The Man Who Fell to Earth (13 page)

After he had helped her off with her jacket, she bent over the heater and began warming her hands. Bryce seated himself and watched her thoughtfully, waiting for her to bring up the reason for her call. She was not an unattractive woman—full-mouthed, black-haired, heavy-bodied beneath her plain blue dress. She must be about his own age, and like himself she dressed in old-fashioned clothes. She wore no makeup, but, with the reddening of her complexion from the cold, she did not need any. Her breasts were heavy, like those of peasant women in Russian propaganda films; and she would have had the perfect, monumental “earth mother” look if it had not been for her shy, self-effacing eyes and her hillbilly manner and voice. Beneath the half-sleeves of her dress there was a light growth of black hair on her arms, soft and pleasant looking. He liked that, as he liked the way that she did not pluck her eyebrows.

Abruptly she straightened up, smiled at him more comfortably now, and spoke. “It isn’t like a wood fire.”

For a moment he didn’t understand what she meant. Then, nodding at the red-glowing heater, he said, “No, it certainly isn’t.” And then, “Why don’t you sit down?”

She took the chair across from him, leaned back, and put her feet up on the ottoman. “Doesn’t smell like a wood fire either.” She looked thoughtful. “I lived on a farm and I can still remember wood fires in the morning when I was hopping around trying to get dressed. I’d lay my clothes on the hearth to warm them up and I’d stand and keep my backside warm by the fire. I can remember how the fire smelt. But I haven’t smelt a wood fire in—God knows—twenty years.”

“I haven’t either,” he said.

“Nothing smells as good as it used to,” she said. “Not even coffee, the way they make it. Most things don’t smell at all any more.”

“Do you want a cup? Of coffee?”

“Sure,” she said. “You want me to get it?”

“I’ll get it,” he stood up, finishing off his cup. “I was ready for another one anyway.”

He went to the kitchen and fixed two cups, using the coffee pills that were practically all you could buy these days, ever since the country had broken relations with Brazil. He brought them in on a tray and she smiled up at him pleasantly as she took hers. She looked very comfortable, like an old, good-tempered dog—with neither pride nor philosophy to hinder its comfort.

He sat down, sipping. “You’re right.” he said, “nothing much smells as it used to. Or maybe we’re too old to remember exactly.”

She continued smiling. Then she said, “He wants to know if you’ll go to Chicago with him. Next month.”

“Mr. Newton?”

“Um hmm. There’s a meeting. He said you’d probably know about it.”

“A meeting?” He drank his coffee speculatively for a moment. “Oh. The Institute of Chemical Engineers. Why does he want to go to that?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “He told me if you wanted to go with him he’d come by this afternoon and talk about it. You won’t be working?”

“No.” he said. “No. I don’t work on Sundays.” He had not changed his casual tone of voice, but his mind was beginning to race. There was an opportunity here, being dropped in his lap. There was a plan he had half formed two days before; and if Newton were definitely coming by the house… “I’ll be glad to talk to him about it.” And then, “Did he say when he would come?”

“No, he didn’t.” She finished her coffee, set the cup on the floor beside her chair. She certainly makes herself at home, he thought, but he did not mind the way that she did it. It was genuine informality, and not the affected kind that men like Professor Canutti, and all his crew-cut peers back at Iowa, practiced.

“He hasn’t been saying much lately at all.” There was a hint of strain in her voice when she said this. “In fact I hardly ever see him anymore.” There was something grim in her voice, too, and Bryce wondered what there could possibly be between these two. And then it occurred to him that her being here was an opportunity, too—one that he might never have again.

“Has he been sick?”
If he could start her talking
…

“Not that I know of. He’s funny. He takes moods.” She was staring at the glowing heat element in front of her, not looking at him. “Sometimes he talks to that Frenchman, Brinnarde his name is, and other times he talks to me. Sometimes he just sits in his room. For days. Or he’ll drink; but you can hardly tell it.”

“What does Brinnarde do? What’s his job?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at him fleetingly and then back to the fire. “I think he’s a bodyguard.” She turned again to him, her face worried, anxious. “You know, Mister Bryce, he carries a gun with him. And you watch the way he moves. He’s quick.” She shook her head, as a mother might. “I don’t trust him and I don’t think Mr. Newton should either.”

