Stanisław Lem - Solaris

Though actually I didn’t hear it clearly. My knuckles were cut and bleeding from the helter-skelter of trying to launch the rocket. A pale blue glow lit the walls. Dust clouds burst from the launch pad beneath the exhaust nozzles and turned into a pillar of toxic sparks, then a sustained roar drowned out all other sounds. The rocket rose up on three flames that instantly merged into a single column of fire, and flew out through the open launch aperture, leaving trembling layers of heat behind. The aperture closed up immediately, and automatically activated compressors began flushing clean air into the bay, which was filled with swirling clouds of acrid smoke. I was completely oblivious to all this. My hands gripping the console, my face still smarting with living fire, my hair curled and scorched from the thermic blast, I was gasping for breath. The air was filled with the stench of burning and the smell of ionization, unmistakable as ozone. Though at the moment of liftoff I’d closed my eyes instinctively, I’d still been struck by the exhaust flame. For a good while I could see nothing but black, red, and gold rings. Gradually they dissipated. The smoke, dust, and fog thinned, drawn into the perpetually moaning ventilation ducts. The first thing I saw was the greenish glow of the radar screen. I started maneuvering the directional reflector, looking for the rocket. When I found it, it was already above the atmosphere. I’d never in my life sent up a projectile in such a mad, blind fashion, with no idea what acceleration to give it or even where to send it. It occurred to me that the simplest thing would be to put it in orbit around Solaris, at an altitude of six hundred miles or so, because then I could turn off the engines — if they were left on too long, I thought it might lead to a disaster that could have unpredictable consequences. I ascertained from the tables that a six-hundred-mile orbit was stationary. It didn’t guarantee anything, true, but it was the only solution I could see.

I had switched the loudspeaker off right after takeoff, and I lacked the courage to turn it back on. I would have done virtually anything not to have to hear again that terrible voice, which carried no vestige of anything human. This much I could say — all appearances had been smashed, and from under the appearance of Harey’s face another, truer face had begun to show, compared to which the alternative of madness was truly becoming a liberation.

It was one o’clock when I left the docking bay.

I had burns on my face and hands. I remembered that when I’d been looking for sleeping pills for Harey (I’d have laughed now at my naivety, if I only could), in the first-aid kit I’d noticed sunburn lotion, so I went back to my cabin. I opened the door and in the red light of the dawn I saw someone sitting in the armchair that Harey had been kneeling by earlier on. I was paralyzed with fear, I jerked back instinctively, about to flee. It only lasted a split second. The person in the chair looked up. It was Snaut. With his back to me and his legs crossed (he was still wearing the same linen pants with the reagent burns), he was looking through some papers. There was a whole pile of them on a small table. When he saw me he put them all aside and stared at me for a moment despondently over his eyeglasses, which were perched on the tip of his nose.

Without a word I went up to the washbasin, took the semi-liquid lotion from the first aid kit and began applying it to the worst places on my forehead and cheeks. Luckily I wasn’t too swollen and my eyes were fine, thanks to the fact that I’d closed them tight. I took a sterile needle, punctured some of the bigger blisters on my temples and cheeks and squeezed out the serous fluid. Then I placed two sheets of moistened gauze on my face. The whole time Snaut observed me closely. I paid him no heed. When I finally finished these operations (my face stung more and more), I sat in the other armchair. I first had to remove Harey’s dress from it. It was a perfectly ordinary dress, aside from the matter of the missing fastener.

Snaut, his hands folded on his bony knees, was following my movements critically.

“How about a chat?” he said when I sat down.

I didn’t answer. I pressed on the gauze, which had begun to slide down my cheek.

“So we had guests, did we?”

“Yes,” I retorted drily. I didn’t have the slightest desire to play along with his tone.

“And we got rid of them? I must say you went about it very energetically.”

He touched his forehead, which was still peeling. Fresh patches of new skin were beginning to appear. I stared at them, suddenly feeling a fool. Why hadn’t I thought about Snaut’s and Sartorius’s so-called “sunburn” till now? All this time I’d thought it was from the sun — but of course no one goes sunbathing on Solaris…

“Though it was a fairly modest beginning, right?” he said, ignoring the sudden flash of understanding in my eyes. “Various narcotics, poisons, catch-as-catch-can, eh?”

“What’s your point? Now we can talk as equals. If you feel like acting the fool you’d be better off leaving.”

“Sometimes a person can’t help being a fool,” he said. He looked up at me through narrowed eyes.

“You’re not going to try and tell me you never used rope or hammer? You never threw an inkpot like Luther? No? How about that,” he said with a grimace. “You’re quite the stand-up guy. Even the washbasin is undamaged; you didn’t try to break any heads on it, nothing. You didn’t smash the cabin up. Right away you just opened the rocket, slammed it shut and wham-bam thank you ma’am, launched it into space and that was that?!”

He glanced over at the clock.

“In that case we should have two hours, three even,” he finished. He stared at me, stared with a disagreeable smile, till he went on:

“So you reckon I’m a swine?”

“A complete swine,” I agreed forcefully.

“Is that so? Would you have believed me if I’d told you? Would you have believed a single word of it?”

I said nothing.

“Gibarian was the first one it happened to,” he continued, still with his fake smile. “He locked himself in his cabin. He’d only talk through the door. And us, can you guess what we figured?”

I knew, but I preferred to remain silent.

“It’s obvious — we thought he’d gone mad. He told us some of it through the door, but not everything. You can probably even guess why he wouldn’t say who exactly was with him. You know full well: suum cuique —to each his own. But he was a true scientist. He demanded that we give him a chance.”

“What chance?”

“I guess he was trying to classify it somehow, figure it out. He worked through the night. You know what he did? I think you do!”

“Those calculations,” I said. “In the drawer. At the radio station. That was him?”

“Yes. But at that point I knew nothing about it all.”

“How long did it go on?”

“The visit? A week maybe. Talking through the door. All sorts of things went on. We thought he was having hallucinations, that he was under some kind of motor stimulus. I gave him Scopolamine.”

“You gave it to him ?!”

“Well, yes. He accepted it, but not for himself. He was experimenting. That was how things went.”

“What about you two?”

“Us? On the third day we decided to force our way into his cabin, to break down the door if we had to. We had noble intentions of treating him.”

“Oh… That explains it!” I exclaimed inadvertently.

“Right.”

“And there… in the locker…”

“Exactly, dear boy. Exactly. He didn’t know that in the meantime we’d had visitors, too. And we couldn’t attend to him anymore. He didn’t know. Now it’s… it’s kind of… routine.”