He was laughing to himself.

“Making your diagnosis? Don’t be in too much of a hurry! You’ve only been through one ordeal — and that a reasonably mild one.”

“Oh, so the devil had pity on me!”

I was beginning to weary of this conversation.

“What is it you want exactly?” Snow went on. “Do you want me to tell you what this mass of metamorphic plasma — x-billion tons of metamorphic plasma — is scheming against us? Perhaps nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

Snow smiled.

“You must know that science is concerned with phenomena rather than causes. The phenomena here began to manifest themselves eight or nine days after that X-ray experiment. Perhaps the ocean reacted to the irradiation with a counter-irradiation, perhaps it probed our brains and penetrated to some kind of psychic tumor.”

I pricked up my ears.

“Tumor?”

“Yes, isolated psychic processes, enclosed, stifled, encysted — foci smouldering under the ashes of memory. It deciphered them and made use of them, in the same way as one uses a recipe or a blue-print. You know how alike the asymmetric crystalline structures of a chromosome are to those of the DNA molecule, one of the constituents of the cerebrosides which constitute the substratum of the memory-processes? This genetic substance is a plasma which ‘remembers.’ The ocean has ‘read’ us by this means, registering the minutest details, with the result that… well, you know the result. But for what purpose? Bah! At any rate, not for the purpose of destroying us. It could have annihilated us much more easily. As far as one can tell, given its technological resources, it could have done anything it wished — confronted me with your double, and you with mine, for example.”

“So that’s why you were so alarmed when I arrived, the first evening!”

“Yes. In fact, how do you know it hasn’t done so? How do you know I’m really the same old Ratface who landed here two years ago?”

He went on laughing silently, enjoying my discomfiture, then he growled:

“No, no, that’s enough of that! We’re two happy mortals; I could kill you, you could kill me.”

“And the others, can’t they be killed?”

“I don’t advise you to try — a horrible sight!”

“Is there no means of killing them?”

“I don’t know. Certainly not with poison, or a weapon, or by injection…”

“What about a gamma pistol?”

“Would you risk it?”

“Since we know they’re not human…”

“In a certain subjective sense, they are human. They know nothing whatsoever about their origins. You must have noticed that?”

“Yes. But then, how do you explain…?”

“They… the whole thing is regenerated with extraordinary rapidity, at an incredible speed — in the twinkling of an eye. Then they start behaving again as…”

“As?”

“As we remember them, as they are engraved on our memories, following which…”

“Did Gibarian know?” I interrupted.

“As much as we do, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Very probably.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“No. I found a book in his room…”

I leapt to my feet.

“The Little Apocrypha!”

“Yes.” He looked at me suspiciously. “Who could have told you about that?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t worry, you can see that I’ve burnt my skin and that it’s not exactly renewing itself. No, Gibarian left a letter addressed to me in his cabin.”

“A letter? What did it say?”

“Nothing much. It was more of a note than a letter, with bibliographic references — allusions to the supplement to the Annual and to the Apocrypha. What is this Apocrypha?”

“An antique which seems to have some relevance to our situation. Here!” He drew from his pocket a small, leatherbound volume, scuffed at the edges, and handed it to me.

I grabbed the little book.

“And what about Sartorius?”

“Him! Everyone has his own way of coping. Sartorius is trying to remain normal — that is, to preserve his respectability as an envoy of an official mission.”

“You’re joking!”

“No, I’m quite serious. We were together on another occasion. I won’t bother you with the details, but there were eight of us and we were down to our last 1000 pounds of oxygen. One after another, we gave up our chores, and by the end we all had beards except Sartorius. He was the only one who shaved and polished his shoes. He’s like that. Now, of course, he can only pretend, act a part — or else commit a crime.”

“A crime?”

“Perhaps that isn’t quite the right word. ‘Divorce by ejection!’ Does that sound better?”

“Very funny!”

“Suggest something else if you don’t like it.”

“Oh, leave me alone!”

“No, let’s discuss the thing seriously. You know pretty well as much as I do by now. Have you got a plan?”

“No, none. I haven’t the least idea what I’ll do when… when she comes back. She will return, if I’ve understood you correctly?”

“It’s on the cards.”

“How do they get in? The Station is hermetically sealed. Perhaps the layer on the outer hull…”

He shook his head.

“The outer hull is in perfect condition. I don’t know where they get in. Usually, they’re there when you wake up, and you have to sleep eventually!”

“Could you barricade yourself securely inside a cabin?”

“The barricades wouldn’t survive for long. There’s only one solution, and you can guess what that is…”

We both stood up.

“Just a minute, Snow! You’re suggesting we liquidate the Station and you expect me to take the initiative and accept the responsibility?”

“It’s not as simple as that. Obviously, we could get out, if only as far as the satellite, and send an SOS from there. Of course, we’ll be regarded as lunatics; we’ll be shut up in a mad-house on Earth — unless we have the sense to retract. A distant planet, isolation, collective derangement — our case won’t seem at all out of the ordinary. But at least we’d be better off in a mental home than we are here: a quiet garden, little white cells, nurses, supervised walks…”

Hands in his pockets, staring fixedly at a corner of the room, he spoke with the utmost seriousness.

The red sun had disappeared over the horizon and the ocean was a sombre desert, mottled with dying gleams, the last rays lingering among the long tresses of the waves. The sky was ablaze. Purple-edged clouds drifted across this dismal red and black world.

“Well, do you want to get out, yes or no? Or not yet?”

“Always the fighter! If you knew the full implications of what you’re asking, you wouldn’t be so insistent. It’s not a matter of what I want, it’s a matter of what’s possible.”

“Such as what?”

“That’s the point, I don’t know.”

“We stay here then? Do you think we’ll find some way…?”

Thin, sickly-looking, his peeling face deeply lined, he turned towards me:

“It might be worth our while to stay. We’re unlikely to learn anything about it, but about ourselves…”

He turned, picked up his papers, and went out. I opened my mouth to detain him, but no sound escaped my lips.

There was nothing I could do now except wait. I went to the window and ran my eyes absently over the dark-red glimmer of the shadowed ocean. For a moment, I thought of locking myself inside one of the capsules on the hangar-deck, but it was not an idea worth considering for long: sooner or later, I should have to come out again.

I sat by the window, and began to leaf through the book Snow had given me. The glowing twilight lit up the room and colored the pages. It was a collection of articles and treatises edited by an Otho Ravintzer, Ph.D., and its general level was immediately obvious. Every science engenders some pseudo-science, inspiring eccentrics to explore freakish by-ways; astronomy has its parodists in astrology, chemistry used to have them in alchemy. It was not surprising, therefore, that Solaristics, in its early days, had set off an explosion of marginal cogitations. Ravintzer’s book was full of this sort of intellectual speculation, prefaced, it is only fair to add, by an introduction in which the editor dissociated himself from some of the texts reproduced. He considered, with some justice, that such a collection could provide an invaluable period document as much for the historian as for the psychologist of science.