“A lot of wealthy men have bodyguards. Besides, Brinnarde’s a kind of secretary too, isn’t he?”

She laughed, a short, wry laugh. “Mr. Newton don’t write letters.”

“No. I suppose not.”

Then, still staring at the heater, she said, meekly, “Could I have a little drink, please?”

“Sure.” He stood up almost too quickly. “Gin?”

She looked up at him. “Yes please, gin.” There was something plaintive about her and Bryce realized, abruptly, that she must be very lonely, must have practically no one to talk to. He felt pity for her—a lost, anachronistic hillbilly—and at the same time excitement at the realization that she was dead ripe to be pumped for information. He could oil her with a little gin, let her stare at the fire for a while, and wait for her to talk. He smiled at himself, feeling Machiavellian.

When he was in the kitchen, getting the gin bottle down from the shelf over the sink, she said, from the living room, “Would you put some sugar in it, please?”

“Sugar?” That was pretty far out.

“Yes. About three spoons.”

“Okay,” he said, shaking his head. And then, “I’ve forgotten your name.”

Her voice was still strained—as if she were trying to keep from trembling, or from crying. “My name’s Betty Jo, Mr. Bryce. Betty Jo Mosher.”

There was a kind of soft dignity about the way she answered him that made him feel ashamed for not having remembered her name. He put sugar in a glass, began filling it with gin, and felt further ashamed for what he was about to do—for using her. “Are you from Kentucky?” he said, as politely as he could. He filled the glass almost full, and stirred it.

“Yes. I’m from Irvine. About seven miles out of Irvine. That’s north of here.”

He carried it in to her and she took it gratefully, but with an attempt at reserve that was both touching and ridiculous. He was beginning to like this woman. “Are your parents living?” He remembered that he was supposed to be pumping her about Newton, not herself. Why did his mind always wander from the point, the real point?

“Mother’s dead.” She took a sip of the gin, rolled it around in her mouth speculatively, swallowed it, blinked. “I sure like gin,” she said. “Daddy sold the farm to the government for a… a hydro…”

“Hydroponics station?”

“That’s right. Where they make that nasty food out of tanks. Anyway, Daddy’s on relief now—up in Chicago in a development—just like I was, in Louisville, until I met Tommy.”

“Tommy?”

She smiled wryly. “Mr. Newton. I call him Tommy sometimes. I used to think he liked it.”

He took a breath, looking away from her, and said, “When did you meet him?”

She took another drink of her gin, savored it, swallowed. Then she laughed softly. “In an elevator. I was going up in this elevator in Louisville, to get my county welfare check, and Tommy was in it. Lord, was he peculiar looking! I could see right off. And then he broke his leg in the elevator.”

“Broke his leg?”

“That’s right. Sounds funny as hell, but that’s what he did. The elevator must’ve been too much for him. If you knew how light he was…”

“How light?”

“Lord yes, he’s light. You could pick him up with one hand. His bones must have no more strength than a bird’s. I tell you he’s a peculiar man. Lord, he’s a nice man; and he’s so smart and rich, and so patient. But, Mr. Bryce…”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Bryce, I think he’s sick, I think he’s sick bad. I think he’s sick in his body—My God, you ought to see the pills he takes!—and I think he has… troubles in his mind. I want to help, but I never know where to begin. And he wouldn’t ever let a doctor come near him.” She finished her glass of gin, and leaned forward, as if to gossip. But there was grief on her face—grief too genuine to be faked as an excuse for gossip. “Mr. Bryce, I don’t think he ever sleeps. I been with him now for almost a year, and I’ve never seen him asleep. He’s just not human.”

Bryce’s mind was opening like a lens. A chill was spreading from the nape of his neck, across his shoulders, down his backbone.

“Do you want more gin?” he asked. And then, feeling something that was half laugh, half sob, he said, “I’ll join you….”

She had two more drinks before she left. She did not tell him very much more about Mr. Newton—probably because he did not want to ask her any more, did not feel as though he had to. But when she left—not staggering at all, for she could hold her liquor like a sailor—she said, as she put on her coat, “Mr. Bryce, I’m a silly, ignorant woman, but I really appreciated talking to you.”

