"The Little Apocrypha"
- Kelvin's hands and face are burned from the rocket launch, so he goes back to his cabin to get some ointment.
- Someone's sitting in a chair in the room; for a second he's terrified, presumably because he thinks it's Rheya, but it turns out to just be Snow.
- Snow asks him if he's had a visitor, and compliments him on getting rid of it so fast. Snow speculates on how Kelvin got rid of it.
- Then Snow explains that Gibarian got the first visitor.
- Gibarian locked himself in his room and the rest of them thought he was mad.
- Before they could break down the door and get him out, though, they got visitors themselves, and everything went higgledy-piggledy.
- Snow explains that Rheya will come back, but won't remember Kelvin putting her in the ship and shooting her into space.
- Kelvin explains that Rheya was his wife and that she killed herself when Kelvin left.
- Snow is very sympathetic.
- He tells Kelvin that this story is tragic and horrible, but there are or can be worse visitors.
- Snow suggests that some visitors are fantasies or uncontrollable thoughts made flesh.
- Snow goes on for a bit about how human beings look out into the cosmos but are really only looking for themselves.
- Kelvin realizes that Snow believes the ocean has created the visitors and thinks the dude's nutty. Why would the ocean do such a thing?
- Snow points out that they don't have any idea about why the ocean does anything. It's a big sentient ocean-thing, so who knows why it does what it does? It's like trying to figure out the mind of God.
- The visitors started to come after the scientists bombarded the ocean with X-rays, Snow says.
- The two men speculate as to whether or not the ocean created one of them, but then decide it didn't and they're real.
- There's some talk about trying to kill the visitors, and whether they're human, since they think they're human.
- Snow has the book The Little Apocrypha with him, which Gibarian had told Kelvin to look at in the note he left behind.
- Snow gives the book to Kelvin.
- They talk briefly about how Sartorius is coping by attempting to remain normal.
- They talk about other options: destroying the station, running away only to be declared mad.
- Nothing looks good, though, and Kelvin is upset by the thought that Rheya, or something like Rheya, will be back.
- Finally Snow leaves; Kelvin sits down to read The Little Apocrypha.
- It's a book of crank theories about Solaris, focused especially on the testimony of Andre Berton, the pilot who survived after another pilot threw himself into the ocean.
- The book then goes into a transcript of Berton's responses to the Commission of Enquiry.
- Berton says he was flying around in a fog and the ocean was creating various inchoate forms—and then he saw a kind of garden in the ocean.
- Then the garden broke apart.
- Berton explains that he thought it was a mirage, not a hallucination, because he didn't feel ill; he saw an enormous child, and it's body was moving.
- The Commission of Enquiry is skeptical.
- Berton says it seemed as if the infant was being moved by something else.
- He pulled up and continued searching for Fechner, without success; he got sick in the cabin.
- He says he saw one more impossible thing, and he asks if the Committee believes him or not.
- They tell him they think he was hallucinating, at which point he refuses to describe the last thing he saw.
- He does arrange to meet one person, though, Dr. Messenger, who apparently believed his account.
- That's the end of the transcript. Then there's a little note from Messenger, implying that Berton saw something from Fechner's memories.
- Messenger thinks the ocean was trying to understand Fechner's brain.
- Kelvin thinks to himself that Berton was an accurate observer, since he knows that the ocean is a tricky colloid.
- He remembers he has tapes he got from Gibarian's room, which he hasn't listened to yet. He hides them under the bed.
- The door opens and Rheya comes in. Sort of like "The Monkey's Paw," but with substantially less gore.