The Man Who Fell to Earth

by Tevis, Walter

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Newton said. It was feeble, but there was nothing else for him to say. The FBI had turned out to be more thorough than he had expected. There was a lengthy pause. Then Newton said. “If I were an arrival by spaceship, wouldn’t I have a better way of getting money than by selling rings?” Although he had thought for some time that he did not particularly care whether they found out the truth about him or not, Newton was surprised to find himself feeling ill-at-ease from these new questions, and from their directness.

  “What would you do,” Bowen said, “if you were from, say, Venus, and needed money?”

  Newton found himself, for one of the first times in his life, having difficulty keeping his voice steady. “If Venusians could build spaceships, I suppose they could counterfeit money.”

  “And where would you find, on Venus, a ten-dollar bill to copy?”

  Newton did not answer, and Bowen reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small object, laid it on the table beside him. The secretary looked up momentarily, waiting for someone to say something, apparently so that he could write it down. Newton blinked. The thing on the table was an aspirin box.

  “Counterfeit money brings us to something else, Mr. Newton.”

  He knew now what Bowen was gong to talk about, and there was really nothing much he could do about it. “Wherever did you get that?” he said.

  “One of our men ran across it while he was searching your hotel room in Louisville. That was two years ago—just after you broke your leg in the elevator.”

  “For how long have you been searching my rooms?”

  “For a long time, Mr. Newton.”

  “Then you must have had reason to arrest me long before this. Why didn’t you do it?”

  “Well,” Bowen said, “naturally we wanted to find out what you were up to first. With that ship you’re making in Kentucky. And, you must be aware, the whole thing is pretty tricky. You’ve become a very rich man, Mr. Newton, and we can’t go around arresting very rich men with impunity—especially if we are running what is supposed to be a sane government and our only charge against the rich man is that he’s from someplace like Venus.” He leaned forward, his voice softer. “Is it Venus, Mr. Newton?”

  Newton smiled back. Actually the new information hadn’t really changed things very much. “I never said it was anywhere but Idle Creek, Kentucky.”

  Bowen looked down at the aspirin box thoughtfully. He picked it up, weighed it in the palm of his hand. Then he said, “As I’m sure you already know, this box is made of platinum, which you’ll admit is striking. It is also striking that, considering the—the quality of the materials and workmanship, as the phrase goes, it is a very inept imitation of a Bayer Aspirin box. For example, it’s a good fourth of an inch too large, and the colors are way off. Nor is the hinge made the way the Bayer people make them.” He looked at Newton. “Not that it’s a better hinge—just different.” He smiled again. “But probably the most striking thing about it is that there’s no fine print on the box, Mr. Newton—just vague lines that look like print.”

  Newton was feeling uncomfortable, and angry with himself for not having remembered to destroy the box. “And what have you concluded from all that?” he said, knowing full well what they would have concluded.

  “We concluded that someone had counterfeited the box as well as he could from a picture on a television commercial.” He laughed briefly. “From television in an extreme fringe area.”

  “Idle Creek.” Newton said, “is an extreme fringe area.”

  “So is Venus. And they sell Bayer Aspirin boxes, complete with aspirin, in the Idle Creek drugstore, for a dollar. There’s no need at all to make you own, in Idle Creek.”

  “Not even if you happen to be a freakish eccentric, with very odd obsessions?”

  Bowen still seemed amused—possibly with himself. “Not very likely,” he said. “As a matter of fact I might as well end all of this fencing.” He looked at Newton carefully. “One of the fascinating things about it is that a… a person of your intelligence could make so many blunders. Why do you suppose we happened to decide to pick you up when you were in Chicago? You’ve had two months to think about it.”

  “I don’t know.” Newton said.

  “That’s what I mean. Apparently you—Antheans, isn’t it?—aren’t altogether accustomed to thinking as we do. I believe any ordinary, human, detective magazine reader would have realized that we were bound to have had a microphone in your room in Chicago, when you were explaining yourself to Doctor Bryce.”

  He remained silent for a full minute, stunned. Then, finally, he said, “No, Mr. Bowen, apparently Antheans don’t think as you people do. But then we wouldn’t lock a person up for two months so that we could ask him questions, the answers to which we already knew.”

  Bowen shrugged his shoulders. “Modern governments move in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. However, it wasn’t my idea to arrest you; it was the FBI’s. Somebody high up panicked. They were afraid you were going to blow the world up with that ferry boat of yours. In fact that has been their theory about you from the very beginning. Their operatives filed reports about the project and the assistant directors would try to decide when you were going to launch it against Washington or New York.” He shook his head in mock sadness. “Ever since Edgar Hoover, that’s been a damn apocalyptic outfit.”

