Solaricists
The tubular corridor was empty. I stood for a moment at the closed door, listening. The walls must have been thin, from outside there came the whining of the wind. On the door there was a crooked rectangle of first-aid plaster that had been stuck up carelessly, bearing the inscription: “Human.” I stared at the scrawled, barely legible word. For a moment I thought about going back to Snaut, but I realized that wasn’t possible.
His demented warning still rang in my ears. I moved off, and my shoulders were bowed by the bothersome weight of the space suit. Quietly, as if hiding from an unseen observer, I returned to the circular hall with the five doors. They bore nameplates: Dr. Gibarian, Dr. Snaut, Dr. Sartorius. On the fourth there was no name. I hesitated, then pressed down lightly on the handle and slowly pushed. As it opened I had the feeling, bordering on certainty, that someone was there. I went inside.
There was no one. An identical convex window, though slightly smaller, looked out onto the ocean, which from here, against the sun, shone greasily, as if reddened olive oil were dripping from the crests of the waves. The crimson glow filled the entire room, which was like a spaceship cabin. On one side there were shelves with books and other items, a bunk strapped to the wall and secured with universal joints; on the other were numerous cabinets, between which were aerial photographs stuck together in nickel-plated frames. In metal holders there were flasks and test tubes stopped with cotton wool. By the window were two rows of white enamel cases so close together there was hardly room to squeeze through. The lids of some of them were half-open; they were full of different kinds of tools and plastic hoses. In both corners there were faucets, a smoke extractor, freezers; a microscope stood on the floor, since there was no longer any room for it on the large table next to the window. When I turned around, right by the door I saw an open locker as high as the ceiling filled with overalls, work wear and protective aprons; there was underwear on the shelves, and among the anti-radiation boots was the glint of aluminum flasks for use with portable oxygen packs. Two packs complete with masks hung from the rail of the raised bed. Everywhere there was the same disarray, which had been only hurriedly and superficially tidied. I sniffed the air testingly and smelled a faint aroma of chemical reagents and the trace of a sharp odor—could it possibly have been chlorine? Instinctively my eyes sought the ventilation grates in the upper corners of the room. The slips of paper fastened to their frames were flapping gently to show the compressors were working, maintaining normal air circulation. I moved the books, apparatus, and tools from two chairs, stuffing them into the corners as best I could, till some space was more or less cleared around the bed between the locker and the shelves. I pulled up a stand to hang my space suit on; I took hold of the zippers, but let go immediately. I couldn’t bring myself to take off the suit, as if it would leave me defenseless. Once again I took in the whole room. I checked the door was properly closed, and since there was no lock, after a moment’s hesitation I pushed the two heaviest crates against it. Once this makeshift barricade was in place, with a couple of tugs I freed myself of the heavy, creaking garment. A narrow mirror inside the locker reflected part of the room. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a movement there; I started, but it turned out to be my own reflection. The shirt I had on under my space suit was drenched in sweat. I yanked it off and pushed the locker sideways. It slid aside; in an alcove behind it were the gleaming walls of a tiny bathroom. On the ground under the shower was a large flat case. Not without difficulty, I hauled it into the main room. When I laid it on the floor the lid popped open as if on a spring and I saw compartments filled with bizarre exhibits: a host of implements similar to those in the cabinets, but in approximate or distorted versions in dark metal. None of them were of any use: they were misshapen, blunted, half-melted, as if they’d been in a fire. The strangest thing was that the handles, which were made of ceramite and so virtually unmeltable, were damaged in the same way. No laboratory oven would have been capable of reaching the temperatures necessary to produce this effect—unless it was inside an atomic pile. From the pocket of my space suit I took out a small Geiger counter, but when I held it up to the mangled tools its black beak remained silent.
I was wearing only underwear and a loose weave tee shirt. I tossed both on the floor like rags and, naked, jumped in the shower. The sudden rush of water felt like relief. I twisted beneath the hard, hot stream of water, massaging my body, snorting, all in a somehow exaggerated way, as if I was shaking off, expelling from myself, the whole obscure uncertainty that filled the Station with its infectious suspicions.
