Solaris (6 page)

My legs were trembling, and I stared at the door, appalled. The
din had subsided, giving way to an uneasy silence. I sat down on a
window ledge, too stunned to move; my head was splitting.

From where I was, I could see only a part of the corridor
encircling the laboratory. I was at the summit of the Station,
beneath the actual shell of the superstructure; the walls were
concave and sloping, with oblong windows a few yards apart. The
blue day was ending, and, as the shutters grated upwards, a
blinding light shone through the thick glass. Every metal fitting,
every latch and joint, blazed, and the great glass panel of the
laboratory door glittered with pale coruscations. My hands looked
grey in the spectral light. I noticed that I was holding the gas
pistol; I had not realized that I had taken it out of its holster,
and replaced it. What use could I have made of it—or even of
a gamma pistol, had I had one? I could hardly have taken the
laboratory by force.

I got up. The disc of the sun, reminiscent of a hydrogen
explosion, was sinking into the ocean, and as I descended the
stairway I was pierced by a jet of horizontal rays which was almost
tangible. Halfway downstairs I paused to think, then went back up
the steps and followed the corridor round the laboratory. Soon, I
came across a second glass door, exactly like the first; I made no
attempt to open it, knowing that it would be locked.

I was looking for an opening or vent of some sort. The idea of
spying on Sartorius had come to me quite naturally, without the
least sense of shame. I was determined to have done with conjecture
and discover the truth, even if, as I imagined it would, the truth
proved incomprehensible. It struck me that the laboratory must be
lit from above by windows let into the dome. It should be possible,
therefore, to spy on Sartorius from the outside. But first I should
have to equip myself with an atmosphere-suit and oxygen gear.

When I reached the deck below, I found the door of the
radio-cabin ajar. Snow, sunk in his armchair, was asleep. At the
sound of my footsteps, he opened his eyes with a start.

"Hello, Kelvin!" he croaked. "Well, did you discover
anything?"

"Yes…he's not alone." Snow grinned sourly.

"Oh, really? Well, that's something. Has he got visitors?"

"I can't understand why you won't tell me what's going on," I
retorted impulsively. "Since I have to remain here, I'm bound to
find out the truth sooner or later. Why the mystery?"

"When you've received some visitors yourself, you'll
understand."

I had the impression that my presence annoyed him and he had no
desire to prolong the conversation. I turned to go. "Where are you
off to?" I did not answer.

The hangar-deck was just as I had left it. My burnt-out capsule
still stood there, gaping open, on its platform. On my way to
select an atmosphere-suit, I suddenly realized that the skylights
through which I hoped to observe Sartorius would probably be made
of slabs of opaque glass, and I lost interest in my venture on to
the outer hull.

Instead, I descended the spiral stairway which led to the
lower-deck store rooms. The cramped passage at the bottom contained
the usual litter of crates and cylinders.

The walls were sheeted in bare metal which had a bluish glint. A
little further on, the frosted pipes of the refrigeration plant
appeared beneath a vault and I followed them to the far end of the
corridor where they vanished into a cooling-jacket with a wide,
plastic collar. The door to the cold store was two inches thick and
lagged with an insulating compound. When I opened it, the icy cold
gripped me. I stood, shivering, on the threshold of a cave carved
out of an iceberg; the huge coils, like sculptured reliefs, were
hung with stalactites. Here, too, buried beneath a covering of
snow, there were crates and cylinders, and shelves laden with boxes
and transparent bags containing a yellow, oily substance. The vault
sloped downwards to where a curtain of ice hid the back of the
cave. I broke through it. An elongated figure, covered with a sheet
of canvas, lay stretched out on an aluminum rack.

I lifted a corner of the canvas and recognised the stiff
features of Gibarian. His glossy black hair clung tightly to his
skull. The sinews of his throat stood out like bones. His glazed
eyes stared up at the vault, a tear of opaque ice hanging from the
corner of each lid. The cold was so intense that I had to clench my
teeth to prevent them from chattering. I touched Gibarian's cheek;
it was like touching a block of petrified wood, bristling with
black prickly hairs. The curve of the lips seemed to express an
infinite, disdainful patience.

