Solaris

Deliberations


I was lying on my back, without a thought, her head on my shoulder. The darkness filling the room was becoming populated. I could hear steps. The walls were disappearing. Something was towering over me, bigger and bigger, endless. I was penetrated through and through, embraced without being touched; I froze still in the darkness, feeling its acute transparency that was displacing the air. I could hear a heart very far away. I focused my whole attention, all the strength I had left, on expecting death throes. They didn’t come. I just kept shrinking, while the unseen sky, the unseen horizons, the emptiness, devoid of shapes, clouds, stars, drawing back and swelling, was making me its center; I strove to crawl into the thing I was lying on, but beneath me there was no longer anything and the darkness no longer concealed anything. I clenched my fists and hid my face in them. I no longer had one. My fingers passed all the way through. I felt like shouting, howling. . .

The room was blue-gray. The furniture, walls, corners seemed sketched in broad dull strokes, in outline only, with no color of their own. There was the brightest pearly white in the silence outside the window. My body was drenched in sweat. I glanced to the side; she was looking at me.

“Is your shoulder numb?”

“What?”

She raised her head. Her eyes were the same hue as the room—gray, luminous between her dark lashes. I felt the warmth of her whisper before I understood the words.

“No. Actually, yes.”

I placed my hand on her back. The touch teemed. I slowly pulled her to me with my other arm.

“You were having a bad dream,” she said.

“A dream? Oh, that’s right. Were you not asleep?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. I’m not tired. But you should sleep. Why are you looking at me like that?”

I half-closed my eyes. I could feel the small regular thump of her heart where mine beat slower. A prop, I thought to myself. But I wasn’t surprised by anything, even my own indifference. I was beyond fear and despair. I was further on; no one had ever gone that far. I touched her neck with my lips, then went lower down, to the little hollow between the tendons, that was smooth as the inside of a seashell. The pulse was there too.

I lifted myself on an elbow. There were no dawns, no softness of light. The horizon was filled with an electric blue glow. The first ray crossed the room like a shot. There was a sudden play of rainbow-colored reflections refracted in the mirror, in the door handles, the nickel-plated pipes; the light appeared to be striking against every surface it encountered as if it were trying to break free, to burst the confined space open. By now it was impossible to look. I turned around. Harey’s pupils dilated. Her gray irises rose to my face.

“Is it time for day already?” she asked in a lusterless voice. She seemed half-asleep, half-awake.

“It’s always like that here, honey.”

“And us?”

“What about us?”

“Are we going to be here for a long time?”

I felt like laughing. But when an indistinct sound burst from my chest, it didn’t resemble a laugh.

“For quite a while, I think. Do you not want that?”

Her eyelids weren’t twitching. She was looking at me intently. Was she winking? I couldn’t be sure. She pulled the blanket up; on her arm I saw a small triangular pink mark.

“Why are you staring like that?”

“Because you’re beautiful.”

She smiled. But it was only out of politeness, a thank-you for the compliment.

“Really? Because you’re looking at me as if you. . . as if I. . .”

“What?”

“As if you were searching for something.”

“Come off it!”

“No, it’s like you thought there was something wrong with me, or there was something I wasn’t telling you.”

“Not at all.”

“If you insist, then I’m sure that’s so. But as you wish.”

Outside the flaming windows a lifeless blue heat was coming into being. Shading my eyes with my hand, I looked around for my dark glasses. They were on the table. I knelt on the bed, put them on, and caught sight of her reflection in the window. She was waiting for something. When I lay back down beside her she smiled.

“What about for me?”

I suddenly understood.

“Sunglasses?”

I got up and started rummaging through the drawers of the table by the window. I found two pairs, both too big. I handed them to her. She tried each pair. They slipped half-way down her nose.

The window shades began to descend with their prolonged grinding sound. A moment later and it was night inside the Station, which had crawled into its shell like a turtle. Going by touch alone, I took her glasses off and put them with mine under the bunk.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“What people do at night—sleep.”

“Kris.”

“What?”

“Maybe I should make you a new dressing.”

“No, there’s no need. There’s no need. . . darling.”

As I said it, I didn’t know myself if I was pretending, but a moment later, without seeing I put my arms around her slender back and when I felt it tremble, I suddenly believed in her. Though I’m not sure. All at once I felt I was the one deceiving her, not the other way around, because she was only herself.

