The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

Captain Phoebus and his submariners notwithstanding, one type of nutrition that is being seriously considered is about as far a cry from blueberry pie as can be imagined. This is the botanical group called the algae, one of the earth’s most primitive forms of vegetation. In many respects, algae would make the ideal food for the astronaut, though they might not appeal to his palate. Algae contain proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, and could easily be grown aboard the ship—in small tanks irradiated by intense light. Moreover, they might solve the difficult problem of disposing of human waste, by using it as fertilizer. And, to mention another of algae’s virtues, they can photosynthesize—that is, re-form the molecules of carbon dioxide breathed out by the space traveler, thereby releasing oxygen. Less than two months ago, during the world’s first international symposium on submarine and space medicine, which was held by the American Institute of Biological Sciences at the naval submarine base in Groton, Connecticut, some researchers reported the discovery of a new strain of algae that can increase itself by cell multiplication a thousandfold daily; the previous high had been eight times. The taste of algae, it might be mentioned, varies; one strain, for example, has a black-peppery tang, and another tastes something like mushrooms. “Algae have it all over pemmi-can,” one man who has sampled both told me. But he hadn’t eaten algae month after month in a spaceship.

  This whole scheme of spaceship farming is patterned after nature’s cycle here on earth, where time and the sun’s energy, through the chemical changes they bring about, convert animal wastes and dead plants into crops. “What better method [of producing food] is there than to emulate the system already found in existence on the earth?” is a rhetorical question asked in “Closed Cycle Biological Systems for Space Feeding,” a paper put out by the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute for the Armed Forces, in Chicago. “Man will be supplied food, water and oxygen from biological and chemical systems. He will eat the food, turning out the same wastes in the spaceship that are produced on the face of the earth.” One expert I met, Dr. Harvey E. Savely, director of the Aero Medical Division of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, confessed to me that the prospect of having our space men grow and harvest algae strikes him as anachronistic. “To think,” he said, “that we may develop so advanced a machine as a spaceship and then have to fall back on so primitive a calling as agriculture.”

  Of all the strange experiences that may await the astronaut, none will be quite so strange, the experts agree, as weightlessness. This phenomenon will occur as soon as the spaceship reaches a speed at which the rocket’s centrifugal force cancels the pull of the earth’s gravity, and when it does, the space man, whether settling into orbit or making for Venus or Mars, will know for certain that he has arrived in outer space. He will weigh nothing. The air in his cabin will weigh nothing. The warm carbon dioxide he breaths out, being no lighter than the air in the cabin, will not rise, so he will have to exhale forcibly. Momentum, the force whirling the ship on its course, will rule its interior as well, and with possibly weird results. All objects that are not in some way fastened down—a map, a flashlight, a pencil—will float freely, subjecting the space man to a haphazard crossfire. If he were to drink water from an ordinary tumbler, the water might dash into his nostrils, float there, and drown him. Ordinary tumblers will not be used, however; plastic squeeze bottles will. (“The proper-size orifice is being worked out,” I was told by Major Henry G. Wise, of the Human Factors Division, Air Force Directorate of Research and Development.) Far more startling than the movement of objects, though, will be the space man’s own movements. Normally, in making a movement of any kind, a man has to overcome the body’s inertia plus its weight; a weightless man has only the inertia to overcome, and the chances are that it will take a long time for his muscles to grow accustomed to the fact. “What would be a normal step on earth would . . . send the ‘stepper’ sailing across the cabin or somersaulting wildly in the air,” the Air University Command and Staff School study declares. “A mere sneeze could propel the victim violently against the cabin wall and result in possible injury.”

  Actually, very little is known about weightlessness. Until a few years ago, it was something that man had experienced only in very special circumstances, and then for no more than a fraction of a second—at the start of a roller coaster’s plunge, for example, or at the instant of going off a high diving board. With the man-in-space program moving along, however, weightlessness has been deliberately arranged in certain flights undertaken at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, in San Antonio; in these, jet planes, flying along a prescribed parabolic course, manage to escape the effects of gravity for as long as thirty seconds. The exposure to weightlessness, brief as it is, has had widely varying effects on the airmen. “The sensation can best be described as one of incredulity, or even slight amusement,” a colonel with a great deal of flying experience has reported, ascribing this reaction to “the incongruity of seeing objects and one’s own feet float free of the floor without any muscular effort.” Another airman, who was a gymnast in college, was reminded of “having started a back flip from a standing position and then become hung up part way over—looking toward the sky but not completing the flip.” The sensation, he said, gave him “no particular enjoyment or dislike”—only “a feeling of indifference.” Other airmen have found the experience extremely unpleasant—accompanied by nausea, sleepiness, weakness, sweating, and/or vertigo—and, to confuse matters, still others have discovered that their reactions differ on different flights. All told, one expert estimates, about a third of the subjects regard weightlessness as “definitely distressing,” while a fourth regard it as “not exactly comfortable.”

  The experts realize, of course, that weightless voyages lasting a good deal longer than half a minute would have physical and mental results that can only be guessed at now. “Most probably, nature will make us pay for the free ride,” one scientist has said, almost superstitiously. For one thing, a long trip would raise hob with a man’s muscles. In any earthly condition of inactivity, no matter how extreme, they still have the job of resisting gravity, and without this they are bound to grow flabby. Moreover, the space man’s sense of balance would be thrown out of whack; this sense is governed by a liquid in our inner ear, and without gravity that liquid, floating freely in the chambers of the ear, could not be relied on to do its work. Not only would the space man be uncertain of where he was in his cabin at any particular moment, I learned from Lieutenant Colonel Robert Williams, a consultant in neurology and psychiatry to the Surgeon General, but he would run the risk of losing his “body image.” This image, Dr. Williams told me, is the deeply rooted conception that we all have of ourselves as a physical entity; it is one of the major constituents of our equanimity. “Without a body image,” he went on, “a person has difficulty in determining what is inside oneself and what is outside, in distinguishing one’s fantasy life from one’s real environment. In losing it, we face a possible complete disruption of personality.”

  Assuming that the space traveler returns to earth with his personality undamaged, other difficulties may be in store for him. “A man who has been weightless for a couple of weeks would find it as hard to move around as a hospital patient taking his first steps after a long siege in bed,” Dr. Savely told me. “If he were to travel in a cooped-up posture over a long period of time—and, for all we know now, that may be the only way he can travel—the whole architecture of his skeleton might change. Of course, we simply cannot allow that to happen.” In view of such forebodings, it is not surprising that the man-in-space people are seeking to avoid weightlessness, altogether or in part, by developing an artificial substitute for gravity, but they don’t seem to have made much headway. According to one scheme, the space man’s cabin would be attached to the rocket by a long cable and would be swung around it continuously, thus creating a field of gravity that would restore the passenger’s weight and, presumably, his efficiency. Discussing this in the Scientific American, Dr. Heinz Haber,
of the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, guesses that it would work only as long as the passenger stood absolutely still. “Every voluntary movement,” he writes, “would give the traveler the peculiar illusion that he was being moved haphazardly.” Another approach would be to have the astronaut tread a magnetized floor in iron shoes, but Dr. Haber isn’t too sanguine about this one, either. Not only would the magnetism throw off the ship’s electronic instruments, he points out, but it would “probably add to the traveler’s confusion, for while his shoes would be attracted to the floor, his nonmagnetic body would not.”

  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.”

  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 s
tudents 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.”