The Voyage of the Space Beagle

by A. E. van Vogt

  “That’s just it. Because of the superficial resemblance, it is a delusion.” Dennison was clearly trying to put over some private conception of his own. He was an earnest, heavy-set individual, and he leaned forward now as if he had already made his point. “Scientists have to stick together. Just imagine, here’s an entire shipload of us, and what do they put over us? — a man who deals in abstractions. That’s no training for handling practical problems.”

  “Funny, I thought he was doing rather well in smoothing out the problems of us working men.”

  “We can smooth out our own problems.” Dennison sounded irritated.

  Grosvenor had been punching buttons. Now his food began to slide up from the vertical conveyor at the centre of the table. He sniffed. “Ah, roast sawdust, straight from the chemistry department. It smells delicious. The question is, has the same amount of effort been lavished to make the sawdust from the brushwood of the cat planet as nourishing as the sawdust we brought?” He held up his hand. “Don’t answer. I don’t wish to be disillusioned about the integrity of Mr. Kent’s department, even though I don’t like his behaviour. You see, I asked him for some of the co-operation they mention on the card, and he told me to call back in ten years. I guess he forgot about the election. Besides, he’s got a nerve scheduling a political meeting on the same night that I’m giving a lecture.” He began to eat.

  “No lecture is as important as this rally. We’re going to discuss matters of policy that will affect everybody on the ship, including you.” Dennison’s face was flushed, his voice harsh. “Look, Grove, you can’t possibly have anything against a man you don’t even know very well. Kent is the kind of person who won’t forget his friends.”

  “I’ll wager he also has special treatment for those he dislikes,” said Grosvenor. He shrugged impatiently. “Carl, to me Kent represents all that is destructive in our present civilization. According to Korita’s theory of cycle history, we’re in the ‘winter’ stage of our culture. I’m going to ask him to explain that more fully one of these days, but I’ll wager Kent’s caricature of a democratic campaign is an example of the worst aspects of such a period.”

  He would have liked to add that this was exactly what he was aboard to prevent, but that, of course, was out of the question. It was just such discord as this that had brought disaster to so many previous expeditions. As a result, unknown to the men, all vessels had become proving grounds for sociological experiments: Nexialists, elections, split command — these and innumerable small changes were being tried out in the hope that man’s expansion into space could somehow be made less costly.

  There was a sneer on Dennison’s face. He said, “Listen to the young philosopher!” He added flatly, “Vote for Kent if you know what’s good for you!”

  Grosvenor restrained his irritation. “What’ll he do — cut off my share of the sawdust? Maybe I’ll run for the directorship myself. Get the votes of all men thirty-five and under. After all, we outnumber the oldsters three or four to one. Democracy demands that we have representation on a proportional basis.”

  Dennison seemed to have recovered himself. He said, “You’re making a grave error, Grosvenor. You’ll find out.”

  The rest of the meal was eaten in silence.

  At five minutes before 1550 hours the following evening, Grosvenor began to feel that his lecture notice had drawn a blank. It baffled him. He could understand that Kent might conceivably forbid his followers to attend lectures given by men who had indicated that they would not support him. But even if the chief chemist controlled a majority of the voters, that still left several hundred individuals who had not been influenced. Grosvenor couldn’t help remembering what a Nexial-trained government executive had said to him on the eve of departure.

  “It won’t be easy, this job you’ve taken aboard the Beagle. Nexialism is a tremendous new approach to learning and association. The older men will fight it instinctively. The young men, if they have already been educated by ordinary methods, will automatically be hostile to anything which suggests that their newly acquired techniques are out of date. You yourself have still to use in practice what you learned in theory, although in your case that very transition is part of your training. Just remember that a man who is right often enough gets a hearing in a crisis.”

  At 1610, Grosvenor visited the bulletin boards in two of the lounges and in the central corridor, and changed the time of his lecture to 1700 hours. At 1700 o’clock he made it 1750 hours, and then still later altered it to 1800 hours. “They’ll be coming out,” he told himself. “The political meeting can’t last forever, and the other lectures are two-hour affairs at most.” At five minutes to 1800 hours, he heard the footsteps of two men come slowly along the corridor. There was silence as they paused opposite his open doorway, then a voice said. “This is the place, all right.”

  They laughed, for no apparent reason. A moment later, two young men entered. Grosvenor hesitated, then nodded friendly greeting. From the first day of the voyage, he had set himself the task of identifying the individuals aboard the ship, their voices, their faces, their names — as much about them as he could discover. With so many men to investigate, the job was not yet completed. But he remembered these two. They were both from the chemistry department.

  He watched them warily as they wandered around looking at the display of training devices. They seemed to be secretly amused. They settled finally in two of the chairs, and one of them said with subtly exaggerated politeness, “When does the lecture begin, Mr. Grosvenor?”

  Grosvenor looked at his watch. “In about five minutes,” he said.

  During that interval, eight men came in. It stimulated Grosvenor considerably after his bad start, particularly since one of the men was Donald McCann, head of the geology department. Even the fact that four of his listeners were from the chemistry department did not disturb him.

