The Man Who Fell to Earth (6 page)

It was noon, and after a while he called room service and had a bottle of Chablis and some cheese sent up to him. He had only recently begun drinking wine, pleased to find that it had, apparently, the same effect on him as it did on men of Earth. The wine was good, although the cheese was a little rubbery. He turned on the television set, which also operated on W. E. Corp, patents, and settled back in an armchair, determined, if he could do nothing else this hot afternoon, to enjoy himself.

It had been over a year since he had watched television at any length, and it seemed very strange to him, here in this plush and vulgarly modern hotel suite—so much like the apartments in which television private detectives lived, with its lounge chairs, never-used bookshelves, abstract paintings and plastic-topped private bar—here in Louisville, Kentucky, to be watching again. Watching the little human men and women moving about on the screen as he had watched them for so many years at home, on Anthea. He thought of those days now, sipping the cool wine, nibbling cheese—foreign, strange foods—while the background music of a love story filled the cool room and the dimly heard voices from the little speaker sounded against his sensitive, other-world hearing like the alien gutturals and gibberings that, fundamentally, they were. So much unlike the purring of his own language, even though the one had, ages ago, developed from the other. He permitted himself to think, for the first time in months, of the soft conversation of old Anthean friends, of the mild and brittle foods that he had eaten all his life at home, and of his wife and children. Perhaps it was the coolness of the room, calming him after his excruciating summer trip, perhaps the alcohol, still new to his veins, that made him fall into a state of mind so closely resembling human nostalgia—sentimental, self-regarding, and bitter. He wanted, suddenly, to hear the sound of his language being spoken, to see the light colors of Anthean soil, to smell the acrid desert odor, to hear the thick sounds of Anthean music, and to see the thin, gauze-like walls of its buildings, the dust of its cities. And he wanted his wife, with the dim Anthean body sexuality—a quiet, insistent aching. And, suddenly, looking again at his room, at its discreet gray walls and its vulgar furniture, he felt disgusted, weary of this cheap and alien place, this loud, throaty, rootless, and sensual culture, this aggregate of clever, itchy, self-absorbed apes—vulgar, uncaring, while their flimsy civilization was, like London Bridge and all bridges, falling down, falling down.

He began to feel what he had sometimes felt before; a heavy lassitude, a world-weariness, a profound fatigue with this busy, busy, destructive world and all its chittering noises. He felt as though he could give the whole thing up, that it was foolish, impossibly foolish to have started it, more than twenty years before. He looked around him again, tiredly. What was he doing here—here on this other world, third from the sun, a hundred million miles from his home? He got up and turned the television set off, and then sat back deeply in the chair, still drinking the wine, feeling the alcohol now and not caring.

He had watched American, British, and Russian television for fifteen years. His colleagues had collected a huge library of monitored and recorded television broadcasts, and by the time, forty years ago, when America had begun continuous television broadcasting, they had already deciphered most of the subtleties of the language from FM radio broadcasts. He had studied daily, learning the language, the manners, the history and geography, everything available, until he had memorized, by means of exhaustive cross-referencing, the meaning of obscure words like “yellow,” “Waterloo,” and “Democratic Republic”—the last a thing which had no counterpart whatever on Anthea. And, while he had worked and studied and done endless physical exercises, while he agonized in anticipation for years, they had deliberated, deciding whether the trip should even be attempted. There was so little power, other than the solar batteries in the desert. It would require so much fuel to send even one Anthean across the empty gulf, possibly to his death, possibly to be received by an already dead world, a world that might by then be, like so much of Anthea itself, littered with atomic rubble, the burnt-out residue of apelike wrath. But they had told him, finally, that the trip would be attempted, in one of the old, old craft that still remained underground. He was informed a year before the journey that the plans at last were definite, that the ship would be ready when the planets had assumed the right position for the crossing. He had not been able to control the trembling of his hands, when he had told his wife of the decision….

***

He waited in his hotel room, not moving from the chair, until five o’clock. Then he got up, called the real estate office, and told them they could expect him at five-thirty. He left the room, leaving the half-empty bottle of wine on the bar. He hoped that the weather would be much cooler by then, but it was not.

