Annihilation (4 page)

“We should go back up,” I said. It was not that I recommended this as the best course
of action but because I wanted to limit their exposure to the spores until I could
see what long-term effects they might have on me. I also knew if I stayed there much
longer I might experience a compulsion to go back down the stairs to continue reading
the words, and they would have to physically restrain me, and I did not know what
I would do then.

There was no argument from the other two. But as we climbed back up, I had a moment
of vertigo despite being in such an enclosed space, a kind of panic for a moment,
in which the walls suddenly had a fleshy aspect to them, as if we traveled inside
of the gullet of a beast.

*   *   *

When we told the psychologist what we had seen, when I recited some of the words,
she seemed at first frozen in an oddly attentive way. Then she decided to descend
to view the words. I struggled with whether I should warn her against this action.
Finally I said, “Only observe from the top of the stairs. We don’t know whether there
are toxins. When we come back, we should wear breathing masks.” These, at least, we
had inherited from the last expedition, in a sealed container.

“
Paralysis is not a cogent analysis?
” she said to me with a pointed stare. I felt a kind of itchiness come over me, but
I said nothing, did nothing. The others did not even seem to realize she had spoken.
It was only later that I realized the psychologist had tried to bind me with a hypnotic
suggestion meant for me and me alone.

My reaction apparently fell within the range of acceptable responses, for she descended
while we waited anxiously above. What would we do if she did not return? A sense of
ownership swept over me. I was agitated by the idea that she might experience the
same need to read further and would act upon it. Even though I didn’t know what the
words meant, I wanted them to mean something so that I might more swiftly remove doubt,
bring reason back into all of my equations. Such thoughts distracted me from thinking
about the effects of the spores on my system.

Thankfully the other two had no desire to talk as we waited, and after just fifteen
minutes the psychologist awkwardly pushed her way up out of the stairwell and into
the light, blinking as her vision adjusted.

“Interesting,” she said in a flat tone as she loomed over us, wiping the cobwebs from
her clothing. “I have never seen anything like that before.” She seemed as if she
might continue, but then decided against it.

What she had already said verged on the moronic; apparently I was not alone in that
assessment.

“Interesting?” the anthropologist said. “No one has ever seen anything like that in
the entire history of the world. No one.
Ever.
And you call it
interesting
?” She seemed close to working herself into a bout of hysteria. While the surveyor
just stared at both of them as if
they
were the alien organisms.

“Do you need me to calm you?” the psychologist asked. There was a steely tone to her
words that made the anthropologist mumble something noncommittal and stare at the
ground.

I stepped into the silence with my own suggestion: “We need time to think about this.
We need time to decide what to do next.” I meant, of course, that I needed time to
see if the spores I had inhaled would affect me in a way significant enough to confess
to what had happened.

“There may not be enough time in the world for that,” the surveyor said. Of all of
us, I think she had best grasped the implications of what we had seen: that we might
now be living in a kind of nightmare. But the psychologist ignored her and sided with
me. “We do need time. We should spend the rest of our day doing what we were sent
here to do.”

So we returned to camp for lunch and then focused on “ordinary things” while I kept
monitoring my body for any changes. Did I feel too cold now, or too hot? Was that
ache in my knee from an old injury suffered in the field, or something new? I even
checked the black box monitor, but it remained inert. Nothing radical had yet changed
in me, and as we took our samples and readings in the general vicinity of the camp—as
if to stray too far would be to come under the tower’s control—I gradually relaxed
and told myself that the spores had had no effect … even though I knew that the incubation
period for some species could be months or years. I suppose I thought merely that
for the next few days at least I might be safe.

The surveyor concentrated on adding detail and nuance to the maps our superiors had
given us. The anthropologist went off to examine the remains of some cabins a quarter
mile away. The psychologist stayed in her tent, writing in her journal. Perhaps she
was reporting on how she was surrounded by idiots, or just setting out every moment
of our morning discoveries.

For my part, I spent an hour observing a tiny red-and-green tree frog on the back
of a broad, thick leaf and another hour following the path of an iridescent black
damselfly that should not have been found at sea level. The rest of the time, I spent
up a pine tree, binoculars focused on the coast and the lighthouse. I liked climbing.
I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was
so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always
been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself.
Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us
from who we are.

The richness of Area X’s biosphere was reflected in the wealth of birdlife, from warblers
and flickers to cormorants and black ibis. I could also see a bit into the salt marshes,
and my attention there was rewarded by a minute-long glimpse of a pair of otters.
At one point, they glanced up and I had a strange sensation that they could see me
watching them. It was a feeling I often had when out in the wilderness: that things
were not quite what they seemed, and I had to fight against the sensation because
it could overwhelm my scientific objectivity. There was also something else, moving
ponderously through the reeds, but it was closer to the lighthouse and in deep cover.
I could not tell what it was, and after a while its disturbance of the vegetation
ceased and I lost track of it entirely. I imagined it might be another wild pig, as
they could be good swimmers and were just as omnivorous in their choice of habitats
as in their diets.

On the whole, by dusk this strategy of busying ourselves in our tasks had worked to
calm our nerves. The tension lifted somewhat, and we even joked a little bit at dinner.
“I wish I knew what you were thinking,” the anthropologist confessed to me, and I
replied, “No, you don’t,” which was met with a laughter that surprised me. I didn’t
want their voices in my head, their ideas of me, nor their own stories or problems.
Why would they want mine?

