Stanislaw Lem: The Conditioned Reflex

Then Pirx understood why. The radar antenna, its grid constantly gyrating, had reduced the angle of inclination to sweep increasingly distant sectors. The system was responding to the “unknown”: the subject had momentarily slipped out of the range of its electromagnetic vision. Three or four minutes later the butterfly resumed its fluttering motion and the radarscope picked up the missing target. Both components were again registering it, as Langner, now up out of the shaft, began heading back to the station. The alarm signal stayed on; unless switched off manually, it would stay on for another two hours before being shut off automatically. The shutoff was to prevent the system, if inadvertently left on, from consuming too much battery-stored electricity.

The more expert he became at the station’s operational systems, the less complicated he found them to be. Langner never once got in the way of his experiments. To him the commission’s report seemed plausible enough. “Accidents do happen,” he said.

“The plates?” he said in reply to Pirx’s objection. “The plates mean nothing. People do funny things when they’re in a panic. Logic is the first thing to desert them, quicker than life. When that happens, anyone will act irrationally…”

Pirx decided to drop the matter.

The long lunar night was nearing the end of its second week. Pirx, for all his sleuthing, was no wiser now than at the beginning. Maybe he was up against one of those unsolvable, one-in-a-million-type cases… Bit by bit, he began lending Langner a hand with his experiments. He had to pass the time somehow. He even learned how to operate an astrograph (It’s turning out to be a routine training mission after all, he thought) and took turns trekking back and forth to the shaft.

At last it came, the thing he had been waiting for: dawn. Eager for news of Earth, he fiddled with the radio dials, but for all his tinkering could pull in only a hailstorm of cosmic crackle announcing the sunrise. Soon it was time for breakfast. After breakfast there were plates to be developed. Langner sat poring over one in particular, having stumbled across a handsome specimen of mesonic decay. He called Pirx over to the microscope, but Pirx reacted indifferently to the wonders of nuclear transformation. Then it was time for lunch, an hour at the astrographs, some stargazing… By then it was suppertime. Langner was already about in the kitchen when Pirx—it being his turn today—stuck his head through the door and said he was on his way out. Langner, who was trying to decipher a complicated recipe printed on a box of dehydrated eggs, told him, in a mumbling voice, to hurry—the omelets would be ready in ten minutes.

Suited up, with a fresh packet of plates in hand, tie-down straps secured to his neck ring, Pirx opened the doors to the kitchen and radio station, squeezed into the chamber, slammed the hermetic door shut, flipped the hatch, and crawled outside, leaving the hatch cover slightly ajar for a speedy return.

He was circumscribed by cosmic darkness, incomparably thicker than any on Earth, where the atmosphere always emits a faint radiation of light. He took his bearings by the stars; where the patterns of known constellations were truncated by a starless black, a rocky presence made itself felt. He switched on his headlamp and, with a pale concentration of light bobbing rhythmically before him, made his way up to the shaft. He swung his heavy boots gracefully over the rim—lunar lightness was easy to master, far easier than readjusting to Earth’s gravity—groped for the top rung, and lowered himself into the well.

As he squatted down and bent over the plate racks, his headlamp flickered and went out. He gave his helmet a pat; the light came back on. A loose contact, he thought. He had just started to collect the plates when the headlamp blinked—and went out again. Pirx deliberated in the dark. He wasn’t worried about the return trip—he knew the trail by heart. Besides, there were always the station’s dome lights—one green, the other blue—to guide him. But one false step in the dark and he ran the risk of damaging the plates. Another blow to the helmet: it worked; the light came back on.

Losing no time, he jotted down the temperature, fitted the plates into their holders, but just as he was transferring the cassettes to the carrying case, the damned headlamp gave out again. This time he set aside the plates and gave his helmet several raps in a row. By now he had observed a certain pattern: when he stood up straight, the lamp worked fine; the moment he bent over, it went out. From then on he tried to hold his back straight while crouching down—an awkward position.

Finally the light went completely dead. There was no going back to the station now, not with the plates scattered helter-skelter. Leaning his back against the lowest rung, he unscrewed the lamp’s outer cap and pushed the mercury-vapor lamp deeper into its socket, then screwed the cap back on. The light was working again, but fitfully; as happens sometimes, the thread refused to grab. He tried every which way to get it back on; finally, running out of patience, he shoved the glass cover into his pocket, quickly picked up the old plates, replenished the racks, and started back up the ladder.

He was a half meter from the top when another light, wavering and fugitive, mingled with his own. He glanced up but saw only a star-pierced sky trapped in the well opening.

Your eyes are playing tricks on you, he thought.

He surfaced and, suddenly gripped by a vague unease, broke into a run, taking the downslope in enormous bounds—those long lunar hops that gave the illusion of speed, being, in fact, six times slower than the Earthly kind.

He was already standing by the dome, one hand clutching the rail, when a second burst of light cleaved the darkness. A flare! To the south! The metal bubble blotted any view he might have had of the rocket flare itself, but not the eerie luminescence reflected by the overhanging rocks, which lunged out of the dark and just as quickly retreated. He scampered monkey-fashion up to the peak of the dome. Impenetrable darkness. He regretted not having a flare gun with him. He switched on his radio. Static—the same goddamned lousy static! His eye fell on the hatch; it was open, a sign Langner was still inside.

“You dummy! Flare, my foot! It was a meteor! What you saw was a meteor colliding with the rocks at cosmic velocity!”

He dropped down into the chamber, sealed the hatch behind him, waited for the air pressure to reach a level of 0.8 kilogram per square centimeter, then opened the inner hatch. Undoing his helmet on the run, he stormed into the vestibule.

“Langner!”

Silence. Still in his g-suit, he barged into the kitchen. One sweeping glance told him it was empty. Dinner plates on the table, bowl of omelet batter on the counter, frying pan next to the red-hot burner…

“Langner!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. He flung down the exposed plates still in his hand and ducked into the radio station. Deserted. Something told him it was a waste of time to look in the observatory. So those were flares he had seen! Was it—yes, it had to be! Langner! But why had he left the station?

Then he saw it. The green eye was pulsating: Langner was out there—breathing, alive. He checked the scope. The tracing beam was picking up a small, tapered light pulse at the very bottom of the screen. Langner was heading for the cliff!

Without taking his eye from the screen, Pirx started screaming into the microphone:

“Langner! Stop! Stop! Hey, come back! Langner, stop!”

The receiver crackled with interference. The willow-green wings pulsated—not in rhythm to normal breathing, but sluggishly, tenuously, at times becoming alarmingly inert, signaling a possible respirator breakdown. The blip on the radar had reached the outer periphery; it was at the bottom of the coordinate grid, or roughly a kilometer and a half from the station, far enough to put Langner among the towering outcrops under the Gap. Then it ceased moving, flaring up with every sweep of the tracing beam, always in the same place.