The Man Who Fell to Earth

  The only logical reason for submitting him to the painful tests must be some form of bureaucratic curiosity. Probably the justification was their desire to prove conclusively that he was non-human, to prove that he was indeed what they must have suspected he was—suspected, but could not admit to, because of its absurdity. If that was the way their thinking went, and very likely it was, they were in very obvious error from the outset. For, no matter what non-human attributes they might find, it would always be more plausible that he was a human physical deviate, a mutation, sport, freak, than that he was from some other planet. Still, they did not seem to see this difficulty. What could they hope to find out in detail that they didn’t already know, in general? And what could they prove? And, finally, if proved beyond doubt, what then could they do?

  But he did not care very much—did not care what they found out about him, did not even care very much what happened to that old, old plan, conceived twenty years before in another part of the solar system. He supposed, without thinking about it very much, that it was all over anyway, and he felt little more than relief. What he cared most about was that they would get their infernal experiments and tests and questions done with, and leave him alone. Being imprisoned as he was, was no problem for him—in many ways it was more native to his way of life, and more satisfying, than freedom.

  7

  The FBI was polite and gentle enough, but after two days of nonsensical questions, Bryce was profoundly weary, unable even to feel anger at the contempt he could sense behind their politeness. Had they not released him on the third day, he felt that he might have gone to pieces. Yet they hadn’t put him under any noticeable strain; in fact they hardly seemed to consider him important.

  On the third morning the man came, as usual, to pick him up at the YMCA and to drive him the four blocks to the Federal Building in downtown Cincinnati. The YMCA had been a contributing factor to his weariness. Had he credited the FBI with enough imagination he would have blamed his stay at the Y upon a deliberate wish to depress him with the tattered cheeriness that filled the public rooms along with the grimy oak furniture and the countless unread Christian tracts.

  The man took him to a new room in the Federal Building this time, a room like a dentist’s office where a technician put hypodermics in him, measured his heartbeat and blood pressure, and even took X-ray photographs of his skull. These things were done, as someone explained, for “routine identification procedure.” Bryce could not imagine what his heartbeat rate would have to do with identifying him; but he knew better than to ask. Then, abruptly, they finished, and the man who had brought him there told him that, as far as the FBI was concerned, he was free to go. Bryce looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty in the morning.

  As he left the room and went down the corridor to the main entrance-way, he had another shock. Being led by a matron to the room he had just left, was Betty Jo. She smiled at him, but said nothing, and the matron hustled her past him and into the room.

  He was astonished at his own reaction. Despite his weariness he felt a stomach-borne excitement, a kind of delight, at seeing her—even more so at seeing her frank-faced, chubby person in this absurd, ponderously severe corridor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Outside the building he sat on the steps in the cold December sunlight and waited for her to come out. It was almost noon when she came and sat, heavily and shyly, beside him. With the cold air her perfume seemed warm—strong and sweet. A brisk young man with an attaché case came striding up the steps, and pretended not to see them sitting there. Bryce turned to Betty Jo and was surprised to see that her eyes were puffy, as though she had been recently crying. He glanced at her nervously. “Where’ve they been keeping you?”

  “At the YWCA.” She shuddered. “I didn’t care for it much.”

  It was logical that they would have had her there, but he hadn’t thought about it. “I’ve been at the other one,” he said. “At the YM. How did they treat you? The FBI, I mean.” It seemed foolish to use all of those initials—YMCA, FBI.

  “All right, I guess.” She shook her head and then moistened her lips. Bryce liked the gesture; she had full lips, without lipstick, red now from the cold air. “But they sure asked a lot of questions. About Tommy.”

  Somehow the reference to Newton embarrassed him. He did not want to talk about the Anthean just then.

  She seemed to sense his embarrassment—or shared it. After a pause she said, “Do you want to go eat lunch?”

  “That’s a good idea.” He stood up and pulled his overcoat around him. Then he leaned down and helped her to her feet, taking both her hands in his.

  By luck they found a good, quiet restaurant and they both ate a large lunch. It was all natural food, with no synthetics, and there was even real coffee to drink afterward, although it was thirty-five cents a cup. But they both had plenty of money.

  They talked little during the meal, and they did not mention Newton. He asked her what her plans were and found that she had none. When they had finished eating he said, “What do we do now?”

  She looked better now, more composed and cheerful. “Why don’t we go to the zoo?” she said.

  “Why not?” It seemed like a good idea. “We can take a taxi.”

  Possibly because it was the Christmas holiday season, there were very few people at the zoo, which suited Bryce perfectly. The animals were all indoors, and the two of them wandered from building to building, talking pleasantly. He liked the big, insolent cats, especially the panthers, and she liked the birds, the bright-colored ones. He was thankful and pleased that she cared for the monkeys no more than he did—he found them obscene little creatures—for it would have dismayed him had she, like so many women, found them cute and funny. He had never seen anything funny about monkeys.

