The Man Who Fell to Earth

1

After two miles of walking he came to a town. At the town’s edge was a sign that read Haneyville; Pop. 1400. That was good, a good size. It was still early in the morning—he had chosen morning for the two-mile walk, because it was cooler then—and there was no one yet in the streets. He walked for several blocks in the weak light, confused at the strangeness—tense and somewhat frightened. He tried not to think of what he was going to do. He had thought about it enough already.

In the small business district he found what he wanted, a tiny store called The Jewel Box. On the street corner nearby was a green wooden bench, and he went to it and seated himself, his body aching from the labor of the long walk.

It was a few minutes later that he saw a human being.

It was a woman, a tired-looking woman in a shapeless blue dress, shuffling toward him up the street. He quickly averted his eyes, dumbfounded. She did not look right. He had expected them to be about his size, but this one was more than a head shorter than he. Her complexion was ruddier than he had expected, and darker. And the look, the feel, was strange—even though he had known that seeing them would not be the same as watching them on television.

Eventually there were more people on the street, and they were all, roughly, like the first one. He heard a man remark, in passing, “…like I say, they don’t make cars like that one no more,” and, although the enunciation was odd, less crisp than he had expected, he could understand the man easily.

Several people stared at him, a few of them suspiciously; but this did not worry him. He did not expect to be molested, and he was confident after observing the others that his clothes would bear up under inspection.

When the jewelry store opened he waited for ten minutes and then walked in. There was one man behind the counter, a small, chubby man in a white shirt and tie, dusting the shelves. The man stopped dusting, looked at him for a moment, a trifle strangely, and said, “Yes sir?”

He felt over tall, awkward. And suddenly very frightened. He opened his mouth to speak. Nothing came out. He tried to smile, and his face seemed to freeze. He felt, deep in him, something beginning to panic, and for a moment he thought he might faint.

The man was still staring at him, and his look seemed not to have changed. “Yes sir?” he said again.

By a great effort of will he was able to speak. “I… I wonder if you might be interested in this… ring?” How many times had he planned that innocuous question, said it over and over to himself? And yet now it rang strangely in his ears, like a ridiculous group of nonsense syllables.

The other man was still staring at him. “What ring?” he said.

“Oh.” Somehow he managed a smile. He slipped the gold ring from the finger of his left hand and set it on the counter, afraid to touch the man’s hand. “I… was driving through and my car broke down. A few miles down the road. I don’t have any money; I thought perhaps I could sell my ring. It’s quite valuable.”

The man was turning the ring over in his hands, looking at it suspiciously. Finally he said, “Where’d you get this?”

The way the man said it made his breath choke in his throat. Could there be something wrong? The color of the gold? Something about the diamond? He tried to smile again. “My wife gave it to me. Several years ago.”

The man’s face was still clouded. “How do I know it isn’t stolen?”

“Oh.” The relief was exquisite. “My name is in the ring.” He pulled his billfold from his breast pocket. “And I have identification.” He took the passport out and set it on the counter.

The man looked at the ring and read aloud, “T.J. from Marie Newton, Anniversary, 1982,” and then “18 K.” He set the ring down, picked up the passport, and leafed through it. “England?”

“Yes. I’m an interpreter at the United Nations. This is my first trip here. Trying to see the country.”

“Mmm,” the man said, looking at the passport again. “I figured you talked with an accent.” When he found the picture he read the name. “Thomas Jerome Newton,” and then, looking up again. “No question about that. This is you, all right.”

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.

He began to see a kind of beauty in the strangeness of the field, too. It was quite different from what he had been taught to expect—as, he had already discovered, were many of the things of this world—yet there was pleasure now for him in its alien colors and textures, its new sights and smells. Its sounds, too; for his ears were very acute and he heard many strange and pleasant noises in the grass, the diverse rubbings and clickings of those insects that had survived the cold weather of early November; and even, with his head now against the ground, the very small, subtle murmurings in the earth itself.

Suddenly there was a fluttering in the air, an uprush of black wings, then hoarse, mournful calling, and a dozen crows flew overhead and away across the field. The Anthean watched them until they were out of sight, and then he smiled. This would be, after all, a fine world….

His camp was in a barren spot, carefully chosen—an abandoned eastern Kentucky coalfield. There was nothing within several miles of it but stripped ground, small patches of pale broom grass, and some outcroppings of sooty rock. Near one of these outcroppings his tent was pitched, barely visible against the rock. The tent was gray, and was made of what seemed to be cotton twill.

He was almost exhausted when he got there, and had to rest for several minutes before opening the sack and taking out the food. He did this carefully, putting on thin gloves before touching the packages, and then laying them on a small folding table. From beneath the table he withdrew a group of instruments, and set them beside the things he had bought in Haneyville. He looked for a moment at the eggs, potatoes, celery, radishes, rice, beans, sausage, and carrots. He smiled for an instant, to himself. The food seemed innocent.

Then he picked up one of the small metallic devices, inserted an end of it into the potato, and began the qualitative analysis….

Three hours later he ate the carrot, raw, and took a bite out of the radish, which burned his tongue. The food was good—extremely strange, but good. Then he made a fire and boiled the egg and the potato. The sausage he buried—having found some amino acids in it that he was not certain of. But there was no danger for him, except for the ever-present bacteria, in the other food. It was as they had hoped. He found the potato delicious, in spite of all the carbohydrates.

He was very tired. But before he lay down on his cot he went outside to look at the spot where he had destroyed the engine and instruments of his one-passenger craft two days before, his first day on Earth.

2

The music was the Mozart Clarinet Quintet in A Major. Just before the final allegretto, Farnsworth adjusted the bass response on each of the preamplifiers and boosted the volume slightly. Then he settled himself ponderously in the leather armchair. He liked the allegretto with strong bass overtones; they gave the clarinet a resonance which, in itself, seemed to hold some kind of meaning. He stared at the curtain window that overlooked Fifth Avenue; he folded his plump fingers together, and listened to the music build.

When it had finished and the tape had cut off its own power, he looked over toward the doorway that led into the outer office and saw that the maid was standing there patiently, waiting for him. He glanced at the porcelain clock on the mantel and frowned. Then he looked at the maid and said, “Yes?”

“A Mr. Newton is here, sir.”

“Newton?” He knew no wealthy Newtons. “What does he want?”

“He didn’t say, sir.” Then she raised one eyebrow slightly. “He’s odd, sir. And he looks very… important.”

He thought for a moment, and then said. “Show him in.”

The maid had been right; the man was very odd. Tall, thin, with white hair and a fine, delicate bone structure. He had smooth skin and a boyish face—but the eyes were very strange, as though they were weak, over-sensitive, yet with a look that was old and wise and tired. The man wore an expensive dark gray suit. He walked to a chair and sat down carefully—easing himself into the seat as if he were carrying a great deal of weight. Then he looked at Farnsworth and smiled. “Oliver Farnsworth?”

“Would you like a drink, Mr. Newton?”

“A glass of water, please.”

Farnsworth mentally shrugged his shoulders and relayed the order to the maid. Then, when she had left, he looked at his guest and leaned forward with that universal gesture which means, “Let’s get on with it.”

Newton, however, remained sitting erect, his long, thin hands folded in his lap, and said, “You are good with patents, I understand?” There was a trace of an accent in his voice and his enunciation was too precise, too formal. Farnsworth could not identify the accent.

“Yes.” Farnsworth said, and then somewhat curtly, “I have office hours, Mr. Newton.”

Newton seemed not to hear this. His tone was gentle, warm. “I understand, in fact, that you are the best man in the United States with patents. Also that you are very expensive.”

“Yes. I’m good.”

“Fine.” the other said. He reached down beside his chair and lifted his briefcase.

“And what do you want?” Farnsworth looked at the clock again.

“I would like to plan some things with you.” The tall man was taking an envelope from his case.

“Isn’t it pretty late?”

Newton had opened the envelope and he now withdrew a thin sheaf of bills, wrapped with a rubber band. He looked up and smiled genially. “Would you please come and get these? It is very difficult for me to walk. My legs.”

Annoyed, Farnsworth pulled himself up from his chair, walked to the tall man, took the money, returned, and sat down. They were thousand-dollar bills.

“There are ten of them,” Newton said.

“You’re being pretty damn melodramatic, aren’t you?” He put the stack into the pocket of his lounging-jacket. “Now what’s this for?”

“For tonight,” Newton said. “For about three hours of your close attention.”

“But why, for heaven’s sake, at night?”

The other shrugged his shoulders casually. “Oh, several reasons. Privacy is one of them.”

“You could have had my attention for less than ten thousand dollars.”

“Yes. But I also wanted to impress you with the… importance of our talk.”

“Well.” Farnsworth settled back in his chair. “Let’s talk.”

The thin man seemed relaxed, but he did not lean back. “First,” he said, “how much money do you make a year, Mr. Farnsworth?”

“I’m not on salary.”

“Well then. How much money did you make last year?”

“All right. You’ve paid for it. About one hundred forty thousand.”

“I see. You are, as these things go, then, wealthy?”

“Yes.”

“But you’d like more?”

This was becoming ridiculous. It was like a cheap television program. But the other man was paying; it was best to go along with it. He took a cigarette from a leather case and said, “Of course I’d like more.”

Newton leaned just a bit forward this time. “A great deal more, Mr. Farnsworth?” he said, smiling, beginning to enjoy the situation enormously.

This was television too, of course, but it got across. “Yes,” he said, and then, “Cigarette?” He held the case out to his guest.

Ignoring the offer, the man with the white, curly hair said, “I can make you very rich, Mr. Farnsworth, if you can devote your next five years entirely to me.

Farnsworth kept his face expressionless, lit his cigarette while his mind worked rapidly, turning this whole strange interview over, puzzling with the situation, with the slim possibility of this man’s offer being sane. But the man, freak that he might be, had money. It would be wise to play along for a while. The maid came in with a silver tray with glasses and ice.

Newton took his glass of water from the tray gingerly, and then held it with one hand while he withdrew an aspirin box from his pocket with the other, flipped it open with his thumb, and dropped one of the pills into the water. The pill dissolved, white and murky. He held the glass and watched it for a moment, and then began sipping, extremely slowly.

Farnsworth was a lawyer; he had an eye for detail. He saw instantly that there was something odd about the aspirin box. It was a common object, obviously a box of Bayer aspirin; but there was something about it that was wrong. And something was not right about the way that Newton was sipping the water, slowly, careful not to spill a drop—as if it were precious. And the water had clouded from one aspirin; that seemed wrong. He would have to try it with an aspirin later, when the man was gone, and see what happened.

Before the maid left, Newton asked her to take his briefcase to Farnsworth. When she had gone he took a last, loving sip and set his glass, still nearly full, beside him on the table. “There are some things in the briefcase I’d like you to read.”

Farnsworth opened the bag, found a thick sheaf of papers and pulled them out on to his lap. The paper, he noticed immediately, had an unusual feel. Extremely thin, it was hard and yet flexible. The top sheet consisted mostly of chemical formulas neatly printed in bluish ink. He shuffled through the rest; circuit diagrams, charts, and schematic drawings of what appeared to be plant equipment. Tools and dies. At a glance, some of the formulas seemed familiar. He looked up. “Electronics?”

