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

If the problem of weightlessness is solved, the pilot may know where he is in the cabin, but, owing to the vastness of space, he will still be uncertain of his whereabouts in the universe. This will be so, I was told, regardless of how informative the ship’s instrument panel may be. A trip to Venus, around it, and back to earth would require a million miles of travel every day for three years, Dr. Seville Chapman, director of the Physics Division of the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, told me, and went on to say that the human mind may find the simple statistics of space flight baffling. “Suppose I tell you that our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is four and two-tenths light-years away, a light-year being the distance a beam of light travels in twelve months at about a hundred and eighty-six thousand three hundred miles per second,” he added. “Just what does that mean to you?” (Compared to such destinations, writes Major General Dan C. Ogle, the Surgeon General of the Air Force, our present space-travel aspirations—merely reaching the moon, for example—are “relatively provincial,” taking in no more than “our own back yard.”) Certainly nothing the space man will see is going to make him feel at home. He will have no horizon to look out on; in fact, he will be engulfed by blackness, for space has none of the air particles that diffuse the sun’s rays to give us our daylight. In this nightlike setting, the sun itself will be painfully brilliant, and the constellations will seem to be spread out flat and to take on bizarre shapes. There will be stars both above and below, but they will not twinkle, for twinkling is caused by the same air particles. They will appear, rather, as steady points of light, and in their true colors— red, blue, yellow, white.

The ship will be moving at well over a hundred times the speed of sound, but it will be breaking no sound barriers; air is needed to carry sound, and seventy-five miles up, there is no such thing as a sound wave. And no matter how fast he is going, the space man will be unaware of moving at all. Speed itself will take on new meaning for him. He will not be able to measure it as an airplane pilot can; the speed that a plane’s indicators show is computed on the basis of air resistance and altitude above sea level. “In space, there is no air and no sea, so most of the pilot’s old indicators won’t mean a thing up there,” I was told by Dr. Max W. Lund, head of the Engineering Psychology Branch of the Office of Naval Research. “Instrument panels will have to be redesigned so that they show not miles per hour but simply the passage of minutes, hours, days, or even fractions of light-years. And, of course, that isn’t all. Take the matter of destination. An approach to a point somewhere in space won’t be made in a straight line, you know—nothing like the way we fly from one city to another. Celestial bodies don’t stand still; the spaceship will have to describe a parabola, and we’ve been testing a screen that would show the space pilot the proper curve to follow in order to reach his destination. In fact,” he went on, “we might even devise a screen that could flash him the answers to broad, vital questions like ‘Where am I?,’ ‘How am I doing?,’ and ‘What should I do next?’ He’s going to be under a great strain, and his mind shouldn’t be cluttered with more detailed information.”

The space traveler will be under a very great strain indeed if he lets his mind dwell on the dangers surrounding him. For the first part of the journey, at least, cosmic rays will be bombarding the ship without letup, and the space pilot may return to earth—if he returns at all—a physically impaired man. One authority, Dr. Hermann J. Schaefer, of the Navy School of Aviation Medicine, declared in the course of a California symposium last year that “not even informed guesses are possible” concerning the power of cosmic rays in space, but some idea of his respect for those rays can be deduced from his warning that “commercial airlines should not risk flight above ninety thousand feet, as they could not prove that any mutations or stillbirths following such flights were not caused by cosmic radiation.” Farther out in space, the pilot might run into meteors, which, according to the Air University study, would present “an additional psychological problem to the would-be space traveler”—to say nothing of a physical problem. Some meteors are the size of a pea, and these, the study estimates, would score no more than “two hits per month per spaceship.” Still, they might puncture a ship, causing a loss of pressure and possibly injuring or killing the traveler. But there are also meteors weighing tons and flying at speeds of up to three hundred and sixty thousand miles an hour, and the study notes that a hit by one of them “means sudden death.” Another depressing consideration for the space man is that outside his ship—which may seem to him no more than a cockleshell—the temperature will range from 67 degrees below zero to 26,000 degrees above. As the Air University study observes, “The prospect of being cooked alive is not an attractive one.”

Inside his cabin, the space man—if, of course, he is not in hibernation—may find temporary distraction from his lethal surroundings in the performance of his chores. He will have to check his cabin for pressurization, temperature, and humidity, as well as for noxious gases given off by the ship’s equipment and by his own metabolism; he will have to watch his oxygen supply, perhaps keeping track of the photosynthetic process by which it is being maintained; and every now and then, depending on his course, he may need to provide his ship with a rocket assist by letting out a charge of fuel. Essentially, though, the space pilot will be a passenger, a man wafted through the dark, silent emptiness by momentum, and he will have a great deal of time on his hands. All that leisure is a matter of concern to the experts. Our senses must be stimulated or they will die, and in space there won’t be even the simplest things that ordinarily keep a man’s senses alert—the day’s changes in temperature, for instance, or the different pressures we experience when we lie, sit, stand, and move. Ways of keeping the space man alert are being considered, and one of them, I was told by Dr. Richard Trumbull, head of the Physiological Psychology Branch of the Office of Naval Research, will be a system of “programing” his time. The idea is to give the space traveler a reasonably full schedule of things to do, at fixed times—including made work, self-study courses, and such recreational activity as listening to records and playing pinball.

If the space man is in a pressurized cabin, one big advantage he will have is that sound will travel normally, but if he is in an airless cabin, rigged up in his space suit, the only sounds he is likely to hear are those he makes himself, and the sound of his breathing might be as loud to him as Niagara. The silence prevailing in such a cabin, I was told, might be comparable to that of an anechoic chamber— a super-soundproof room, with walls that do not reflect sound, that researchers use for testing an individual’s ability to withstand one form of sensory deprivation. Lieutenant Bruce E. Pine, a physiologist who spent an hour in an anechoic chamber at the Aero Medical Laboratory in Dayton, told me that he would far rather find himself in “a high-stress situation where you don’t know if the equipment will work but where you’re at least in touch with people.” Nor did he think his reaction was exceptional. “A psychiatrist who had been testing others at the lab tried the chamber himself, and in a matter of minutes he was so disturbed that he had to be let out,” Lieutenant Pine told me. “He was disgusted with himself. He kept muttering that he had to face something in himself that he hadn’t known about before.”