After that I drifted off to sleep several times and kept being woken from my doze by a cramp. My hammering heart gradually calmed down, I held her close, dead tired; she touched my face and forehead gingerly, checking to see if I didn’t have a fever. This was Harey. Another, truer one could not have existed.

After that thought something changed inside me. I stopped struggling. I fell asleep almost immediately.

I was woken by a gentle touch. There was a pleasant coolness on my forehead. My face was covered with something moist and soft that was slowly being lifted up. I saw Harey’s face leaning over me. With both hands she was squeezing out the excess fluid from the gauze into a porcelain bowl. Nearby stood a bottle of sunburn cream. She smiled at me.

“Boy, did you sleep,” she said, then as she laid the gauze back: “Does that hurt?”

“No.”

I moved the skin on my forehead. It was true, I couldn’t feel the burns now. Harey was sitting on the edge of the bunk, wrapped in an orange-and-white striped man’s bathrobe; her black hair lay spread over the collar. She’d rolled the sleeves all the way up to the elbows so they wouldn’t get in the way. I was feeling extraordinarily hungry—it must have been twenty hours since I’d last eaten. When Harey finished dressing my face I got up. I suddenly caught sight of the two completely identical white dresses with red buttons, which lay side by side. The first was the one I’d helped her take off by cutting the back; the second was the dress she’d come in the day before. This time she’d unpicked the seam herself with a small pair of scissors, saying the zipper must have gotten stuck.

The two identical dresses were the most terrible thing of all I’d experienced till now. Harey was busy tidying the medicine cabinet. I turned away from her surreptitiously and bit my fist till it bled. Still staring at the two dresses—or rather the same dress repeated two times—I began backing towards the door. Water was still noisily running from the faucet. I opened the door, slipped quietly out and closed it carefully. I could hear the faint murmur of the running water and the clatter of bottles. Then, suddenly, the sound stopped. The strip lighting from the ceiling illuminated the corridor; a hazy patch of reflected light lay on the door, by which I was waiting with clenched jaw. I held the handle, though I didn’t expect to be able to keep the door closed. A sudden tug almost wrenched it out of my hand, but the door didn’t open; it just shook and started creaking horribly. Stunned, I let go of the handle and took a step back. Something quite incredible was happening with the door—its smooth plastic surface was cratering inwards as if it was being pressed into the room from my side. The enamel began cracking off in small flakes, exposing the steel frame, which was straining ever more. I suddenly realized that instead of pushing the door, which opened towards the corridor, she was trying to open it by pulling it towards herself. The reflection of the light curved on the white surface like a concave mirror; there was a powerful crunching sound and the solid panel, bent to its limit, made a snapping noise. At the same time the handle was ripped from its mount and flew into the room. In the hole it left, there immediately appeared a pair of bloodied hands that kept on pulling, leaving red streaks on the enamel. The panel of the door broke in two, hung crookedly on its hinges, and an orange-and-white creature with a livid blue, lifeless face threw its arms around me sobbing.

If I hadn’t been paralyzed by what I’d seen I probably would have attempted to run. Harey was gasping for breath, knocking her head against my shoulder, her hair flying every which way. When I held her I could feel her slipping through my arms. I carried her back into the room, squeezing past the shattered door, and laid her on the bunk. Her fingernails were broken and covered with blood. When she turned her hand I saw the palm was chafed to raw flesh. I looked into her face; her wide-open eyes stared through me expressionless.

“Harey!”

She responded with an inarticulate grunt.

I moved my finger close to her eye. The lid closed. I went to the medicine cabinet. The bunk creaked. I turned around. She was sitting up straight, gazing at her bloodied hands in alarm.

“Kris,” she moaned, “I. . . I. . . What happened to me?”

“You hurt yourself breaking down the door,” I said impassively. There was a feeling in my lips, especially the lower one, as if ants were crawling all over it. I clamped it between my teeth.

Harey looked for a moment at the jagged pieces of plastic hanging loose from the frame and turned her eyes to me. Her chin trembled. I could see her struggling to master her alarm.

I cut a strip of gauze, took some powder for abrasions from the cabinet, and went back to the bunk. But all at once everything I was carrying slipped out of my hands; the glass jar with its gelatin seal broke, but I didn’t even pick it up. It was no longer needed.

