Solaris (22 page)

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 resumed. 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.

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 was a lifeless chemical conglomerate, a gelatinous mass which through its 'quasi-volcanic' activity produced marvellous creations and stabilized its eccentric orbit by virtue of a self-generated mechanical process, as a pendulum keeps itself on a fixed path once it is set in motion. To be precise, Magenon had come up with the idea three years after the first expedition, but according to the
Compendium
the period of biological hypotheses does not begin until nine years later, when Magenon's idea had acquired numerous supporters. The following years teemed with theoretical accounts of the living ocean, extremely complex, and supported by biomathematical analysis. During the third period, scientific opinion, hitherto practically unanimous, became divided.

What followed was internecine warfare between scores of new schools of thought. It was the age of Panmaller, Strobel, Freyus, Le Greuille and Osipowicz: the entire legacy of Giese was submitted to a merciless examination. The first atlases and inventories appeared, and new techniques in remote control enabled instruments to transmit stereophotographs from the interior of the asymmetriads, once considered impossible to explore. In the hubbub of controversy, 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 still worth investigating the cartilaginous cities of the mimoids and the ballooning mountains that rose above the ocean because we would gain valuable chemical and physio-chemical information, and enlarge our understanding of the structure of giant molecules. Nobody bothered even to refute the adherents of this defeatist line of reasoning. Scientists devoted themselves to drawing up catalogues of the typical metamorphoses which are still standard works, and Frank developed his bioplasmatic theory of the mimoids, which has since been shown to be inaccurate, but remains a superb example of intellectual audacity and logical construction.

The thirty or so years of the first three 'Gravinsky periods,' with their open assurance and irresistibly optimistic romanticism, constitute the infancy of Solarist studies. Already a growing scepticism heralded the age of maturity. Towards the end of the first quarter-century the 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 of that entire generation of scientists who believed that their observations were evidence of a conscious 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 the team headed by Holden, Ionides and Stoliva, whose lucid, analytically based speculations concentrated on scrupulous examination of a growing body of data. It was the golden age of the archivists. Microfilm libraries burst at the seams with documents; expeditions, some of them more than a thousand strong, were equipped with the most lavish apparatus Earth could provide—robot recorders, sonar and radar, and the entire range of spectrometers, radiation counters and so on. Material was being accumulated at an accelerating tempo, but the essential spirits of the research flagged, and in the course of this period, still an optimistic one in spite of everything, a decline set in.

The first phase of Solaristics had been shaped by the personality of men like Giese, Strobel and Sevada, who had remained adventurous whether they were asserting or attacking a theoretical position. 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 a novice would have made. Flying at low altitude, in full view of scores of observers, his aircraft had plunged into the interior of an agilus which was not even directly in its path. There was speculation about a sudden heart attack or fainting fit, or a mechanical failure, but I have always believed that this was in fact the first suicide, brought on by the first abrupt crisis of despair.

There were other 'crises,' not mentioned in Gravinsky, whose details I was able to fill in out of my own knowledge as I stared at the yellowed, closely printed pages.

The later expressions of despair were in any case less dramatic, just as outstanding personalities became rarer. The recruitment of scientists to any particular field of study in a given age has never been studied as a phenomenon in its own right. Every generation throws up a fairly constant number of brilliant and determined men; the only difference lies in the direction they choose to take. The absence or presence of such individuals in a particular field of study is probably explicable in terms of the new perspectives offered. Opinions may differ about the researchers of the classical age of Solarist studies, but nobody can deny their stature, even their genius. For several decades, the mysterious ocean had attracted the best mathematicians and physicists, and the top specialists in biophysics, information theory and electro-physiology. Now, without warning, the army of researchers found itself leaderless. There remained a faceless mass of industrious collectors and compilers. The occasional original experiment might be devised, but the succession of vast expeditions mounted on a worldwide scale petered out, and the scientific world no longer echoed with ambitious, controversial theories.

