Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [107]
Back at Underhill he turned on the shrink program in his head and asked Maya if she was feeling better, and she touched her faceplate to his, giving him a brief glimpse of a gaze that was a kiss. “You know I do,” her voice said in his ear. He nodded. “I think I’ll go for another walk, then,” he said, and did not say, But what about me? What will make me feel better? He willed the movement of his legs and walked off. The bleak plain surrounding the base was a vision out of some post-holocaust desolation, a nightmare world; nevertheless he didn’t want to go back into their little warren of artificial light and heated air and carefully deployed colors, colors that he himself had chosen for the most part, utilizing the very latest in color-mood theory, a theory which he now understood to be based on certain root assumptions that did not in fact apply here. The colors were all wrong, or worse, irrelevant. Wallpaper in hell.
The phrase formed in his mind and pushed at his lips. Wallpaper in hell. Wallpaper in hell. Since they’re going to go crazy anyway . . . Certainly it had been a mistake to have only one psychiatrist along. Every therapist on Earth was also in therapy, it was part of the job, it came with the territory. But his therapist was back in Nice, fifteen timeslipped minutes away at best, and Michel talked to him but he couldn’t help. He didn’t understand, not really; he lived where it was warm and blue, he could go outside, he was (Michel presumed) in reasonably good mental health. While Michel was a doctor in a hospice in a prison in hell; and the doctor was sick.
He hadn’t been able to adapt. People were different in that regard, it was a matter of temperament. Maya, walking toward the lock door, had a temperament quite different from his, which somehow enabled her to be completely at home here. To tell the truth he didn’t think she really noticed her surroundings much in any case. And yet in other ways he and she were similar. It had to do with the lability-stability index, and its particular emotionality; they were both labile. And yet fundamentally they were very different characters; the labile-stabile index had to be considered in combination with the very different set of characteristics grouped under the labels extroversion and introversion. This had been his great discovery of the recent year, and now it structured all his thinking about himself and his charges.
Walking toward the Alchemists’ Quarter, he fit the morning’s events into the gridwork of this new characterological system. Extroversion-introversion was one of the best-studied systems of traits in all psychological theory, with great masses of evidence from many different cultures supporting the objective reality of the concept. Not as a simple duality of course; one did not label a person plainly this or that, but rather placed them on a scale, rating them for such qualities as sociability, impulsiveness, changeability, talkativeness, outgoingness, activity, liveliness, excitability, optimism, and so on. These measurements had been done so many times that it was statistically certain that the various traits did indeed hang together, to a degree that exceeded chance by a huge amount. So the concept was real, quite real! In fact physiological investigations had revealed that extroversion was linked with resting states of low cortical arousal, introversion with high cortical arousal; this had