Stanislaw Lem: The Conditioned Reflex

Poof! The finger disappeared. Pirx spun, spiraled, plummeted like a rock. Tried to scream but couldn’t.

Scintillating shapes—faceless, spherical, gaping, dispersing every time he tried to confront them—advanced, bore down on him, swelled his insides… He was a thin-walled, membranous receptacle, strained to the bursting point.

He exploded—splattered into random and disjointed fragments of night, which fluttered aimlessly in space like flakes of charred paper. Throughout this flurry of oscillating movements there was the awareness of some terrific exertion of will, some last-ditch effort to traverse the realm of murky oblivion that had once been his own body but was now reduced to an insensate, chilling nothingness—to reach out and touch someone, to catch one final glimpse of him…

“Hold it,” something said in an astonishingly clear and matter-of-fact voice, one decidedly not his own. Some sympathetic onlooker? Where? He could have sworn he’d heard a voice. No, it was only his imagination playing tricks on him.

“Hold it. If others have lived to tell about it, then it can’t be fatal. So just hang in there.”

The words spun around until they were emptied of their meaning. Then it started up again: the slow dismemberment, the breaking up, the crumbling apart of everything like gray, water-soaked tissue, melting like a snowcapped peak warmed by the sun. Swept up by it, he was freighted passively away.

I’m a goner, he thought in earnest, convinced that this was death, that it was not a dream. It swamped him—no, not him, but them, his manifold selves, too prolific to be counted.

What am I doing here? Where am I? In the ocean? On the Moon? Taking part in some experiment…?

He refused to believe it was an experiment. What—vanish because of a little paraffin and a tankful of salt water? Hey! Enough of this crap. And he began to fight back against whatever it was; he exerted every muscle; it was like trying to heft a boulder. But there was nothing left of him, not enough to make his muscles flinch. During his last glimmer of consciousness he mustered the strength to groan—feeble and distant, the sound was like a radio signal from another planet.

For a second or so he almost revived, only to surrender to an even blacker, more nullifying ordeal.

He was not in any physical discomfort. If only it had hurt! If only he could have experienced a twinge of real pain, the kind that bestows limits, presence, confirmation of self… But it was painless, a numbing surge of nothingness. He felt the air rush into him—spasmodically, in snatches, not into his lungs but into that wilderness of shuddering, stunted thought-scraps. Whine, groan—anything to hear your own voice…

“You can moan without thinking of the stars,” said some intimate yet strangely anonymous voice.

Whine? Moan? How could he? He was dead. Extinct. Defunct. Look: he was a hole, a sieve, a labyrinth of tortuous caves and passages, transparent, porous… Oh, why hadn’t they told him it would be like this? Cold and clammy streams… they were running through him… freely… without obstruction… The bastards! Why hadn’t they told him?!

Soon the sensation of airy transparency gave way to raw fear, and it persisted—even after the darkness, convulsed by shimmering spasms, had vanished.

The worst was yet to come, but it defied description, even clear recollection; there was no vocabulary for it. Yes, the “victims” were the richer for the experience, the hellish nature of which escaped their professors—but it was scarcely an experience to be envied.

Pirx had to undergo still more punishment. He would vanish for a while, then return to life, not singly but in multiple versions; have his brain eaten completely away, then recover long enough to be plunged into a series of abnormal states too intricate to articulate, whose leitmotif was a conscious and ineradicable terror transcending time and space.

Pirx had had a bellyful.

Later Dr. Grotius said: “Your first groan came at the one-hundred-thirty mark, your second at the two hundred twenty-ninth. All told, a loss of three points—but not a single jerk! Fold one leg over the other, please. I’m going to test your reflexes… Tell me, how did you manage to stick it out so long, especially toward the end?”

Pirx was sitting on a neatly folded towel, the more pleasant for being coarse. He felt like Lazarus himself. Not that it showed on the outside, but inwardly he felt resurrected. He had tested a full seven hours. The highest grade in the class! Never mind that he had died umpteen thousand times during the final three hours; he’d done it without a peep. After they fished him out of the tank, after they dried him off, gave him a body massage, an injection, and a generous swig of cognac, they hustled him off to the examination room, where Dr. Grotius was waiting for him. Along the way he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: the stunned, comatose, bleary-eyed look of someone just recovered from a bout with malignant fever. He stared into the mirror—not because he expected to see his hair streaked with gray, but on a whim—took one look at his broad-boned pie face, wheeled around, and marched off, trailing wet footprints on the parquet flooring.

Dr. Grotius labored long and hard to get him to recount his experience. Seven hours was no small feat. He regarded Pirx differently now, less with sympathy than with the fervor of an entomologist on discovering some rare species of moth or insect. Possibly he saw in him the makings of a scholarly article.

Pirx, it must be said, was not the most obliging of research subjects. He sat the whole time in stunned silence, batting his eyes like a halfwit. Everything seemed flat and two-dimensional, receding or moving closer the moment he tried to grasp it. A typical reaction. But his response to the doctor’s questioning aimed at prying further details out of him was anything but typical.

“Ever been in there yourself?” He answered a question with a question.

“No.” Grotius backed off in some astonishment. “Why do you ask?”

“You should try it sometime,” suggested Pirx. “That way you’d see firsthand what it’s like.”

By the second day he felt fit enough to joke about the “loony dip.” From then on, it was back and forth to the Main Building, where the summer training missions were posted daily on a glassed-in bulletin board. But when the weekend rolled around, his name was still not on the list.

On Monday he was told to report to the commandant’s office.

Pirx, though not immediately fazed, examined his conscience beforehand. Was it for sneaking that mouse aboard Osten’s ship? Nah, that was ancient history by now. Anyway, what was one measly mouse? Big deal. How about the time he hooked up the AC/DC to Maebius’s mattress springs, using an alarm clock for a timer? But that was just a lowerclassman’s prank, a twenty-two-year-old’s idea of a practical joke. The commandant was a bighearted guy; he’d understand. Up to a point. Or was it for Operation Zombie?

Operation Zombie was Pirx’s own brainstorm. He of course had help from friends—what were friends for, anyway? It was his smoothest, slickest job ever: a little gunpowder in a paper cone, a trail three times around the room, payload under the desk—there he might have overdone it a bit—then back out into the corridor through the slit under the door. And the way Barn had been “primed”: for one whole week Pirx made sure the nightly bull sessions were devoted exclusively to “extraterrestrial beings.” Pirx—nobody’s fool—was shrewd enough to cast people in different roles—some telling horror stories, others acting as skeptics—so Barn wouldn’t be the wiser. Except for occasionally sneering at the partisans of the “beyond,” Barn kept aloof from these metaphysical debates. But, man, what a sight he made, barrel-assing out of his room at midnight, bellowing like a water buffalo with a tiger on its tail! The flame, as planned, had sneaked under the door, snaked three times around the room, and—whamo!—exploded under the table, toppling books and starting a small fire. A couple of buckets of tap water took care of it, but it left a nice hole in the floor, not to mention the lingering stench of cordite. The operation, though technically flawless, proved a flop: Barn still refused to believe in spirits. Yep, Operation Zombie it was. Pirx got up early, slipped on a fresh shirt, took one last peek into his Flight Book and Basic Navigation— just to be on the safe side—and went to face the music.