Уолтер Тевис - The Man Who Fell to Earth

The man smiled. “Van Brugh doesn’t tell anybody anything, except maybe the President, and he tells him only what he feels like telling.”

At the end of the hallway—or tunnel, he was not certain which it was—was a door that led them into what appeared to be an oversized dentist’s office. It was startlingly clean, with pale yellow tiles. There was a chair of the sort that dentists use, flanked by several uncomfortably new-looking machines. Two women and a man stood waiting, smiling politely, wearing pale yellow smocks that matched the tiles. He had expected to see Van Brugh—he wasn’t certain why—but Van Brugh was not in the room. The man who had accompanied him here conducted him to the chair. He grinned. “I know it looks awful, but they won’t do anything that hurts. Some routine tests, mostly for identification.”

“My God,” Newton said, “haven’t you tested me enough?”

“Not us, Mr. Newton. I’m sorry if there’s any duplication of what the CIA’s been doing. But we’re FBI, and we have to get this stuff for our files. You know, blood type, fingerprints, EEG, things like that.”

“All right.” He sat resignedly in the chair. Van Brugh had said that governments moved in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. Anyway it shouldn’t take too long.

For a while they prodded and inspected him with needles, photographic equipment, and various metallic devices. They put clamps on his head to measure his brain waves, clamps on his wrists to measure his heartbeat. Some of their results he knew must be surprising them, but they showed no surprise. It was all, as the FBI man had said, a matter of routine.

And then, after about an hour, they wheeled a machine up in front of him, putting it very close, and asked him to remove his glasses. The machine had two lenses, spaced like eyes, which seemed to regard him quizzically. There was a black rubber cup, like an eyecup, around each lens.

He was immediately frightened. If they did not know about the peculiarities of his eyes… “What are you going to do with that?”

The yellow-frocked technician took a small ruler from his shirt pocket and held it across the bridge of Newton’s nose, measuring. His voice was flat. “We’re just going to make some photographs of you,” he said. “Won’t hurt.”

One of the women, smiling professionally, reached out for his dark glasses. “Here, sir, we’ll just take these off now…”

He jerked his head away from her, putting up a hand to defend his face. “Just a minute. What kind of photographs?”

The man at the machine hesitated a moment. Then he glanced at the FBI man, now seated near the wall. The FBI man nodded affably. The man in the yellow smock said, “Actually, two kinds of pictures, sir, both at once. One’s a routine I.D. photo of your retinas, to get the blood vessel pattern. Best identification you can make. Then the other picture is X-ray. We want the ridges at the inside of your occiput—the back of your skull.”

Newton tried to get out of the chair. “No!” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Faster than he would have believed possible, the affable FBI man was behind him, pulling him back into the chair. He was unable to move. Probably the FBI man was not aware of it, but a woman could have held him easily. “I’m sorry, sir,” the man behind him was saying, “but we have to have those pictures.”

He tried to calm himself. “Haven’t you been informed about me? Haven’t you been told about my eyes? Certainly they know about my eyes.”

“What about your eyes?” the man in the yellow gown said. He seemed impatient.

“They are sensitive to X-rays. That device…”

“Nobody’s eyes can see X-rays.” The man pursed his lips, obviously in irritation. “Nobody sees at those frequencies.” He nodded to the woman and, smiling uncomfortably, she took his glasses off. The light in the room made him blink.

“I do,” he said, squinting. “I see altogether differently from the way you do.” Then, “Let me show you the way my eyes are made. If you’ll release me I’ll remove my… my contact lenses.”

The FBI man did not release him. “Contact lenses?” the technician said. He leaned over closely, staring for a long moment into Newton’s eyes. Then he drew back. “You’re not wearing contact lenses.”

He was feeling a sensation he had not felt for a long time—panic. The brightness of the room had become oppressive; it seemed to pulsate around him with the regularity of his heartbeat. His speech felt thick, drunken. “They’re a… new kind of lens. A membrane, not plastic. If you’ll release me for a moment I’ll show you.”

The technician was still pursing his lips. “There’s no such thing,” he said. “I’ve had experience for twenty years with contact lenses and…”

Behind him the FBI man said something beautiful. “Let him try, Arthur,” he said, abruptly releasing his arms. “After all, he’s a taxpayer.”

Newton let out a sigh. Then he said, “I’ll need a mirror.” He began fumbling in his pockets and, suddenly, panicked again. He did not have the special little tweezers with him, the ones designed for removing the membranes…. “I’m sorry,” he said, talking to none of them in particular. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to have an instrument. Maybe back in my room…”

The FBI man smiled patiently. “Now come on,” he said. “We don’t have all day. And I couldn’t get in that room if I wanted to.”

“All right,” Newton said. “Then do you have a pair of small tweezers? Maybe I can do it with them.”

The technician grimaced. “Just a minute.” He mumbled something else, then went to a drawer. In a minute he had assembled a formidable set of shining instruments—tweezers, quasi-tweezers, and tweezerlike tools of unknown function. He laid them out on the table beside the dentist’s chair.

One of the women had already handed Newton a circular mirror. He picked a blunt-ended small tweezer from the table. It was not very much like the one made for the job, but it might work. He clicked it experimentally a few times. Maybe a little too large, but it would have to do.

Then he found that he could not hold the mirror steady. He asked the woman who had given it to him to hold it. She stepped closer and took the mirror, holding it too near his face. He told her to back off a bit, then had to make her readjust its angle so that he could see properly. He was still squinting. The man in the yellow gown was beginning to tap his foot on the floor. The tapping seemed to keep time with the pulsation of the lights in the room.

When he brought his hand, carrying the tweezer, toward his eyes, the fingers began to tremble uncontrollably. He drew the hand back quickly. He tried again, but could not get the thing near his eye. His hand shook violently this time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Just a minute more…” His hand drew back involuntarily from his eye, from fear of the instrument and of the damnably shaking, trembling, uncontrolled fingers. The tweezers fell from his hand, into his lap. He fumbled for them, then, sighing, looked at the FBI man, whose face was noncommittal. He cleared his throat, still squinting. Why did the lights have to be so bright? “Do you suppose,” he said, “that I could have a drink? Of gin?”

Abruptly the man laughed. But this time the laugh did not seem affable. It sounded sharp, cold, brutal. And it rang in the tiled room.

“Now come on,” the man said, smiling indulgently. “Now come on.”

Desperately now, he grasped the tweezers. If he could get only one of the membranes partly off, even if he damaged the eye, they could tell… Why didn’t Van Brugh come and tell them? It would be better for him to ruin one of his eyes than to submit them both to that machine, to those lenses that wanted to stare into his skull, to count, for some reason of idiots, the ridges on the back of his skull from the inside, counting them through his eyes, his sensitive eyes.