"Stanislaw Lem - Solaris2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

out of paper. I held it up to the window in the purplish glow of the somber
twilight, now overhung by a sooty fog. What was I doing, allowing myself to
be distracted by irrelevancies, by the first trifle which came to hand?
I gave a start: the lights had gone on, activated by a photo-electric
relay; the sun had set. What would happen next? I was so tense that the
sensation of an empty space behind me became unbearable. In an attempt to
pull myself together, I took a chair over to the bookshelves and chose a book
familiar to me: the second volume of the early monograph by Hughes and Eugel,
_Historia Solaris_. I rested the thick, solidly bound volume on my knees and
began leafing through the pages.
The discovery of Solaris dated from about 100 years before I was born.
The planet orbits two suns: a red sun and a blue sun. For 45 years after
its discovery, no spacecraft had visited Solaris. At that time, the Gamow-
Shapley theory — that Life was impossible on planets which are satellites of
two solar bodies — was firmly believed. The orbit is constantly being
modified by variations in the gravitational pull in the course of its
revolutions around the two suns.
Due to these fluctuations in gravity, the orbit is either flattened or
distended and the elements of life, if they appear, are inevitably destroyed,
either by intense heat or an extreme drop in temperature. These changes take
place at intervals estimated in millions of years — very short intervals, that
is, according to the laws of astronomy and biology (evolution takes hundreds
of millions of years if not a billion).
According to the earliest calculations, in 500,000 years' time Solaris
would be drawn one half of an astronomic unit nearer to its red sun, and a
million years after that would be engulfed by the incandescent star.
A few decades later, however, observations seemed to suggest that the
planet's orbit was in no way subject to the expected variations: it was
stable, as stable as the orbit of the planets in our own solar system.
The observations and calculations were reworked with great precision;
they simply confirmed the original conclusions: Solaris's orbit was unstable.
A modest item among the hundreds of planets discovered annually — to
which official statistics devoted only a few lines defining the
characteristics of their orbits — Solaris eventually began to attract special
attention and attain a high rank.
Four years after this promotion, overflying the planet with the _Laakon_
and two auxiliary craft, the Ottenskjöld expedition undertook a study of
Solaris. This expedition being in the nature of a preliminary, not to say
improvised, reconnaissance, the scientists were not equipped for a landing.
Ottenskjöld placed a quantity of automatic observation satellites into
equatorial and polar orbit, their principal function being to measure the
gravitational pull. In addition, a study was made of the planet's surface,
which is covered by an ocean dotted with innumerable flat, low-lying islands
whose combined area is less than that of Europe, although the diameter of
Solaris is a fifth greater than Earth's. These expanses of barren, rocky
territory, irregularly distributed, are largely concentrated in the southern
hemisphere. At the same time the composition of the atmosphere — devoid of
oxygen — was analyzed, and precise measurements made of the planet's density,
from which its albedo and other astronomical characteristics were determined.
As was foreseeable, no trace of life was discovered, either on the islands or