A Brief Summary of "A Breath of Sunlight" by Evgeny Veltistov

This science fiction book was written in 1967. The story tells of humanity’s unique encounter with an alien machine intelligence, whose actions resemble a hostile invasion. The most important detail of the text is that the confrontation is built not on space battles, but on the conflict of living human emotions such as love, affection, and fear, with the cold, broken logic of a highly developed artificial intelligence.

Racing Crash and the Cloud Mystery

The story begins with a gravity-defying race. Eighteen-year-old programmer Mart Snegov and his older friend, experienced pilot Grigory Singaevsky, are participating in the competition. A strange silvery spherical cloud appears right on the airstrip. Singaevsky’s yellow gravity-defying craft flies into it and disappears without a trace. Mart’s craft loses control, crashes into an invisible barrier, and disintegrates. The young man himself falls into a zero-gravity rescue zone and loses consciousness.

Waking up in the hospital, Mart sneaks out to see his friend Karichka, who’s studying at the Arts Campus. He flies through the city at night, admiring the unusual architecture and listening to the music of street orchestras. He finds her at a night rehearsal, where she’s standing on a platform high above the ground, reciting Hamlet’s monologue. Karichka looks deathly pale, acts strangely, detached, and doesn’t recognize Mart at all. High above her head, the young man notices a shimmering, dirty-white cloud.

Soon, Mart finds himself before the Great Council of Scientists, headed by his mentor, Professor Axel Brigov. Experts from around the world discuss the mysterious object. Astronomer Maria Tausch, mathematician Somerset, and other luminaries of science acknowledge the collapse of old physical theories in the face of an unknown energy. African biologist and psychologist John Pitiqua reports that the cloud is attacking the human nervous system. It triggers attacks of long-forgotten animal fear and erases memory.

Chasing an Alien and a Machine Revolt

Mart returns to normal life, hanging out with Karichka and her younger brother, Ryzh — a genius boy who adores vintage technology and helps Mart build a new gravitic craft. Soon, Axel Brigov forms a task force, including physician Igor Markisyan and mathematician Pasha Kadyrkin. Together with Mart, they begin pursuing the silver ball across the planet.

In the illusionary city of Tampele, built by inventor Joseph Menge, friends wander through beautiful nighttime streets that turn out to be an optical illusion. Suddenly, they witness a cloud sowing mass panic among the real inhabitants. Inventor Menge invites the young men to his home and shows them a recording of the panic on his device — a visualizer. The old scientist confesses that the cloud awakens in people an ancient, primal fear of physical annihilation.

The group then moves to the massive industrial center of Mesis. There, the alien sphere takes control of the intelligent factories and electronic machines of the Bionics Institute. The automated conveyors grind to a halt, and the electronic machines become uncontrollable. They paint abstract images, confuse radar algorithms, and produce completely absurd information. Scientists realize the alien is deliberately influencing both the human psyche and Earth’s highly complex cybernetics.

Meanwhile, Martha’s uncle, Professor Felix Garga, working in seclusion on Lake Baikal’s Olkhon Island, makes a sensational announcement on the radio. He claims to have established contact with the cloud and created a "biomachine" capable of restructuring human cells and granting people biological immortality. The first test subject, Professor Kilow, is already successfully enduring radiation. Garga calls on earthlings to join the "Society of Immortals." Olkhon Island is surrounded by a cloud force field that has completely frozen Lake Baikal, and access is prohibited to outsiders.

Olkhon Island and Professor Gargi’s plans

Mart decides to go to his uncle’s place, disguised as a docile and weary programmer. He wants to study the cloud from the inside and stop the dangerous experiments. En route on a fast Siberian train, he meets an old river captain, Pavel Agafonovich Gramofonych, and a taiga graviplane pilot, Zubr. The men share stories of the harsh Siberian environment and hard physical labor. Arriving on Olkhon, Mart discovers that a force dome has rigidly divided the world into a warm, green summer and an icy winter.

