Ursula Le Guin - The Field of Vision

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.