Mr. West and his inner Voice

Mr. West and his inner Voice form a private decision-making system that West regards as more rational than ordinary human judgment. The arrangement serves him reliably until an interruption leaves him exposed to a crowd of strange voices; when his own voice returns, its accuracy and authority are restored alongside its capacity to direct him toward a harmful course of action.

Identity and the Arrangement

Mr. West is a large, glum, secretive accountant at Adwell, Gipper and Gascoigne in New York. He prides himself on making decisions rationally and rejects the I Ching, Tarot cards, and horoscopes as irrational aids. Yet he does not make difficult choices unaided. He refers his problems to The Voice, which tells him what to do and, as far as he is concerned, is always right.

West gives this arrangement a vivid internal image: a miniature version of himself, about the size of a pea, seated in a part of his brain he calls Control Central. From there, the tiny West looks at the world through the larger West’s senses, sorts through problems, and makes decisions. The imagined division of labor lets West understand himself as both the person who encounters a dilemma and the observer capable of resolving it. He regards this not as a strange dependency but as the normal, rational way nature intended.

Trust in The Voice

The relationship is practical as well as intimate: West delegates consequential choices to his inner authority. During the week when his familiar voice stops communicating, he is weighing whether to sell South African Sweatshops, Ltd. and buy International Thanatopsis Corporation. His decision requires him to assess a long list of market factors, including leverage, margin, seasonal variation, investor confidence, market averages, and alfalfa futures. West assumes such matters are too much for a person to work through alone and expects The Voice to solve them.

When an answer comes at breakfast, it is an elaborate explanation about tensile web structures, rigidity, flexibility, and industrial lamination, not a response he can connect to his investment question. West asks what it is talking about, then demands to know who is speaking. The speech ends without an answer. The exchange breaks the ordinary pact: a voice is present, but it is no longer the intelligible adviser West depends on. His familiar inner authority has become unrecognizable even before it disappears.

Disconnection and Its Consequences

During the generator tests across the street, West hears numerous voices saying unrelated things. The surrounding week is also marked by unusually high sunspot activity, a ten-year maximum in cosmic-ray output, and a temporary four-degree southward shift of the Van Allen belts. The story places these conditions beside the change in his experience, then notes that the voices stop when testing ends and the cosmic measurements return toward normal; it does not establish a definite cause.

West finds the many voices alarming because he distinguishes his customary single voice from what he takes to be a sign of madness. More distressing still, he cannot get an answer from his own. He tries to manage without it and makes poor decisions: he sells South African Sweatshops, Ltd., which promptly rises five points, and buys International Thanatopsis Corporation, which falls to a record low after news of an imminent immortality serum.

His other problem concerns Amelia, his fourteen-year-old niece, who is staying with him while her parents are in Europe. West recognizes the danger and illegality of his predatory sexual intentions, but without his usual adviser he turns over schemes involving entering her room in disguise or presenting sexual abuse as education. He knows these thoughts are dangerous, yet insists that solving such problems is work for The Voice. The episode exposes the disturbing limit of his faith: he treats the adviser’s availability as a safeguard, although the decisions he wants help with are themselves threatening to Amelia.

Return and Reversal

After several days, West’s impatience turns into an appeal to his missing authority: he pounds his forehead and demands a solution. Instead, the other voices offer bizarre instructions about liquid helium, a machine made from an old washing machine, and rotogravure collage. Their fluent answers do not help him distinguish useful counsel from irrelevant noise. Once the generator tests finish, sunspot activity declines, cosmic-ray activity returns to normal, and the Van Allen belts shift back north; the voices cease.

Later, after reading about a religious colony on Mount Alluci whose members await the end of the world, West feels disoriented and books a flight to Lima. As he puts down the telephone, his own voice returns with an investment recommendation. The miniature West then insists that it had been present all along but unable to establish a connection. This account restores the old model of their relationship: the adviser was not, in its telling, gone, merely unreachable.

The returned voice advises West that he can recover from selling South African Sweatshops, Ltd. by doubling his holdings in Thanatopsis. It also proposes drugging Amelia with Nembutal. West cancels his trip, follows the investment advice, and Thanatopsis splits ten for one at month’s end. The account also reports that Amelia becomes hooked on nembies. The successful market prediction and the disastrous consequence for Amelia arrive together, making the restored voice neither simply a reliable guide nor simply a failed one.

Significance of the Relationship

West’s insistence on rationality sits uneasily beside his dependence on an imagined authority inside his head. He rejects conventional forms of divination but accepts The Voice’s pronouncements without questioning the structure that makes them authoritative. The miniature self gives that dependence a coherent form: West can cast the decision-maker as both himself and someone separate from himself, a private expert operating behind his ordinary awareness.

The interruption tests that arrangement by separating the familiar voice from the many voices that sound like advice but provide no dependable direction. Its return seems to confirm West’s faith through a profitable prediction, even as its recommendation concerning Amelia shows that accuracy and moral judgment are not the same thing. The closing insistence that every man must follow his inner voice is therefore edged with irony. West’s story does not merely ask whether the voice is right; it shows the danger of treating a trusted inner authority as sufficient reason to obey.