"Kris, is it the experiment that's on your mind?"The sound of her voice made me start with surprise. I had been lying in the dark for hours withmy eyes open, unable to sleep. Not hearing Rheya's breathing, I had forgotten her, lettingmyself drift in a tide of aimless speculation. The waking dream had lured me out of sight of themeasure and meaning of reality. "How did you know I wasn't asleep?" "Your breathingchanges when you are asleep," she said gently, as if to apologize for her question. "I didn'twant to interfere…If you can't answer, don't.""Why would I not tell you? Anyway you've guessed right, it is the experiment.""What do they expect to achieve?""They don't know themselves. Something. Anything. It isn't 'Operation Brainwave,' it's'Operation Desperation.' Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment offand shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind ofcourage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would meanan undignified surrender for mankind—as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowningin what we don't understand and never will." I stopped, but a new access of rage quickly builtup. "Needless to say they're not short of arguments. They claim that even if we fail to establishcontact we won't have been wasting our time investigating the plasma, and that we shalleventually uncover the secret of matter. They know very well that they are deceivingthemselves. It's like wandering about in a library where all the books are written in anindecipherable language. The only thing that's familiar is the color of the bindings!""Are there no other planets like this?""It's possible. This is the only one we've come across. In any case, it's in an extremely rarecategory, not like Earth. Earth is a common type—the grass of the universe! And we prideourselves on this universality. There's nowhere we can't go; in that belief we set out for otherworlds, all brimming with confidence. And what were we going to do with them? Rule them orbe ruled by them: that was the only idea in our pathetic minds! What a useless waste…"I got out of bed and fumbled in the medicine cabinet. My fingers recognized the shape of thebig bottle of sleeping pills, and I turned around in the darkness:
"I'm going to sleep, darling." Up in the ceiling, the ventilator hummed. "I must get somesleep…"In the morning, I woke up feeling calm and refreshed. The experiment seemed a petty matter,and I could not understand how I had managed to take the encephalogram so seriously. Norwas I much bothered by having to bring Rheya into the laboratory. In spite of all her exertions,she could not bear to stay out of sight and earshot for longer than five minutes, so I hadabandoned my idea of further tests (she was even prepared to let herself be locked upsomewhere), asked her to come with me, and advised her to bring something to read.
I was especially curious about what I would find in the laboratory. There was nothing unusualabout the appearance of the big, blue-and-white-painted room, except that the shelves andcupboards meant to contain glass instruments seemed bare. The glass panel in one door wasstarred, and in some doors it was missing altogether, suggesting that there had been a strugglehere recently, and that someone had done his best to remove the traces.
Snow busied himself with the equipment, and behaved quite civilly, showing no surprise at thesight of Rheya, and greeting her with a quick nod of the head.
I was lying down and Snow was swabbing my temples and forehead with saline solution, whena narrow door opened and Sartorius emerged from an unlighted room. He was wearing a whitesmock and a black anti-radiation overall that came down to his ankles, and his greeting wasauthoritative and very professional in manner. We might have been two researchers in somegreat institute on Earth, continuing from where we had left off the day before. He was notwearing his dark glasses, but I noticed that he had on contact lenses, which I took to be theexplanation of his lack of expression.
Satorius looked on with arms folded as Snow attached the electrodes and wrapped a bandagearound my head. He looked around the room several times, ignoring Rheya, who sat on a stoolwith her back against the wall, pretending to read.
Snow stepped back, and I moved my head, which was bulging with metal discs and wires, towatch him switch on. At this point Sartorius raised his hand and launched into a floweryspeech:
"Dr. Kelvin, may I have your attention and concentration for a moment. I do not intend todictate any precise sequence of thought to you, for that would invalidate the experiment, but Ido insist that you cease thinking of yourself, of me, our colleague Snow, or anybody else.
Make an effort to eliminate any intrusion of individual personalities, and concentrate on thematter in hand. Earth and Solaris; the body of scientists considered as a single entity, althoughgenerations succeed each other and man as an individual has a limited span; our aspirations,and our perseverance in the attempt to establish an intellectual contact; the long historic marchof humanity, our own certitude of furthering that advance, and our determination to renounceall personal feelings in order to accomplish our mission; the sacrifices that we are prepared tomake, and the hardships we stand ready to overcome…These are the themes that mightproperly occupy your awareness. The association of ideas does not depend entirely on yourown will. However, the very fact of your presence here bears out the authenticity of theprogression I have drawn to your attention. If you are unsure that you have acquitted yourselfof your task, say so, I beg you, and our colleague Snow will make another recording. We haveplenty of time."A dry little smile flickered over his face as he spoke these last words, but his expressionremained morose. I was still trying to unravel the pompous phraseology which he had spun outwith the utmost gravity. Snow broke the lengthening silence:
"Ready Kris?"He was leaning with one elbow on the control-panel of the electro-encephalograph, lookingcompletely relaxed. His confident tone reassured me, and I was grateful to him for calling meby my first name.