  He was also pleased to find that he could buy beer from a stand at, of all places, the entrance to the aquarium. They took their beers inside with them—although a sign told them plainly not to—and seated themselves in the dusky light before a large tank which contained an enormous catfish. The catfish was a fine, solid, placid-looking creature, with Mandarin mustaches and gray, pachydermous skin. It watched them dolefully while they drank their beer.

  After they had sat in silence for a while, watching the catfish, Betty Jo said, “What do you think they’ll do with Tommy?”

  He realized that he had been waiting for her to bring up the subject. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll hurt him or anything.”

  Betty Jo sipped from her cup. “They said he wasn’t… wasn’t an American.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you know if he is, Doctor Bryce?”

  He started to tell her to call him Nathan, but it didn’t seem right to do that, just then. “I imagine they’re right,” he said, wondering how in the name of heaven they could deport him if they had found out.

  “Do you think they’ll keep him long?”

  He remembered that X-ray of Newton’s skeleton and the thoroughness of the FBI in testing him in the little dentist’s office and abruptly he understood why they had tested him. They wanted to make sure that he was not an Anthean, too. “Yes,” he said. “I think they’ll probably keep him for a long time. As long as they can.”

  She didn’t reply and he looked over at her. She was holding her paper cup in her lap, with both hands, and staring down into it as if into a well. The flat, diffused light from the catfish’s tank made no shadows on her face, and the unlined simplicity of her features and her poised, solid position on the bench made her appear like a fine and solid statue. He looked at her silently for what seemed a long time.

  Then she looked over at him and it became obvious why she had been crying before. “You’ll miss him, I suppose,” he said. Then he finished his beer.

  Her expression did not change. Her voice was soft. “I sure will miss him,” she said. “Let’s go look at the rest of the fish.”

  They looked at the rest of them, but there was
none he liked so well as the old catfish.

  When the time came to take a taxi back into town he realized that he had no address to give, that there was no particular place for him to go. He looked at Betty Jo, standing beside him now in the sunshine, “where are you going to stay?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have any people around Cincinnati.”

  “You could go back to your family in… what was it?”

  “In Irvine. It’s not too far.” She looked at him wistfully. “But I don’t think I want to. We never got along.”

  He said, hardly thinking what it meant. “Do you want to stay with me? Maybe at a hotel? And then, if you wanted to, we could find an apartment.”

  She seemed stunned for a moment, and he was afraid he had insulted her. But then she took a step closer to him and said, “My God, yes. I think we ought to stay together, Doctor Bryce.”

  8

  He began drinking heavily again, during the second month of his confinement, and he was not altogether sure why. It was not loneliness, since now he had confessed himself, as it were, to Bryce, he felt little wish for companionship. Nor did he feel that sense of intense strain he had labored with for years, now that the issues were simpler and the responsibilities almost nonexistent. He had only one major problem that might have served as an excuse for drinking; the problem of whether or not to continue the plan, should he ever be permitted by the government to do so. Yet he did not often trouble himself with that—drunk or sober—since the possibility of his having any further choice in the matter seemed remote.

  He still read a great deal, and had taken up a new interest in avant-garde literature, especially in the difficult, rigidly formal poetry of the little magazines—sestinas, villanelles, ballades, which, though somewhat weak on ideas and insight, were often linguistically fascinating. He even attempted a poem himself, an Italian sonnet in Alexandrines, but found himself alarmingly ungifted at it before he had struggled his way through the octave. He thought he might attempt it some time in Anthean.

  He also read a good deal in the sciences and in history. His jailers were as liberal about supplying him with books as with gin; he never received so much as a raised eyebrow or a day’s delay about anything he requested of the steward who was in charge of feeding him and cleaning his apartment. They seemed admirably skilled at serving him. Once, to see what would happen, he asked for the Arabic translation of Gone With The Wind, and the steward, unconcerned, had it for him in five hours. Since he could not read Arabic, and cared little for novels anyway, he used it as a bookend on one of his shelves; it was monumentally heavy.

  The only serious objections he had to his confinement were that he sometimes missed being out of doors, and there were times that he would have liked to see Betty Jo, or Nathan Bryce, the only two people on the planet he could have claimed as friends. He had some feeling as well about Anthea—he had a wife on Anthea, and children—but the feeling was vague. He no longer thought very often about his home. He had gone native.

  By the end of two months they seemed to have finished their physical tests, leaving him with a few unpleasant memories and a mild, recurring backache. Their interrogations by that time had become boringly repetitious; apparently they had run out of things to ask him. And yet no one had put to him the most obvious of questions; no one had asked him if he were from another planet. He was certain by that time that they suspected it, but it was never directly asked. Were they afraid of being laughed at, or was this a part of some elaborate psychological technique? At times he almost decided to tell them the entire truth, which they would probably disbelieve anyway. Or he could claim to be from Mars or Venus and insist on it until they were convinced he was a crackpot. But they could hardly be that foolish.

