Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

I took my shirt off and began working in earnest, pulling up the little gray mushrooms, dusting them off, and filling my bucket.

I stopped for breath after a while and looked up. Ruth was standing near me barefoot, resting herself. Her hair was wet from perspiration. “Remember what Charlie said about UV,” she said. “You can get a burn from those suns.”

That annoyed me a little. “I won’t get sunburned,” I said.

“You’re the boss,” she said. And then, “Ben. I wish you weren’t impotent.”

I felt relieved that she had said it. “Thank you,” I said.

“Would you like to make love anyway?” she said.

I must have just stared at her.

“You know,” she said. “There’s a lot we could do…”

“Yes, I know,” I said, coming out of it. She stepped closer and laid a hand lightly on my forearm.

I was embarrassed. “Ruth,” I said, “you’re a fine woman. But I don’t think I’m ready yet…”

She looked hurt for a moment. She let go of my arm and blushed. “Sure,” she said, “I understand.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt like a fool. A part of me would like to try myself with her on a field of spongy Juno grass under the palms. I could be an effective lover sometimes without the use of the essential. It had certainly been a long time. But I didn’t want to. “I’m really sorry, Ruth,” I said.

“It’s okay ,” her words said, but her voice said it wasn’t.

When we got back to the ship at first sunset, I found I was badly sunburned.

I had supper with the crew that night and they were high with excitement over the cargo, but I was miserable. I was painfully red and I felt foolish for letting myself get that way in the first place. I felt awkward about what had happened between Ruth and me.

I was halfway through the meal before I thought of endolin and asked Charlie where he kept it. He got up from his roast beef and went to his sick bay and got some. It was a little plastic cup of dried leaves. I took a pinch, waited several minutes for the annoying pain on my back and shoulders to go away, and nothing happened. Charlie had returned to his roast beef and to a joke he had been telling the navigator. When we had arrived at dessert, he got up and came over to my seat at the head of the table.

“How’re you feeling, Captain?” he said.

I looked up at him. “How long since I took it?”

He checked his watch. “A dozen minutes.”

“Well, it isn’t working,” I said.

“Give it a few more minutes,” he said.

I looked at him. “It’s not going to work, Charlie.”

“I’ll get you some more,” he said.

I looked at him. “Don’t bother,” I said. “Get some morphine.”

He stared at me for a minute. “ Ben ,” he said, “you kicked it…”

Inside, I was as astonished as he was. As far as I knew, I had hardly missed my chemical euphoria since the trip from Belson to Juno, and yet here I was with my attention suddenly fixed on wiping out the discomfort of a goddamn sunburn with, as they say, morphia. I was not only astonished; on some quiet level of perception and feeling, I was terrified. But my voice was unruffled and I felt outwardly as calm as a madonna. “Get me fifty milligrams, Charlie. I know what I’m doing.”

“Ben,” he said, “we jettisoned what I had left. Remember?”

“I remember,” I said. “But you can make it. Go make me some.”

The ship had a drug synthesizer. For some reason you couldn’t make aspirin with it, but you could make atropine, propranolol, prednisone, and two hundred milligrams of morphine sulphate a day—enough to keep a heavy spirit permanently afloat.

Charlie shook his head. “Ben,” he said, “as your doctor I can’t allow it.”

I stood up. I’m pretty tall and Charlie isn’t; I towered over him. “Charlie,” I said, “I am the captain of this ship. You aren’t making a house call. Get me that morphine.”

He said nothing and went and got it. I took the syringe from him right there in front of everybody at the mess table and shot myself in the throat with it, just like they do in the movies. Doing it I was outwardly calm, slightly theatrical. Inside I was astonished. I sat down again and waited. The fear went away. Euphoria settled over my unquiet spirit like a luminous dust.

So I was hooked after all. Part of me thought, with wonderment: if I was going to do this, why didn’t I do it with booze back in my forties in New York City? They have spiffy hospitals there for the well-heeled lush, and a man can ricochet around with a liquor habit for years and hardly suffer from it at all. I had sure come close to going that way—close enough that Anna thought I was an alcoholic. Her position was biased, however; I was drunker than usual around her. Anyway, here I was twenty light-years away from methadone centers and rehabilitation programs and emergency rooms, turning my bloodstream into a chemical bath for my brain. I am at heart a gambler and I am drawn to the edge. I stood now at an edge I had not dreamed of visiting until I broke my arm in my puppydog rush onto the slick black surface of Belson, my namesake planet.

It was then I made the decision to stay on when the Isabel went back with its cargo of uranium. I would write out instructions to Aaron and to Met Luk San and to Arnie; they would start buying utilities for me, selling my six million acres of woodlands, putting me in the electric-automobile business and, most of all, into the business of selling safe uranium. The instructions could be sent the minute the ship got into space-warp; they could get the whole thing started and when I got back to New York I would do the necessary tinkering with it. My uranium was in itself a brute fact; any bright student at the Harvard Business School—that training ground for fledgling swindlers—could work out a reasonable plan for making ten billion dollars from the Isabel’ s first cargo. There was a lot of rationalization in that; I knew I should get my ass back on Earth if I wanted things to go right, that you didn’t send boys to do men’s work. But down deep I didn’t care. I wasn’t ready to get involved. I might lose a few billion by not being there to decide whether to start buying electric clock factories or get into the highway construction business, but damn it, everything was going to start paying off like a gambler’s dream when all that power hit the hungry world. There was no way to lose, if I sold my wood, coal, solar plants and shale oil convertors and bought everything else in sight. Anyway, I had enough money already. And the Isabel now had enough uranium to buzz around the cosmos forever. Meanwhile I would have my fling with euphoria. I couldn’t O.D.; the synthesizer wouldn’t produce it that fast. What the hell, I had planned suicide once, in Mexico. People do that all the time; they did it over the Dow Jones Average back in the last century, dropping themselves onto Wall Street like garbage, over margin calls. Reason would dictate that if a man is ready to kill himself he should try something outrageous first.

I think the crew would have been less shocked if they found I had slit my throat, when I told them I was going to stay. “Look,” I said, “it’s nothing personal. I’m going to stay on until you people get back and I’m going to stay high on morphine while I do it. I’ll kick the habit in sleep on the way back. I know what I’m doing.”

But they looked at me as though I had gone berserk.

The night before the ship was to return to Earth I went to my stateroom alone and had a thoughtful supper of veal and Juno mushrooms with a half bottle of claret. It was dark outside my porthole; none of the moons was in view. I turned on the ball recorder and played the song of the Belson grass and let a pleasant melancholy suffuse my spirit. I had a small power hypodermic filled with morphine sulphate near my bedside. It was made of glass and chromium, like a fine camera. The sight of it was a deep comfort. The claret’s alcohol felt good in my veins—a shy, chaste sprinkle of euphoria; but morhpine was more to the point.