The Man Who Fell to Earth

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…”