Free Memoirs of a Space Traveler by Stanislaw Lem Page B

the house on all sides. It made an alarming racket.
    “A chair?” he said. I might have asked for a golden throne. “A chair, really! I have no chair for you, Mr. Tichy. No chair to spare. I think, yes, I think it would be best for both of us if you left.”
    Looking over my shoulder into the garden—the door was still open—I saw that the trees, bushes, everything had merged into one mass that shook violently in the wind and the streams of water. My eyes returned to the hunchback. I had encountered rudeness in my life, but never anything like this. I began to lose my temper. Dispensing with the social amenities, I said:
    “I’ll leave if you can throw me out. But I warn you, I am no weakling.”
    “What?” he screeched. “The gall! How dare you, in my own house!”
    “You have provoked me,” I replied icily. And added, in my anger and because of his grating voice, “There are some kinds of behavior, Zazul, for which a man can be thrashed even in his own house!”
    “Scoundrel!” he shrieked, even louder.
    I seized his arm, which felt as though it had been whittled from a rotten branch, and hissed: “I will not tolerate abuse. Understand? One more insult and you will remember me as long as you live!”
    For a second or two it seemed that we really would come to blows, and I felt shame—how could I raise my hand against a hunchback? Then the unexpected happened. The professor stepped back, freed his arm from my grip, and, with his head twisted even lower, accentuating the hump, began to giggle in a revolting, high-pitched voice. As if I had regaled him with a rare joke.
    “Well, well,” he said, taking off his pince-nez. “You are a tough one, Tichy.”
    With the tip of a long, nicotine-stained finger he wiped a tear from his eye.
    “Good,” he rasped. “I like that. Can’t stand manners, mealy-mouthed talk, but you said what you thought. I hate you, you hate me, fine, we’re even, everything’s clear. You can follow me. Yes, Tichy, you surprised me…”
    And, chattering in this vein, he took me up a creaky wooden staircase dark with age. It went up around a huge square hall, paneled with bare wood. I remained silent, and when we reached the second floor Zazul said:
    “Tichy, I can’t afford parlors and guest rooms; you can see that. I sleep among my specimens, yes, eat, live with them. Come in, and don’t talk too much.”
    The room he ushered me into was the one whose three windows were shaded with sheets of paper, paper once white but now extremely dirty, spotted with grease and innumerable crushed flies. The windowsills were black with dead flies. When I closed the door, I noticed comma-shaped marks and dried, bloody insect fragments on it, as though Zazul had been under siege here by all the Hymenoptera. Before I had time to wonder at this, I noticed the other peculiarities of the room. In the middle stood a table, actually two sawhorses with ordinary, roughly planed boards between them; books, papers, and yellowed bones were piled there. But the strangest thing about the room was the walls. Large, crudely constructed shelves held rows of thick bottles and jars; opposite the window, in the space where the shelves broke off, was an enormous glass tank resembling an aquarium the size of a cabinet—resembling, rather, a transparent sarcophagus. The upper half of the tank was covered by a carelessly thrown dirty rag whose tattered ends hung halfway down the glass. But what I saw in the lower, uncovered half made me freeze.
    All the jars and bottles contained a blue, cloudy liquid, as in an anatomical museum where various organs are preserved in embalming fluid. The tank was the same type of container, only of enormous size. In its murky depths, which glimmered with a bluish light, two shadows a few centimeters above the bottom rocked back and forth extremely slowly, with the motion of an infinitely patient pendulum. To my horror I recognized these shadows as human legs in alcohol-soaked