The Man Who Fell to Earth (11 page)

“I don’t think so.”

“Philadelphia?”

Bryce laughed. “Portsmouth, Ohio. That’s farther from here than Mars.” With no apparent warning, the ducks on the lake began quacking confusedly. Suddenly they took off in flight, beginning in disarray, but then coordinating themselves into something loosely resembling a formation. Bryce watched them disappear over the mountains, still gaining in altitude. He thought fuzzily of the migration of birds, of birds and insects and small furry animals, moving, following old, old pathways to ancient homes and new deaths. And then the flock of ducks reminded him bitterly of a squadron of missiles he had seen pictured on a magazine cover years before, and this made him think again of the thing he was helping this strange man beside him to build, that sleek, missilelike ship that was supposed to explore or experiment or take pictures or something and that somehow, now, feeling very light and drunk in the mid-afternoon sun, he did not trust, did not trust at all.

Newton stood up, unsteadily, and said, “We can walk to the house. I’ll have Brinnarde drive you home from there, if you’d like.”

“I’d like.” He stood up, brushing leaves from his clothes, and then finished his gin. “I’m too drunk and too old to walk home.”

They walked, staggering slightly, in silence. But when they were near the house Newton said, “I hope it will be ten years.”

“Why ten years?” Bryce said. “If it’s that long the weapons will be even better. They’ll blow up everything. The whole business. Maybe even the Lithuanians’ll do it. Or the Philadelphians.”

Newton looked down at him strangely, and Bryce for a moment felt uneasy. “If we have ten years,” Newton said, “it may not happen at all. It may not be able to happen.”

“And what’s going to stop it then? Human virtue? The Second Coming?” Somehow he could not look Newton in the eye.

For the first time Newton laughed, softly and pleasantly. “Maybe it will be the Second Coming indeed. Maybe it will be Jesus Christ himself. In ten years.”

“If he comes,” Bryce said, “he’d better watch his step.”

“I imagine he’ll remember what happened to him the last time,” Newton said.

Brinnarde came from the house to meet them. Bryce was relieved: he had begun to feel dizzy in the sunshine.

He had Brinnarde take him directly home, and did not stop by the laboratory. During the drive Brinnarde asked what seemed to be a great many questions, to all of which Bryce gave vague answers. It was five o’clock when he arrived home. He went into the kitchen, which was, as always, a thorough mess. On the wall hung
The Fall of Icarus
, brought from Iowa, and in the sink were his breakfast dishes. He got a cold chicken leg from the refrigerator in the wall, and, chewing on it, staggered tiredly to bed, where he fell quickly asleep, the half-eaten leg beside him on the night-stand. He had a great many dreams, all of them confused, and many of them involving the flight of birds in straggling formation across a cold blue sky….

He awoke at four o’clock in the morning, coming wide awake in the darkness with his mouth tasting foul, his head aching and his neck sweating from the heavy woolen collar. His feet felt swollen from walking; he was very thirsty. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the luminous dial of the clock for several minutes, and then gingerly he turned on the bedside lamp, closing his eyes before the click. He stood up, blinked his way across the floor to the bathroom, filled the basin with cold water, and drank two glassfuls from his toothbrush glass while it was filling. He cut off the tap, turned the light on, began unbuttoning the oppressive plaid shirt. In the mirror he saw a patch of his white chest beneath the U of his undershirt, and looked away. He dipped his hands in the water and held them there, letting the coldness stimulate circulation in his wrists. Then he cupped his hands and put water on the back of his neck and on his face. He dried himself hard with a coarse towel, and then brushed his teeth, getting the foul taste from his mouth. He combed his hair, went to the bedroom for a clean shirt—a blue dress shirt this time, but without the frilled front that most men wore.

All the time that he was doing this an old phrase was running through his head:
You pays your money and you takes your choice
.