“Yes. Partly. You are familiar with that kind of equipment?”

Farnsworth did not answer. If the other man knew anything about him at all, he knew that he had fought half a dozen battles, as leader of a group of nearly forty lawyers, for the corporate life of one of the largest electronics-parts manufacturing combines in the world. He began reading the papers…

Newton sat erect in his chair, looking at him, his white hair gleaming in the light from the chandelier. He was smiling; but his entire body ached. After a while he picked up his glass and began to sip the water that for all of his long life had been the most precious of all things at his home. He sipped slowly and watched Farnsworth read, and the tension he had felt, the carefully concealed anxiety that this utterly strange office in this still strange world had given him, the fright that this fat human, with his bulging jowls, his taut-skinned head and his little, porcine eyes, had made him feel, began to leave him. He knew now that he had this man; he had come to the right place….

More than two hours passed before Farnsworth looked up from the papers. During that time he drank three glasses of whiskey. His eyes were pink at the corners. He blinked at Newton, at first hardly seeing him and then focusing on him, his small eyes wide.

“Well?” Newton said, still smiling.

The fat man took a breath, then shook his head as if trying to clear his mind. When he spoke, his voice was soft, hesitant, extremely cautious. “I don’t understand them all.” he said. “Only a few. A few. I don’t understand optics—or photographic films.” He looked back to the papers in his hand, as if making sure they were still there. “I’m a lawyer, Mr. Newton,” he said. “I’m a lawyer.” And then, suddenly, his voice came alive, trembling and strong, his fat body and his tiny eyes intent, alert. “But I know electronics. And I know dyes. I think I understand your… amplifier and I think I understand your television, and…” He paused for a moment, blinking. “My God, I think they can be manufactured the way you say they can.” He let out his breath, slowly. “They look convincing, Mr. Newton. I think they will work.”

Newton was still smiling at him. “They will work. All of them.”

Farnsworth took out a cigarette and lit it, calming himself. “I’ll have to check them. The metals, the circuits…” And then, suddenly, interrupting himself, the cigarette clutched between his fat fingers, “Good God, man, do you know what all of this means? Do you know that you have nine basic—that’s basic patents here.” He raised one paper in a pudgy hand, “Here in just the video transmission and in that little rectifier? And… do you know what that means?”

Newton’s expression did not change. “Yes. I know what it means,” he said.

Farnsworth inhaled slowly from his cigarette. “If you’re right, Mr. Newton,” he said, his voice becoming calmer now, “if you’re right you can have RCA, Eastman Kodak. My Lord, you can have Du Pont. Do you know what you have here?”

Newton stared hard at him. “I know what I have here,” he said.

It took them six hours to drive to Farnsworth’s country home. Newton tried to keep up their conversation for part of the time, bracing himself in the corner of the limousine’s back seat, but the heavy accelerations of the car were too blindingly painful to his body, already overloaded with the pull of a gravitation that he knew it would take him years to become used to, and he was forced to tell the lawyer that he was very tired and needed to rest. Then he closed his eyes, let the cushioned back of the seat bear his weight as much as possible, and withstood the pain as well as he could. The air in the car was very warm to him, too—the temperature of their hottest days at home.

Eventually, as they passed beyond the edge of the city, the chauffeur’s driving became more steady, and the painful jerks of stopping and starting began to subside. He glanced a few times at Farnsworth. The lawyer was not dozing. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, still shuffling through the papers that Newton had given him, his little eyes bright, intense.

The house was an immense place, isolated in a great wooded area. The building and the trees seemed wet, glistening dimly in the gray morning light that was much like the light of midday of Anthea. It was refreshing to his over-sensitive eyes. He liked the woods, the quiet sense of life in them, and the glistening moisture—the sense of water and of fruitfulness that this earth overflowed with, even down to the continual trilling and chirping sounds of the insects. It would be an endless source of delight compared to his own world, with the dryness, the emptiness, the soundlessness of the broad, empty deserts between the almost deserted cities where the only sound was the whining of the cold and endless wind that voiced the agony of his own, dying people….

A servant, sleepy-eyed and wearing a bathrobe, met them at the door. Farnsworth dismissed the man with an order for coffee, and then shouted after him that he must have a room prepared for his guest and that he would receive no telephone calls for at least three days. Then Farnsworth led him into the library.

The room was very big and even more expensively decorated than the study in the New York apartment had been. Obviously Farnsworth read the best rich men’s magazines. In the center of the floor was a white statue of a naked woman holding an elaborate lyre. Two of the walls were covered with bookshelves, and on the third was a large painting of a religious figure whom Newton recognized as Jesus, nailed to a wooden cross. The face in the picture startled him for a moment—with its thinness and large piercing eyes it could have been the face of an Anthean.

Then he looked at Farnsworth, who, although bleary-eyed, was more composed now, leaning back in his armchair, his small hands clasped together over his belly, looking at his guest. Their eyes met for an embarrassed moment, and the lawyer turned his away.

Then, in a moment, he looked back and said, quietly, “Well, Mr. Newton, what are your plans?”

He smiled. “They’re very simple. I want to make as much money as possible. As quickly as possible.”

There was no expression on the lawyer’s face, but his voice was wry. “Your simplicity has elegance. Mr. Newton, he said. “How much money did you have in mind?”

Newton gazed distractedly at the expensive objets d’art in the room. “How much can we make in, say, five years?

Farnsworth looked at him a moment, and then stood up. He waddled tiredly over to the bookshelf and began turning some small knobs there until speakers, hidden somewhere in the room, began playing violin music. Newton did not recognize the melody; but it was quiet and complex. Then, adjusting the dials, Farnsworth said, “That depends on two things.”

“Yes?”

“First, how fairly do you want to play, Mr. Newton?”

Newton refocused his attention on Farnsworth. “Completely fairly,” he said. “Legally.”

“I see.” Farnsworth could not seem to get the treble control adjusted to suit him. “Well then, second; what will my share be?”

“Ten percent of the net profits. Five percent of all corporate holdings.”

Abruptly, Farnsworth took his fingers off the amplifier controls. He returned slowly to his chair. Then he smiled faintly. “All right, Mr. Newton,” he said. “I think I can give you a net worth of… three hundred million dollars, within five years.”

Newton thought for a moment about this. Then he said, “That won’t be enough.”

Farnsworth stared at him for a long minute, his eyebrows high, before he said, “Not enough for what, Mr. Newton?”

Newton’s eyes hardened. “For a… research project. A very expensive one.”

“I’ll warrant it is.”

“Suppose,” the tall man said, “that I could provide you with a petroleum refining process about fifteen percent more efficient than any now in use? Would that bring your figure up to five hundred million?”

“Could your… process be set up within a year?”

Newton nodded. “Within a year it could be outproducing the Standard Oil Company—to whom, I suppose, we might lease it.”

Farnsworth was staring again. Finally he said. “We’ll start drawing up the papers tomorrow.”

“Good.” Newton rose stiffly from his chair. “We can talk about the arrangements in more detail then. There are, really, only two important considerations; that you get the money honestly, and that I be required to have little contact with anyone but you.”

His bedroom was upstairs, and for a moment he thought he would not be able to climb the stairway. But he made it, a step at a time, while Farnsworth climbed beside him, saying nothing. Then, after he had shown him to his room, the lawyer looked at him and said, “You’re an unusual man. Mr. Newton. Do you mind if I ask where you are from?”

The question came as a complete surprise, but he kept his composure. “Not at all,” he said, “I’m from Kentucky, Mr. Farnsworth.”

The lawyer’s eyebrows rose only slightly. “I see,” he said. Then he turned and walked ponderously away down the hall, which was floored with marble and caused his footsteps to echo….

His room was high-ceilinged and ornately furnished. He noticed a television set built into the wall in such a way that it could be viewed from his bed and he smiled tiredly on seeing it—he would have to watch it sometime, to see how their reception compared with that on Anthea. And it would be amusing to see some of the shows again. He had always liked the Westerns, even though the quiz programs and the Sunday “educational” shows had provided his staff at home with most of the information that he had memorized. He had not seen a television show in… how long had the trip taken? …four months. And he had been on earth two months—getting money, studying the disease germs, studying the food and water, perfecting his accent, reading the newspapers, preparing himself for the critical interview with Farnsworth.

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.

On the uncluttered side of his desk his typewriter sat like another mundane god—a boorish, trivial, over-demanding god—still holding the seventeenth page of a paper on the effects of ionizing radiations upon polyester resins, a paper unsought, unhonored and one that would probably always remain unfinished. Bryce’s gaze met this sullen disarray; the scattered paper sheets like a fallen, bombed-out city of card houses, the endless, frighteningly neat student solutions of oxidation-reduction equations and of the industrial preparations of unlovely acids; the equally dull, dull paper on polyester resins. He stared at these things, his hands in the pocket of his coat, for a full thirty seconds, in black dismay. Then, since it was hot in the room, he pulled off his coat, threw it on the gold brocade couch, reached under his shirt to scratch his belly, and walked into the kitchen and began making coffee. The sink was littered with dirty retorts, beakers and small jars, together with the breakfast dishes, one of them smeared with egg yolk. Looking at this impossible confusion he felt for a moment like screaming with despair; but he did not. He merely stood for a minute and then said, softly, aloud. “Bryce, you’re a damn mess.” Then he found a reasonably clean beaker, rinsed it out, filled it with powdered coffee and hot tap water, stirred it with a lab thermometer, and drank it up, staring over the beaker at the big, expensive Brueghel print of The Fall of Icarus that hung on the wall above the white stove. A fine picture. It was a picture that he had once loved but was now merely used to. The pleasure it gave him now was only intellectual—he liked the color, the forms, the things a dilettante likes—and he knew perfectly well that was supposed to be a bad sign and furthermore that the feeling had much to do with the unhappy pile of papers surrounding his desk in the next room. Finishing the coffee, he quoted, in a soft, ritualistic voice, without any particular expression or feeling, the lines from Auden’s poem about the painting.

He set the beaker down, unrinsed, on the stove. Then he rolled up his sleeves, took off his tie, and began filling the sink with hot water, watching the detergent foam bubble up under the pressure from the faucet like a multicelled living thing, the compound eye of a huge albino insect. Then he began putting glassware through the foam, into the hot water beneath it. He found the dishwashing sponge and began working. He had to start somewhere….

