If I had understood correctly, it was only a short time since Gibarian had died. What had they done with his body? Had they buried it? No, that was impossible on this planet. I puzzled over the question for a long time, concentrating on the fate of the corpse; then, realizing the absurdity of my thoughts, I began to pace up and down. My toe knocked against a canvas bag half-buried under a pile of books; I bent down and picked it up. It contained a small bottle made of colored glass, so light that it might have been blown out of paper. I held it up to the window in the purplish glow of the somber twilight, now overhung by a sooty fog. What was I doing, allowing myself to be distracted by irrelevancies, by the first trifle which came to hand?
I gave a start: the lights had gone on, activated by a photo-electric relay; the sun had set. What would happen next? I was so tense that the sensation of an empty space behind me became unbearable. In an attempt to pull myself together, I took a chair over to the bookshelves and chose a book familiar to me: the second volume of the early monograph by Hughes and Eugel, _Historia Solaris_. I rested the thick, solidly bound volume on my knees and began leafing through the pages.
The discovery of Solaris dated from about 100 years before I was born.
The planet orbits two suns: a red sun and a blue sun. For 45 years after its discovery, no spacecraft had visited Solaris. At that time, the Gamow-Shapley theory – that Life was impossible on planets which are satellites of two solar bodies – was firmly believed. The orbit is constantly being modified by variations in the gravitational pull in the course of its revolutions around the two suns.
Due to these fluctuations in gravity, the orbit is either flattened or distended and the elements of life, if they appear, are inevitably destroyed, either by intense heat or an extreme drop in temperature. These changes take place at intervals estimated in millions of years – very short intervals, that is, according to the laws of astronomy and biology (evolution takes hundreds of millions of years if not a billion).
According to the earliest calculations, in 500,000 years’ time Solaris would be drawn one half of an astronomic unit nearer to its red sun, and a million years after that would be engulfed by the incandescent star.
A few decades later, however, observations seemed to suggest that the planet’s orbit was in no way subject to the expected variations: it was stable, as stable as the orbit of the planets in our own solar system.
The observations and calculations were reworked with great precision; they simply confirmed the original conclusions: Solaris’s orbit was unstable.
A modest item among the hundreds of planets discovered annually – to which official statistics devoted only a few lines defining the characteristics of their orbits – Solaris eventually began to attract special attention and attain a high rank.
Four years after this promotion, overflying the planet with the _Laakon_ and two auxiliary craft, the Ottenskjöld expedition undertook a study of Solaris. This expedition being in the nature of a preliminary, not to say improvised, reconnaissance, the scientists were not equipped for a landing. Ottenskjöld placed a quantity of automatic observation satellites into equatorial and polar orbit, their principal function being to measure the gravitational pull. In addition, a study was made of the planet’s surface, which is covered by an ocean dotted with innumerable flat, low-lying islands whose combined area is less than that of Europe, although the diameter of Solaris is a fifth greater than Earth’s. These expanses of barren, rocky territory, irregularly distributed, are largely concentrated in the southern hemisphere. At the same time the composition of the atmosphere – devoid of oxygen – was analyzed, and precise measurements made of the planet’s density, from which its albedo and other astronomical characteristics were determined. As was foreseeable, no trace of life was discovered, either on the islands or in the ocean.
During the following ten years, Solaris became the center of attraction for all observatories concerned with the study of this region of space, for the planet had in the meantime shown the astonishing faculty of maintaining an orbit which ought, without any shadow of doubt, to have been unstable. The problem almost developed into a scandal: since the results of the observations could only be inaccurate, attempts were made (in the interests of science) to denounce and discredit various scientists or else the computers they used.
Lack of funds delayed the departure of a proper Solaris expedition for three years. Finally Shannahan assembled his team and obtained three C-tonnage vessels from the Institute, the largest starships of the period. A year and a half before the arrival of the expedition, which left from the region of Alpha in Aquarius, a second exploration fleet, acting in the name of the Institute, placed an automatic satellite – Luna 247 – into orbit around Solaris. This satellite, after three successive reconstructions at roughly ten-year intervals, is still functioning today. The data it supplied confirmed beyond doubt the findings of the Ottenskjöld expedition concerning the active character of the ocean’s movements.
One of Shannahan’s ships remained in orbit, while the two others, after some preliminary attempts, landed in the southern hemisphere, in a rocky area about 600 miles square. The work of the expedition lasted eighteen months and was carried out under favorable conditions, apart from an unfortunate accident brought about by the malfunction of some apparatus. In the meantime, the scientists had split into two opposing camps; the bone of contention was the ocean. On the basis of the analyses, it had been accepted that the ocean was an organic formation (at that time, no one had yet dared to call it living). But, while the biologists considered it as a primitive formation – a sort of gigantic entity, a fluid cell, unique and monstrous (which they called ‘prebiological’), surrounding the globe with a colloidal envelope several miles thick in places – the astronomers and physicists asserted that it must be an organic structure, extraordinarily evolved. According to them, the ocean possibly exceeded terrestrial organic structures in complexity, since it was capable of exerting an active influence on the planet’s orbital path. Certainly, no other factor could be found that might explain the behavior of Solaris; moreover, the planeto-physicists had established a relationship between certain processes of the plasmic ocean and the local measurements of gravitational pull, which altered according to the ‘matter transformations’ of the ocean.
Consequently it was the physicists, rather than the biologists, who put forward the paradoxical formulation of a ‘plasmic mechanism’, implying by this a structure, possibly without life as we conceive it, but capable of performing functional activities – on an astronomic scale, it should be emphasized.
It was during this quarrel, whose reverberations soon reached the ears of the most eminent authorities, that the Gamow-Shapely doctrine, unchallenged for eighty years, was shaken for the first time.
There were some who continued to support the Gamow-Shapley contentions, to the effect that the ocean had nothing to do with life, that it was neither ‘parabiological’ nor ‘prebiological’ but a geological formation – of extreme rarity, it is true – with the unique ability to stabilize the orbit of Solaris, despite the variations in the forces of attraction. Le Chatelier’s law was enlisted in support of this argument.
To challenge this conservative attitude, new hypotheses were advanced – of which Civito-Vitta’s was one of the most elaborate – proclaiming that the ocean was the product of a dialectical development: on the basis of its earliest pre-oceanic form, a solution of slow-reacting chemical elements, and by the force of circumstances (the threat to its existence from the changes of orbit), it had reached in a single bound the stage of ‘homeostatic ocean,’ without passing through all the stages of terrestrial evolution, by-passing the unicellular and multicellular phases, the vegetable and the animal, the development of a nervous and cerebral system. In other words, unlike terrestrial organisms, it had not taken hundreds of millions of years to adapt itself to its environment – culminating in the first representatives of a species endowed with reason – but dominated its environment immediately.
This was an original point of view. Nevertheless, the means whereby this collodial envelope was able to stabilize the planet’s orbit remained unknown. For almost a century, devices had existed capable of creating artificial magnetic and gravitational fields; they were called gravitors. But no one could even guess how this formless glue could produce an effect which the gravitors achieved by the use of complicated nuclear reactions and enormously high temperatures. The newspapers of the day, exciting the curiosity of the layman and the anger of the scientist, were full of the most improbable embroideries on the theme of the ‘Solaris Mystery,’ one reporter going so far as to suggest that the ocean was, no less, a distant relation to our electric eels!