The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (15 page)

His
handsome face was now contorted with anxiety or bewilderment.

'Where,'
he said, 'where—'

His
hands, groping at his ears to find the cause of silence, found the earplugs and
removed one. That was enough. 'Ah,' he said, and stood still. His eyes were
still directed towards Shapir, but he did not see him. His face relaxed.

Later
attempts were more successful. Though bewildered at first, Temski was
cooperative while artificially deafened, and responded readily to Shapir's
attempts to communicate with him by touch, by sign, and finally by writing.
After the fifth such session, Temski consented to longer sessions involving the
use of a drug which would deaden his auditory nerve endings for about five
hours at a time.

During
the second of these long periods he asked to see Hughes. Shapir had already
been instructed to let the two astronauts talk together if possible; there was
a feeling that this might elicit more information, if they talked freely
together. It was necessary for Hughes to write, since Temski was artificially
deafened; as he knew touch typing he carried on his part of the dialogue on a
portable typewriter. Not all the material found in the wastebasket, however,
could be successfully collated in to the tape of Temski's spoken conversation.
The two men mostly discussed the return journey and Commander Rogers's illness
and death, which Temski could not recall; Hughes described all this as he had
done before without new information. They did not talk about the 'room' (Site
D) or their respective disabilities, except as follows:

T.
It's not inside, is it?

H.
If it was, earplugs wd improve yr reception.

T.
It's real, then.

H.
Hell yes.

T.
See, when they first stuck those plugs in my ears, when I woke up and there was
this silence, I was really spooked. It took me a long time to come back from
where I'd been. And I didn't much want to come back. But when Shapir began
telling me how long it had been, and I realized this was Earth, you know,
that's what spooked me — I thought, maybe all this has been some sort of, like,
hallucination. You know. Jesus, have I been off my chump? That scared me. Like
I was two different people. But I began to put it together, to see that it
wasn't a split, but a...

H.
Change.

T.
Exactly, it changed me, it had changed me. It's real.

Because
when I
can
hear,
that's what I hear. And when you can see, that's what you see. Right? In other
words, it is real.

We
have to be artificially blinded and made deaf to
not
hear it and
see it. That's it, isn't it? [Hughes's typed responses for the following
section were not identifiable in the wastebasket material.]

H.
...

T.
Oh, no. Beautiful. It took me a long time, at least I know now it was a long time,
to begin to get it. At first it didn't make any sense, Jesus, it scared the
balls off me at first. You or Dwight would say something, and there'd be this
kind of chords all around your voice, like rainbows around a prism so you can't
even see the prism — yeah, that's what it's like for you, isn't it? It's the
same, only this is with hearing, it's like everything turns into this music,
only it isn't music, it's... At first like I said I didn't know how to hear it.
I thought it was something wrong with my suit radio! Jesus! [laughs] I couldn't
follow the patterns, you know, the modulations, like, the transformations. It
was all so different. But you learn. The more you listen the more you hear. I
wish you could hear it. You know, you tell me it's two months since we left Mars,
and so on, and shit, I believe you, but it doesn't matter. It really doesn't
matter — does it, Gerry?

H....

T.
I wish I could see it, the way you do. It must be tremendous. But I'll tell
you, I'm glad they pull me out of it like this, every day now. I think it's
meant to be that way. I was kind of, I don't know, swamped, overwhelmed, it's
too much. We're not built right, not quite strong enough, maybe. At least at
first. Can't take it all at once. What I'd like to try to do while I'm out of
touch is try to write some of it down.

H....

T.
No, I don't. But it wouldn't have to be music. See, it isn't music, that's just
like a way of describing it because it's beautiful. I think I could get it into
words just as well.

Maybe
better. To say what it means.

H.
...

T.
Afraid of what?

Bernard
Decelis and his wife called Hughes every couple of days on the telephone,
though they were prevented by the quarantine from coming to see him. On the
27th of July Hughes and Decelis had a significant conversation concerning the
so-called room, site D of the Psyche XIV survey. Decelis said, 'If I don't get
on the Sixteen team and
see
that damned
place, I'll flip.'

'Seeing
is believing,' Hughes remarked. He was not as excitable as he had been earlier,
tending to be terse and rather bitter.

'Listen,
Terry. 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—'