Solaris Read Free Page B

needle-sharp jets, I scrubbed myself vigorously, splashing the walls, expelling, eradicating from my skin the thick scum of morbid apprehensions which had pervaded me since my arrival.
    I rummaged in the locker and found a work-suit which could also be worn under an atmosphere suit. As I pocketed my few belongings, I felt something hard tucked between the pages of my notebook: it was a key, the key to my apartment, down there on Earth. Absently, I turned it over in my fingers. Finally I put it down on the table. It occurred to me suddenly that I might need a weapon. An all-purpose pocket-knife was hardly sufficient for my needs, but I had nothing else, and I was not going to start searching for a gamma pistol or something else of the kind.
    I sat down on a tubular stool in the middle of the clear space, glad to be alone, and seeing with satisfaction that I had over half an hour to myself. (By nature, I have always been scrupulous about keeping engagements, whether important or trivial.) The hands of the clock, its face divided into twenty- four hours, pointed to seven o'clock. The sun was setting. 07.00 hours here was 20.00 hours on board the Prometheus . On Moddard's screens, Solaris would be nothing but an indistinct dust-cloud, mingled with the stars. But what did the Prometheus matter to me now? I closed my eyes. I could hear no sound except the moaning of the ventilation pipes and a faint trickling of water from the bathroom.
    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