Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

I finished, unstrapped and wiped the sweat off with a towel. The hatch was open and from outside came the muted shouts and grinding sounds of the loading operation. I waited for Howard to finish and then said, “I’ve had women troubles lately myself. How do you feel about marriage, after six tries?”

He puffed heavily for a while. Then he said, “I’m not sure. Every time I do it I have high hopes. But then the fighting starts.”

I took a towel from a hook on the bulkhead and handed it to him, for the sweat. “Over what?”

“Money. Sex. The way she dresses. What we eat.” He dabbed at his chest and armpits. “You know.”

“I know.” I wrapped my towel around my neck and did a few knee bends. Outside the porthole I heard Annie shouting orders to someone.

“Are you married now?” I said.

“No. But I think about trying again.”

“Maybe that’s why you can’t sleep.”

“Could be.”

I finished my workout in silence and showered before Howard was through his. During my shower it occurred to me that I might not go back to Earth with the Isabel .

The next morning I decided to go back to the valley by our original landing site and pick some food. I wanted to get away from all the activity around the ship. Annie had worked out an improved system by then that didn’t require the smaller jeep. I had the earth-moving rig taken off it and invited Ruth to go along with me. She accepted, and we took off on the long drive. We didn’t talk much during the trip. I drove it at fifteen miles an hour and had to pay attention to the road.

I parked at a place where Annie’s road came within a few hundred yards of the valley. We got out, carrying buckets for the food we were going to pick, headed into the forest, and began walking along one of the lanes between orange-trunked palms. “Ruth,” I said, “how’d you come to be a star pilot? Is it something you dreamed about when you were a kid?”

She looked over at me. “I took it as an elective in college.”

“An elective?” I said. “What kind of college gives electives like that?”

“Ohio State. I was studying to be a railroad engineer. That was my dream when I was a kid. I wanted to pull the cord that blows the whistle.”

I knew what she meant. “Have you ever done it?”

“Nope.” There was a hint of melancholy in her voice. “I never have.”

I started to say something else when she went on. She seemed looser now and eager to talk. “There was a course in astronavigation on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and it fit my schedule. I had thermodynamics and steam-power systems in the mornings, and I wanted something simple after lunch. I thought astronavigation would be easy, because nobody was piloting spaceships anymore.”

“Why were they teaching it at all?”

“Well, they still had the equipment. The Sony Trainer and videospheres from the days of the Uranium Bust. Their landing simulator was a dream. I made an ‘A’ in the course, and took another. It was still a glamour course.”

“Really?” I said. “It must have been twenty years since anybody had flown a spaceship…”

“You’re forgetting the TV shows,” she said. “Remember those space adventure stories?” She stopped walking for a moment and looked over at me, with her eyes just a bit wide. She looked very attractive that way. “You know,” she said, “we’ve actually done what they were doing in those shows. We’ve found uranium! ” I thought Ruth was an unemotional type; this was the first time I had heard a thrill like that in her voice. It was a pleasure to see her like that. “We sure have,” I said.

“How much money do you think it’s worth?”

“Trillions,” I said. “It’s a fucking king’s ransom.”

“Then why aren’t you more excited?” she said. “You’re supposed to be a… a tycoon .”

That was a funny word for her and I had to laugh. “Ruth, I really don’t know. I think about hauling this cargo back to Chicago and New York and the things I have to buy and sell and all the wheeling and dealing I have to do and it just bores me.”

She was still looking at me. She stopped walking and bent down and pulled a blade of grass and began chewing it. We all did that every now and then; the grass on Juno had a pleasant licorice flavor. In fact, I think it’s habit-forming. I thought sadly of Belson grass. And then Ruth said something that shocked me. It was as though she were reading my mind. “Something happened to you on Belson, didn’t it?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Was it morphine?”

I thought for a minute. “No.”

She nodded. “But it was something… something mystical,” she said.

I was surprised at her knowingness about me, but I remained silent.

“Come on, Ben,” she said. “It’s been written all over you since that morning we had to carry you back to the ship.”

“Even during the picnic?” The picnic had been about a month before this.

“Even during the picnic.” She smiled. “You were very sweet then and we all loved you. But a part of you was somewhere else.”

“I was thinking about Isabel. A woman friend.”

She frowned. “It was something else, Ben.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was.” But I didn’t want to talk to her about how it felt to hear the Belson grass, holding me in its thousands of gentle fingers, saying, “I love you.”

“Come on, Ben,” Ruth said. “What’s the matter?”

I looked at her closely. She was really very good-looking. “Well,” I said, “sex, for one thing.” I bent down and pulled a piece of licorice grass myself. “I’ve been impotent for the last couple of years.”

“Oh,” she said.

I laughed wryly. “Yeah,” I said, suddenly feeling very relieved.

We had come to the rise and we began scrambling silently down the hill. When we were about halfway down I stopped and let Ruth go on ahead. I stood and looked around and then up ahead at the enormous valley that stretched ahead of me to the horizon. It was as splendid a vista as a man could ever want to see. I drew a deep breath of the delicious air and thought with a profound historical thrill, as deep as my genes: if mankind ever leaves a shattered Earth to live elsewhere in the universe, it should be for Juno. This was a second chance as vast and breathtaking as the one spread before the eyes of Columbus and his sailors—those rapt men from the alleys of Barcelona and Seville. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Planetfall had confused me; with the heavy rain, the frustration, I had missed this thrill at the time, intent merely on exploration and discovery. It had caught me now, after my conversation with Ruth. I was staggered by this planet, its breadth and diversity—its beauty and life. A part of me had been searching, all my life, for a home; my bags had always been packed. And here it was.

I looked up. Two suns shone pleasantly down on my body. At night there would be a half-dozen moons. Everything about this place was generous, replete, fulfilling. I breathed as deeply as my lungs would allow, exhaled, and walked slowly down the rest of the hill, into the valley.

Ruth was off a bit to my right and I started to walk toward her, but then decided to stay alone for a bit. I walked to my left, toward a small field of mushrooms that grew in Juno’s open suns. Ruth waved at me and I waved back and bent to picking, and after a while my exalted feelings began to leave. I began sweating. It was hot. I looked over toward Ruth; she was gathering the little red berries we had discovered a few days before. As I was looking toward her she stood up and arched her back and stretched. She was sweating too and the cloth of her blouse was clinging damply to her full breasts. How pleasant to see that!