Four hours later he had collected a small stack of graded term papers and began fumbling in his pocket for a rubber band to fasten them into a bundle. It was then he discovered the roll of caps. He pulled it from his pocket, held it in the palm of his hand for a moment, and then grinned foolishly. He hadn’t shot a cap for thirty years—not since, at some time of ancient, pimply innocence, he had gone from cap guns and A Child’s Garden of Verses to the giant, official-looking Chem-Craft set that had been given him by his grandfather as a direct prod from Fate. Suddenly he found himself wishing he had a cap gun; he felt that, here, in his empty apartment, he would like to shoot the caps off, one by one. And then he remembered how, once, God knew how many years ago, he had wondered what would happen if you set a whole roll of caps afire—a delightful, radical idea. But he had never tried it. Well, there was no better time. He got up, smiling wearily, and went into the kitchen. He set the roll of caps on a sheet of copper gauze, put the sheet on a tripod stand, poured a little alcohol from an alcohol lamp on them, muttering pedantically, “Positive ignition,” took a wood splinter from a stack, lit it with his cigarette lighter, and then cautiously touched off the caps. He was surprised and pleased by the results; expecting only an irregular series of little phrrt sounds and some gray gunsmoke, he got instead, while the roll danced madly on the wire gauze, a fine confusion of loud, satisfying bangs. Strangely, no smoke rose from the black residue. He bent and sniffed the little black mass that was left. No odor at all. That was odd. My God, he thought, how fast things happen! Some other poor fool of a chemist had found a substitute for gunpowder already. He wondered briefly what it could be and then shrugged. Maybe he’d look into it some time. But he missed the smell of gunpowder—a fine, pungent smell. He looked at his watch. Seven-thirty. Outside the windows was spring twilight. It was past supper-time. He went into the bathroom, washed his hands and face, shaking his head at his own gray haggardness in the mirror. Then he picked up his coat from the couch, put it on and went out. Vaguely, walking downstairs, he scanned the steps for another roll of caps, but there was none.

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 talking 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.”

He walked in, through the main hallway, past the rows of elevators, and down to the special elevator at the end of the hall, where an attendant awaited him, standing stiffly, his uniform impeccable. Newton smiled to himself; he could imagine the flurry of commands that must have gone out the day before, after he had called and said he would be coming in the next morning. He hadn’t been in the offices for three months. It was seldom that he ever left his apartment. The elevator boy gave him a rehearsed and nervous, “Good morning. Mr. Newton.” He smiled at him and stepped in.

The elevator took him slowly and very smoothly up to the seventh floor, which had formerly housed Farnsworth’s law offices. Farnsworth was waiting for him when he stepped out. The lawyer was dressed like a potentate in a gray silk suit, a brilliant red jewel flashing on a fat and perfectly manicured ring finger. “You’re looking well, Mr. Newton,” he said, taking his extended hand with gentle care. Farnsworth was observant; he would have noticed, quickly enough, the wince that Newton made if he were touched roughly in any way.

“Thank you, Oliver. I’ve been feeling especially well.”

Farnsworth led him down a hallway, past offices and into a suite of rooms with the plaque, W. E. Corp. They walked by a battery of secretaries, who became respectfully silent at their approach, and into Farnsworth’s office, with O. Y. Farnsworth, President, in small brass letters on the door.

Inside, the office was furnished as before, with mixed rococo pieces dominated by the huge, grotesquely ornamented Caffieri desk. The room was, as always, filled with music—a violin piece this time. It was unpleasant to Newton’s ears; but he said nothing.

A maid brought them tea, while they chatted for a few minutes—Newton had learned to like tea, although he had to drink it lukewarm—and then they began to talk about business; their status in the courts, the arranging and rearranging of directorships, holding companies, grants and licenses and royalties, the financing of new plants, the purchase of old ones, the markets, prices, and the fluctuation of public interest in the seventy-three consumer articles they made—television antennas, transistors, photographic film, and radiation detectors—and the three hundred-odd patents they leased out, from the oil refining process to a harmless substitute for gunpowder that was used in children’s toys. Newton was well aware of Farnsworth’s amazement—even more than usual—with his own grasp of these things, and he told himself it would be wise if he made a few intentional blunders in his recollection of figures and details. Yet it was enjoyable, exciting—even though he knew the vain and cheap pride that gave the pleasure—in using his Anthean mind on these matters. It was as if one of these people—he always thought of them as “these people,” much as he had grown to like and to admire them—should find himself dealing with a group of very alert and resourceful chimpanzees. He was fond of them and, with his fundamental human vanity, unable to resist the easy pleasure of exercising his mental superiority to their dumbfounded amazement. Yet, enjoyable as this might be, he had to remember that these people were more dangerous than chimpanzees—and it had been thousands of years since any of them had seen an Anthean undisguised.

They went on talking until the maid brought them lunch—sliced-chicken sandwiches and a bottle of Rhine wine for Farnsworth; oatmeal cookies and a glass of water for Newton. Oatmeal, he had found, was one of the most digestible foods for the peculiar qualities of his system, and he ate it frequently. They continued to talk for quite a while about the complex business of financing the various and widespread enterprises. Newton had come to enjoy this part of the game for its own sake. He had been forced to learn it from scratch—there were many things about this society and this planet that could not be learned from watching television—and he had found he had a natural bent for it, possibly an atavism tracing back to ancient ancestors in the old, strong days that had been the glory of primitive Anthean culture. That was during the time that this Earth had been in its second ice age—the time of harsh capitalism and warfare, before the Anthean power sources had been all but exhausted and the water gone. He enjoyed playing with the counters and the numbers of finance, even though this power gave him little excitement and though he had entered the game with the stacked deck that only ten thousand years of Anthean electronics, chemistry, and optics could have provided. But he never for a moment forgot what he had come to Earth for. It was always with him, unavoidable, like the dim ache that still lived in his strengthened, but always tired, muscles, like the impossible strangeness, however familiar it would become, of this huge and various planet.

He enjoyed Farnsworth. He enjoyed the few humans he knew. He was unacquainted with any women, for he feared them, for reasons he did not understand himself. He was sad, sometimes, that security made it too risky to know these people better. Farnsworth, hedonist that he was, was a shrewd man, a lusty player of the game of money; a man who required occasional watching; a possibly dangerous man, but one whose mind had many fine and subtle facets. He had not made his huge income—an income that Newton had trebled for him—solely on reputation.

When he had made it clear enough to Farnsworth what he wanted to have done, he leaned back in his chair for a moment, resting, and then said, “Oliver, now that the money is beginning to… accumulate, there is a new thing I want to undertake. I spoke to you before of a research project….”

Farnsworth did not seem surprised. But then he had probably been expecting something more important to be the subject of this visit. “Yes, Mr. Newton?”

He smiled gently. “It will be a different kind of undertaking, Oliver. And, I fear, an expensive one. I imagine you’ll have some work to do in setting it up—the financial end of it anyway.” He looked out the window for a moment, at the discreet row of gray Fifth Avenue shops, and at the trees. “It’s to be nonprofit, and I think the best thing is to set up a research foundation.”

“A research foundation?” The lawyer pursed his lips.

“Yes.” He turned back to Farnsworth. “Yes, I think we’ll incorporate in Kentucky, with about all the capital I can gather together. That’ll be about forty million dollars, I think—if we can get the banks to help us.”

Farnsworth’s eyebrows shot up. “Forty million? You’re not worth half that, Mr. Newton. In another six months maybe, but we’ve only begun…”

“Yes. I know. But I think I’m going to sell my rights in Worldcolor to Eastman Kodak, outright. You may, of course, keep your share, if you wish. Eastman will make intelligent use of it, I imagine. They’re prepared to go rather high to get it—with a proviso that I don’t market a competitive color film within the next five years.”

Farnsworth was getting red in the face now. “Isn’t that like selling a life interest in the U.S. Treasury?

“I suppose it is. But I need the capital; and you know yourself that there’s an annoying danger of anti-trust action inherent in these patents. And Kodak has better access to the world markets than we have. Really, we’ll be saving ourselves a great deal of trouble.”

Farnsworth shook his head, somewhat placated. “If I had a copyright on the Bible I wouldn’t sell it to Random House. But I suppose you know what you’re doing. You always do.”

5

At Pendley State University in Pendley, Iowa, Nathan Bryce dropped by the office of his department head. This was Professor Canutti and his position was called Departmental Coordinator-Advisor, which was much like the titles of most department heads these days, since the time of the great labeling shift that had turned every salesman into a Field Representative, every janitor into a Custodian. It had taken a little longer to reach the universities. But it had reached them, and nowadays there were no more secretaries, only Receptionists and Administrative Aides, no more bosses, only Coordinators.

Professor Canutti, crew-cut, pipe-smoking and rubbery-complexioned, welcomed him with a twenty-dollar smile, waved him across the pigeons-egg-blue carpet to a lavender plastic-chair and said, “Good to see you, Nate.”

Bryce winced almost visibly at the “Nate.” and, looking at his watch as though in a hurry, said, “Something I’m curious about, Professor Canutti.” He was not in a hurry—except to get this interview over with; now that exams were ended he had nothing to do for a week.

Canutti smiled sympathetically, and Bryce momentarily cursed himself for coming to see this golf-playing idiot in the first place. But Canutti might know something of use to him; he was at least no fool as a chemist.

Bryce pulled a box from his pocket, and set it on Canutti’s desk. “Have you seen this new film?” he said.

Canutti picked it up in his soft, uncalloused hand, and looked at it for a moment, puzzled. “Worldcolor? Yes, I’ve used it, Nate.” He set it down, with a kind of finality. “It’s a darn good film. Self-developing.”

“Do you know how it works?”

Canutti drew speculatively on his pipe, which was unlit. “No, Nate. Can’t say as I do. Like any other film, I guess. Only a little more… sophisticated.” He smiled at his pleasantry.

“Not exactly.” Bryce reached over and picked up the box, weighing it in his hand, and watching Canutti’s bland face. “I ran some tests on it, and was pretty thoroughly startled. You know, the best color films have three separate emulsions, one for each primary. Well, this one has no emulsion at all.”

Canutti raised his eyebrows. You’d better look surprised, you idiot, Bryce thought. Taking the pipe from his mouth Canutti said, “Sounds impossible. Where’s the photosensitivity?”

“Apparently in the base. And it seems to be done with barium salts—only God would know how. Crystalline barium salts in a random dispersion. And,” he drew a breath, “the developer is gaseous—in a little pod under the canister lid. I’ve tried to find what’s in it and all I can be certain of is potassium nitrate, some peroxide, and something that, so help me, acted like cobalt. And it’s all mildly radioactive, which may explain something, although I’m not certain what.”

Canutti gave him the long pause that his little lecture, in all politeness, required. Then he said, “Sounds wild, Nate. Where do they make it?”

“There’s a factory in Kentucky. But they’re incorporated in New York, as near as I can find out. No stock listed on the exchange.”

Canutti, listening, adopted a serious expression; probably, Bryce thought, the one he reserved for solemn occasions, like being admitted to a new country club. “I see. Well, this is tricky, isn’t it?”

Tricky? What in hell did that mean? Of course it was tricky. It was impossible. “Yes, it’s tricky. That’s what I wanted to ask you about.” He hesitated a moment, reluctant to ask a favor of this pompous little extrovert. “I’d like to follow it up, find out how the devil it works. I wonder if I could use one of the big research labs down in the basement—at least during the time between semesters. And I could use a student assistant, if there’s one available.”

