Stanislaw Lem: The Test

“Cadet Pirx!”

Bullpen’s voice snapped him out of his daydreaming. He had just had visions of a two-crown piece lying tucked away in the fob pocket of his old civvies, the ones stashed at the bottom of his locker. A jingling, shiny silver coin—all but forgotten. A while ago he could have sworn nothing was there, an old mailing stub at best, but the more he thought about it, the more plausible it seemed that one might be there, so that by the time Bullpen called out his name, he was absolutely sure of it. The coin was now sufficiently real that he could feel it bulging in his pocket, so round and sleek to the touch. There was his ticket to the movies, he thought, with half a crown to spare. And if he settled for some newsreel shorts, that would leave a crown and a half, of which he’d squirrel away a crown and the rest blow on the slot machines. Oh, what if the machine suddenly went haywire and coughed up so many coins into his waiting hands that he couldn’t stuff his pockets fast enough…? Well, why not—it happened to Smiga, didn’t it? He was already reeling under the burden of his unexpected windfall when Bullpen roused him with a bang.

Folding his hands behind his back and shifting his weight to his good leg, his instructor asked:

“Cadet Pirx, what would you do if you were on patrol and encountered a ship from an alien planet?”

Pirx opened his mouth wide, as if the answer were there and all he had to do was to force it out. He looked like the last person on Earth who knew what to do when meeting up with a vessel from an alien planet.

“I would maneuver closer,” he answered, his voice muted and strangely hoarse.

The class froze in welcome anticipation of some comic relief.

“Very good,” Bullpen said in a fatherly sort of way. “ Then what would you do?”

“I would stop,” Pirx blurted out, sensing that he was drifting off into realms that lay vastly beyond his competence. Furiously he racked his empty brains in search of the appropriate paragraphs from his Space Manual, but it was as if he had never laid eyes on it. Sheepishly he lowered his gaze, and as he did so, he noticed that Smiga was trying to prompt him—with his lips only. One by one he deciphered Smiga’s words and repeated them out loud, before he had a chance to fully digest them.

“I’d introduce myself.”

A howl went up from the class. Bullpen struggled for a moment; then he, too, exploded with laughter, only to assume a serious expression again.

“Cadet Pirx, you will report to me tomorrow with your navigation book. Cadet Boerst!”

Pirx sat down at his desk as if it were made of uncongealed glass. He wasn’t even sore at Smiga—that’s the kind of guy he was, always good for a gag. He didn’t catch a word of what Boerst was saying; Boerst was trying to plot a graph while Bullpen was up to his old trick of turning down the electronic computer, leaving the cadet to get bogged down in his computations. School regs permitted the use of a computer, but Bullpen was of a different mind. “A computer is only human,” he used to say. “It, too, can break down.” Pirx wasn’t sore at Bullpen, either. Fact is, he wasn’t sore at anyone. Hardly ever. Five minutes later he was standing in front of a shopwindow on Dyerhoff Street, his attention caught by a display of gas pistols, good for firing blanks or live ammo, a set consisting of one pistol and a hundred cartridges priced at six crowns. Needless to say, he only imagined he was window-browsing on Dyerhoff Street.

The bell rang and the class emptied, but without all that yelling and stampeding of lowerclassmen. No sir, these weren’t kids anymore! Half of the class meandered off in the direction of the cafeteria because, although no meals were being served at that time, there were other attractions to be had—a new waitress, for example (word had it she was a knockout). Pirx strolled leisurely past the glass cabinets where the stellar globes were stored, and with every step saw his hopes of finding a two-crown piece in the pocket of his civvies dwindle a little more. By the time he reached the bottom of the staircase, he realized the coin was just a figment of his imagination.

Hanging around the lobby were Boerst, Smiga, and Payartz. For a semester he and Payartz had been deskmates in cosmodesy, and he had him to thank for all the ink blots in his star atlas.

“You’re up for a trial run tomorrow,” Boerst let drop just as Pirx was about to overtake them.

“No sweat,” came his lackadaisical reply. He was nobody’s fool.

“Don’t believe me? Read for yourself,” said Boerst, tapping his finger on the glass pane of the bulletin board.

He had a mind to keep going, but his head involuntarily twisted around on its axis. The list showed only three names—and there it was, right at the top, as big as blazes: Cadet Pirx.

For a second, his mind was a total blank.

Then he heard a distant voice, which turned out to be his own.

“Like I said, no sweat.”

Leaving them, he headed down a walkway lined with flower beds. That year the beds were planted with forget-me-nots, artfully arranged in the pattern of a descending rocket ship, with streaks of now faded buttercups suggesting the exhaust flare. But right now Pirx was oblivious of everything—the flower beds, the pathway, the forget-me-nots, and even of Bullpen, who at that very instant was hurriedly ducking out of the Institute by a side entrance, and whom he narrowly missed bumping into on his way out. Pirx saluted as they stood cheek to jowl.

“Oh, it’s you, Pirx!” said Bullpen. “You’re flying tomorrow, aren’t you? Well, have a good takeoff! Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to… er… meet up with those people from alien planets.”

The dormitory was situated behind a wall of sprawling weeping willows on the far side of the park. It stood overlooking a pond, and its side wings, buttressed by stone columns, towered above the water. The columns were rumored to have been shipped back from the Moon, which was blatant nonsense, of course, but that hadn’t stopped the first-year students from carving their initials and class dates on them with an air of sacrosanct emotion. Pirx’s name was likewise among them, four years having gone by since the day he had diligently inscribed it.

Once inside his room—it was too cramped to serve as anything but a single—he debated whether or not to open the locker. He knew exactly where his old pants were stashed. He had held on to them, despite the fact that it was against the rules—or maybe because of that—and even though he had hardly any use for them now. Closing his eyes, he crouched down, stuck his hand through the crack in the door, and gave the pocket a probing pat. Sure enough—empty.

He was standing in his unpressurized suit on the metal catwalk, just under the hangar ceiling, and, with neither hand free, was bracing himself against the cable railing with his elbow. In one hand he held his navigation book, in the other the cribsheet Smiga had lent him. The whole school was alleged to have flown with this pony, though how it managed to find its way back every time was a mystery, all the more so since, after completing the flight test, the cadets were immediately transferred from the Institute to the north, to the Base Camp, where they began cramming for their final exams. Still, the fact remained: it always came back. Some claimed that it was parachuted down. Facetiously, of course.

To kill time while he stood on the catwalk, suspended above a forty-meter drop, he wondered whether he would be frisked—sad to say, such things were still a common practice. The cadets were known for sneaking aboard the weirdest assortment of trinkets, including such strenuously forbidden things as whiskey flasks, chewing tobacco, and pictures of their girl friends. Not excluding cribsheets, of course. Pirx had already exhausted a dozen or so hiding places—in his shoes, between his stocking legs, in the inner pocket of his space suit, in the mini-atlas the cadets were allowed to take aboard… An eyeglass case… now that would have done the trick, he thought, but, first of all, it would have had to be a fair-sized one, and secondly—he didn’t wear glasses. A few seconds later it occurred to him that if he had worn glasses he never would have been admitted to the Institute.