Read Online Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    On Monday he was told to report to the commandant’s office.
    Pirx, though not immediately fazed, examined his conscience beforehand. Was it for sneaking that mouse aboard Osten’s ship? Nah, that was ancient history by now. Anyway, what was one measly mouse? Big deal. How about the time he hooked up the AC/DC to Maebius’s mattress springs, using an alarm clock for a timer? But that was just a lowerclassman’s prank, a twenty-two-year-old’s idea of a practical joke. The commandant was a bighearted guy; he’d understand. Up to a point. Or was it for Operation Zombie?
    Operation Zombie was Pirx’s own brainstorm. He of course had help from friends—what were friends for, anyway? It was his smoothest, slickest job ever: a little gunpowder in a paper cone, a trail three times around the room, payload under the desk—there he might have overdone it a bit—then back out into the corridor through the slit under the door. And the way Barn had been “primed”: for one whole week Pirx made sure the nightly bull sessions were devoted exclusively to “extraterrestrial beings.” Pirx—nobody’s fool—was shrewd enough to cast people in different roles—some telling horror stories, others acting as skeptics—so Barn wouldn’t be the wiser. Except for occasionally sneering at the partisans of the “beyond,” Barn kept aloof from these metaphysical debates. But, man, what a sight he made, barrel-assing out of his room at midnight, bellowing like a water buffalo with a tiger on its tail! The flame, as planned, had sneaked under the door, snaked three times around the room, and—whamo!—exploded under the table, toppling books and starting a small fire. A couple of buckets of tap water took care of it, but it left a nice hole in the floor, not to mention the lingering stench of cordite. The operation, though technically