Stanislaw Lem: The Conditioned Reflex

Pirx was seated next to a port. No matter how strenuously he tried to ignore the familiar sight below, he couldn’t resist. From the moment the Selene settled into its circum-Terra orbit, before escaping onto a translunar course, his eyes were glued to the viewport. The most thrilling moment came when Earth’s surface, crisscrossed by roads and canals, speckled with cities, was gradually cleansed of any human presence; when nothing was visible below save the planet’s soft, round bulge, blotchy and cloud-flecked; when the eye, moving from the violet-black of oceans to the familiar shapes of continents, failed to locate a single trace of man’s technological genius. At an altitude of several hundred meters, Earth looked empty—eerily empty—and newborn, the warmer regions being denoted by a faint coating of green.

As often as he had been a spectator to this abrupt transition, it never ceased to jolt him into an awareness of something—something to which he found it hard to reconcile himself. Was it the lurid manifestation of man’s microscopic stature in relation to the cosmos? The transposition to another—planetary—scale? The visualization of mankind’s feeble and ephemeral efforts expended over the millennia? Or was it the overcoming of that frailty, the transcending of the blind and indifferent force of gravitation exerted by that formidable mass? The leaving behind of rugged mountain massifs, of polar shields, to brave the shores of other celestial bodies? These reflections, these unarticulated sensations, soon gave way to others as the ship changed course and, threading the gap in the radiation zone hugging the North Pole, shot up to the stars.

The stargazing stopped the second the lights went on.

Luncheon was served, during which the engines labored to create a semblance of gravity. The meal over and the lights once again extinguished, the passengers sat back in their seats and got their first glimpse of the Moon.

They were approaching from the side of the Moon’s southern hemisphere. A few hundred kilometers below the pole was the crater Tycho, a yawning white Sun-drenched pockmark with luminous bands radiating in all directions, whose stunning regularity had enthralled generations of Earthly astronauts, only to become, once the mystery of its symmetry was solved, the subject of student jokes. First-year students, for example, were made to believe that the circular white depression constituted the “Moon’s axle hole” and that the luminous rays were in fact thickly drawn meridians.

The closer they came to the bright sphere suspended in a black void, the more evident it was that the Moon was indeed a congealed, lava-caked version of the world as it must have existed billions of years ago, when the hot Earth wandered with its satellite through meteorite clouds and masses of planetisimals; when a continuous hailstorm of rock and iron pelted and pierced the Moon’s thin outer crust, tossing up huge amounts of magma onto the lunar surface; and when, the universe cleansed and purified at last, the era of tectonic cataclysms over, the airless planet died on the battlefield, to become a stony mask ravaged by bombardments—the inspiration of poets, the lyrical lamp of lovers.

The Selene, with is four-hundred-ton payload of freight and flesh, turned its tail to the expanding disk and commenced braking, slowly and in stages, until its gently throbbing hull roosted on one of the cosmodrome’s huge steel cone assemblies.

This was Pirx’s third lunar landing; on one of them, his solo, he had soft-landed in a practice field located a kilometer and a half from the passenger terminal.

He saw nothing of the field this trip; the Selene’s generous ceramite-plated frame was immediately hoisted onto a hydraulic winch and lowered into a hermetically sealed hangar. Customs inspection. Any narcotics? Alcohol? Material of an explosive, corrosive, or toxic nature? Uh, Pirx suddenly remembered that he had some toxic liquid in his possession—namely, a small flask of cognac, a present from Matters. He stashed it in his back pocket. Then came the health inspection—vaccination certificate, baggage sterilization (to guard against contamination)—which he whipped through in nothing flat.

He paused outside the gate to check whether anyone was on hand to greet him.

Later he stood on the mezzanine overlooking the hangar, an enormous concrete chamber hewn in the rock, with a hemispherical ceiling, level floor, and fluorescent light panels that flooded the interior with artificial sunlight. The place was aswarm with battery-powered dollies wheeling out baggage, cylinders of compressed gases, vats, crates, tubing, cable coils… Looming darkly, stolidly in the background was the cause of all this commotion—the Selene, its midships a gaping wound, its stern anchored far below the concrete in a cavernous shaft, its bow jutting up through an opening to the next level.

