All at once I came to a halt in the middle of the downstairs corridor. I couldn’t bear to think that once again we’d be stuck in our cabin open to the ocean, like in a prison cell.
“Harey,” I said, “you know… I wouldn’t mind swinging by the library. Would that be OK…?”
“Sure, I’d be glad to. I could look for something to read,” she said, with somewhat artificial animation.
I sensed that since the day before there was an unfilled gulf between us and that I ought to show her a least a little warmth; but I was overcome by complete apathy. I don’t know what would have had to happen for me to be shaken out of it. We went back along the corridor, then down a ramp to a small vestibule. Here there were three doors, and between them flowers as if in display cabinets behind crystal glass panes.
The middle door, which led to the library, was lined on both sides with bulging artificial leather which I tried not to touch as I went in. Inside it was a little cooler in the large circular space under the pale silver ceiling with its stylized suns.
I ran my hand across the backs of the series of solaristic classics, and I was about to take down the first volume of Giese, the one with the engraving under tissue paper on the title page, when I unexpectedly found Gravinsky’s small-format book, which I’d overlooked the previous time.
I sat down on an upholstered chair. It was completely quiet. A few feet away from me Harey was flipping through some book. I could hear the faint rustle of the pages beneath her fingers. Gravinsky’s compendium, which was most often used in school as a simple crib, was an alphabetically arranged collection of solaristic hypotheses, from Abiological to Zoo-degenerative. The compiler, who I don’t think had ever seen Solaris, had plowed through every monograph, expedition logbook, fragmentary text and interim report; he’d even found quotations in the works of planetologists who studied other globes, and provided a catalogue that was somewhat terrifying in the brevity of its formulations, since some of them veered into inconsequentiality, deprived of the subtle complexity of thought that had accompanied their inception. Though in fact the whole, encyclopedic in intention, had ended up rather having curiosity value only; the book had been published twenty years before, and in the meantime a mountain of new hypotheses had appeared, by now too numerous to be contained in a single volume. I looked over the alphabetical index of authors, which was like a list of the fallen — very few of them were still alive, and I don’t think a single one was still active in the field. This entire treasury of thought, branching off in every direction, left the impression that one of the hypotheses simply had to be correct, that it wasn’t possible reality should be entirely other than the myriad propositions hurled at it. Gravinsky had prefaced the whole with an introduction in which he divided the preceding almost sixty years of Solaris studies into periods. In the first, dating from the initial exploration of the planet, no one was really consciously proposing hypotheses yet. At that time it was assumed, intuitively as it were, on the basis of “common sense,” that the ocean was a lifeless chemical conglomerate, a monstrous mass of jelly covering the globe, which produced extraordinary formations as a consequence of its “quasi-volcanic” activity, and through self-generating automatic processes stabilized its irregular orbit, just as a pendulum maintains an unchanging plane once set in motion. True, only three years later Magenon declared the living nature of the “gelatinous machine,” though Gravinsky dated the period of biological hypotheses as beginning only nine years afterwards, when Magenon’s previously isolated notion began to gather more and more supporters. The subsequent years abounded in theoretical models of the living ocean, all highly complex and based on biomathematical analyses. The third period involved the collapse of what had hitherto been largely monolithic opinion on the part of scholars.
A multiplicity of schools appeared, that often fought furiously with one another. It was the time when Panmaller, Strobla, Freyhouss, le Greuill, and Osipovich were active; Giese’s entire legacy was subject to devastating critique. It was at that time there appeared the first atlases, catalogues, stereoscopic photographs of asymmetriads, which previously had been regarded as unexaminable — the turning-point came with new remote-controlled mechanisms that were dispatched into the stormy hearts of the giants, which threatened to explode at any moment. At this point, in the margins of the raging discussions, there began to appear isolated, scornfully ignored minimalistic hypotheses suggesting that even if the much-trumpeted “contact” with a “rational monster” were not made, an examination of the hardening mimoid cities and balloon-like mountains thrown up and subsequently swallowed by the ocean was still likely to produce valuable chemical and physio-chemical knowledge and insights into the structure of giant molecules; but no one even engaged the proponents of such ideas in debate. After all, it was a period that saw the appearance of still current catalogues of typical metamorphoses, or Franck’s bioplasmic theory of mimoids, which, though it was abandoned as false, remained a magnificent example of intellectual panache and logical construction.
These “Gravinsky periods,” which lasted over thirty years in all, were the naive youth, the impulsively optimistic romanticism, and finally the maturity of solaristics, marked by the first skeptical voices. By the end of the first twenty-five years there were already heard — as a return to the first colloidal-mechanistic theories — hypotheses that were their late offspring, concerning the non-mental state of Solaris’ ocean. The entire search for signs of a conscious will, for a teleology of processes, for activity motivated by the ocean’s inner needs, was almost universally acknowledged to have been an aberration on the part of a whole generation of researchers. A journalistic passion for refuting their assertions prepared the ground for the sober, analytically oriented work, concentrating on the assiduous gathering of facts, that was conducted by the group of Holden, Eonides, and Stoliwa; it was a time of the rapid increase in number and size of archives and microfilm collections, of expeditions lavishly equipped with every possible device Earth had to offer: automatic recording equipment, sensors, probes, you name it. In some years more than a thousand people took part in the research at the same time; but while the speed at which new material was amassed continued to grow, the spirit that moved the scientists was waning, and there began a period of decline, hard to pinpoint in time, for that still optimistic phase in the exploration of Solaris.
It was characterized above all by the great and courageous personalities — sometimes in theoretical imagination, sometimes in negation — of people such as Giese, Strobla, or Sevada; the last of these, who was also the last of the great solaricists, perished in mysterious circumstances in the vicinity of the planet’s south pole, having done something that even first-timers never would. Before the eyes of a hundred observers he flew his machine, which had been gliding low over the ocean, into the heart of a rapido which was clearly moving out of his way. There was talk of some kind of sudden incapacity, a loss of consciousness, or a rudder defect; in reality, I believe it was the first suicide — the first abrupt, overt explosion of despair.
But not the last. Gravinsky’s volume, however, did not include such information; I added dates, facts, and details from myself as I studied the yellowed pages and tiny print of his book.
In fact, those sorry attempts on one’s own life also came to a stop; nor were there any more of the great characters. The recruitment of scientists who are to devote themselves to a particular branch of planetology is itself an unstudied phenomenon. People of outstanding abilities and strength of character are born at more or less regular intervals, so it’s only the matter of their selection that is uneven. Their presence or absence in a particular field of inquiry can perhaps be explained by the perspectives it opens up. Whatever one thinks about the classic scholars of solaristics, no one can deny them greatness, often genius. The best mathematicians and physicists, the leading figures in biophysics, information theory, and electrophysiology, for decades were drawn to the silent giant of Solaris. All at once, from one year to the next the army of researchers was, as it were, deprived of its generals. There remained a gray, nameless mass of patient fact-gatherers, compilers, creators of experiments that were occasionally designed with originality; but there were no more mass expeditions on a global scale, or bold unifying theories.