Arms folded on his chest, he stood and watched as Snaut wrapped a bandage around the electrodes attached to my head, forming a kind of white cap. Several times he cast his eyes about the whole room, seeming not to notice Harey, who sat hunched and uncomfortable on a small stool by the wall, pretending to read her book. When Snaut stepped away from my chair I moved my head, which was weighed down with metal and wires, to watch him turn on the apparatus. But all at once Sartorius raised his hand and said unctuously:
“Doctor Kelvin! I’d like to ask for a moment of your attention! I don’t wish to impose anything on you, for that would not serve our purpose; but you need to stop thinking about yourself, about me, about our colleague Snaut, about any other persons, so that by eliminating the randomness of particular individuals, you concentrate on the matter at hand. Earth and Solaris; generations of researchers who constitute a whole, despite the fact that particular people have their beginnings and endings; our unyielding efforts at establishing intellectual contact; the historical path taken by humanity; the certainty that it will be continued into the future; the readiness to make any effort and any sacrifice, to give up all personal feelings in the interests of our mission — these are the subjects that ought to fill your consciousness completely. True, the sequence of associations does not depend entirely on your will, but the fact that you are here at all guarantees the authenticity of the continuity I speak of. If you are uncertain you have performed the task appropriately please say so, and Dr. Snaut will repeat the recording. After all, we do not lack for time…”
He uttered these last words with a pale dry smile that did not detract in the slightest from the expression of penetrating consternation in his eyes. I was writhing inside from this mountain of cliches pronounced with such earnestness and gravity; fortunately Snaut interrupted the lengthening silence.
“Shall we, Kris?” he asked, leaning on the high console of the electroencephalograph, in a casual, unconstrained pose, as if he were resting his elbow on an armchair. I was grateful to him for using my first name.
“Yes,” I said, half-closing my eyes. The jitters that had laid waste to my mind when he finished attaching the electrodes and placed his fingers on the switch suddenly passed; through my eyelashes I could see the pinkish glow of the control lights on the black dashboard of the machine. The cold, disagreeable chill of the metal electrodes, pressed to my head like frozen coins, also went away. I was like a dark, unlit stage. The empty space was surrounded on all sides by an invisible crowd of spectators gathered in a circle around a silence filled with an ironic contempt for Sartorius and the Mission. The tension felt by these inner observers, eager to play an improvised role, grew weaker. “Harey?”—I thought the word as a test, with a sickening unease, prepared to withdraw it immediately. But that blind, attentive audience of mine did not protest. For a certain short time I was nothing but pure tenderness, sincere regret, willing to undertake long, patient sacrifices. Harey filled me, lacking features, shape, face; and at the same time, through the impersonal idea of her, infused with desperate affection, I had a vision of Giese, the father of solaristics and of solaricists, in all the dignity of his professorial presence. But I wasn’t thinking about the muddy explosion, about the stinking void that swallowed up his gold-rimmed spectacles and his scrupulously brushed gray mustache. I could only see the engraving on the title page of his monograph, the densely hatched background the artist had added around his head such that it appeared unsuspectingly almost in an aureola, so similar not in its features but its steadfast old-fashioned prudence to the face of my own father, and in the end I didn’t know which of the two of them was looking at me. Neither of them had a grave, something that in our times was so frequent and ordinary that it stirred no particular feelings.
The image was fading already, and for a moment that lasted I don’t know how long I forgot about the Station, the experiment, Harey, the black ocean, everything; I was filled with an instantaneous certainty that those two men, who were no longer with us, infinitely small and turned to dust, had been equal to anything they had encountered, and the calm that resulted from this realization annihilated the formless crowd surrounding the arena in mute expectation of my defeat. Along with a double click of the apparatus being turned off, the artificial light exploded into my eyes. I squinted. Sartorius was gazing at me inquiringly, still in the same pose; Snaut, his back to the other man, was busy with the equipment, seemingly deliberately clattering the clogs he wore loosely on his feet.
“Do you think it was successful, Dr. Kelvin?” Sartorius asked, his repulsive nasal voice breaking off.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Sartorius responded with a hint of surprise or even suspicion.
“Yes.”
The certainty and brusqueness of my reply temporarily threw him off balance with his stiff solemnity.
“Oh… Very well…,” he mumbled, and looked around as if he didn’t know what to do now. Snaut came up to my chair and started unwinding the bandage.
I got up and walked around the room; in the meantime Sartorius, who had disappeared into the darkroom, came out with the film already developed and dried. The wavering lines with their whitish zigzags covered several yards of tape, like some kind of mold or cobweb extending along the shiny black ribbon of celluloid.
I no longer had anything to do, but I didn’t leave. The other two men had entered the tape into the oxidized head of the modulator; Sartorius had taken a last look at the end of it, frowning mistrustfully, as if he were attempting to decipher what was contained in those shaky lines.
The rest of the experiment was not to be seen. I only knew what was happening when they stood at the instrument consoles by the wall and turned on the appropriate apparatus. The current sprang to life with a faint bass hum in the coil casing beneath the armored floor, and then there were just the lights in the vertical glass tubes of the indicators moving downwards to show that the great tube of the X-ray cannon was dropping down the vertical shaft and coming to rest in its open mouth. At this point the lights stopped at the lowest levels of the scale and Snaut began to crank up the voltage till the indicators, or more accurately the white bars that represented them, fluttered and made a half-turn to the right. The noise of the current was barely audible. Nothing was happening; the drums containing the film revolved beneath their cover so even that was out of sight, and the footage counter ticked softly like the workings of a clock.
Harey gazed now at me, now at them, from over her book. I went up to her. She gave me a quizzical look. The experiment was ending now; Sartorius slowly approached the conical top of the machine.
“Can we go?” Harey mouthed at me. I nodded. She got up. Without saying goodbye to anyone — I would have found it too ridiculous — I walked past Sartorius.
The high windows of the upper corridor were filled with a sunset of exceptional beauty. It wasn’t the usual cheerless tumescent red, but every possible shade of pink, beneath a luminous mist that seemed sprinkled with the finest silver. The leaden, irregularly undulating black of the ocean’s endless plain seemed to respond to this mild aura with a spume that gave off a soft, dirty purple reflection. It was only at its very zenith that the sky was fiercely ruddy.