“It was a pleasure for me,” he said. “Feel free to come back whenever you like.”

She blinked at him. “Can I?”

He hadn’t meant it literally, but he said now, and meant it, “I want you to come back.” And then, “I don’t have many people to talk to, either.”

“Thank you,” she said, and then, as she went out into the winter noon, “That makes three of us, doesn’t it…?”

He did not know how many hours he would have before Newton arrived; but he knew he would have to act quickly if he were going to be ready in time. He felt terribly excited and nervous, and while he was dressing he kept muttering, “It can’t be Massachusetts, it has to be Mars. It has to be Mars….” Did he want it to be Mars?

When he was dressed he put on his overcoat and left the house for the laboratory—a five-minute walk. It was snowing outside now, and the coldness took his attention, for a moment, off the ideas whirling in his mind, the riddle that he was about to solve once and for all, if he could set up the apparatus properly, and set it up in time.

Three of his assistants were in the lab, and he spoke to them gruffly, refusing to answer their comments on the weather. He could feel their curiosity when he began dismantling the small apparatus in the metals lab—the device they used for X-ray stress and analysis—but he pretended not to notice the raised eyebrows. It did not take long; he merely had to remove the bolts that held the camera and the lightweight cathode ray generator to their frames. He was able to carry them easily enough by himself. He made certain the camera was loaded—loaded with W. E. Corporation high speed X-ray film—and then he left, carrying the camera in one hand, the cathode ray outfit in the other. Before closing the door he said to the other men, “Look, why don’t you three take the afternoon off? Okay?”

They looked a bit dazed, but one of them said, “Okay, sure, Doctor Bryce,” and looked at the others.

“Fine.” He shut the door and left.

Next to the imitation fireplace in Bryce’s living room was an air-conditioning vent, now unused. After twenty minutes of work, and some swearing, he managed to install the camera behind its grill-work, with the shutter wide open. Fortunately the W.E. film was, like so many of Newton’s patents, a vast technical improvement over its predecessors; it was totally unaffected by visible light. Only the X-rays could expose it.

The tube in the generator was also a W. E. Corporation device; it worked like a strobe light, giving one instant, concentrated flash of X-rays—extremely useful for high-speed vibration studies. It was even more useful, perhaps, for what Bryce now had in mind. He installed it in the bread drawer in his kitchen, aiming it, through the wall, toward the open-lensed camera. Then he brought the electric cord from the front of the drawer and plugged it into the appliance socket over the sink. He left the drawer partly open so that he could reach his hand in and flip the switch on the side of the little transformer that supplied power to the tube.

He went back into the living room and carefully placed his most comfortable chair directly between the camera and the cathode ray tube. Then he sat down, in another chair, to wait for Thomas Jerome Newton.

4

The wait was a long one. Bryce became hungry; he tried to eat a sandwich, but could not finish it. He paced the floor, picked up his detective novel again, could not concentrate on the reading. Every few minutes he would go into the kitchen and check the position of the cathode ray tube in the bread drawer. Once, deciding on impulse to make certain the instrument was working properly, he flicked the switch to “on,” waited for it to heat up, and then pressed the button that made the invisible flash—the flash that would go through the wall, through the chair, through the camera lens, and expose the film in its holder at the back of the camera. And, right after pressing the button, he cursed himself silently and viciously; by fooling around stupidly, he had exposed the film.

It took him twenty minutes to remove the grate from the air duct again and to get the camera out. Then he had to remove the film—it had the brownish color now that meant it had been exposed properly—and replaced it with another sheet from the camera’s magazine. Then, in a sweat for fear that Newton might knock on the door at any moment, he re-installed the camera in the duct, checked the lens, shakily but carefully pointed the camera toward the chair, and replaced the grill. He made sure the lens was lined up with a hole in the grill-work, so that no metal would interfere.

He had his sleeves rolled up and was washing his hands when the knock came at the front door. He forced himself to walk slowly to it, still carrying a towel in his hands, and opened the door.

Standing in the snow was T. J. Newton, wearing sunglasses and a light jacket. He was smiling slightly, almost ironically it seemed, and, unlike Betty Jo, he did not appear to be at all cold. Mars, Bryce thought, letting him in, Mars is a cold planet.