I picked up her hand. There was a still a faint outline of blood around the fingernails, but the bruising had disappeared, and the palm was covered with fresh pink skin that was lighter than its surroundings, though the wound was fading almost as I watched.

I sat down, stroked her cheek and tried to smile at her, though I can’t say I succeeded.

“Why did you do it, Harey?”

“No. That was. . . me?”

She indicated the door with her eyes.

“Yes. Don’t you remember?”

“No. I mean, I saw you were gone, I got really scared, and. . .”

“And what?”

“I started looking for you. I thought maybe you were in the bathroom. . .”

It was only now I noticed that the locker had been slid aside to reveal the entrance to the bathroom.

“And then?”

“I ran to the door.”

“And?”

“I don’t remember. Something must have happened.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you remember? What happened next?”

“I was sitting here on the bed.”

“You don’t remember me carrying you here?”

She hesitated. The corners of her mouth drooped, her face was intent.

“I guess. Maybe. I really can’t say.”

She lowered her feet to the floor and stood up. She went up to the broken door.

“Kris!”

I put my arms around her shoulders from behind. She was shaking. All at once she turned and sought my eyes.

“Kris,” she whispered, “Kris.”

“Take it easy.”

“Kris, what if. . . Kris, do I have epilepsy?”

Epilepsy? Dear God! I felt like laughing.

“Of course not, darling. It’s just a door, you know, they have these kind of doors here. . .”

We left the room when the outer plating rose over the windows with its drawn-out grinding sound, revealing the disk of the sun setting into the ocean.

I headed for the small galley at the far end of the corridor. Harey and I worked together, checking out the cabinets and refrigerators. I quickly realized she wasn’t much of a cook and couldn’t do a lot more than open a few cans, much like me. I wolfed down the contents of two of the cans and drank endless cups of coffee. Harey ate too, but the way children sometimes eat, so as not to hurt the feelings of the grown-ups—not exactly forcing themselves, but mechanically and indifferently.

The two of us went together to the small surgery next to the radio station. I had a plan. I told her I wanted to examine her just in case. I sat her down in a folding chair and took a hypodermic syringe and needle from the sterilizer. I knew where everything was almost by heart, we’d been so well prepared at the training copy of the Station on Earth. I took a drop of blood from her finger, prepared a smear, dried it in the exhauster and sprinkled it with silver ions in a high vacuum.

The matter-of-factness of this work had a calming effect. Harey, resting on the cushions of the folding chair, was looking around the interior of the room, cluttered with apparatus.

The silence was broken by the ringing of the internal telephone. I picked up the receiver.

“Kelvin,” I said. I didn’t take my eyes off Harey, who for some time now had been apathetic, as if she’d been exhausted by her experiences in the last few hours.

“You’re in the surgery? Finally!” I heard what sounded like a sigh of relief.

It was Snaut. I waited with the receiver pressed to my ear.

“You have a ‘guest,’ eh?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re busy?”

“Yes.”

“A little examination perhaps?”

“What of it? Are you looking for a chess partner?”

“Give it a rest, Kelvin. Sartorius wants to see you. That is, see us.”

“That’s something new,” I said, surprised. “What about the. . .” I broke off and added:

“Is he alone?”

“No. I misspoke. He wants to talk with us. The three of us can connect by visuphone, he’s going to cover up the screen.”

“Is that so? Why didn’t he just call me directly? Is he embarrassed?”

“Something like that,” Snaut muttered indistinctly. “Well then?”

“You want to set a time? Let’s say in an hour. OK?”

“OK.”

I could see him on the screen, just his face, no bigger than the palm of my hand. For a moment that was filled with the faint hum of current, he looked searchingly into my face.

In the end he said with a certain hesitation:

“How’s life?”

“Bearable. You?”

“I’m guessing a bit worse than for you. Could I. . .”

“You want to come see me?” I guessed. I glanced over my shoulder at Harey. Her head hung over the cushion; she was lying with her legs crossed, in her boredom absentmindedly tossing up the silver ball at the end of a chain attached to the arm of the chair.

“Leave that alone, you hear? Leave it!” I heard Snaut’s raised voice. On the screen I could see him in profile. I didn’t catch the rest, he covered the microphone with his hand, but I saw his lips move.

“No, I can’t come. Maybe later. In an hour, then,” he said quickly, and the screen went blank. I hung up the receiver.

