Tales of Pirx the Pilot Read online

  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.” The candidate first reported to Albert, officially employed as janitor in the Department of Behavioral Astropsychology, but in reality the chairman’s right-hand man, whose word carried more weight than the combined wisdom of the tenured faculty. Albert, formerly the factotum of Professor Balloe, who had retired the year before—to the delight of the students, but to the distress of Albert (“No one ever appreciated me half as much as Professor Balloe emeritus”)—then took the candidate down to a small room in the basement. There he had his face cast in paraffin. Into the nostrils of this facial mask, once it was removed, were inserted two metal tubes. After that, the candidate was sent back upstairs to the “pool.” It was not really a pool at all—students never like to call anything by its proper name—but a large room containing a tank filled with water. The candidate, or, in cadet slang, the “patient,” was made to strip and climb into the water, which was gradually heated until it matched his body temperature. For some the cutoff point came at twenty-eight, for others at thirty degrees Celsius. Once the test subject’s body temperature was reached—signaled by an upraised arm of the freely floating “patient”—one of the assistants attached the paraffin mask. Salt was then added to the water—not potassium cyanide, as was attested by those who had already been through the “loony dip,” but ordinary table salt, in amounts large enough to allow the “patient” (also referred to as the “drowning victim”) to float just below the surface without sinking. Breathing was made possible by the metal tubes protruding above the water. That, in essence, was all there was to the test, the scientific name for which was the Sensory Deprivation Experiment. Blind and deaf, without any sense of smell, taste, or touch (after a very short while the water ceased to exert any sensation), lying with arms folded on his chest like an Egyptian mummy, the “victim” was soon submerged in a simulated weightless condition. For how long depended on the subject’s endurance.

  It looked harmless enough. Yet when a man was subjected to this condition for any length of time, he became susceptible to the strangest sensations. The experiences of past test subjects were amply documented in textbooks on experimental psychology; yet while nothing prevented one from reading up on them, the experiences themselves were too varied to be of much help. One-third of the candidates were lucky to last three hours; five or six hours was considered exceptional. Perseverance had its rewards, too, as the summer training assignments were awarded on the basis of the class grade list: the one with the highest grade was assigned a “special” mission, rather than a routine assignment at one of the many circum-Terra stations. But there was no way of predicting who would “tough it out” and who wouldn’t; the “dip” was designed to test severely the subject’s psychological stability.

  Pirx got off to an auspicious start, disregarding the fact that he unnecessarily kept his head underwater before the mask was installed. In the process he consumed a quarter of a liter of water that, as he now had occasion to verify, was treated with ordinary salt.

  Once the mask was in place, his first sensation was of a slight buzzing in the ears and of being immersed in total darkness—his eyes were kept forcibly shut by the mask’s tight fit. He relaxed his muscles and was gently buoyed by the water. Then something unexpected: an itching sensation in his nose and right eye. Now what? He couldn’t very well scratch through the mask. Hm. Nobody ever reported having an itch before. Maybe this was to be his own special contribution to experimental psychology. He rested, perfectly poised, the water neither warming nor cooling his naked body. Before long it was completely lacking in any sensations. One wiggle of his toes would have told him they were wet, but he also knew that hidden in the ceiling was a video recorder and that every twitch of his body meant a minus point. By monitoring himself internally, he was able to distinguish his own faint heartbeat. Soon the discomfort passed; even the itching abated. Albert had installed the metal tubes so adeptly that he could hardly feel their presence. For that matter, he was slowly being divested of any feeling: a vacuum, the more alarming for being so painless. He was losing all sense of spatial relationship, of the position of his arms and legs; only his memory told him where they were. He tried to calculate how long he had been underwater with
his face imprisoned in white paraffin. To his surprise, he discovered he hadn’t the faintest idea of how much time had elapsed since his submersion in the “loony dip”—and he’d always been able to guess the time to within a few minutes’ accuracy.

  He hadn’t got over his surprise when he discovered that his body, his face—everything—was gone. Not what one would call a pleasant feeling; on the contrary, it was terrifying. Slowly but surely, he was dissolving into this water, whose presence was as unreal to him as his own body. Even his heartbeat had faded. He listened intently. Nothing. Silence engulfed him, was transformed into a low murmur, a monotonous white drone, against which he was defenseless—he couldn’t plug his ears. After a while, when he was sure enough time had elapsed so that he could risk a few minus points, he decided to move his arms.

  There was nothing to move, which was more a cause for amazement than alarm. Okay, the textbooks had said something about “total sensory deprivation”—but who would have believed it could be this total?

  A normal reaction, he assured himself. The thing is not to move. Whoever toughs it out the longest will get the highest grade. For a while he sustained himself on this maxim, though for how long he didn’t know.

  The situation went from bad to worse.

  The darkness in which he was submerged—which he embodied—began teeming, flickering with dimly incandescent circles swirling about on the periphery. He swiveled his eyeballs and was consoled, though it wasn’t long before this feeling eluded him as well.

  The sum of all these sensations—the flickering lights, the monotonous drone—was a harmless prelude, a trifle, compared to what came next.

  Anyone who has ever had his hand or arm fall asleep when the blood supply has been temporarily cut off knows how wooden it seems to the touch. Uncomfortable as it is, the condition is usually short-lived. The deadening numbness affects only a few fingers, or a hand, momentarily turning it into a lifeless appendage on an otherwise normal, sensate body. But Pirx was deprived of all sensation—save that of terror.

  He was disintegrating not into different personalities but into a manifold terror. Of what he didn’t know. He was residing neither in reality (how could he without a body to perceive it?) nor in a dream (he was too conscious of where he was, of his own responses, to be dreaming). No, it was something else, not comparable to anything he’d ever experienced, not even to an alcoholic or narcotic stupor.

  He remembered reading about it. He was experiencing what was known as “disorganization of the cortex caused by sensory deprivation of the brain.”

  It sounded innocent enough. The real thing was something else again.

  He felt scattered, diffused. Up, down, right, and left no longer meant anything to him. Where was the ceiling? He couldn’t remember. How could he? Without a body, without eyes, he had lost all sense of direction.

  Wait a sec, he thought. Let’s get this straight. Space has three dimensions…

  Words without meaning. He tried to summon up some sense of time, kept repeating the word “time”… It was like munching on a wad of paper. Time was a senseless glob. It was not he who was repeating the word, but someone else, some intruder who had wormed his way inside him. Or he inside him. And that someone was enlarging, swelling, transcending all boundaries. He was traveling through unfathomable interiors, a ballooning, preposterous, elephantine finger—not his own, not a real finger, but a fictitious one, coming out of nowhere … sovereign, overwhelming, rigid, full of reproach and silly innuendo… And Pirx—not he but his thought processes—reeled back and forth inside this preposterous, fetid, torpid, nullifying mass…

  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.