Canutti had leaned far back in his plastic-covered chair during the middle of this speech, as though Bryce had physically pushed him down into the soft and billowy foam cushions. “The labs are all being used, Nate,” he said. “You know we’ve got more industrial and military projects now than we can handle. Why don’t you write the company that makes the film and query them?”

He tried to keep his voice level: “I’ve already written them. They don’t answer their mail. Nobody knows anything about them. There’s nothing about them in the journals—not even in American Photochemistry.” He stopped a minute. “Look, all I need is a lab, Professor Canutti… I can do without the assistant.”

“Walt. Walt Canutti. But the labs are full, Nate. Coordinator Johnson would have me by the ruddy ears if I—”

“Look… Walt… This is basic research. Johnson is always giving speeches about basic research, isn’t he? The backbone of science. All we appear to be doing here is developing cheaper ways to make insecticides, and perfecting gas bombs.”

Canutti raised his eyebrows, his chubby body still sunk in cushioning foam. “We don’t make a habit of talking about our military projects that way, Nate. Our applied tactical research is—”

“All right. All right.” He fought his voice back down, trying to make it sound normal. “Killing people is basic, I suppose. Part of the nation’s life, too. But this film…”

Canutti flushed at the sarcasm. “Look. Nate.” he said, “what you want to do is diddle with a commercial process. And, moreover, one that already works just fine. Why blow your top over it? So the film’s a little unusual. All the better.”

“My God.” he said, “this film is more than unusual. You can see that. You’re a chemist—a better chemist than I am. Can’t you see the techniques this thing implies? My Lord, barium salts and a gaseous developer!” He suddenly remembered the roll of film still in his hand, and held it out as if it were a snake, or a holy relic. “It’s as if we were… as if we were cave men, scratching fleas out of our armpits, and one of us found a… a roll of toy caps…” And then, in an instant, it struck him like a physical blow in the chest and, pausing in his speech a second he thought, Good holy God—that roll of caps! “…and threw them in the fire. Think of the tradition, the technical tradition, that went into making a strip of paper with little gunpowder pods in a neat row, so that we could hear the little pop, pop, pop! Or if you gave an ancient Roman a wrist-watch, and he knew what a sundial was…” He didn’t finish the comparison, thinking now of that roll of caps, how they had gone off so loudly, had not smelt of gunpowder at all.

Canutti smiled coldly. “Well, Nate, you’re very eloquent. But I wouldn’t get so worked up over a thing that some hot research team thought up.” He tried to sound humorous, to joke away the disagreement. “I doubt we’ve been visited by men of the future. Not, at least, to sell us camera film.”

Bryce stood up, clenching the film box in his hand. He spoke softly. “Hot research team, the devil! And for all I know—the way this film doesn’t use a single chemical technique from over a hundred years of development in photography—this process might be extraterrestrial. Or there’s a genius hiding somewhere in Kentucky who’s going to be selling us perpetual motion machines next week.” Abruptly, he turned, sick of the interview, and began walking toward the door.

Like a mother calling after a child who leaves in a tantrum, Canutti said. “I wouldn’t talk about extraterrestrial too much, Nate. Of course, I understand what you mean….”

“Of course you do,” Bryce said, leaving.

He went directly home on the afternoon monorail, and began looking—or, rather, listening—for small boys with cap guns.

6

Five minutes after he left the airport he realized that he had made a serious mistake. He should not have attempted to come this far south in the summer time, no matter how necessary it was. He could have sent Farnsworth, sent someone, to buy property, to make arrangements. The temperature was over ninety and, being physically unable to perspire, his body having been designed for temperatures in the forties, he was sick almost to unconsciousness in the back seat of the airport limousine that drove him, grinding his still gravity-sensitive body against its hard cushions, into downtown Louisville.

But, in more than two years on earth and with the ten years of physical conditioning he had undergone before leaving Anthea, he was able to endure the pain and keep himself, by force of will, grimly, although confusedly, conscious. He was able to get from the limousine into the hotel lobby, and from the lobby up the elevator—relieved that it was a smooth-running, slow elevator—and into his third-floor room, where he fell on the bed the moment the bellboy had left him to himself. After a moment he managed to get to the air-conditioner and set it for very cold. Then he fell back on the bed. It was a good air-conditioner; it was based on a group of patents he had leased to the company that made it. In a short while the room became sufficiently comfortable for him, but he left the machine on, thankful that his contribution to the science of refrigeration had managed to make the ugly little boxes, so necessary to him, noiseless.

It was noon, and after a while he called room service and had a bottle of Chablis and some cheese sent up to him. He had only recently begun drinking wine, pleased to find that it had, apparently, the same effect on him as it did on men of Earth. The wine was good, although the cheese was a little rubbery. He turned on the television set, which also operated on W. E. Corp, patents, and settled back in an armchair, determined, if he could do nothing else this hot afternoon, to enjoy himself.

It had been over a year since he had watched television at any length, and it seemed very strange to him, here in this plush and vulgarly modern hotel suite—so much like the apartments in which television private detectives lived, with its lounge chairs, never-used bookshelves, abstract paintings and plastic-topped private bar—here in Louisville, Kentucky, to be watching again. Watching the little human men and women moving about on the screen as he had watched them for so many years at home, on Anthea. He thought of those days now, sipping the cool wine, nibbling cheese—foreign, strange foods—while the background music of a love story filled the cool room and the dimly heard voices from the little speaker sounded against his sensitive, other-world hearing like the alien gutturals and gibberings that, fundamentally, they were. So much unlike the purring of his own language, even though the one had, ages ago, developed from the other. He permitted himself to think, for the first time in months, of the soft conversation of old Anthean friends, of the mild and brittle foods that he had eaten all his life at home, and of his wife and children. Perhaps it was the coolness of the room, calming him after his excruciating summer trip, perhaps the alcohol, still new to his veins, that made him fall into a state of mind so closely resembling human nostalgia—sentimental, self-regarding, and bitter. He wanted, suddenly, to hear the sound of his language being spoken, to see the light colors of Anthean soil, to smell the acrid desert odor, to hear the thick sounds of Anthean music, and to see the thin, gauze-like walls of its buildings, the dust of its cities. And he wanted his wife, with the dim Anthean body sexuality—a quiet, insistent aching. And, suddenly, looking again at his room, at its discreet gray walls and its vulgar furniture, he felt disgusted, weary of this cheap and alien place, this loud, throaty, rootless, and sensual culture, this aggregate of clever, itchy, self-absorbed apes—vulgar, uncaring, while their flimsy civilization was, like London Bridge and all bridges, falling down, falling down.

He began to feel what he had sometimes felt before; a heavy lassitude, a world-weariness, a profound fatigue with this busy, busy, destructive world and all its chittering noises. He felt as though he could give the whole thing up, that it was foolish, impossibly foolish to have started it, more than twenty years before. He looked around him again, tiredly. What was he doing here—here on this other world, third from the sun, a hundred million miles from his home? He got up and turned the television set off, and then sat back deeply in the chair, still drinking the wine, feeling the alcohol now and not caring.

He had watched American, British, and Russian television for fifteen years. His colleagues had collected a huge library of monitored and recorded television broadcasts, and by the time, forty years ago, when America had begun continuous television broadcasting, they had already deciphered most of the subtleties of the language from FM radio broadcasts. He had studied daily, learning the language, the manners, the history and geography, everything available, until he had memorized, by means of exhaustive cross-referencing, the meaning of obscure words like “yellow,” “Waterloo,” and “Democratic Republic”—the last a thing which had no counterpart whatever on Anthea. And, while he had worked and studied and done endless physical exercises, while he agonized in anticipation for years, they had deliberated, deciding whether the trip should even be attempted. There was so little power, other than the solar batteries in the desert. It would require so much fuel to send even one Anthean across the empty gulf, possibly to his death, possibly to be received by an already dead world, a world that might by then be, like so much of Anthea itself, littered with atomic rubble, the burnt-out residue of apelike wrath. But they had told him, finally, that the trip would be attempted, in one of the old, old craft that still remained underground. He was informed a year before the journey that the plans at last were definite, that the ship would be ready when the planets had assumed the right position for the crossing. He had not been able to control the trembling of his hands, when he had told his wife of the decision….

He waited in his hotel room, not moving from the chair, until five o’clock. Then he got up, called the real estate office, and told them they could expect him at five-thirty. He left the room, leaving the half-empty bottle of wine on the bar. He hoped that the weather would be much cooler by then, but it was not.

He had chosen the hotel because it was within three blocks of the office he was going to visit, the office where he was to begin the huge real estate transaction he had already planned. He was able to walk the distance; but the sullen, heavy, and agonizingly hot air that seemed to cover the streets like a cushion made him dizzy, confused, and weak. For a few moments he thought he should return to the hotel and have the real estate men come to him, but he kept on walking.

And then, when he found the building, he discovered a thing that frightened him; the office he wanted was on the nineteenth floor. He had not expected tall buildings in Kentucky, had not anticipated this. Walking up the stairs was out of the question. And he did not know anything about the elevators. If he should ride in one that went up too fast, or jerked, it might be disastrous to his already gravity-strained body. But the elevators looked new and well made, and, at least, the building was air-conditioned. He stepped into one, empty except for the operator, a quiet-looking old man with a tobacco-stained uniform. They took on one more passenger, a chubby, pretty woman who came running up breathless, at the last moment. Then the operator closed the brass doors. Newton said. “Nineteen, please,” the woman muttered “twelve,” and the old man lazily, somewhat contemptuously, placed his hand on the manual control handle. Newton realized instantly, in dismay, that this was not a modern, push-button elevator, but some kind of refurbished old one. But this realization was a moment too late, for, before he could protest, he felt his stomach twist and his muscles tighten in pain as the elevator jerked, hesitated, jerked again and then shot upward, doubling, for a moment, his already trebled weight. And then everything seemed to happen at once. He saw the woman staring at him and knew that his nose must be bleeding, pouring blood on his shirt front, and looking down saw that this was so. At the same instant he heard—or felt, in his quivering body—a brittle cracking, and his legs collapsed under him and he fell to the floor of the elevator, grotesquely twisted, seeing one leg horribly jackknifed under him as he lost consciousness, his mind falling into a blackness as profound as that of the void that separated him from his home….

He had been unconscious twice before in his life; once during the training in the centrifuge at home, and once during the blind acceleration of his take-off in the ship. Both of those times he had recovered himself quickly, coming awake to confusion and pain. This time, too, he awoke to the aching of an abused body and the frightened confusion of not knowing where he was. He was lying on his back, on something smooth and soft, and there were bright lights in his eyes. He squinted and then winced, turning his head. He was lying on some kind of couch. On the other side of the room, a woman was standing at a desk, holding a telephone in her hand. She was looking at him. He stared at her, and then realized who she was—the woman from the elevator.

She hesitated, seeing him awaken, and did not seem to know what to do with the telephone, holding it limply in her hand. She smiled at him vaguely. “You all right, mister?”