  Pleased, he launched into his lecture on the conditioned reflex, and its development since the days of Pavlov into a cornerstone of the science of Nexialism.

  Afterwards, McCann came up and talked to him. He said, “I noticed that part of the technique is the so-called sleep machine, which educates you while you sleep.” He chuckled. “I remember one of my old professors pointing out that you could learn all that is known about science in just under a thousand years. You didn’t admit that limitation.”

  Grosvenor was aware of the other’s grey eyes watching him with a kindly twinkle. He smiled. “That limitation,” he said, “was partly a product of the old method of using the machine without preliminary training. Today, the Nexial Foundation uses hypnosis and psychotherapy to break initial resistance. For instance, when I was tested, I was told that normally for me the sleep machine could only be turned on for five minutes every two hours.”

  “A very low tolerance,” said McCann. “Mine was three minutes every half hour.”

  “But you accepted that,” said Grosvenor pointedly. “Right?”

  “What did you do?”

  Grosvenor smiled. ”I didn’t do anything. I was conditioned by various methods until I could sleep soundly for eight hours while the machine ran steadily. Several other techniques supplemented the process.”

  The geologist ignored the final sentence. “Eight solid hours!” he said in astonishment.

  “Solid,” agreed Grosvenor.

  The older man seemed to consider that. “Still,” he said finally, “that only reduces the figure by a factor of about three. Even without conditioning, there are many people who can take five minutes out of every quarter hour of a sleep period without waking.”

  Grosvenor replied slowly, studying the other’s face for reaction. “But the information has to be repeated many times.” He realized from the staggered expression on McCann’s face that the point had been made. He went on quickly: “Surely, sir, you’ve had the experience of seeing or hearing something — once — and never forgetting it. And yet at other times what seems to be an equally profound impression fades away to
a point where you cannot recall it accurately even when it is mentioned. There are reasons for that. The Nexial Foundation found out what they were.”

  McCann said nothing. His lips were pursed. Over his shoulder, Grosvenor noticed that the four men from the chemistry department were gathered in a group near the corridor door. They were talking together in low tones. He gave them only a glance, and then said to the geologist, “There were times in the beginning when I thought the pressure would be too much for me. You understand, I’m not talking about the sleep machine. In actual quantity of training, that was just about ten per cent of the total.”

  McCann was shaking his head. “Those figures almost overwhelm me. I suppose you get your largest percentage figure from those little films where each picture stays on but a fraction of a second.”

  Grosvenor nodded. “We used the tachistoscopic films about three hours a day, but they constituted some forty-five per cent of the training. The secret is speed and repetition.”

  “An entire science at one sitting!” McCann exclaimed. “That’s what you call learning-as-a-whole.”

  “That’s one facet of it. We learned with every sense, through our fingers, our ears, or eyes, and even from smell and taste.”

  Once more McCann stood frowning. Grosvenor saw that the young chemists were trooping out of the room at last. From the corridor came the sound of low laughter. It seemed to startle McCann out of his brown study. The geologist thrust out his hand and said, “How about coming up to my department one of these days? Perhaps we can work out a method of co-ordinating your integrative knowledge with our field work. We can try it out when we land on another planet.”

  As Grosvenor walked along the corridor to his own bedroom, he whistled under his breath. He’d won his first victory, and the feeling was pleasant.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next morning, as Grosvenor approached his department, he saw with astonishment that the door was open. A bright swath of light cut out from it across the more dimly illuminated corridor. He hurried forward, and stopped short in the doorway.

  In his first glance, he saw seven chemist technicians, including two who had attended his lecture. Machinery had been moved into the room. There were a number of large vats, a series of heating units, and an entire system of pipes for supplying chemicals to the vats.

  Grosvenor’s mind leaped back to the way the chemist technicians had acted at his lecture. He moved through the doorway, tense with the possibilities and sick with the thought of what might have been done to his own equipment. He used this outer room for general purposes. It normally contained some machinery, but it was primarily designed to channel the output from the other rooms for purposes of group instruction. The remaining four rooms contained his special equipment.

  Through the open door that led into his film and sound-recording studio, Grosvenor saw that it also had been taken over. The shock of that held him silent. Ignoring the men, he went through the outer room and into each of the four special sections in turn. Three had been occupied by the invading chemists. That included, in addition to the film studio, the laboratory and the toolroom. The fourth section, with its technique devices, and an adjoining storeroom were completely unscathed. Into them had been shoved and piled the movable machinery and furniture from the other rooms. A door led from the fourth section to a smaller corridor. Grosvenor presumed grimly that it was henceforth to be his entrance to the department.

  And still he held his anger, weighing the potentialities of the situation. He would be expected to protest to Morton. Somehow, Kent would try to turn that to his own advantage in the election. Grosvenor couldn’t see just how it would benefit the chemist in his campaign. But Kent evidently thought it would.

  Slowly, Grosvenor returned to the outer room — his auditorium. He noticed for the first time that the vats were food-making machines. Clever. It would look as if the space were being put to good use, something which, it could be argued, had not been true before. The shrewdness of it challenged his own integrity.

