Annihilation(22)

“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.

* * *

I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at samples under the microscope, on the makeshift table outside of my tent. The surveyor busied herself with developing the photographs in the tent that doubled as a darkroom, a frustrating process for anyone used to digital uploads. Then, while the photos were resting, she went back through the remnants of maps and documents the prior expedition had left at the base camp.

My samples told a series of cryptic jokes with punch lines I didn’t understand. The cells of the biomass that made up the words on the wall had an unusual structure, but they still fell within an acceptable range. Or, those cells were doing a magnificent job of mimicking certain species of saprotrophic organisms. I made a mental note to take a sample of the wall from behind the words. I had no idea how deeply the filaments had taken root, or if there were nodes beneath and those filaments were only sentinels.

The tissue sample from the hand-shaped creature resisted any interpretation, and that was strange but told me nothing. By which I mean I found no cells in the sample, just a solid amber surface with air bubbles in it. At the time, I interpreted this as a contaminated sample or evidence that this organism decomposed quickly. Another thought came to me too late to test: that, having absorbed the organism’s spores, I was causing a reaction in the sample. I didn’t have the medical facilities to run the kinds of diagnostics that might have revealed any further changes to my body or mind since the encounter.

Then there was the sample from the anthropologist’s vial. I had left it for last for the obvious reasons. I had the surveyor take a section, put it on the slide, and write down what she saw through the microscope.

“Why?” she asked. “Why did you need me to do this?”