Solaris (18 page)

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.

I took care to replace the
Compendium
in its
correct alphabetical position, and in doing so dislodged a slim
pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist
literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge
to understand what lies beyond the grasp of mankind, and aimed in
particular against the individual, man, and the human species. It
was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had
previously made a series of unusual contributions to various
marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this
fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to
demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the
most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented
nothing more than a stumbling one- or two-step progression from our
rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe
around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human
body—the projections of our senses, the structure of our
physical organization, and the physiological limitations of
man—in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem
of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories.
Grastrom's conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be, any
question of 'contact' between mankind and any nonhuman
civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific
mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and
scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at
any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew
it to my attention, and it must have been Gibarian who had added it
to the Station's collection, on his own authority, since Grastrom's
pamphlet was regarded more as a curiosity than a true contribution
to Solarist literature.

With a strange feeling almost of respect, I carefully slid the
slim pamphlet back into the crowded bookshelf, then stroked the
green bronze binding of the Solaris Annual with my fingertips. In
the space of a few days, we had unquestionably gained positive
information about a number of basic questions, which had made seas
of ink flow and fed innumerable controversies, yet had remained
sterile for lack of arguments. Today the mystery practically had us
under siege, and we had powerful arguments.

Was the ocean a living creature? It could hardly be doubted any
longer by any but lovers of paradox or obstinacy. It was no longer
possible to deny the 'psychic' functions of the ocean, no matter
how that term might be defined. Certainly it was only too obvious
that the ocean had 'noticed' us. This fact alone invalidated that
category of Solarist theories which claimed that the ocean was an
'introverted' world, a 'hermit entity,' deprived by a process of
degeneration of the thinking organs it once possessed, unaware of
the existence of external objects and events, the prisoner of a
gigantic vortex of mental currents created and confined in the
depths of this monster revolving between two suns.

Not only that, we had discovered that the ocean was capable of
reproducing what we ourselves had never succeeded in creating
artificially—a perfect human body, modified in its sub-atomic
structure for purposes we could not guess.

The ocean lived, thought and acted. The 'Solaris problem' had
not been annihilated by its very absurdity. We were truly dealing
with a living creature. The 'lost' faculty was not lost at all. All
this now seemed proved beyond doubt. Like it or not, men must pay
attention to this neighbor, light years away, but nevertheless a
neighbor situated inside our sphere of expansion, and more
disquieting than all the rest of the universe.

Perhaps we had arrived at a turning-point. What would the
high-level decision be? Would we be ordered to give up and return
to Earth, immediately or in the near future? Was it even possible
that we would be ordered to liquidate the Station? It was at least
not improbable. But I did not favor the solution by retreat. The
existence of the thinking colossus was bound to go on haunting
men's minds. Even when man had explored every corner of the cosmos,
and established relations with other civilizations founded by
creatures similar to ourselves, Solaris would remain an eternal
challenge.