The machinery of Solaristics fell into disrepair, and rusted over with hypotheses differentiated only in minor details, and unanimous in their concentration on the theme of the ocean's degeneration, regression and introversion. Now and then a bolder, more interesting concept might emerge, but it always amounted to a kind of indictment of the ocean, viewed as the end-product of a development which long ago, thousands of years before, had gone through a phase of superior organization, and now had nothing more than a physical unity. The argument went that its many useless, absurd creations were its death-throes—impressive enough, nonetheless—which had been going on for centuries. Thus, for instance, the extensors and mimoids were seen as tumors, and all the surface processes of the huge fluid body as expressions of chaos and anarchy. This approach to the problem became an obsession. For seven or eight years, the academic literature produced a spate of assertions which although framed in polite, cautious terms, amounted to little more than insults, the revenge of a rabble of leaderless suitors when they realized that the object of their most pressing attentions was indifferent to the point of obstinately ignoring all their advances.

A group of European psychologists once carried out a public opinion poll spread over a period of several years. Their report had no direct bearing on Solarist studies, and was not included in the library collection, but I had read it, and retained a clear memory of its findings. The investigators had strikingly demonstrated that the changes in lay opinion were closely correlated to the fluctuations of opinion recorded in scientific circles.

That change was expressed even in the coordinating committee of the Institute of Planetology, which controls the financial appropriations for research, by means of a progressive reduction in the budgets of institutes and appointments devoted to Solarist studies, as well as by restrictions on the size of the exploration teams.

Some scientists adopted a position at the other extreme, and agitated for more vigorous steps to be taken. The administrative director of the Universal Cosmological Institute ventured to assert that the living ocean did not despise men in the least, but had not noticed them, as an elephant neither feels nor sees the ants crawling on its back. To attract and hold the ocean's attention, it would be necessary to devise more powerful stimuli, and gigantic machines tailored to the dimensions of the entire planet. Malicious commentators were not slow to point out that the director could well afford to be generous, since it was the Institute of Planetology which would have to foot the bill.

Still the hypotheses rained down—old, 'resurrected' hypotheses, superficially modified, simplified, or complicated to the extreme—and Solaristics, a relatively well-defined discipline in spite of its scope, became an increasingly tangled maze where every apparent exit led to a dead end. In the despondency, the ocean of Solaris was submerging under an ocean of printed paper.

Two years before I began the stint in Gibarian's laboratory which ended when I obtained the diploma of the Institute, the Mett-Irving Foundation offered a huge prize to anybody who could find a viable method of tapping the energy of the ocean. The idea was not a new one. Several cargoes of the plasmatic jelly had been shipped back to Earth in the past, and various methods of preservation had been patiently tested: high and low temperatures, artificial micro-atmospheres and micro-climates, and prolonged irradiation. The whole gamut of physical and chemical processes had been run, only to end with the same outcome, a gradual process of decomposition which passed through well-defined stages, starting with wasting, maceration, then first-degree (primary) and late (secondary) liquefaction. The samples removed from the plasmatic growths and creations met with the same fate, with certain variations in the phases of decomposition. The end-product was always a light metallic ash.

Once the scientists recognized that it was impossible to keep alive, or even in a 'vegetative' state, any fragment of the ocean, large or small, in dissociation from the entire organism, a growing tendency developed (under the influence of the Meunier-Proroch school) to isolate this problem as the key to the mystery. It was seen as a matter of interpretation—solve it, and the back of the problem would be broken.

The quest for this key, the philosopher's stone of Solarist studies, had absorbed the time and energy of all kinds of people with little or no scientific training. During the fourth decade of Solaristics the craze spread like an epidemic, and provided a fertile ground for the psychologists. An unknown number of cranks and ignorant fanatics toiled at their fumbling researches with a greater enthusiasm than any which had animated the old prophets of perpetual motion, or the squaring of the circle. The craze fizzled out in only a few years, and by the time I was ready to leave for Solaris it had vanished from the headlines and from conversation, and the ocean itself was practically forgotten by the public.