From the locker I dug out a light track suit that could also be worn under a space suit, and transferred all my modest belongings to its pockets. Between the pages of my notebook I felt something hard; it was the key to my apartment on Earth. Goodness knows how it had gotten there. I turned it in my fingers a moment, not knowing what to do with it. In the end I laid it on the table. It occurred to me I might need a weapon. My all-purpose pocket knife certainly wouldn’t do the trick, but I didn’t have anything else, and I wasn’t yet in the kind of mental state that would make me go looking for a ray gun or anything of that kind. I sat on a metal chair in the middle of the open space, far from all objects. I wanted to be alone. I was glad to see I still had half an hour. I couldn’t help it; exactitude in carrying out any commitment, however important or trivial, was always in my nature. The hands of the twenty-four hour clock stood at 7 am. The sun was setting. Seven local time was twenty hundred hours on the Prometheus. Solaris would be shrinking to the size of a dot on Moddard’s screen; it would be indistinguishable from the stars. But what could the Prometheus matter to me? I closed my eyes. There was total silence, aside from the whine of the pipes at regular intervals. Water ticked softly in the bathroom as it dripped into the porcelain basin.
Gibarian was dead. If I’d understood Snaut correctly, less than a day had passed since his death. What had they done with the body? Had they buried it? Oh, right, on this planet that couldn’t be done. I thought about it in a matter-of-fact way for a long while, as if what had been become of the dead man was the most essential thing here, until, realizing how ridiculous these thoughts were, I stood up and began pacing diagonally across the room. With the tip of my foot I kicked at the books scattered about, at a small empty field satchel. I bent down and picked it up. It turned out not to be empty after all. It contained a dark glass bottle that weighed so little it felt like it was made of paper. I held it up to the window, where the last dismal red light of the sunset was blurred by a dirty mist. What was wrong with me? Why was I occupying myself with any old nonsense, with whatever insignificant trifle fell to my hand?
I gave a start—the light had come on. Of course, the photo-cell, triggered by the falling dusk. I was filled with anticipation; the tension had grown to the point where I didn’t want to have open space behind me. I decided to fight it. I moved the chair up to the shelves. I took down a book I knew only too well—the second volume of Hughes and Eugel’s old History of Solaris—and started flipping through it, resting the thick, stiff spine on my lap.
Solaris had been discovered almost a hundred years before I was born. The planet orbits two suns, a red one and a blue one. For over forty years no spaceship came near to it. In those days the Gamov-Shapley hypothesis, concerning the impossibility of life arising on planets around double stars, went unquestioned. The orbits of such planets are constantly changing from the gravitational interplay of two suns circling around one another.
The resulting perturbations successively reduce and expand the planet’s orbit, and the beginnings of life, if they emerge, are destroyed by radiant heat or freezing cold. These changes occur over a period of millions of years, which is to say, on an astronomical or biological scale (for evolution requires hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years) a very short time.
According to initial calculations, in the course of five hundred thousand years Solaris was supposed to move to within half an astronomical unit of its red sun, then after another million years fall into its burning maw.
But only ten or twenty years later it became apparent that the planet’s orbit was not showing the expected changes, exactly as if it were as regular as the courses of planets in our own Solar System.
The observations and calculations were now repeated, this time with the utmost exactness, and they revealed only what was already known: that Solaris possessed an unstable orbit.
From one of several hundred planets discovered yearly and added into the great databases with a few notes concerning the fundamentals of their motion, Solaris advanced to the rank of a body worthy of special attention.
As a consequence, four years after this discovery it was orbited by the Ottenskjold expedition, which studied it from the Laocoon and two accompanying auxiliary ships. This expedition constituted a makeshift, improvised reconnaissance, the more so because it lacked the capability to make a landing. It launched into equatorial and polar orbit a number of unmanned observer satellites whose main task was to take measurements of gravitational potentials. Furthermore, it investigated the surface of the planet, which was almost in its entirety covered by ocean, and the few plateaus rising above it. Their combined area was less than that of Europe, though Solaris was twenty percent larger than Earth in diameter. Those scraps of rocky, desert-like land, scattered irregularly across the planet, were mostly found in the southern hemisphere. Studies were also conducted on the atmosphere, which contained no oxygen, and highly detailed measurements were taken of the density of the planet, as well as its albedo and other astronomical indicators. As expected, no life forms were found either on the land or in the ocean.
