The Man Who Fell to Earth Read online

  After a hamburger and a cup of coffee he decided to go to a movie. He’d had a hard day—four hours of lab work, three hours of teaching, four hours of reading those idiot papers. He walked downtown, hoping there would be a science-fiction movie—one with resurrected dinosaurs clomping around Manhattan in bird-brained wonder, or insectivorous invaders from Mars, come to destroy the whole damn world (and good riddance, too), so they could eat the bugs. But nothing like that was playing, and he settled for a musical, buying popcorn and a candy bar before going into the dark little auditorium and searching out an isolated seat on the aisle. He began eating the popcorn, trying to get the taste of the cheap mustard from the hamburger out of his mouth. A newsreel was in progress and he watched it dully, with the mild dread that such things could give him. There were pictures of riots in Africa. How many years have they been rioting in Africa? Ever since the early sixties? There was a speech by a Gold Coast politician, threatening the use of “tactical hydrogen weapons” against some hapless “fomenters.” Bryce squirmed in his seat, ashamed for his profession. Years before, as a graduate student of brilliant promise, he had worked for a while on the original H-bomb project. Like poor old Oppenheimer, he had had his serious doubts even then. The newsreel shifted to pictures of missile emplacements along the Congo River, then to the manned rocket races in Argentina, and finally to New York fashions, featuring off-the-bosom gowns for women, and men’s frilly trousers. But Bryce could not get the Africans out of his mind; those serious young black men were the grandsons of the dusty, sullen family groups in the National Geographic’s, thumbed through in innumerable doctors’ offices and in the parlors of respectable relatives. He remembered the sagging breasts of the women, the inevitable red scarf handkerchief in every color photograph. Now the descendants of those people were wearing uniforms and going to universities, drinking martinis, making their own hydrogen bombs.

  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.

  He found a narrow space at the bar and ordered a glass of beer from a woman with graying bangs and black-rimmed glasses. He had never seen her there before; he was served in the mornings by a taciturn and dyspeptic old man named Arthur. This woman’s husband? He smiled at her vaguely, taking the beer. He gulped at it quickly, feeling uncomfortable, wanting to get out. On the juke box, now behind his head, a record had started playing a folk song, with a zither thrumming metallically. Oh Lordie, Pick a Bale of Cotton! Oh Lordie… Next to him at the bar a white girl was talking to a sad-eyed girl about the “structure” of poetry and asking her if the poem “worked,” a kind of talk that made Bryce shudder. How goddamned knowing could these children be? Then he remembered the cant he had talked, during the year that he had majored in English, when he was in his twenties: “levels of meaning.” “the semantic problem.” “the symbolical level.” Well, there were plenty of substitutes for knowledge and insight—false metaphors everywhere. He finished his beer and then, not knowing why, ordered another, even though he wanted to leave, to get away from the noise and the posturing. And wasn’t he being unfair to these kids, being a pompous ass? Young people always looked foolish, were deceived by appearances—as was everybody else. Better they should grow beards than join fraternities or become debaters. They would learn enough about that kind of bland idiocy soon enough, when they got out of school, shaven, and looked for jobs. Or was he wrong there too? There was always the chance that they—at least some of them—were honest-to-God Ezra Pounds, would never shave the beards, would become brilliant and shrill Fascists, Anarchists, Socialists, and die in unheard-of European cities, the authors of fine poems, the painters of meaningful pictures, men of no fortune, and with a name to come. He finished the beer and had another. Drinking it, there flashed across his mind the image of the theater poster and the giant word, Worldcolor, and it occurred to him that the W of W. E. Corp, might stand for Worldcolor. Or, perhaps, World. And the E? Elimination? Exhibitionism? Eroticism? Or, he smiled grimly, just Exit? He smiled wisely at the red-jacketed girl next to him, who was talkin
g now about the “texture” of language. She could not have been more than eighteen. She gave him a dubious look, her dark eyes serious. And then he felt something hurt him; she was so pretty. He stopped smiling, finished his beer quickly, and left. As he passed the booth on the way out, the Organic Chemistry student with the beard said, “Hello, Professor Bryce,” his voice very decent. Bryce nodded to him, mumbled, and pushed his way out the door into the warm night.

  It was eleven o’clock, but he did not want to go home. For a moment he thought of calling Gelber, his one close friend on the faculty, but decided not to. Gelber was a sympathetic man; but there did not seem to be anything to say right now. He did not want to talk about himself, his fear, his cheap lust, his dreadful and foolish life. He kept walking.

  Just before midnight he stopped in the town’s one all-night drugstore, empty except for an aged clerk behind the gleaming, plastic lunch counter. He sat down and ordered coffee and, after his eyes became accustomed to the false brilliance of the fluorescent lights, began to gaze idly about the counter, reading the display labels on aspirin bottles, camera equipment, packages of razor blades…. He was squinting, and his head was beginning to hurt. The beer; the light… Sun tan lotion and pocket combs. And then something caught his eyes and held them. Worldcolor: 35mm Camera Film, printed on each of a row of square blue boxes, next to the pocket combs, under a card of nail clippers. It startled him, he did not know why. The clerk was standing near, and abruptly Bryce said, “Let me see that film, please.”

  The clerk squinted at him—did the light hurt his eyes, too?—and said, “What film?”

  “The color. Worldcolor.”

  “Oh. I didn’t—”

  “Sure, I know.” He was surprised that his voice was impatient. He wasn’t in the habit of interrupting people.

  The old man frowned slightly, and then shuffled over and pulled down a box of the film. Then he set it down on the counter in front of Bryce, with exaggerated firmness, saying nothing.

