The Man Who Fell to Earth (3 page)

Farnsworth was staring again. Finally he said. “We’ll start drawing up the papers tomorrow.”

“Good.” Newton rose stiffly from his chair. “We can talk about the arrangements in more detail then. There are, really, only two important considerations; that you get the money honestly, and that I be required to have little contact with anyone but you.”

His bedroom was upstairs, and for a moment he thought he would not be able to climb the stairway. But he made it, a step at a time, while Farnsworth climbed beside him, saying nothing. Then, after he had shown him to his room, the lawyer looked at him and said, “You’re an unusual man. Mr. Newton. Do you mind if I ask where you are from?”

The question came as a complete surprise, but he kept his composure. “Not at all,” he said, “I’m from Kentucky, Mr. Farnsworth.”

The lawyer’s eyebrows rose only slightly. “I see,” he said. Then he turned and walked ponderously away down the hall, which was floored with marble and caused his footsteps to echo….

His room was high-ceilinged and ornately furnished. He noticed a television set built into the wall in such a way that it could be viewed from his bed and he smiled tiredly on seeing it—he would have to watch it sometime, to see how their reception compared with that on Anthea. And it would be amusing to see some of the shows again. He had always liked the Westerns, even though the quiz programs and the Sunday “educational” shows had provided his staff at home with most of the information that he had memorized. He had not seen a television show in… how long had the trip taken? …four months. And he had been on earth two months—getting money, studying the disease germs, studying the food and water, perfecting his accent, reading the newspapers, preparing himself for the critical interview with Farnsworth.

He looked out the window at the brighter light of morning, at the pale blue sky. Somewhere in the sky, possibly directly where he was looking, was Anthea. A cold place, dying, but one for which he could be homesick; a place where there were people whom he loved, people whom he would not see again for a very long time…. But he would see them again.

He closed the curtains at the window, and then, gently, eased his tired, aching body into bed. Somehow all of the excitement seemed gone, and he was placid and calm. He fell asleep within a few minutes.

Afternoon sunlight woke him, and even though it hurt his eyes with its brilliance—for the curtains at the window were translucent—he awoke feeling rested and pleasant. Possibly it was the softness of the bed compared with those in the obscure hotels where he had been staying, and possibly it was relief at the success of last night. He lay in bed, thinking, for several minutes and then got up and went into the bathroom. There was an electric razor laid out for him, together with soap, washcloth, and towel. He smiled at this; Antheans did not have beards. He turned the lavatory tap on and watched it for a moment, fascinated as ever with the sight of all that water. Then he washed his face, not using the soap—for it was irritating to his skin—but using a cream from a jar in his briefcase. Then he took his usual pills, changed his clothes, and went downstairs to begin earning a half billion dollars….

***

That evening, after six hours of talking and planning, he stood for a long time on the balcony outside his room, enjoying the cool air and looking at the black sky. The stars and the planets seemed strange, shimmering in the heavy atmosphere, and he enjoyed staring at them, in their unfamiliar positions. But he knew little of astronomy, and the patterns were confusing to him—except for those of the Big Dipper and a few minor constellations. Finally he returned to his room. It would have been pleasant to know which one was Anthea; but he could not tell….

3

On an unseasonably warm spring afternoon, Professor Nathan Bryce, walking up the stairs to his fourth-floor apartment, discovered a roll of caps on the third-floor landing. Remembering the last afternoon’s loud banging of cap guns in the hallways, he picked this up with the intention of flushing it down the toilet when he reached his apartment. It had taken him a moment to recognize the little roll, for it was bright yellow. When he was a boy, caps had always been red, a peculiar rust shade, and that had always seemed the right color for caps and firecrackers, and that kind of thing. But apparently they were making yellow ones now, as they made pink refrigerators and yellow aluminum drinking glasses, and other such incongruous wonders. He continued up the stairs, perspiring, thinking now of some of the chemical subtleties that went into even the making of yellow spun-aluminum drinking glasses. He speculated that the cave men who drank from their cupped and calloused hands might have done perfectly well for themselves without all the complex learning in chemical engineering—that ungodly, sophisticated knowledge of molecular behavior and of commercial processes—which he, Nathan Bryce, was paid to know and to publish research papers about.

