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

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 brainstorm: 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