Over the following ten years Solaris, now the center of attention of all observatories in the area, demonstrated a remarkable tendency to maintain what was beyond any doubt a gravitationally unstable orbit. For a while there was a hint of scandal in the matter, since (in the interests of science) attempts were made to blame the results of these observations either on certain people, or on the instruments they employed.
A shortage of funding delayed the dispatch of a proper expedition to Solaris for three more years, till the moment when Shannahan, having assembled a crew, managed to secure three C-tonnage cosmodrome class vessels from the Institute. A year and a half before the arrival of the expedition, which set off from the Alpha Aquarii region, a second exploratory fleet put an unmanned Satelloid, Luna 247, in solar orbit on behalf of the Institute. The Satelloid, rebuilt three times over the space of several decades, has continued to work to this day. The data it collected definitively confirmed what the Ottenskjold expedition had observed concerning the active nature of the ocean’s movements.
One of Shannahan’s ships remained at a high orbit while the other two made the necessary preparations and landed on a rocky stretch of ground that occupied about six hundred square miles at Solaris’s south pole. The expedition wrapped up its work after eighteen months; it went well, except for one accident caused by an equipment malfunction. The crew, however, divided into two mutually opposing camps. The object of their disagreement was the ocean. On the basis of their analyses it had been designated an organic formation (at that time, no one dared say it was alive). Yet while the biologists saw it as a primitive being—something like an immense syncytium, in other words a single, monstrously grown, fluid cell (even though they called it a “prebiological form”) that extended across the entire globe in a jelly-like covering whose depth reached several miles in places—the astronomers and physicists, on the other hand, claimed it must be a highly organized structure, perhaps exceeding terrestrial organisms in its complexity, since it was capable of actively influencing the orbit of its plane -- for no other cause had been discovered that might explain Solaris’s behavior. In addition, planetary physicists had uncovered a relationship between certain processes in the plasmic ocean and local measurements of gravitational potential, which changed depending on the ocean’s “metabolic rate.”
In this way it was physicists, not biologists, who proposed the paradoxical formulation “plasmic machine” to refer to a formation that in our sense might be devoid of life, but was capable of undertaking purposive actions on a scale that, let us add at once, was astronomical.
In this dispute, which in the space of weeks sucked in every leading authority like a whirlwind, the Gamov-Shapley hypothesis was brought into question for the first time in eighty years.
For a period efforts were made to defend it by asserting that the ocean had nothing to do with life, that it wasn’t even a “parabiological” or “pre-biological” formation, but a geological entity, no doubt of an unusual kind, but whose only capability was to preserve Solaris’s orbit through changes in gravitational pull (reference was made to Le Châtelier’s principle).
To counter this conservatism there arose suggestions such as the Civita-Vitty hypothesis, one of the better constructed, claiming that the ocean was the product of a dialectical development: starting from its original form, that of a proto-ocean, a solution of sluggishly interacting chemical substances, under the pressure of conditions (meaning the orbital changes that threatened its existence), without passing through all the terrestrial stages of development -- that is to say, the emergence of protozoa and metazoa, plant and animal evolution. Without developing a nervous system, it had been able to jump directly to the phase of a “homeostatic ocean.” Put simply, unlike terrestrial organisms it did not adapt to its surroundings over the course of hundreds of millions of years, so as only then to produce a rational species, but it had gained control over its environment from the start.
This was highly original, except that it was still the case no one knew how a syrupy jelly could stabilize the orbit of a celestial body. For almost a century there had existed devices that created artificial force fields and gravitational fields—gravitors—but no one could even imagine how the effects a gravitor achieves through a complex series of nuclear reactions and extremely high temperatures could be accomplished by an amorphous ooze. In the newspapers—which in those days, to the delight of their readers and the despair of scientists, reveled in the most indiscriminate conjectures concerning the “enigma of Solaris”—there were claims that the planetary ocean was a distant relative of earth’s electric eel.
