Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

Naturally, all these difficulties would be cleared up if the vehicle carried a physicist, an astronomer, a meteorologist, an engineer, a physician, and the rest, but at the moment it seems likely that the first spaceships will carry a crew of only one, because present computations show that half a ton of fuel and metal must be provided for every pound of cargo. Still, some farsighted psychologists are pondering the intangibles that would make a large spaceship a happy one. The crew members, living close to disaster at all times and needing all their resources to forestall it, will have to be able to get along with one another, and various experts have told me that this state of affairs will not be as easy to achieve as it might sound. One question they are mulling over is what size crew would prove most efficient and congenial, and the question, I learned, has its facets. A group of five or six, research discloses, would be better in some ways, and worse in others, than a smaller one. Studies now in progress at various universities, though their results are anything but definitive, seem to show that half a dozen men thrown together in close confinement tend to form a highly standardized, if miniature, community, taking on and retaining social patterns through a desire to conform. The members of a smaller group, being less concerned about neighborliness and conformity, are apt to attack the business at hand, whatever it may be, with greater zest and intelligence. “It’s something of a dilemma,” I was told by Luigi Petrullo, who heads up the Group Psychology Branch of the Office of Naval Research, an agency that has for many years observed the behavior of submarine crews. “The factors that make for harmony—a nice clubby atmosphere, if you will—won’t necessarily make for efficiency, will probably lead to jangled nerves. The particular character of a mission, I suspect, will have a lot to do with determining the size of the crew.”

Whatever the crew’s size, its members will have no escape from one another’s likes, dislikes, normalities, abnormalities, and day-to-day moods for weeks, months, or years, in which long stretches of boredom will be interrupted only by moments of stark terror. Such a situation, as the military services have discovered from observing the behavior of men assigned to long-drawn-out perilous missions, does not ordinarily make for camaraderie; indeed, familiarity may breed feelings even stronger than contempt. One of the psychologists who pointed this out to me referred to a passage from “Kabloona,” in which the author, Gontran de Poncins, a French anthropologist and explorer, describes his change of attitude toward a trader, Paddy Gibson, with whom he spent part of an arctic winter:

I liked Gibson as soon as I saw him, and from the moment of my arrival we got on exceedingly well. He was a man of poise and order; he took life calmly and philosophically; he had an endless budget of good stories. In the beginning we would sit for hours . . . discussing with warmth and friendliness every topic that suggested itself, and I soon felt a real affection for him.

Now as winter closed in round us, and week after week our world narrowed until it was reduced—in my mind, at any rate—to the dimensions of a trap, I went from impatience to restlessness, and from restlessness finally to monomania. I began to rage inwardly and the very traits in my friend .. . which had struck me at the beginning as admirable, ultimately seemed to me detestable.

The time came when I could no longer bear the sight of this man who was unfailingly kind to me.

In an effort to learn more about the way groups of men react to prolonged togetherness, the military services, some universities, and various aircraft companies have been incarcerating crews in mockup space gondolas right here on earth, and the findings, though inevitably sketchy, have, on the whole, been illuminating. After a day or two, most of the subjects—even pilots with considerable flight experience —begin to show signs of listlessness and frayed nerves. Several experiments of the sort have been conducted by the Air Force Aero Medical Laboratory, in Dayton, Ohio, each involving the isolation of a five-man crew for five days, and as the time wore on, the crews, whose talk was recorded, revealed a preoccupation with food that eventually bordered on the obsessive. I was told about these experiments by Charles Dempsey, the head of the laboratory’s Escape Division, which is studying the habitation of space vehicles and emergency escapes from them. “The men seemed to be living to eat rather than eating to live,” he said. “Their schedule provided for fifteen minutes of work each hour for sixteen hours, with the remaining forty-five minutes spent sitting around, after which they had eight hours off duty, eighty per cent of this time spent in sleeping. At the start, they discussed everything under the sun. In due course, though, they just about talked themselves out, and then there seemed to be only one subject that still interested them—food. Each man had his own five-day supply of food to eat when he wished, and, as things turned out, practically every one of the men soon started watching what his companions were doing with their food. Each seemed uncertain whether he was using good judgment about his own supply —whether he was eating too much of it at once or too little. Living on the kind of schedule they did, their stomachs became confused, and they kept debating whether it was breakfast time or suppertime or what. Yes, food got to be quite a deal. I’d say it was on their minds three-quarters of the time they were awake.”

The food that the earth-bound astronauts were given at the Aero Medical Laboratory was familiar, varied, and tasty, including such items as brownies and salted peanuts. In space, the voyager would be unlikely to have such interesting fare. In fact, no one knows at this point what he would have in the way of food. On the assumption that the spaceship would have automatic controls, Dr. John Lyman, associate professor of engineering at the University of California, has gone so far as to suggest that if a space man were bound for Mars, say, he might be given a still undeveloped drug that would lower his body temperature and put him to sleep until he got there; such a hibernating man, with his breathing and heart action slowed, would require relatively little food and water, and what he did need could be automatically injected into his veins. In an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dr. James B. Edson, assistant to the director of Research and Development of the Department of the Army, goes even further, envisioning a synthetic nutrient that could make breathing as well as eating and drinking unnecessary. After speculating for a time on how the nutrient might work, Dr. Edson does relent a bit. “It may, however, prove necessary,” his article says, “to breath at least a little, so as not to get out of the habit.”

In contrast to Dr. Lyman and Dr. Edson, some of the Navy’s scientists take a decidedly old-fashioned view. With a conscious, lively space crew in mind, these men insist on a normal terrestrial diet, including all possible trimmings. “We do not completely understand why,” Captain C. P. Phoebus, a physician assigned to the Naval War College, in Newport; has written, “but we have found in dealing with submariners that the mere provision of enough calories, bulk, vitamins and minerals, and other essentials is not enough to keep a man physically and mentally healthy. It is very important that some of these needs be supplied in the form of fresh food, that the types of food and cooking techniques be varied, that the diet be balanced, and that the food be as tasty as that served at home. If it is not, the crew’s performance and morale are not at their best.” And that, these Navy men seem to think, would be just as true in outer space as under water.