  Bryce picked up the box and looked at the label. Under the big letters was printed, in small letters: A Grainless, Perfectly Balanced Color Film. And below this: ASA film speed: 200 to 3,000, depending upon development. My God! he thought, the speed can’t be that high. And variable?

  He looked up at the clerk. “How much is this?”

  “Six dollars. That’s for thirty-six pictures. For twenty it’s two seventy-five.”

  He felt the box, which was light in his hand. “That’s pretty expensive, isn’t it?”

  The clerk grimaced, in some kind of old man’s annoyance. “Not when you don’t pay for developing it.”

  “Oh, I see. They develop it for you. You get a mailing envelope…” He broke off. This was a stupid conversation. Somebody has invented a new film. What did he care; he wasn’t a photographer.

  After a pause, the clerk said, “No.” And then, turning away, toward the door, “It develops itself.”

  “It what?”

  “Develops itself. Look, you want to buy the film?”

  Not answering, he turned the box over in his hand. On each end was printed, boldly, the words, Self-Developing. And it struck him. Why haven’t I heard about this in the chemical journals? A new process…

  “Yes,” he said, distractedly, looking at the label. There, at the bottom, was the fine print: W. E. Corp. “Yes. I’ll buy it.” He fumbled his billfold out, and gave the man six crumpled bills. “How does it work?”

  “You put it back in the can.” The man picked up the money. He seemed soothed by it, less truculent.

  “Back in the can?”

  “The little can that it comes in. You put it back in the can when you’ve shot all your pictures. Then you press a little button on top of the can. It tells you. There’s directions inside. You press the button once, or more times—depends on what they call ‘film speed.’ That’s all there is to it.”

  “Oh.” He stood up, his coffee unfinished, putting the box gingerly in his coat pocket. Leaving, he asked the clerk, “How long has this stuff been on the market?”

  “The film? About two, three weeks. Works fine. We sell a lot of it.”

  He walked directly home, wondering about the film. How could anything be that good, that easy? Absently, he pulled the box from his pocket, peeled it open with his thumbnail. Inside was a blue metal can, with a screw top, a red button sticking up from it. He opened it. Wrapped in a sheet of directions was an ordinary-looking cassette of 35-millimeter film. Under the canister top, beneath the button, was a small grid. He felt this with his thumbnail. It seemed to be made of porcelain.

  At home, he dug an ancient Argus camera out of a drawer. Then, before loading it, he pulled about a foot of the film out of the cartridge, exposing it, and then tore it off. It felt dull to the touch, without the usual slickness of a gelatinous emulsion. Then he loaded the rest in the camera and exposed it rapidly, taking random pictures of the walls, the radiator, the pile of papers on his desk, shooting at an 800 speed in the dim light. Then, finished, he developed the film in the can, pressing the button eight times and then opening it, smelling the can as he did so. A faint bluish gas with an acrid, unrecognizable smell came out. There was no liquid in the can. Gaseous development? He took the film out hastily, pulling the strip from the cartridge, and, holding it up to the light, found a set of perfect transparencies, in fine, life-like color and detail. He whistled aloud and said, “Goddamn.” Then he took the piece of blank film, and the transparency strip, and went into the kitchen with them. He began setting up the materials for a quick analysis, arranging rows of beakers, getting out the titration equipment. He found himself working feverishly, and did not take the time to wonder what was making him so frenetically curious about the thing. Something about it was nagging at him, but he ignored it—he was too busy….

  ***

  Five hours later, at six o’clock in the morning, with a gray and bird-noisy sky outside the window, he fell back wearily into a kitchen chair, holding a small piece of the film. He had not tried everything with it; but he had tried enough to know that none of the conventional chemicals of photography, none of the silver salts, were in the film. He sat, red-eyed and staring, for several minutes. Then he got up, walked with great weariness to his bedroom and fell, half-exhausted, on the unmade bed. Before he fell asleep, still dressed, with birds shouting outside his window and the sun rising, he said aloud, his voice wry and gravelly, “It’s got to be a whole new technology… somebody digging up a science in the Mayan ruins… or from some other planet….”

  4

  People moved up and down the sidewalks in shifting, fast-paced crowds, dressed in spring clothes. Everywhere there seemed to be young women, high heels clicking (he could hear them, even from the car), many of them brilliantly dressed, their clothes preternaturally bright in the strong morning light. Enjoying the sight of the people and the colors—even though they hurt his still over-sensitive eyes—he told his driver to go slowly down Park Avenue. It was a lovely day, one of the first truly bright days of his second spring on earth. He leaned back, smiling, against the specially-designed back cushions and the car moved downtown at a slow and steady speed. Arthur, the driver, was very good; he had been chosen for his smoothness, his ability to hold speed steadily, to avoid sudden changes in movement.

  They turned over to Fifth Avenue at midtown, pulling up in front of Farnsworth’s old office building, which now bore, at one side of the entranceway, a brass plaque that read, in discreet raised letters: World Enterprises Corporation. Newton adjusted his dark glasses to a darker shade, to protect against the outside sunlight, and eased himself out of the limousine. He stood on the pavement, stretching, feeling the sun—mildly warm to the people around him, pleasantly hot to him—on his face.

  Arthur put his head out the window and said, “Shall I wait, Mr. Newton?”

  He stretched again, enjoying the sunlight, the air. He had not left his apartment for over a month. “No.” he said. “I’ll call you, Arthur. But I doubt
I’ll need you before evening; you may go to a movie if you’d like.”