When the problem was at least in some measure cleared up, it transpired that as was so often the case with Solaris, one mystery had been replaced with another that was perhaps even more puzzling.
Research revealed that the ocean did not operate at all like our gravitors (which, of course, would have been impossible), but that it was capable of directly modeling space-time specifications, which led among other things to variations in the measurement of time at one and the same meridian on Solaris. In this way the ocean not only in a certain sense knew the Einstein-Boeve hypothesis, but (unlike us humans) was even able to make use of its consequences.
When this emerged, one of the most tempestuous storms of our century broke out in the scientific world. Some of the most venerable theories, universally regarded as correct, collapsed in ruins, the most heretical articles began to appear in the scientific literature, and the “brilliant ocean” versus “gravitational jelly” debate set every mind on fire.
All this happened a good fifteen or so years before I was born. When I was at school, thanks to facts discovered later, Solaris was widely regarded as a planet endowed with life—but with only a single inhabitant. . .
The second volume of Hughes and Eugel, which I was still abstractedly thumbing through, opened with a taxonomy that was as original as it was amusing. A classification table showed the following:
Type: Polytheria
Order: Syncytialia
Class: Metamorpha.
It was as if we knew goodness knows how many specimens, whereas in reality there was still only one, which admittedly weighted seventeen billion tons.
I flipped past colored diagrams and graphs, analyses and spectrographs setting out the class and tempo of basic metabolism and its chemical reactions. The deeper I immersed myself in the bulky tome, the more mathematics appeared on its chalk-white pages. It might have seemed that our knowledge of this representative of the class of Metamorpha, which lay swathed in the darkness of its four-hour night a thousand or so feet below the steel bed of the Station, was complete.
In reality, however, not everyone agreed that this was a “being,” quite aside from the question of whether an ocean could be called rational. I plonked the big book back on the shelf and took down the next volume. It was divided into two parts. The first constituted a summary of the results of all the innumerable experiments aimed at making contact with the ocean. As I remember only too well, this contact was the source of endless anecdotes, witticisms, and jokes when I was in school; medieval scholastics seemed a model of clarity compared with the jungle that this matter gave rise to. The second part of the volume, comprising almost thirteen hundred pages, contained nothing but a bibliography. There would not have been space in the room I was in for all the original literature on the topic.
The first attempts at contact employed special electronic devices that transformed stimuli sent in both directions. The ocean played an active part in the design of the devices -- though all this happened in complete darkness. What does it mean to say it “played an active part”? It modified certain components of the equipment lowered into it, as a result of which the discharges it registered would change, and the devices would record a multitude of signals that were like fragments of some vast advanced analysis. But what did it all mean? Perhaps these data captured a temporary state of excitation of the ocean? Perhaps they were impulses that gave rise to its immense creations, somewhere thousands of miles from the researchers? Perhaps they were expressions of the ocean’s eternal truths, converted into inscrutable electronic formulations? Perhaps they were its works of art? Who could know, since it was never possible to produce the same reaction to a stimulus twice? Since one time the response would be an explosion of impulses that almost blew the apparatus up, the next time profound silence? Since no experiment could ever be replicated? It always seemed as if we were on the brink of deciphering this constantly accumulating sea of readings; it was for this purpose that electronic brains were constructed with the ability to process more information than had ever been required by any problem before now. And, in fact, certain results were obtained. The ocean—a source of electrical, magnetic, and gravitational impulses—spoke as it were in the language of mathematics; certain sequences of its electrical discharges could be classified by drawing on the most abstract branches of terrestrial analysis and of set theory; they contained homologues of structures known from the area of physics that is concerned with the mutual relationship between energy and matter, finite and infinite magnitude, particles and fields. All this led scientists to believe they were dealing with a thinking monster, that it was some kind of protoplasmic sea-cum-brain grown so vast it covered an entire planet, which passed time engrossed in theoretical reflections on an inconceivable scale concerning the nature of the universe; and that what the instruments captured were no more than tiny, accidentally overheard snippets of a stupendous monologue, utterly beyond our comprehension, that was endlessly being performed in its depths.
