Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth (3 page)

JOHN.
Yeah. Maybe.

(Again he’s silent.)

HARRY.
Ten, nine, eight, seven –

SANDY.
– stop! –

JOHN.
There is something I’m kind of tempted to tell you. I think. I’ve never done this before. I wonder how it would pan out.

(An uncomfortable silence… where is this going?)

JOHN
(cont’d)
Okay. To pass the time, I wonder if you’d answer a silly question for me.

ART.
We’re teachers. We answer silly questions all the time.

(A look from
LINDA
… )

JOHN.
What if a man from the Upper Paleolithic had survived until the present day?

HARRY.
What does this have to do with –

DAN.
You mean just, survived? Never died?

JOHN.
Yeah. What do you think he would be like?

HARRY.
I’ve
met some guys. You ever been to the Ozarks?

DAN.
It’s an interesting idea. You working on a science-fiction story?

JOHN.
Say I am. What do you think he would be like?

HARRY.
Pretty tired?

DAN.
Seriously? Well, okay. As Art’s book title implies, he might be about like any of us.

EDITH.
Dan – a caveman?

DAN.
There’s no anatomical difference between, say, a Cro Magnon and us.

ART.
Except that as a rule we’ve grown a little taller.

LINDA.
What’s the selective advantage of height?

ART.
The better to see predators in high grass, my dear.

DAN.
Actually, tall and skinny radiates heat more effectively in warm climates.

ART.
As for Neanderthals, we’ve all seen apish people. That strain is still with us.

EDITH.
But he’d be a caveman.

DAN.
No, he wouldn’t. John’s hypothetical man would have lived through about a hundred and forty centuries –

ART.
– roughly –

DAN.
– and changed with every one of them – assuming normal intelligence, and men of the Upper Paleolithic were, we think, quite as intelligent as we are. They just didn’t know as much. But John’s man would have learned as the race learned. In fact, if he had an inquiring mind, his knowledge might be astonishing.
(takes a sip)
If you do write it, let me have a look. You’d probably make anthropological boners.

JOHN.
Deal.

LINDA.
What would keep him alive?

EDITH.
(looks at
HARRY
)
What does a biologist say?

HARRY.
Cigarettes and ice cream.
(gets laughs)
Okay, okay, I’ll play. In science-fiction terms, perfect regeneration of body cells, especially in vital organs. The human body appears designed to live maybe a hundred and ninety years. Most of us die of slow poisoning.

JOHN.
Maybe he did something right. Something everybody else in history has done wrong.

ART.
Like eat the food, drink the water, and breathe the air?

DAN.
Prior to modern times, those were pristine. We’ve extended our life-span in a world not fit to live in.

HARRY.
It could happen. The pancreas turns over cells every twenty-four hours, the stomach lining in three days, the entire body in seven years. But the process falters. Waste accumulates and eventually is fatal to function. If a quirk in his immune system led to perfect detox and renewal, he could duck decay.

EDITH.
Now there’s a secret we’d all like to have!

JOHN.
Would you really want to do that? Live fourteen thousand years?

HARRY.
(the Gershwin tune:) “But who calls that livin’, when no gal will give in, to no man who’s nine-hundred years?”

ART.
If I was healthy, and didn’t age, why not?

LINDA.
What a chance to learn!

SANDY.
(changing the subject)
Anyone hungry?

(Off their affirmatives,
SANDY
heads for the kitchen.)

HARRY.
The more I think about it, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. One century’s magic is the next century’s science. They thought Columbus was nuts. Pasteur, Copernicus…

JOHN.
Aristarchus, long before that. I had a chance to sail with Columbus, but I’m not the adventurous type. I was pretty sure the world was round – but still, he might fall off an edge someplace.

(Silence.)

ART.
Look around you. We just did.

(Silence. )

DAN.
Well, I guess there’s a joke in there somewhere, but I don’t get it.

JOHN.
Nothing to get.

DAN.
What are we talking about? Explain.

JOHN.
You did a pretty good job of that.

ART.
We’ve been talking about a caveman who survived until this time.

JOHN.
As you said, what a chance to learn. Once I learned to learn.

(Silence.)

DAN.
Did you start the whiskey before we got here?

JOHN.
Pretend it’s science-fiction. Figure it out.

HARRY.
A very old Cro Magnon, living until the present…

(
JOHN
grunts loudly. Shockingly.)

(After a blank moment,
ART
starts to laugh.
DAN
and
HARRY
join in.
LINDA
is staring at
JOHN
.
SANDY
comes to the kitchen door.)

