The Man Who Fell to Earth (21 page)

The man at the machine hesitated a moment. Then he glanced at the FBI man, now seated near the wall. The FBI man nodded affably. The man in the yellow smock said, “Actually, two kinds of pictures, sir, both at once. One’s a routine I.D. photo of your retinas, to get the blood vessel pattern. Best identification you can make. Then the other picture is X-ray. We want the ridges at the inside of your occiput—the back of your skull.”

Newton tried to get out of the chair. “No!” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Faster than he would have believed possible, the affable FBI man was behind him, pulling him back into the chair. He was unable to move. Probably the FBI man was not aware of it, but a woman could have held him easily. “I’m sorry, sir,” the man behind him was saying, “but we have to have those pictures.”

He tried to calm himself. “Haven’t you been informed about me? Haven’t you been told about my eyes? Certainly they know about my eyes.”

“What about your eyes?” the man in the yellow gown said. He seemed impatient.

“They are sensitive to X-rays. That device…”

“Nobody’s eyes can see X-rays.” The man pursed his lips, obviously in irritation. “Nobody sees at those frequencies.” He nodded to the woman and, smiling uncomfortably, she took his glasses off. The light in the room made him blink.

“I do,” he said, squinting. “I see altogether differently from the way you do.” Then, “Let me show you the way my eyes are made. If you’ll release me I’ll remove my… my contact lenses.”

The FBI man did not release him. “Contact lenses?” the technician said. He leaned over closely, staring for a long moment into Newton’s eyes. Then he drew back. “You’re not wearing contact lenses.”

He was feeling a sensation he had not felt for a long time—panic. The brightness of the room had become oppressive; it seemed to pulsate around him with the regularity of his heartbeat. His speech felt thick, drunken. “They’re a… new kind of lens. A membrane, not plastic. If you’ll release me for a moment I’ll show you.”

The technician was still pursing his lips. “There’s no such thing,” he said. “I’ve had experience for twenty years with contact lenses and…”

Behind him the FBI man said something beautiful. “Let him try, Arthur,” he said, abruptly releasing his arms. “After all, he’s a taxpayer.”

Newton let out a sigh. Then he said, “I’ll need a mirror.” He began fumbling in his pockets and, suddenly, panicked again. He did not have the special little tweezers with him, the ones designed for removing the membranes…. “I’m sorry,” he said, talking to none of them in particular. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to have an instrument. Maybe back in my room…”

The FBI man smiled patiently. “Now come on,” he said. “We don’t have all day. And I couldn’t get in that room if I wanted to.”

“All right,” Newton said. “Then do you have a pair of small tweezers? Maybe I can do it with them.”

The technician grimaced. “Just a minute.” He mumbled something else, then went to a drawer. In a minute he had assembled a formidable set of shining instruments—tweezers, quasi-tweezers, and tweezerlike tools of unknown function. He laid them out on the table beside the dentist’s chair.

One of the women had already handed Newton a circular mirror. He picked a blunt-ended small tweezer from the table. It was not very much like the one made for the job, but it might work. He clicked it experimentally a few times. Maybe a little too large, but it would have to do.

Then he found that he could not hold the mirror steady. He asked the woman who had given it to him to hold it. She stepped closer and took the mirror, holding it too near his face. He told her to back off a bit, then had to make her readjust its angle so that he could see properly. He was still squinting. The man in the yellow gown was beginning to tap his foot on the floor. The tapping seemed to keep time with the pulsation of the lights in the room.

When he brought his hand, carrying the tweezer, toward his eyes, the fingers began to tremble uncontrollably. He drew the hand back quickly. He tried again, but could not get the thing near his eye. His hand shook violently this time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Just a minute more…” His hand drew back involuntarily from his eye, from fear of the instrument and of the damnably shaking, trembling, uncontrolled fingers. The tweezers fell from his hand, into his lap. He fumbled for them, then, sighing, looked at the FBI man, whose face was noncommittal. He cleared his throat, still squinting. Why did the lights have to be so bright? “Do you suppose,” he said, “that I could have a drink? Of gin?”

Abruptly the man laughed. But this time the laugh did not seem affable. It sounded sharp, cold, brutal. And it rang in the tiled room.

