The Man Who Fell to Earth

He looked out the window at the brighter light of morning, at the pale blue sky. Somewhere in the sky, possibly directly where he was looking, was Anthea. A cold place, dying, but one for which he could be homesick; a place where there were people whom he loved, people whom he would not see again for a very long time…. But he would see them again.

He closed the curtains at the window, and then, gently, eased his tired, aching body into bed. Somehow all of the excitement seemed gone, and he was placid and calm. He fell asleep within a few minutes.

Afternoon sunlight woke him, and even though it hurt his eyes with its brilliance — for the curtains at the window were translucent — he awoke feeling rested and pleasant. Possibly it was the softness of the bed compared with those in the obscure hotels where he had been staying, and possibly it was relief at the success of last night. He lay in bed, thinking, for several minutes and then got up and went into the bathroom. There was an electric razor laid out for him, together with soap, washcloth, and towel. He smiled at this; Antheans did not have beards. He turned the lavatory tap on and watched it for a moment, fascinated as ever with the sight of all that water. Then he washed his face, not using the soap — for it was irritating to his skin — but using a cream from a jar in his briefcase. Then he took his usual pills, changed his clothes, and went downstairs to begin earning a half billion dollars….

* * *

That evening, after six hours of talking and planning, he stood for a long time on the balcony outside his room, enjoying the cool air and looking at the black sky. The stars and the planets seemed strange, shimmering in the heavy atmosphere, and he enjoyed staring at them, in their unfamiliar positions. But he knew little of astronomy, and the patterns were confusing to him — except for those of the Big Dipper and a few minor constellations. Finally he returned to his room. It would have been pleasant to know which one was Anthea; but he could not tell….

3

On an unseasonably warm spring afternoon, Professor Nathan Bryce, walking up the stairs to his fourth-floor apartment, discovered a roll of caps on the third-floor landing. Remembering the last afternoon’s loud banging of cap guns in the hallways, he picked this up with the intention of flushing it down the toilet when he reached his apartment. It had taken him a moment to recognize the little roll, for it was bright yellow. When he was a boy, caps had always been red, a peculiar rust shade, and that had always seemed the right color for caps and firecrackers, and that kind of thing. But apparently they were making yellow ones now, as they made pink refrigerators and yellow aluminum drinking glasses, and other such incongruous wonders. He continued up the stairs, perspiring, thinking now of some of the chemical subtleties that went into even the making of yellow spun-aluminum drinking glasses. He speculated that the cave men who drank from their cupped and calloused hands might have done perfectly well for themselves without all the complex learning in chemical engineering — that ungodly, sophisticated knowledge of molecular behavior and of commercial processes — which he, Nathan Bryce, was paid to know and to publish research papers about.

By the time he reached his apartment he had forgotten the caps. There were too many other things to be thought of. Still sitting where it had sat for the past six weeks, on one side of his big, scarred oak desk, was a disordered pile of student papers, horrible to contemplate. Next to the desk was an ancient, gray-painted steam radiator, an anachronism in these days of electrical heating, and on its venerable ironwork cover was stacked a disorderly, menacing pile of student lab notebooks. These were piled so high that the little Lasansky print that hung well clear of the radiator was almost completely covered by them. Only a pair of heavy-lidded eyes showed — the eyes, possibly, of a weary god of science, peering in mute anguish over laboratory reports. Professor Bryce, being a man given to a peculiar kind of wry whimsy, thought of this. He also noted the fact that the little print — it was the bearded face of a man — one of the few worthwhile things he had encountered in three years in this midwestern town, was now impossible to see because of the work of his, Bryce’s, students.