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

In the silence and isolation, the space man is likely to be afflicted with hallucinations; he may see strange shapes and hear strange voices. That, at least, was the experience of a group of students at the University of Texas who voluntarily took part in an isolation experiment, and one report prepared by General Dynamics says that it will be necessary “to convince future space men that the hallucinations they may experience are the normal responses of . . . isolated people and not a cause for worry.” Paradoxical as it may seem to the layman, ear surgery has been proposed as a method of forestalling visual illusions, and nerve-soothing drugs are being studied, as well as drugs to regulate the metabolic rate and the appetite. Another effect of isolation is profound fatigue, I was told, and here, again, it is hoped that drugs may be the answer, though a recent experiment with one powerful substance would seem to indicate the need for further research. The experiment has been described in a paper called “Fatigue, Confinement, Proficiency and Decrement,” by Dr. George T. Hauty, of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine. A group of subjects used the stimulant to good advantage for twenty-four hours, Dr. Hauty discloses, but then delusions and hallucinations set in and proficiency vanished. “Since these operations [the delusions and hallucinations] occur with a normal sensory environment,” he concludes, “it may be that such will occur to a greater degree in a closed ecological system associated with sensory deprivation as it is found in space flight with nullified gravitation [weightlessness], in a hermetic cabin, surrounded by the perpetual silence of space.”

Perhaps the greatest danger of all is that the space man will fall victim to the “breakoff phenomenon”—an eerie and sometimes fatal by-product of isolation and boredom, which, according to a paper published in the Journal of Aviation Medicine, has caused some airplane pilots, flying well within the confines of the earth’s atmosphere, to experience an unsettling “loss of identification with the earth.” Upon becoming thus disconnected from the home planet, the flier grows uninterested in survival and falls into something like a trance, staring with apparent concentration at his instruments or out his window. Skin divers, Dr. Trumbull told me, undergo a counterpart of the breakoff phenomenon in what Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the French writer and underwater explorer, has called “the rapture of the depths”—a beckoning power that more than one diver has heeded, with fatal results. Colonel David G. Simons, new chief of the Space Biology Branch of the Aero Medical Field Laboratory, in Alamogordo, experienced the break-off phenomenon in 1956, when he made his famous balloon ascent to an altitude of a hundred thousand feet. In describing the sensation to me, he likened it to the grip of a daydream. Judging only by his own experience, he said, he doubted whether the breakoff phenomenon would trouble any space traveler who managed to keep occupied. “When I was busy—and if ever anyone was busy, for thirty-two hours I was, what with making observations and reading dials and maps—I wasn’t bothered by breakoff,” he said. “But when I was tired and took a short break, I did feel that peculiar sense of detachment.”

Even if the grand objective of a man in space is not attained for a long time to come, many of the scientists on the project are convinced that their work will bring about some fairly immediate benefits on earth. Animals that are to be catapulted into space in the near future, for instance, will have instruments attached to their bodies that will send back data on their physiological reactions, and these instruments—very possibly like those that were attached to the late Laika—may have their medical uses here and now. Heart action, brain waves, changes in both deep and superficial reflexes, and a wide variety of other information will be recorded, and the effort to develop instruments for this purpose, in the opinion of General Ogle, is hastening the improvement (the miniaturization, for one thing) of many appliances used in terrestrial diagnostic procedures. Moreover, he said, devices that will eventually be used for transmitting data from spaceships may soon be used to send information to centralized hospitals, where panels of specialists can diagnose difficult cases no matter how far away the patients are. “Maybe they’ll save the life of an Ozark woman whose hill doctor is stumped,” General Ogle remarked. Another doctor general, Don Flickinger, who is director of Life Sciences for the Air Research and Development Command, told me that wired monkeys, mice, and rats have already been rocketed and ballooned to high altitudes, though within the earth’s atmosphere, and these, he said, may one day furnish leads for cancer research. He was particularly interested in the fact that certain black mice, dispatched from the Holloman Air Force Base, have white streaks in their fur where cosmic rays hit it. The black fur has never grown back, and this interests the General. “The white streak isn’t just an ordinary burn,” he said. “It represents a deleterious transfer of energy from ray to rodent, and it produces a basic alteration in cell function, though the cells continue to live. Well, what the cancer-re-search people are doing, to put it in basic terms, is to find out all they can about what influences and stimulates and changes the cell.”

Another study that has been speeded up by the man-in-space program is that of the stress hormones, like adrenalin, which accelerate our mental processes and quicken our reflexes. Fear triggers the flow of adrenalin, and adrenalin thereupon intensifies some of the side effects of fear—a faster heartbeat, for instance, and a tendency of the blood to clot. Now some scientists are calculating that if a man were to be given small doses of the stress hormones, he might develop a tolerance for them, and the dangerous effects of anxiety would be brought more or less under control—an achievement that, an Air Force physiologist told me, would benefit people here as well as out in space. “Certainly a space man is going to get the quakes,” he told me, “but no worse than those poor wretches who were tossed to the lions in ancient Rome. A fellow can get just so scared and no more.” As various medical discoveries give us increasing control over the nervous system, General Flickinger said, it may become possible to predict human performance under pressure. “This question is a dilly,” he said. “To tackle it, one has to deal with the whole spectrum of personality, from a genius to an African Bushman, say—a simple fellow with a stomach that tells him he’s hungry and eyes that tell him when the sun goes down. We know right now that if the heart does this and the cerebral cortex that, then, as a functional organism, a particular fellow can do this and that. But to translate this into terms of human performance, of what he will do when the chips are down— that’s something else again. It’s possible that I will have a hand in picking our first space operator, and in any case he’ll surely be someone who has passed all the tests and who has a record of behaving well under stress. But how he’ll behave once he gets up there—all we can do is hope.”

Interesting though the terrestrial by-products of space research may be, the experts are concerned principally with the big prize. They want a man in space, and nothing less will do. Some of them have even begun to wonder exactly why. Some laymen are intrigued by the idea that space stations might have a military value, but not many scientists. In fact, Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, president of the California Institute of Technology, speaking at the Second Symposium on Basic and Applied Science in the Navy, held a few months ago in San Diego, dismissed the whole idea. If any military commander looks forward to launching missiles from Fortress Moon, Dr. DuBridge said, “Well, more power to him! He’ll find the temperature a bit variable— boiling water by day, dry ice by night. And the days and nights are each two weeks long! He will find the lack of air, water and any appreciable or usable source of energy a bit inconvenient. And he will be bothered by the logistic problem of shooting his materials and supplies and weapons and personnel up there in the first place. Why shoot a load of explosives plus all auxiliary equipment two hundred and forty thousand miles to the moon, then two hundred and forty thousand miles back to hit a target only five thousand miles away? I’ll guarantee to shoot a thousand missiles from the U.S. to any point on earth while our moon man is waiting twelve hours, more or less, for the earth to turn around and bring the target into shooting position. Finally ... a bomb projected on a zero-angular-momentum path from the moon to the earth will take just five days to get there. . . . And we will hope the bombardier can figure correctly which side of the earth will be up by then.”