The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (14 page)

All
Temski did was sit. He was capable of looking after himself, and did so. That
is, when he was hungry and food was present, he ate some with his fingers; when
he had to relieve himself, he went to a corner and did so; when he was sleepy,
he lay down on the floor and slept. The rest of the time he sat. He was in good
physical condition and quite calm. Nothing said to him produced the slightest
reaction, nor did he take any interest in anything that went on. His wife was
brought in to see him in hopes of producing a response. She was taken away
weeping after five minutes.

Since
Temski wouldn't respond, and Rogers, being dead, couldn't respond, it was quite
natural to look upon Hughes as being, somehow, responsible.

There
was nothing wrong with him except a case of something like hysterical
blindness, so it was to be expected that he should answer questions rationally
and explain precisely what had happened. This, however, he could not, or would
not, do.

A
psychiatric consultant was brought in, a distinguished New York doctor called
Shapir. He was requested to work with both Temski and Hughes. It was of course
unthinkable to admit that the mission had been a failure (the word 'disaster'
was not even mentioned), but a couple of rumors had leaked out to the press
despite all security precautions. Irresponsible journalists demanded to know
why the crew of Psyche XIV was being held incommunicado, and claimed the
'right' of the American people to 'know', etc. It had been necessary to issue a
statement concerning a new health test being run on astronauts who had spent
over fifteen days in space, due to Commander Rogers's unexpected and tragic
death from heart failure, and to have a whole new series of articles written
for the papers concerning plans for a 'Little America' dome city on Mars, to
maintain a positive attitude in the public. The real people of course knew that
the rest of the Psyche program was in jeopardy; and they instructed Dr Shapir
to diagnose and cure the astronauts with all deliberate speed.

Shapir
talked with Hughes for half an hour about the food in the hospital, Cal Tech,
and the latest Chinese report on their Alpha Centauri probe, all very relaxed
and trivial. Then he said, 'What is it you see, when you open your eyes?'

Hughes,
who was up and dressed now, sat silent for a while. Opaque goggles covered his
eyes entirely, giving him the arrogant, staring look of people who affect dark
glasses. 'Nobody's asked that,' he said.

'Didn't
the oculists?'

'Yes,
I guess Kray did. Early on. Before they decided I was a mental case.'

'What
did you tell him?'

'It's
hard to describe. The point is, it's indescribable. At first it was things
going out of focus, going transparent, going away. Then the light. Too much
light. Like overexposing a film, bleaching everything out. But with that, a
kind of whirling. Changing positions and relationships, changing perspectives,
constant transformation. It made me get dizzy. My eyes kept sending signals to
my inner ears, I guess. Like that inner-ear disease, only in reverse. Doesn't
it foul up your spatial orientation?'

'Meniere's
syndrome, I think it's called, yes, it does. Especially on stairs and slopes.'

'It's
as if I was looking from a great height, or ... up at a great height....'

'Heights
ever worry you?'

'Hell
no. They don't even mean anything to me. What's up and down, in space? No, see,
I'm not giving you the picture. There is no picture. I've been trying to look
more, to learn to ... how to see ... it's not much good.'

There
was a pause. 'That takes courage,' said Shapir.

'What
do you mean?' the astronaut said sharply.

'Well...
To have the sensory input which is most important to the conscious mind - sight
- reporting non-existent and incomprehensible things, in flagrant contradiction
with all other sensory input - your touch, your hearing, your sense of balance,
and so on - to have that going on, every time you try to open your eyes, and
not only to live with it but to attempt to investigate it... It doesn't sound
easy.'

'So
mostly I keep my eyes shut,' Hughes said, dour. 'Like a damned see-no-evil
monkey.'

'When
you do have your eyes open, and you look towards some object you know is there
- your own hand, for instance -what do you see?'

'
"A blooming, buzzing confusion." '

'William
James,' Shapir said with satisfaction. 'What was he talking about - how a baby
perceives the world, eh?' He had a pleasant voice with a mild, glancing quality
to it, non-percussive; one could not imagine him scolding or yelling. He nodded
several times, thinking out the implications of what Hughes had said. 'To learn
how to see, you said. To learn. That's how you feel about it?'

Hughes
hesitated, then said with a sudden, marked increase of trust, 'I have to. What
else can I do? Apparently I'm never going to be able to - to see the way I used
to, the way other people do, again. But I still do
see.
Only I don't
understand what I see, it doesn't make sense. There are no outlines, no
distinctions, even between nearer and farther. There
is
something there
- only I can't say that, because there aren't any
things.
No forms.
Instead of forms, I see transformations -transfigurations. Does that make any
sense at all?'

'I
think it does,' Shapir said, 'only it's enormously difficult to put a direct
experience into words. And when the experience is new, unique, overwhelming...'

'And
irrational. That's it.' Hughes spoke now with real gratitude. 'If only I could
show it to you,' he said wistfully.

The
two astronauts were being kept on the tenth floor of a big military hospital in
Maryland now. They were not permitted to leave that floor, and anyone who
visited it still spent ten days in quarantine before he rejoined the outer
world: the Martian plague theory was currently on top. At Shapir's insistence,
Hughes was allowed to go up to the roof garden of the hospital (after which the
elevator was elaborately sterilized and roped off for three days).

They
demanded that Hughes wear a surgical mask; and Shapir had asked him not to wear
his goggles. Docile, he went up the elevator with his mouth and nose covered,
his eyes uncovered, but tightly shut.