“Who was that?” Harey asked indifferently.

“Just this guy. Snaut. A cybernetician. You don’t know him.”

“Is it going to take much longer?”

“Are you bored?” I asked. I placed the first of a series of slides in the holder of the neutrino microscope and one by one flipped the colored switches. The force fields set up a hollow drone. “There’s not much in the way of entertainment around here. If my modest company isn’t enough for you, things are going to get tough,” I said, distractedly elongating the pauses between words as I simultaneously used both hands to pull the huge black head of the microscope toward me, and pressed my eyes into the soft rubber cup of the gleaming eyepiece. Harey said something I didn’t catch. I saw from above, sharply foreshortened, a vast wilderness flooded by a silvery glow. On it, in a hazy mist there lay flat round rocks that looked shattered and weather-beaten. These were the red corpuscles. I focused the image without removing my eyes; it was as if I were sailing ever deeper into the silvery radiance of the field of vision. At the same time, with my left hand I operated the crank that turned the stage, and when a blood corpuscle solitary as an erratic boulder appeared between the cross-hairs, I increased the magnification. The lens zoomed in on what seemed like a misshapen erythrocyte, sagging in the middle, which already resembled the rim of a rocky crater, with distinct black shadows in the indentations around its ring like edge. The rim, bristling with crystallized accumulations of silver ions, stretched beyond the edge of the microscope’s field. Murky outlines of half-fused, twisting protein chains came into view, as if seen through opalescent water. When I had one such tangle of ruined proteins in the cross-hairs, I gradually turned the dial to bring the magnification up further and still further. Any moment now I’d reach the limit of this journey into the depths. The flattened shadow of a single molecule was filling the picture; the mist was clearing now!

But nothing happened. I ought to have seen a trembling haze of atoms, like a quaking jelly, but it wasn’t there. The screen glowed pure silver. I turned the dial all the way to the maximum. The hum intensified angrily, but still I didn’t see anything. A repeated buzz let me know the apparatus was overloaded. I looked one more time into the silver emptiness and turned off the electricity.

I looked over at Harey. She was just opening her mouth in a yawn that she turned adroitly into a smile.

“So how am I?” she asked.

“You’re fine,” I said. “In my view. . . you couldn’t be better.”

I kept staring at her, once again feeling that crawling sensation in my lower lip. What had actually happened? What did it mean? This body, seemingly so slender and frail—in fact indestructible—at its deepest level had turned out to be made of nothingness? I thumped the cylindrical casing of the microscope. Maybe there was something wrong with it? Maybe the force fields weren’t centering? No, I knew the equipment was in order. I’d gone down through all the stages, cells, protein conglomerate, molecules, and they looked exactly as they had on thousands of slides I’d seen. But the last step downwards led nowhere.

I drew some blood from her vein and poured it into a measuring glass. I separated it into portions and prepared it for analysis. It took me longer than I expected; I was out of practice. The reactions were within expected norms. All of them. Unless. . .

I placed a drop of concentrated acid on the red dot in one of the test tubes. There was smoke; the dot turned gray and disappeared under a coating of dirty foam. This was decomposition. Denaturation. Keep going! I reached for another test tube. When I turned back, the thin glass container almost fell from my hand.

Beneath the layer of scum, at the very bottom of the tube a thin layer of dark red was already re-forming. This was nonsense! This was impossible!

“Kris!” I heard as if from very far away. “Kris, the telephone!”

“What? Oh, right, thanks.”

The phone had been ringing for a long time, but it was only now I heard it. I picked up the receiver.

“Kelvin here.”

“This is Snaut. I hooked it up so the three of us can hear each other at the same time.”

“Greetings, Dr. Kelvin,” came Sartorius’s high-pitched, nasal voice. Its owner sounded like he was walking onto a dangerously sagging platform—suspicious, cautious, while on the outside collected.

“My respects, Dr. Sartorius,” I replied. I felt like laughing, but I wasn’t sure I was clear enough about the reasons for my mirth to be able to give it free rein. When it came down to it, who was I supposed to be laughing at? I was holding something in my hand: the test tube with the blood. I shook it. It had already congealed. Maybe what I’d just seen was merely an illusion? Maybe it had merely seemed that way?

