Stanislaw Lem: The Conditioned Reflex

The diminished lunar gravity had allowed the rocky matter to assume nightmarish shapes, able to withstand the test of ages; forms so bizarre that the eye, no matter how accustomed to the sight of it, sooner or later went astray as it meandered up to the summit, the unreality, the implausibility of the landscape being heightened by the spectacle of powdery white pumice rising up like soap bubbles, of heavy chunks of basalt being hurtled through space in eerie slow motion, noiselessly subsiding in the talus below, more dreamlike than real.

A few hundred paces up the trail the rocks changed color. Riverbeds of rosy-hued porphyry framed the ravine ahead of them. Stone mesas, piled several stories high in places, their razor-thin edges delicately intertwining, stood there tenuously, begging to be nudged, to be toppled down in a wild and uncontainable rockslide.

Pnin guided them through this forest of petrified eruptions leisurely but infallibly. Now and then he would put his space boot on a slab; if it wobbled, he would stop and brood, then either proceed on a straight course or maneuver around it, intuiting by means of signs recognizable only to him whether or not it could sustain a man’s weight—sound, the warning signal of mountain climbers, being wholly absent here. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, one of the stone witches they had passed earlier broke loose and started down the slope, slowly and somnolently at first, then bouncing and ricocheting to touch off a stampede of stone, a furious rush of rock and rubble that was gradually enveloped by milky-white swirls of dust. It was a spectacle bordering on a hallucinatory vision—collisions without noise, a mute avalanche without tremors or vibrations, thanks to the inflated boots. When they veered sharply around the next hairpin bend farther up, Pirx beheld the trail left by the avalanche—a cloud of serenely undulating waves. Instinctively, with unease, his eyes scanned the horizon in search of the ship; it was safely parked in the same place as before, a kilometer or two away, its shiny hull and three hyphenlike legs clearly visible. A weird lunar spider resting on the site of an old avalanche, on what only a short while ago had seemed so precipitous but now lay flat as a tabletop.

As they neared the shadow zone, Pnin quickened his step. Until now the terror, the extremity of the landscape had so engaged Pirx that he had neglected to notice Langner. He was struck now by the surefooted agility with which the little astrophysicist moved.

They came to a four-meter-wide rift. Leaping broadjump-style, Pirx managed to get too much into it, went sailing high up and over the ravine, and, pedaling his legs wildly, overjumped the opposite ledge by some eight meters. This kind of lunar hopping was a new experience, one that made a mockery of the tourists and their clowning acrobatics back at Luna Base.

They slipped into the shadow. Occasionally a Sun-glazed wall would break up the darkness with its reflection, casting them and their surroundings in a bright radiance. The transition from sharp light to thick shadow made them lose sight of one another. Soon they were braced by a nocturnal cold. Pirx felt it penetrate the layers of his antithermal suit—not a biting, bone-clamping cold, more like a mute and icy presence. The twenty-degree drop in temperature made the aluminized layers of his suit vibrate. When his eyes had grown more accustomed to the dark, he observed that the balls atop the aluminum poles emitted a strong red light—beads in a ruby necklace that snaked its way up the slope before dissolving in the light. The serrated, rock-ribbed skyline flung its three precipices down to the plain, each traversed by a narrow, shelflike ledge of displaced rock. He could have sworn the serpentine chain of stakes led up to one of these shelves, but he also knew that it was an illusion. Higher up, the sundered wall of Mendeleev was grazed by an almost horizontal column of sunlight—a mute explosion, splashing buttes and crevasses with a blinding incandescence.

“Over there’s the station,” he heard Pnin’s voice say in his headset. The Russian, straddling night and day, cold and heat, was pointing up the mountain; but beyond a series of rocks, black even in the Sun, Pirx could see nothing.

“You see the Eagle? There’s the head; there you see the beak; and over there the wing.”

At first Pirx saw only a mass of light and shadow, then a hooked crag bulging over the eastern sunlit ridge, deceptively close because it was so clear in outline, unobscured by fog. Suddenly he saw the Eagle. The wall they were scaling was the wing; higher up was the head, a prominence framed by stars; the crag was its beak.

He glanced at his watch. They had been at it for forty minutes, with another hour of climbing ahead of them.

Before entering the next shadow zone, Pnin stopped to switch on his A/C unit. Pirx took advantage of the pause to ask which way the road had run.

“That way.” Pnin pointed down below.

Pirx saw only a huge gash, emptying out onto a cone-shaped talus littered with boulders.

“That’s where the wall gave way,” said Pnin. He pointed to a deep notch in the skyline. “There you see the Sun Gap. Our seismographs back at Tsiolkovsky registered the tremors. By our estimates, a half ton of basalt spilled down—”

“Hold it,” interrupted Pirx, a trifle bewildered. “How did they get the supplies up there?”

“You’ll see when we get there,” said the Russian, hitting the trail again.

Pirx fell in behind him, puzzling over the riddle. Did they backpack in every liter of water, every oxygen cylinder? No, impossible. They were moving along at a faster clip now. The last of the aluminum markers was buried at the top of the cliff. Darkness. They switched on their headlamps, the beams flitting aimlessly from one rocky hump to another, and started out along the ledge, which narrowed in places to two handwidths, in others to a trail wide enough for a man to stand up on with legs apart. They edged along the shelf, which was faintly undulating but otherwise level, its rugged surface making it good for footholds. Still, one false step, one dizzy spell…

Why haven’t we roped up? wondered Pirx. The light ahead of him suddenly came to a standstill. Pnin had stopped.

“The rope,” he said.

He handed one end to Pirx, who looped it through his belt buckle and tossed it back to Langner. Pirx, leaning against a boulder, surveyed the area.

The inside of the crater lay below him in all its pristine clarity: the black lava gorges, now shriveled to a net of cracks; the submerged cone in the center, throwing a long shadow…

Where was the ship? No sign of it. What about the trail? The hairpin turns? All that met the eye was an expanse of rocky basin, caught partially in a blinding glare, partially in a black configuration of shadows stretching from one rock pile to another. The luminous rocky powder accentuated the sculpture of the terrain—that grotesque proliferation of constantly diminishing craters, numbering in the hundreds in the vicinity of Mendeleev alone, ranging from a half kilometer in diameter to those barely visible to the naked eye; each crater perfectly round, with a gentle, tapered outer slope and an even steeper one converging toward a hill, a cone, or a navellike hollow in the center; the smallest being a replica of the larger ones, and all of them circumscribed by a rock-walled colossus measuring thirty kilometers in diameter.

This proximity of chaos and precision somehow jarred the mind: the proximity of waste and creation, both governed by a uniform design, implying simultaneously a mathematical perfection and the anarchy of death. He turned his gaze upward. The Sun Gap was still spewing a torrent of white fire.

The wall began to recede a few hundred paces past the ravine. They hiked, as before, in shadow, its thickness modulated by the light refracted by the vertical cudgel rising some 200,000 meters up out of the murk, and traversed a tongue of scree that frayed off at the top into a moderately steep slope. Pirx was gradually overcome by a strange torpor, not so much physical as mental, the effect, presumably, of his intense concentration, of this surge of impressions: the Moon, the rugged highland, glacial night alternating with blazing heat, and this ubiquitous, all-encompassing silence that reduced the sound of a human voice inside a space helmet to something as unlikely, as incompatible with its surroundings, as a goldfish on the Matterhorn.