His voice sounded like someone else’s, weak and soft. “I believe so. I don’t know….” His legs were stretched out in front of him. He was afraid to try and move them. The blood on his shirt was still sticky, but cold now. He could not have been unconscious long. “I believe I hurt my legs….”

She looked at him gravely, shaking her head. “You sure did. One of ’em bent up like old baling wire.”

He kept looking at her, not knowing what to say, trying to think of what he should do. He could not go to a hospital; there would be an examination. X-rays….

“I been trying to get you a doctor for five minutes.” Her voice was hoarse and she looked frightened. “I already called three and they’re not in.”

He blinked at her, trying to think clearly. “No.” he said. “No! Don’t call…”

“Don’t call a doctor? But you got to have a doctor, mister. You been hurt bad.” She looked doubtful, worried, but too frightened to be suspicious.

“No,” He tried to say more, but was suddenly overcome with nausea and, hardly aware of what he was doing, found himself vomiting over the side of the couch, his legs screaming with pain at each convulsion. Then, exhausted, he lay back again, face up. But the lights were too bright, burning his eyes even through the closed lids—his thin, translucent eyelids—and, groaning, he threw his arm up, to cover them.

Somehow, his being sick seemed to calm her. Perhaps it was the recognizable humanness of the act. Her voice was more easy. “Can I help?” she said. “Is there something I can do to help?” She hesitated. “I can get you a drink….”

“No. I don’t want…” What was he going to do?

Suddenly her voice got light, as though she had been near hysteria and had just drawn back from it. “You sure are a mess,” she said.

“I imagine.” He turned his face toward the back of the couch, trying to avoid the lights. “Can you… can you just leave me alone? I’ll be better… if I can rest.”

She laughed softly. “I don’t see how. This here’s an office; there’s going to be people filling it up in the morning. The elevator boy gave me the key.”

“Oh.” He had to do something about the pain, or he would not stay conscious long. “Listen.” he said. “I have a hotel key in my pocket, the Brown Hotel. It’s three blocks from here, down the street you take as—”

“I know where the Brown Hotel is.”

“Oh. That’s fine. Can you take the key and get a black briefcase from the bedroom closet in the room? And bring it to me? I have… medicine in it. Please.”

She was silent.

“I can pay you….”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.” He turned and opened his eyes to look at her a moment. Her broad face was frowning, the eyebrows wrinkled in a kind of parody of deep thought. Then she laughed loosely, not looking at him. “I don’t know as they’d let me in the Brown Hotel—or let me walk into one of the rooms, like I owned it.”

“Why not?” It hurt him somewhere in his chest to talk. He felt as though he would faint again before long. “Why can’t you?”

“You don’t know much about clothes, do you, mister? You look like you never had to worry. I ain’t wearing nothing but a country dress, and that torn. And they might not like my breath.”

“Oh!” he said.

“Gin. But maybe I could…” She looked thoughtful. “No, I couldn’t.”

He felt himself going watery again, his body felt as if he were floating. Blinking, he forced himself to hold on, trying to ignore the weakness, the pain. “In my billfold. Get the twenty-dollar bills. Give the bellboys the money. You can do it.” The room was spinning about him, the lights going fainter now, seeming to move in dim procession, across his vision. “Please.”

He felt her fumbling in his pocket, felt her hot breath on his face, then, after a moment, heard her gasp. “Lordy!” she said, “if you ain’t loaded…! Why I could run off with this.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Please help me. I’m rich. I can…”

“I won’t,” she said wearily. And then, more brightly, “You just hang on, mister. I’ll get back with your medicine, if I have to buy the hotel. You just take it easy.”

He heard her closing the door behind her as he fainted…

It seemed only a moment later that she was back in the room, panting, and had the briefcase open on the desk.

And then, after he had taken the pain capsules and the pills that would help heal his leg, the elevator operator came in with a man who said he was the building superintendent and Newton had to reassure them that he would sue no one, that, really, he felt fine and that all would be well. No, he did not need an ambulance. Yes, he would sign a waiver to absolve the building of responsibility. Now would they get him to a taxi? He almost fainted again, several times, during this frenetic discussion, and when it was over he did faint again.

He awoke in a taxi with the woman. She was shaking him gently. “Where do you want to go?” She said, “Where’s your home?”

He stared at her. “I… I don’t really know.”

7

He looked up from his reading, somewhat startled. He had not known she was in the room. She frequently did that, seemed to appear from nowhere, and her hoarse, serious voice could be irritating to him. But she was a good woman, and entirely unsuspicious. In four weeks he had grown very fond of her, as if she were a kind of useful pet. He shifted his leg to a more comfortable position before he answered. “You’ll be going to church this afternoon, won’t you?” He looked over his shoulder at her. She must have just come in; she was carrying a red plastic grocery bag, hugging it against her heavy bosom as if it were a child.

She grinned at him a little foolishly, and he realized that she was probably already somewhat drunk, even though it was early afternoon. “That’s what I mean, Mr. Newton. I thought you might want to go to church.” She set the bag on the table by the air-conditioner—the one he had bought for her during his first week at her home. “I got you some wine.” she said.

He turned back toward his leg, propped up in front of him on a flimsy little crate that was weighted down with old comic books, her only reading material. He was annoyed. Her buying wine meant that she definitely intended to get drunk that evening, and, although she held her liquor well, he was always made apprehensive by her drunkenness. Even though she commented often and with amused wonder upon his lightness and frailty, she probably still had no idea of the harm she could do his frame—his slight, birdlike bones—if she were ever to stumble over him, fall on him, or even merely slap him hard. She was a sturdy, fleshy woman, and outweighed him by at least fifty pounds. “It was thoughtful of you to bring the wine, Betty Jo,” he said. “Is it chilled?”

“Uh huh,” she said. “Too damn cold, in fact.” She took the bottle from the sack, and he heard it clink against other, still hidden, companions. She looked at it speculatively. “I didn’t buy it at Reichmann’s this time. Today was my day for the welfare check, and I just got it as I come out of the welfare building. There’s a little store there called Goldie’s Quickie. Gets a lot of the welfare business.” She took a tumbler from a row of them that sat on top of the ancient, red-painted bookshelf and set it on the window ledge. Then, with a kind of lazy abstraction that characterized her dealings with liquor, she pulled a bottle of gin from the bag, and stood now, a wine bottle in one hand, a bottle of gin in the other, as if undecided which to set down first. “They keep all the wine in a regular refrigerator, and it gets too cold. I should of bought it over at Reichmann’s.” She finally set the wine bottle down, and opened the gin.

“That’s all right,” he said. “It shouldn’t take long to warm up.”

“I’ll just set it here, and just any time you want some you ask me, hear?” She poured herself a half tumbler of the gin and then went into the little kitchen. He heard her clinking the sugar bowl, spooning in the sugar that she always put in her gin, and then she returned in a minute, drinking as she walked. “Damn, I like gin!” she said, in a self-satisfied tone.

“I don’t believe I’ll be able to go to church.”

She looked genuinely disappointed. She came over and sat awkwardly in the aged chintz-covered chair that faced his, pulling her print skirt over her knees with one hand while she held the glass with the other. “I’m sorry. Its a real good church, and high-class too. You wouldn’t be out of place at all.” He noticed for the first time that she was wearing a diamond ring. She had probably bought it with his money. He did not begrudge it to her; she had certainly earned it by the care she had taken of him. In spite of her habits and her talk, she was an excellent nurse. And she wasn’t curious about him.

Not wanting to talk further about the church, he remained silent while she settled herself comfortably in the chair and began working seriously on her gin. She was the sort of irregular and sentimental churchgoer whom television interviewers would call deeply religious—she claimed that her religion was a great source of strength. It consisted largely of attending Sunday afternoon lectures about personal magnetism and Wednesday evening lectures about men who became successful in business through prayer. Its faith was based on a belief that whatever happened, all would be well; its morality was that each must decide for himself what was right for him. Betty Jo apparently had decided on gin and relief, as had a great many others.

In a few weeks of living with this woman he had learned a great deal about one aspect of American society that television had not informed him of at all. He had known about the general prosperity that had bloomed continuously, like the flower of some giant and impossibly hardy weed, for the forty years since the end of World War II, and he had known how this wealth had been distributed among and spent by the nearly all-inclusive middle class that, as every year passed, put more time into less productive work and made more money for it. It was that overdressed and immensely comfortable middle class that almost all television shows dealt with, so that one could easily get the notion that all Americans were young, suntanned, clear-eyed and ambitious. In meeting Betty Jo he had learned that there was a large substratum of society that was totally unaffected by this middle-class prototype, that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever. He had read enough history to realize that people like Betty Jo would once have been the industrial poor; but they were now the industrial well-to-do, living comfortably in government-built housing—Betty Jo rented a three-room dwelling unit in a huge old brick housing project, now a semi-slum—on checks from a bewildering diversity of agencies; Federal Welfare, State Welfare, Emergency Relief, Country Poor Relief. This American society was so rich that it could support the eight or ten million members of Betty Jo’s class in a kind of shabby, gin-and-used-furniture luxury in the cities, while the bulk of the country tanned its healthy cheeks by its suburban swimming pools and followed the current fashions in clothes and child-rearing and mixed drinks and wives, playing endless games with religion and psychoanalysis and “creative leisure.” With the exception of Farnsworth, who belonged to still another, rarer class, that of the genuinely wealthy, all of the men whom Newton had met were of this middle class. All of them were very much alike and seeming, if you caught them off their guard, when the hand wasn’t extended in friendliness or the face composed in its usual mask of smug and boyish charm, a little haggard, a little lost. It seemed to Newton that Betty Jo, with her gin, her boredom, her cats, and her used furniture, was getting the better part of the social arrangement.

She had had a party once, with some “girl friends” from other units in the building. He had remained in the bedroom out of sight, but he had been able to hear them well enough, singing old hymns like Rock of Ages and Faith of Our Fathers, and getting drunk on gin and sentimentality, and it had seemed to him that they had found a better kind of satisfaction in this emotional debauch than the middle class derived from its Roman barbecue feasts, its drunken midnight swimming, and its quick sex. Yet even Betty Jo was false to those childish old hymns, for after the other women had gone drunkenly back to their own three-room cells, she had laid by him in bed and giggled about the silliness of the Baptist, hymn-singing, revivalist religion that her Kentucky family had brought her up in and how she had “outgrown all that, even though, sometimes, it was kind of cute to sing the songs.” Newton said nothing to this, yet he could not help but wonder. He had seen an “old-time revival hour” several times, on the old Anthean TV tapes, and he had seen a “modern” church hour which “made a creative use of God,” for which the music consisted solely of an electronic organ playing Strauss waltzes and parts of The Poet and Peasant Overture. He was not at all certain that these people had been entirely wise in their development of that strange manifestation of theirs, a thing Anthea was totally without—and yet which the Antheans, in their ancient visits to the planet, were probably to blame for—this peculiar set of premises and promises called religion. He did not understand it very well, however. Antheans believed, to be sure, that there probably were gods in the universe, or creatures that might be called gods, but this was not a thing of any great importance to them, any more than it really was to most humans, Yet the old human belief in sin and redemption was meaningful to him and, he, like all Antheans, was quite familiar with the sense of guilt and the need for its expiation. Yet now the humans seemed to be building loose constructions of half-belief and sentiment to replace their religions, and he did not know what to make of it; he could not really fathom why Betty Jo was so much concerned over the supposed strength she received in weekly doses from her synthetic church, a form of strength that seemed less certain and more troublesome than that she received from her gin.

