the wind's twelve quarters (35 page)

“Listen, Gerry. Was there ever machinery in those pigeonholes?”
 

“No.”
 

“Hah! There’s a definite answer! I thought you wouldn’t assert anything about Site D except its incomprehensibility to the human mind. You softening up?”
 

“No. Learning.”
 

“Learning what?”
 

“How to see.”
 

After a pause Decelis asked cautiously, “See what?” “Site D. Since it’s all I can see.”
 

“You mean, that’s what you—when your eyes are open—”
 

“No.” Hughes spoke wearily and with reluctance. “It’s more complex than that. I don’t see Site D. I see... the world in the light cast by Site D.... A new light. The man you ought to ask is Joe Temski. Or, listen, did you ever run the pigeonholes through Algie, like you said?”
 

“I had trouble setting up the program.”
 

“I’ll bet you did,” Hughes said with a short laugh. “Send the stuff on up here. I’ll set it up. Blindfolded.”
 

Temski came into Hughes’s room, radiant. “Gerry,” he said, “I’ve got it.”
 

“Got what?”
 

“I’ve got it together. I heard you. No, I wasn’t lip-reading. Say something with your back turned. Go on!” “Ptomaine poisoning.”
 

“ ‘Ptomaine poisoning.’ —OK? See, I’m hearing you. But I haven’t lost the music. I’ve got it all together!” Blue-eyed and fair, Temski was ordinarily a handsome man; now he was magnificent. Hughes could not see him (though the spy camera in the ventilator grille could and did), but he heard the vibration of his voice, and was moved, and frightened.
 

“Take off your blinkers, Gerry,” the gentle, vibrant voice said.
 

Hughes shook his head.
 

“You can’t sit in the dark inside yourself forever. Come out. You can’t choose blindness, Gerry.”
 

“Why can’t I?”
 

“Not after you’ve seen the light.”
 

“What light?”
 

“The light, the word, the truth we have been taught to perceive and to know,” Temski said, with the gentleness of utter certainty, and a warmth in his voice, a warmth like sunlight.
 

“Get out,” Hughes said. “Get out, Temski!”
 

 Twelve weeks had passed since Psyche XIV splashdown. Nobody on the debriefing staff had come down with any symptoms more alarming than boredom. Hughes was no worse, and Temski was now completely recovered. It could be safely assumed that whatever had affected the crew of Psyche XIV, it had not been an infection vectored by a virus, spore, bacterium, or other physical agent. The hypothesis accepted tentatively and with various reservations by the majority, including Dr Shapir, was that something in the arrangement of the elements constituting the “room,” Site D, had, during their prolonged and intense study of the site, caused a degree of brain-wave disruption in all three men, analogous to the brain-function disturbance caused by strobe lights at certain frequencies, etc. Precisely what elements of the “room” were involved was not yet known, though the holographs were being examined intensively by experts. Psyche XV was to make a still more thorough investigation of the site, taking due precautions to protect and monitor the astronauts.
 

These suspect elements of Site D were so numerous and so intricately interrelated that it was very hard for a single mind to attempt to arrange or order them. Some Martianologists were sure the peculiar properties of the “room” were only a geological accident, and that all the “room” had to “tell” us was the kind of information furnished so concisely and beautifully by the strata of rocks, the rings of a tree, the lines of a spectrum. Others were as convinced that intelligent beings had built the City, and that in studying it we might learn something of their nature and the way their minds worked—those unimaginable minds of six hundred million years ago (for the radioactive-decay dating of the site was absolutely definite now).
The job of doing so, however, was daunting. T. A. Newman of the Smithsonian Institution put it well: “Archaeologists are used to getting a lot of information out of very simple things—potsherds, bits of flint, a wall here, a grave there. But what if all we had of an ancient civilization was a very complicated thing, complicated in more than a technological sense— let’s say, one copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Now let’s assume that the archaeologists who find this copy of
 

Hamlet are not humanoid, don’t have books, don’t have plays, don’t speak, write, or think at all as we do. What are they going to make of that little physical artifact, the evident complexity and purposefulness of it, the repetition of certain elements and the non-repetition of others, the semi-regularity of line lengths, and so on? How are they going to read Hamlet?”
 

To those who accepted the “Hamlet theory,” the obvious first step was to employ computers, and a number of them had been set to work analyzing the various elements of Site D: the spacing, size, depth, and configurations of the “pigeonholes,” the proportions of the first, middle, and third “subchambers,” the extraordinary acoustical properties of the “room” as a whole, and so on. None of these programs had as yet produced any sure evidence of conscious planning or rational pattern; none, that is, except the program set up by Decelis and Hughes on NASA’s new Algebraic V, which had certainly got results, though they could not be called rational. Indeed, that print-out had given a shudder to the NASA brass, and a good laugh to those few scientists to whom Decelis had shown it before it was suppressed as being probably a fraud and certainly an embarrassment. The entire print-out read as follows:
 

RUN
 

PIGEONHOLES SITE D MARS SECTOR NINE
 

DECELIS HUGHES
 

GOD
 

GOOD GOD GOD GOOD YOU ARE GOD
 

RESET
 

RESET TOTALITY COMPREHENSION NONSENSE
 

PERCEIVE NONSENSE NO SENSE REAL GOOD GOD
 

PERCEIVE RECEIVE DIRECTIONS DIRECTION
 

PROCEED INFORM UNINFORMED
 

GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD
 

END RUN
 

Shapir came in to find Hughes lying on his bed, as he now did most of the time, wearing his black goggles. He looked white and ill.
 

“I think you’ve been overdoing it.”
 

Hughes did not answer.
 

Shapir sat down. “They’re sending me back to New York,” he said presently.
 

Hughes did not answer.
 

