Satorius looked on with arms folded as Snow attached the electrodes and wrapped a bandage around my head. He looked around the room several times, ignoring Rheya, who sat on a stool with her back against the wall, pretending to read.
Snow stepped back, and I moved my head, which was bulging with metal discs and wires, to watch him switch on. At this point Sartorius raised his hand and launched into a flowery speech:
“Dr. Kelvin, may I have your attention and concentration for a moment. I do not intend to dictate any precise sequence of thought to you, for that would invalidate the experiment, but I do 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 the matter in hand. Earth and Solaris; the body of scientists considered as a single entity, although generations 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 march of humanity, our own certitude of furthering that advance, and our determination to renounce all personal feelings in order to accomplish our mission; the sacrifices that we are prepared to make, and the hardships we stand ready to overcome . . . These are the themes that might properly occupy your awareness. The association of ideas does not depend entirely on your own will. However, the very fact of your presence here bears out the authenticity of the progression I have drawn to your attention. If you are unsure that you have acquitted yourself of your task, say so, I beg you, and our colleague Snow will make another recording. We have plenty of time.”
A dry little smile flickered over his face as he spoke these last words, but his expression remained morose. I was still trying to unravel the pompous phraseology which he had spun out with the utmost gravity. Snow broke the lengthening silence:
“Ready Kris?”
He was leaning with one elbow on the control-panel of the electro-encephalograph, looking completely relaxed. His confident tone reassured me, and I was grateful to him for calling me by 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 to the controls: now it disappeared just as suddenly. Through half-closed lids, I could see the red lights winking on the black control-panel. I was no longer aware of the damp, unpleasant touch of the crown of clammy electrodes. My mind was an empty grey arena ringed by a crowd of invisible onlookers massed on tiers of seats, attentive, silent, and emanating in their silence an ironic 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 sacrifices patiently. 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 grey shadows the learned, professorial face of Giese, the father of Solarist studies and of Solarists. I was not visualizing the nauseating mud-eruption which had swallowed up the gold-rimmed spectacles and carefully brushed moustache. I was seeing the engraving on the title-page of his classic work, and the close-hatched strokes against which the artist had made his head stand out – so like my father’s, that head, not in its I features but in its expression of old-fashioned wisdom 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 burial are not uncommon in our time.
The image of Giese vanished, and I momentarily forgot the Station, the experiment, Rheya and the ocean. Recent memories were obliterated by the overwhelming conviction that these two men, my father and Giese, nothing but ashes now, had once faced up to the totality of their existence, and this conviction afforded a profound calm which annihilated the formless assembly 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 his back turned to operate the control-panel. I had the impression that he was amusing himself by making his sandals slap on the floor.
“Do you think that stage one has been successful, Dr. Kelvin?” Sartorius inquired, in the nasal voice 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 stepped back, hesitated, then disappeared into the dark-room.
I was rubbing the circulation back into my legs when he came out again, holding the developed film. Zigzag lines traced a lacy pattern along fifty feet of glistening black ribbon. My presence was no longer necessary, but I stayed, and Snow fed the ribbon into the modulator. Sartorius made a final suspicious examination of the last few feet of the spool, as if trying to decipher the content 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 reinforced floor, I heard the whine of power building up in the turbines. Lights moved downward inside glass-fronted indicators in time with the descent of the great X-ray beamer to the bottom of its housing. 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-right semicircle. The hum of current was barely audible now, as the film unwound, invisible behind the 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 the machine.
“Can we go?” Rheya mouthed silently.
I replied with a nod, Rheya stood up and we left the room without taking leave of my colleagues.
A superb sunset was blazing through the windows of the upper-deck corridor. Usually the horizon was reddish and gloomy at this hour. This time it was a shimmering pink, laced with silver. Under the soft glow of the light, the somber foothills of the ocean shone pale violet. The sky was red only at the zenith.
We came to the bottom of the stairway, and I stopped, reluctant to wall myself up again in the prison 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 to read . . .”
I knew only too well that a gulf had opened between us since the previous day. I should have behaved more considerately, and tried to master my apathy, but I could not summon the strength.
We walked down the ramp leading to the library. There were three doors giving onto the little entrance hall, and crystal globes containing flowers were spaced out along the walls. I opened the middle door, which was lined with synthetic leather on either side. I always avoided contact with 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 all the Solarist classics, the first volume of Giese, so as to refresh my memory of the portrait on the title-page, when I came upon a book I had not noticed before, an octavo volume with a cracked 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 alphabetical classification of the various Solarist theories. The compiler, who had never set foot on Solaris, had combed through every monograph, expedition report, fragmentary outline and provisional account, even making excerpts of incidental comments about Solaris in planetological works dealing with other worlds. He had drawn up an inventory crammed with simplistic formulations, which grossly diminished the subtlety of the ideas it resuméd. Originally intended as an all-embracing account, Gravinsky’s book was little more than a curiosity now. It had only been published twenty years before, but since that time such a mass of new theories had accumulated that there would not have been room for them in a single volume. I glanced through the index – practically an obituary list, for few of the authors cited were still alive, and among the survivors none was still playing an active part in Solarist studies. Reading all these names, and adding up the sum of the intellectual efforts they represented in every field of research, it was tempting to think that surely one of the theories quoted must be correct, and that the thousands of listed hypotheses must each contain some grain of truth, could not be totally unrelated to the reality.