"Let's get started." I closed my eyes.
A sudden panic had overwhelmed me after Snow had fixed the electrodes and walked over tothe controls: now it disappeared just as suddenly. Through half-closed lids, I could see the redlights winking on the black control-panel. I was no longer aware of the damp, unpleasant touchof the crown of clammy electrodes. My mind was an empty grey arena ringed by a crowd ofinvisible onlookers massed on tiers of seats, attentive, silent, and emanating in their silence anironic contempt for Sartorius and the Mission. What should I improvise for these spectators?…Rheya…I introduced her name cautiously, ready to withdraw it at once, but no protest came,and I kept going. I was drunk with grief and tenderness, ready to suffer prolonged sacrificespatiently. My mind was pervaded with Rheya, without a body or a face, but alive inside me,real and imperceptible. Suddenly, as if printed over that despairing presence, I saw in the greyshadows the learned, professorial face of Giese, the father of Solarist studies and of Solarists. Iwas not visualizing the nauseating mud-eruption which had swallowed up the gold-rimmedspectacles and carefully brushed moustache. I was seeing the engraving on the title-page of hisclassic work, and the close-hatched strokes against which the artist had made his head standout—so like my father's, that head, not in its I features but in its expression of old-fashionedwisdom and honesty, that I was finally no longer able to tell which of them was looking at me,my father or Giese. They were dead, and neither of them buried, but then deaths without burialare not uncommon in our time.
The image of Giese vanished, and I momentarily forgot the Station, the experiment, Rheya andthe ocean. Recent memories were obliterated by the overwhelming conviction that these twomen, my father and Giese, nothing but ashes now, had once faced up to the totality of theirexistence, and this conviction afforded a profound calm which annihilated the formlessassembly clustered around the grey arena in the expectation of my defeat.
I heard the click of circuit-breakers, and light penetrated my eyelids, which blinked open.
Sartorius had not budged from his previous position, and was looking at me. Snow had hisback turned to operate the control-panel. I had the impression that he was amusing himself bymaking his sandals slap on the floor.
"Do you think that stage one has been successful, Dr. Kelvin?" Sartorius inquired, in the nasalvoice which I had come to detest.
"Yes.""Are you sure?" he persisted, obviously rather surprised, and perhaps even suspicious.
"Yes."My assurance and the bluntness of my answers made him lose his composure briefly.
"Oh…good," he stammered.
Snow came over to me and started to unwrap the bandage from my head. Sartorius steppedback, hesitated, then disappeared into the dark-room.
I was rubbing the circulation back into my legs when he came out again, holding the developedfilm. Zigzag lines traced a lacy pattern along fifty feet of glistening black ribbon. My presencewas no longer necessary, but I stayed, and Snow fed the ribbon into the modulator. Sartoriusmade a final suspicious examination of the last few feet of the spool, as if trying to decipher thecontent of the wavering lines.
The experiment proceeded with a minimum of fuss.
Snow and Sartorius each sat at a bank of controls and pushed buttons. Through the reinforcedfloor, I heard the whine of power building up in the turbines. Lights moved downward insideglass-fronted indicators in time with the descent of the great X-ray beamer to the bottom of itshousing. They came to a stop at the low limit of the indicators.
Snow stepped up the power, and the white needle of the voltmeter described a left-to-rightsemicircle. The hum of current was barely audible now, as the film unwound, invisible behindthe two round caps. Numbers clicked through the footage indicator.
I went over to Rheya, who was watching us over her book. She glanced up at me inquiringly.
The experiment was over, and Sartorius was walking towards the heavy conical head of themachine.
"Can we go?" Rheya mouthed silently.
I replied with a nod, Rheya stood up and we left the room without taking leave of mycolleagues.
A superb sunset was blazing through the windows of the upper-deck corridor. Usually thehorizon was reddish and gloomy at this hour. This time it was a shimmering pink, laced withsilver. Under the soft glow of the light, the somber foothills of the ocean shone pale violet. Thesky was red only at the zenith.
We came to the bottom of the stairway, and I stopped, reluctant to wall myself up again in theprison cell of the cabin.
"Rheya, I want to look something up in the library. Do you mind?""Of course not," she exclaimed, in a forced attempt at cheerfulness. "I can find something toread…"I knew only too well that a gulf had opened between us since the previous day. I should havebehaved more considerately, and tried to master my apathy, but I could not summon thestrength.
We walked down the ramp leading to the library. There were three doors giving onto the littleentrance hall, and crystal globes containing flowers were spaced out along the walls. I openedthe middle door, which was lined with synthetic leather on either side. I always avoided contactwith this upholstery when entering the library. We were greeted by a pleasant gust of fresh air.
In spite of the stylized sun painted on the ceiling, the great circular hall had remained cool.