The
change from the dusk of the elevator to the hot smoggy sunlight of July on the
open roof did not, as far as Shapir could see, affect those shut eyes. Hughes
did not screw them tighter against the flooding light, though he raised his
face to it as if he felt the heat pleasant on his skin, and took a deep breath
through the binding gauze.

'I
haven't been outside since March,' he said.

It
was true, of course. He had been in a spacesuit or in a hospital room,
breathing canned or conditioned air.

'Have
you got your compass bearings?' Shapir asked.

'Not
the faintest. It makes me feel blinder, being outdoors. Afraid to walk off the
edge.' Hughes had refused assistance coming through the corridors and in the
elevator, feeling his way adeptly with his hands, and now despite his joke
about falling off he began to explore the roof garden. He was exhilarated: an
active man released from long confinement. Shapir watched him, brooding. The
low furniture was a hazard to him but he learned at once how to feel for it; he
had tactile intelligence; there was grace in his movements, even as he
blundered in blindness.

'Will
you open your eyes?' Shapir said in his glancing, reluctant voice.

Hughes
stopped. 'All right,' he said; but he turned towards Shapir, and his right hand
came up gropingly. Shapir came forward and let that hand take his arm.

The
grip of it tightened, as Hughes opened his eyes. Then Hughes let go, and took a
step away, stretching out both his arms. A cry broke from him. He reached
forward and upward, his head back, his eyes wide open, staring at the empty
sky. 'Oh, my God!' he whispered, and dropped, like a man hit by a sledgehammer.

Psychiatric
counselling session, 18th July. S. Shapir, Geraint Hughes.

S.
Hello. Sidney... I won't stay long. Listen, that wasn't such a bright idea of
mine. The roof. I'm sorry. I had no idea. But no right, either... Would you
rather I left?

H.
No.

S.
All right... I'm getting stir-crazy myself. Need a good walk. I walk a good
deal, usually. About two miles to my office and the same back. Then I add
detours. Whatever they say, New York is a beautiful town to walk in. If you
know how to pick your route. Listen, I have a queer story about Joe Temski. Not
a story, just a queer fact, actually. Did you know that they have written on
his record that he is 'functionally deaf'?

H.
Deaf?

S.
Yes, deaf. Well, you know, I began to wonder. I go in and talk to Joe, you
know, touch him, try to make eye contact, any kind of contact, to get through. No
go. I've had patients tell me in so many words,
'I
can't hear you.' A metaphor. But
what if it isn't a metaphor? It happens sometimes with little kids, they're
called retarded and it turns out they've got thirty, sixty, eighty percent
hearing dysfunction. Well, maybe Joe really can't hear me. Just like you can't
see me.

H.
[pause of forty seconds] Do you mean he's hearing things? Listening?

S.
It's possible.

H.
[pause of twenty seconds] You can't shut your ears.

S.
That's what I thought, too. It could be rough, couldn't it? Well, what I
thought was, what about trying to shut them for him? Put earplugs in his ears.

H.
He still wouldn't be able to hear you.

S.
No, but he wouldn't be distracted. If you had to watch your light show all the
time, you wouldn't be able to pay much attention to me or anything else, right?
Maybe it's like that with Joe. Maybe there's this noise drowning out everything
else for him.

H.
[pause of twenty seconds] It would be more than noise.

S.
I don't suppose you want to talk about...on the roof...

No,
all right.

H.
You'd like to know what I saw, wouldn't you?

S.
Sure I would. But in your own time.

H.
Yeah, I've got so much else to do here besides talk to you.

All
the books I can read and the beautiful women I can look at. You know damned
well I'll tell you eventually, because I haven't got anybody else to talk to.

S.
Oh, hell, Geraint. [pause of ten seconds]

H.
Shit. I'm sorry, Sidney. If I didn't have you to talk to, I'd have cracked
completely. I know that. You're very patient with me.

S.
Whatever you saw, up there, disturbs you. That's one reason why I want to know
what it was. But what the hell, if you can handle it alone, do. That's the
idea, after all. My curiosity is my problem, not yours! Listen. Let's forget
talking. Let me read you this article in
Science.
Your Colonel
Wood gave it to me, said you might be interested. I was. It's on what they
found inside the Argentinian meteorite. The authors are suggesting we go comb
the Meteor Belt for remnants of a trans-stellar fleet that came to grief in our
solar system about six hundred million years ago. They would have landed on
Mars first, of course. Are these guys nuts?

H.
I don't know. Read the article.

Temski
slept heavily, and it was easy for Shapir to insert ordinary wax plugs like
those insomniacs use into his ears while he was asleep. When Temski woke he did
nothing unusual at first. He sat up, yawned, stretched, scratched, looked
lazily around to see if anything to eat was handy, in that serene way which
Shapir privately felt was altogether unlike any psychotic behavior he had ever
seen, and in fact unlike any human behavior he had ever seen. Temski reminded
him of a healthy, poised, contented, tame animal. Not a chimpanzee; something
milder, more contemplative, an orang, maybe.

But
the orang began to feel uncomfortable.

Temski
looked around, left and right, nervous. Perhaps he was not looking but moving
his head trying to find the vanished sounds. The lost chord, Shapir thought.
Temski grew more and more disturbed and alert. He got up, still turning his
head restlessly. He looked across the room. For the first time in seventeen
days of daily contact, he saw Shapir.