Even so, perhaps the Proxima loop was just a trifle ambitious. In all, the ship would be trans-c for several days. Why not a couple of hours? Why not a couple of minutes, just to try? But there was no such thing as a couple of minutes, or a couple of hours. Phase shift took twelve hours at least. That was the minimum time the ship could spend pretending to be a creature born and bred to tachyonic existence.
The “pilot” of six was Kel Furin. He was in no way connected with the military, though he had passed all the tests which the military could devise in order to test his fitness (in their eyes) to undertake the mission. Furin was a physicist — a personal friend of Sobieski.
The new ship was called Hope. I don’t know who named the ships, but the sequence of names was close to black comedy. The people who built and sent out those ships meant every word of it, though. From their point of view there was no kind of comedy at all in the name Hope. That ship really did carry their hope. There was nobody on the base, by the time that titan six went into tachyonic phase, who hadn’t encountered the suspicion that the human race might never be able to claim the stars, whether they could be reached or not.
There were no press releases at all concerning titan six. The fact that a fourth man was being sent into deep space was simply not talked about, as if it were rank bad taste to even think about it.
And, thanks to the discretion of all the Project people involved, there were no headlines when six made her reappearance right on schedule. They failed to make radio contact with Furin.
He was dead. He had killed himself by electrocution.
Every man on the Project knew that he hadn’t done it for terrestrial reasons. Something out there had made him do it. Something out there was hostile to human life. The conquest of space was to be no kind of cakewalk. Space was fighting back.
In came the psychologists then, in their legions. Jenny was already on the Project, but not until six came back was she a major figure. She’d known Kel Furin, too.
Titan seven was built from the ground up. They knew they didn’t have to worry about cogs and circuits now. But they didn’t leave out a single thing. If anything, they made even more certain than they ever had.
This time, the capsule wasn’t so much a prison cell as a minihospital ward. There were two men again: Cartland and Napier. Cartland was a careful, clever young man with a reputation for absolute stability. And not just a reputation. The brainwashers had virtually dismantled his mind to make sure it was put together exactly as they would have wished if they’d been designing him. I can imagine how hard they must have searched for Cartland. He was on the technical staff of the Project — a clock watcher and a button pusher, pretty low in the hierarchy. But he was what the situation — at that time — seemed to demand. Napier was Cartland’s watchdog. He was a psychiatrist (and perhaps a bad risk simply because of that). The logic of including him in the team was that if something did go wrong he was at least capable of describing what it was. He was there to collect data, to make sure that when seven came back there would be something to go on.
There were cameras to watch Cartland and Napier, record every second of their time on seven. There was a vast battery of instruments, some scheduled to give constant readings, others that they were obliged to use periodically.
With the number of instruments that were there to gather data, it was quite impossible to deny Cartland and Napier the wherewithal to commit suicide if they so desired. They knew that, and they accepted the risk. It wasn’t made easy for them — they weren’t issued knives — but it was known by all concerned that suicide was in the cards.
The cards turned up just that way. Seven (which was called Lady Luck) brought them back. Dead.
Titan base knew how, and when. But they didn’t know why. Cartland and Napier hadn’t bothered to put their reasons, or their thoughts, on record. In fact, they hadn’t done anything at all, except die. They hadn’t moved from their beds — it was electrocution, as with Furin. They had survived only two hours and a few minutes of hyperspace. (Their deaths were not simultaneous, but Cartland — the man picked for his stability — survived Napier by only seven minutes.)
All the tapes, all the film, all the monitors told titan exactly nothing that they could use.
And so: Lindquist.
They were determined that Lindquist wasn’t going to kill himself. They built him into a machine. He was totally immobilized. The machine breathed for him, fed him, extracted his wastes, and would beat his heart for him if he somehow forgot to do it himself. They rigged Johnny Lindquist so they could run him by remote control. They weren’t even satisfied with that. They put him into a perpetual sleep. He wasn’t to be conscious for a single moment while titan eight was in tachyonic phase. He’d be able to talk to them all the way out to the testing ground, and they intended to bring him around as soon as he was safely sub-c. But apart from that, they asked nothing of him but that he should live, and they gave him as much help as was mechanically possible with that.
These were desperate measures. Titan was a desperate Project.
They profiled him — took a comprehensive tape of his mind as revealed by resonance phenomena. They made a start on an analysis, exactly along the lines of the Lee-Segal handbook for brain-pickers. They put a monitor tape on him so they could track his mind activity while he was in hyperspace.
Mike Sobieski still insisted on Proxima. It was no good sending him out to do a lightning tour around Pluto. It had to be Proxima. The stars were the purpose of the Project, and Mike insisted on dealing with the stars.
