Free Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem Page B

you know what it’s like. Here’s your plane ticket and your reservation on the Transgalactic. You’ll fly straight to Luna Base; from there you’ll be transferred.”
    He added a few more words. To wish him luck? By way of farewell? Pirx couldn’t tell. He was too far away in his thoughts to comprehend. His ears were already full of the roar of boosting rockets, his eyes blinded by the desiccating white glare of rocky lunar terrain, his face wrought with stunned bewilderment—the same look that must have accompanied the two Canadians to their mysterious deaths. He did an about-face and bumped into the large globe by the window; took the front steps in four lunarlike bounds; and was nearly run over by a car, whose screeching brakes brought everyone—excluding Pirx—to a standstill. Luckily the commandant had gone back to his papers and thus was spared this opening display of “sensible behavior.”
     
    In the course of the next twenty-four hours, there was such a bustle of activity around, for the sake of, on behalf of, and with a view to Pirx, that at times he almost pined after the salty, lukewarm bath where nothing happened.
    A person can be adversely affected as much by a lack of as by a surfeit of impressions. But Pirx was in no frame of mind to formulate such insights. All the commandant’s efforts to soft-pedal, reduce, and even dismiss the Mendeleev mission had been, to put it mildly, in vain. Pirx boarded the plane with a facial expression that made the comely stewardess recoil instinctively—though she was guilty of a gross injustice, for as far as Pirx was concerned she might just as well not have existed. Marching up the aisle like the commander of an armed legion, he took his seat; he, this William the Conqueror of the Space Age, this Cosmic Crusader, this Lunar Benefactor, this Explorer of Awesome Mysteries, this Monster Tamer of the Far Side (speaking potentially, of course, and hypothetically, which made his present bliss no less delectable; on the contrary, it made him profoundly benevolent toward his fellow passengers, who never suspected who was traveling with them in the belly of the big jetliner). He looked on them with the same amused detachment as Einstein, in the waning years of his life, must have felt watching children at play in a sandbox.
    The Selene, a new vessel from the Transgalactic fleet, lifted from a Nubian cosmodrome deep in the heart of Africa. Pirx felt deeply satisfied. He didn’t exactly have visions of a plaque being installed here in his honor—that much of a dreamer he was not; but he was not very far from it. All the more bitter, then, were the drops of gall that began to creep into his cup of self-contentment as he boarded the Selene. That nobody aboard the jet had recognized him—well, that was bad enough. But aboard the spaceship? He took his seat on the lower deck—in tourist class, no less—and found himself surrounded by a bunch of wildly garrulous, camera-toting, jibber-jabbering Frenchmen. Pirx—sandwiched among a lot of loudmouthed tourists!
    No one doted or fussed over him. No one offered to help him into his suit or to inflate it; no one asked how he was feeling or strapped on his oxygen bottles. For a while he consoled himself with the thought that it was to avoid recognition. Tourist class was like the seating compartment of any jet, except that the seats were bigger, roomier, and the NO SMOKING — NO STANDING sign stared one right in the face. Pirx tried to dissociate himself from this crowd of astronautical neophytes by adopting a more professional pose, folding one leg over the other, deliberately neglecting to fasten his safety belt—but to no avail. The only time he was noticed by the crew was when he was told to buckle up—this coming not from the pretty stewardess but from one of the copilots. Finally one of the Frenchmen—quite unintentionally, it seemed—offered him a jelly bean, which he took and chewed on until the gooey filling gummed