Уолтер Тевис - The Man Who Fell to Earth

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.