  There seemed little doubt as to why it had happened. Kent disliked him. In setting himself verbally against Kent’s election — a fact which must have been reported — he had intensified that dislike. But the chief chemist’s vindictive reaction, if handled in the proper manner, might be used against him.

  It seemed to Grosvenor that he must see to it that Kent definitely did not benefit from his invasion.

  He walked over to one of the men and said, “Will you pass the word along that I welcome the opportunity to further the education of the staff of the chemistry department, and that I hope no one will object to learning while he works.”

  He moved off without waiting for a reply. When he glanced back, the man Was staring after him. Grosvenor suppressed a smile. He felt quite cheerful as he entered the technique room. Now, at last, he was confronted by a situation in which he could employ some of the training methods he had available.

  Because of the way his movable cabinets and other equipment had been jumbled into a comparatively small space, it took him a little time to find the hypnotic gas he wanted. He spent nearly half an hour fitting a baffler to the spout, so that the compressed matter inside wouldn’t hiss as it poured out. When that was done, Grosvenor carried the container into the outer room. He unlocked a wall cabinet that had a grated door, placed the container inside, and released the gas. Quickly, he locked the door again.

  A faint odour of perfume mingled with the chemical smell from the vat.

  Whistling softly, Grosvenor started across the room. He was stopped by the straw boss, one of the men who had attended his lecture the previous night.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing.”

  Grosvenor said mildly, “You’ll hardly notice it in a minute. It’s part of my educational programme for your staff.”

  “Who asked you for an educational programme?”

  “Why, Mr. Maiden,” said Grosvenor in simulated astonishment. “What else would you be doing in my department?” He broke off with a laugh. “I’m just kidding you. It’s a deodorant. I don’t want this place smelled up.”

  He moved off without waiting for a reply, and then stood to one side watching the men for reactions to the gas. There were fifteen individuals altogether. He could expect five favourable reactions and five partially favourable. There were ways of telling how a person had been affected.

  After several minutes of careful observation, Grosvenor walked forward, paused beside one of the men, and said in a low but firm voice, “Come to the washroom in five minutes, and I’ll give you something. Now forget about it!”

  He retreated to the doorway that connected the outer room with the film studio. As he turned he saw Maiden go over and speak to the man. The technician shook his head in evident surprise.

  The straw boss’s voice held a note of astounded anger. “What do you mean, he didn’t speak to you? I saw him.”

  The technician got angry. “I didn’t hear a thing. I ought to know.”

  If the argument continued, Grosvenor neither heard it nor saw it. From the corner of his eye, he noticed that one of the younger men in the next room was showing signs of sufficient response. He walked over to the man in the same casual way, and spoke the same words that he had to the first subject — with one difference: He made the time fifteen minutes instead of five.

  In all, six men responded to the degree Grosvenor considered essential to his plan. Of the remaining nine individuals, three — including Maiden — showed a milder reaction. Grosvenor left the latter group alone. At this stage, he needed virtual certainties. Later he could try a different pattern for the others.

  Grosvenor was waiting when the first subject of his experiment entered the washroom. He smiled at the man, and said, “Ever seen one of these?” He held out the tiny ear crystal, with its flanges for fastening it inside the ear.

  The man accepted the little instrument, looked at it then shook his head in puzzlement. “What is it?” he asked.

&nb
sp; Grosvenor commanded, “Turn this way, and I’ll fit it into your ear.” As the other obeyed without question, Grosvenor went on firmly. “You’ll notice, I’m sure, that the part facing outside is flesh coloured. In other words, it can be seen only on close examination. If anyone does notice it, you can say it’s a hearing aid.”

  He completed the fitting and stepped back. “After a minute or so, you won’t even know that it’s there. You won’t feel it.”

  The technician seemed interested. “I can hardly feel it now. What does it do?”

  “It’s a radio,” Grosvenor explained. He went on slowly, emphasizing each word. “But you will never consciously hear what it says. The words come through, and go directly into your unconscious. You can hear what other people say to you. You can carry on conversations. In fact, you’ll just go about your normal business unaware that anything unusual is going on. You’ll forget all about it”

  “Well, imagine that!” said the technician.

  He went out shaking his head. A few minutes later, the second man came in; and then, each in turn, the remaining four who had shown a deep trance response. Grosvenor fitted them all with duplicates of the nearly invisible ear radio.

  Humming tunelessly, he brought out another hypnotic gas, put it into a suitable container, and substituted it for the one in the cabinet. This time, the straw boss and four other men responded profoundly. Of the rest, two showed a slight reaction, one — who had previously been slightly affected — seemed to come out of his state completely, and one man gave no sign at all.

  Grosvenor decided to be satisfied with eleven out of fifteen deep-trance subjects. Kent was going to be unpleasantly surprised at the number of chemical geniuses that turned up in his department.

  Nevertheless, this was far from final victory. That was probably not obtainable except by a somewhat more direct attack on Kent himself.

  Swiftly, Grosvenor made a tape recording for an experimental broadcast to the ear radios. He left it running steadily while he wandered among the men and observed how they were reacting. Four individuals seemed to be worried about something. Grosvenor went up to one, who was shaking his head frequently.