The Man Who Fell to Earth

The musical came on in strong vulgar colors, as if, by glaring force, it could erase the memory of the newsreel. It was called The Shari Leslie Story, and was dull and noisy. Bryce tried to lose himself in the aimless movement and color, but found he could not and had to content himself at first with the tight bosoms and long legs of the young women in the picture. This was distracting enough in itself, but it was the kind of distraction that could be painful, as well as absurd, for a middle-aged widower. Squirming, confronted by blatant sensuality, he shifted his attention to the photography, and became for the first time aware that the technical quality of the images was striking. The line and detail, though blown up on a huge Dupliscope screen, appeared as sharp as in a contact print. He blinked, seeing this now, and then cleaned his glasses on his handkerchief. There was no doubt of it, the images were perfect. He knew a smattering of photochemistry; this quality did not seem quite possible, with what he knew of dye-transfer processes and three-emulsion color films. He caught himself whistling softly in astonishment, and watched the rest of the movie with a greater interest — only occasionally distracted when one of the pink images would peel off a brassiere — a thing he had never got used to in the movies.

Afterward, on his way out of the theater, he stopped a moment to look at the advertisements for the film, to see what they might say about the color process. This was not at all hard to find; blazoned across the garish ads was a banner that read: In The New, New Color Sensation WORLDCOLOR. There was, however, nothing more than this, except for the little circled R that meant “registered trademark,” and in infinitesimal print, below, Registered by W. E. Corp. He fished around in his mind for combinations that would fit the initials, but with the freakish whimsicality that his mind would sometimes produce, the only things he found were absurd: Wan Eagles, Wamsutta Enchiladas, Wealthy Engineers, Worldly Eros. He shrugged his shoulders, and, hands in his pants pockets, began walking down the evening street, into the neon heart of the little college town.

Restless, a little irritated, not wanting just yet to have to go home and stare at those papers again, he found himself looking for one of the beer parlors where the students hung out. He found one, a small taproom named Henry’s, an arty little place with German beer mugs in the front windows. He had been there before, but only in the mornings. This was one of his few active vices. He had found, since the time eight years ago when his wife had died (in a glossy hospital, with a three-pound tumor in her stomach), that there were certain things to be said in favor of drinking in the mornings. He had discovered, quite by accident, that it could be a fine thing, on a gray, dismal morning — a morning of limp, oyster-colored weather — to be gently but firmly drunk, making a pleasure of melancholy. But it had to be undertaken with a chemist’s precision; bad things could happen in the event of a mistake. There were nameless cliffs that could be fallen over, and on gray days there were always self-pity and grief nibbling about, like earnest mice, at the corner of morning drunkenness. But he was a wise man, and he knew about these matters. Like morphine it all depended upon proper measurements.

He opened the door of Henry’s and was greeted by the subdued agony of a juke box that dominated the center of the room, pulsating with bass sound and red light, like a diseased and frenetic heart. He walked in, a little unsteadily, between rows of plastic booths, normally empty and colorless in the mornings, now jammed with students. Some of them were muttering earnestly; many were bearded and fashionably shabby — like theatrical anarchists, or “agents of a foreign power” from the old, old movies of the thirties. And behind the beards? Poets? Revolutionaries? One of them, a student in his organic chemistry course, wrote articles for the student paper about free love and the “decayed corpse of the Christian ethic, polluting the wellsprings of life.” Bryce nodded to him, and the boy gave him an embarrassed glare, over the sulky beard. Nebraska and Iowa farm boys, most of them, signing disarmament petitions, discussing socialism. For a moment he felt uneasy; a tired old Bolshevik wearing a tweed coat amid the new class.