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 poses. Besides, it was not for signs of any masculine sexiness that he was looking—heavens, no!—but grit. For he had read Conrad, and whenever he would ponder, with cheeks aglow, the great galactic silence, the lonely valor of men, he always had trouble picturing a hero of eternal night, a loner, having such a—dimplepuss. He soon gave up his morning posing once and for all, thereby demonstrating what superior willpower he had.

These concerns, though festering, paled beside his upcoming oral with Professor Merinus, popularly nicknamed “the Merino.” To tell the truth, Pirx wasn’t all that anxious about the exam; only a few times had he been tempted to hang around the Department of Navigational Astrodesy and Astrognosis, at whose entrance students used to waylay those coming out of the Merino’s office—not to congratulate the lucky few who passed, but to hear what new and tricky questions had been devised by “the Ornery Ram,” as that pitiless interrogator was called. The old man, though he had yet to set foot inside a spaceship, to say nothing of stepping on the Moon, was possessed of such theoretical omniscience that he knew every stone of every crater in the Sea of Rains, could recite every butte and bluff of every planetoid, and was equally at home among the far-flung regions of Jupiter’s moons.