Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

I picked up the syringe speculatively, held it up to the light on my desk. The addict falls in love with the tools; I found the syringe a pleasure merely to hold lightly in my hand. Phallic. Soon I would force the drug into my neck, not far from the jugular vein, in what I had come to call the “Dracula spot”—halfway between brain and heart.

I set it down for a moment. There was a knock at my locked door. I was startled and annoyed. I got up from my chair and opened the door. It was Ruth. She was wearing her plain khaki pilot’s uniform, but her hair and skin looked fresh and bright.

“What is it?” I said.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Ben. I want to talk to you.”

“Okay,” I said and let her come in. She seated herself on the edge of my bed and I went back to my Eames chair.

“Ben,” she said, awkwardly. “We may not see each other again.”

That was a surprise. “You’re coming back with the ship, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I only signed up for one voyage. I don’t think I should be away from my eight-year-old any longer than that.”

I was impatient with this. “I’m sorry to lose you as a pilot,” I said. “Mel should be able to get someone else, though.”

“Ben, I want to give you my address and telephone number in Columbus, Ohio. I’d like to stay in touch.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, Ruth.” She handed me a square of paper with writing on it and I slipped it into my billfold where I keep papers with such things on them as the names of Isabel’s cats and last September’s price of wheat in Chicago. There’s a forest of random information in there waiting for me to broadcast it into my central computer in Atlanta.

I felt something else was called for from me. “Ruth,” I began, “it’s a pity we didn’t become lovers.”

She shook her head. “That’s okay now,” she said. “But I don’t think you should stay on Juno. What if you get sick or break a leg?”

“I won’t get sick,” I said. “The microorganisms for that aren’t around here. And I won’t break a leg in this gravity. I’ll be okay.”

“Ben,” she said. “It seems so damned foolish. You need to be on Earth, selling the uranium. Making deals.”

I was beginning to get angry. I didn’t need this motherly concern. “Damn it, Ruth, I know what I’m doing. I’m sending back enough instructions to keep my people in New York busy for a year. I need time to myself. I need to ride my morphine habit, too…” I nodded toward the hypodermic on the table.

Her face opened a bit at this frankness. “Are you really hooked, Ben?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I love it a lot.”

“What’s wrong ?” she said. “Why should a man so lively and strong and rich…? Hell, Ben, there’s so much to you. You don’t need drugs.”

Somehow I became furious at this. I could have slapped her. “How do you know what I need?” I said. “How in hell do you know what goes on inside me?”

She stared at me. “I’m sorry. But I think you’re a fool to spend months on Juno alone. You can withdraw from your habit in a long sleep. You did it before.”

“I want to do it this way, Ruth. I’m fifty-two years old and I know what I want to do for myself. I’m not ready to go back to New York and start making money. I have a dozen people whom I trust to run my businesses. I’m on vacation.” I settled back into my chair.

She sat and looked at me for a long time. “Okay, Ben,” she said, and stood up. “I’ve said what I had to.”

I could see that she was really pretty and kindhearted and something inside me reached out to her. But I pulled back from the feeling. I did not want to make love to her and I wanted to be alone with my hypodermic. I held my hand out to her. I was shocked to see that it was trembling.

She shook it and left. There was ice in my stomach. Old, glacial ice.

I locked the cabin door behind her, picked up my syringe and lay back on the bed. I held the head of it to my neck, just below the mastoids, and gently squeezed the handle. Oh yes. Comfort came down.

And as my high settled in for the night a relay somewhere in my head clicked into place and my decision veered toward its real direction. I would not stay on Juno. It was not Juno my heart longed for, with all its abundance of life and power. Not Juno at all.

I looked at them all sitting around the table, drew in a breath and said, “We’ll activate the ship’s coils at nine A.M. tomorrow. The Isabel should be in orbit by noon and into a warp an hour after.” My head ached, but my mind was clear.

“Terrific, Captain!” Charlie said. Ruth smiled toward me. Everyone looked cheerful. They had known we would be leaving tomorrow, but this was the first official announcement of it.

“Before you start planning your homecomings, I have some news for you that you won’t like,” I said. I paused only a second. “We are taking a detour by Belson. I’m staying there.”

They were dismayed and they fussed and fumed about it. I thought for a while they might even mutiny. But eventually they accepted it. We were, as I had said, in our warp shortly after lunchtime the next day. By suppertime I was in my chemical sleep. Twelve days. That was the time from Aminidab to Fomalhaut. It was taking them twenty-four days out of their way home, and I didn’t blame them for being pissed. But there was enough fuel for it and I promised them all a bonus for the extra time.

When I came out of my sleep and went up to the bridge and looked out the window, there was Belson at about the size the moon is when seen from Earth. It looked as empty as the moon. I had awakened with cold in my gut and remembered no dreams; the sight of that planet of black glass sent a deep chill into my soul; it was all I could do not to quail at it and tell Ruth not to land. Where did these spooky feelings come from, anyway? I had never felt anything but love for Belson—even when it had broken my arm.

I steeled myself, shook off the bad feelings as well as I could, and told Ruth to pick a spot on the other side of the planet from where we were before. She was shocked to hear my voice. She had been sitting hunched over the controls when I came in and hadn’t looked up. Somehow she had cut her hair. It looked nice short. She blinked at me and then frowned slightly. “Good morning, Captain.”

“Good morning, Ruth. Find us a big plain of obsidian and come down on it. I don’t want us hurting the grass.”

“Okay, Captain,” she said. And she did it. Within two hours she had set us down on the planet’s day side without even a bump. Out the portholes was Belson, looking the same here as on its other side. And my spooky feelings had evaporated. I couldn’t wait to get out there and start making my homestead.

It took a week. On the first day we explored the new area just to make sure. There was a higher proportion of obsidian to grass here, but that was the only difference. On the second and third days I erected myself this shack of moonwood, with the help of five crew members.

We outfitted it from the ship. We carried out the little red computer that I use for writing this journal, four of the Nautilus machines, eighteen cases of wine and, from the ship’s garden, an array of hydroponics. I have my Eames chair, a mattress, my books and a very serious voice-activated recorder for recording the song of the Belson grass. A lot of food, a lot of whiskey, the drug synthesizer, seeds and hydroponics. I am relatively happy now.

My stateroom aboard the Isabel was not much bigger than my bathroom at the Pierre; it barely held my narrow bed, my Eames chair and a small desk. Above the desk was a narrow bookshelf, and to the right of it a hatchway that led into my private head. Whatever Chinese had designed the head had placed things so that when I sat on the john I faced a porthole that gave a view of the Milky Way; the clarity of the view was, shortly after I arose in the mornings, breathtaking. Being in spacewarp and at an analogy travel rate of two hundred times the speed of light did not affect it. I sat on the can in the mornings and watched the starry universe.