He had chosen the hotel because it was within three blocks of the office he was going to visit, the office where he was to begin the huge real estate transaction he had already planned. He was able to walk the distance; but the sullen, heavy, and agonizingly hot air that seemed to cover the streets like a cushion made him dizzy, confused, and weak. For a few moments he thought he should return to the hotel and have the real estate men come to him, but he kept on walking.

And then, when he found the building, he discovered a thing that frightened him; the office he wanted was on the nineteenth floor. He had not expected tall buildings in Kentucky, had not anticipated this. Walking up the stairs was out of the question. And he did not know anything about the elevators. If he should ride in one that went up too fast, or jerked, it might be disastrous to his already gravity-strained body. But the elevators looked new and well made, and, at least, the building was air-conditioned. He stepped into one, empty except for the operator, a quiet-looking old man with a tobacco-stained uniform. They took on one more passenger, a chubby, pretty woman who came running up breathless, at the last moment. Then the operator closed the brass doors. Newton said. “Nineteen, please,” the woman muttered “twelve,” and the old man lazily, somewhat contemptuously, placed his hand on the manual control handle. Newton realized instantly, in dismay, that this was not a modern, push-button elevator, but some kind of refurbished old one. But this realization was a moment too late, for, before he could protest, he felt his stomach twist and his muscles tighten in pain as the elevator jerked, hesitated, jerked again and then shot upward, doubling, for a moment, his already trebled weight. And then everything seemed to happen at once. He saw the woman staring at him and knew that his nose must be bleeding, pouring blood on his shirt front, and looking down saw that this was so. At the same instant he heard—or felt, in his quivering body—a brittle cracking, and his legs collapsed under him and he fell to the floor of the elevator, grotesquely twisted, seeing one leg horribly jackknifed under him as he lost consciousness, his mind falling into a blackness as profound as that of the void that separated him from his home….

***

He had been unconscious twice before in his life; once during the training in the centrifuge at home, and once during the blind acceleration of his take-off in the ship. Both of those times he had recovered himself quickly, coming awake to confusion and pain. This time, too, he awoke to the aching of an abused body and the frightened confusion of not knowing where he was. He was lying on his back, on something smooth and soft, and there were bright lights in his eyes. He squinted and then winced, turning his head. He was lying on some kind of couch. On the other side of the room, a woman was standing at a desk, holding a telephone in her hand. She was looking at him. He stared at her, and then realized who she was—the woman from the elevator.

She hesitated, seeing him awaken, and did not seem to know what to do with the telephone, holding it limply in her hand. She smiled at him vaguely. “You all right, mister?”

His voice sounded like someone else’s, weak and soft. “I believe so. I don’t know….” His legs were stretched out in front of him. He was afraid to try and move them. The blood on his shirt was still sticky, but cold now. He could not have been unconscious long. “I believe I hurt my legs….”

She looked at him gravely, shaking her head. “You sure did. One of ’em bent up like old baling wire.”

He kept looking at her, not knowing what to say, trying to think of what he should do. He could not go to a hospital; there would be an examination. X-rays….

“I been trying to get you a doctor for five minutes.” Her voice was hoarse and she looked frightened. “I already called three and they’re not in.”

He blinked at her, trying to think clearly. “No.” he said. “No! Don’t call…”

“Don’t call a doctor? But you got to have a doctor, mister. You been hurt bad.” She looked doubtful, worried, but too frightened to be suspicious.

“No,” He tried to say more, but was suddenly overcome with nausea and, hardly aware of what he was doing, found himself vomiting over the side of the couch, his legs screaming with pain at each convulsion. Then, exhausted, he lay back again, face up. But the lights were too bright, burning his eyes even through the closed lids—his thin, translucent eyelids—and, groaning, he threw his arm up, to cover them.

Somehow, his being sick seemed to calm her. Perhaps it was the recognizable humanness of the act. Her voice was more easy. “Can I help?” she said. “Is there something I can do to help?” She hesitated. “I can get you a drink….”

“No. I don’t want…”
What was he going to do?

Suddenly her voice got light, as though she had been near hysteria and had just drawn back from it. “You sure are a mess,” she said.

