The Man Who Fell to Earth

And Newton, for the second time in two days, did something new to him, and very human. He screamed. He screamed wordlessly at first and then he found himself forming words: “Don’t you know I’m not human? I’m not a human being!” The cups had blocked off all light. He could see nothing, no one. “I’m not a human being at all!”

“Now come on,” the FBI man said, behind him.

And then there was a flash of silver light that was brighter, to Newton, than the midday sun of deep summer is to a man who has come from a dark room and has forced himself to stare up at it, open-eyed, until his eyes had gone dark. Then he felt the pressure leave his face, and knew that they had wheeled the machine away.

It was only after he had fallen twice that they tested his eyes and discovered that he was blind.

10

He was kept incommunicado in a government hospital for six weeks, where the government doctors were able to do nothing whatever for him. The light-sensitive cells of his retinas had been almost completely seared; they were no more capable of visual distinctions than is a greatly overexposed photographic plate. He could, after a few weeks, faintly make out light and dark, and could tell, when a large dark object was placed in front of him, that it was, indeed, a large, dark object. But that was all — no color was apparent, no form.

It was during this period that he began to think again of Anthea. At first his mind found itself recalling old and scattered memories, mostly of his childhood. He remembered a certain chesslike game that he had loved as a child — a game played with transparent cubes on a circular board — and he found himself recalling the complex rules whereby the pale green cubes took precedence over the gray ones when their configurations formed polygons. He remembered the musical instruments he had studied, the books he had read, especially the history books, and the automatic ending of his childhood at the age of thirty-two Anthean years — or forty-five, as the human beings counted time — by marriage. He had not chosen his wife himself, although that was sometimes done, but had permitted his family to make the choice. The marriage had been an effective one, and pleasant enough. There had been no passion, but Antheans were not a passionate race. Now blind, in a United States hospital, he found himself thinking of his wife more fondly than he ever had before. He missed her, and wished she were with him. Sometimes he wept.

Not being able to watch television, he would listen at times to the radio. The government, he learned, had not been able to keep his blindness a secret. The Republicans were making considerable use of him in their campaign. What had happened to him they called an example of administrative high-handedness and irresponsibility.

After the first week he felt no rancor toward them. How could he be angry with children? Van Brugh offered embarrassed apologies; it had all been a mistake; he had not known the FBI hadn’t been informed of Newton’s peculiarities. He was aware that Van Brugh did not actually care, that he was only worried about what he, Newton, might eventually say to the press, what names he would name. Newton assured him, wearily, that he would say nothing except that it was all an unavoidable accident. No one’s fault — an accident.

Then one day Van Brugh told him that he had destroyed the tape. He had known from the beginning, he said, that no one would believe it anyway. They would believe it to be a fake, or that Newton was insane, or anything except that it was true.

Newton asked him if he believed it was true.

“Of course I believe it,” Van Brugh said quietly. “At least six people know about it and believe it. The President is one of them, and so is the Secretary of State. But we’re destroying the records.”

“Why?”

“Well,” Van Brugh laughed coldly, “among other things we don’t want to go down in history as the greatest assembly of crackpots ever to govern this country.”

Newton set down the book with which he had been practicing Braille. “Then I can resume my work? In Kentucky?”

“Possibly. I don’t know. We’ll be watching you every minute for the rest of your life. But if the Republicans get in I’ll be replaced. I don’t know.”

Newton picked up the book again. For a moment he had been interested, for the first time in weeks, in what was going on around him. But the interest had gone as quickly as it had come, leaving no trace. He laughed gently. “That’s interesting,” he said.

* * *