Part 1

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

AVOIDANCE SITUATION

BY JAMES MC CONNELL

_What can a man do when he alone must decide the fate of Earth and all its people--and when the choices offered him are slavery and death...._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Captain Allen Hawkins stood quietly in the observation room of the _Sunward_ looking out at subspace. He was a medium-sized man with a trim squareness to him that suggested he had been in the military most of his life. He had a good deal of gold on his sleeve and a good deal of silver in his hair, and he had discovered in his many years in the Space Navy that the two usually went hand in hand. In the background he could hear the noise and ordered confusion of the ship's bridge. But at the moment he paid it little attention, concentrating instead on the observation window.

It was not the first time that he had stood thus, gazing at whatever lay beyond the shell of the ship. Almost every time he had put the _Sunward_ through the dark shadow of subspace, he had deserted the bridge for at least a few moments to come and stare out the window.

"God," he said out loud, repressing a shiver that wanted to crawl down his spine.

"Perhaps 'God forsaken' would be a better description," came a voice from behind him.

The voice belonged to Dr. J. L. Broussard, the _Sunward's_ senior psychologist. And although the two men were on more than casually friendly terms, Hawkins didn't turn to greet him. The fascination of the observation port seemed to obviate the normal requirements of courtesy. "At times like this I think you're right. 'God forsaken.' That's just what it is," Hawkins said. "Completely black, completely empty. You know, it frightens me every time we make the jump through it."

A voice from the bridge called out, "Twelve minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain."

"Very well," Hawkins said loudly enough to be heard on the bridge.

"Perhaps it frightens all of us just a little," said Broussard. He leaned his oversized body against the observation room wall. His big, mild face had a relaxed look to it. "I wonder why it affects us that way," he added almost as if it were a casual afterthought, but his eyes had a too-shrewd look to them.

"You're the psychologist. You tell me why," Hawkins said. He paused for just a moment, expecting Broussard to reply. But after a few seconds when the man gave him no conversational support, Hawkins continued. "For my part, I guess it frightens me because--well, because a man seems to get lost out there. In normal space there are always stars around, no matter how distant they may be, and you feel that you've got direction and location. In subspace, all you've got is nothing--and one hell of a lot of that." He pushed his cap back until it perched comfortably on the rear of his head. "It's incredible when you stop to think about it. An area--an opening as big as the whole of our universe, big enough to pack every galaxy we've ever seen in it and still have lots of room left over. All that space--and not a single atom of matter in it anywhere." Captain Hawkins shook his grayed head in wonder. "At least," he went on. "Not a single atom in it until we came barging in to use it as a short cut across our own universe."

The man on the bridge called out, "Ten minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain."

"Very well," Hawkins answered.

Broussard shifted his considerable weight into a more comfortable position. "You feel rather strongly about this, don't you?"

"That I do," said Hawkins. As much as he enjoyed an occasional conversation with the psychologist, Broussard's questions often got on his nerves.

"Don't you think it's better we discovered subspace than if we were still back trying to beat the speed of light in our own universe?" Broussard asked him.

"Oh, stop looking for a dangling neurosis somewhere, Broussard," Hawkins said, managing a smile. "You know quite well that I've got absolutely nothing at all against the use of subspace for 'rapid transportation,' so to speak. It's just that I'm the sort of man who likes to know where he's going _all_ the time. And out here, in this stuff, you lose your sense of direction. There's no up, no down, no in between. It took spacemen a long time to get accustomed to the wild freedom they found out in the middle of normal space. But at least there you could always head for a star if you got lost. Out here ..." He gestured futilely towards the blackness staring in at them from the window. They stood silently contemplating it for several moments.

"Eight minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain," came the voice from the bridge again.

"Very well," Captain Hawkins replied, breaking the brief silence between the two men. Then he went on, "Broussard, have you ever been out there in that stuff? Oh, I don't mean like now, in a ship or a rescue craft. I mean in a spacesuit, all by yourself."

The psychologist shook his head. "No, I never have." He paused for just a second, then added, "What's it really like?"

There were times, Hawkins thought, when even the phrasing of a simple question on Broussard's part carried a slight sting. But like the brief pain that accompanies the probing point of a hypodermic needle, the tiny barbs contained in the man's questions were soon forgotten. Hawkins smiled. "It's my own private guess of what hell will turn out to be. 'God forsaken,' did we say? That's just about it. We stopped to repair a ship once, and some of us had to go outside to work on it. I guess I was out there for less than three hours--no more than that. And yet I was almost a madman by the time they hauled me back inside. I can't explain why." His voice trailed off into nothingness. "I guess it was just the blackness that did it."

"Six minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain."

