Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth (5 page)

ART.
‘A few thousand years.’ I
know
you’re guessing.

JOHN.
You can’t get there from here.

ART.
Pray continue.

JOHN.
We hunted reindeer, mammoth –

ART.
…bison, horses. Then game retreated northward as the climate changed. You got the idea of growing food instead of gathering it, raising animals instead of hunting them. Am I getting warm? Lakeside living became the norm. Fishing, fowling. Again, out of any textbook.

JOHN.
Even yours. You had most of it right. Finally I headed east. I’d become curious about the world, wanted to explore. I’d gotten the hang of going it alone, and fitting in when I wanted to.

DAN.
East, toward the rising sun.

JOHN.
I thought it might be warmer over there. That’s when I saw an ocean. The Mediterranean, probably. This was around the beginning of the Bronze Age. I followed trade routes from the east, copper, tin, learning languages as I went. And everywhere creation myths, new gods, so many and so different I finally realized they were probably all hogwash, though it was wise to pretend belief. I was Sumerian for maybe two thousand years, then Babylonian… finally under Hammurabi, a great man. Then I sailed as a Phoenician for a time. Moving on had been easy as a hunter-gatherer, harder when villages emerged, tougher still in city-states where authority was centralized and strangers were suspect. It seemed like I was always on the move. I learned some tricks. Even faked my death a few times. I headed east again, finally to India, luckily at the time of the Buddha.

ART.
Luckily?

JOHN.
The most extraordinary man I’ve ever known. He taught me things that I’d never thought about before.

HARRY.
You studied with the Buddha?

JOHN.
Until he died. He knew there was something special about me. I never told him.

DAN.
Well, it sounds fascinating. I almost wish it were true.

ART.
If it is true, why are you telling us? We might tell others.

JOHN.
(shrugs)
It would vanish in disbelief. The story that goes around the room, no credibility. If I could make any of you believe me, in a month you wouldn’t. Some of you would say I’m a psychopath, others would be angry at a pointless joke.

ART.
Some of us are angry now.

JOHN.
I guess this was a bad idea. I love you all, I don’t want to put you through anything. I’m sorry if I have.

EDITH.
Then why are you doing it!

JOHN.
I wanted to say goodbye –

EDITH.
(cutting in, cold)
As “yourself.” Well, I’d say you’ve done that. Whatever that “self” is.

DAN.
Easy, Edith, we’re just grading his homework.

ART.
(to
DAN
)
You’re playing good cop. Enjoy it. This is a crock, and I’m tempted to walk out –

JOHN.
I’m sorry. I don’t like to hurt anyone.

ART.
– but I won’t. I’m curious. I want to know what the hell this is about.

EDITH.
I agree, John! What is this all about?

(Under above, sound of a car pulling up outside.
JOHN
glances out the window. His expression turns wry.
ART
rises – )

ART.
And here comes Dr. Freud.

(Footsteps on the porch.
ART
opens the door, revealing
WILLIAM GRUBER
. )

GRUBER.
John! I’m glad I caught you! Someone mentioned you were leaving today –

JOHN.
(cutting in)
– someone called you and told you I’ve lost it. Come on in, Will. This is going in unexpected directions.

GRUBER.
(entering)
So I hear.

(
GRUBER
nods to the others.
SANDY
indicates the paper plates.)

SANDY.
Are you hungry? Pork chop, taco, cake?

GRUBER.
Ah. Thank you, no.

JOHN.
Whiskey?

HARRY.
Johnnie Walker Blue!

GRUBER.
Oh, yes!

(
JOHN
pours a cup for
GRUBER
, who glances at
ART
and
LINDA
, instantly sizing up the situation.)

GRUBER
(cont’d) (to
LINDA
)
You look familiar, my dear.

LINDA.
Linda Murphy. I’m in your Tuesday Psych One class.

GRUBER.
Well, this may be a lesson I could not have imagined.
(to
JOHN
)
I regret being obvious, John. These people are concerned for you.

JOHN.
Yeah, I’m cutting out paper dinosaurs.

GRUBER.
I really wish I’d been here at the beginning.

ART.
Don’t.

JOHN.
Me, too.

DAN.
Let me say something right here. There’s no way in the whole world for John to prove his story to us, and there’s no way for us to disprove it! No matter how outrageous we believe it is, and no matter how highly trained we believe we are, we absolutely can’t disprove it. Our friend is either a caveman, a liar, or a nut. So while we’re thinking about that, why not just go with it? He may jolt us into believing him, we may jolt him into reality.

EDITH.
“Believing”?

ART.
Whose reality?

GRUBER.
So you’re caveman?

JOHN.
Yes. I am, or was, a Cro Magnon. I think.

GRUBER.
You don’t know if you’re a caveman or not?

JOHN.
Oh, I’m sure about that.