“I imagine.” He turned his face toward the back of the couch, trying to avoid the lights. “Can you… can you just leave me alone? I’ll be better… if I can rest.”

She laughed softly. “I don’t see how. This here’s an office; there’s going to be people filling it up in the morning. The elevator boy gave me the key.”

“Oh.” He had to do something about the pain, or he would not stay conscious long. “Listen.” he said. “I have a hotel key in my pocket, the Brown Hotel. It’s three blocks from here, down the street you take as—”

“I know where the Brown Hotel is.”

“Oh. That’s fine. Can you take the key and get a black briefcase from the bedroom closet in the room? And bring it to me? I have… medicine in it. Please.”

She was silent.

“I can pay you….”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.” He turned and opened his eyes to look at her a moment. Her broad face was frowning, the eyebrows wrinkled in a kind of parody of deep thought. Then she laughed loosely, not looking at him. “I don’t know as they’d let me in the Brown Hotel—or let me walk into one of the rooms, like I owned it.”

“Why not?” It hurt him somewhere in his chest to talk. He felt as though he would faint again before long. “Why can’t you?”

“You don’t know much about clothes, do you, mister? You look like you never had to worry. I ain’t wearing nothing but a country dress, and that torn. And they might not like my breath.”

“Oh!” he said.

“Gin. But maybe I could…” She looked thoughtful. “No, I couldn’t.”

He felt himself going watery again, his body felt as if he were floating. Blinking, he forced himself to hold on, trying to ignore the weakness, the pain. “In my billfold. Get the twenty-dollar bills. Give the bellboys the money. You can do it.” The room was spinning about him, the lights going fainter now, seeming to move in dim procession, across his vision. “Please.”

He felt her fumbling in his pocket, felt her hot breath on his face, then, after a moment, heard her gasp. “Lordy!” she said, “if you ain’t loaded…! Why I could run off with this.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Please help me. I’m rich. I can…”

“I won’t,” she said wearily. And then, more brightly, “You just hang on, mister. I’ll get back with your medicine, if I have to buy the hotel. You just take it easy.”

He heard her closing the door behind her as he fainted…

It seemed only a moment later that she was back in the room, panting, and had the briefcase open on the desk.

And then, after he had taken the pain capsules and the pills that would help heal his leg, the elevator operator came in with a man who said he was the building superintendent and Newton had to reassure them that he would sue no one, that, really, he felt fine and that all would be well. No, he did not need an ambulance. Yes, he would sign a waiver to absolve the building of responsibility. Now would they get him to a taxi? He almost fainted again, several times, during this frenetic discussion, and when it was over he did faint again.

He awoke in a taxi with the woman. She was shaking him gently. “Where do you want to go?” She said, “Where’s your home?”

He stared at her. “I… I don’t really know.”

7

He looked up from his reading, somewhat startled. He had not known she was in the room. She frequently did that, seemed to appear from nowhere, and her hoarse, serious voice could be irritating to him. But she was a good woman, and entirely unsuspicious. In four weeks he had grown very fond of her, as if she were a kind of useful pet. He shifted his leg to a more comfortable position before he answered. “You’ll be going to church this afternoon, won’t you?” He looked over his shoulder at her. She must have just come in; she was carrying a red plastic grocery bag, hugging it against her heavy bosom as if it were a child.

She grinned at him a little foolishly, and he realized that she was probably already somewhat drunk, even though it was early afternoon. “That’s what I mean, Mr. Newton. I thought you might want to go to church.” She set the bag on the table by the air-conditioner—the one he had bought for her during his first week at her home. “I got you some wine.” she said.

He turned back toward his leg, propped up in front of him on a flimsy little crate that was weighted down with old comic books, her only reading material. He was annoyed. Her buying wine meant that she definitely intended to get drunk that evening, and, although she held her liquor well, he was always made apprehensive by her drunkenness. Even though she commented often and with amused wonder upon his lightness and frailty, she probably still had no idea of the harm she could do his frame—his slight, birdlike bones—if she were ever to stumble over him, fall on him, or even merely slap him hard. She was a sturdy, fleshy woman, and outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. “It was thoughtful of you to bring the wine, Betty Jo,” he said. “Is it chilled?”