He fixed himself breakfast in the kitchen, dissolving a coffee pill in hot water and frying himself an omelette, which he doused liberally with sliced mushrooms from a can. He folded the omelette expertly with a spatula, took it out while it was still moist in the center, set it with the coffee on the plastic table, sat, and ate slowly, letting his gin-burdened stomach enclose the squashy thing as gently as he could. It stayed down well enough; and he felt momentarily pleased with himself for not being sick—after having had nothing since yesterday’s breakfast but wine, cheese, and straight gin. He shuddered. He could at least have eaten a few of those PA pills that people ate when they didn’t want the trouble of an honest dinner. PA was protein algae—a nasty thought, eating pond scum instead of liver and onions. But maybe he should use them, considering the population and the Asian dust bowls that had put the Fascists back in in China—and thus in the “free world” of dictators, demagogues, and hedonists once more—and was making liver and onions or beef and potatoes harder and harder to find. We’ll all be eating pond scum and fish oil and Erlenmeyer flask carbohydrate in another twenty years, he thought, finishing the omelette. When there’s no more room for the chickens they’ll keep the eggs in museums. Maybe the Smithsonian will have a preserved omelette, in plastic. He drank his coffee, itself partly synthetic, and thought of the old biologists’ maxim that a chicken is an egg’s way of reproducing itself. This made him think, grimly, that some hotshot young biologist with a crew cut and frilly trousers would probably find a way more efficient than the egg’s natural one, eliminating the chicken altogether. But, then, it wouldn’t be a young hotshot; T. J. Newton would be the man likely to come out with a navel egg—like a navel orange—all wrapped in gay plastic and marketed by World Enterprises Corporation. A self-reproducing egg; you plant it in pond water and it grows like a plastic bead necklace, popping forth a new egg daily. But it would not cackle with satisfaction afterward, nor could it ever produce a gorgeously prideful bantam rooster, a gamecock, or a stupid hen for a child to chase. Or a fried chicken dinner.

Then, finishing the coffee, he looked up and saw
The Fall of Icarus
and, knowing now what the picture was coming to mean to him, he set the cup down and said aloud, “Quit playing intellectual games, Bryce. You pays your money and you takes your choice: Mars or Massachusetts?” And, still looking at the leg and arm of the sky-fallen boy in the ocean in the serene picture on the wall, he thought.
Friend or foe?
He kept staring at the picture.
Destroyer or preserver?
Newton’s words were in his head. “It may be the Second Coming indeed.” But Icarus had failed, had burned and drowned, while Daedalus, who had not gone so high, had escaped from his lonely island. Not to save the world, however. Maybe even to destroy it, for he had invented flights; and destruction, when it came, would come from the air. Brightness falls from the air, he thought; I grow sick: I must die; Lord have mercy on us. He shook his head, trying to keep his mind from wandering. The problem now was Mars or Massachusetts; everything else was secondary. And what did he know now? There was Newton’s accent, his appearance, his way of walking. There were the productions of his mind, implying a technology more alien than the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. There were those fantastic logarithms, there was his being slightly drunk the two times Bryce had seen him, which could imply the ungodly loneliness that an extraterrestrial might feel, or an inability to withstand the bruises of the culture he had fallen into. But being drunk was so damnably human and that canceled out the other argument. Wouldn’t it be unlikely that an extraterrestrial would be affected by alcohol as a man is? But Newton must be a man—or something like a man. He would have a man’s blood chemistry; he should be able to get drunk. But that would still be more plausible if he were from Massachusetts. Or Lithuania. But why not a drunken Martian? Christ himself drank wine, and he came down from heaven—a wine-bibber, the Pharisees said. A wine-bibber from outer space. Why did his mind keep wandering from the point? Cortés had been given tequila, probably; and he was another Second Comer: the blue-eyed god, Quetzalcoatl, come to save the peons from the Aztecs. In ten years? Logarithms to the base twelve. And what else?
And what else?

2

Sometimes he felt as if he must be going insane in the way that humans did; and yet it was theoretically impossible that an Anthean could be insane. He did not understand what was happening to him, or what had happened. They had prepared him for the extraordinary difficulty of his work, and he had been selected for it because of his physical strength and his ability to adapt. He had known from the outset that there were many ways in which he might fail, that the entire thing was an enormous risk, an extravagant plan by a people who could find nowhere else to turn; and he was prepared for failure. But he had not been prepared for what had, in fact, happened. The plan itself was going so well—the great amounts of money made, the construction of the ship begun with almost no difficulty, the failure of anyone (although, he believed, many had suspected and were suspecting) to recognize him for what he was—and the possibility of success was now so close. And he, the Anthean, a superior being from a superior race, was losing control, becoming a degenerate, a drunkard, a lost and foolish creature, a renegade and, possibly, a traitor to his own.