But I did not mind that a sense of camaraderie had begun to take hold, even if it
would prove short-lived. The psychologist allowed us each a couple of beers from the
store of alcohol, which loosened us up to the point that I even clumsily expressed
the idea that we might maintain some sort of contact once we had completed our mission.
I had stopped checking myself for physiological or psychological reactions to the
spores by then, and found that the surveyor and I got along better than I had expected.
I still didn’t like the anthropologist very much, but mostly in the context of the
mission, not anything she had said to me. I felt that, once in the field, much as
some athletes were good in practice and not during the game, she had exhibited a lack
of mental toughness thus far. Although just volunteering for such a mission meant
something.

When the nightly cry from the marshes came a little after nightfall, while we sat
around our fire, we at first called back to it in a drunken show of bravado. The beast
in the marshes now seemed like an old friend compared to the tower. We were confident
that eventually we would photograph it, document its behavior, tag it, and assign
it a place in the taxonomy of living things. It would become known in a way we feared
the tower would not. But we stopped calling back when the intensity of its moans heightened
in a way that suggested anger, as if it knew we were mocking it. Nervous laughter
all around, then, and the psychologist took that as her cue to ready us for the next
day.

“Tomorrow we will go back to the tunnel. We will go deeper, taking certain precautions—wearing
breathing masks, as suggested. We will record the writing on the walls and get a sense
of how old it is, I hope. Also, perhaps a sense of how deep the tunnel descends. In
the afternoon, we’ll return to our general investigations of the area. We’ll repeat
this schedule every day until we think we know enough about the tunnel and how it
fits into Area X.”

Tower, not tunnel
. She could have been talking about investigating an abandoned shopping center, for
all of the emphasis she put on it … and yet something about her tone seemed rehearsed.

Then she abruptly stood and said three words: “
Consolidation of authority.
”

Immediately the surveyor and the anthropologist beside me went slack, their eyes unfocused.
I was shocked, but I mimicked them, hoping that the psychologist had not noticed the
lag. I felt no compulsion whatsoever, but clearly we had been preprogrammed to enter
a hypnotic state in response to those words, uttered by the psychologist.

Her demeanor more assertive than just a moment before, the psychologist said, “You
will retain a memory of having discussed several options with regard to the tunnel.
You will find that you ultimately agreed with me about the best course of action,
and that you felt quite confident about this course of action. You will experience
a sensation of calm whenever you think about this decision, and you will remain calm
once back inside the tunnel, although you will react to any stimuli as per your training.
You will not take undue risks.

“You will continue to see a structure that is made of coquina and stone. You will
trust your colleagues completely and feel a continued sense of fellowship with them.
When you emerge from the structure, any time you see a bird in flight it will trigger
a strong feeling that you are doing the
right thing
, that you are in the
right place
. When I snap my fingers, you will have no memory of this conversation, but will follow
my directives. You will feel very tired and you will want to retire to your tents
to get a good night’s sleep before tomorrow’s activities. You will not dream. You
will not have nightmares.”

I stared straight ahead as she said these words, and when she snapped her fingers
I took my cue from the actions of the other two. I don’t believe the psychologist
suspected anything, and I retired to my tent just as the others retired to their tents.

Now I had new data to process, along with the tower. We knew that the psychologist’s
role was to provide balance and calm in a situation that might become stressful, and
that part of this role included hypnotic suggestion. I could not blame her for performing
that role. But to see it laid out so nakedly troubled me. It is one thing to think
you might be receiving hypnotic suggestion and quite another to experience it as an
observer. What level of control could she exert over us? What did she mean by saying
that we would continue to think of the tower as made of coquina and stone?

Most important, however, I now could guess at one way in which the spores had affected
me: They had made me immune to the psychologist’s hypnotic suggestions. They had made
me into a kind of conspirator against her. Even if her purposes were benign, I felt
a wave of anxiety whenever I thought of confessing that I was resistant to hypnosis—especially
since it meant any underlying
conditioning
hidden in our training also was affecting me less and less.

I now hid not one but two secrets, and that meant I was steadily, irrevocably, becoming
estranged from the expedition and its purpose.

*   *   *

Estrangement, in all of its many forms, was nothing new for these missions. I understood
this from having been given an opportunity along with the others to view videotape
of the reentry interviews with the members of the eleventh expedition. Once those
individuals had been identified as having returned to their former lives, they were
quarantined and questioned about their experiences. Reasonably enough, in most cases
family members had called the authorities, finding their loved one’s return uncanny
or frightening. Any papers found on these returnees had been confiscated by our superiors
for examination and study. This information, too, we were allowed to see.

The interviews were fairly short, and in them all eight expedition members told the
same story. They had experienced no unusual phenomenon while in Area X, taken no unusual
readings, and reported no unusual internal conflicts. But after a period of time,
each one of them had had the intense desire to return home and had set out to do so.
None of them could explain how they had managed to come back across the border, or
why they had gone straight home instead of first reporting to their superiors. One
by one they had simply abandoned the expedition, left their journals behind, and drifted
home. Somehow.

Throughout these interviews, their expressions were friendly and their gazes direct.
If their words seemed a little flat, then this went with the kind of general calm,
the almost dreamlike demeanor each had returned with—even the compact, wiry man who
had served as that expedition’s military expert, a person who’d had a mercurial and
energetic personality. In terms of their affect, I could not tell any of the eight
apart. I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they
spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space.