The Conditioned Reflex ptp-2 Read online

  A trail led from the pass, out along the ridge, to the northern peak of the Eagle’s head; three hundred meters below the peak, its dome shimmering bright, was the station. With a semicircle of boulders on the downslope and boulders pressing it on all sides, the bubblelike structure was wedged right into the cliff. A few of these boulders crowded the concrete platform by the entrance.

  “Couldn’t they have found a better place?” exclaimed Pirx.

  Pnin, one leg already on the platform, paused.

  “For a moment I thought I heard Animtsev talking,” he said. Pirx detected a trace of laughter in his voice.

  Pnin headed back—alone—four hours before sundown. But, in fact, he walked out into a lunar night, the way back being already blanketed by impenetrable darkness. Langner, a veteran of many lunar expeditions, told Pirx that the cold they had met on the way up was nothing compared to the cold that came within an hour after nightfall, when the rocks had had time to cool.

  Pnin was supposed to report back the moment he reached the shuttle. An hour and twenty minutes later, a voice came over the station’s radio—Pnin’s voice. They exchanged only a few words. They were in a hurry… bad lift-off conditions… ship listing… feet anchored in the scree… Pirx and Langner slid back a metal shutter and watched the lift-off—not the very beginning, because a ridge blocked their view of the landing site, but in time to see a fiery line stitch the dense and shapeless black, trailed by a reddish-brown glow-dust swirls reflecting the exhaust flare. The smoldering javelin climbed higher and higher, the ship invisible except as a glowing piece of string that became more and more attenuated, vibrant, frazzled—the normal pulsation of an engine working at full blast. Then, their heads craning toward the sky, where a fiery trajectory was inscribing itself on a starry backdrop, they watched as the straight line tilted gently and described a beautiful arc over the horizon.

  Now there were just the two of them, in the dark—they had doused the lights for a better view of the blast-off. They slid back the shutter and exchanged glances. Langner mustered a faint smile, then, with a slight stoop, dressed in his checkered flannel shirt, marched over to the table, to his pack, and began removing his books. Pirx, leaning against a concave wall, stood with his legs apart as if on a deep-space probe. His mind was aswarm with images: Luna Base, with its chilly basements, narrow hotel corridors, elevators, and bouncing, basalt-swapping tourists; the flight to Tsiolkovsky station, their visit with the Russians, the silver grid of the radartelescope strung between ridge and black sky; Pnin’s lecture; the second flight; and finally that eerie trek through a landscape of extremes, of icy cold and blinding heat, and those abysslike gorges staring into his visor… Golly, so much in the space of just a few hours. Time, grown gigantic, had swallowed and devoured these images, and now they were reasserting themselves, fighting for supremacy. He closed his hot, parched eyelids for a moment, then opened them again.

  Langner was arranging his books on a shelf in meticulous order, and Pirx got his first real insight into the man. The calm, leisurely way he went about shelving his books, one next to the other, by subject, came not from insensitivity or dullness of intellect. Langner was not oppressed by his surroundings, by this desiccating world; he made it serve him. He had volunteered for station duty and felt not the slightest twinge of homesickness. His home was precisely here, among these spectrograms and computations and the phenomena giving rise to them; he was at home wherever he could quench his thirst for knowledge; he had a purpose in life. He was, in short, the last man in whom Pirx would have confided his romantic dreams of greatness. Pirx envied him his self-assurance, his self-confidence, but only for a split second, because he also sensed some deep incompatibility between them. Here they were, two men who had little to say to one another, forced to spend this first night together. Then tomorrow, and the next night…

  Pirx let his eyes roam about the cabin. Curving, foam-padded walls. Recessed light panels in the ceiling. Several color reproductions sprinkled among shelves of reference works, and a small plaque inscribed with two columns of names: their predecessors. Corners were crowded with empty oxygen cylinders, tin cans filled with colorful mineral samples, and lightweight metal chairs with nylon webbing. A small table, a swivel desk lamp. Through a crack in the door he caught a glimpse of the radio station.