“Now come on,” the man said, smiling indulgently. “Now come on.”

Desperately now, he grasped the tweezers. If he could get only one of the membranes partly off, even if he damaged the eye, they could tell…
Why didn’t Van Brugh come and tell them?
It would be better for him to ruin one of his eyes than to submit them both to that machine, to those lenses that wanted to stare into his skull, to count, for some reason of idiots, the ridges on the back of his skull from the inside, counting them through his eyes, his sensitive eyes.

Abruptly, the FBI man’s hands had clamped over his wrists again and his arms—those arms with so little strength in them when pitted against the strength of a human being—were drawn once again behind his back and held. And then someone put a clamp around his head, tightening it at the temples. “No!” he said, softly, trembling. “No!” He could not move his head.

“I’m sorry,” the technician said. “I’m sorry, but we have to hold your head still for this.” He did not sound at all sorry. He pushed the machine directly up to Newton’s face. Then he turned a knob that brought the lenses and rubber cups up to Newton’s eyes, like binoculars.

And Newton, for the second time in two days, did something new to him, and very human. He screamed. He screamed wordlessly at first and then he found himself forming words: “Don’t you know I’m not human?
I’m not a human being!
” The cups had blocked off all light. He could see nothing, no one. “
I’m not a human being at all!
”

“Now come on,” the FBI man said, behind him.

And then there was a flash of silver light that was brighter, to Newton, than the midday sun of deep summer is to a man who has come from a dark room and has forced himself to stare up at it, open-eyed, until his eyes had gone dark. Then he felt the pressure leave his face, and knew that they had wheeled the machine away.

It was only after he had fallen twice that they tested his eyes and discovered that he was blind.

10

He was kept incommunicado in a government hospital for six weeks, where the government doctors were able to do nothing whatever for him. The light-sensitive cells of his retinas had been almost completely seared; they were no more capable of visual distinctions than is a greatly overexposed photographic plate. He could, after a few weeks, faintly make out light and dark, and could tell, when a large dark object was placed in front of him, that it was, indeed, a large, dark object. But that was all—no color was apparent, no form.

It was during this period that he began to think again of Anthea. At first his mind found itself recalling old and scattered memories, mostly of his childhood. He remembered a certain chesslike game that he had loved as a child—a game played with transparent cubes on a circular board—and he found himself recalling the complex rules whereby the pale green cubes took precedence over the gray ones when their configurations formed polygons. He remembered the musical instruments he had studied, the books he had read, especially the history books, and the automatic ending of his childhood at the age of thirty-two Anthean years—or forty-five, as the human beings counted time—by marriage. He had not chosen his wife himself, although that was sometimes done, but had permitted his family to make the choice. The marriage had been an effective one, and pleasant enough. There had been no passion, but Antheans were not a passionate race. Now blind, in a United States hospital, he found himself thinking of his wife more fondly than he ever had before. He missed her, and wished she were with him. Sometimes he wept.

Not being able to watch television, he would listen at times to the radio. The government, he learned, had not been able to keep his blindness a secret. The Republicans were making considerable use of him in their campaign. What had happened to him they called an example of administrative high-handedness and irresponsibility.

After the first week he felt no rancor toward them. How could he be angry with children? Van Brugh offered embarrassed apologies; it had all been a mistake; he had not known the FBI hadn’t been informed of Newton’s peculiarities. He was aware that Van Brugh did not actually care, that he was only worried about what he, Newton, might eventually say to the press, what names he would name. Newton assured him, wearily, that he would say nothing except that it was all an unavoidable accident. No one’s fault—an accident.

Then one day Van Brugh told him that he had destroyed the tape. He had known from the beginning, he said, that no one would believe it anyway. They would believe it to be a fake, or that Newton was insane, or anything except that it was true.

Newton asked him if he believed it was true.

“Of course I believe it,” Van Brugh said quietly. “At least six people know about it and believe it. The President is one of them, and so is the Secretary of State. But we’re destroying the records.”

“Why?”

“Well,” Van Brugh laughed coldly, “among other things we don’t want to go down in history as the greatest assembly of crackpots ever to govern this country.”

Newton set down the book with which he had been practicing Braille. “Then I can resume my work? In Kentucky?”

