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escape. A death that would not
     mean being dead.

 
    02: INTEGRATION
    In the morning, I woke with my senses heightened, so that even the rough brown bark
     of the pines or the ordinary lunging swoop of a woodpecker came to me as a kind of
     minor revelation. The lingering fatigue from the four-day hike to base camp had left
     me. Was this some side effect of the spores or just the result of a good night’s sleep?
     I felt so refreshed that I didn’t really care.
    But my reverie was soon tempered by disastrous news. The anthropologist was gone,
     her tent empty of her personal effects. Worse, in my view, the psychologist seemed
     shaken, and as if she hadn’t slept. She was squinting oddly, her hair more windblown
     than usual. I noticed dirt caked on the sides of her boots. She was favoring her right
     side, as if she had been injured.
    “Where is the anthropologist?” the surveyor demanded, while I hung back, trying to
     make my own sense of it. What have you done with the anthropologist? was my unspoken question, which I knew was unfair. The psychologist was no different
     than she had been before; that I knew the secret to her magician’s show did not necessarily
     mean she was a threat.
    The psychologist stepped into our rising panic with a strange assertion: “I talked
     to her late last night. What she saw in that … structure … unnerved her to the point
     that she did not want to continue with this expedition. She has started back to the
     border to await extraction. She took a partial report with her so that our superiors
     will know our progress.” The psychologist’s habit of allowing a slim smile to cross
     her face at inappropriate times made me want to slap her.
    “But she left her gear—her gun, too,” the surveyor said.
    “She took only what she needed so we would have more—including an extra gun.”
    “Do you think we need an extra gun?” I asked the psychologist. I was truly curious.
     In some ways I found the psychologist as fascinating as the tower. Her motivations,
     her reasons. Why not resort to hypnosis now? Perhaps even with our underlying conditioning
     some things are not suggestible, or fade with repetition, or she lacked the stamina
     for it after the events of the night before.
    “I think we don’t know what we need,” the psychologist said. “But we definitely did
     not need the anthropologist here if she was unable to do her job.”
    The surveyor and I stared at the psychologist. The surveyor’s arms were crossed. We
     had been trained to keep a close watch on our colleagues for signs of sudden mental
     stress or dysfunction. She was probably thinking what I was thinking: We had a choice
     now. We could accept the psychologist’s explanation for the anthropologist’s disappearance
     or reject it. If we rejected it, then we were saying the psychologist had lied to
     us, and therefore also rejecting her authority at a critical time. And if we tried
     to follow the trail back home, hoping to catch up with the anthropologist, to verify
     the psychologist’s story … would we have the will to return to base camp afterward?
    “We should continue with our plan,” the psychologist said. “We should investigate
     the … tower.” The word tower in this context felt like a blatant plea for my loyalty.
    Still the surveyor wavered, as if fighting the psychologist’s suggestion from the
     night before. This alarmed me in another way. I was not going to leave Area X before
     investigating the tower. This fact was ingrained in every part of me. And in that
     context I could not bear to think of losing another member of the team so soon, leaving
     me alone with the psychologist. Not when I was unsure of her and not when I still
     had no idea of the effects of my exposure to the spores.
    “She’s right,” I said. “We should continue with the mission. We can make do without
     the anthropologist.” But my pointed stare to the surveyor made it clear to both of
     them