Barry N. Malzberg - Sigmund in Space.pdf

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SIGMUND IN SPACE
by Barry N. Malzberg
Freud walks the anterior corridors of the Whipperly VI , meditating on the
situation. The captain is a manic-depressive. The navigator has a severe oedipal
block, which is gradually destroying him; he is unable to attain orgasm, even
though the mechanicals are skilled and devoted. The hydroponics expert, a grim
woman in her nineties, is manifesting advanced symptoms of dementia praecox,
and at least half the crew, by all standards of early-twentieth-century Vienna
(which must of necessity be his touchstone), is neurotic to the point of
dysfunction: depressive reactions, conversion hysteria, bizarre sexual urges, and
the like. Clearly, the administrators must have been desperate to place him on this
vessel. Freud hardly knows where to begin. What can he do? What
psychotherapeutic techniques (which by definition require patience) can possibly
prevail in this emergency? If Freud were not so wondrously confident of his
abilities, so protectively despairing, he would be most undone.
The rhythm of his pacing increases. Freud risks greedy little glances at the
huge screens, glinting around him, looking at the disorder of a constellation, a
smudge of stars. Here in the late twenty-fifth century space exploration is not
routine; the Whipperly VI is on a dangerous mission to the hitherto-unprobed
Vegans. The view of the universe from a distance of so many light-years from
Vienna is astonishing. Freud would not have dreamed that such things were
possible. Furthermore, he would not have dreamed that as technology advanced,
the common neuroses would prevail. Of course, that was foolish. The pain, the
schism, the older ironies would prevail.
Freud shrugs. He reaches inside his vest pocket for a cigar and match, lights
the cigar with a flourish, watches smoke whisk into the ventilators as he turns in
the corridor and then returns to the small cubicle that the administrators have
given him as office space. The desk is littered with papers, the wall with diplomas.
Freud feels right at home, within their limits the administrators have done
everything possible to grant him credibility and a sense of domain. If he is unable
to cope he knows they will only blame him more. Well , he thinks, well, what they
decide will be done. I will be shrunken again and replaced in the dream cube. It
will be many centuries before I receive another assignment. But then again I will
have no knowledge, and therefore my entrapment will be in their estimation, not
mine. The last time I had an assignment was in the early twenty-second century:
the madman on Venus who thought he was a vine and threatened to cut off the
dome respirators. I didn’t handle that too well and got derricked for centuries. But
 
here I am again and none the worse for it. Their sanctions exclude me .
This thought impels him toward his next act, which is to use the
communicator on his desk to contact the captain and summon him to his office. Of
all the technological wonders of this time, the communicator is a simple
instrument, reminiscent of the telephone of his era. Freud wonders idly whether
they have given him this to make him feel at home or whether the twenty-fifth is
simply a century less sophisticated than the slick and dangerous twenty-second,
which he remembers so vividly. He also thinks, while waiting for the captain, of his
old rivals Adler and Jung.
Doubtless that miserable pair have already been summoned and failed on
this case. There is grim satisfaction in knowing this. But he would have hoped to
have been reconstructed more often. Two jobs in the twenty-first, three in the
twenty-second before that disaster on Venus, and now this. Not good. Not good
at all.
Well, there is nothing to be done about that. Here he is, and here the
responsibility for the mission reposes. The captain enters his cabin, a slender,
ashen-faced man, dressed in fatigues but wearing a full dress cap. His aspect is
impatient but restrained. Like all on board, he has been given the strictest orders
to comply with Freud’s procedures. The administrators cannot control the fate of
the mission, but they can abort it, tearing the ship apart at the touch of a
light-year-distant incendiary beam. The captain knows this. He sits across from
Freud, his hands on his knees, and while staring at him earnestly, his eyes slowly
ignite under Freud’s gaze. “We’re going to take over those Vegans,” he says,
unprompted. “You know that, of course.”
“Of course.” Freud says sympathetically.
“They’re a green humanoid race, primitive but with the potential for
technological advance. They’re hostile and barbaric. We’re going to wipe them out
while we still have time. I have plans,” the captain says shakily. “I have enormous
plans.” ‘
“Of course you do,” Freud says. He puffs on the cigar with what he hopes
resembles a gesture of serenity. “Why do you feel you must destroy the Vegans?”
“Because otherwise in a generation they’ll have spaceships and atomic
devices and will destroy us ,” the captain says. “Don’t worry, I’m completely in
control. I’m a highly trained man.”
 
