Stanislaw Lem: The Conditioned Reflex

They switched their watches to Lunar Time, knowing they would have to change again soon. The Mendeleev station was in a different time zone. The whole Far Side was in another time zone.

Lift-off was still nine hours away when, without a word, Langner got up and left the room. Pirx sat and did nothing for a while, later moved his chair into the light, browsed through some ragged-looking magazines lying on the table, and finally, in a fit of restlessness, went out. The corridor wound around before opening onto a small lounge where several armchairs stood facing a recessed TV set. A track and field meet was being telecast by special relay from Australia. Though not much of a track fan, Pirx flopped down into one of the chairs and watched until his eyelids drooped. As he stood up, he shot a half meter into the air: he had forgotten about the reduced gravity. Nothing to do but loaf around. When could he change out of his civvies and into his g -suit? Where were his instructions? Why all the stalling?

He would have nosed around, even raised hell, if what’s-his-name, Doctor Langner, hadn’t treated the whole thing so casually. Better to keep his mouth shut.

The track meet was over. Pirx switched off the set and shuffled back to his room. Gosh, if he had known it was going to be like this… While he was taking a shower he heard voices through the dividing wall: the tourists, still rhapsodizing over lunar splendors. Ho-hum. For lack of anything better to do, he changed his shirt. He was just stretching out on his bunk when Langner reappeared with a fresh supply of books. Four of them this time.

Pirx started to get the creeps. He began to suspect Langner of being one of those scientific fanatics, a younger version of Professor Merinus.

Spreading out some new spectrograms on the table and studying them more intently than Pirx had ever scrutinized his favorite pinup, Langner suddenly asked: “How old are you?”

“A hundred and eleven,” Pirx said, and added, when the other looked up, “in binary.”

Langner broke out in a smile—his first—a smile that lent him an almost human look. He had strong, immaculately white teeth.

“The Russians are picking us up in one of their ships,” he said. “We’ll stop off at their station on the way.”

“The Tsiolkovsky station?”

“Yes.”

The Tsiolkovsky station was on the Far Side. That meant another stopover. Pirx wondered how they would cover the remaining thousand kilometers. Not by land, surely. By ship? He refrained from asking, not wishing to betray his ignorance. Langner was about to say something, but it was too late. Pirx was sound asleep—in his clothes.

He woke up with a start. Langner was bent over his bunk, touching his arm.

“It’s time,” he said, not wasting any words.

Pirx sat up. Langner, judging by the stack of computations on the table, had been up the whole time, reading and writing. At first Pirx understood him to mean that it was time for dinner, but soon found out he was referring to takeoff. As he slung on his knapsack, he noticed that Langner’s was even bulkier and heavier. Rocks, he guessed. Later he discovered that aside from a few personal items—a couple of shirts, some toilet soap, a toothbrush—it held only books.

They moved directly to the upper level, this time without having to pass any inspections, customs or otherwise, and found a lunar shuttle waiting for them—a squat, dome-shaped vehicle, supported by three elbowlike legs measuring twenty meters in height. The ship’s original silver finish was now a dingy gray. Pirx had never been aboard such a ship. An astrochemist who was to have joined them failed to show in time. They took off without him, right on schedule.

The Moon’s lack of atmosphere meant that no aerodynamic vehicles such as helicopters or airplanes could be used for transportation—only rocket-propelled ships. Not even hydroplanes, the vehicles most suited for rugged terrain, were practical, requiring as they did a large supply of air. Rocket ships were fast, but fickle about where they were landed: they had a special aversion to mountains and cliffs.

Their shell-shaped, three-legged insect rumbled, roared, and went up candlestick-straight. The passenger cabin was twice as large as a hotel single. Portholes in the walls, a large round port in the ceiling, cockpit under the belly, snugly situated between the exhaust ducts for maximum ground visibility. Pirx felt a little like a parcel being shipped to an unknown destination. Not a clue as to the whys and wherefores.

It was the same old story.

They pitched into a parabola, the cabin tilting sharply, the ship trailing its long “legs,” the Moon scudding by underneath—a huge convex swelling of rock and dust, seemingly untrodden by human foot. In space there is a point somewhere between Earth and the Moon where both spheres appear equal in size. Pirx distinctly recalled the illusory impression from his first lunar flight: Earth, icy blue, wrapped in mist, its continental contours blurred beyond recognition, had seemed less real than the Moon—suspended like a stone pendant, its stationary mass looming almost palpably.

They were flying over the Sea of Clouds, the crater Bullialdus already behind them, Tycho now situated to the southeast, a halo flinging its luminous rays clear across the south pole to the Far Side, the supreme symmetry of its rocky skull made even more awesome, more overwhelming from high altitude. Refulgent with sunlight, Tycho became the center of a dazzling design, its luminous white arms embracing and traversing Mare Humorum and Mare Nubium; its northernmost spur, the most prominent of all, vanishing over the horizon in the direction of Mare Serenitatis. But once past Circus Clavius to the east, once they began losing altitude over the equator and were flying over the Sea of Dreams on the Far Side, the illusion of symmetry was lost and the deceptively dark, smooth surface of the “sea” revealed its flaws and cracks. To the northeast the sawtoothed ridge of Verne stood out in brilliant relief. The closer they came to the lunar surface, the more authentic the view, the truer the image: plateaus, plains, crater basins, and ringed mountains riddled by cosmic bombardments; wreaths of debris and lava, overlapping and interlacing, as if the will unleashing this titanic shower had not been content with the ravages already inflicted. Before Pirx could locate the Tsiolkovsky massif, the shuttle, nudged by a brief burst of power, righted itself; his last glance was of the ocean of darkness swallowing the Moon’s whole western hemisphere, leaving only the blazing tip of Lobachevski Peak protruding above the terminator. The stars in the upper port came to a standstill. The shuttle went down like an elevator; as they plunged through the engine flare converging around the stern, gases rocked the ship’s skirt with all the booming force of an atmospheric entry. Their seats automatically reclined; the stars remained fixed in the port above; the downward plunge was gradually slowed by the timid but stubborn resistance of the rumbling retro-rockets. Suddenly the braking jets resounded full blast.

All right! We’re standing on the column! Pirx thought, just to remind himself that he was a full-fledged—if not yet licensed—astronaut.

There was a jolt, a clank, then a hard thud, similar to a sledgehammer hitting a slab of rock; the cabin seesawed gently up and down; the hydraulics hissed and gurgled until the ship’s wobbly, twenty-meter-long legs finally wedged into the rubble.

The pilot applied a little pressure to the oil lines to quell the rocking; there was a long pshhh, and the cabin stabilized.

Crawling out through the deck hatch, the pilot opened a wall locker, and lo! their space suits.

Pirx’s sudden elation was quickly aborted. There were, it turned out, four suits: the pilot’s, a small, a medium, and a large. The pilot was suited up in nothing flat, but waited for the others before putting on his helmet. Langner was equally quick getting into his. But Pirx—flushed, sweaty, and inwardly fuming—was having a tough time of it. The medium-size suit turned out to be too small; the large, too large. When he tried on the medium, his head rammed into the impact liner of his helmet. In the large he floated around like a seed in a hollowed-out gourd. He was not without friendly advice, though. The pilot was quick to point out that better a baggy suit than one too tight, and suggested stuffing the gaps with underwear from his pack. If that didn’t do the trick, he would gladly lend him a blanket. For Pirx the very idea of stuffing his suit was somehow blasphemous, and he rebelled against it with all his astronautical soul.