  Newton got up abruptly and went to make himself a drink. Bowen asked him to fix three. Then he stood up himself and, hands in pockets, stared for a while at his shoes while Newton was making the drinks.

  Handing the glasses to Bowen and the secretary—the secretary avoided his eyes as he took the drink—Newton thought of something. “But once the FBI heard your recording—I suppose you made a recording—they must have changed their minds about my purposes.”

  Bowen sipped his drink. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Newton, we’ve never let the FBI know about the recording. We merely gave them the order to make the arrest for us. The tape has never left my office.”

  That was another surprise. But surprises had been coming so rapidly that he was getting used to them. “How can you keep them from demanding the tape?”

  “Well,” Bowen said, “you might as well know that I have the good fortune to be director of the CIA. In a way, I outrank the FBI.”

  “Then you must be—what’s his name, Van Brugh? I’ve heard of you.”

  “We’re an elusive bunch in the CIA,” Bowen—or Van Brugh—said. “Anyway, once we had the tape, we knew what we wanted to know about you. And we also determined from the fact of your confession, that if the FBI did pick you up—which as I told you they were on the verge of doing—you might well spill out the whole story to them. We didn’t want that to happen, because we don’t trust the FBI. These are perilous times, Mr. Newton; they might have solved the problem that we’ve been wrestling with by killing you.”

  “And you don’t intend to kill me?”

  “It’s certainly occurred to us. I’ve never been for it mainly because—however dangerous you could be—doing away with you might be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.”

  Newton finished his drink, then refilled the glass. “How do you mean that?” he said.

  “Right now we already have, over at Defense, a good many projected weapons based on data we pilfered from your private file over three years ago. These are, as I say, perilous times; there are a lot of ways in which we could use you. I imagine you Antheans know a great deal about weapons.”

  Newton paused a minute, staring at his drink. Then he said, calmly, “If you heard me talking to Bryce you know what we Antheans did to ourselves with our weapons. I have no intention of trying to make the United States of America omnipotent. Nor, as a matter of fact, could I if I wished to. I’m not a scientist. I was picked for the trip because of my physical stamina, not my knowledge. I know very little about weapons—less than you do, I suspect.”

  “You must have seen, or heard abo
ut, weapons on Anthea.”

  Newton was regaining his composure now, possibly because of the drinks. He no longer felt defensive. “You’ve seen automobiles, Mr. Van Brugh. Could you explain, off-hand, to an African savage how to make one? With only locally available materials?”

  “No. But I could explain internal combustion to a savage. If I could find a savage in modern Africa. And, if he were a smart savage he might be able to do something with that.”

  “Probably kill himself,” Newton said. “In any event, I do not intend to tell you anything along that line, for whatever it might be worth to you.” He finished another drink. “I suppose you cold try torturing me.”

  “A waste of time, I’m afraid,” Van Brugh said. “You see the reason we’ve been asking foolish questions of you for two months has been to conduct a kind of psychoanalysis. We’ve had cameras in here, recording eye-blink rates and things like that. We’ve already concluded that torture wouldn’t work on you. You’d go insane too easily under pain; and we just can’t learn enough about your psychology—guilt and anxieties and things like that—to do any kind of brainwashing on you. We’ve also loaded you with drugs—hypnotics, narcotics—and they don’t work.”

  “Then what are you going to do? Shoot me?”

  “No. I’m afraid we can’t even do that. Not without the President’s permission, and he won’t give it.” Then he smiled sadly. “You see, Mr. Newton, after all of the cosmic factors to be considered, the final one turns out to be a matter of practical, human politics.”

  “Politics?”

  “It just happens that this is 1988. And 1988 is an election year. The President is already campaigning for a second term, and he has it on good authority—did you know that Watergate changed nothing—nothing—the President uses us, in the CIA, to spy on the other party?—that the Republicans are going to turn this whole business into something like the Dreyfus case if we don’t either bring adequate charges against you or turn you loose with profuse apologies all around.”

  Abruptly, Newton laughed. “And if you shoot me, the President might lose the election?”

  “The Republicans have your brother industrialists in the NAM already worked up into a later. And those gentlemen, as you probably know, wield a lot of influence. They also protect their own.”

  Newton was beginning to laugh even harder. It was the first time in his life that he had actually laughed aloud. He did not merely chuckle, or snicker, or snort; he laughed loudly and deeply. Finally, he said, “Then you’ll have to let me go?”

