The Man Who Fell to Earth

When he left the hospital, led by a nurse, there was a crowd waiting outside the building. In the bright sunlight he could see their silhouettes, and he could hear their voices. A passage in the crowd was kept open for him, probably by policemen, and the nurse led him through this to his car. He heard faint applause. Twice he stumbled, but did not fall. The nurse led him expertly; she would stay with him for months or years, as long as he needed her. Her name was Shirley, and as well as he could tell she was fat.

Suddenly his hand was taken and he felt it being gripped softly. A large person was in front of him. “Good to have you back, Mr. Newton.” Farnsworth’s voice.

“Thank you, Oliver.” He felt very tired. “We have some business to discuss.”

“Yes. You’re on television, you know, Mr. Newton.”

“Oh, I didn’t know.” He looked around, trying unsuccessfully to find the shape of a camera. “Where’s the camera?”

“On your right.” Farnsworth said, sotto voce.

“Turn me toward it, please. Did someone want to ask me something?”

A voice, evidently that of a television commentator, spoke at his elbow. “Mr. Newton, I’m Duane Whitely of CBS television. Can you tell me how it feels to be out again?”

“No,” Newton said. “Not yet.”

The announcer did not seem taken aback. “What,” he said, “are your plans for the future? After the experience you’ve just been through?”

Newton had finally been able pick out the camera, and he faced it now, almost totally unconscious of his human audience, both here in Washington and behind sets all over the country. He was thinking of another audience. He smiled faintly. At the Anthean scientists? At his wife? “I was, as you know,” he said, “working toward a space exploration project. My company was engaged in a rather large undertaking, to send a craft out into the solar system, to measure the radiations that have so far made interplanetary travel impossible.” He paused for breath, and realized that his head and shoulders were aching. Perhaps it was the gravity again, after so long a time in bed. “During my confinement — which was in no way unpleasant — I have had a chance to think.”

“Yes?” the announcer said, filling the pause.

“Yes.” He smiled gently, meaningfully, even happily toward the camera, toward his home. “I’ve decided that the project was over-ambitious. I am going to abandon it.”

1990: Icarus drowning

1

Nathan Bryce had first discovered Thomas Jerome Newton through a roll of caps. He rediscovered him through a phonograph record. He found the record as accidentally as he had found the caps, but what it meant — at least in part — was much more immediately evident than the meaning of the caps had been. This happened in October of 1990, in a Walgreen drugstore in Louisville, a few blocks from the apartment where Bryce and Betty Jo Mosher lived together. It was seven months after the time of Newton’s tiny farewell address on television.

Both Bryce and Betty Jo had saved the larger part of their World Enterprises salaries, and it was not really necessary that Bryce work for a living, at least not for a year or two. He had, however, taken a job as consultant to a manufacturer of scientific toys — a job which he felt, with a certain satisfaction, brought his career in chemistry full circle. He was on his way home from work one afternoon when he stopped in the drug-store. His purpose was to buy a pair of shoelaces, but he paused at the doorway when he saw a large metal basket of phonograph records beneath a sign that read, Closeout 89¢. Bryce had always been a bargain hunter. He thumbed through a few of the record tags, toyed for a moment with one or two, and then encountered an amateurishly turned-out one that, by its title, immediately startled him. Since the time that phonograph records had become small steel balls, the manufacturers ordinarily packed them in little plastic boxes fastened to a large plastic tag. The tag displayed the arty picture and the usually ridiculous commentary that the old-fashioned quadraphonic albums had carried. But the tag on this one was merely of cardboard, and there was no picture. In an inexpensive attempt at the required artiness, the record’s title made use of the trite device of lower case printing throughout. It read: poems from outer space. And, on the reverse side of the card: we guarantee you won’t know the language, but you’ll wish you did! Seven out-of-this-world poems by a man we call “the visitor.”

Without any hesitation at all Bryce took the record to the trial booth, put the ball in its channel, and turned on the switch. The language that came out was weird indeed — sad, liquid, long-voweled, rising and falling strangely in pitch, completely unintelligible. But the voice, without question, was that of T. J. Newton.