Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

During the nine months I lived in that mansion and tried to be a family man I would, from time to time, feel guilty about my style of life and about all the money I had. I have always been a Communist manqué, perhaps even more so than Isabel. And Isabel was born in a Communist country and went to Maoist schools. My parents seldom spoke at the dinner table in more than grunts; when they did speak it was usually to remind me that a family of six in India could have been fed on the vegetables I didn’t want to eat. I silently wished in those days that I had a postpaid jiffy bag by my plate, into which I could dump my uneaten Spam and mail it off immediately to some address in New Delhi. I still pay a dole in guilt for my affluence.

Sometimes I would roam through the long hallways and parlors of my big house and find myself thinking, “What a waste!” I would decide glumly to turn the place into a shelter for homeless drunks or a hospital, that I myself really needed no more than a single room. But then I would console myself, as one does at such times, by thinking of worse cases. If I looked across the street from my big dining-room window I could see the facade of a mansion bigger than mine, with a brass plaque that read THE PENNY NEWTON MEMORIAL SHELTER. Penny, dead a dozen years, was the last of that family of oil barons and electronics wizards; she had put her hundreds of millions into endowing a five-story mansion to be used as a home for stray cats. There were about six thousand pussycats living across the street from me, and brigades of uniformed men searched the city for more, while a staff of veterinarians and nutritionists kept the residents glossy-coated and bright-eyed. There were still plenty of families in Harlem with rickets and frostbite. Ratbite too. What the hell, at least I had earned my money. Penny had done nothing in her entire life but attend the ballet, play whist and accumulate dividends from the fortune her father had cheated other people out of. My general feeling was that the wealth of most of my neighbors was as unearned and as trivially spent; Penny’s cat home was merely more blatant. Property is theft.

After several days of it, the loading got to be routine, although some crew members continued to go around in a kind of protracted excitement. I was neither thrilled nor glum, but I realized my emotional distance from the ore that continued to pile up had separated me from the crew too, canceling the picnic as it were. I made the motions of supervising the work, but I gave no orders or instructions. It was Annie with her tanned, serious face and her quickness who ran the show. Under her supervision the raw Juno subsoil was fed into machinery that refined and compacted it and processed the pure uranium into heavy yellowish pellets about the size of a twenty-dollar coin but an inch thick. The Isabel had brought a supply of boron moderators just in case radioactivity had to be contended with, and these were, on Annie’s orders, placed between the pellets. Stacks of twenty pellets alternating with twenty moderators were then covered with transparent, high-density sheaths. The result looked like some kind of gargantuan candy roll or parfait; it would be placed carefully in a plastic case along with nineteen others of its kind. The cases were numbered and loaded into the Isabel’ s storage by a crane.

This was not a neat and smooth operation, as in a Japanese holovision factory. Nobody wore a white lab coat, and there was a lot of dust, noise, confusion and sweating. But the boxes, looking sturdy and potent, were stacking up in the holds at an exhilarating pace—exhilarating to the others, if not to me.

I worked out in the gym every morning during these days. I took Artaud, my trainer, off the work crew for enough time to help me get the zero-gravity springs off the machines and replace them with weights, but I didn’t need his help in working out. The crew was invited to use the gym too; but I was usually in there alone, shortly after a light breakfast, putting myself through a pretty grueling sequence. It would be painful sometimes, doing repeated movements against those weights, but it accomplished something very necessary for my spirit.

After working out I showered heavily, dried off with one of the Isabel’ s heavy towels, dressed in jeans and lumberjack shirt, and went outside to make a show of being the captain of this busy and cheerful crew. Every now and then I lent a hand if one of the conveyor belts jammed or a slowdown cropped up along the line. In the afternoons I would go to my stateroom and spend some time trying to plan out my course of action when I returned to Earth with the Isabel’ s cargo. I would try to concentrate on some of the basic decisions: should I set up my own power plants or try merging with businesses like Con Ed? Should I merely sell uranium, confining myself to the fuel market in the way I had started out, hauling coal in a wagon? Should I buy more ships and have a fleet of them ferrying fuel to Earth? Should I go into the electric-car business or even the lighting and small-appliance business, which would be booming as electricity became abundant again? I somehow could not really focus on these questions. It lacked substance. It all seemed foregone.

At night I had supper at my desk and then played solo chess or read. I usually drank, alone.

One morning in the gym, during the second week of loading, another person came in just after I had started working out. It was Howard, dressed in yellow shorts, looking skinny and embarrassed. Howard is an intellectual, he’d been a professor of biochemistry somewhere for years, and he looked comical standing in the hatchway.

“Come on in,” I said, heaving my legs up against a hundred and fifty pounds.

He seemed heartened by that. He came over and strapped himself into the hip-and-back machine, next to mine.

“Did you warm up first?” I said.

He nodded. “Stationary running, in the mess hall.”

I grunted and continued. For a while we both worked silently. We unstrapped and changed machines; Howard moved to the leg raise I’d just left and I moved to the leg curl. He set the weights down to sixty and we began working our machines in unison. “Captain,” Howard suddenly said, panting, “do you have trouble sleeping here? With the short days and the two suns?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t say that I was usually drunk by the time I turned in.

He nodded. “One of those suns is always coming up just when I’m going to sleep.”

“Close down the hatch by your bunk,” I said. “Put a pillow over your head.”

“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “I could do that.”

For a while there was silence except for the squeaking of the cams and the clunking of the weights in their tracks. When we got up to switch to the next machines he spoke again. “I keep thinking about my wives when I go to bed.”

“Wives?” I said.

“Six.”

That was a serious number. But I didn’t want to talk about women just then. “Where are you from, Howard?”

He lay down on the leg-curl bench and awkwardly got his heels under the lifter. “Columbus, Ohio.”

“Isn’t that where Ruth’s from?”

“Yes. Ruth’s my sister.” He strained to lift the weights but nothing happened.

“I’ll get it,” I said. He was trying to do the hundred pounds I’d been using. I set it back to forty. I was a bit shocked to think of this skinny guy as the brother of Ruth, with her hefty build. “I didn’t know that,” I said. “You sure don’t look alike.”

“I favor our mother.”

I seated myself in the overhead press and began working.

“Ruth’s a smart one,” he said.

I didn’t reply. Howard annoyed me, as much in his tone of voice as anything. I knew that if some part of me had given up back when I was a dirty-kneed kid I could have grown up to be like him. I pushed hard at the weights, repeating fast until I could feel the sweat pop out and hear myself groaning with the effort. If my father had seduced me into imitating his aloofness and if my mother had hidden her chaos and self-hate better, instead of letting it all hang out there in the kitchen where gin bottles outnumbered spice jars…