The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (13 page)

The
automatic information feed from the ship continued. Departure was normal.
Normal, reports came in during the twenty-six days of flight which the
astronauts spent in drugged sleep on HKL and I.V. hookups. There was no medical
monitor on Psyche missions. The only link with the crew was voice contact. When
they did not call in on Day 2, the long tension at Houston tightened to
despair.

The
onboard automatics, directed by the ground crew, had just about established
Psyche's re-entry course when the dead speakers suddenly said in Hughes's
voice, 'Houston, can you give me readings. Optical interference here.' They
tried to direct him, but the one attempt he made at a manual correction was
disastrous, and took ground control five hours to compensate. They told him
hands off, they'd bring in the ship. Almost immediately after that they lost
voice contact again.

The
great pale parachutes opened above the grey Pacific, roses slowly falling out
of heaven. The speed-burnt ship screamed steam, plunging; popped back up and
rocked, quiet, on the long deep swells. Ground control had done a beautiful
job. She was down within a half-kilo of the
California.
Helicopters
hovered, rafts assembled, the ship was stabilized, the hatch was opened. Nobody
scrambled out.

They
went in and brought them out.

Commander
Rogers was in his flight seat, still strapped down and plugged into the HKL and
I.V.s. He had been dead about ten days, and it was clear why the others had not
opened his suit.

Captain
Temski seemed physically unhurt, but dazed and bewildered. He did not speak, or
respond to instructions. They had to manhandle him to haul him out of the ship,
though he put up no active resistance.

Dr
Hughes was in a state of collapse, but fully conscious; he appeared to be
blind.

'Please...'

'Can
you see anything?'

'Yes!
Please let me have the blindfold.'

'Do
you see this light I'm showing? What color is it, Dr Hughes?'

'All
colors, white, it's too bright.'

'Will
you point towards it, please?'

'It's
everywhere. It's too bright.'

'The
room's quite dark, Dr Hughes. Now, will you open your eyes again, please.'

'It
isn't dark.'

'Mmmh.
Possible supersensitivity here. All right now, how about that? Dark enough for
you?'

'Make
it dark!'

'No,
keep your hands down, please. Take it easy. All right, we'll put the compresses
back on.'

The
struggling man relaxed as soon as his eyes were covered, and lay still,
breathing hard. His narrow face, framed in a month's growth of dark beard, was
oiled with sweat. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

'We'll
try again later on when you've rested.'

'Will
you open your eyes, please. The room's quite dark.'

'Why
do you tell me that when it's
not
dark?'

'Dr
Hughes, I can hardly make out your face; I've got the faintest red illumination
on my scope - nothing else. Can you see me?'

'No!
I can't see for the light!'

The
doctor increased the illumination until he could see Hughes's face, the
clenched jaw, the open, dazzled, frightened eyes.

'There,
does that make it any darker?' he asked with the sarcasm of helplessness.

'No!'
Hughes shut his eyes; he had gone dead white. 'Get dizzy,' he muttered, 'the
whirling,' then he gasped for breath and began to vomit.

Hughes
was unmarried and had no immediate kin. His closest friend was known to be
Bernard Decelis. They had trained together; Decelis had been specialist on Psyche
XII, the mission that had discovered the City of Mars, as Hughes was on XIV.
They flew Decelis to the debriefing station in Pasadena and instructed him to
go in and talk with his friend. The conversation was of course recorded.

D.
Hullo, Gerry. Decelis.

H.
Barnie?

D.
How you doing?

H.
Fine. You been OK?

D.
Sure. No picnic, was it?

H.
How's Gloria?

D.
Fine, just fine.

H.
She got past 'Aunt Rhody' yet?

D.
[laughs] Oh, Christ, yeah. She can play 'Greensleeves' now.

At
least she calls it 'Greensleeves'. H. What have they got you in this dump for?
D. To see you.

H.
Wish I could return the compliment.

D.
You will. Listen. I've been assured by three different oculists, or whatever
the hell they are, opthamollywhoggers, eye-doctors here, that there is
absolutely nothing wrong with your eyes. Three opthamacadamizers and a
neurologist, in fact. It's a sort of chorus they have. But they sure as hell
seem sure of it.

H.
So what's wrong is my brain, evidently.

D.
In the sense of a crossed connection, maybe.

H.
What about Joe Temski?

D.
I don't know. Haven't seen him.

H.
What did they tell you about him?

D.
They didn't have a chorus line worked out for him. Just said he's inclined to
be withdrawn.

H.
Withdrawn! Jesus, I'll say so. Like a rock is withdrawn.

D.
Temski? That joker?

H.
It started with him.

D.
What did?

H.
At the site. He stopped answering. D. What happened?

H.
Just that. He stopped answering. Stopped talking. Stopped noticing. Dwight
thought it was cafard. Is that what they're still calling it?

