The Man Who Fell to Earth

He smiled again, and this time the smile was more relaxed, more genuine, although he still felt lightheaded, strange — always there was the tremendous weight of his own body, the weight produced by the leaden gravity of this place. But he managed to say pleasantly, “Well then, would you be interested in buying the ring…?”

* * *

He got sixty dollars for it, and knew that he had been cheated. But what he had now was worth more to him than the ring, more than the hundreds of rings just like it that he had with him. Now he had the first beginnings of confidence, and he had money.

With some of the money he bought a half pound of bacon, six eggs, bread, a few potatoes, some vegetables — ten pounds of food altogether, all that he could carry. His presence aroused some curiosity, but no one asked questions, and he did not volunteer answers. It would not make any difference; he would not be back in that Kentucky town again.

When he left the town he felt well enough, in spite of all of the weight and the pain in his joints and in his back, for he had mastered the first step, he had made his start, he now owned his first American money. But when he was a mile from the town, walking through a barren field, toward the low hills where his camp was, all of it suddenly came over him in one crushing shock — the strangeness of it, the danger, the pain and worry in his body — and he fell to the ground and lay there, his body and his mind crying out against the violence that was being done to them by this most foreign, most strange and alien of all places.

He was sick; sick from the long, dangerous trip he had taken, sick from all the medicine — the pills, the inoculations, the inhaled gases — sick from worry, the anticipation of crisis, and terribly sick from the awful burden of his own weight. He had known for years that when the time came, when he would finally land and begin to effect that complex, long-prepared plan, he would feel something like this. This place, however much he had studied it, however much he had rehearsed his part in it, was so incredibly alien — the feeling, now that he could feel — the feeling was overpowering. He lay down in the grass and became very sick.

He was not a man; yet he was very much like a man. He was six and a half feet tall, and some men are even taller than that; his hair was as white as that of an albino, yet his face was a light tan color; and his eyes a pale blue. His frame was improbably slight, his features delicate, his fingers long, thin, and the skin almost translucent, hairless. There was an elfin quality to his face, a fine boyish look to the wide, intelligent eyes, and the white, curly hair now grew a little over his ears. He seemed quite young.

There were other differences, too; his fingernails, for example, were artificial, for he had none by nature. There were only four toes on each of his feet; he had no vermiform appendix and no wisdom teeth. It would have been impossible for him to develop hiccups, for his diaphragm, together with the rest of his breathing apparatus, was extremely sturdy, very highly developed. His chest expansion would have been about five inches. He weighed very little, about ninety pounds.

Yet he did have eyelashes, eyebrows, opposed thumbs, binocular vision, and a thousand of the physiological features of a normal human. He was incapable of warts; but stomach ulcers, measles and dental caries could affect him. He was human; but not, properly, a man. Also, manlike, he was susceptible to love, to fear, to intense physical pain and to self-pity.

After a half hour he felt better. His stomach was still trembling and he felt as if he could not lift his head; but there was a sense that the first crisis was past and he began to look more objectively at the world around him. He sat up and looked across the field he was in. It was a grubby, flat pasture, with small areas of brown grass, a broom sage, and patches of glassy, refrozen snow. The air was quite clear and the sky overcast, so that the light was diffused and soft and did not hurt his eyes as the glaring sunlight had two days before. There were a small house and a bam on the other side of the clump of dark and barren trees that fringed a pond. He could see the water of the pond through the trees, and the sight of it made his breath catch, for there was so much of it. He had seen it before like that, in his two days on earth; but he was not yet used to it. It was another of those things that he had expected but was still a shock to see. He knew, of course, about the great oceans and about the lakes and rivers, had known about them since he was a boy; but the actual sight of the profusion of water in a single pond was breathtaking.