Lindquist was a volunteer. He was Army, but I don’t think his military status came into it. He was one of a couple of hundred volunteers from titan base. Titan eight was a one-way ticket to hell, and everybody knew it, but there were still two hundred volunteers. I don’t know how they chose Lindquist. Probably by ballot. Everybody loved Johnny. Outside the base, he was nothing and had never seemed likely to be anything. He’d flown a rocket just once, but not an important rocket. But he was a great guy.
The machines saved him, of course. You can rely on machines. Machines aren’t human. They don’t give in. Johnny Lindquist came back. Alive and in one piece. But not quite the same piece they sent out. It looked the same, but it wasn’t. The piece they sent out was intent and serious, full of memories of smiling and friends and youth. He’d smoked and he’d drunk and he’d screwed his share of women. He had a lot of life and every reason to want it back. Every bit of it. . . .
But he came back completely catatonic. His body was all there, heart beating, breathing, blood flowing, nourished, and clean. But his mind had gone away. It just wasn’t there anymore — either that or it had changed beyond recognition. It took hours of studying tapes and monitors to find a trace of Johnny Lindquist inside his skull. They found traces. Only traces. Lindquist’s mind had been exploded, and there was only wreckage left.
You could still find traces of him inside his body. You could see them there, on the tape. I saw them there myself. The monitors clicked on and on, and the nickering needles gave out fugitive evidence that somewhere Johnny Lindquist still existed. But so far away.
He was ultimately schizophrenic. Hopelessly insane. They said. But their words weren’t in any way adequate to describe. Their words were worthless in the face of what the universe had sent back in exchange for Johnny Lindquist.
Titan eight, by the way, was called simply Traveler.
They found a whole host of new theories to account for Johnny not holding out. They knew from the monitor he’d stayed together for a day or more, then got steadily worse. They knew it was only a matter of time extending that day into days, and then to weeks. If they could lay their hands on the right kind of mind . . .
There were still one hundred and ninety-nine volunteers. But they chose me instead.
Cage of Darkness
Survival
We know very little about
human nature. We know almost nothing about human capabilities. There is vast scope for discovery about man and what he can do. The fact that there is vast scope for discovery does not mean that such discovery is to be sought, or that it will be of any significance if and when it is found.
Such discoveries are made in terms of endurance. They have no universal meaning at all. Such meaning as they have is entirely personal.
A man who walks from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the United States will be applauded and mocked. A man who sails around the world in a small boat or swims the English Channel will be applauded, but not mocked. A man who spends years squatting atop a pole or drinks fifty pints of beer faster than any man has ever done it before will be mocked, and applauded in a mocking fashion. The discrepancies in the way these feats are regarded in the eyes of the world are not rational. To embark upon any of these projects is not particularly courageous. They are all possible. In every case the challenge is internal — to force oneself to accept the rigors and the particular hardships involved. Success, too, is measured only internally, by the degree to which hardship has been accepted, endured, conquered. In all cases, the feat itself is meaningless except in an internal context.
The men who live in Block C are neither applauded nor mocked. They are forgotten. They embark upon their Canaanite existence without courage, without even enthusiasm. For them, the rigors and the hardships are not a challenge accepted but a situation given. The time of hardships is not finite — once condemned to Block C a prisoner is there for life. The feat of survival is a greater one than any of those I quoted earlier, but it is quite as meaningless in any context save the internal one. There is not even any achievement involved — merely survival. Yet this survival offers each man a vast scope for discovery about what he is.
What was Con Radley?
When you are hungry, you want to eat. That is what being hungry means. That, says the crowd (this is the faceless crowd which applauds, mocks, or forgets), is natural.
When the crowd says natural they want to imply that it is right and proper and the way God planned it. What they actually do mean, however, is that they either like it that way or they welcome the opportunity to put on a brave face and play their own version of the endurance game. (This is why there is such a vast difference between eating being natural, shitting being natural, and fucking being natural.)
Apologies for the interlude, but it really is necessary if we are to discuss with any depth of meaning the question of what is/was Con Radley.
Con Radley was a hungry man. It was exactly the same as the hunger you know so well. In terms of the way things actually are it was a perfectly natural hunger. He felt it. It was there. It existed.
And people didn’t like it. It wasn’t, you see, a hunger for food.
What is more, people certainly did not welcome this particular opportunity to don a brave face and accept it.
So the crowd naturally called it unnatural.
Needless to say, nobody gave a tinker’s dam about Con. Nobody cared what he felt or thought or who he was. They only cared about what they felt and liked and liked to think and feel. After all, when you come right down to it (they say), in the final analysis (they say), ultimately (they say), God had put Con on Earth so that he could be part of their environment, and it was damn well up to them to say what he should be and feel and think and do. He hadn’t anything to do with himself.
I’m not going to tell you exactly what kind of a pervert Con Radley was. I mean, you don’t approve of me writing about things like that, do you? You’d prefer that Radley didn’t even exist, especially in this document, to which you think he isn’t at all relevant. If he’s here at all, you want him kept well back out of sight. You want him to be unmentionable.