So much for the mathematicians. These hypotheses were regarded by some as an underestimation of human capability, as an obeisance toward something we didn’t yet comprehend, but which could be understood as a resurrection of the old doctrine of ignoramus et ignorabimus—“we do not know and will not know.” Others saw these as harmful, sterile fairy stories, and claimed the mathematicians’ hypotheses revealed a latter-day mythology that saw an immense brain—whether electronic or plasmic—as the highest goal of being, the sum total of existence.
While others yet. . . but scientists and opinions were legion. Besides, all the attempts at “establishing contact” were nothing compared to other branches of solaristics, in which specializations grew so advanced a cybernetician was barely able to communicate with a symmetriadologist. Veubeke, who at the time, during my studies, was director of the Institute, once jokingly asked: “How can you communicate with the ocean if you can’t communicate with each other?” His jibe contained much truth.
For it wasn’t by accident that the ocean had been classed as a Metamorpha. Its undulating surface was capable of giving rise to the most diverse formations that bore no resemblance to anything terrestrial, on top of which the purpose—adaptive, cognitive, or whatever—of those often violent eruptions of plasmic “creativity” remained a total mystery.
Returning the volume to the shelf—it was so heavy I had to lift it with both hands—I thought to myself that what we know about Solaris, all the knowledge that filled this library, was useless ballast, a mere quagmire of facts, and that we were in the same position as when we’d started to gather this information seventy-eight years ago; in fact, the situation was a lot worse, since all the labors of those years had proved to be in vain.
That which we knew in detail contained nothing but contradictions. The ocean did not employ machines or construct them, though in certain circumstances it seemed capable of doing so, since it copied components of some of the devices lowered into it. But it did so only in the first two years of the exploratory research; after that, with boundless patience it ignored repeated attempts, as if it had lost all interest in our instruments and artifacts (and thus, it seemed, in us). To continue with our “negative knowledge,” it did not possess a nervous system, or cells, or any structure resembling protein. It didn’t always respond to stimuli, even the most powerful (for instance, it completely “ignored” the disaster involving the auxiliary rocket ship of Giese’s second expedition, which plummeted from a height of two hundred miles to the surface of the planet, destroying plasma for a mile and a half around when its atomic piles exploded).
In scientific circles the “case of Solaris” gradually began to sound like a lost cause, especially among the academic leadership of the Institute, where in recent years voices had been raised calling for cuts in future research funding. No one yet dared suggest closing down the Station completely; this would be too overt an admission of failure. Though some, at least privately, said that all we needed was a strategy for as “honorable” a retreat as possible from the “Solaris affair.”
But for many, especially young people, this “affair” eventually became something of a touchstone of one’s own worth. “In essence,” they would say, “the stakes are higher than exploring the civilization of Solaris; this is about us ourselves, about the limits of human cognition.”
For some time one popular view, eagerly disseminated by the press, was that the thinking ocean covering the whole of Solaris was a gigantic brain more advanced by millions of years than our own civilization, that it was some kind of “cosmic yogi,” a sage, omniscience incarnate, which had long ago grasped the futility of all action and for this reason was maintaining a categorical silence towards us. This was simply untrue, because the living ocean certainly does act—it’s just that it does so according to notions other than those of humans, it doesn’t build cities or bridges, or flying machines; it doesn’t try to conquer space or cross it (something defenders of human superiority insisted on seeing as an invaluable trump card for us). Instead, it occupies itself with thousand fold transformations—“ontological autometamorphosis” (there was no lack of learned terminology in the literature on Solaris!). Since, on the other hand, anyone plunging stubbornly into all this literature cannot resist the impression that though he encounters fragments of perhaps brilliant intellectual constructions, these fragments are mixed indiscriminately with the products of utter foolishness bordering on insanity, as an antithesis to the concept of the “oceanic yogi” there arose the idea of the “oceanic idiot.”
