Stanislaw Lem: The Conditioned Reflex

Pnin rounded an aiguille—and was engulfed by fire. Pirx was blinded by the same burst of light before he understood: the Sun. They had reached the upper stretch of road, the only part salvaged in the avalanche.

They walked three abreast now, with both sun visors lowered.

“We’re almost there,” said Pnin.

The road was indeed passable. Hewn—or rather blasted—in the rock, it ran under the Eagle’s Wing clear up to the top of the ridge, where a low-slung saddle overlooked a natural rock basin. Thanks to the basin, the station was kept supplied even after the slide. A cargo ship, rigged with a special rocket launcher, flew in the supplies and fired the canisters into the basin. Though a few were lost in every shipment, most of the canisters were able to withstand the shock of impact, thanks to their extremely durable armor casings. In the old days, before there were any stations in operation, the only way of supplying expeditionary teams in the Sinus Medii had been by “spacelift.” Since parachutes were not deployable in an airless atmosphere, special shock-resistant canisters made of duralumin and steel had been designed. These were dropped like bombs and later collected by members of the teams, who sometimes found them scattered over areas a kilometer square. Now, many years later, the containers were again being put to good use.

A trail led from the pass, out along the ridge, to the northern peak of the Eagle’s head; three hundred meters below the peak, its dome shimmering bright, was the station. With a semicircle of boulders on the downslope and boulders pressing it on all sides, the bubblelike structure was wedged right into the cliff. A few of these boulders crowded the concrete platform by the entrance.

“Couldn’t they have found a better place?” exclaimed Pirx.

Pnin, one leg already on the platform, paused.

“For a moment I thought I heard Animtsev talking,” he said. Pirx detected a trace of laughter in his voice.

Pnin headed back—alone—four hours before sundown. But, in fact, he walked out into a lunar night, the way back being already blanketed by impenetrable darkness. Langner, a veteran of many lunar expeditions, told Pirx that the cold they had met on the way up was nothing compared to the cold that came within an hour after nightfall, when the rocks had had time to cool.

Pnin was supposed to report back the moment he reached the shuttle. An hour and twenty minutes later, a voice came over the station’s radio—Pnin’s voice. They exchanged only a few words. They were in a hurry… bad lift-off conditions… ship listing… feet anchored in the scree… Pirx and Langner slid back a metal shutter and watched the lift-off—not the very beginning, because a ridge blocked their view of the landing site, but in time to see a fiery line stitch the dense and shapeless black, trailed by a reddish-brown glow-dust swirls reflecting the exhaust flare. The smoldering javelin climbed higher and higher, the ship invisible except as a glowing piece of string that became more and more attenuated, vibrant, frazzled—the normal pulsation of an engine working at full blast. Then, their heads craning toward the sky, where a fiery trajectory was inscribing itself on a starry backdrop, they watched as the straight line tilted gently and described a beautiful arc over the horizon.

Now there were just the two of them, in the dark—they had doused the lights for a better view of the blast-off. They slid back the shutter and exchanged glances. Langner mustered a faint smile, then, with a slight stoop, dressed in his checkered flannel shirt, marched over to the table, to his pack, and began removing his books. Pirx, leaning against a concave wall, stood with his legs apart as if on a deep-space probe. His mind was aswarm with images: Luna Base, with its chilly basements, narrow hotel corridors, elevators, and bouncing, basalt-swapping tourists; the flight to Tsiolkovsky station, their visit with the Russians, the silver grid of the radartelescope strung between ridge and black sky; Pnin’s lecture; the second flight; and finally that eerie trek through a landscape of extremes, of icy cold and blinding heat, and those abysslike gorges staring into his visor… Golly, so much in the space of just a few hours. Time, grown gigantic, had swallowed and devoured these images, and now they were reasserting themselves, fighting for supremacy. He closed his hot, parched eyelids for a moment, then opened them again.

Langner was arranging his books on a shelf in meticulous order, and Pirx got his first real insight into the man. The calm, leisurely way he went about shelving his books, one next to the other, by subject, came not from insensitivity or dullness of intellect. Langner was not oppressed by his surroundings, by this desiccating world; he made it serve him. He had volunteered for station duty and felt not the slightest twinge of homesickness. His home was precisely here, among these spectrograms and computations and the phenomena giving rise to them; he was at home wherever he could quench his thirst for knowledge; he had a purpose in life. He was, in short, the last man in whom Pirx would have confided his romantic dreams of greatness. Pirx envied him his self-assurance, his self-confidence, but only for a split second, because he also sensed some deep incompatibility between them. Here they were, two men who had little to say to one another, forced to spend this first night together. Then tomorrow, and the next night…

Pirx let his eyes roam about the cabin. Curving, foam-padded walls. Recessed light panels in the ceiling. Several color reproductions sprinkled among shelves of reference works, and a small plaque inscribed with two columns of names: their predecessors. Corners were crowded with empty oxygen cylinders, tin cans filled with colorful mineral samples, and lightweight metal chairs with nylon webbing. A small table, a swivel desk lamp. Through a crack in the door he caught a glimpse of the radio station.

While Langner began sorting out a shelf stacked with photographic plates, Pirx maneuvered around him and went to explore the rest of the station. To the left, branching off a tiny vestibule, stood the door to the kitchen; straight ahead was the hatch to the pressure chamber, with two other doors to the right, both leading to tiny cubicles. He opened the door to his room: bare except for a bed, a folding chair, a collapsible writing desk, and a few bookshelves. The ceiling dropped down over the bed at an angle, as in an attic, but it was curved instead of sloping, matching the station’s exterior design.

He made his way back to the vestibule. The chamber hatch, rounded at the corners and hermetically sealed by a thick rubberized silicone gasket, was mounted with a spoked wheel and a small lamp, which, when lit, meant that the outer hatch was open and there was a vacuum inside. The lamp was off at the moment. He opened the door, tripping two lights, which revealed a narrow compartment with sheer metal walls and a vertical iron-rung ladder in the center, the ladder leading up to a hatch in the ceiling. Under the first rung was a chalk outline, partially obliterated by footsteps: the place where Savage’s body had been discovered. The body had been lying with its legs tucked up and on its side, frozen to the rough concrete slab where the blood had escaped from his eyes and mouth.

Pirx studied the blurry outline for a while, then withdrew. As he was sealing the airtight door, his head suddenly snapped back: footfalls overhead. It was Langner, who had climbed the ladder mounted opposite the vestibule and was prowling about the observatory. Pirx poked his head up through a round opening in the floor and took stock of the hardware: a slip-covered telescope the size of a small cannon, astrographs, cameras, plus two other fair-size pieces of equipment—one a Wilson cloud chamber, the other a high-voltage spark-gap chamber, rigged with an attachment for photographing ionization trails.