cramped old office, in the Project’s administration shack, he
felt both strange and as old, as compressed, constricted. He
said, “I don’t think I’d do that, Adolph. I think it saved
my life.”
“How?”
“I told you that I seemed to die after a while. Since I got
home, I’ve been reading; and I’ve discovered that the psychol-
ogists take far less stock in the individuality of the human
psyche than you and I do. You and I are physical scientists,
so we think about the world as being all outside our skins
something which is to be observed, but which doesn’t alter the
essential /. But evidently, that old solipsistic position isn’t
quite true. Our very personalities, really, depend in large
part upon alt the things in our environment, large and small,
that exist outside our skins. If by some means you could
cut a human being off from every sense impression that
comes to him from outside, he would cease to exist as a
personality within two or three minutes. Probably he would
die.”
“Unquote: Harry Stack Sullivan,” Haertel said, dryly.
“So?”
“So,” Garrard said, “think of what a monotonous environ-
ment the inside of a spaceship is. It’s perfectly rigid, still,
unchanging, lifeless. In ordinary interplanetary flight, in such
an environment, even the most hardened spaceman may go
off his rocker now and then. You know the typical spaceman’s
psychosis as well as I do, I suppose. The man’s personality
goes rigid, just like his surroundings. Usually he recovers
as soon as he makes port, and makes contact with a more-
or-less normal world again.