These hypotheses resuscitated one of the most ancient of philosophical problems—the relationship between matter and consciousness. It took a fair amount of courage to lead the way, like du Haart, in attributing consciousness to the ocean. This problem, which the methodologists over-hastily classified as metaphysical, smoldered beneath virtually every discussion and dispute. Was thinking without consciousness possible? Yet could the processes that took place in the ocean be regarded as thought? Is a mountain a very large rock? Is a planet a huge mountain? These terms can be used, but the new scale of magnitude brings with it new regularities and new phenomena.
This problem became a squaring of the circle for our times. Every independent thinker strove to make his own contribution to the treasury of solaristics. Theories multiplied. They claimed we were dealing with the result of a degeneration or regression that had set in after the period of the ocean’s “intellectual splendor”; or that the ocean was in fact a neoplasmic glioma which, having come into existence within the bodies of former inhabitants of the planet, had consumed them all and swallowed them up, fusing the remains together in the form of an everlasting, self-rejuvenating, supracellular element.
In the white glow of neon lamps that was reminiscent of terrestrial light I removed the instruments and books from the table and, spreading a map of Solaris on the plastic surface, I leaned over it, my hands resting on the metal trim. The living ocean had its shallows and its trenches, while its islands were coated with a deposit of weathered minerals that showed they had once constituted its bottom. Did it also regulate the rise and fall of the rock formations immersed in its utterly dark bosom? I gazed at the massive hemispheres on the map, colored in various shades of purple and pale blue. I felt, as countless times before in my life, a sense of wonder just as thrilling as the first time, when as a boy I had learned at school about the existence of Solaris.
I don’t know how it came about that my surroundings—including the lurking mystery of Gibarian’s death, even my own unknown future—all suddenly seemed unimportant, and I thought about nothing whatsoever as I pored over the map, which any human would have found overwhelming.
The various areas of the living formation were named after scientists who had dedicated their lives to exploring them. I was studying the Thexall gliamassif that flowed around the equatorial islands, when I felt someone’s eyes on me.
I was still standing over the map, but I no longer saw it, it was as if I were paralyzed. The door was straight in front of me; it was barricaded with crates, plus I’d pushed a locker against them. Must have been an automat, I thought to myself, though there hadn’t been any in the room before, and none could have come in without my noticing. The skin on my back and the nape of my neck began to tingle, the feeling of a hard, motionless gaze was becoming unbearable. I didn’t realize that as I shrank my head into my shoulders I was leaning more and more heavily on the table; in the end it began to move slowly across the floor, and it was this movement that seemed to free me. I turned around abruptly.
The room was empty. In front of me there was only the gaping black of the bay window. The sensation lingered. The darkness was looking at me, amorphous, immense, eyeless, devoid of limits. The gloom outside was unbrightened by even a single star. I drew the lightproof drapes. I’d not even been a whole hour at the Station and I was already starting to understand why incidents of paranoia had occurred here. I connected it instinctively with Gibarian’s death. Knowing him, I’d thought till now that nothing could have disturbed his mind. I was no longer so sure.
I stood in the middle of the room next to the table. My breathing grew calmer. I could feel the sweat that had broken out on my forehead cooling. What had I been thinking about a moment ago? That’s right—automats. The fact that I’d not seen a single one in the corridor or in the cabins was very strange. Where had they all gone? The only one I’d encountered—at a distance—had belonged to the mechanized service at the docking bay. What about the others?
I glanced at my watch. It was just about time to go and see Snaut.
I left the cabin. The corridor was rather dimly lit by fluorescent lighting strips mounted on the ceiling. I passed two doors and came to the one that bore Gibarian’s name. For a long time I stood in front of it. The Station was filled with silence. I took hold of the door handle. The truth was, I really didn’t want to go in. The handle moved downwards, the door cracked open an inch or so, there was a gap that for a moment was black, then the light came on. Now I could be seen by anyone walking along the corridor. I quickly crossed the threshold and closed the door behind me, quietly and firmly. Then I turned around.