As I let the canvas fall, I noticed, peeping out from beneath
the folds at the foot, five round, shiny objects, like black
pearls, ranged in order of size. I stiffened with horror.

What I had seen were the round pads of five bare toes. Under the
shroud, flattened against Gibarian's body, lay the Negress. Slowly,
I pulled back the canvas. Her head, covered in frizzy hair twisted
up into little tufts, was resting in the hollow of one massive arm.
Her back glistened, the skin stretched taut over the spinal column.
The huge body gave no sign of life. I looked again at the soles of
her naked feet; they had not been flattened or deformed in any way
by the weight which they had had to carry. Walking had not
calloused the skin, which was as unblemished as that of her
shoulders.

With a far greater effort than it had taken to touch Gibarian's
corpse, I forced myself to touch one of the bare feet. Then I made
a second bewildering discovery: this body, abandoned in a deep
freeze, this apparent corpse, lived and moved. The woman had
withdrawn her foot, like a sleeping dog when you try to take its
paw.

"She'll freeze," I thought confusedly, but her flesh had been
warm to the touch, and I even imagined I had felt the regular
beating of her pulse. I backed out and fled.

As I emerged from the white cave, the heat seemed suffocating. I
climbed the spiral stairway back to the hangar-deck.

I sat on the hoops of a rolled-up parachute and put my head in
my hands. I was stunned. My thoughts ran wild. What was happening
to me? If my reason was giving way, the sooner I lost consciousness
the better. The idea of sudden extinction aroused an inexpressible,
unrealistic hope.

Useless to go and find Snow or Sartorius: no one could fully
understand what I had just experienced, what I had seen, what I had
touched with my own hands. There was only one possible explanation,
one possible conclusion: madness. Yes, that was it, I had gone mad
as soon as I arrived here. Emanations from the ocean had attacked
my brain, and hallucination had followed hallucination. Rather than
exhaust myself trying to solve these illusory riddles, I would do
better to ask for medical assistance, to radio the
Prometheus
or some other vessel, to send out an
SOS.

Then a curious change came over me: at the thought that I had
gone mad, I calmed down.

And yet…I had heard Snow's words quite clearly. If, that
is, Snow existed and I had ever spoken to him. The hallucinations
might have begun much earlier. Perhaps I was still on board the
Prometheus
, perhaps I had been stricken with a
sudden mental illness and was now confronting the creations of my
own inflamed brain.

Assuming that I was ill, there was reason to believe that I
would get better, which gave me some hope of deliverance—a
hope irreconcilable with a belief in the reality of the tangled
nightmares through which I had just lived.

If only I could think up some experiment in logic—a key
experiment—which would reveal whether I had really gone mad
and was a helpless prey to the figments of my imagination, or
whether, in spite of their ludicrous improbability, I had been
experiencing real events.

As I turned all this over in my mind, I was looking at the
monorail which led to the launching pad. It was a steel girder,
painted pale green, a yard above the ground. Here and there, the
paint was chipped, worn by the friction of the rocket trolleys. I
touched the steel, feeling it grow warm beneath my fingers, and
rapped the metal plating with my knuckles. Could madness attain
such a degree of reality? Yes, I answered myself. After all, it was
my own subject, I knew what I was talking about.

But was it possible to work out a controlled experiment? At
first I told myself that it was not, since my sick brain (if it
really was sick) would create the illusions I demanded of it. Even
while dreaming, when we are in perfectly good health, we talk to
strangers, put questions to them and hear their replies. Moreover,
although our interlocutors are in fact the creations of our own
psychic activity, evolved by a pseudo-independent process, until
they have spoken to us we do not know what words will emerge from
their lips. And yet these words have been formulated by a separate
part of our own minds; we should therefore be aware of them at the
very moment that we think them up in order to put them into the
mouths of imaginary beings. Consequently, whatever form my proposed
test were to take, and whatever method I used to put it into
execution, there was always the possibility that I was behaving
exactly as in a dream. Neither Snow nor Sartorius having any real
existence, it would be pointless to put questions to them.