"Very well." For the first time Hawkins turned to face the psychologist. "During my training at the Academy they locked me up in a closet once, just as a joke. I was without light for hours, but it was nothing like that out there. You should know, Broussard. Why does it look so much blacker in that window now than any other black I've ever seen?"

Broussard looked the man over carefully before answering, wondering just exactly what sort of reply might be called for. "I think the reason is that you've got close to optimum conditions for it here in the observatory," he said momentarily. "You always get the blackest shade of black inside a ring of white light. Look at the window." Hawkins turned to do as directed. "There you've got a white frame surrounding the complete absence of light. That's just about as good as you can get. No wonder it looks so black to you."

Hawkins shook his head, not so much in disbelief as in wonder.

"As a matter of fact," the psychologist continued almost in a hurry. "If you stayed out in subspace all by yourself, with no ship near you and no light of your own, after a while it wouldn't seem black to you at all. You'd get cortical adaptation, and things would just look gray. And not too long after that, you'd stop 'seeing' entirely, as we think of seeing. Or, as a friend of mine once said, under those conditions you'd 'see' as much with your elbows as you would with your eyes. Funny, isn't it? We usually think of black as being the absence of light. And yet, in order to 'see' black, we've got to have at least a little light around every once in a while."

The watchman on the bridge droned out the time again. "Four minutes until zero. No noticeable deviations, Captain."

Allen Hawkins gave a large sigh, then readjusted the cap on his head. He had the feeling that Broussard's little lecture on science, while factually accurate, was delivered more to obscure the facts than to illuminate. "I'd better get to the bridge now, Broussard. Not that they really need me, but ..." He left the sentence dangling, then turned and walked briskly out of the observation room.

* * * * *

Once in the control room, he gave the dials and the illuminated screens a rapid, practiced glance and then sat down in his chair to one side of the operations panel. There was actually no known danger to this shifting back and forth from one space to another. No ship had ever encountered any difficulties whatsoever in doing so; there had never been an accident of any kind during transition. The whole thing was as completely automatic as man could make it, and apparently entirely safe. But still Hawkins had never made the shift one way or another without feeling a telltale tightening of muscles deep inside him, and without wondering just what would happen if they got _stuck_ in all that darkness.

"One minute, Captain," the watch officer reminded him. Hawkins nodded in reply, his face illuminated by the flashing lights on the control panel in front of him. He watched their changing signals calmly with knowing eyes.

"Thirty seconds ... all drives off," sang out a voice. The hands on the clock crept slowly around the dial.

"Zero...."

There was no sound, no feeling, no jerk nor jar, no noise to mark the transition--nothing at all different from the moment before except a slight increase in the total light flux in the room.

_Stars._

Captain Allen Hawkins smiled softly to himself. Stars ... something to cling to, he whispered under his breath.

"Bridge from Navigation," came a voice close to his ear.

"Go ahead, Navigation," he said after pressing the communications button.

"Looks like we hit it right on the nose, Captain," the Navigator told him. "Can't tell just yet, of course, until I feed the positions of the nearest stars into Betsy and she decides where we are. But it looks good from here, and if I'm right, the one we're hunting for is about eight o'clock high from the nose of the ship as she sits now. I'll plot a course there right now. Do you want to wait until Betsy decides that's the one, or shall we take a chance and head for it first?"

The Navigator always asked the question, but he knew what the answer would be. "We'll start just as soon as you can give us the course," Hawkins replied.

"Aye, aye, Captain," the Navigator replied.

Hawkins turned to the officer on duty. "Mr. Smith, you will remain as you are until you receive the course from the Navigator. Once you have it, you will get underway immediately."

"Aye, aye, Captain," Smith replied.

"I'll be in my cabin if you want me," Hawkins said as he left the bridge. He was rather tired and he meant to go straight to bed, but somehow he found himself stopping by the observation room en route. Broussard was still there, looking out of the window at the stars.

"Lovely, aren't they, Broussard?" Hawkins said.

"So you feel the stars are lovely?" the psychologist answered slowly.

"Yes, I do. They give us light, and hope for the future, and more than that, a frame of reference when we fly through the dark reaches of our universe. They're more than beautiful--they're necessary." As he turned to leave, Hawkins chuckled to himself. Just let the head-shrinker try to read a neurosis into that!

* * * * *

It took them three weeks from the day they arrived back in normal space to make sure that they had found a sun with planets, and another three weeks from then to make landfall on the second of the four satellites this particular solar system had to offer. Almost from the very beginning they were elated with their luck, for the planet seemed to be a first class find. The _Sunward_ and her crew had been exploring this section of space for more than six years, and out of the thirty-eight systems they had investigated, this was the first that offered any promise of eventual human habitation.

