Garrard swirled his highball reflectively. In Haertel’s 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 environment 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.