  While Langner began sorting out a shelf stacked with photographic plates, Pirx maneuvered around him and went to explore the rest of the station. To the left, branching off a tiny vestibule, stood the door to the kitchen; straight ahead was the hatch to the pressure chamber, with two other doors to the right, both leading to tiny cubicles. He opened the door to his room: bare except for a bed, a folding chair, a collapsible writing desk, and a few bookshelves. The ceiling dropped down over the bed at an angle, as in an attic, but it was curved instead of sloping, matching the station’s exterior design.

  He made his way back to the vestibule. The chamber hatch, rounded at the corners and hermetically sealed by a thick rubberized silicone gasket, was mounted with a spoked wheel and a small lamp, which, when lit, meant that the outer hatch was open and there was a vacuum inside. The lamp was off at the moment. He opened the door, tripping two lights, which revealed a narrow compartment with sheer metal walls and a vertical iron-rung ladder in the center, the ladder leading up to a hatch in the ceiling. Under the first rung was a chalk outline, partially obliterated by footsteps: the place where Savage’s body had been discovered. The body had been lying with its legs tucked up and on its side, frozen to the rough concrete slab where the blood had escaped from his eyes and mouth.

  Pirx studied the blurry outline for a while, then withdrew. As he was sealing the airtight door, his head suddenly snapped back: footfalls overhead. It was Langner, who had climbed the ladder mounted opposite the vestibule and was prowling about the observatory. Pirx poked his head up through a round opening in the floor and took stock of the hardware: a slip-covered telescope the size of a small cannon, astrographs, cameras, plus two other fair-size pieces of equipment—one a Wilson cloud chamber, the other a high-voltage spark-gap chamber, rigged with an attachment for photographing ionization trails.

  The station was designed for monitoring cosmic radiation, and the photographic plates were everywhere. The orange packets containing them were sandwiched between books, stacked under shelves, stuffed into drawers, plopped on the floor beside beds, and even strewn about the kitchen.

  That was all there was to the station, not counting the huge water and oxygen tanks stored underground, deep beneath the station’s floor in the Mendeleev massif.

  Above each compartment was a CO2 gauge and a perforated air vent. The air-conditioning system silently took in air, purified it of carbon dioxide, added the right amount of oxygen, and forced the mixture back out into the cabins. Pirx welcomed every footstep, every thud coming from the observatory; the moment the noises stopped, the silence swelled to the point that he could hear the whispering murmur of his own blood, as clearly as he had that time in the “loony dip,” though the latter had one distinct advantage: you could quit at any time.

  Langner came down from the observatory and started making supper, but so quietly and competently that everything was on the table by the time Pirx came in. “Pass the salt, please.” “Any bread left in the can?” “Tomorrow we’ll have to open a new one.” “Tea or coffee?” That was the extent of their table talk—which, at the present moment, suited Pirx just fine. What meal was this? Their third of the day? Fourth? Breakfast of the following day? Langner said he had some developing to do and scooted along upstairs. But Pirx was left with nothing to do.

  Suddenly he understood. He had been sent up here for one reason only: to keep Langner company. Astrophysics? Cosmic radiation? That wasn’t his line. And Langner wasn’t about to break him in, either, by teaching him how to handle an astrograph. No, he was here because he had earned the highest grade in the class, because the psychologists said he wouldn’t go batty. So, fourteen nights and fourteen da
ys in this sardine can, waiting for no one knew what, investigating no one knew what.

  Suddenly the Mission, which only a while ago had seemed such a blessing, was showing him its true face: a blank. Protect Langner and himself? Okay, but from what? Hunt for clues? What clues? No one seriously believed that he, dumb clod that he was, would stumble onto something overlooked by a commission of lunar experts.

  He went on sitting at the table. He knew there were dishes to be washed. That he would have to be stingy with the tap water—water, that precious commodity flown in in ice blocks and fired into the basin at the foot of the station on a two-and-a-half-kilometer parabola. They couldn’t afford to waste a drop of the wet stuff.