Idly running a finger along the spines of the books, I was on the point of choosing, out of allthe Solarist classics, the first volume of Giese, so as to refresh my memory of the portrait onthe title-page, when I came upon a book I had not noticed before, an octavo volume with acracked binding. It was Gravinsky's Compendium, used mostly by students, as a crib.
Sitting in an armchair, with Rheya at my side, I leafed through Gravinsky's alphabeticalclassification of the various Solarist theories. The compiler, who had never set foot on Solaris,had combed through every monograph, expedition report, fragmentary outline and provisionalaccount, even making excerpts of incidental comments about Solaris in planetological worksdealing with other worlds. He had drawn up an inventory crammed with simplisticformulations, which grossly diminished the subtlety of the ideas it resuméd. Originallyintended as an all-embracing account, Gravinsky's book was little more than a curiosity now. Ithad only been published twenty years before, but since that time such a mass of new theorieshad accumulated that there would not have been room for them in a single volume. I glancedthrough the index—practically an obituary list, for few of the authors cited were still alive, andamong the survivors none was still playing an active part in Solarist studies. Reading all thesenames, and adding up the sum of the intellectual efforts they represented in every field ofresearch, it was tempting to think that surely one of the theories quoted must be correct, andthat the thousands of listed hypotheses must each contain some grain of truth, could not betotally unrelated to the reality.
In his introduction, Gravinsky divided the first sixty years of Solarist studies into periods.
During the initial period, which began with the scouting ship that studied the planet from orbit,nobody had produced theories in the strict sense. 'Common sense' suggested that the ocean wasa lifeless chemical conglomerate, a gelatinous mass which through its 'quasi-volcanic' activityproduced marvellous creations and stabilized its eccentric orbit by virtue of a self-generatedmechanical process, as a pendulum keeps itself on a fixed path once it is set in motion. To beprecise, Magenon had come up with the idea three years after the first expedition, butaccording to the Compendium the period of biological hypotheses does not begin until nineyears later, when Magenon's idea had acquired numerous supporters. The following yearsteemed with theoretical accounts of the living ocean, extremely complex, and supported bybiomathematical analysis. During the third period, scientific opinion, hitherto practicallyunanimous, became divided.
What followed was internecine warfare between scores of new schools of thought. It was theage of Panmaller, Strobel, Freyus, Le Greuille and Osipowicz: the entire legacy of Giese wassubmitted to a merciless examination. The first atlases and inventories appeared, and newtechniques in remote control enabled instruments to transmit stereophotographs from theinterior of the asymmetriads, once considered impossible to explore. In the hubbub ofcontroversy, the 'minimal' hypotheses were contemptuously dismissed: even if the long-awaited contact with the 'reasoning monster' did not materialize, it was argued that it was stillworth investigating the cartilaginous cities of the mimoids and the ballooning mountains thatrose above the ocean because we would gain valuable chemical and physio-chemicalinformation, and enlarge our understanding of the structure of giant molecules. Nobodybothered even to refute the adherents of this defeatist line of reasoning. Scientists devotedthemselves to drawing up catalogues of the typical metamorphoses which are still standardworks, and Frank developed his bioplasmatic theory of the mimoids, which has since beenshown to be inaccurate, but remains a superb example of intellectual audacity and logicalconstruction.
The thirty or so years of the first three 'Gravinsky periods,' with their open assurance andirresistibly optimistic romanticism, constitute the infancy of Solarist studies. Already agrowing scepticism heralded the age of maturity. Towards the end of the first quarter-centurythe early colloido-mechanistic theories had found a distant descendant in the concept of the'apsychic ocean,' a new and almost unanimous orthodoxy which threw overboard the view ofthat entire generation of scientists who believed that their observations were evidence of aconscious will, teleological processes, and activity motivated by some inner need of the ocean.
This point of view was now overwhelmingly repudiated, and the ground was cleared for theteam headed by Holden, Ionides and Stoliva, whose lucid, analytically based speculationsconcentrated on scrupulous examination of a growing body of data. It was the golden age ofthe archivists. Microfilm libraries burst at the seams with documents; expeditions, some ofthem more than a thousand strong, were equipped with the most lavish apparatus Earth couldprovide—robot recorders, sonar and radar, and the entire range of spectrometers, radiationcounters and so on. Material was being accumulated at an accelerating tempo, but the essentialspirits of the research flagged, and in the course of this period, still an optimistic one in spite ofeverything, a decline set in.
The first phase of Solaristics had been shaped by the personality of men like Giese, Strobel andSevada, who had remained adventurous whether they were asserting or attacking a theoreticalposition. Sevada, the last of the great Solarists, disappeared near the south pole of the planet,and his death was never satisfactorily explained. He fell victim to a mistake which not even anovice would have made. Flying at low altitude, in full view of scores of observers, his aircrafthad plunged into the interior of an agilus which was not even directly in its path. There wasspeculation about a sudden heart attack or fainting fit, or a mechanical failure, but I havealways believed that th............