Ursula Le Guin - The Field of Vision

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.

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.’