Уолтер Тевис - The Man Who Fell to Earth

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.

In autumn the mountains around the lake became red and yellow and orange and brown. The water, under a colder sky, was bluer; it reflected in places the colors of the trees on the mountains. When the wind blew, pushing ripples before it, reds and yellows would flash on the water, and leaves would fall.

From the door of his laboratory, Bryce, often lost in thought, would sometimes stare across the water to the mountains, and to the house where T. J. Newton lived. The house was more than a mile distant from the crescent of aluminum and plywood buildings to which the laboratory was joined; at the other side of the crescent, when the sun was shining, the polished hull of the Thing—the Project, the Vehicle, whatever it was—glistened. Sometimes the sight of the silvery monolith would make Bryce feel something resembling pride; sometimes it only seemed ridiculous, like an illustration from a child’s book on space; sometimes it frightened him. It was possible for him to stand in his doorway and look directly across the lake to the uninhabited far shore and see the peculiar contrast—which he had observed early and often—between the structures at each end of the panorama; to his right the old Victorian mansion, with bay windows, white clapboarding, huge and useless pillars at its three porches, a home built in heavy-handed and tasteless pride by some unknown and long-dead tobacco or coal or lumber baron more than a century before; and to his left the most austere and futuristic of all constructions, a spaceship. A spaceship standing in a Kentucky pasture, surrounded by autumnal mountains, owned by a man who chose to live in a mansion with one drunken servant, with a French secretary, with parrots, paintings, and cats. Between the ship and the house stood the water, the mountains. Bryce himself, and the sky.

One morning in November, when the youthful seriousness of one of his lab assistants had made him feel a twinge of his old despair over scientific work and the airs of young men who practiced it, he went to the doorway and spent several minutes staring at the familiar view. Abruptly, he decided to take a walk; it had never occurred to him before to walk around the lake. There was no reason why he shouldn’t.

The air was cold, and for a moment he thought he should return to the lab for his jacket. But the sun was warm, in a mild. November morning way, and by staying along the edge of the water, out of the shade, he was able to keep comfortable enough. He walked in the direction of the big house, away from the construction site and the ship. He was wearing a faded wool plaid shirt, a ten-year-old gift from his dead wife; after a mile of walking he was forced to roll up the sleeves to his elbows, for they had begun prickling with the warmth of his body. His forearms, thin, white, and hairy, seemed shockingly pale in the sunlight—the arms of a very old man. Underfoot was gravel, and occasionally scrubgrass. He saw several squirrels, and a rabbit. Once, out in the lake, a fish jumped. He passed a few buildings and some kind of metalworking shop; some men waved at him. One of them spoke to him by name, but he did not recognize the man. He smiled back, and waved. He settled to a slow walk, and let his mind wander aimlessly. Once he stopped and tried to skip a few flat rocks on the lake and succeeded in forcing one of them to make a single leap. The others, hitting wrong, all sank the minute they touched the water. He shook his head at them, feeling foolish. High overhead a dozen birds flew soundlessly across the sky. He went on walking.

Before noon he passed the house, which seemed closed and silent, sitting a few hundred feet back from the water’s edge. He stared for a moment at the upstairs bay window, but could see nothing save the reflection of the sky on the glass. By the time the sun was as nearly overhead as it would be at that time of year, he was walking along the uninhabited shore at the far edge of the lake. The scrubgrass and weeds were thicker now; there were bushes and goldenrod and a few rotten logs. He thought momentarily of snakes, which he disliked, but dismissed the thought. He saw a lizard, sitting immobile on a stone, its eyes like glass. He began to be hungry, and wondered idly what he would do about it. Tiring, he sat on a log at the water’s edge, loosened his shirt buttons, wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief, and stared at the water. He felt momentarily like Henry Thoreau, and smiled at himself for the feeling. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. He looked back toward the house, partly obscured now by trees. Someone, still quite distant, was walking toward him. He blinked in the strong light, stared for a few moments, and became gradually aware that it was T. J. Newton. He leaned his elbows on his knees, and waited. He began to feel nervous.

Newton was carrying a small basket on his arm. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and light gray slacks. He walked slowly, his tall body erect, but with a light gracefulness to the movement. There was an indefinable strangeness about his way of walking, a quality that reminded Bryce of the first homosexual he had ever seen, back when he had been too young to know what a homosexual was. Newton did not walk like that; but then he walked like no one else; light and heavy at the same time.

When Newton was close enough to be heard he said, “I brought some cheese and wine.” He was wearing dark glasses.

“Fine.” Bryce stood up. “Did you see me when I passed the house?”

“Yes.” The log was fairly long and semicircular in shape. Newton sat at the other end of it, placing the basket at his feet. He withdrew a wine bottle and a corkscrew and held them out toward Bryce. “Would you open it?”

“I’ll try.” He took the bottle, noticing as he did so that Newton’s arms were as thin and pale as his own, but hairless. The fingers were very long and slender, with the smallest knuckles he had ever seen. The hands trembled slightly, as Newton handed him the bottle.

The wine was a Beaujolais. Bryce held the bottle, cold and wet, between his knees and began working the corkscrew. This was one operation he was fairly dexterous at, unlike skipping flat rocks on the water. He got the cork out, with a neat and satisfying pop , on the first try. Newton walked over with two glasses—not wineglasses, but tumblers—and held them for him while he poured. “Be generous,” Newton said, smiling down at him; and he poured the tumblers nearly full. Newton’s voice was pleasant; the faint accent seemed quite natural.

The wine was excellent, cool and fragrant in his dry throat. It warmed his stomach instantly with a tinge of the fine old double pleasure of alcohol—physical and spiritual—the pleasure that kept a great many men going, had kept him going for years. The cheese was strong cheddar, old and flaky. They ate and drank silently for several minutes. They were in the shade, and Bryce rolled his sleeves down. Now that he was no longer walking, he was cool again. He wondered why Newton, in his light clothes, did not seem cold. He looked the sort of man who would sit by a fire, wrapped in a shawl—the person whom George Arliss had played in old movies: thin, pale, cold-blooded. But who could say what kind of person he was? He might be a vaguely foreign count in an English comedy, or an aging Hamlet; or the mad scientist, planning discreetly to blow up the world; or an unostentatious Cortés, quietly building his citadel with local labor. The Cortés notion reminded him of his old idea, never completely forgotten, that Newton might be an extraterrestrial. At this moment almost anything seemed possible; it was not so ridiculous that he, Nathan Bryce, might be drinking wine and eating cheese with a man from Mars. Why not? Cortés had conquered Mexico with about four hundred men; could a single man from Mars do it alone? It seemed possible, as he sat with the wine in his stomach and the sun on his face. Newton sat beside him, chewing delicately, then sipping, his back erect. There was an Ichabod Crane look to him in profile. How could he, Bryce, be sure that if Newton were from Mars he would be the only one from there? Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Why not four hundred Martians, or four thousand? He looked at him again, and Newton caught his eye and smiled gravely. From Mars? He was probably a Lithuanian, or from Massachusetts.