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

in the ocean.
During the following ten years, Solaris became the center of attraction
for all observatories concerned with the study of this region of space, for
the planet had in the meantime shown the astonishing faculty of maintaining an
orbit which ought, without any shadow of doubt, to have been unstable. The
problem almost developed into a scandal: since the results of the observations
could only be inaccurate, attempts were made (in the interests of science) to
denounce and discredit various scientists or else the computers they used.
Lack of funds delayed the departure of a proper Solaris expedition for
three years. Finally Shannahan assembled his team and obtained three C-
tonnage vessels from the Institute, the largest starships of the period. A
year and a half before the arrival of the expedition, which left from the
region of Alpha in Aquarius, a second exploration fleet, acting in the name of
the Institute, placed an automatic satellite — Luna 247 — into orbit around
Solaris. This satellite, after three successive reconstructions at roughly
ten-year intervals, is still functioning today. The data it supplied
confirmed beyond doubt the findings of the Ottenskjöld expedition concerning
the active character of the ocean's movements.
One of Shannahan's ships remained in orbit, while the two others, after
some preliminary attempts, landed in the southern hemisphere, in a rocky area
about 600 miles square. The work of the expedition lasted eighteen months and
was carried out under favorable conditions, apart from an unfortunate accident
brought about by the malfunction of some apparatus. In the meantime, the
scientists had split into two opposing camps; the bone of contention was the
ocean. On the basis of the analyses, it had been accepted that the ocean was
an organic formation (at that time, no one had yet dared to call it living).
But, while the biologists considered it as a primitive formation — a sort of
gigantic entity, a fluid cell, unique and monstrous (which they called
'prebiological'), surrounding the globe with a colloidal envelope several
miles thick in places — the astronomers and physicists asserted that it must
be an organic structure, extraordinarily evolved. According to them, the
ocean possibly exceeded terrestrial organic structures in complexity, since it
was capable of exerting an active influence on the planet's orbital path.
Certainly, no other factor could be found that might explain the behavior of
Solaris; moreover, the planeto-physicists had established a relationship
between certain processes of the plasmic ocean and the local measurements of
gravitational pull, which altered according to the 'matter transformations' of
the ocean.
Consequently it was the physicists, rather than the biologists, who put
forward the paradoxical formulation of a 'plasmic mechanism', implying by this
a structure, possibly without life as we conceive it, but capable of
performing functional activities — on an astronomic scale, it should be
emphasized.
It was during this quarrel, whose reverberations soon reached the ears of
the most eminent authorities, that the Gamow-Shapely doctrine, unchallenged
for eighty years, was shaken for the first time.
There were some who continued to support the Gamow-Shapley contentions,
to the effect that the ocean had nothing to do with life, that it was neither
'parabiological' nor 'prebiological' but a geological formation — of extreme
rarity, it is true — with the unique ability to stabilize the orbit of