By the time he reached his apartment he had forgotten the caps. There were too many other things to be thought of. Still sitting where it had sat for the past six weeks, on one side of his big, scarred oak desk, was a disordered pile of student papers, horrible to contemplate. Next to the desk was an ancient, gray-painted steam radiator, an anachronism in these days of electrical heating, and on its venerable ironwork cover was stacked a disorderly, menacing pile of student lab notebooks. These were piled so high that the little Lasansky print that hung well clear of the radiator was almost completely covered by them. Only a pair of heavy-lidded eyes showed—the eyes, possibly, of a weary god of science, peering in mute anguish over laboratory reports. Professor Bryce, being a man given to a peculiar kind of wry whimsy, thought of this. He also noted the fact that the little print—it was the bearded face of a man—one of the few worthwhile things he had encountered in three years in this midwestern town, was now impossible to see because of the work of his, Bryce’s, students.

On the uncluttered side of his desk his typewriter sat like another mundane god—a boorish, trivial, over-demanding god—still holding the seventeenth page of a paper on the effects of ionizing radiations upon polyester resins, a paper unsought, unhonored and one that would probably always remain unfinished. Bryce’s gaze met this sullen disarray; the scattered paper sheets like a fallen, bombed-out city of card houses, the endless, frighteningly neat student solutions of oxidation-reduction equations and of the industrial preparations of unlovely acids; the equally dull, dull paper on polyester resins. He stared at these things, his hands in the pocket of his coat, for a full thirty seconds, in black dismay. Then, since it was hot in the room, he pulled off his coat, threw it on the gold brocade couch, reached under his shirt to scratch his belly, and walked into the kitchen and began making coffee. The sink was littered with dirty retorts, beakers and small jars, together with the breakfast dishes, one of them smeared with egg yolk. Looking at this impossible confusion he felt for a moment like screaming with despair; but he did not. He merely stood for a minute and then said, softly, aloud. “Bryce, you’re a damn mess.” Then he found a reasonably clean beaker, rinsed it out, filled it with powdered coffee and hot tap water, stirred it with a lab thermometer, and drank it up, staring over the beaker at the big, expensive Brueghel print of
The Fall of Icarus
that hung on the wall above the white stove. A fine picture. It was a picture that he had once loved but was now merely used to. The pleasure it gave him now was only intellectual—he liked the color, the forms, the things a dilettante likes—and he knew perfectly well that was supposed to be a bad sign and furthermore that the feeling had much to do with the unhappy pile of papers surrounding his desk in the next room. Finishing the coffee, he quoted, in a soft, ritualistic voice, without any particular expression or feeling, the lines from Auden’s poem about the painting.

He set the beaker down, unrinsed, on the stove. Then he rolled up his sleeves, took off his tie, and began filling the sink with hot water, watching the detergent foam bubble up under the pressure from the faucet like a multicelled living thing, the compound eye of a huge albino insect. Then he began putting glassware through the foam, into the hot water beneath it. He found the dishwashing sponge and began working. He had to start somewhere….

Four hours later he had collected a small stack of graded term papers and began fumbling in his pocket for a rubber band to fasten them into a bundle. It was then he discovered the roll of caps. He pulled it from his pocket, held it in the palm of his hand for a moment, and then grinned foolishly. He hadn’t shot a cap for thirty years—not since, at some time of ancient, pimply innocence, he had gone from cap guns and
A Child’s Garden of Verses
to the giant, official-looking Chem-Craft set that had been given him by his grandfather as a direct prod from Fate. Suddenly he found himself wishing he had a cap gun; he felt that, here, in his empty apartment, he would like to shoot the caps off, one by one. And then he remembered how, once, God knew how many years ago, he had wondered what would happen if you set a whole roll of caps afire—a delightful, radical idea. But he had never tried it. Well, there was no better time. He got up, smiling wearily, and went into the kitchen. He set the roll of caps on a sheet of copper gauze, put the sheet on a tripod stand, poured a little alcohol from an alcohol lamp on them, muttering pedantically, “Positive ignition,” took a wood splinter from a stack, lit it with his cigarette lighter, and then cautiously touched off the caps. He was surprised and pleased by the results; expecting only an irregular series of little
phrrt
sounds and some gray gunsmoke, he got instead, while the roll danced madly on the wire gauze, a fine confusion of loud, satisfying
bangs
. Strangely, no smoke rose from the black residue. He bent and sniffed the little black mass that was left. No odor at all. That was odd. My God, he thought, how fast things happen! Some other poor fool of a chemist had found a substitute for gunpowder already. He wondered briefly what it could be and then shrugged. Maybe he’d look into it some time. But he missed the smell of gunpowder—a fine, pungent smell. He looked at his watch. Seven-thirty. Outside the windows was spring twilight. It was past supper-time. He went into the bathroom, washed his hands and face, shaking his head at his own gray haggardness in the mirror. Then he picked up his coat from the couch, put it on and went out. Vaguely, walking downstairs, he scanned the steps for another roll of caps, but there was none.

