Ursula Le Guin: The Field of Vision

Reports from Psyche XIV came in regularly, all routine, until just before their return window opened. Then all at once Commander Rogers radioed that they had left surface, had rejoined the ship, and were commencing departure procedures—82 hours 18 minutes early. Houston of course demanded explanations, but Psyche’s answers were erratic. The 220-second answer lag didn’t help. Psyche kept breaking contact. Once Rogers said, ‘We have got to bring her home now if we’re going to do it at all,’ apparently in answer to Houston’s questions, but the next thing was Hughes asking for a reading, and then something about a dosage. The sun was noisy and reception was very bad. The voice transmission ceased without sign-off.

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.