pilot’s, coming over the on-board radio, or Pnin’s. Their seats tilted back. Pirx took a deep breath, felt light enough to float up to the ceiling, and gripped the armrests. The pilot braked sharply; rockets blazed and squealed; fiery implosions licked the outside walls; the gravitation climbed and fell… Pirx heard a couple of hollow thuds in quick succession. They had landed. Then something unexpected. The ship, which had already gone into its rocking motion, seesawing up and down on its insectlike legs, suddenly listed to one side and, accompanied by a clattering cascade of rock, started to slide downhill… We’ve crashed! Pirx thought. Instinctively, without panicking, he braced himself. The other two lay perfectly still. Engine shutoff. He grasped the pilot’s dilemma at once: the craft was lamely, fitfully sliding along with the debris; a burst of thrust, instead of lifting them, could, with a sudden lurching of one of the legs, capsize or hurtle them onto the rocky fragments below.

Gradually, the clattering and grating of heaving rock beneath the ship’s steel feet let up. A trickle of shingle clanking against metal, a final shifting of bedrock under the weight of the ship’s telescoped legs, and the cabin stabilized at a ten-degree angle.

The pilot crawled up out of the deck hatch, somewhat jittery in his gestures, and started making apologies. Ground profile had changed, he said, another landslide down the northern gully… He had put her down on the scree, close to the wall, to save them a long hike.

Pnin to that: A fine way to take shortcuts. A lava bed was not a cosmodrome. And: One should avoid taking any unnecessary risks.

This brief exchange ended, the pilot let the others get by him. They filed through the air lock, climbed down the footladder, and stepped onto the scree.

The pilot remained aboard ship to await Pnin’s return, while the others set out for the station, the towering and lanky Russian in the lead.

Pirx had always felt at home on the Moon. Until now, that is. The terrain around the Tsiolkovsky station was a board-walk promenade in comparison with his present surroundings. Their ship, listing on its maximally stressed legs, mired in a mass of ejecta, was parked some three hundred steps beyond the shadow cast by Mendeleev’s main wall. The Sun, a blazing chasm against the black sky, grazed the ridge, creating a mirage of melting rock. But the expanse of vertical walls rising up out of the darkness to heights of one, and, in the distance, two kilometers—that was no illusion. Stark-white alluvial cones ran down out of the gullies and spilled out onto the flat, deeply crevassed crater bed below; the blurry outline of boulders—blurred by dust clouds that took hours to settle—marked the latest cave-ins. The floor of the crater, a bed of fissured lava, was likewise mantled with luminous dust; the whole Moon, in fact, was powdered with the microscopic debris of meteors—that desiccating rain that had been pelting the surface for millions of years. The trail—a trail in name only, being rather a heaping up of block and slab, every bit as rugged as the rest of the terrain—was marked with aluminum stakes, anchored in cement and capped with ruby-red balls; on both sides of this trail cutting up through the talus, one half bathed in light, the other half black as galactic night, loomed a wall surpassing in grandeur the giants of the Alps or the Himalaya.