Sometimes he blamed Betty Jo for it, for his own weakness in the face of this world. How human he had become, to rationalize that way! He blamed her for his going native and becoming obsessed with vague guilts and vaguer doubts. She had taught him to drink gin; and she had shown him an aspect of strong and comfortable and hedonistic and unthinking humanity that his fifteen years of studying television had left him unaware of. She had shown him a drowsy, drunken vitality that Antheans might never, in their godawful timelessness and wisdom, have known of or dreamed of. He felt like a man who had been surrounded by reasonably amiable, silly, and fairly intelligent animals, and has gradually discovered that their concepts and relationships are more complex than his training could have led him to suspect. Such a man might discover that, in one or more of the many aspects of weighing and judging that are available to a high intelligence, the animals who surround him and who foul their own lairs and eat their own filth might be happier and wiser than he.

Or was it merely that a man surrounded by animals long enough became more of an animal than he should? But the analogy was unfair, was not right. He shared with the humans an ancestry that was closer than the common kinship in the family of mammals and furry creatures in general. Both he and the humans were articulate, fairly rational creatures, capable of insight, prediction, and emotions loosely named love, pity, and reverence. And, he found, capable of drunkenness.

Antheans had some familiarity with alcohol, although sugars and fats played a very minor part in the ecology of that world. There was a sweet berry from which a kind of light wine was sometimes made; pure alcohol could, of course, be synthesized easily enough, and very occasionally an Anthean might become drunk. But steady drinking did not exist; there was no such thing as an alcoholic Anthean. He had never in his life heard of anyone on Anthea drinking as he, on Earth, drank—daily now, and steadily.

He did not become drunk in quite the same way that the humans did; or at least he thought he did not. He never wished to become unconscious, or riotously happy, or godlike; he only wanted relief, and he was not certain from what. He did not have hangovers, no matter how much he drank. He was alone most of the time. It might have been difficult for him not to drink.

After he left Bryce to be driven home by Brinnarde, he walked into the never used living room of his house and stood silently for a minute, enjoying the coolness of the room and its quiet dimness. One of the cats got up lazily from a couch, stretched itself, came over to him, and began rubbing itself against his leg, purring. He looked at it fondly; he had grown to like cats very much. They had a quality that reminded him of Anthea, even though there was no animal resembling them there. But they hardly seemed to belong to this world either.

Betty Jo came in from the kitchen, wearing an apron. She looked at him silently for a moment, her eyes gentle, and then she said. “Tommy?”

“Yes?”

“Tommy, Mr. Farnsworth called you from New York. Twice.”

He shrugged. “He calls almost every day now, doesn’t he?”

“Yes he does, Tommy.” She smiled softly. “Anyhow he said it was important and you should call him back right away.”

He knew well enough that Farnsworth was having problems, but they would have to wait for a while. He did not feel up to dealing with them just yet. He looked at his watch. Almost five o’clock. “Tell Brinnarde to put a call through at eight,” he said. “If Oliver calls again tell him I’m busy and that I’ll talk to him at eight.”

“All right.” She hesitated a moment and then said, “Do you want me to come sit with you? And talk maybe?”

He saw the look on her face, the hopeful look that he knew meant she was as dependent upon him as he was on her for companionship. What strange companions they had become! Yet, though he knew her to be as lonely as himself and to share his sense of alienation, he felt unable even now to grant her the right to sit with him in silence. He smiled as pleasantly as he could. “I’m sorry, Betty Jo. I have to be alone for a while.” How difficult that practiced smile was becoming for him!

“Sure, Tommy.” she said. She turned, too quickly. “I have to get back to the kitchen.” At the door she turned back to him. “You let me know when you want supper, hear? I’ll bring it up.”

“Fine.” He walked to the staircase and decided to ride the little escalator chair, which he had not used for weeks. He was beginning to feel very tired. As he sat down, one of the cats sprang into his lap, and with an unaccustomed shudder, he flung it off. It hit the floor soundlessly, shook itself, and walked off unperturbed, not deigning to look back at him. He thought, looking at the cat, if only you were the intelligent species on this world. And then, smiling wryly, maybe you are.