“Gentlemen, I’d like to raise certain issues concerning the. . .um. . . ghosts.” I heard and at the same time did not hear Sartorius. It was as if he was trying to enter my consciousness. I fought off his voice, still staring at the test tube with the dried blood.

“Let’s call them G-formations,” suggested Snaut quickly.

“Very good.”

In the middle of the screen there was a black vertical line to show I was receiving two channels at once. There should have been the faces of my interlocutors on either side. But the image was dark, only the narrow border of light around the edge showed that the equipment was working but that the screens had been covered over.

“Each of us has conducted various tests.” The nasal voice once again carried the same tone of caution. There was a moment of silence. “Perhaps we could first share what we have discovered, and then I can explain the conclusions I myself have reached. . . You first, perhaps, Dr. Kelvin. . .”

“Me?” I said. I suddenly sensed Harey’s eyes on me. I placed the test tube on the table, where it rolled against a stand, and sat on a tall stool I’d pulled up with my foot. In the first moment I was going to refuse, but I surprised myself by saying:

“Fine. A short colloquium? Fine! I’ve done very little, but I can talk. One histological smear and a few reactions. Microreactions. I have the impression that—”

Up till this moment I’d had no idea what to say. All of a sudden it was as if something opened up inside me.

“—Everything is normal, but it’s camouflage. A mask. In some sense it’s a supercopy—a re-creation more exact than the original. That’s to say, where in humans we encounter the limits of granularity, the limits of divisibility of matter, here the road goes further, thanks to the use of subatomic building matter!”

“Just a moment. What do you mean by that?” inquired Sartorius. Snaut said nothing. Or perhaps it was his quickening breathing that could be heard on the line? Harey looked across at me. I became aware of how excited I was. I’d almost shouted the last words. I calmed down, hunched over on my uncomfortable perch, and closed my eyes. How could I phrase it?

“The ultimate structural element of our bodies is the atom. I suspect that G-formations are built of units smaller than regular atoms. Much smaller.”

“Mesons?” suggested Sartorius. He wasn’t at all surprised.

“No, not mesons. . . Mesons would be visible. The resolution of my apparatus here downstairs is ten to the minus twentieth ångströms. Right? But nothing can be seen, all the way to the max. So it isn’t mesons. More likely neutrinos.”

“How do you imagine that? After all, neutrino conglomerates are unstable. . .”

“I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. Maybe they’re stabilized by some kind of force field. It’s not my area. In any case, if it’s like I say, then the building matter consists of particles about ten thousand times smaller than atoms. But that’s not all! If the protein molecules and cells were constructed directly from these “micro-atoms” they’d have to be correspondingly smaller. And the blood corpuscles, the enzymes, everything. But they’re not. That means that all the proteins, cells, cell nuclei—they’re all just a mask! The actual structure responsible for the functioning of the ‘guest’ is hidden deeper.”

“For goodness’ sake, Kelvin!” Snaut almost yelled. I broke off in dismay. Had I said “guest”?! Yes, but Harey hadn’t heard it. Besides, she wouldn’t have understood. She was staring out of the window, her head resting on her hands; her small neat profile stood out against the crimson dawn. There was silence in the receiver. I could only hear distant breathing.

“There’s something in that,” Snaut murmured.

“Yes, it’s possible,” added Sartorius. “The only problem is that the ocean is not composed of these hypothetical particles of Kelvin’s. It’s made of regular ones.”

“Perhaps it’s able to synthesize the other kind too,” I commented. I felt a sudden sense of apathy. The conversation wasn’t even amusing. It was unnecessary.

“That would explain their extraordinary fortitude,” Snaut said, still in a murmur. “And the speed of regeneration. Perhaps even their energy source is there, in the depths; remember they don’t need to eat. . .”

“I wish to say something,” put in Sartorius. I couldn’t stand him. If he’d only step out of the role he’d imposed upon himself!

“I would like to raise the question of motivation. The motivation for the appearance of the G-formations. I would break it down as follows: What are G-formations? They are not persons, nor are they copies of specific individuals, but rather materialized projections of what our brain contains regarding a particular person.”

The accuracy of this observation struck me. Sartorius may have been unlikeable, but he was far from stupid.

