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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.
    As for the papers, they proved to be sketches of landscapes within Area X or brief
     descriptions. Some were cartoons of animals or caricatures of fellow expedition members.
     All of them had, at some point, drawn the lighthouse or written about it. Looking
     for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the
     natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the
     beholder.
    At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces,
     even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign