Stanislaw Lem: The Conditioned Reflex

It happened in his fourth year, shortly before the summer break. Pirx, fresh out of basic training, had passed his qualifying tests on the mock-ups, logged two unsimulated flights, and soloed once to the Moon. By now he fancied himself something of a rocket jockey, a space ace, whose real home was among the planets and who had only one set of clothes—his g-suit, much the worse for wear, of course—the first to sound the time-honored meteorite alert and with a brilliantly executed maneuver save his ship, himself, and his less keen-eyed buddies from certain disaster. That was how he liked to think of himself, anyway; and it always pained him, while shaving, to observe how unscathed his manifold experiences had left him: not a single telltale nick! Not even the nastiest of these experiences—the time the Harelsberg machine went off in his hands as he was setting his ship down in the Sinus Medii—had rewarded him with a single gray hair. Oh, well, maybe it was wishful thinking—but gee, how nice to have just a sprinkling of gray around the temples, a few crow’s-feet at least, the kind bearing witness to prolonged concentration on the reference stars. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be; he was what he was—a smooth-faced, chubby-cheeked cadet. And so, while running his razor over his face, swallowing his shame, he would go on inventing all sorts of adventures, one more spine-tingling than the next, designed to show him off to his full heroic stature. Matters, who either knew of his frustration or merely intuited it, advised him to grow a mustache. Whether or not his advice was sincerely meant, the next day Pirx, in the privacy of his morning shave, stood before the mirror balancing a black shoelace on his lip—and nearly cracked up. From that day on, he had reason to doubt Matters’s sincerity, though not that of Matters’s sister—Matters’s very cute sister—who once confided that he had the look of a “decent, regular sort of fella.” That was the last straw.

Nothing really bad happened that night at the discothèque; at least, none of his worst fears was realized. True, he danced the wrong dance once—something he discovered only after it was too late—but she was tactful enough not to rub it in. The rest of the evening went off without a hitch. He managed to stay off her feet and even to keep a straight face (his was the sort of grin that could stop traffic), and wasn’t refused when he offered to take her home. They got off at the last stop and traveled the rest of the way afoot, giving him time to brood. What could he do to prove to her that he was far from being the “decent, regular sort of fella” she took him to be? Ooo, how those words rankled! But by the time they got to her place, he’d fallen into a blue funk. For all his mental exertions, he’d drawn a blank; worse, they had left him altogether tongue-tied, his head like a void, differing from the cosmic version only in that it was consumed by a grim determination. Then he was struck by a meteorlike brain-storm: why not kiss her, ask her for a date, and squeeze her hand—suggestively, passionately, perversely… or something like that (echoes of something he had read somewhere)? A false alarm. There was no kiss, no asking for a date, and no hand squeezing. But when she said good night in that titillatingly throaty voice of hers, turned, and reached for the door handle, the demon in him was aroused. Was it that he detected a note of irony in her voice, real or imagined? Who knows. The fact was that, quite spontaneously, the moment she turned her back on him, so breezy in her bearing, so confident in her feminine charm, so very much the belle…

Anyway, the moment she turned around, he gave her a formidable whack on the fanny. Oh, was she surprised! All he caught as he spun on his heel and took off lickety-split, hell-bent for safety, was a muffled “Ouch!” Matters, whom he approached the next day as though he were a time bomb, made no mention of the incident.

Nevertheless, his rash behavior continued to nag at him. He had acted impetuously, without any forethought—something for which he seemed to have a special talent. A slap on the rump. Now was that something worthy of a “decent, regular sort of fella”?

He was inclined to think it was. Regardless, the effect of this episode with Matters’s sister—whom he had avoided like the plague ever since—was to cure him of his early morning habit of posing before the mirror. Before that, he had sunk so low on several occasions that, not content with one mirror, he had enlisted an additional hand mirror, to find a profile that, however insignificantly, might satisfy his Great Expectations. Fortunately, he was not so consummate an idiot as not to see the absurdity of these asinine poses. Besides, it was not for signs of any masculine sexiness that he was looking—heavens, no!—but grit . For he had read Conrad, and whenever he would ponder, with cheeks aglow, the great galactic silence, the lonely valor of men, he always had trouble picturing a hero of eternal night, a loner, having such a—dimplepuss. He soon gave up his morning posing once and for all, thereby demonstrating what superior willpower he had.

These concerns, though festering, paled beside his upcoming oral with Professor Merinus, popularly nicknamed “the Merino.” To tell the truth, Pirx wasn’t all that anxious about the exam; only a few times had he been tempted to hang around the Department of Navigational Astrodesy and Astrognosis, at whose entrance students used to waylay those coming out of the Merino’s office—not to congratulate the lucky few who passed, but to hear what new and tricky questions had been devised by “the Ornery Ram,” as that pitiless interrogator was called. The old man, though he had yet to set foot inside a spaceship, to say nothing of stepping on the Moon, was possessed of such theoretical omniscience that he knew every stone of every crater in the Sea of Rains, could recite every butte and bluff of every planetoid, and was equally at home among the far-flung regions of Jupiter’s moons. It was said that he was an expert on meteors and comets yet to be discovered (in the next millennium), this ability mathematically to project future trajectories owing to his favorite pastime: the perturbational analysis of celestial bodies. And precisely this prodigious knowledge of his made him cantankerous among those whose own knowledge was microscopic by comparison. But Pirx was not the least bit intimidated by him, for he had discovered his Achilles’ heel. The professor had his own terminology, one uniquely his in the world of scientific scholarship. Guided by his own innate cunning, Pirx went to the library and got out all of Merinus’s major works. Not to read them, of course. Oh, no. He only thumbed through them, jotting down some two hundred of the Merino’s favorite verbal eccentricities. Once he had committed them to memory, he felt sure of passing. He was not disappointed. The old professor, attending closely to the style of his delivery, fidgeted and squirmed, twitched his scraggly brows, and hung on every word as if harking to the trills of a nightingale. The clouds that normally darkened his face scattered. He looked almost young again. Pirx, spurred on by this sudden transformation, and by his own pluck, really poured it on. And even though he completely flubbed the last question—it presumed a knowledge of a four-part formula, unobtainable even with the help of Merinosian rhetoric—the professor, somewhat apologetically, awarded him with a big fat B.

But the taming of Professor Merinus was nothing compared to the anxiety aroused by what was known as the “loony dip,” the last and final phase of his qualifying exam.

There was no bluffing one’s way through the “loony dip.