nothing more. It was irritating, degrading almost.
Reports of U.F.O.s (Unidentified Flying Objects) were of course commonplace, had been for twenty years. To allay public anxiety, an official inquiry had been necessary—that would be about ten years ago. The findings weren’t too well received in some quarters. A lot of witnesses had been judged to be irresponsible publicity-seekers. Liars, in fact. And the more honest ones had been put down as victims of anxiety complexes. This had been Agent 38’s own opinion at the time. A bunch of psychotic characters. How could objects whiz through the atmosphere, or whiz along outside the atmosphere, at the fantastic speeds that had been claimed? The accelerations would kill you in a moment.
According to the big boys, the way an anxiety complex works is this. You’re all hotted up inside about something or other. You can’t find any outlet for your bottled emotions in the real world. So you invent a phantom world. You force yourself to see things and hear things—U.F.O.s, in fact. In short, you go crazy.
Agent 38 could well believe he was suffering from an anxiety complex. Who wouldn’t be after the troubles of the last few years? But how, in his case, could spotting a U.F.O. be of the slightest help to a bottled-up psychosis? So far from helping, it would be a disastrous end to his career. Perhaps he should suppress his report? Oh, to hell with it! He’d been over that possibility a hundred times before, and a hundred times he’d rejected it. His whole training was against it—suppressing a report was one of the things one just did not do.
Of course, his report would have one unusual feature to distinguish it. He hadn’t merely spotted the U.F.O., he’d detected an electromagnetic transmission from it—in an unusual part of the wave band, too. Agent 38 couldn’t understand why anyone should want to transmit at such a short wavelength. But after all, that wasn’t his business. His business was to send out his report.
The transmission had obviously been coded. Although he himself hadn’t been able to decipher it, perhaps the big bugs might be able to do so. Then perhaps they wouldn’t think he was crazy. But the chances were they’d fail, just as he himself had failed. Which would put him in a tough spot. They’d think he’d invented the whole thing. They’d say that his psychosis was very very bad. He’d be moved immediately to some quiet place for recuperation.
Well, perhaps that wouldn’t be so unpleasant after all. Perhaps deep down in himself that was what he really wanted. Perhaps that was the reason for his psychosis.
Dave Johnson looked out of the starboard porthole. There were four of them in the spaceship: Bill Harrison, Chris Yolantis, Stu Fieldman, and himself. This was the end of the line, the end of hard, unremitting training. But there were some things you could train for, and there were others you couldn’t. Take the silence, for instance, the strange, gliding silence. It made you aware of all the little noises you could hear on Earth, even in places that were supposed to be dead quiet. For the first two weeks they’d played records and they’d talked incessantly. But then they’d come to realize they were talking simply to shut out the silence. After that it had seemed somehow better to accept the silence. So there were no long speeches anymore. Most of what they said now was in terse Anglo-Saxon.
Dave doubted that any of them had really recovered from the beginning. Once the shattering effect of the starting blast had worn off, they’d watched the bright ball of the Earth recede away from them. At first it had filled almost half the sky. But day after day it had become smaller and smaller. Now it was a mere point, like Mars or Jupiter. This was the terrible morale destroyer—watching your home receding implacably to huge, pitiless distances. You knew that out there, nearly forty million miles away, people were going about their
Reports of U.F.O.s (Unidentified Flying Objects) were of course commonplace, had been for twenty years. To allay public anxiety, an official inquiry had been necessary—that would be about ten years ago. The findings weren’t too well received in some quarters. A lot of witnesses had been judged to be irresponsible publicity-seekers. Liars, in fact. And the more honest ones had been put down as victims of anxiety complexes. This had been Agent 38’s own opinion at the time. A bunch of psychotic characters. How could objects whiz through the atmosphere, or whiz along outside the atmosphere, at the fantastic speeds that had been claimed? The accelerations would kill you in a moment.
According to the big boys, the way an anxiety complex works is this. You’re all hotted up inside about something or other. You can’t find any outlet for your bottled emotions in the real world. So you invent a phantom world. You force yourself to see things and hear things—U.F.O.s, in fact. In short, you go crazy.
Agent 38 could well believe he was suffering from an anxiety complex. Who wouldn’t be after the troubles of the last few years? But how, in his case, could spotting a U.F.O. be of the slightest help to a bottled-up psychosis? So far from helping, it would be a disastrous end to his career. Perhaps he should suppress his report? Oh, to hell with it! He’d been over that possibility a hundred times before, and a hundred times he’d rejected it. His whole training was against it—suppressing a report was one of the things one just did not do.
Of course, his report would have one unusual feature to distinguish it. He hadn’t merely spotted the U.F.O., he’d detected an electromagnetic transmission from it—in an unusual part of the wave band, too. Agent 38 couldn’t understand why anyone should want to transmit at such a short wavelength. But after all, that wasn’t his business. His business was to send out his report.
The transmission had obviously been coded. Although he himself hadn’t been able to decipher it, perhaps the big bugs might be able to do so. Then perhaps they wouldn’t think he was crazy. But the chances were they’d fail, just as he himself had failed. Which would put him in a tough spot. They’d think he’d invented the whole thing. They’d say that his psychosis was very very bad. He’d be moved immediately to some quiet place for recuperation.
Well, perhaps that wouldn’t be so unpleasant after all. Perhaps deep down in himself that was what he really wanted. Perhaps that was the reason for his psychosis.
Dave Johnson looked out of the starboard porthole. There were four of them in the spaceship: Bill Harrison, Chris Yolantis, Stu Fieldman, and himself. This was the end of the line, the end of hard, unremitting training. But there were some things you could train for, and there were others you couldn’t. Take the silence, for instance, the strange, gliding silence. It made you aware of all the little noises you could hear on Earth, even in places that were supposed to be dead quiet. For the first two weeks they’d played records and they’d talked incessantly. But then they’d come to realize they were talking simply to shut out the silence. After that it had seemed somehow better to accept the silence. So there were no long speeches anymore. Most of what they said now was in terse Anglo-Saxon.
Dave doubted that any of them had really recovered from the beginning. Once the shattering effect of the starting blast had worn off, they’d watched the bright ball of the Earth recede away from them. At first it had filled almost half the sky. But day after day it had become smaller and smaller. Now it was a mere point, like Mars or Jupiter. This was the terrible morale destroyer—watching your home receding implacably to huge, pitiless distances. You knew that out there, nearly forty million miles away, people were going about their
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