Pirx stood idly around, then remembered he still had to get squared away. An agent at the Port Authority office handed him an overnight pass, told him his ship wasn’t scheduled to leave for another eleven hours, then ducked out of sight, leaving him completely in the lurch. Pirx strode back out into the hallway, a little dazed by this display of bumbling inefficiency. Not a boo about whether they were to fly directly to the Tsiolkovsky station or over Mare Smythii. Come to think of it, where was his lunar sidekick? And the commission? And their work agenda?

The more he thought, the more disgruntled he became, his irritation gradually coalescing into a gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach. He was hungry. Chow time. The directory was in six languages; he studied it carefully, hopped on the right elevator, and rode down to the pilots’ cafeteria, where he was directed to the public cafeteria: this one was for pilots only.

That took the cake. He was about to make his way over to the damned restaurant when he remembered something: he had forgotten to claim his knapsack. Back upstairs to the hangar. To learn that his baggage had been sent to his hotel room. In disgust he stomped off to lunch without his pack. On the way he was caught up by two waves of tourists: some Frenchmen—the same ones—and a crowd of Swiss, Dutch, and Germans, just returned from a selenobus tour of the crater Eratosthenes. The French, doing what people normally did when getting their first taste of lunar gravitation, bunnyhopped instead of walked, bounced off the ceiling—to the squeals and cheers of the women—relished the slow descent from a height of three meters. The Germans, being more reserved by nature, filed into the spacious dining room, draped the backs of their chairs with camera gear, binoculars, tripods—with everything but high-powered telescopes—and over soup swapped samples of Moon rock fobbed off on them by the selenobus crews. Pirx sat hunched over his soup, drowning in a German-French-Greek-Dutch potpourri. Amid the general euphoria he was the only glum-faced customer. A Dutchman, taking pity on him, convinced that he was suffering from space sickness (“Your first trip to the Moon, no?”), offered him a pill. That was the drop that made his cup run over. Pirx skipped the second course, bought four packages of fruitcake at the snack bar, and took the elevator up to the hotel, venting his scorn on the porter. The man had offered to sell him a piece of the Moon—that is, a chunk of vitrified basalt.

“Get lost, you two-bit peddler! I was here before you were—” he barked and, trembling with rage, left the stupefied man standing there with jaw agape.

His room, a double, was already occupied by a short-to-medium-size man in a faded windjacket, sitting under the overhead lamp. Ginger-haired with a sprinkling of gray, a few wisps dangling over the forehead, a sunburned face, bespectacled. He took off his glasses the moment Pirx entered the room. His name was Langner—Dr. Langner—the astrophysicist who was to accompany him to Mendeleev. Pirx, already prepared for the worst, pronounced his name, mumbled something, and sat down. Langner looked to be a man in his forties—an old man in Pirx’s book—but still fairly fit for his age. He didn’t smoke, probably didn’t drink, and didn’t look like the talkative type. He was reading three books at once: a logarithm table, another brimming with formulas, a third with spectrograms. He kept a miniature calculator in his trouser pocket, using it sparingly but with effortless ease. From time to time, without taking his eyes off his formulas, he threw a question at Pirx—to which the cadet responded with a mouth full of fruitcake. Their cubicle was furnished with a set of bunkbeds and a shower stall barely big enough to accommodate someone on the beefy side, and was plastered with multilingual signs bearing entreaties to conserve water and electricity. Fortunately, breathing was permitted: a short while later, oxygen was delivered to their room. Pirx washed down his snack with tap water, so cold it set his teeth on edge—reservoirs just below the basalt crust, he thought. That’s funny. It was eleven by his watch, seven by the room’s electric clock, and ten past midnight by Langner’s.