  And then one afternoon they abruptly changed their technique with him. It came as a considerable surprise, and, finally, as a relief.

  The questioning began in the usual fashion; his interrogator, a Mr. Bowen, had questioned him at least once a week from the beginning. Although none of the various officials had identified their positions to him, Bowen had always struck Newton as being a more important personage than the others. His secretary seemed a shade more efficient, his clothes a shade more expensive, the circles beneath his eyes a shade darker. Perhaps he was an under-secretary, or someone of consequence in the CIA. He was also obviously a man of considerable intelligence.

  When he came in he greeted Newton cordially, seated himself in an armchair, and lit a cigarette. Newton did not like the smell of cigarettes, but he had long since given up protesting against them. Besides, the room was air-conditioned. The secretary seated himself at Newton’s desk. Fortunately, the secretary did not smoke. Newton greeted them both affably enough; however, he did not offer to rise from the couch when they entered the room. There was, he recognized, a kind of petty cat-and-mouse game in all that; but he was not loath to play the game.

  Bowen usually got to the point in a hurry. “I’ll have to confess, Mr. Newton,” he said, “that you have us as mystified as ever. We still don’t know who you are or where you are from.”

  Newton looked straight at him. “I’m Thomas Jerome Newton, from Idle Creek, Kentucky. I’m a physical freak. You’ve seen my birth record in the Bassett County courthouse. I was born there in 1918.”

  “That would make you seventy years old. You look forty.”

  Newton shrugged his shoulders. “As I say, I’m a freak. A mutant. Possibly a new species. I don’t think that’s illegal, is it?” All of this had been said before; but he did not much mind saying it all again.

  “It’s not illegal. But we believe your birth record is forged. And that’s illegal.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “Probably not. What you do you do pretty well, Mr. Newton. If you could invent Worldcolor films I imagine you could have a record forged easily enough. Naturally, a 1918 record would be a hard one to check on. Nobody still alive, and all. But there’s still that matter of our not being able to locate any childhood acquaintances. And the even more odd matter that we can’t find anyone who knew you prior to five years ago.” Bowen stubbed out his cigarette, and then scratched his ear, as if his mind were somewhere else. “Would you tell me again why that is so, Mr. Newton?” Newton wondered idly if interrogators went to special schools to learn their techniques, like scratching the ear, or if they picked them up from the movies.

  He gave the same answer he had given before. “Because I was such a freak, Mr. Bowen. My mother let hardly anyone see me. As you may have noticed I’m not the sort who chafes at confinement. Nor was confining a child very difficult to do in those days. Especially not in that part of Kentucky.”

  “You never went to school?”

  “Never.”

  “Yet you’re one of the best educated persons I’ve ever met.” And then, before he could reply, “Yes. I know, you have a freak mind as well.” Bowen stifled a yawn. He seemed thoroughly bored.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you hid out in some obscure Kentucky ivory tower until you were sixty-five years old, and nobody ever saw you or heard of you?” Bowen smiled wearily at him.

  The conception of that was, of course, absurd, but there was nothing he could do about it. Obviously nobody but a fool would believe it, but he had to have a story of some kind or other. He could have taken more pains to create some documents and to bribe some officials to make a more convincing past for himself; but that had been decided against long before he’d left Anthea as being more risky than it would have been worth. Even getting an expert to forge the birth document had been a difficult and perilous business.

  “That’s right,” he smiled. “Nobody ever heard of me, except a few long-dead relatives, until I was sixty-five.”

  Abruptly Bowen said something that was new. “And then you decided to start selling rings, from town to town?” His voice had become harsh. “You had made for yourself—out of local materials, I suppose—about a hundred gold rin
gs, all exactly alike. And you suddenly decided, at the age of sixty-five, to start peddling them?”

  That came as a surprise; they had not mentioned the rings before, although he had assumed that they must know about them. Newton smiled at the thought of the absurd explanation he was going to have to give for that one. “That’s right,” he said.

  “And I suppose you dug up the gold in your back yard, and then made the gems with your Chem-Craft set, and did the engraving yourself with the point of a safety pin? All this so you could sell the rings for less than the gems alone were worth, to small jewelry stores.”

  Newton could not help being amused. “I’m an eccentric, too, Mr. Bowen.”

  “You’re not that eccentric,” Bowen said. “Nobody’s that eccentric.”

  “Well, how would you explain it then?”

  Bowen paused to light another cigarette. For all his show of irritation, his hand was perfectly steady. Then he said, “I think you brought the rings with you on a spaceship.” He raised his eyebrows slightly. “How’s that for a guess?”

  Newton could not help being shocked, but he kept himself from showing it. “It’s interesting,” he said.

  “Yes, it is. Even more interesting when you consider that we found the remains of a peculiar craft about five miles from the town where you sold your first ring. You may not know this, Mr. Newton, but that hull you left there was still radioactive in the right frequencies. It had been through the Van Allen belts.”