“That… that black woman…” He was leaning forward, and as I spoke his body almost imperceptibly relaxed. “You might have warned me.”

“I did warn you.”

“You could have chosen a better way!”

“It was the only way possible. I didn’t know what you would see. No one could know, no one ever knows…”

“Listen, Snow, I want to ask you something. You’ve had some experience of this… phenomenon. Will she… will the person who visited me today…?”

“Will she come back, do you mean?”

I nodded.

“Yes and no,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“She… this person will come back as though nothing had happened, just as she was at the beginning of her first visit. More precisely, she will appear not to realize what you did to get rid of her. If you abide by the rules, she won’t be aggressive.”

“What rules?”

“That depends on the circumstances.”

“Snow!”

“What?”

“Don’t let’s waste time talking in riddles.”

“In riddles? Kelvin, I’m afraid you still don’t understand.” His eyes glittered. “All right, then!” he went on, brutally. “Can you tell me who your visitor was?”

I swallowed my saliva and turned away. I did not want to look at him. I would have preferred to be dealing with anyone else but him; but I had no choice. A piece of gauze came unstuck and fell on my hand. I gave a start.

“A woman who…” I stopped. “She died. An injection…”

“Suicide?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all?”

He waited. Seeing that I remained silent, he murmured:

“No, it’s not all…”

I looked up quickly; he was not looking at me.

“How did you guess?” He said nothing. “It’s true, there’s more to it than that.” I moistened my lips. “We quarrelled. Or rather, I lost my temper and said a lot of things I didn’t mean. I packed my bags and cleared out. She had given me to understand… not in so many words — when one’s lived together for years it’s not necessary. I was certain she didn’t mean it, that she wouldn’t dare, she’d be too afraid, and I told her so. Next day, I remembered I’d left these… these ampoules in a drawer. She knew they were there. I’d brought them back from the laboratory because I needed them, and I had explained to her that the effect of a heavy dose would be lethal. I was a bit worried. I wanted to go back and get them, but I thought that would give the impression that I’d taken her remarks seriously. By the third day I was really worried and made up my mind to go back. When I arrived, she was dead.”

“You poor innocent!”

I looked up with a start. But Snow was not making fun of me. It seemed to me that I was seeing him now for the first time. His face was grey, and the deep lines between cheek and nose were evidence of an unutterable exhaustion: he looked a sick man.

Curiously awed, I asked him:

“Why did you say that?”

“Because it’s a tragic story.” Seeing that I was upset, he added, hastily: “No, no, you still don’t understand. Of course it’s a terrible burden to carry around, and you must feel like a murderer, but… there are worse things.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really. And I’m almost glad that you refuse to believe me. Certain events, which have actually happened, are horrible, but what is more horrible still is what hasn’t happened, what has never existed.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, my voice faltering.

He shook his head from side to side.

“A normal man,” he said. “What is a normal man? A man who has never committed a disgraceful act? Maybe, but has he never had uncontrollable thoughts? Perhaps he hasn’t. But perhaps something, a phantasm, rose up from somewhere within him, ten or thirty years ago, something which he suppressed and then forgot about, which he doesn’t fear since he knows he will never allow it to develop and so lead to any action on his part. And now, suddenly, in broad daylight, he comes across this thing… this thought, embodied, riveted to him, indestructible. He wonders where he is… Do you know where he is?”

“Where?”

“Here,” whispered Snow, “on Solaris.”

“But what does it mean? After all, you and Sartorius aren’t criminals….”

“And you call yourself a psychologist, Kelvin! Who hasn’t had, at some moment in his life, a crazy daydream, an obsession? Imagine… imagine a fetishist who becomes infatuated with, let’s say, a grubby piece of cloth, and who threatens and entreats and defies every risk in order to acquire this beloved bit of rag. A peculiar idea, isn’t it? A man who at one and the same time is ashamed of the object of his desire and cherishes it above everything else, a man who is ready to sacrifice his life for his love, since the feeling he has for it is perhaps as overwhelming as Romeo’s feeling for Juliet. Such cases exist, as you know. So, in the same way, there are things, situations, that no one has dared to externalize, but which the mind has produced by accident in a moment of aberration, of madness, call it what you will. At the next stage, the idea becomes flesh and blood. That’s all.”

Stupefied, my mouth dry, I repeated:

“That’s all?” My head was spinning. “And what about the Station? What has it got to do with the Station?”

“It’s almost as if you’re purposely refusing to understand,” he groaned. “I’ve been talking about Solaris the whole time, solely about Solaris. If the truth is hard to swallow, it’s not my fault. Anyhow, after what you’ve already been through, you ought to be able to hear me out! We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don’t like it any more.”

I had listened to him patiently.

“But what on earth are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about what we all wanted: contact with another civilization. Now we’ve got it! And we can observe, through a microscope, as it were, our own monstrous ugliness, our folly, our shame!” His voice shook with rage.

“So… you think it’s… the ocean? That the ocean is responsible for it all? But why? I’m not asking how, I’m simply asking why? Do you seriously think that it wants to toy with us, or punish us — a sort of elementary demonomania? A planet dominated by a huge devil, who satisfies the demands of his satanic humors by sending succubi to haunt the members of a scientific expedition…? Snow, you can’t believe anything so absurd!”

He muttered under his breath.

“This devil isn’t such a fool as all that…”

I looked at him in amazement. Perhaps what had happened, assuming that we had experienced it in our right minds, had finally driven him over the edge? A reaction psychosis?