Read Online Solaris by Stanislaw Lem - Free Book Online

sign of life. I looked again at the soles of
her naked feet; they had not been flattened or deformed in any way
by the weight which they had had to carry. Walking had not
calloused the skin, which was as unblemished as that of her
shoulders.
    With a far greater effort than it had taken to touch Gibarian's
corpse, I forced myself to touch one of the bare feet. Then I made
a second bewildering discovery: this body, abandoned in a deep
freeze, this apparent corpse, lived and moved. The woman had
withdrawn her foot, like a sleeping dog when you try to take its
paw.
    "She'll freeze," I thought confusedly, but her flesh had been
warm to the touch, and I even imagined I had felt the regular
beating of her pulse. I backed out and fled.
    As I emerged from the white cave, the heat seemed suffocating. I
climbed the spiral stairway back to the hangar-deck.
    I sat on the hoops of a rolled-up parachute and put my head in
my hands. I was stunned. My thoughts ran wild. What was happening
to me? If my reason was giving way, the sooner I lost consciousness
the better. The idea of sudden extinction aroused an inexpressible,
unrealistic hope.
    Useless to go and find Snow or Sartorius: no one could fully
understand what I had just experienced, what I had seen, what I had
touched with my own hands. There was only one possible explanation,
one possible conclusion: madness. Yes, that was it, I had gone mad
as soon as I arrived here. Emanations from the ocean had attacked
my brain, and hallucination had followed hallucination. Rather than
exhaust myself trying to solve these illusory riddles, I would do
better to ask for medical assistance, to radio the Prometheus or some other vessel, to send out an
SOS.
    Then a curious change came over me: at the thought that I had
gone mad, I calmed down.
    And yet…I had heard Snow's words quite clearly. If, that
is, Snow existed and I had ever spoken to him. The hallucinations
might have begun much earlier. Perhaps I was still on board the Prometheus , perhaps I had been stricken with a
sudden mental illness and was now confronting the creations of my
own inflamed brain.
    Assuming that I was ill, there was reason to believe that I
would get better, which gave me some hope of deliverance—a
hope irreconcilable with a belief in the reality of the tangled
nightmares through which I had just lived.
    If only I could think up some experiment in logic—a key
experiment—which would reveal whether I had really gone mad
and was a helpless prey to the figments of my imagination, or
whether, in spite of their ludicrous improbability, I had been
experiencing real events.
    As I turned all this over in my mind, I was looking at the
monorail which led to the launching pad. It was a steel girder,
painted pale green, a yard above the ground. Here and there, the
paint was chipped, worn by the friction of the rocket trolleys. I
touched the steel, feeling it grow warm beneath my fingers, and
rapped the metal plating with my knuckles. Could madness attain
such a degree of reality? Yes, I answered myself. After all, it was
my own subject, I knew what I was talking about.
    But was it possible to work out a controlled experiment? At
first I told myself that it was not, since my sick brain (if it
really was sick) would create the illusions I demanded of it. Even
while dreaming, when we are in perfectly good health, we talk to
strangers, put questions to them and hear their replies. Moreover,
although our interlocutors are in fact the creations of our own
psychic activity, evolved by a pseudo-independent process, until
they have spoken to us we do not know what words will emerge from
their lips. And yet these words have been formulated by a separate
part of our own minds; we should therefore be aware of them at the
very moment that we think them up in order to put them into the
mouths of imaginary beings. Consequently, whatever form my proposed
test were to take, and whatever method I used to put it into
execution, there was always the