GRUBER.
A Cro Magnon, then. When did you first realize this?

JOHN.
When the Cro Magnon was first identified. When anthropology gave them a name, I had mine.

GRUBER.
Well, please continue. I’m sure you must have more to say.

JOHN.
Want me to lie down on the couch?

GRUBER.
(smiles)
As you wish.

(Brief silence.
GRUBER
sips his whiskey.)

As a physician, I am curious. In the enormous lifetime you describe, have you ever been ill?

JOHN.
Sure. As much as anyone else.

GRUBER.
Seriously ill?

JOHN.
Sometimes.

GRUBER.
Of what, do you know?

JOHN.
In prehistory, I can’t tell you. Maybe pneumonia, once or twice. The last few hundred years, I’ve gotten over typhoid, yellow fever, smallpox. I survived the black plague.

GRUBER.
Bubonic. Terrible.

JOHN.
More so than history describes.

GRUBER.
And smallpox. You are not scarred.

JOHN.
I don’t scar.

HARRY.
That’s not possible!

GRUBER.
Let us take John’s story at face value, and explore it from that perspective. If he doesn’t scar, it’s no stranger than the rest of it.

HARRY.
Would you come to my lab, John, before you take off? Suffer a few tests from your friendly biologist?

JOHN.
No, I’m leery of labs. I could go in and maybe stay in, for a thousand years, while cigarette-smoking men tried to figure me out.

HARRY.
You don’t think I’d betray you in any way.

JOHN.
Walls have ears.

DAN.
Medical tests might be a way of proving what you say.

JOHN.
I don’t
want
to prove it.

ART.
You’re telling us all this, the yarn of the century, and you don’t care if we believe you?

JOHN.
I guess I shouldn’t have expected you to. You’re not as crazy as you think I am.

EDITH.
Amen.

SANDY.
(to
EDITH
)
I’ve always liked you.

EDITH.
Why, thank you, dear...

SANDY.
That’s changing.

EDITH.
Surely you don’t believe this nonsense?

SANDY.
I think we should remain courteous to someone we’ve known and trusted.

LINDA.
Here you sit – scholars, and you can’t break his story. All you can do is thumb your nose at it.

ART.
Are you doing that to
us
, John? Laughing at us, inside?

JOHN.
I wish you didn’t feel that way.

ART.
What you’re telling us, it offends common sense.

JOHN.
So does relativity, quantum mechanics, but that’s the way Nature works.

DAN.
Your story doesn’t fit into Nature as we know it.

JOHN.
And we know so little, Dan. Learning all the time. Even experts…each of you probably knows five “geniuses” in your specialty you disagree with; probably one you’d like to strangle.

DAN.
I’d strangle all of ’em!

EDITH.
Dammit Dan – it’s bad enough we have to listen to Harry’s idiotic jokes –

HARRY.
Well, thank you very much. Maybe when
I
get to be a hundred-ten I’ll be as smart as you are.

EDITH.
If you lived as long as John, you still wouldn’t grow up.

DAN.
Aw, take it easy. How often do you meet someone who thinks he is a Stone Age man?

EDITH.
Once is enough.

HARRY.
Edith?

(She looks up, eyebrow raised. He blows her a kiss. She shakes her head…but her anger dissipates a little.)

DAN.
(beat)
Alright then. A guy with your mind, you would have studied a great deal.

JOHN.
I have ten degrees, including all of yours. Except yours, Will.

HARRY.
That makes me feel a trifle Lilliputian.

JOHN.
But that’s over the span of a hundred and seventy years! I got my biology degree at Oxford in 1840, so I’m a little behind the times. The same in other areas. I can’t keep up with all the new stuff that comes along. Hell, these days no one can, even in your specialty.

ART.
So much for the myth of the super-wise, all knowing immortal.

DAN.
I see your point, John. No matter how long a man lives, he can’t be in advance of his times. He can’t know more than the best of the race knows, if that. When the world learned it was round, you learned it.

JOHN.
It took some time. News traveled slowly before communications got fancy. And there were problems of preconception, social obstacles, screams from the church.

ART.
Ten Doctorates. Impressive. Have you taught them, John?

JOHN.
Some. Look, you all might have done the same. Living fourteen thousand years didn’t make me a genius. I just had the time.

DAN.
(pondering)
Time…

( A moment goes by. Everyone looking at
DAN
. He notices:)

DAN
(cont’d)
Oh. You can’t see it, hear it, weigh it, you can’t isolate it in a laboratory. It’s our subjective sense of becoming – becoming what we are – instead of what we were a nanosecond ago – becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The Hopi see time as a landscape, existing before and behind us. We move through it slice by slice.

LINDA.
Clocks measure time.

DAN.
They measure themselves. The only objective referent of a clock is another one.