I thought of taking some powerful drug, peyotl for example, or
another preparation inducing vivid hallucinations. If visions
ensued, this would prove that I had really experienced these recent
events and that they were part and parcel of the surrounding
material reality. But then, no, I thought, this would not
constitute the proof I needed, since I knew the effects of the drug
(which I should have chosen for myself) and my imagination could
suggest to me the double illusion of having taken the drug and of
experiencing its effects.

I was going around in circles; there seemed to be no escape. It
was not possible to think except with one's brain, no one could
stand outside himself in order to check the functioning of his
inner processes. Suddenly an idea struck me, as simple as it was
effective.

I leapt to my feet and ran to the radio-cabin. The room was
deserted. I glanced at the electric clock on the wall. Nearly four
o'clock, the fourth hour of the Station's artificial night-time.
Outside, the red sun was shining. I quickly plugged in the
long-range transmitter, and while the valves warmed up, I went over
in my mind the principal stages of the experiment.

I could not remember the call-sign for the automatic station on
the satellite, but I found it on a card hanging above the main
instrument panel, sent it out in Morse, and received the answering
signal eight seconds later. The satellite, or rather its electronic
brain, identified itself by a rhythmic pulse.

I instructed the satellite to give me the figures of the
galactic meridians it was traversing at 22-second intervals while
orbiting Solaris, and I specified an answer to five decimal
points.

Then I sat and waited for the reply. Ten minutes later, it
arrived. I tore off the strip of freshly printed paper and hid it
in a drawer, taking care not to look at it. I went to the bookcase
and took out the big galactic charts, the logarithm tables, a
calendar giving the daily path of the satellite, and various other
textbooks. Then I sat down to work out for myself the answer to the
question I had posed.

For an hour or more, I integrated the equations. It was a long
time since I had tackled such elaborate calculations. My last major
effort in this direction must have been my practical astronomy
exam.

I worked at the problem with the help of the Station's giant
computer. My reasoning went as follows: by making my calculations
from the galactic charts, I would obtain an approximate cross-check
with the results provided by the satellite. Approximate because the
path of the satellite was subject to very complex variations due to
the effects of the gravitational forces of Solaris and its two
suns, as well as to the local variations in gravity caused by the
ocean. When I had the two series of figures, one furnished by the
satellite and the other calculated theoretically on the basis of
the galactic charts, I would make the necessary adjustments and the
two groups would then coincide up to the fourth decimal point,
discrepancies due to the unforeseeable influence of the ocean
arising only at the fifth.

If the figures obtained from the satellite were simply the
product of my deranged mind, they could not possibly coincide with
the second series. My brain might be unhinged, but it could not
conceivably compete with the Station's giant computer and secretly
perform calculations requiring several months' work. Therefore if
the figures corresponded, it would follow that the Station's
computer really existed, that I had really used it, and that I was
not delirious.

My hands trembled as I took the telegraphic tape out of the
drawer and laid it alongside the wide band of paper from the
computer. As I had predicted, the two series of numbers
corresponded up to the fourth decimal point.

I put all the papers away in the drawer. So the computer existed
independently of me; that meant that the Station and its
inhabitants really existed too.

As I was closing the drawer, I noticed that it was stuffed with
sheets of paper covered with hastily scribbled sums. A single
glance told me that someone had already attempted an experiment
similar to mine and had asked the satellite, not for information
about the galactic meridians, but for the measurements of Solaris's
albedo at intervals of forty seconds.

I was not mad. The last ray of hope was extinguished. I
unplugged the transmitter, drank the remains of the soup in the
vacuum flask, and went to bed.