D.
It's mentioned as one possibility. Was there anything special happened, there
at the site?

H.
We found the room.

D.
The room, yeah. That all came back on your reports. I've seen them, and some of
the holos you brought back with you. Fantastic. What the hell is it, Gerry?

H.
I don't know.

D.
Is it a construct?

H.
I don't know. What's the whole City?

D.
It was built, made; it must have been.

H.
How do you know, how can you tell, when you don't know what made it? Is a
seashell 'made'? If you didn't know, if you didn't have any background and
couldn't assume any likeness, and you looked at a seashell and a ceramic
ashtray, could you tell, could you say which was 'made'? And what for? What
does it mean? Or what about a ceramic seashell? Or a paperwasp's nest? Or a
geode?

D.
Yeah, OK. But what about those things, that...

arrangement
that you call 'pigeonholes' in the reports? I saw the holos. What did you make of
them?

H.
What did you make of them?

D.
I don't know. They're weird. I thought of running the spatial arrangements
through a computer, looking for meaningful pattern..
..
You don't think much of that.

H.
No. Fine. Only what are you going to program for 'meaning'?

D.
Mathematical relationships. Any kind of geometrical pattern, regularity, code.
I don't know. What was the place like, Gerry?

H.
I don't know.

D.
You were in there a lot?

H.
All the time, after we found it.

D.
That's where you noticed this kind of eye trouble you've got? How did it start?

H.
Things going out of focus. Like eye strain. It was worse outside the room. Came
on over several days. I could still make things out all right when we were
taking the ML up to the ship. But getting worse. There'd be these flashes of
light, left my depth perception all screwed up, I'd get dizzy. Dwight and I set
up the course, one or the other of us was functioning most of the time. But he
was getting kind of wild. Didn't want to use the radio, wouldn't touch the
onboard computer.

D.
What was... wrong with him?

H.
I don't know. When I told him about my eyes he said he'd been having something
like shaking fits. I said we'd better get the hell up to the ship while we
could. He said OK, because Joe was really beginning to not function. Before we
even launched he started having some kind of seizures, like epilepsy — Dwight,
I mean. When he came out of one he was shaky, but he seemed rational. He took
us up OK, but as soon as we docked in he went into another fit, and they kept
getting longer. He started hallucinating in between them. I gave him some
tranquillizers and strapped him in; it was wearing him out. When I took the
sleep, I don't know, he could have been dead already then.

D.
No, he died in the sleep. About ten days out from Earth.

H.
They didn't tell me that.

D.
There wasn't anything you could have done, Gerry.

H.
I don't know. Those attacks he had, they were like overloads. Like all his
fuses blew. Burned him out. He talked, while he was in them. Sort of in bursts,
like barking — as if he was trying to say a whole sentence at once. Epileptics
don't talk, do they, when they're having a seizure?

D.
I don't know. Epilepsy's so well controlled now you don't hear much about it.
They catch the tendency, and cure it first. If Rogers had had the tendency....

H.
Yeah. He never would have been in the program. Christ, he'd had six months in
space. D. What had you had - six days? H. Like you. One Moon hop.

D.
It isn't that, then. Do you think...

H.
What?

D.
Some kind of virus?

H.
Space plague? Martian fever? Mysterious ancient spores madden astronauts? D.
All right, it sounds dumb. But look, the room had been sealed. And it does
sound like all of you— H. Dwight gets a cortical overcharge, Joe goes
catatonic, I start seeing things. What's the connection? D. Nervous system.

H.
Why different symptoms in each of us?

D.
Well, drugs affect people differently—

H.
Do you think we found some kind of God damned Martian psychogenic mushrooms in
there? There isn't anything there, it's dead, like all the rest of Mars. You
know, you've been there! There aren't any God damned germs or viruses, there's
no life there, no life.

D.
But there may have been—

H.
What makes you think so?

D.
The room you found. The City we found.

H.
City! For Christ's sake, Barnie, you talk like some damned pop journalist, you
know damned well the whole thing is a set of mud concretions for all we can
tell. There's no way to tell. It's too old, conditions are too different, we
have no context. We don't understand, we can't understand, it's something the
human mind is outside of. Cities, rooms, all that - we're just analogizing,
trying to make sense in our terms. But it's not in our terms. There is no
sense. I can see that now. That's the only thing I can see!

D.
See what, Gerry?

H.
What I see when I open my eyes!

D.
What?

H.
Everything that isn't there and doesn't make sense. Oh—I— D. Here, come on.
Take it easy. Look, it'll be OK. It's going to be OK, Gerry, you'll be OK. H.
[unclear] light, and the [unclear] try to see what I touch and I can't, I don't
understand and I can't [unclear] D. Hang on. I'm right here. Take it easy, old
man.

Hughes,
who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good
record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors,
to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination.
His performance had been solid and his behavior irreproachable; but now it was
frequently recalled that he was, after all, an intellectual.

Temski
was harder to explain. He was a crack test pilot, an Air Force captain, and a
baseball fan, but now his behavior was even more aberrant than Hughes's.