Уолтер Тевис - The Man Who Fell to Earth

Abruptly Bowen said something that was new. “And then you decided to start selling rings, from town to town?” His voice had become harsh. “You had made for yourself—out of local materials, I suppose—about a hundred gold rings, all exactly alike. And you suddenly decided, at the age of sixty-five, to start peddling them?”

That came as a surprise; they had not mentioned the rings before, although he had assumed that they must know about them. Newton smiled at the thought of the absurd explanation he was going to have to give for that one. “That’s right,” he said.

“And I suppose you dug up the gold in your back yard, and then made the gems with your Chem-Craft set, and did the engraving yourself with the point of a safety pin? All this so you could sell the rings for less than the gems alone were worth, to small jewelry stores.”

Newton could not help being amused. “I’m an eccentric, too, Mr. Bowen.”

“You’re not that eccentric,” Bowen said. “Nobody’s that eccentric.”

“Well, how would you explain it then?”

Bowen paused to light another cigarette. For all his show of irritation, his hand was perfectly steady. Then he said, “I think you brought the rings with you on a spaceship.” He raised his eyebrows slightly. “How’s that for a guess?”

Newton could not help being shocked, but he kept himself from showing it. “It’s interesting,” he said.

“Yes, it is. Even more interesting when you consider that we found the remains of a peculiar craft about five miles from the town where you sold your first ring. You may not know this, Mr. Newton, but that hull you left there was still radioactive in the right frequencies. It had been through the Van Allen belts.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Newton said. It was feeble, but there was nothing else for him to say. The FBI had turned out to be more thorough than he had expected. There was a lengthy pause. Then Newton said. “If I were an arrival by spaceship, wouldn’t I have a better way of getting money than by selling rings?” Although he had thought for some time that he did not particularly care whether they found out the truth about him or not, Newton was surprised to find himself feeling ill-at-ease from these new questions, and from their directness.

“What would you do,” Bowen said, “if you were from, say, Venus, and needed money?”

Newton found himself, for one of the first times in his life, having difficulty keeping his voice steady. “If Venusians could build spaceships, I suppose they could counterfeit money.”

“And where would you find, on Venus, a ten-dollar bill to copy?”

Newton did not answer, and Bowen reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small object, laid it on the table beside him. The secretary looked up momentarily, waiting for someone to say something, apparently so that he could write it down. Newton blinked. The thing on the table was an aspirin box.

“Counterfeit money brings us to something else, Mr. Newton.”

He knew now what Bowen was gong to talk about, and there was really nothing much he could do about it. “Wherever did you get that?” he said.

“One of our men ran across it while he was searching your hotel room in Louisville. That was two years ago—just after you broke your leg in the elevator.”

“For how long have you been searching my rooms?”

“For a long time, Mr. Newton.”

“Then you must have had reason to arrest me long before this. Why didn’t you do it?”

“Well,” Bowen said, “naturally we wanted to find out what you were up to first. With that ship you’re making in Kentucky. And, you must be aware, the whole thing is pretty tricky. You’ve become a very rich man, Mr. Newton, and we can’t go around arresting very rich men with impunity—especially if we are running what is supposed to be a sane government and our only charge against the rich man is that he’s from someplace like Venus.” He leaned forward, his voice softer. “ Is it Venus, Mr. Newton?”

Newton smiled back. Actually the new information hadn’t really changed things very much. “I never said it was anywhere but Idle Creek, Kentucky.”

Bowen looked down at the aspirin box thoughtfully. He picked it up, weighed it in the palm of his hand. Then he said, “As I’m sure you already know, this box is made of platinum, which you’ll admit is striking. It is also striking that, considering the—the quality of the materials and workmanship, as the phrase goes, it is a very inept imitation of a Bayer Aspirin box. For example, it’s a good fourth of an inch too large, and the colors are way off. Nor is the hinge made the way the Bayer people make them.” He looked at Newton. “Not that it’s a better hinge—just different.” He smiled again. “But probably the most striking thing about it is that there’s no fine print on the box, Mr. Newton—just vague lines that look like print.”

Newton was feeling uncomfortable, and angry with himself for not having remembered to destroy the box. “And what have you concluded from all that?” he said, knowing full well what they would have concluded.

“We concluded that someone had counterfeited the box as well as he could from a picture on a television commercial.” He laughed briefly. “From television in an extreme fringe area.”

“Idle Creek.” Newton said, “is an extreme fringe area.”

“So is Venus. And they sell Bayer Aspirin boxes, complete with aspirin, in the Idle Creek drugstore, for a dollar. There’s no need at all to make you own, in Idle Creek.”

“Not even if you happen to be a freakish eccentric, with very odd obsessions?”

Bowen still seemed amused—possibly with himself. “Not very likely,” he said. “As a matter of fact I might as well end all of this fencing.” He looked at Newton carefully. “One of the fascinating things about it is that a… a person of your intelligence could make so many blunders. Why do you suppose we happened to decide to pick you up when you were in Chicago? You’ve had two months to think about it.”

“I don’t know.” Newton said.

“That’s what I mean. Apparently you—Antheans, isn’t it?—aren’t altogether accustomed to thinking as we do. I believe any ordinary, human, detective magazine reader would have realized that we were bound to have had a microphone in your room in Chicago, when you were explaining yourself to Doctor Bryce.”

He remained silent for a full minute, stunned. Then, finally, he said, “No, Mr. Bowen, apparently Antheans don’t think as you people do. But then we wouldn’t lock a person up for two months so that we could ask him questions, the answers to which we already knew.”

Bowen shrugged his shoulders. “Modern governments move in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. However, it wasn’t my idea to arrest you; it was the FBI’s. Somebody high up panicked. They were afraid you were going to blow the world up with that ferry boat of yours. In fact that has been their theory about you from the very beginning. Their operatives filed reports about the project and the assistant directors would try to decide when you were going to launch it against Washington or New York.” He shook his head in mock sadness. “Ever since Edgar Hoover, that’s been a damn apocalyptic outfit.”

Newton got up abruptly and went to make himself a drink. Bowen asked him to fix three. Then he stood up himself and, hands in pockets, stared for a while at his shoes while Newton was making the drinks.

Handing the glasses to Bowen and the secretary—the secretary avoided his eyes as he took the drink—Newton thought of something. “But once the FBI heard your recording—I suppose you made a recording—they must have changed their minds about my purposes.”