After a hamburger and a cup of coffee he decided to go to a movie. He’d had a hard day—four hours of lab work, three hours of teaching, four hours of reading those idiot papers. He walked downtown, hoping there would be a science-fiction movie—one with resurrected dinosaurs clomping around Manhattan in bird-brained wonder, or insectivorous invaders from Mars, come to destroy the whole damn world (and good riddance, too), so they could eat the bugs. But nothing like that was playing, and he settled for a musical, buying popcorn and a candy bar before going into the dark little auditorium and searching out an isolated seat on the aisle. He began eating the popcorn, trying to get the taste of the cheap mustard from the hamburger out of his mouth. A newsreel was in progress and he watched it dully, with the mild dread that such things could give him. There were pictures of riots in Africa.
How many years have they been rioting in Africa? Ever since the early sixties?
There was a speech by a Gold Coast politician, threatening the use of “tactical hydrogen weapons” against some hapless “fomenters.” Bryce squirmed in his seat, ashamed for his profession. Years before, as a graduate student of brilliant promise, he had worked for a while on the original H-bomb project. Like poor old Oppenheimer, he had had his serious doubts even then. The newsreel shifted to pictures of missile emplacements along the Congo River, then to the manned rocket races in Argentina, and finally to New York fashions, featuring off-the-bosom gowns for women, and men’s frilly trousers. But Bryce could not get the Africans out of his mind; those serious young black men were the grandsons of the dusty, sullen family groups in the
National Geographic
’s, thumbed through in innumerable doctors’ offices and in the parlors of respectable relatives. He remembered the sagging breasts of the women, the inevitable red scarf handkerchief in every color photograph. Now the descendants of those people were wearing uniforms and going to universities, drinking martinis, making their own hydrogen bombs.

The musical came on in strong vulgar colors, as if, by glaring force, it could erase the memory of the newsreel. It was called
The Shari Leslie Story
, and was dull and noisy. Bryce tried to lose himself in the aimless movement and color, but found he could not and had to content himself at first with the tight bosoms and long legs of the young women in the picture. This was distracting enough in itself, but it was the kind of distraction that could be painful, as well as absurd, for a middle-aged widower. Squirming, confronted by blatant sensuality, he shifted his attention to the photography, and became for the first time aware that the technical quality of the images was striking. The line and detail, though blown up on a huge Dupliscope screen, appeared as sharp as in a contact print. He blinked, seeing this now, and then cleaned his glasses on his handkerchief. There was no doubt of it, the images were perfect. He knew a smattering of photochemistry; this quality did not seem quite possible, with what he knew of dye-transfer processes and three-emulsion color films. He caught himself whistling softly in astonishment, and watched the rest of the movie with a greater interest—only occasionally distracted when one of the pink images would peel off a brassiere—a thing he had never got used to in the movies.

Afterward, on his way out of the theater, he stopped a moment to look at the advertisements for the film, to see what they might say about the color process. This was not at all hard to find; blazoned across the garish ads was a banner that read: In The New, New Color Sensation WORLDCOLOR. There was, however, nothing more than this, except for the little circled R that meant “registered trademark,” and in infinitesimal print, below, Registered by W. E. Corp. He fished around in his mind for combinations that would fit the initials, but with the freakish whimsicality that his mind would sometimes produce, the only things he found were absurd: Wan Eagles, Wamsutta Enchiladas, Wealthy Engineers, Worldly Eros. He shrugged his shoulders, and, hands in his pants pockets, began walking down the evening street, into the neon heart of the little college town.