I stood with my back almost touching the door. The cabin was bigger than mine; it also had a panoramic window, which was three-fourths covered by a net curtain decorated with small blue and pink flowers that was clearly not a Station fitting but had been brought from Earth. The walls were lined with bookshelves and cabinets, both painted with a very pale green enamel that had a silvery sheen. Their contents had been tipped onto the floor in piles, and lay heaped among the upright chairs and armchairs. Right in front of me the way was barred by two tables on wheels that were tipped over and partially buried in mounds of journals that were spilling from damaged binders. Books with pages flapping open were drenched in fluids from broken flasks and bottles with fitted corks that mostly were made of such thick glass that simply being dropped on the floor, even from a considerable height, would not have been enough to smash them. By the window was an overturned desk with a broken adjustable lamp; a stool lay in front of it, two of its legs thrust among the half-open drawers. There was a veritable flood of papers, hand-written sheets, and other documents spilling across the entire floor. I recognized Gibarian’s handwriting and bent down. As I picked up loose sheets of notepaper I noticed that my arm was casting not one shadow as it had till now, but two.
I turned around. As if it had been set alight from the top, the pink curtain was burning with a vivid line of fierce blue fire that was widening with every moment. I tugged the fabric aside, and my eyes were struck by a terrifying blaze. It occupied a third of the horizon. A tangle of weirdly elongated shadows ran across the indentations of the waves toward the Station. It was the dawn. In the zone where the Station was located, after an hour-long night, the planet’s second, blue sun rose into the sky. The automatic switch turned off the ceiling lights as I went back to the scattered papers. I found a concise outline of an experiment that had been prepared three weeks before—Gibarian had planned to subject the plasma to extremely hard X-radiation. From the text I gathered the description was meant for Sartorius, who was to set up the experiment; what I had in my hand was a copy. The white sheets of paper were starting to dazzle me. The day that was beginning was different from the preceding one. Beneath the orange sky of the cooling sun the ocean, ink-black with bloody flecks, was almost always covered with a dirty pink mist that fused sky, clouds, and waves together. Now all this had disappeared. Even filtered by the pink fabric, the light glowed like the burner of a powerful halogen lamp. It made the suntan on my arms look almost gray. The whole room was transformed. Everything that had been red turned brown and faded to the color of liver, whereas the color of white, green, and yellow objects was so intensified they looked as if they were emitting their own glow. I squinted through the crack in the curtains. The sky was a white sea of fire, beneath which what looked like molten metal was twitching and trembling. I squeezed my eyes shut at the red circles that were filling my field of vision. On the shelf of the washbasin, the edge of which was cracked, I found a pair of sunglasses and put them on; they covered almost half of my face. The curtain covering the window was now flaring like a sodium flame. I went on reading, picking up sheets of paper from the floor and stacking them on the one small table still standing. Parts of the text were missing.
These were reports of experiments already conducted. From them I learned that the ocean had been subjected to radiation for four days, at a point located fourteen hundred miles northeast of the Station. All this shocked me, since the use of X-rays had been banned by a UN convention because of their lethal effect, and I was quite sure no one had sought permission on Earth for these studies. At a certain moment I raised my head and in the mirror of an open locker I caught sight of my own reflection, a deathly pale face in dark glasses. The room looked extraordinary, burning white and light blue. But a few minutes later there was an extended grinding noise and hermetic blinds came down outside the windows. The room darkened, then the artificial lighting came back on, now strangely wan. The place heated up, till at one point the steady hum from the air conditioning conduits turned into a strained whine. The cooling system of the Station was working at full blast. Despite this, the lifeless heat kept intensifying.
I heard footsteps. Someone was coming down the corridor. In a couple of soundless strides I was at the door. The steps slowed and stopped. Whoever it was, was standing outside the door. The handle moved slightly. Without thinking, I grabbed it from my side and held on. The pressure didn’t increase, but neither did it ease off. The person on the other side was being as silent as me, as if taken aback. For a good while we both held onto the handle. Then it jumped back up suddenly in my hand. It had been released, and a rustling sound let me know that the other person was walking away. I stood for a moment longer, listening intently, but nothing could be heard.