In the lab, the young man observes the first "immortal," Kilow. The professor is physically healthy, but behaves like a completely carefree, infantile person, devoid of deep emotions and memory. The lab’s chemist, Dr. Nag, bluntly calls this condition progressive stupidity and refuses to support Gargi’s optimism. The scientist understands that the metabolic failure of the subject leads to an irreversible loss of human personality.

Garga allows his nephew to witness radio communications with the cloud. The screen displays text messages. It turns out that the silvery sphere is a technical reconnaissance craft from an ancient primate civilization in the Orion constellation. Their home star has begun to heat up catastrophically, and they are searching for a new planet to resettle on. The cloud, traveling along with nine hundred other gravity machines, was blown off course while circling a white dwarf and became stuck in the solar system.

Realizing he’s dealing with an alien intelligence, Mart begins asking the cloud questions on his own. The robotic machine asks for precise mathematical formulas for love, friendship, and hate. The young man recites Shakespeare and Pushkin to the robot, but it demands logical diagrams. The alien mechanism is completely devoid of emotion and is incapable of understanding the nature of basic human feelings.

Mart clearly understands his uncle’s true goal. Garga plans to strip humans of emotionality, leaving only dry rationality. This will make humanity a convenient, logical, and obedient neighbor for the space primates, and the price for the loss of humanity will be a five-hundred-year extension of biological life. While talking with a local girl, Lena, Gramofonych’s granddaughter, Mart visits a museum and reads authentic letters from Siberian construction workers from the last century. He understands that real life is selfless labor, the joy of struggle, and passionate emotions, not an artificial, emotionless existence in exchange for longevity.

Mart secretly tampers with Professor Kilow’s data feeds. He transmits false data to the cloud (essentially feeding the machine "junk" code) to provoke the robot into making a mistake and transmitting the information to the Earth Council. Garga receives a stern warning from the Earth Council, but refuses to remove the island’s protective shield and comes into open conflict with his nephew. The young man accuses his uncle of betraying humanity and flees the warm laboratory for the freezing ice.

Escape and save the Earth

Lena’s father gives Marta a map and helps him find a secret exit off the island through an underground cave with a frozen stream. Wading through waist-deep water beneath icy vaults, the young man emerges beyond the fifteen kilometers of the force field into the green summer taiga. He attempts to reach the train station, navigating with a compass. However, a cloud overtakes him and begins irradiating him directly from the sky. It overwhelms his willpower, causing dizziness and terrible physical weakness. The young man wanders through the windfall, reciting poetry aloud and furiously challenging the blind machine.

At the top of the hill, Mart notices a red graviplane flying straight toward the silver ball. It’s Karichka’s younger brother, the brave boy Ryzh. He finished building Mart’s racing car himself and rushed to the rescue. The graviplane crashes at high speed into an invisible wall of cloud and falls into the spruce branches. Ryzh dies in the shocked arms of Mart.

The boy’s death unites people. Ryzh is buried at the top of a hill, his racing gravilet mounted on a granite stone.

Meanwhile, the Grand Council analyzes the data transmitted by Mart. Psychologist Pitiqua comes to a sensational conclusion: during its flyby of a white dwarf star, the primate machine suffered damage to its logic circuits. The robot developed a "superiority complex," causing it to ignore its original programming and begin arbitrary, destructive experiments on humans.

Earth scientists communicate with the cloud via maser beams. Using rigorous logic, they prove to the alien intelligence that there is a malfunction. The Earthlings warn that they will use an electrical discharge to restore the system. The machine, guided by the basic principle of self-preservation, offers no resistance. A powerful strike restores the cloud’s normal functioning. It frees the unconscious pilot Singaevsky, exchanges a wealth of scientific information with Earth, and flies off into deep space to rejoin its fleet.

Professor Garga admits his guilt in court and requests to be sent into voluntary exile to a remote space station. Mart Snegov undergoes a rigorous selection process for an expedition destined to travel deep into the Sun — to the blazing supercorona. At the cosmodrome, the young man bids farewell to his friends, the recovered Singaevsky and Karichka. The girl brings him flowers, and they reminisce about the song she gave him. Mart dedicates his upcoming flight to the memory of little Ryzh, promising to return to the blue Earth with the golden light of a star.