The Man Who Fell to Earth

He thought, looking at the cat, if only you were the intelligent species on this world. And then, smiling wryly, maybe you are.

“We won’t necessarily become extinct. Disarmament is being negotiated. Not all of us are insane.”

“But most of you are. Enough of you are—it only requires a few insane ones, in the right places.

“I want you to save the world, Mr. Newton.”

Newton’s smile did not change, and his reply was immediate. “Is it worth saving, Nathan?”

It always horrified Bryce to see professors fawn on businessmen—the very men they ridiculed in their private conversations—whenever a research contract might be in the offing.

Weren’t there naive arts and sophisticated arts? And corrupt arts as well? And might that not be true of the sciences too? Could chemistry be more corrupt than botany? But that wasn’t so. It was the uses, the ends…

“But, damn it, you’re not gods.”

“No, but have your gods ever saved you before?”

“I don’t know. No, of course not.”

“There may be such a thing as human destiny,” Newton said, “but I rather imagine it resembles passenger-pigeon destiny.”

He was, if not happy, too busy to be unhappy.

He carried his bag and was accompanied by a nurse with a deliberately impassive face—the sort of face that seemed to say, “I don’t care what you die of, I intend to be efficient about my part of it.”

Bryce thought for a minute. Then he laughed at his situation: using a Martian, in a bar, for a confessor. But perhaps it was appropriate.

He had never seen anything funny about monkeys.

“Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.”

For a moment Bryce did not speak. Then he said, “But it was human beings who painted the pictures, made the statues.”

“Only a few human beings,” Newton said. “Only a few.”

“We must remember that the United States, regardless of what the uninformed may say, is not a second-rate power. We must remember that freedom will conquer, we must…”

Suddenly Newton realized that the man speaking was the President of the United States, and he was speaking the bombast of the hopeless.

Are you from Venus? Jupiter? Philadelphia?

The large picture of the heron on the far wall began to fade. When it was gone it was replaced by the head of a handsome man with the falsely serious stare in his eyes that is cultivated by politicians, faith healers, and evangelists.