Уолтер Тевис - The Man Who Fell to Earth

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.

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….