Inside Out

Let's take peek at J.G. Ballard's The Voices of Time.

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Someone is missing. Oh, you’ve noticed? But have you never thought to worry about it… Come on Schloss, as usual, you’re playing around; this one’s obvious, there are no riddles here; look, it’s you, yes you, who are making the difficulties. None exist, never have done, and that’s a fact. Take that for your subtleties! He throws me a smile, it's a knife whose blade is cheap plastic. Ok. I must say, though, I find your answer rather smug for my liking. Thirteen to Centaurus. For sure, at the beginning there is no riddle, for there is no question, no question at all, that these thirteen crew members are in flight to a planet they will never see, only their descendants to reach it. There we can agree. But afterwards… I assume you read past the intro? (I dig maliciously away.)

Surely you did not overlook the story’s end…

…when Dr. Francis joins the crew, even though he knows the spaceship has never left earth, the mission a fake and the crew to fade out into death. For it is more humane, these scientists assure us, to leave these characters inside this aborted experiment than to expose them to the truth; it would be like injecting madness into a laboratory animal, is the argument. What! Guinea pigs! Inside a cage! For decades! No, It is kinder to kill them off, this reader agrees. But when Dr. Francis joins the crew are you not just a little bemused; not even a wrinkle on your radar screen…

A wrinkle? Frowns on the forehead, you have them all the time, you know. So you are not concerned when…

…Dr. Francis, like so many of Ballard’s heroes, gives himself up to insanity; that last frontier, it is the zone of pure freedom, where one, safe from the demands of others, is free to explore the inner space of one’s own psychosis. To believe, above all else, isn’t that the secret? To live inside the insane world of this spaceship far better - so much richer, more intense, exciting, surreal - than to merely exist outside, where one must submit to the practical men, those automatons of the real, so amenable to political expediency and economics. No freedom there; only contingency, managed by a bureaucratic reason that drains out all meaning, every purpose. Dr. Francis cannot accept such a fate. He won’t give up this experiment, it has become a mad idea for him, a crazy belief. He will have his liberty!

Sealed inside the ship Dr. Francis is to discover an awful truth.

A long dead captain and young Abel know the whole thing is a con: through a porthole in the ship’s carapace they have watched the soldiers, scientists and workmen maintaining the ship day on day. This is terrible! Over decades old Peters had known that the operation was a sham; yet he stayed here, accepting the conditioning, performing the meaningless routines, putting up with the lethargy and the boredom, watching his mind crumble away; hardly human at the end. Why? Dr. Francis offers a plausible explanation: better a leader here than be a curiosity to the outside world. We should go deeper than this. I suspect old Peter’s motivation was the same as the doctor’s: to experience that strange ecstasy that comes of giving oneself up to the impossible.

Now this idea is busted…

But Dr. Francis has committed himself to his idea. An idea, we must remember, vastly more interesting and infinitely more compelling than the small truths of commonplace reality. The doctor will not surrender to the facts of this case - the money running out, the infrastructure rusting away, the public appalled, the politicians nervous - no, he will transcend them with a leap of faith; Dr. Francis to sacrifice himself to an insane concept. Yes. The maddest ideas produce the strongest purposes, the deepest meanings.

If only…

The idea has been exposed as a lie. No longer can Dr. Francis believe in it. Yet now he must live inside an idea that he knows has failed. There is no way out. He is going to Alpha Centauri! No exit back to the hangar, he must travel onto a place he knows does not exist. We predict a complete mental collapse shortly after the story ends.

Still not worried… No? You know what, I really don’t like that smirk on your face. Very confident, aren’t you? So all this is known to you already. You're not suggesting, are you now, that I’m a little slow…? Well, we’ll see. Yes, we’ll damn well see!

Fourteen are going to Centaurus then. Yes? No? 

No! Abel is very clear about his destination. The scientists have given him the opportunity to turn this group into a laboratory experiment; these thirteen human beings to be his live specimens, whom he can test with impunity. The crew - and Dr. Francis is now one of them - his chance to explore the outer reaches of psychology. Do you see... Abel is going to discover places inside the human mind impossible outside this closed community (even the scientists baulked at the more intrusive experiments: the moral qualms of the wider society, to which they of course belong, holding them back). Abel is not going to Centaurus. He’s on earth, travelling into the deep dark centre of the human cosmos. Like Dr. Francis he has entered the zone. Unlike Dr. Francis he knows it is real.

And you knew that, all the time did you…