“Temski’s been released, you know. He’s on his way to Florida now. With his wife. I can’t find out what they plan for you. I asked...” After a long pause he completed the sentence. “I asked for another two weeks here with you. No go.”
 

“It’s all right,” Hughes said.
 

“I want to keep in touch with you, Geraint. Obviously we can’t write letters. But there’s the phone. And tapes; I’m leaving a cassette recorder here with you. When you want to talk, please call me. If you can’t get me, talk to the recorder. It’s not the same, but—” “You’re a very good man, Sidney,” Hughes said gently. “I wish....” After a minute he sat up. He reached up to his face and took off the black goggles.
They fitted so closely around his eye sockets that it took him a little while to get them off. When they were off he lowered his hands, and looked across the room, directly at Shapir. His eyes, the pupils enlarged by long privation of light, were almost as dark as the goggles.
 

“I see you,” he said. “Hide and seek. I spy. You’re It. Do you want to know what I see?”
 

“Yes,” Shapir said softly.
 

“A blot. A shadow. An incompleteness, a rudiment, an obstruction. Something completely unimportant. You see, it doesn’t do any good to be a good man, even...” “And when you look at yourself?”
 

“The same. Just the same. A hindrance, a triviality. A blot on the field of vision.”
 

“The field of vision. What is the field of vision?” “What do you think?” Hughes said, very quietly and wearily. “What is true vision of? Reality, of course. I have been re-programmed to perceive reality, to see the truth. I see God.” He sank his face into his hands, covering his eyes. “I was a thinking man,” he said. “I tried to be a rational man. But what good’s reason, when you can see the truth? Seeing is believing....” He looked up again at Shapir, his dark eyes both piercing and unseeing. “If you want a real explanation, go ask Joe Temski. He’s keeping quiet now; he’s biding his time. But he’s the one who can tell you. And he will, when his time comes. He can translate what he hears— translate it into words. It’s harder to do with visual perceptions. Mystics have always had trouble putting their visions into words; except the ones that got the Word, that heard the Voice. They usually got right up and acted, didn’t they? Temski will act. But I will not. I refuse. I will not preach. I will not be a missionary.”
 

“A missionary?”
 

“Don’t you see? Don’t you see that’s what the ‘room’ is? A training center, a briefing room, a—”
 

“A religious center? A church?”
 

“Well, in a way. A place where you are taught to see God, and hear God, and know God. And love God. A conversion center. A place where you’re converted! And then you want to go out and preach the knowledge of God to the others—to the heathen. Because now you know how blind they are, and how easy it is to see. No, not just a church; a mission. The Mission. And you learn the Mission, and you come out of it with the Mission. They weren’t explorers. They were missionaries, bearing the truth, bringing it to the other races and the future races, all the poor damned heathens living in the outer darkness. They knew the answer, and they wanted us all to know the answer. Nothing else matters, once you’ve learned the answer. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good man or a bad one, if I’m an intelligent man or a fool. Nothing about us matters except that we are trivial vehicles of the great truth. The earth doesn’t matter, the stars don’t matter, death doesn’t matter, nothing is anything. Only God is.”
 

“An alien god?”
 

“Not a god. God—the one true God, immanent in all things. Everywhere, forever. I have learned to see God. All I have to do is open my eyes, and I see the Face of God. And I’d give all my life just to see one human face again, to see a tree, just a tree, a chair—a plain wooden chair, ordinary— They can keep their God, they can keep their Light. I want the world back. I want questions, not the answer. I want my own life back, and my own death!”
 

On the recommendation of the Army psychiatrist who took over the case of Geraint Hughes after Shapir was dismissed, Hughes was moved to a military hospital for the insane. As he was generally a quiet and cooperative patient he was not kept under strict supervision, and after eleven months of confinement he unfortunately carried
out a successful suicide attempt, slashing his wrists with a spoon-handle which he had stolen from the mess hall and sharpened by rubbing against the bed frame. It is an interesting fact that he killed himself on the day the Psyche XV Mission started back to Earth from Mars, bringing the documents and records which, as interpreted by the First Apostle, now form the first chapters of the Revelation of the Ancients, the sacred texts of the holy and universal Church of God, bringer of light to the
heathen, sole vehicle of the One Eternal Truth.
 

O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
 

Before true light....
 

But as I did their madness so discuss
 

One whisper’d thus,
 

This Ring the Bride-groome did for none provide
 

But for his bride.
 

The tree stands just south of the McMinnville bypass on Oregon State Highway 18. It lost a major limb last year, but still looks grand. We drive past it several times a year, and it has never failed to uphold Relativity with dignity and the skill of long practice.
 

They did not use to be so demanding. They never hurried us into anything more than a gallop, and that was rare; most of the time it was just a jigjog foot-pace. And when one of them was on his own feet, it was a real pleasure to approach him. There was time to accomplish the entire act with style. There he’d be, working his legs and arms the way they do, usually looking at the road, but often aside at the fields, or straight at me: and I’d approach him steadily but quite slowly, growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly, so that at the very moment that I’d finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size—sixty feet in those days—I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, overshadowed him. Yet he would show no fear. Not even the children were afraid of me, though often they kept their eyes on me as I passed by and started to diminish. Sometimes on a hot afternoon one of the adults would stop me right there at our meeting-place, and lie down with his back against mine for an hour or more.
 

I didn’t mind in the least I have an excellent hill, good sun, good wind, good view; why should I mind standing still for an hour or an afternoon? It’s only a relative stillness, after all. One need only look at the sun to realize how fast one is going; and then, one grows continually—especially in summer. In any case I was touched by the way they would entrust themselves to me, letting me lean against their little warm backs, and falling sound asleep there between my feet. I liked them. They have seldom lent us Grace as do the birds; but I really preferred them to squirrels.