SANDY.
What’s going on?

ART.
John has confided that he’s fourteen thousand years old!

SANDY.
He doesn’t look a day over nine hundred.

(
SANDY
turns back into the kitchen. The chuckles subside.)

ART.
O-
kay
.

HARRY.
(Shatner imitation)
All right, Spock, I’ll play your little game. What is it you want? What’s the punchline?

JOHN.
I have to move on every ten years or so, when people start wondering why I don’t age.

ART.
Very good. Quick. Let
me
see your story too, when it’s done.

JOHN.
Do you want more?

HARRY.
By all means. This is great. So you think you’re a Cro Magnon?

JOHN.
Well, I didn’t go to school and learn it. It’s my best guess, based on archeological data, maps, anthropological research. Since Mesopotamia, I’ve got the last three or four thousand years straight.

ART.
You’re ahead of most people. Do go on.

(
DAN
and
ART
are amused. But underneath, puzzlement is starting to show. What gives?)

JOHN.
You know all the background stuff, so I’ll make it short. In what I call my first lifetime, I aged to about thirty-five or so, what you see. I ended up leading my group. They saw me as magical. I didn’t even have to fight for it. But finally there was fear. They chased me away. They thought I was stealing their lives to stay young.

HARRY.
The prehistoric origin of the vampire myth?

JOHN.
The first thousand years I didn’t know up from sideways.

DAN.
How do you know, a thousand years?

JOHN.
An informed guess. From what I’ve learned, and my memories.

ART.
Most of us can scarcely remember our own childhoods, but you have memories of that time.

JOHN.
Like yours. Selective, the high points. And traumas, they stick in the mind forever. A put-down at three or thirty, you still feel a twinge.

DAN.
Go on.

JOHN.
I kept getting chased because I didn’t die. I got the hang of joining other groups I found. I also got the idea of moving on periodically. We were semi-nomadic, of course, following the weather, the game we hunted. Those few first thousand years were cold. We learned it was warmer at lower elevations. Late Glacial period, I guess.

ART.
What was the terrain like?

JOHN.
Mountainous, plains off to the west. Snow and ice.

DAN.
West? Something you learned in school?

JOHN.
Toward the setting sun. Another assumption based on memory. In fact, I suspect I saw the British Isles from what is now the French coast. Huge mountains in the distance, on the other side of an enormous deep valley, shadowed by the setting sun. Before they were separated from the continent by rising seas as glaciers melted.

HARRY.
That happened?

DAN.
The end of the Pleistocene. So far what he says fits.

(
SANDY
and
EDITH
have come to the kitchen door. A touch of concern in
SANDY
’s eyes.)

ART.
Into any textbook.

JOHN.
That’s where I found it! How can I have knowledgeable recall, when I didn’t have knowledge? It’s retrospected. All I can do is integrate my recollections with modern findings.

EDITH.
A caveman! Are you going to hit me over the head with a club and drag me into the bedroom?

JOHN.
You’d be more fun conscious.

EDITH.
Oh, John.

(
EDITH
turns back into the kitchen.
SANDY
stays in the doorway.)

HARRY.
Let’s get one thing straight. We’re not talking reincarnation. You’re not saying you remember – what would it be? – maybe two hundred lifetimes. Dying and being born again.

JOHN.
One lifetime.

HARRY.
Some lifetime. Maybe there is something to reincarnation. You’re supposed to come back again and again, and learn and learn. You just bypassed all the other bodies.

DAN.
John, what is the point?

LINDA.
(ignoring
DAN
)
How about oceans?

JOHN.
I didn’t see any until much later.

LINDA.
How would you know an ocean from a lake?

JOHN.
Big waves. Something else I can surmise only in retrospect.

LINDA.
Were you curious about where it all came from? The question of origin?

JOHN.
We’d look at the sky and wonder. There had to be big guys up there. Otherwise, what made all this down here?

EDITH’S VOICE.
(from kitchen)
Shit!

(All suddenly look over – )

EDITH.
I dropped the tuna salad.

(The rest now look back to
JOHN
:)

JOHN.
At first I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought maybe I was a bad guy, for not dying. In my way, I wondered if I was cursed, or maybe blessed. Later on, I wondered if I had a mission.

EDITH.
(from kitchen door)
And now, do you think you do? God works in mysterious ways.

JOHN.
I think I just happened.

(
JOHN
’s cell phone rings, on a table. He goes to answer it. Others look after him, concerned.
EDITH
starts to bring out food.)