Man had been in space less then one hundred years. At first he had thrown himself towards the stars with crude rocket-driven craft. A few years later he had invented a type of atomic drive which allowed him to approach the speed of light. But it was the discovery of the subspace technique of travel which had theoretically given him the whole universe to live in. There were drawbacks, however, and they were important ones. To tear himself from the matrix of normal space he still needed huge machines, and probably always would. This meant the building of exceedingly large space vessels, like the _Sunward_, which could contain not only the equipment necessary to propel him into the blackness of subspace, but which also could be equipped with the mammoth control mechanisms necessary to regulate the change-over. The switch to subspace could never be made near the surface of a planet, for the field forces generated during the change had far-flung effects and were quite capable, even under tightest control, of tearing loose a huge chunk of a planet and dropping it into subspace with the ship. Big ships meant big money, and even now there were fewer than a thousand of the large exploration craft in operation. Each ship could average fewer than ten new worlds a year. So while man had taken a lease on the universe, it seemed that at his present rate of exploration a great many centuries would pass before he finished the charting of even the stars in his own back yard.

But if at times he became discouraged at the immensity of the task, there were always moments of great joy which helped to spur a man on.

The men of the _Sunward_ named the new star Clarion, and the habitable planet they called Trellis. It was the second of three large and one very small planets which circled Clarion. The _Sunward_ spent more than two weeks circling over Trellis, making maps and checking the atmosphere. Then the council of scientists on board picked a landing site and Captain Hawkins brought the ship down on the spot they had chosen. Exactly twenty-seven days from the hour they landed, the council voted unanimously that Trellis was safe for human habitation, and Allen Hawkins gave the orders to have the hatches opened to the Trellian air.

The Captain, as was customary, was the first man to set foot on the soil. He led the brief ceremonies that claimed the world as Earth's own and then planted the Terran flag. He also took the customary measure of declaring it a ship's holiday, and even threw out the first baseball when the inevitable game started up later in the afternoon. But he didn't stay to watch, preferring to stroll around the landscape by himself for a little while.

He had been walking for a little more than an hour, traveling in a wide circle around the ship, when he came upon Dr. Broussard, sitting quietly under a shady tree, a book in one hand and a container of beer in the other. The beer looked good and cold, and the shade looked comfortable. "Mind if I join you?" Hawkins asked, and since he was Captain of the ship, scarcely waited for an invitation before he sat down and opened himself a beer. It tasted as good as it had looked, and Hawkins soon found himself in an expansive mood. "Tell me, Broussard," he said good-naturedly. "How come you aren't out snooping around, making sure that the crew's libidos aren't acting up or something."

Cocking an ear towards the distant ball field, rife with the excited noise that always accompanies such a game, Broussard replied, "It sounds to me as if the crew is getting about as much libidinal discharge as I could hope for under the circumstances. That being the case, I saw no reason why the ship's alienist shouldn't have a little time off."

Hawkins leaned back comfortably against the tree. "Alienist. That's a pretty strange word these days, Broussard. Used to be what they called psychiatrists in England back in the old days, right?" Hawkins was of vaguely English descent and felt it behooved him to know such things.

"That's right. They revived the term briefly a hundred years ago when we first got out into space, because they thought that psychologists might be needed for the first contacts with alien cultures." A slight frown came over the man's face. "The word's fallen into disuse again of late, however," he continued.

Captain Hawkins grunted in assent. "No aliens, eh?"

"That's right. No aliens. Thousands of new worlds, thousands upon thousands of new species, but not one of them intelligent enough to hold a candle to our earthside chimpanzee. But still they go on outfitting each of the exploration vessels with psychologists, and outfitting all of the psychologists for the double task of soothing the crew's _psyches_ and making contact with mythical intelligent races that so far we've only dreamed about." Broussard emptied his container of beer and with a single vicious movement threw it as far away from him as he could. "I must say, however, that of late they've been spending more time training us to be mind doctors than to be official greeters to unknown cultures."

Suddenly Broussard straightened up. "But why should you twit me about deserting my work today. I saw you throw out the first baseball. How come you didn't stay for the game? Surely that falls under the province of a Captain's job."

Allen Hawkins smiled. "I learned long ago, Broussard, that there are times when the presence of the Commanding Officer has an undesired influence on the spirits of the crew. After all, as Captain of the _Sunward_, I can't very well take part in the game itself. Who'd dare to strike me out when I came to bat?" He stopped to think about that for a moment. "Or, maybe I should have said, I don't _think_ anybody would dare to strike me out."

"Ah, yes, the Father Figure," Broussard said laughing.

