I heard the mechanical voice from the control center:

“Station Solaris. Zero and zero. The capsule has landed. Out.”

Feeling a vague pressure on my chest and a disagreeable heaviness in the pit of my stomach, I seized the control levers with both hands and cut the contacts. A green indicator lit up: ‘ARRIVAL.’ The capsule opened, and the pneumatic padding shoved me gently from behind, so that, in order to keep my balance, I had to take a step forward.

With a muffled sigh of resignation, the spacesuit expelled its air. I was free.

I found myself inside a vast, silver funnel, as high as a cathedral nave. A cluster of colored pipes ran down the sloping walls and disappeared into rounded orifices. I turned round. The ventilation shafts were roaring, sucking in the poisonous gases from the planet’s atmosphere which had infiltrated when my capsule had landed inside the Station. Empty, resembling a burst cocoon, the cigar-shaped capsule stood upright, enfolded by a calyx mounted on a steel base. The outer casing, scorched during flight, had turned a dirty brown.

I went down a small stairway. The metal floor below had been coated with a heavy-duty plastic. In places, the wheels of trolleys carrying rockets had worn through this plastic covering to expose the bare steel beneath.

The throbbing of the ventilators ceased abruptly and there was total silence. I looked around me, a little uncertain, waiting for someone to appear; but there was no sign of life. Only a neon arrow glowed, pointing towards a moving walkway which was silently unreeling. I allowed myself to be carried forward.

The ceiling of the hall descended in a fine parabolic arc until it reached the entrance to a gallery, in whose recesses gas cylinders, gauges, parachutes, crates and a quantity of other objects were scattered about in untidy heaps.