  He knew all that and still didn’t budge. He couldn’t even muster the energy to lift his arm when it fell limply onto the edge of the table. His head was still reeling from the heat and the waste and the darkness and the silence that pressed on this steel shell from all sides. He rubbed his burning eyes that felt sand-whipped, stood up, and, feeling twice his normal weight, cleared the table and dumped the dirty dishes into the sink and started rinsing them with a trickle of warm water. And as he stood there scrubbing the dishes, turning them over in his hands, scraping off the little globs of fat, he smiled at his own dreams, which had been left behind somewhere on the trail leading up to the Mendeleev ridge, dreams that now seemed so distant in time and place, so absurdly inappropriate, that he did not even need to feel ashamed of them.

  Langner never changed; whether you shared his company for a year or a day, he never altered his routine. He worked diligently, but always according to schedule, never hurrying. He was a man without any vices, eccentricities, or tics. Now, when you live with someone in such close quarters, the smallest trifle can begin to grate. Someone hogs the shower, or won’t open a can of spinach because he doesn’t like spinach, or grumps a lot, or starts sporting a prickly stubble, or shaves but pampers himself in front of the mirror… But Langner was not that sort. He ate everything, but without gusto. He never bellyached or sulked. When it was his turn to wash, he washed. When he was asked something, he replied. He was neither unsociable nor overbearing. And it was precisely this neutral, neither-here-nor-there behavior of his that began to get on Pirx’s nerves, because the first evening’s impression—when the image of the physicist fastidiously arranging his books on the shelf had seemed the embodiment of a quiet and unassuming heroism, of a truly enviable and noble-minded dedication—well, that impression had become tarnished, to say the least, to the point that his partner—his compulsory partner—now struck him as lackluster, even boring. Not that he actually was bored or irritated by Langner’s company. Because meanwhile he had found something else to occupy him—at least temporarily. Now that he was more at home in his surroundings, he began reviewing all the known facts in the case.

  The avalanche had occurred when the station had been only four months in operation. Contrary to what one would have expected, it transpired not at dawn or dusk but in the middle of a lunar afternoon. Suddenly, with no advance warning, three-fourths of the overhanging wall known as the Eagle’s Wing had collapsed. By coincidence, that same day the station’s four-man crew had been mustered to receive a convoy of transports. They were all eyewitnesses to the tragedy.

  Subsequent studies showed that the deep incisions on the Eagle’s main rib had indeed disturbed the crystal core and upset its tectonic equilibrium. The English shifted the burden of blame onto the Canadians, and the Canadians onto the English, their mutual loyalty being manifested only by their consistent failure to heed Professor Animtsev’s advice. The four crew members standing in front of the station, less than a mile from the scene of the accident, later described how the blinding wall had split in two, collapsing the system of wedges and barriers, how the avalanche swept away the road and spilled into the valley below, and how, for the next thirty hours, the basin had been a sea of undulating white. In the space of just a few minutes the flood of swirling debris had been carried by the slide’s momentum clear across to the other side of the crater.

  Two transports had been within range of the avalanche. The one bringing up the rear of the column had been buried instantly by a ten-meter-thick layer of rubble. The other had already reached the upper road, was just out of range of the main flow, when an enormous mass of debris jumped the last of the barriers and swept the vehicle over the side of the three-hundred-meter cliff. At the last minute its driver managed to open the hatch and drop down onto the shifting scree. He became the disaster’s lone survivor, outliving his companions by only a few hours. For the witnesses those few hours became a living hell. The driver, a French-Canadian named Roget, who either remained conscious or regained consciousness later on, started radioing for help from somewhere inside the white cloud—his receiver had been damaged, but not his transmitter. There was no locating the injured man. The multiple refractions caused by the waves bouncing off the boulders—so mammoth the people moved in and out of the dusty labyrinth as through a city in ruins—made it impossible to get an accurate fix. Radar was out because of the iron sulfide content of the rock. An hour later, another avalanche, originating from up around the Gap, forced the men to call off their search. This second slide, though smaller than the first, portended still others. There was nothing to do but wait. And wait they did, all the while hearing Roget’s voice loud and clear at the station, the basin in which he was stranded acting as a dish reflector. Three hours later the Tsiolkovsky team arrived and drove out into the dust cloud with their ground crawlers, but the shifting talus kept tipping their vehicles on end—the reduced gravity made the angle of inclination commensurately greater on the lunar scree than Earthside. Rescue teams, dispatched into those areas not accessible to the crawlers, combed the rubble three times. One of the searchers fell into a crevasse; only his immediate transfer to Tsiolkovsky and prompt medical treatment saved his life. Despite this near-fatality, the search went on, prodded by the sound of Roget’s ever weaker but still audible voice.

