You’re not going anywhere.
After the weeks and months, there’s some change, sure; but from day to day, you can’t see the difference, so after a while you stop looking for any.
Naturally, that eliminates the viewports as an amusement device, which is too bad. There aren’t so many things for a man to do during a Long Haul that he can afford to eliminate anything.
Getting bored with the infinities outside is only a reminder that the same could happen with your writing materials, and the music, the stereo and all the rest of it.
And it’s hard to gripe, to say, “Why don’t they install a such-and-such on these barrels?” because you’ve already got what a thousand spacemen griped about long since—many of them men with more experience, more imagination and less internal resources (that is to say, more need) than you’ll ever have. Certainly more than you have now; this is your first trip and you’re just making the transition from “inside looking out” to “inside looking on.”
It’s a small world. It better be a little complicated.
A lot that has happened in worlds’ like these would be simple to understand, if you knew about it. Not knowing is better, though; it keeps you wondering. Some of it you can figure out, knowing as you do that a lot of men have died in these things, a lot have disappeared, ship and all, and some (but you don’t know how many) have been taken out of the ships and straight to the laughing academy.
You find out fairly soon, for example, that the manual controls are automatically relayed out, and stay out of temptation until you need them to land. (Whether they’ll switch in if you need them for evasive maneuvering some time, you don’t know yet.) Who died—how many died— because they started playing with the manual controls? And was it because they decided to quit and go home? Or because they convinced themselves that the auto-astrogator had bugs in it? Or because they just couldn’t stand all those stationary stars?
Then there’s this: You’re alone. You have a shipmate, but even so, you’re alone. You crouch in this little cell in the nose of your ship, with the curving hull to your left and the flat wall of the midship bulkhead to your right.
Because it’s there, that bulkhead, you know that in previous models it wasn’t. You can imagine what happened in some (how many?) ships to make it necessary to seal you away from your shipmate.
Psychodynamics has come a long way, but you called this a world; well, reduce a world to two separate nations and see what happens. Between two confined entities, there’s no mean and no median, and no real way of determining a majority. How many battered pilots have come home crazed, cooped up with the shredded bodies of their shipmates?
So that’s easy to understand—you can’t trust two human beings together. Not for long enough. If you don’t believe it, look at the bulkhead. It’s there because it has to be there.
Being a peaceable guy, it scares you a little to know how dangerous you are.
Makes you a little proud, though, doesn’t it?
Be proud of this, too—that they trust you to be alone so much. Sure, there is a shipmate; but by and large you’re alone, and that’s what’s expected of you. What most people, especially Earthside people, never find out is that a man who can’t be by himself is a man who knows, away down deep, that he’s not good company. You could probably make it by yourself altogether ... but you must admit you’re glad you don’t have to. You have access to the other side of the bulkhead, when you need it. If you need it. It didn’t take you too long to figure out you’d use it sparingly.
You have books and you have games, you have pictures and text tapes and nine different euphorics (with a watchdog dispenser, so you can never become an addict) all of which help you, when you need help, to explore yourself. But having another human mind to explore is a wonderful idea—a wonder tempered by the knowledge—oh, how smart you were to figure it out in time!—that the other mind is a last resort. If you ever use up the potentialities it holds for you, you’re through, brother!
So you have endurance contests with yourself to see how long you can leave that bulkhead alone.
You go back over your life, the things you’ve done. People have written whole novels about 24 hours in a man’s life. That’s the way you think it all out, slowly, piece by piece; every feature of every face and the way they were used; what people did and why. Especially why. It doesn’t take any time to remember what a man did, but you can spend hours in thinking about why he did it.
You live it again and it’s like being a little god, knowing what’s going to happen to everyone.
When you reported to Base, there was a busload of guys with you. Now you know who would go all the way through the course and wind up out here; reliving it, you can put yourself back in the bus again and say, “That stranger across the aisle is Pegg. He isn’t going to make it. He’ll go home on furlough three months from now and he’ll try to kill himself rather than come back. The freckled nape in the seat ahead of you belongs to the redhead Walkinok, who will throw his weight around during his first week and pay expensively for it afterward. But he’ll make it.”
You make friends with the shy dark guy next to you. His name is Stein and he looks like a big-brain. He’s easy to talk to and smart, the kind of fellow who always goes straight to the top. And he won’t last even until the first furlough; two weeks is all he can take, and you never see him again. But you remember his name. You remember everything and you go back over it and remember the memories in between the memories. Did somebody on that bus have shoes that squeaked? Back you go and hunt for it. If it happened, you’ll remember it.
They say anyone can recall this way; but for you, with what the psycho-dynamicians have done to you—or is it for you?—you can do more of this than anybody. There isn’t anything that ever happened in your whole life that you can’t remember. You can start at the beginning and go all the way through. You can start at the beginning and jump years in a second and go through an episode again ... get mad again . . . fall in love again.
And when you get tired of the events themselves, you can run them off again, to find out why. Why did Stein go through those years of study and preparation, those months of competition, when all the time he didn’t want to be in the Space Service? Why did Pegg conceal from himself that he wasn’t fit for the Space Service?
So you cast back, comb, compare and ponder, keeping busy. If you’re careful, just remembering lasts a long time, wondering why lasts even longer; and in between times, there are the books and stereos, the autochess and the music ... until you’re ready to cast and comb in your memories again. But sooner or later—later, if you’re especially careful—you’ll get restless and your life as it was played out, and the reasons why it was played just that way, all that gets old. You can think of no new approach to any of it and learn nothing more from it..
That’s where the centerline bulkhead comes in handy. Its very shape is a friendly thing to you; the hull on your left is curved, being part of the ship’s side, but the bulkhead is a flat wall. Its constant presence is a reminder that it has a function, like everything else in your world; that it is, by nature, a partition; that the existence of a partition presupposes another compartment; and that the other compartment is the size and shape of this one and designed for a similar purpose—to be a dwelling for someone.