Freud has read the capsule reports prepared by the administrators. Of
course there are no Vegans at all; there are three silicon-based planets circling an
arid star. In five centuries of space probes, life has never been found on these
planets. “I know you’re trained,” Freud says. “Still, I have a question, if I might ask
it.”
“Please ask it,” the captain says hoarsely. “I am prepared to deal with any
questions.”
“That’s an important quality, to be sure. Now, what if it happened to be,”
Freud says gently, “that there are no Vegans?”
“There are Vegans. Several hundred million of them. I’m going to wipe them
out.”
“Yes, yes, but what if there aren’t? Just to speculate-”
“You’re just like the rest of them,” the captain says, his face mottling. “You
damned toy, you reconstruct . You’re just like the rest. Don’t humor me. I’m going
to save the universe. Now I have to get back to my bridge. I must prepare for the
deadly cancer-causing Vegan probes, which could encircle us at any moment.”
“How long have you felt this way?” Freud essays mildly as the captain stalks
out. Freud sighs and stubs his cigar on the desk and then stares at his diploma for
a while. Then he summons the navigator.
The navigator shows considerably less effect than the captain but, after
some gentle probing, discloses that his mother is aboard the ship stowed away in
one of the ventilators and whispering thoughts to him of the most disgusting
nature. He has always hated and feared his mother, and that is why he enlisted in
the service. But she will not leave him alone-he was a fool to think that he could
escape. Freud dismisses him and turns to the hydroponics engineer, who tells him
bitterly that he, too, is already affected virally with an insidious disease, which the
captain has been seeding into the units. Machine or otherwise. Freud is as
doomed as the rest, but at least he can try to keep up his strength. She offers him
some celery. After she leaves, he gnaws it meditatively and talks to some selected
members of the crew. They believe the officers to be quite mad; in self-defense
they have turned to bestial practices. Here at last Freud finds some professional
respect-they are impressed that the administrators would send another famous
psychoanalyst as reconstruct to superintend their voyage. They hope that he does
better than Adler and Jung, who worked together and succeeded only in boring
them with lectures in the assembly hall on mass consciousness until the
 
administrators, displeased, dwindled them and said they would send a true
practitioner, a medical doctor, in their place.
Freud sends the crew on their way and lights another cigar. The symptoms
evinced are extraordinary, yet there is enough consistency in the syndrome for
him to infer that the administrators have lied to him: Everyone on this ship has
gone mad, and this is probably a consequence of the mission itself. Long probes
their stress, isolation, boredom, and propinquity-must tend to break down the
crews. The administrators have called for him not because of special
circumstances but because of ordinary circumstances. What they want him to do
is to patch over matters in order that the mission may conclude. There has been
much difficulty and expense; it would be wasteful and cruel to abort the mission
so close to its end.
Freud stands, neatens his desk marginally, and returns to the corridor and
his pacing. The welter of constellation now stuns and discommodes. Freud adjusts
the angle of the windows so that he can evade them. Space for an
early-twentieth-century Viennese, is overwhelming; it must have less of an effect
upon the custodians of the twenty-fifth, but several months in this environment
would undo anyone, he thinks. The administrators have obviously tried to
routinize the missions just as with the reconstructions they have routinized a
qualified immortality. But in neither case has it really worked. Three centuries in a
cube , thinks bitterly. Three centuries . They should have allowed his corpse to
commingle with the earth undisturbed; they should have left him with the less
noted of his time; they should have spared him this difficult and humiliating
afterlife. What they need aboard the Whipperly VI is not a doctor but a priest.
Freud can offer them no solutions; he can, at best, take them further into their
unspeaking, resistant hearts, at the core of which outrage has been transformed
into insanity. It is not the Vegan cancer probes that the captain fears; it is himself.
If he were to be shown that, he would die.
This line of thinking, however, gives Freud an idea. He returns once more to
his cubicle and uses the communicator to summon all officers and crew to an
emergency meeting in the lounge in ten minutes. Then he uses the special device
he has been shown and speaks to the administrators. “I want to tell you,” he says,
“that your twenty-fifth century is finished. Your deep-space probes are finished,
and your Vegan mission is done.”
“Why is that?” one administrator says flatly. “Aren’t you being a little
florid?”
“I am telling you the truth.”
 
“Why is that the truth? On what basis are you saying this outrageous
thing?”
“Because you have pushed limits, you have isolated circumstances, you
have misunderstood the human spirit itself, you have lied your way through the
circumference of the planet, but you cannot do it among the stars.” Freud says,
and so on and so forth and on and on. He permits himself a raving monologue of
two minutes in which he accuses the administrators of all the technological
barbarities he can call to mind and then says that he has found a one-time,
stopgap solution to the problem that can never be used again but that he will
invoke for the sake of all those on board who cannot discern their right hand from
their left and also much cattle.
“What is that?” the same administrator says weakly. “We have no cattle on
board. I don’t understand. Explain yourself before you’re dwindled on the spot.”
“You won’t dwindle me,” Freud says. “You don’t dare do it; I’m your last
hope. If you shut me down, you know the mission is finished, and you can’t deal
with that. So you’re going to let me go ahead. And afterwards I don’t care what
you do. You are monstrous yet unconvinced of your monstrosity. That is the
centrality of your evil.” It is a good statement, a clean, high ventilation. Feeling as
triumphant as the captain preparing his crew for dangerous probes, Freud shuts
down the communicator, leaves his cubicle, and descends to the brightly,
decorated lounge, where forty members of the Whipperly VI crew sit uneasily
staring at him, waiting for him to speak. Freud stands on the Plexiglas stage,
swaying unevenly in the wafting, odorous breezes of the ventilators.
“All of you should know who I am. I am Sigmund Freud, a famous Viennese
medical doctor and student of the human mind who has been reconstructed to
help you with your difficulties on this Vegan probe. I have come to give you the
solution to your problems.”
They stare at him. The hydroponics engineer puts down her gun, folds her
hands in her lap, and looks at him luminously. The captain giggles, then subsides.
“Ah, then.” Freud says, “you must repel the Vegans. Caution will not do it.
Circumspection will not do it. Only your own courage and integrity will accomplish
this.”
Chairs shift. The captain applauds fervently. “Understand me,” Freud says,
nodding at him, “the administrators have lied to you. They have always lied to
you. Spaceflight is not the routine transference of human cargo. Space itself is not
 

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