“Possibly. I don’t know. We’ll be watching you every minute for the rest of your life. But if the Republicans get in I’ll be replaced. I don’t know.”

Newton picked up the book again. For a moment he had been interested, for the first time in weeks, in what was going on around him. But the interest had gone as quickly as it had come, leaving no trace. He laughed gently. “That’s interesting,” he said.

***

When he left the hospital, led by a nurse, there was a crowd waiting outside the building. In the bright sunlight he could see their silhouettes, and he could hear their voices. A passage in the crowd was kept open for him, probably by policemen, and the nurse led him through this to his car. He heard faint applause. Twice he stumbled, but did not fall. The nurse led him expertly; she would stay with him for months or years, as long as he needed her. Her name was Shirley, and as well as he could tell she was fat.

Suddenly his hand was taken and he felt it being gripped softly. A large person was in front of him. “Good to have you back, Mr. Newton.” Farnsworth’s voice.

“Thank you, Oliver.” He felt very tired. “We have some business to discuss.”

“Yes. You’re on television, you know, Mr. Newton.”

“Oh, I didn’t know.” He looked around, trying unsuccessfully to find the shape of a camera. “Where’s the camera?”

“On your right.” Farnsworth said,
sotto voce
.

“Turn me toward it, please. Did someone want to ask me something?”

A voice, evidently that of a television commentator, spoke at his elbow. “Mr. Newton, I’m Duane Whitely of CBS television. Can you tell me how it feels to be out again?”

“No,” Newton said. “Not yet.”

The announcer did not seem taken aback. “What,” he said, “are your plans for the future? After the experience you’ve just been through?”

Newton had finally been able pick out the camera, and he faced it now, almost totally unconscious of his human audience, both here in Washington and behind sets all over the country. He was thinking of another audience. He smiled faintly. At the Anthean scientists? At his wife? “I was, as you know,” he said, “working toward a space exploration project. My company was engaged in a rather large undertaking, to send a craft out into the solar system, to measure the radiations that have so far made interplanetary travel impossible.” He paused for breath, and realized that his head and shoulders were aching. Perhaps it was the gravity again, after so long a time in bed. “During my confinement—which was in no way unpleasant—I have had a chance to think.”

“Yes?” the announcer said, filling the pause.

“Yes.” He smiled gently, meaningfully, even happily toward the camera, toward his home. “I’ve decided that the project was over-ambitious. I am going to abandon it.”

1990:
Icarus drowning

1

Nathan Bryce had first discovered Thomas Jerome Newton through a roll of caps. He rediscovered him through a phonograph record. He found the record as accidentally as he had found the caps, but what it meant—at least in part—was much more immediately evident than the meaning of the caps had been. This happened in October of 1990, in a Walgreen drugstore in Louisville, a few blocks from the apartment where Bryce and Betty Jo Mosher lived together. It was seven months after the time of Newton’s tiny farewell address on television.

Both Bryce and Betty Jo had saved the larger part of their World Enterprises salaries, and it was not really necessary that Bryce work for a living, at least not for a year or two. He had, however, taken a job as consultant to a manufacturer of scientific toys—a job which he felt, with a certain satisfaction, brought his career in chemistry full circle. He was on his way home from work one afternoon when he stopped in the drug-store. His purpose was to buy a pair of shoelaces, but he paused at the doorway when he saw a large metal basket of phonograph records beneath a sign that read, Closeout 89¢. Bryce had always been a bargain hunter. He thumbed through a few of the record tags, toyed for a moment with one or two, and then encountered an amateurishly turned-out one that, by its title, immediately startled him. Since the time that phonograph records had become small steel balls, the manufacturers ordinarily packed them in little plastic boxes fastened to a large plastic tag. The tag displayed the arty picture and the usually ridiculous commentary that the old-fashioned quadraphonic albums had carried. But the tag on this one was merely of cardboard, and there was no picture. In an inexpensive attempt at the required artiness, the record’s title made use of the trite device of lower case printing throughout. It read:
poems from outer space
. And, on the reverse side of the card:
we guarantee you won’t know the language, but you’ll wish you did! Seven out-of-this-world poems by a man we call “the visitor.”