After a while he asked her for a glass of wine, which she obligingly got for him, handing him the one little crystal wine glass that she had bought especially for him and then pouring expertly from the bottle. He drank it up rather quickly. He had learned to enjoy alcohol considerably, during his convalescence.

“Well.” he said, as she was pouring the second glass for him, “I expect I’ll be able to move from here next week.”

She hesitated a moment and then finished pouring the wine. Then she said, “What for, Tommy?” She called him Tommy sometimes when she was getting drunk. “There’s no call to hurry.”

8

Lord, he was peculiar. Tall and skinny and wide-eyed like a bird; but he could move around, even with a broken leg, like a cat. He look pills all the time and he never shaved. He didn’t seem to sleep either; she would get up sometimes at night, waking up with the dry throat and spinning head that the gin would give her when she hadn’t watched it too close, and there he’d be in the living room, his leg propped up, reading, or listening to that little gold record player that the fat man had brought him from New York, or just sitting in the chair with his hands under his chin, staring at the wall with his lips tight together and his mind God only could ever know where. She would try to move quietly at times like that, so as not to disturb him; but he always heard her no matter how quiet she was and she could tell he was startled. But he would always smile at her and sometimes say a word or two. Once, during the second week, he had seemed so lost and alone, sitting, staring at the wall as if he was trying to find something there that he could talk to; he looked, with his twisted leg, like some half-broken baby bird that had fallen from a nest. He was so pitiful that she felt like putting her arms around his head and stroking him, mothering him. But she hadn’t done it; she already knew about how he didn’t like to be touched. And he was such a light thing, she might hurt him. She would never forget how light he was when she carried him off that elevator the first time, with the blood on his shirt and his leg twisted like a bent wire.

She finished brushing her hair, and then began putting on lipstick. She used, for the first time, some of the silver lipstick and eye shadow that young girls wore; and when she had finished this she looked at herself in the mirror with some pleasure. For forty she wasn’t bad to look at, if you covered up the tiny-purplish places around her eyes that came from gin and sugar. She was covering them up tonight, with a makeup bought just for that.

After looking at her face for a while she began to dress, putting on the sheer gold panties and brassiere that she’d bought that afternoon, and then the crimson pants and the matching blouse. Garish earrings, and finally the silver flakes in her hair. She looked now like somebody else and, standing before the mirror, she at first felt self-conscious. What kind of foolishness was she up to, dressing like this? But, in the back of her mind, in that vague, seldom-examined registry where bottles of gin were mercilessly numbered and unpleasant recollections of a thankfully dead husband were filed, she knew perfectly well what she was doing this for. But she did not bring it to the surface of her mind to inspect it. She was expert at the technique. In a minute she felt more accustomed to this new, sexy-matron appearance, and, taking her tumbler of gin from the top of the dresser in one hand, smoothing the tight crimson pants with the other, she pushed open the door and walked into the room where Tommy was sitting.

He was on the phone, and she could see the face of that lawyer, Farnsworth, on the little screen. They usually talked three or four times a day, and once Farnsworth had come with a staff of earnest-looking young men, and they had spent the day discussing and arguing in her living room, ignoring her as if she d been a part of the furniture. Except for Tommy, that is, because he had been polite and nice and had thanked her gently when she had brought the men coffee and offered them gin.

She sat on the couch while he talked to Farnsworth and picked up an old comic book and lazily looked over some of the more sexy pages while she finished the drink. But this bored her, and Tommy was still talking about some kind of research project that they were doing in the southern part of the state and about selling shares of this and that. She set the comic book down, finished her drink, picked up one of his books that sat on the end table. He’d had hundreds of books sent to the house, and the room was getting crowded with them. The book turned out to be some kind of poetry and she put it back hastily, picking up another. It was called Thermonuclear Engines and was filled with lines and numbers. She began to feel silly again, dressed in these clothes. She got up and resolutely fixed two drinks of gin, leaving one on top of the television set and taking the other back to the couch with her. Yet, silly as she felt, she found herself automatically taking a seductive, movie-star pose on the couch, and stretching her heavy legs out lazily. She watched him over the top of her glass, saw the glow of the lamplight on his white hair and on his delicate, brownish, almost transparent skin, and then his graceful, womanish hand that lay casually, lightly on the desk. At that moment she began consciously to review what she was up to and, in the soft light, with the gin wanning her stomach, she began to feel a touch of wicked excitement in her from flirting at the edge of the idea of that strange, delicate body against hers. Looking at him and letting her imagination play with the thought, she knew that the particular thrill came from his strangeness—his strange, unmanlike, unsexual nature. Maybe she was like those women who like to make love with freaks and cripples. Well, he was both—and she did not care now, was not ashamed, with the tight pants on and the gin in her. If she could arouse him—if he could be aroused—she would be proud of herself. And if not—he was a dear man anyway and he wouldn’t be offended. She felt her heart go out to him then in quick, warm sentiment; as she finished her drink she felt, for the first time in years, an emotion resembling love, along with the desire that she had been working herself up to all day long—since this morning when she had gone out in her aged print dress and bought panties and earrings, makeup and tights, without admitting to herself the final meaning of the vague plan that had entered her mind.

She got still another drink, telling herself that she ought to go easy. But she was getting nervous, waiting. He was talking now about somebody named Bryce and Farnsworth was saying that this Bryce was trying to see him, wanted to come to work for them, but wanted to see Tommy first, and Tommy was saying it was impossible and Farnsworth was saying they needed all the men they could get with Bryce’s training. She began to be impatient. Who cared about this Bryce? But then, abruptly, Tommy ended the conversation, hung up the phone, and after remaining silent for a minute looked over at her, smiling thoughtfully. “My new place is ready, down in the southern part of the state. Would you like to go there with me? As my housekeeper?”

Well that was a shock. She blinked at him. “Housekeeper?”

“Yes. The house will be ready Saturday, but there will be furniture to arrange, things of that sort to take care of. I’ll need someone to help with it all. And,” he smiled, getting up with his cane and limping over toward her, “you know I dislike meeting strangers. You could talk to people for me.” He stood up over her.

She blinked up at him. “I fixed you a drink. On the television.” His offer was hard to believe. She had known about the house from when the real estate people had come by that second week—a huge old mansion that he was buying, and nine hundred acres of land, down east in the mountains.

He picked up the glass, sniffed it, and said, “Gin?”

“I thought you ought to try it,” she said. “It’s pretty good. Sweet.”

“No,” he said. “No. But I’ll be glad to have some wine with you.”

“Sure, Tommy.” She got up, staggering a bit, and went to the kitchen for his bottle of Sauterne and his crystal glass. “You don’t need me,” she called, from the kitchen.

His voice was solemn. “Why yes I do. Betty Jo.”

She came back in, standing close to him as she handed him the glass. He was such a nice man. She felt almost ashamed of herself wanting to seduce him, as though he were a baby. She could not help being drunkenly amused. He probably didn’t know what it was all about. He was the kind that probably peed in a silver pot when he was little and ran away if a girl tried to touch him. Or maybe he was queer—anybody who sat around reading all the time and looked like he did… But he didn’t talk like a queer. She liked to hear him talk. He looked tired now. But he looked tired all the time.

He sat down, painfully, in the armchair, and set his cane on the floor beside him. She sat on the couch and then lay back on her side, facing him. He was looking at her but he hardly seemed to see her. When he looked that way it made her feel creepy. “I’m wearing new clothes.” she said.

“So you are.”

“Yeah. So I am.” She laughed self-consciously. “The pants was sixty-five and the blouse was fifty, and I bought gold undies and earrings.” She raised a leg to show off the bright-red pants and then scratched her knee through the cloth. “With the money you been giving me I could dress like a movie star if I wanted to. I could get my face fixed, you know, and take off weight and all.” She felt her earrings for a minute, thoughtfully, tugging at them and running her thumbnail across the soft, metallic gold, enjoying the little hints of pain on her earlobes. “But I don’t know. I been sloppy for a long time. Ever since me and Barney went on welfare and Medicare and all I let myself go and, hell, you get so you like it that way.”

He said nothing for a while and they sat in silence while she finished her drink. Finally he said, “Will you come with me to the new house?”

She stretched and yawned, beginning to feel tired. “You sure you really need me?”

For a moment he blinked at her and his face looked a way she had never seen it look before, as if he were pleading with her. “Yes, I do need you,” he said. “I know very few people….”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll come.” She gestured tiredly. “I’d be a damn fool not to, anyway, since I imagine you’ll pay me twice as much as I’m worth.”

“Good.” His face relaxed a little and he settled back in his chair and picked up a book.

Before he could get started in it she recalled her plans, already cool by now, and after a moment of reluctant doubt she made a final try. But she was sleepy and her heart wasn’t in it. “Are you married, Tommy?” she asked. It should have been a pretty obvious question.

If he had any idea of what she was driving at he didn’t show it. “Yes, I’m married,” he said, politely putting his book in his lap and looking over at her.

Embarrassed, she said, “I just wanted to know.” And then, “What does she look like? Your wife?”

“Oh, she resembles me, I imagine. Tall and thin.”

Somehow her embarrassment was turning into irritation. She finished off her drink and said, “I used to be thin,” almost with defiance. Then, tired of it, she stood up and walked over to her bedroom door. The whole thing had been silly anyway. And maybe he was queer—being married didn’t prove anything that way. Anyway he was peculiar. A nice, rich man, but weird as green milk. Still irritated she said, “Good night,” and went into her room and began peeling off her expensive clothes. Then she sat on the edge of the bed a moment, in her nightgown, thinking. She was much more comfortable with the tight clothes off, and when she finally lay down, her mind now blank, she had no difficulty in falling into a deep sleep, pleasantly filled with undisturbing dreams.

9

They flew over the mountains, but the little plane was so stable, the pilot so expert, that there was no pitching, almost no sensation of movement. They flew over Harlan, Kentucky, a drab city sprawled loosely in the foothills, and then over vast, barren fields and down into a valley. Bryce, a glass of whiskey in his hand, saw the distant gleam of a lake, its static surface shining like a new and rich coin; and then they dipped lower, losing sight of the lake, and landed on a broad, new strip of concrete that sat at the flat bottom of the valley, amid broom straw and upturned red clay, like a wild Euclidian diagram drawn there with gray chalk by some geometrically minded god.