All well and good. From this moment until he goes the way of all bit-part players, you won’t even notice that Con Radley is in any way different from your own sweet self. He’ll be mentioned only by name, if at all.
You can make up your own mind about who and what he was that made you hand him a free, one-way ticket to Canaan. After all, if you don’t want me to talk about such things, it’s only natural that I should comply.
But I want to say this. In Canaan, Con Radley had no option but to discover things about human nature — his own human nature, that you tried to steal from him by sending him there — that you haven’t even dreamed of. It may mean nothing, except to him (it doesn’t matter whether you applaud, mock, forget, or kill), but to him, it means everything.
It means: up yours.
Madman’s Dance
While the Gods Sleep Restfully, the World Is Free from Nightmares
I descend into a long basin of land, tapered like a spearhead, which ends in a narrow neck between two cliffs. The surface is scattered with boulders, as though the faces of rock on either side have been blasted apart. I can see long figures moving about on the clifftops above me, but the valley itself seems desolate and silent. Once, I pause to watch a landslide tumble down the sheer wall to the right of me, leaving yet another diagonal scar in the face of the rock.
I find, when I get there, that the pass is blocked. I cannot hope to get through that way. The barricade is made of loose boulders, and the crevices are filled with lubricant ash. I try, at first, to pick my way carefully up the rocky slope, but I sink and slip and slide, and I make no progress at all.
“There’s no way.”
I turn to find an old man standing behind me. It is he who speaks.
“Where did you come from?” I ask him. I was alone, I am sure of that.
“From the hills,” he replies.
I contemplate his answer briefly, and then I repeat the question. I have found that it pays to repeat questions. The answers are almost never the same.
“From beyond the slopes,” he replies this time.
“Then there is a path,” I conclude.
“No,” he says, “there is only the other way.”
“And which is that?” I ask.
The old man walks away, treading lightly upon the fluid surface. I watch him closely. But he is right. There is no way but the other. His feet do not touch the surface. He dissolves himself into the rock. His shape blurs in the clear air, and he passes into shadow beneath the bright sun. He fades into the barricade. He becomes invisible.
Lifting my eyes to the jagged ridge of the cliff which towers high above me, I discern a tiny silhouette.
It is waving.
Nevertheless, I think that I have come through the worst. It is not easy. It is never easy. But there is yet another way. I can go back. I can go around. I have all the time that I need. If I were Sisyphus, I would abandon the rock and go to the mountaintop without it. If I were Tantalus, I would go hungry. If I were Ixion, I would be patient, because I would know that someday the wheel would return, and that existence is only a matter of waiting for it to do so.
I think that you and I are at rest. Not that our troubles are over — merely that we have come to accept them. Neither you nor I can work miracles. I think you have accepted that at last. You are content to be a conjurer — you have abandoned your futile quest to be a real magician. We are most certainly on the way home. We have looped the star. We have come close to it, and we have passed it by. We are aimed for the sun.
I am not complacent. I look at the sunrise, and I do not call it dawn. There are more false dawns than real. But I remember, and I endure. The dreams flow by, taunting me with their petty frustrations and their giggling specters and their veiled meanings. I am not afraid of them. They try to make everything fearful with their coy hints and their baseless insistences of danger and significance. But dreams are froth. I know it, and so — I think — do you.
If this is the calm before the storm, all well and good. Let me taste your lightning. I will find it as bitter as I ever did, but I will drink it down. I remain unbroken. We are whole.
We are going home.
At the crossroads where the dead-ended highways meet, I find a featureless milestone, a weatherworn signpost, and a scarecrow in a tattered military uniform holding aloft a cross and speaking to a multitude which passes him silently by.
“It is coming in clouds of night,” he pronounces, in accusing, prophetic tones. “Shadowless in the black sky. The good crops will wither, and from the derelict land and the dust of city streets there will spring new wheat, in the cause of compensation.
“And those whose crops are blighted will cry out aloud for help, but there will be no one to turn to, save for those to whom they sold their bread in years past. And these, who now have plenty, will set the price at the very highest, and will spit on the erstwhile rich, in the name of compensation.”
I remember that in the long-gone days when I was given my first pair of wings, my father warned me:
“Do not fly as high as your dreams might take you.”
But I trusted my dreams. How was I to know that dreams can be faithless? How was I to know that I was set apart, by the mark of Tom O’Bedlam, that dreams were meant for other men, and that to me they could be only a curse?
How?
I, child of the winds, flexed and furled my giant wings with a feeling of great power, and I soared away into the black, brooding skies. I flew above the clouds, bathed in airborne fountains, and danced in the ballroom of the stars.
I flew to the distant moon and cooled my feet in her oceans of tidal dust.
I flew to the sun and glided in and out of her flowing tresses of fire, crying aloud to hear the echoes fleeing through her honeycombed caverns of light.
Man in a Cage Page 14