“That’s good,” I put in. “It even explains why these peo. . . these formations have appeared and not others. What’s been selected are the most enduring memory traces, those most isolated from all the others, though naturally no such trace can be completely separated, and in the course of being ‘copied’ the remains of other traces that happen to be in the vicinity are, or can be, included. As a result, the newcomer sometimes shows more knowledge than could be possessed by the real person whose reproduction they’re supposed to be. . .”

“Kelvin!” said Snaut once again. I was struck by the fact that only he was irked by my careless words. Sartorius seemed unconcerned by them. Could this mean that his guest was by nature less intelligent than Snaut’s? For a split second I imagined some cretinous dwarf at the side of the learned Dr. Sartorius.

“Indeed, we have observed such a thing,” said the man himself. “Now, as concerns the motivation for the appearance of G-formations. . . The first and as it were natural thought is that an experiment is being conducted upon us. Yet it would not be a terribly impressive one. When we perform an experiment we learn from the results, in particular from our mistakes, so when we repeat it we introduce corrections. . . Yet there is no question of that here. The same G-formations reappear. . . unimproved. . . with no additional protections against our. . . attempts to get rid of them. . .”

“In a word, there’s no cycle of action with a corrective reflex loop, as Dr. Snaut would term it,” I remarked. “What does that mean?”

“Only that as an experiment it would be shoddy work, which in fact is rather unlikely. The ocean is. . . precise. This is manifest in the double-layered construction of the G-formations, for a start. To a certain point they behave like the real. . .their real. . .”

He was unable to finish.

“Originals,” Snaut suggested quickly.

“Yes, originals. But where the situation exceeds the normal possibilities of the, um, original, there occurs something like a ‘disconnection of consciousness’ in the G-formation and another kind of action, of an inhuman nature, is directly observed. . .”

“That’s true,” I said, “but in this way all we’re doing is compiling a catalogue of behaviors of these. . . these formations, nothing more. This is utterly futile.”

“I’m not so certain of that,” protested Sartorius. All at once I realized what it was about him that irritated me so: he didn’t speak but gave speeches, as if he were taking part in a conference at the Institute. Evidently this was the only way he knew how.

“The matter of individuality arises here. The ocean is entirely devoid of such a concept. This has to be the case. It seems to me, gentlemen, it is completely oblivious to what for us is the most, um, troublesome, shocking aspect of the experiment, that it lies beyond the boundaries of its comprehension.”

“You think it’s unintentional. . . ?” I asked. This assertion took me aback, but after a moment’s reflection I admitted it couldn’t be dismissed.

“That’s right. I don’t believe in any villainy, malice, a desire to hurt us as painfully as possible. . . Unlike Dr. Snaut.”

“I don’t attribute human emotions to it at all,” said Snaut, speaking up for the first time, “but tell us, how do you explain these perpetual returns?”

“Perhaps they set up some kind of device that operates over and over again, like a gramophone record,” I said, not without a hidden urge to needle Sartorius.

“Now then, gentlemen, let us not become distracted,” the latter declared in his nasal voice. “That is not all I wished to say. Under normal conditions I would regard the submission of even an interim report on my research as premature, but in light of this particular situation I shall make an exception. I have the impression, I repeat, I have the impression, no more for the moment, that Dr. Kelvin’s conjecture is correct. I am referring to his hypothesis about a neutrino-based structure. Such structures are known to us only theoretically, we were not aware they could be stabilized. This opens up a specific opportunity, since the destruction of the force field that provides permanence for the structure. . .”

For some time I’d been noticing that the dark object covering the screen at Sartorius’s end was shifting; at the very top of the image a bright gap appeared and something pink could be seen moving there slowly. Now the object suddenly slipped off.

“Go away! Go away!!” came an ear-splitting shout from Sartorius. In the unexpectedly lit-up screen, between the doctor’s arms, clad in puffy oversleeves of the kind worn in laboratories, that were wrestling with something, a large golden disk-like object flashed into view and everything went dark before I’d realized the golden circle was a straw hat. . .

“Snaut?” I said after taking a deep breath.

“Yes, Kelvin,” the cybernetician’s tired voice replied. At that moment I suddenly felt that I liked him. I truly preferred not to know who his companion was. “We’ve had enough for the moment, no?”

“I think you’re right,” I replied. “Listen, if you can, swing by downstairs or to my cabin, OK?” I added in a hurry before he hung up.

“All right,” he said. “Though I don’t know when it’ll be.”

And so ended the discussion of the problem.