Return from the Stars

SIX

For a couple joined only by the violence of my madness, we suited each other above expectation. Our life together was subject to a curious division. When it came to a difference in attitudes, Eri was able to defend her position, but then the matter in question was usually of a general nature; she was, for example, a staunch advocate of betrization and defended it with arguments not taken from books. That she opposed my views so openly I considered a good sign; but these discussions of ours took place during the day. In the light of day she did not dare — or did not wish — to speak about me objectively, calmly, no doubt because she did not know which of her words would amount to pointing out some personal fault of mine, some absurdity of “the character from the pickle jar,” to use Olaf’s expression, and which an attack leveled at the basic values of my time. But at night — perhaps because the darkness attenuated my presence somewhat — she spoke to me about myself, that is, about us, and I was glad of these quiet conversations in the dark, for the dark mercifully hid my frequent amazement. She told me about herself, about her childhood, and in this way I learned for the second time — for the first time, really, since with concrete, human content — how finely wrought was this society of constant, delicately stabilized harmony. It was considered a natural thing that having children and raising them during the first years of their life should require high qualifications and extensive preparation, in other words, a special course of study; in order to obtain permission to have offspring, a married couple had to pass a kind of examination; at first this seemed incredible to me, but on thinking it over I had to admit that we, of the past, and not they, should be charged with having paradoxical customs: in the old society one was not allowed to build a house or a bridge, treat an illness, perform the simplest administrative function, without specialized education, whereas the matter of utmost responsibility, bearing children, shaping their minds, was left to blind chance and momentary desires, and the community intervened only when mistakes had been made and it was too late to correct them.

So, then, obtaining the right to a child was now a distinction not awarded to just anyone. Furthermore, parents could not isolate children from their contemporaries; specially selected groups were formed, for both sexes, and in these the most divergent temperaments were represented. So-called difficult children were given additional, hypnagogic treatment, and the education of all children was begun very early. Not reading and writing, which came much later, but the education of the youngest, introducing them — through special games — to the functioning of the world, Earth, to the richness and variety of life in society; four- and five-year-olds were instilled, in precisely this way, with the principles of tolerance, coexistence, respect for other beliefs and attitudes, the unimportance of the differing external features of the children (and hence the adults) of other races. All of which seemed quite fine to me, with one single but fundamental reservation, because the immovable cornerstone of this world, its all-embracing rule, was betrization. The whole aim of a child’s upbringing was to make it accept betrization as a fact of life no less unquestionable than birth or death. When I heard how ancient history was taught, even from Eri, I had difficulty containing my indignation. According to this portrayal, those were times of animality and barbaric, uncontrolled procreation, of catastrophe both economic and military, and the undeniable achievements of past civilization were presented as an expression of the strength and determination that permitted people to overcome the benightedness and the cruelty of the period: those achievements, then, came about as it were in spite of the prevailing tendency to live at the cost of others. What once took untold effort, they said, and was attainable only by a few, the road to it bristling with danger and the necessity for sacrifice, compromise — material success purchased only by moral defeat — was now common, easy, and certain.

It was not so bad as long as one dealt in generalizations; I could go along with the condemnation of various aspects of the past, such as, say, war; and the lack — the complete lack — of politics, of friction or tension, of international conflict — though a surprising lack, giving instant rise to the suspicion that such things existed but went unmentioned — I had to admit was an accomplishment, not a loss; but it was bad indeed when this re-evaluation touched me personally. Because it was not only Starck who abandoned, in his book (written, nota bene, a half century before my return), the exploration of space. Here Eri, as an archeology graduate, had much to teach me. The first betrizated generations radically changed their attitude toward astronautics, but though the signs changed from plus to minus, the interest in it remained intense. The consensus, then, was that a tragic error had been committed, an error that reached its culmination in the very years during which our expedition was planned, because at that time similar expeditions were mounted in huge numbers. It was not that the yield of these expeditions had been so small, that the penetration of space in a radius of many light years from the solar system had led only to the discovery, on a few planets, of primitive and strange forms of vegetation, not to contact with any highly developed civilization. Nor was it considered the worst thing that the terrible length of the voyage would change the crew of the spacecraft, those representatives of Earth — to an increasing degree, as the destinations became more remote — into a group of wretched, mortally weary creatures who, after landing here and there, would require much care and convalescence; or that the decision to send forth such enthusiasts was thoughtless and cruel. The crux of the matter was that man wanted to conquer the universe without having attended to his own problems on Earth, as though it were not obvious that heroic flights would do nothing to alleviate the sea of human suffering, injustice, fear, and hunger on the globe.

But, as I say, only the first betrizated generation thought this way, because afterward, in the natural course of things, came oblivion and indifference; children marveled when they learned of the romantic period of astronautics, and possibly felt even a little fear toward their ancestors, who were as strange to them and as incomprehensible as the ancestors who engaged in wars of plunder and voyages for gold. It was the indifference that appalled me the most, far more than the condemnation — our life’s work had become wrapped in silence, buried, and forgotten.

Eri did not try to kindle enthusiasm in me for this new world, she made no effort to convert me; she simply told me of it in speaking about herself, and I — precisely because she spoke about herself and was herself testimony to it — could not shut my eyes to its virtues.

It was a civilization that had rid itself of fear. Everything that existed served the people. Nothing had weight but their well-being, the satisfaction of their basic as well as their most sophisticated needs. Everywhere — in all walks of life where the presence of man, the fallibility of his passions, and the slowness of his reflexes could create even the smallest risk — man was replaced by nonliving devices, automata.

It was a world that had shut out danger. Threat, conflict, all forms of violence — these had no place in it; a world of tranquillity, of gentle manners and customs, easy transitions, undramatic situations, every bit as amazing as my or our (I am thinking of Olaf) reaction to it.