Bryce stepped from the plane into the thumping din of earthmoving machinery, the confusion of khaki-shirted men, red-faced in the summer heat, shouting hoarsely at one another, in the process of building unidentifiable buildings. There were machinery sheds, some kind of huge concrete platform, a row of barracks. For a moment, having left the quiet and coolness of the smooth, air-conditioned plane—Thomas Jerome Newton’s personal plane, sent to Louisville for him—he was bewildered, made dizzy by heat and noise, by all this feverish and unexplained activity.

A young man, rugged looking as a cigarette advertisement, stepped up to him. The man wore a pith helmet; his rolled-up sleeves displayed an abundance of tanned, youthful muscle; he looked exactly like a hero of one of those half-forgotten boys’ novels that had, at a dimly remembered time of aspiring adolescence, made him, Bryce, dedicated to becoming an engineer—a chemical engineer, a man of science and of action. He did not smile at the young man, thinking of his own paunch, his graying hair, and the taste of whiskey in his mouth; but he nodded his head in recognition.

The man held out a hand. “You’re Professor Bryce?”

He took the hand, expecting an affectedly firm grip, pleased to receive a gentle one. “Professor no more,” he said, “but I’m Bryce.”

“Good. Good. I’m Hopkins. Foreman.” The man’s friendliness seemed doglike, as if he were pleading for approval. “What do you think of it all, Doctor Bryce?” He gestured toward the rows of buildings going up. Just beyond them was a tall tower, apparently a broadcasting antenna of some kind.

Bryce cleared his throat. “I don’t know.” He started to ask what they were making here, but decided that his ignorance would be embarrassing. Why hadn’t that fat buffoon, Farnsworth, told him what he was being hired for? “Is Mr. Newton expecting me?” he said aloud, not looking at the man.

“Sure. Sure.” Suddenly showing efficiency, the young man hustled him around to the other side of the plane, where a small monorail car, obscured before, sat atop a dully gleaming track that snaked away into the hills at the side of the valley like a thin, silvery pencil line. Hopkins slid the door back, revealing polished leather upholstery and a satisfyingly dark interior. “This’ll have you up at the house in five minutes.”

“The house? How far is it?”

“About four miles. I’ll call ahead and Brinnarde’ll meet you. Brinnarde’s Mr. Newton’s secretary; he’ll probably do the interviewing”

Bryce hesitated before getting into the car. “Won’t I meet Mr. Newton?” The thought upset him; after these two years, not to meet the man who invented Worldcolor, who operated the biggest oil refineries in Texas, who had developed three-D television, reusable photo negatives, the ATF process in dye-transfer—the man who was either the world’s most original inventive genius, or an extraterrestrial.

The young man frowned. “I doubt it. I’ve been here six months and I’ve never seen him, except from behind the window of that car you’re getting into. About once a week he comes down here in it, to look things over, I guess. But he never gets out, and it’s so dark inside that you can’t see his face, only the shadow of it, looking out.”

Bryce settled himself into the car. “Doesn’t he ever get out?” He nodded toward the plane, where a group of mechanics, seeming to have come from nowhere, were beginning to go over the jets. “To fly… places?”

Hopkins grinned, inanely, it seemed to Bryce. “Only at night, and you can’t see him then. He’s a tall man, though, and thin. The pilot’s told me that; but that’s about all. The pilot isn’t much of a talker.”

“I see.” He touched the door button and the door slid back, noiselessly. As it was shutting, Hopkins said, “Good luck!” and he replied quickly, “Thank you,” but was not sure whether or not his voice had been cut off by the door.

Like the plane, the car was soundproof and very cool. Also like the plane, it began moving with almost imperceptible acceleration, gathering speed so smoothly that there was little sensation of motion. He lightened the transparency of the windows by turning the little silver knob that was obviously for that purpose, and watched the frail-looking aluminum construction sheds, and the groups of working men—an unusual and, he felt, satisfactory sight, in these days of automatic factories and six-hour working days. The men seemed eager, working heartily, sweating under the Kentucky sun. It occurred to him that they must be very we’ll paid to have come to this barren place, so far from golf courses, municipal gambling halls, and other consolations of the working man. He saw one young man—so many of them seemed young—sitting atop a huge earthmover, grinning with the pleasure of pushing great quantities of mud; for a moment Bryce envied him his work and his young, unquestioning confidence, easy under the hot sun.

A moment later he had left the construction site and was threading through densely foliated hills, moving so fast now that the trees close to him were a blur of sunlight and green leaves, of light and shadow. He leaned back, against the extraordinarily comfortable cushions, trying to enjoy the ride. But he was too excited to relax, too keyed up by the speed of events and all of the excitement of a strange, new place—so blissfully far, now, from Iowa, from college students, bearded intellectuals, men like Canutti. He looked toward the windows, watching the increasingly rapid flashing of light, shade, light, pale green and dark shadows; and then, abruptly ahead of him, as the car sped over a rise, he saw the glimmer of the lake, spread out in a hollow like a sheet of wonderfully blue-gray metal, a giant, serene disc. Just beyond it rose, in the shadow of a mountain, a huge, old white house with a white-columned porch and large, shuttered windows, sitting quietly at the edge of the broad lake, solidly, at the base of a mountain. Then the house and lake, seen in the distance, vanished behind another hill as the monorail track dipped down, and he realized that the car was beginning to decelerate. A minute later the house and lake reappeared and the car eased in a broad, curving glide that swooped along the edge of the water, delicately inclining with the curve of the track, and he saw a man standing, waiting for him, at the side of the house. The car came to a gentle stop and Bryce took a deep breath, touched the doorknob, watched the wood-paneled door slide quietly open, and stepped out into the shade of the mountain and the smell of pine trees and the gentle, almost inaudible sound of water lapping against the shore of the lake. The man was small and dark, with little bright eyes and a mustache. He stepped forward, smiling formally. “Doctor Bryce?” His accent was French.

Suddenly feeling exhilarated, he answered, “Monsieur Brinnarde?” holding out his hand to the man. “Enchanté.”

The man took his hand, his eyebrows slightly raised. “Soyez le bienvenu, Monsieur le Docteur. Monsieur Newton vous attend. Alors…”

Bryce caught his breath. “Newton will see me?”

“Yes. I will show you the way.”

Inside the house he was greeted by three cats, who stared at him from the floor where they had been playing. They seemed to be ordinary alley cats, but well fed, and scornful of his entrance. He did not like cats. The Frenchman led him silently through the parlor and up a heavily carpeted staircase. There were pictures on the walls—odd, expensive-looking tableaux by painters he did not recognize. The staircase was very wide, and curved. He noticed that it had one of those motor-powered seats, folded now, that could run up and down by the banister. Could Newton be a cripple? There seemed to be no one else in the house except the two of them, and the cats. He glanced back; they were still staring at him, eyes wide, curious and insolent.

At the top of the stairs was a hall, and at the end of the hall was a door, which obviously led into Newton’s room. It opened and a rather sad-eyed, plump woman came out, wearing an apron. She walked up to them, blinked at him and said. “I guess you’re Professor Bryce.” Her voice, amiable and throaty, was thick with a hillbilly accent.

He nodded and she led him to the door. He walked in alone, noticing to his dismay that his breath was short and his legs unsteady.

The room was immense and the air in it was cold. The light came dimly from a huge, only slightly transparent bay window that overlooked the lake. There seemed to be furniture everywhere, in a bewildering array of colors—the heavy forms of couches, a table, desks, taking on blues and grays and faded orange as his eyes became accustomed to the dim, yellowish light. Two pictures faced him on the back wall; one was an etching of a giant bird, a heron or whooping crane; the other a nervous abstraction by someone like Klee. Maybe it was a Klee. The two works did not go well together. In the corner was a giant birdcage, with a purple and red parrot, apparently asleep. And now walking toward him slowly, carrying a cane, was a tall, thin man, with indistinct features. “Professor Bryce?” The voice was clear, faintly accented, pleasant.

“Yes. You’re… Mr. Newton?”

“That’s right. Why don’t we sit down and talk for a while?”

He sat, and they talked for several minutes. Newton was pleasant, easy, a shade over-correct in his manner, but neither imposing nor snobbish. He had a great deal of natural dignity, and he discussed the painting that Bryce mentioned—it was a Klee after all—with interest and intelligence. In talking about it he stood up for a minute to point out a detail and Bryce got his first good look at the man’s face. It was a fine face, beautifully featured, almost womanish, with a strange cast to it. Immediately the thought, the absurd thought that he had toyed with for over a year, came to him strongly. For a moment, watching the strange, tall man pointing a delicate finger toward an eerie, nervous-lined painting there in the dim light, it did not seem at all absurd. Yet it was; and, when Newton turned back to him, smiled, and said, “I think we ought to have a drink. Professor Bryce,” the illusion vanished completely and Bryce’s reason asserted itself. There were stranger-looking men than this one in the world, and there had been brilliant inventors before.

“I’d like a drink,” he said. And then, “I know you’re busy.”

“Not at all.” Newton smiled easily, walking over toward the door. “Not today at least. What would you like?”

“Scotch.” He started to add, “If you have it,” but checked himself. He imagined Newton would have it. “Scotch and water.”

Instead of pressing a button or ringing a gong—in this house ringing a gong would not have seemed out of place—Newton merely opened the door and called out, “Betty Jo.” When she answered, he said, “Bring Professor Bryce the Scotch, with water and ice. I’d like my gin and bitters.” Then he closed the door and returned to his chair. “I’ve only recently come to enjoy gin,” he said. Bryce shuddered inwardly at the thought of gin and bitters.

“Well, Professor Bryce, what do you think of our site here? I suppose you saw all the… activity when you got off the plane?”

He settled back in his chair, feeling more at ease now. Newton seemed very gracious, genuinely interested in hearing what he had to say. “Yes. It looked very interesting. But to tell you the truth I don’t know what you are building.”

Newton stared for a moment, and then laughed. “Didn’t Oliver tell you, in New York?”

Bryce shook his head.

“Oliver can be very secretive. I certainly didn’t mean him to go that far.” He smiled—and for the first time. Bryce was vaguely bothered by the smile, although he could not see precisely what it was that bothered him. “Perhaps that was why you demanded to see me?”

Apparently he only meant it lightly. “Maybe.” Bryce said. “But I had other reasons as well.”

“Yes,” Newton started to say something, but stopped when the door opened and Betty Jo came in, carrying the bottles and pitchers on a tray. Bryce looked at her closely. She was a slightly pretty, middle-aged woman, the kind you would expect to see at a matinee or a bridge club. Yet her face was not vacant, not stupid, and there was a warmth, a trace of good humor or amusement, around her eyes and in her full lips. But she was somewhat out of place as this millionaire’s only visible servant. She said nothing and set the drinks down, and as she walked past him on her way out he was astonished at the unmistakable odors of liquor and perfume as she went by.

The Scotch had been freshly opened, and he fixed himself a drink with some amusement and wonder. Was this the way millionaire scientists went about things? One asks for a drink and a half-drunk servant brings a fifth? Perhaps it was the best way. The two of them poured the liquor in silence and then, after the first drink, Newton said unexpectedly, “It’s a space vehicle.”

Bryce blinked, not understanding what the man meant. “How’s that?”