  Five hours later the voice fell silent, though they knew he was still alive. Every space suit had, in addition to a voice transmitter, a miniature automatic sensor hooked up to the respirator. The sensor relayed, electromagnetically, every breath to the station, where a special tracking device, similar to a “magic eye,” projected it as a luminous green butterfly-shaped blip, dilating and contracting in rhythm to the man’s respiration. The phosphorescent “butterfly” indicated that the unconscious Roget was still breathing. The pulsations grew steadily weaker, slower, but no one left the radio station. The people crowded inside waited, in helpless despair, for the inevitable.

  Roget continued breathing for another two hours. Finally the green light on the magic eye flickered and shrank for good. The mutilated body was located some thirty hours later, stone-hard, so badly mangled that he was buried together with his aluminized space suit, as in a coffin.

  Later a new road was staked out—the same rocky trail used by Pirx on his ascent to the station. The Canadians were all set to abandon the project, but their persistent English colleagues solved the logistical problem in a manner originally conceived during the assault on Mount Everest. It was rejected at the time as unworkable.

  News of the accident circulated in numerous, often conflicting versions until the clamor finally subsided, to become a tragic chapter in the chronicle of man’s struggle with the lunar wilds. Meanwhile, astrophysicists on field assignment continued to take turns manning the station. Six lunar days and nights passed. Just when it seemed the sorely tested station had given rise to its last sensation, Mendeleev’s radio station failed to acknowledge Tsiolkovsky’s transmission at dawn. Again the Tsiolkovsky team set out on a rescue—or rather reconnaissance—mission. They arrived by ship, landing at the foot of the slide.

  They reached the station when the crater floor was still untouched by the Sun’s rays. Except for the metal shell under the peak, glinting in the horizontal shaft of light, the entire basin was under a mantle of dar
kness. They found the outer hatch open, and down below, at the foot of the ladder, Savage’s body, slumped to the floor in a way that suggested he had slipped and fallen from the rungs. Death was attributed to asphyxiation, caused by a punctured faceplate. Faint traces of dust, later found lining the inside of his gloves, suggested that he had been returning to, not leaving, the station, though the traces could easily have remained from a previous climb. The body of the second Canadian, Challiers, was discovered only after a meticulous combing of the neighboring ravines and gullies. Rescuers lowered on three-hundred-meter ropes brought up the body from the base of the cliff, no more than fifty steps away from the place where Roget had expired.

  No matter how they tried to reconstruct the sequence of events, not a single plausible hypothesis could be advanced. That’s when a combined English-Canadian commission decided to conduct an on-the-spot inquiry.

  The inquiry disclosed that the hands of Challiers’s watch had stopped at exactly twelve o’clock—whether noon or midnight, it was impossible to say—and Savage’s at two. In the case of Savage, an expert’s examination of the watch’s works revealed that the mainspring had been fully wound; hence the time shown on the watch’s face did not necessarily coincide with the time of death.

  Everything inside the station was found to be in perfect order. The log, recording only events of scientific relevance, contained nothing that could shed the faintest light on the unexplained fatalities. Pirx went through it carefully, entry by entry. They were written in the usual laconic style. Astrographic survey taken at such-and-such a time, so-and-so many plates exposed under such-and-such conditions… Not a single reference, however oblique, to whatever had transpired that night, Savage’s and Challiers’s last. Not only was the station found to be in perfect order, but all the evidence indicated that death had taken its inhabitants by surprise. An open book, with Challiers’s notes in the margin, was found lying face up, with another book on top to keep the pages from turning, under a burning lamp. A pipe, which had tipped over on its side and spilled a few cinders onto the table, lightly scorching the Bakelite top, lay beside it. Savage, from the looks of things, had been making supper. In the kitchen they found freshly opened cans, a mixing bowl full of omelet batter, and on the little white eating table, place settings for two and slices of stale bread.