Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem Page B

hadn’t got over his surprise when he discovered that his body, his face—everything—was gone. Not what one would call a pleasant feeling; on the contrary, it was terrifying. Slowly but surely, he was dissolving into this water, whose presence was as unreal to him as his own body. Even his heartbeat had faded. He listened intently. Nothing. Silence engulfed him, was transformed into a low murmur, a monotonous white drone, against which he was defenseless—he couldn’t plug his ears. After a while, when he was sure enough time had elapsed so that he could risk a few minus points, he decided to move his arms.
    There was nothing to move, which was more a cause for amazement than alarm. Okay, the textbooks had said something about “total sensory deprivation”—but who would have believed it could be this total?
    A normal reaction, he assured himself. The thing is not to move. Whoever toughs it out the longest will get the highest grade. For a while he sustained himself on this maxim, though for how long he didn’t know.
    The situation went from bad to worse.
    The darkness in which he was submerged—which he embodied—began teeming, flickering with dimly incandescent circles swirling about on the periphery. He swiveled his eyeballs and was consoled, though it wasn’t long before this feeling eluded him as well.
    The sum of all these sensations—the flickering lights, the monotonous drone—was a harmless prelude, a trifle, compared to what came next.
    Anyone who has ever had his hand or arm fall asleep when the blood supply has been temporarily cut off knows how wooden it seems to the touch. Uncomfortable as it is, the condition is usually short-lived. The deadening numbness affects only a few fingers, or a hand, momentarily turning it into a lifeless appendage on an otherwise normal, sensate body. But Pirx was deprived of all sensation—save that of terror.
    He was disintegrating not into different personalities but into a manifold terror. Of what he didn’t know. He was residing neither in reality (how could he without a body to perceive it?) nor in a dream (he was too conscious of where he was, of his own responses, to be dreaming). No, it was something else, not comparable to anything he’d ever experienced, not even to an alcoholic or narcotic stupor.
    He remembered reading about it. He was experiencing what was known as “disorganization of the cortex caused by sensory deprivation of the brain.”
    It sounded innocent enough. The real thing was something else again.
    He felt scattered, diffused. Up, down, right, and left no longer meant anything to him. Where was the ceiling? He couldn’t remember. How could he? Without a body, without eyes, he had lost all sense of direction.
    Wait a sec, he thought. Let’s get this straight. Space has three dimensions…
    Words without meaning. He tried to summon up some sense of time, kept repeating the word “time”… It was like munching on a wad of paper. Time was a senseless glob. It was not he who was repeating the word, but someone else, some intruder who had wormed his way inside him. Or he inside him. And that someone was enlarging, swelling, transcending all boundaries. He was traveling through unfathomable interiors, a ballooning, preposterous, elephantine finger—not his own, not a real finger, but a fictitious one, coming out of nowhere … sovereign, overwhelming, rigid, full of reproach and silly innuendo… And Pirx—not he but his thought processes—reeled back and forth inside this preposterous, fetid, torpid, nullifying mass…
    Poof! The finger disappeared. Pirx spun, spiraled, plummeted like a rock. Tried to scream but couldn’t.
    Scintillating shapes—faceless, spherical, gaping, dispersing every time he tried to confront them—advanced, bore down on him, swelled his insides… He was a thin-walled, membranous receptacle, strained to the bursting point.
    He exploded—splattered into random and disjointed fragments of night, which