"That's right. So I can't play. Nor can I umpire, for half the fun of baseball is arguing with the umpire and I couldn't allow any of that. And if I just watched without playing the game itself, a lot of the crew might think that I felt myself too high and mighty to take part in their proletarian type of recreation. So I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. So what did I do...?"

"You left the field," Broussard answered, lighting up a cigarette after offering the other man one.

"That's right, I left the baseball field and went walking."

"That's not quite what I meant when I said 'you left the field,'" Broussard went on. "It's a psychological term, first used by Lewin many centuries ago. Any time a man is in a conflict situation, faced with two or more alternatives that he finds it difficult to choose among, he may solve his problem by choosing none of them."

Hawkins stretched his legs out restfully on the grass in front of him. As he thought about it, there had been few times in the past when he had given the psychologist his head and let the man talk. Probably, Hawkins thought to himself, Broussard spends most of his time listening to the petty confessions of all of us and never gets the opportunity to unload a bit himself. He caught himself wondering just who on Earth confesses the Pope....

And so he uttered the magical words, "I don't think I quite understand...."

Broussard scarcely needed the encouragement to continue. "Lewin liked to think of psychological situations as approximating physical situations. He spoke in terms of valences and attractions, of vectors and forces operating through psychological distances. For example, let's consider the case of a child put into a long hallway. At one end of the hall is a large, fierce dog. At the other end is an ugly man with a big switch. We tell the child that he has to go to one end of the hall or the other. This becomes an 'avoidance-avoidance' situation in the Lewinian terminology. Both the man with the switch and the fierce dog carry negative valences--that means that the child actually doesn't want to approach either of them--and the closer the child comes to one of them, the more powerfully it repels him. Just as with magnets--the closer you bring one negative charge to another negative charge, the more powerful is the force of repulsion."

Captain Hawkins smiled. It wasn't going to be as bad as he had feared. "What does all this have to do with baseball?"

"We'll get back to home plate in just a moment. But first, let's continue with the child. We put him in the hallway, tell him to go to one end or the other, and then we just sit back and watch. At first he stands about as close to the center of the hall as he can, assuming that the two negative valences are about of equal strength. He's undecided--can't make up his mind which is worse, the man or the dog. So we prompt him to action--shock him or tell him that he has to keep moving. Then he begins to move back and forth, vacillating between the two undesirable objects. So we apply more and more pressure to try to force him to a decision. But the closer he moves to the dog, for example, the more distasteful _it_ becomes, and the less dangerous does the _man_ seem to be. So the child turns around and starts towards the man. But here the situation is repeated. It's a beautiful example of a conflict situation."

Giving vent to a well-disciplined snort, Captain Hawkins said, "And eventually the child either gets well switched or badly bitten, eh?"

"No, that's where you're wrong. Eventually the child tries to escape from the hallway altogether. Sometimes he'll try to climb the walls, or break down a door, or anything like that which will release him from what has become an impossible psychological environment."

"So," said Hawkins. "I think you left me stranded on first base."

Broussard laughed. "Pardon the sermon, Captain. What I was trying to point out was that the baseball game represented just about the same sort of thing to you as the hallway did to the child. Any time a human being is faced with two impossible decisions like that, he usually ends up by 'leaving the field' of conflict altogether. Nowadays we can even predict the exact field forces necessary to bring on this type of behavior."

"And what do you predict I'm going to do right now?" Hawkins asked with a bit of a laugh in his voice.

"That's an easy one. I predict you're going to ask for another beer--and that I'll give it to you. No conflict there." He opened a container that chilled itself automatically as he handed it to his superior officer.

Hawkins blew the foam from it and then took a long, satisfying swallow. "There are times when I'm glad I'm just an uncomplicated space officer," he said presently.

Broussard grinned. "Sorry if I seemed to be giving you a lecture, Captain. I'm afraid you would have enjoyed a good, healthy discussion of Freud much more. My own particular problem is that I'm much more interested in thinking about the remote possibilities of man's encountering new types of intelligences than I am in playing father confessor to a bunch of space rats. Back on Earth the social psychologists felt that Lewin's work offered a fruitful means of analyzing the motivational components in any alien society we might encounter. I guess my trotting out the vector charts was just a neat example of wishful thinking."

Captain Allen Hawkins didn't bother to answer the remark for some time. He was too busy watching something move slowly towards them across the grassy plain. Finally he half-whispered to his companion, "Don't put those charts away too soon, Broussard. You finally may have a chance to use them."

* * * * *

Bells clanged loudly. Red and yellow lights flashed insistently in front of the man, demanding his attention. The clattering noise of a computer working at high speed added to the unholy din of the small spaceship's control room.