For we, in the course of ten years, had gone through so many horrors, everything that was inimical to man, that wounded him and crushed him, and we had returned, sick of it, so very sick of it; any one of us, hearing that the return would be delayed, that there would be a few more months in space to endure, would probably have leapt at the speaker’s throat. And now we — no longer able to stand the constant risk, the blind chance of a meteorite hit, that endless suspense, the hell we went through when an Arder or an Ennesson failed to return from a reconnaissance flight — we immediately began to refer to that time of terror as the only proper thing, as right, as giving us dignity and purpose. Yet even now I shuddered at the memory of how, sitting, lying, hanging in the oddest positions above the circular radio-cabin, we waited, waited, in a silence broken only by the steady buzz of the signal from the ship’s automatic scanner, seeing, in the leaden bluish light, drops of sweat run down the forehead of the radio operator frozen in the same waiting — while the clock, its alarm set, moved soundlessly, until finally the moment when the hand touched the red mark on the dial, the moment of relief. Relief… because then it was possible to go out and explore and die alone, and that truly seemed easier than waiting. We pilots, the nonscientists, made up the old guard; our time had stopped three years before the actual start of the expedition. In those three years we went through a succession of tests of increasing psychological stress. There were three main stages, three stations, which we called the Ghost Palace, the Wringer, and the Coronation.

The Ghost Palace: One was locked inside a small container, cut off completely from the world. No sound, ray of light, puff of air, or vibration from without reached the interior. Resembling a small rocket, the container was equipped with a mock-up of the same controls, supplies of water, food, and oxygen. And one had to stay there, idle, with absolutely nothing to do, for a month — which seemed an eternity. No one came out the same. I, one of the toughest of Dr. Janssen’s subjects, began in my third week to see the strange things that others had observed as early as the fourth or fifth day: monsters without faces, shapeless crowds that oozed from the dully glowing dials to enter into senseless conversations with me, to hover above my sweating body, my body that was losing its outline, was changing, growing larger, and that finally — the most frightening thing — began to assume an independence, first in spasms of individual muscles, then, after a tingling and a numbness, contractions, and finally movements, while I watched, amazed, not understanding. But for the preliminary training, but for the theoretical briefing, I would have sworn that my arms, head, neck were possessed by demons. The upholstered interior of the container had seen things that defied description — Janssen and his staff, with the appropriate equipment, were monitoring what took place in there, but none of us knew that at the time. The feeling of isolation had to be genuine and complete. Therefore the disappearance of some of the doctor’s assistants was a mystery to us. It was only during the voyage that Gimma told me that they had simply cracked. One of them, a certain Gobbek, had apparently tried to force open the container, unable to watch the torment of the man inside.

But that was only the Ghost Palace. Because then came the Wringer, with its tumblers and centrifuges, its hellish accelerating machine that could produce 400 g’s — an acceleration, never used, of course, that would have turned a man into a puddle, but 100 g’s was enough to make a subject’s entire back sticky with blood forced out through the skin.

The last test, the Coronation, I passed with flying colors. This was the final sieve, the final station for weeding us out. Al Martin, a strapping fellow who back then, on Earth, looked the way I do today, a giant, one hunk of iron muscle, and as calm as you could want — he came back to Earth from the Coronation in such a state that they immediately removed him from the center.

The Coronation was quite a simple matter. They put a man in a suit, took him up into orbit, and at an altitude of some hundred thousand kilometers, where the Earth shines like the Moon enlarged fivefold, simply tossed him out of the rocket into space, and then flew away. Hanging there like that, moving his arms and legs, he had to wait for their return, wait to be rescued; the spacesuit was reliable and comfortable, it had oxygen, air conditioning, a heater, and it even fed the man, with a paste squeezed out every two hours from a special mouthpiece. So nothing could happen, unless maybe there was a malfunction in the small radio attached to the outside of the suit, which automatically signaled the location of the wearer. There was only one thing missing in the suit, a receiver, which meant that the man could hear no voice but his own. With the void and the stars around him, suspended, weightless, he had to wait. True, the wait was fairly long, but not that long. And that was all.

Yes, but people went insane from this; they would be dragged in writhing in epileptic convulsions. This was the test that went most against what lay in a man — an utter annihilation, a doom, a death with full and continuing consciousness. It was a taste of eternity, which got inside a man and let him know its horror. The knowledge, always held to be impossible and impalpable, of the cosmic abyss extending in all directions, became ours; the never-ending fall, the stars between the useless, dangling legs, the futility, the pointlessness of arms, mouth, gestures, of movement and no movement, in the suit an earsplitting scream, the wretches howled, enough.

No need to dwell on what was only, after all, a test, an introduction, intentional, planned with care, with safety precautions: physically, none of the “coronated” were harmed, and the rocket from the base retrieved every one. True, we were not told that, either, to keep the situation as authentic as possible.

The “Coronation” went well for me. I had my own system. It was very simple and completely dishonest — we were not supposed to do it. When they threw me out the hatch, I closed my eyes. Then I thought about various things. The only thing you needed, and needed in plenty, was will power. You had to tell yourself not to open those miserable eyes no matter what. Janssen, I think, knew about my trick. But there were no repercussions.

All this, however, took place on Earth or in its proximity. Afterward came a space not contrived and not created in the laboratory, a space that killed in fact, without pretending, and that sometimes spared — Olaf, Gimma, Thurber, myself, those seven from the Ulysses — and even let us return. Whereupon we, who longed most of all for peace, seeing our dream come true, and to perfection, immediately scorned it. I believe it was Plato who said, “O wretched one — you will have what you wanted.”