  Van Brugh smiled grimly. “Tomorrow. We’re letting you go tomorrow.”

  9

  For more than a year it had become increasingly difficult for him to know how he felt about many things. This was not a difficulty characteristic of his people, but he had acquired it somehow. During those fifteen years that he had learned to speak English, learned to fasten buttons, to tie a tie, learned batting averages, the brand names of automobiles, and countless other bits and pieces of information, so much of which had turned out to be unnecessary, during all that time he had never suffered from self-doubt, had never questioned that plan he had been chosen to carry out. And now, after five years of actually living with human beings, he was unable to tell how he felt about such a clear-cut matter as being released from prison. As for the plan itself, he did not know what to think, and as a consequence he hardly thought about it at all. He had become very human.

  In the morning he was given his disguises again. It seemed odd to put them on once more, before going back into the world, and it was silly as well, for from whom was he concealing himself now? Yet he was glad to have the contact lenses on again, the lenses that gave his eyes a more human appearance. Their light filters relieved his eyes from the strain of brightness that even the dark glasses he had been wearing continuously could not altogether protect him from. And when he put them on and looked in the mirror at himself, he was relieved to look human again.

  A man he had not seen before took him from the room and down a hallway that was lighted by luminous panels—panels made under W. E. Corporation patents—and guarded by soldiers who carried guns. They entered an elevator.

  The lights in the elevator were oppressively bright. He put on his dark glasses. “What have you told the newspapers about all this?” he asked, although he did not really care.

  The man, though silent up to now, turned out to be quite affable. He was a short, stocky, bad-complexioned man. “That’s not my department,” he said pleasantly, “but I think they’ve said you were held in protective custody because of security reasons. Your work was vital to the national defense. Things like that.”

  “Will there be reporters waiting? When I get out?”

  I don’t think so.” The elevator stopped. The door opened into another guarded hallway. “We’re going to sneak you out the back door, so to speak.”

  “Right away?”

  “In about two hours. There are some routine things to do first. We have to process you out of this place. That’s what I’m here for.” They continued down the hallway, which was very long and, like the rest of the building, too brightly lighted. “Tell me,” the man said, “what were you being held for anyway?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Those things are kept pretty quiet around here.”

  “Doesn’t Mr. Van Brugh inform you of things like that?”

  The man smiled. “Van Brugh doesn’t tell anybody anything, except maybe the President, and he tells him only what he feels like telling.”

  At the end of the hallway—or tunnel, he was not certain which it was—was a door that led them into what appeared to be an oversized dentist’s office. It was startlingly clean, with pale yellow tiles. There was a chair of the sort that dentists use, flanked by several uncomfortably new-looking machines. Two women and a man stood waiting, smiling politely, wearing pale yellow smocks that matched the tiles. He had expected to see Van Brugh—he wasn’t certain why—but Van Brugh was not in the room. The man who had accompanied him here conducted him to the chair. He grinned. “I know it looks awful, but they won’t do anything that hurts. Some routine tests, mostly for identification.”

  “My God,” Newton said, “haven’t you tested me enough?”

  “Not us, Mr. Newton. I’m sorry if there’s any duplication of what the CIA’s been doing. But we’re FBI, and we have to get this stuff for our files. You know, blood type, fingerprints, EEG, things like that.”

  “All right.” He sat resignedly in the chair. Van Brugh had said that governments moved in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. Anyway it shouldn’t take too long.

  For a while they prodded and inspected him with needles, photographic equipment, and various metallic devices. They put clamps on his head to measure his brain waves, clamps on his wrists to measure his heartbeat. Some of their results he knew must be surprising them, but they showed no surprise. It was all, as the FBI man had said, a matter of routine.

  And then, after about an hour, they wheeled a machine up in front of him, putting it very close, and asked him to remove his glasses. The machine had two lenses, spaced like eyes, which seemed to regard him quizzically. There was a black rubber cup, like an eyecup, around each lens.

  He was immediately frightened. If they did not know about the peculiarities of his eyes… “What are you going to do with that?”

  The yellow-frocked technician took a small ruler from his shirt pocket and held it across the bridge of Newton’s nose, measuring. His voice was flat. “We’re just going to make some photographs of you,” he said. “Won’t hurt.”

  One of the women, smiling professionally, reached out for his dark glasses. “Here, sir, we’ll just take these off now…”

  He jerked his head away from her, putting up a hand to defend his face. “Just a minute. What kind of photographs?”

  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…”