“The thing we’re building here will be a space vehicle.”

“Oh?” It was a surprise, but not overmuch of one. Space-probing craft, unmanned, of one sort or another were common enough…. Even the Cuban bloc had put one up a few months ago.

“Then you’ll want me on metals for the frame?”

“No.” Newton was sipping his drink slowly, and looking out the window as if thinking of something else. “The frame is worked out thoroughly already. I’d like you to work on the fuel-carrying systems—to find materials that can contain some of the chemicals, such as fuels and wastes and the like.” He turned back to Bryce, smiling again, and Bryce realized that the smile was vaguely disquieting because of a hint of some incomprehensible weariness about it. “I’m afraid I know very little about materials—heat and acid resistance and stresses. Oliver says that you’re one of the very best men for that kind of work.”

“Farnsworth may be overrating me, but I know the work fairly well.”

That seemed to end the subject and they were silent for a while. From the moment Newton had mentioned a space vehicle the old suspicion had, of course, returned. But with it came the obvious refutation—if Newton were, through some wild irrationality, from some other planet, he and his people would not be building spacecraft. That would be the one thing that they would be certain to have already. He smiled at himself, at the cheap, science-fiction level of his own private discourse. If Newton were a Martian or a Venusian, he should, by all rights, be importing heat rays to fry New York or planning to disintegrate Chicago, or carrying off young girls to underground caves for otherworldly sacrifices. Betty Jo? Feeling imaginative now, from the whiskey and his fatigue, he almost laughed aloud at the thought: Betty Jo, on a movie poster, with Newton in a plastic helmet, menacing her with a ray gun, a bulky, silver gun with heavy convector fins and little bright zig-zags coming out of it. Newton was still looking distractedly out the window. He had already finished his first gin drink and had poured himself another. A drunken Martian? An extraterrestrial who drank gin and bitters?

Newton had spoken abruptly before—yet without rudeness—and he turned back and spoke abruptly again. “Why did you want to see me, Mr. Bryce?” His voice was not demanding, only curious.

The question caught him off guard, and he hesitated, pouring himself another drink to cover the pause. Then he said. “I was impressed with your work. The photographic films—color. X-ray—and your innovations in electronic gear. I thought them the most… the most original ideas I’ve seen in years.”

“Thank you.” Newton seemed more interested now. “I thought very few people knew that I was… responsible for those things.”

Something about the tired, dispassionate way that Newton spoke made him feel slightly ashamed of himself, ashamed of the curiosity that had made him trace down the W. E. Corporation to Farnsworth, and browbeat Farnsworth into arranging this interview. He felt like a child who has tried to gain the attention of an indulgent father and has failed, has instead only disturbed and wearied the man. For a moment he thought that he might be blushing, and was thankful for the dim light in the room in case he were.

“I… I’ve always admired a first-rate mind.” He had somehow got caught up in embarrassment and he knew, cursing himself, that he sounded like a schoolboy. But when Newton answered with something modest and polite, Bryce was shocked out of embarrassment by realizing, in an instant, that the other man might well be drunk. He heard the distant, apathetic, slightly blurred speech, saw the distracted, unfocused look in the man’s wide eyes, and saw that Newton, almost imperceptibly, was either very drunk—quietly, calmly drunk—or very sick. And he suddenly felt a wave of quick affection—was he drunk himself?—for the thin, lonely man. Was Newton, also, a master of quiet morning drunkenness, looking for—for whatever it was that could supply a sane man in an insane world a reason for not being drunk in the morning? Or was this only one of the notorious aberrations of genius, a kind of wild and lonely abstraction, the ozone of an electrical intelligence?

“Oliver has arranged with you about your salary? And you’re satisfied with it?”

“It’s all been taken care of very well.” He stood up, recognizing that Newton’s question closed the interview. “I’m thoroughly content with the salary.” And then, before he offered to go, he said, “I wonder if I may ask you a question before I leave, Mr. Newton?”

Newton hardly seemed to hear him; he was still looking out the window, the empty glass held gently in his frail fingers, his face smooth, unlined, yet very old looking. “Certainly, Professor Bryce,” he said, his voice very soft, almost a whisper.

He felt embarrassed again, awkward. The man was so impossibly gentle. He cleared his throat, and noticed that, across the room, the parrot was awake, peering at him somewhat curiously as the cats had before. He felt dizzy and was certain now that he was blushing. He stammered, “It really doesn’t matter, I guess. I’ll… I’ll ask you some other time.”

Newton looked at him as though he had not heard him, but was still waiting to hear. He said, “Certainly. Some other time.”

Bryce excused himself, left the room, and walked, squinting, into bright light. When he got downstairs again the cats were gone.

10

During the next several months Bryce was busier than he had ever been before in his life. From the moment Brinnarde had led him from the big house and had sent him to the research labs, on the far side of the lake, he had plunged, with a willingness and fervor that were altogether foreign to him, into a multiplicity of jobs that Newton had waiting. There were alloys to be selected and developed, endless tests to be run, unearthly ideal qualifications of heat and acid resistance to be met in plastics, metals, resins, and ceramics. This was work for which his training ideally suited him, and he adjusted to it with great rapidity. He had a staff of fourteen under him, a huge aluminum shed of a laboratory to work in, a practically limitless budget, a small private house of four rooms and carte blanche—which he never exercised—for plane trips to Louisville, Chicago, or New York. There were irritations and confusions of course, especially in having necessary equipment and materials brought in on time, and in occasional petty feuds among his assistants, but these annoyances were never sufficiently great to hold up the work in more than a few of its multiple aspects. He was, if not happy, too busy to be unhappy. He was absorbed, engaged, in a way that he had never been as a teacher, and he was aware that much in his life was dependent upon his work. He knew that he had broken completely with teaching, just as he had broken, years before, with government work, and that it was imperative that he believe in his present work. He was too old to fail again, to sink into despair again; he would never be able to recover. In a series of events that had begun with a roll of caps and had depended on an absurd, science-fiction speculation, he had fluked into a job that many men might dream of. He often found himself working far into the night, absorbed in his work; and he no longer drank in the mornings. There were deadlines to be met, certain designs had to be ready for production at certain dates, and he was not worried about these. He was well ahead of schedule. Occasionally the fact that the work was applied research and not genuinely basic research was a source of some concern to him; but he was a little too old now, a little too disillusioned, to worry about points of honor, matters of integrity. Perhaps the only real moral question was whether or not he was working on a new weapon, a new means of dismembering men or destroying cities. And the answer to that was negative. They were building a vehicle to carry instruments around the solar system, and that in itself was, if not worthwhile, at least harmless.

A routine part of his work consisted of checking his progress against the portfolio of Newton’s specifications that had been given him by Brinnarde. These papers, which he thought of as the “master plumber’s inventory,” consisted largely of specifications for hundreds of minor parts of refrigeration, fuel control and guidance systems, specifications which called for certain measures of thermal conductivity, electrical resistance, chemical stability, mass, ignition temperature, and the like. It was Bryce’s business to find the most thoroughly suitable material, or if none could be found, to find what would be second best. In many cases this was quite easy, so much so that he could not help wondering at Newton’s naiveté about materials; but in several cases the specifications could be matched by no known substances. He was forced, in such cases, to talk the thing over with the project engineers and devise the shrewdest possible compromise. The compromise would be delivered, then, to Brinnarde, and would be pronounced upon by Newton. The project engineers told him that they had been having this kind of trouble all along, during the six months the project had been under way, Newton was a genius at design, the over-all pattern was the most sophisticated they had ever seen and embodied a thousand startling innovations, but there had been hundreds of compromises already, and the construction of the ship itself was not due to begin for another year. The entire project was scheduled to be finished within six years—by 1990—and everyone seemed to entertain doubts about the probability of finishing by that time. But this speculation did not disturb Bryce very much. Despite the ambiguous nature of his one interview with Newton, he was immensely confident of that strange person’s scientific abilities.

Then, on a cool evening three months after he had first come to Kentucky, Bryce made a discovery. It was near midnight and he found himself alone in his private office at one end of the laboratory building, tiredly going over a group of specification sheets, unwilling yet to go home, since the evening was pleasant and he enjoyed the quietness of the lab. He was idly staring at one of Newton’s few sheets of diagrams—a schematic of the cooling system that was supposed to eliminate reentry heat—and tracing the relationship of parts, when some unidentifiable strangeness about the measurements and computations began vaguely to annoy him. For several minutes he chewed the end of his pencil, staring first at the neatly laid-out diagrams and then out the window that faced the lake. There was nothing wrong with the figures, but something about them disturbed him. He had noticed that before, in the back of his mind; but it had always been impossible to put his finger on the discrepancy. Outside, a clear half-moon was poised over the black lake, and hidden insects clicked remotely. It all seemed strange—like a lunar landscape. He looked back to the paper on the desk before him. The central group of figures was a progression of thermal values—values in an irregular sequence—Newton’s tentative specifications for a kind of tubing. Something about the sequence was suggestive; it was like a logarithmic progression, and yet was not. But then, what was it? Why should Newton pick this particular set of values, and not others? It had to be arbitrary. The precise values didn’t count anyway. These were only tentative requirements; it was up to Bryce to find the actual values for the material that would come closest to satisfying the specifications. He stared at the figures on the paper in a kind of gentle hypnosis until the digits seemed to merge and blend before his eyes and to lose all meaning for him except for their pattern. He blinked and then, with an effort of will, looked away, staring once again out the window into the Kentucky night. The moon had changed position, was now obscured by the hills beyond the lake. Across the black water a faint light burned in the second floor of the big house, probably in Newton’s study, and overhead the stars, a myriad of faint pinpricks, covered the black sky like specks of luminous powder. Suddenly with no apparent cause, a bullfrog began to glunk outside the window, startling Bryce. The frog continued, unanswered, unchorused, for several minutes, calling with heavy, purposeful vibrancy, crouched wetly somewhere; he could visualize its demi-reptilian body huddled, legs beneath chin, in cool, dew-wet grass. The sound seemed for a while to vibrate over the lake, in rhythm, and then it abruptly stopped, leaving Bryce’s ears dissatisfied for a moment, waiting for the final beat that never came. But the insects returned, in chorus, and he settled wearily back to the paper before him and it was then that he saw easily, in a brief moment of insight, his eyes merely tracing the familiar figures in an automatic way, what had been bothering him. They were in logarithmic progression; they had to be. But in no familiar logarithm—not to the base ten, or two, or pi—but in some unheard-of one. He picked up his slide rule from the desk and, his weariness gone, began to make trial-and-error divisions….

After an hour he stood up, stretched his arms, and left the office, walking through the wet grass to the edge of the lake. The moon was out again; he watched its reflection on the water for a while, and then he stared at Newton’s window and said softly aloud the question that had been taking shape in his mind for twenty minutes: “What kind of a man would compute with logarithms to the base twelve?” The light in Newton’s window, much fainter than the moon, stared back at him blankly, and at his feet the water washed gently against the shore, in a dim, mindless cadence, monotonous, quiet, and as old as the world.