* * *
The psychologist wasn’t there when we emerged, blinking into the sunlight, ripping off our masks and breathing in the fresh air. We had been ready for almost any scenario, but not for the psychologist’s absence. It left us adrift for a while, afloat in that ordinary day, the sky so brightly blue, the stand of trees casting long shadows. I took out my earplugs and found I couldn’t hear the beating of the tower’s heartbeat at all. How what we had seen below could coexist with the mundane was baffling. It was as if we had come up too fast from a deep-sea dive but it was the memories of the creatures we had seen that had given us the bends. We just kept searching the environs for the psychologist, certain she was hiding, and half-hoping we would find her, because surely she had an explanation. It was, after a time, pathological to keep searching the same area around the tower. But for almost an hour we could not find a way to stop.
Finally I could not deny the truth.
“She’s gone,” I said.
“Maybe she’s back at the base camp,” the surveyor said.
“Would you agree that her absence is a sign of guilt?” I asked.
The surveyor spat into the grass, regarded me closely. “No, I would not. Maybe something happened to her. Maybe she needed to go back to the camp.”
“You saw the footprints. You saw the body.”
She motioned with her rifle. “Let’s just get back to base camp.”
I couldn’t read her at all. I didn’t know if she was turning on me or just cautious. Coming up aboveground had emboldened her, regardless, and I had preferred her uncertain.
But back at base camp, some of her resolve crumbled again. The psychologist wasn’t there. Not only wasn’t she there, but she had taken half of our supplies and most of the guns. Either that or buried them somewhere. So we knew the psychologist was still alive.
You must understand how I felt then, how the surveyor must have felt: We were scientists, trained to observe natural phenomena and the results of human activity. We had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny. In unusual situations there can be a comfort in the presence of even someone you think might be your enemy. Now we had come close to the edges of something unprecedented, and less than a week into our mission we had lost not just the linguist at the border but our anthropologist and our psychologist.
“Okay, I give up,” the surveyor said, throwing down her rifle and sagging into a chair in front of the anthropologist’s tent as I rummaged around inside of it. “I’m going to believe you for now. I’m going to believe you because I don’t really have a choice. Because I don’t have any better theories. What should we do now?”
There still weren’t any clues in the anthropologist’s tent. The horror of what had happened to her was still hitting me. To be coerced into your own death. If I was right, the psychologist was a murderer, much more so than whatever had killed the anthropologist.
When I didn’t answer the surveyor, she repeated herself, with extra emphasis: “So what the hell are we going to do now?”
Emerging from the tent, I said, “We examine the samples I took, we develop the photographs and go through them. Then, tomorrow, we probably go back down into the tower.”
The surveyor gave a harsh laugh as she struggled to find words. Her face seemed to almost want to pull apart for a second, perhaps from the strain of fighting off the ghost of some hypnotic suggestion. Finally she got it out: “No. I’m not going back down into that place. And it’s a tunnel, not a tower.”
“What do you want to do instead?” I asked.
As if she’d broken through some barrier, the words now came faster, more determined. “We go back to the border and await extraction. We don’t have the resources to continue, and if you’re right the psychologist is out there right now plotting something, even if it’s just what excuses to give us. And if she’s not, if she’s dead or injured because something attacked her, that’s another reason to get the hell out.” She had lit a cigarette, one of the few we’d been given. She blew two long plumes of smoke out of her nose.
“I’m not ready to go back,” I told her. “Not yet.” I wasn’t near ready, despite what had happened.
“You prefer this place, you really do, don’t you?” the surveyor said. It wasn’t really a question; a kind of pity or disgust infused her voice. “You think this is going to last much longer? Let me tell you, even on military maneuvers designed to simulate negative outcomes, I’ve seen better odds.”
Fear was driving her, even if she was right. I decided to steal my delaying tactics from the psychologist.
“Let’s just look at what we brought back, and then we can decide what to do. You can always head back to the border tomorrow.”
She took another drag on the cigarette, digesting that. The border was still a four-day hike away.
“True enough,” she said, relenting for the moment.
I didn’t say what I was thinking: That it might not be that simple. That she might make it back across the border only in the abstract sense that my husband had, stripped of what made her unique. But I didn’t want her to feel as if she had no way out.