Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

After a moment I passed a patch with cracks. In the cracks grew endolin; I could see it there, the color of heather. I bent and pulled a pinch of it. My neck was still sore from staring at the takeoff and after. I chewed and swallowed the endolin and as I continued walking the pain eased. Wonderful stuff, when fresh. If only it could speak to the soul the way morphine does. The way the grass had done.

I stopped at the end of the field. At nighttime there is usually a breeze here; one had just sprung up. The light was weak, and the grass looked gray and silky. The sky was a deep emerald. I stood at the edge of the rippling grass, finished off my drink and said, “Hello. I’m your new neighbor.” The grass waved silently in the wind but said nothing.

I stood there alone for a long time while the sky turned black and the stars came out. There was a pink light from the only moon up, off to my left. And then for a minute I was seized with loneliness. I missed Isabel. I wanted her looking at that black sky with me. I did not want to make love to her, not even necessarily to kiss her. I just wanted her with me.

I turned and went back to my cabin, had another drink, and played the part of Così fan tutte that was left on my recorder. I’d had the machine on the seat arm between us; at several points on the recording I could hear the rustling of Isabel’s dress, there at the Metropolitan Opera.

For the next few days I busied myself making simple pieces of furniture. The moonwood came from an outcropping about a hundred yards to the south of my cabin. I cut boards from it with a hot wire slicer, much like using a cheese knife on gruyère, and then nailed them together into a chair and two small tables and a set of shelves. The nails were pieces of heavy wire cut in the Isabel’ s machine shop and fed into a forming machine that gave them a point and a head.

Every few hours I would take a break from the carpentry, not because it was difficult but because I wanted to stretch the project out. I would shoot a little morphine and then go out looking for endolin. There was a lot of it. At least once a day I would go stand at the end of the grass and speak to it, but it never spoke back to me.

I discovered something important about endolin. I had accidentally gotten a few twigs of it wet once while checking the irrigation flow in my hydroponics. I’d set the twigs on a two-day-old lettuce plant so I could use both hands to tighten a plastic fitting. Some water sprayed the endolin. Later, when it dried out in the sun, I saw it had changed color, from heather to a dark brown. When I picked it up, a fine grayish dust sifted down from the twigs onto my hand and onto the ground.

The drug synthesizer has an electronic analysis device as a doublecheck precaution. You can read out the formula for the drug you just made. A person wouldn’t want the machine to slip up and make strychnine by mistake. I used the analyzer to check out the gray dust from the endolin and found it was the pure alkaloid, just as Howard had written it down for me. The rest of the plant turned out to be mostly cellulose. So the gray dust was concentrated endolin. Very concentrated; its weight was less than a fiftieth that of the twig.

It occurred to me immediately that the stuff might keep better in this form. I spent a few hours gathering a bushel and a half of the twigs. Then I wet them down thoroughly and spread them to dry in the next day’s sun. When they had dried out I picked them up a few at a time and shook them carefully over a large plastic bowl. Eventually there was a half cup of gray powder in the bowl. I checked it on the analyzer, saw that it was indeed the alkaloid, sealed it into a folded-up square of plastic, and irradiated it just as I was prepared to irradiate lettuce and peas for preservation. In the nearly two months since I tried that, it has worked perfectly. A three-milligram pinch of the dust, stirred into water and swallowed, will cure the worst morphine hangover in about a minute. There are no side effects. My health here on Belson is perfect. Ben Belson, pharmacological researcher. With a patent on this stuff, back on Earth, a smart man could get a 15 percent interest in Parke-Davis, or Lao-tzu. It’s a business I’ve never fooled with, but what the hell.

So that added another project to my daily rounds: preparing concentrated endolin. The analyzer’s scales have a beam, so that whatever gravitation I’m in will give constant readings. I now have fifty-three pounds, Earth weight. That’s almost all the plastic bags I can spare. It’s enough to cure all the hangovers in Japan. They can stir it into their tea.

What a narrow, limited life this is! And how it has grown on me, how I take to it so easily! I am not homesick and I am not lonely anymore. Or if I am lonely I don’t know it. Sometimes I think I swim in loneliness the way a fish swims in water, unaware that it is wet.

In my third month I began to shoot dope in dead earnest. My veins swelled with morphine and my brain became a hot fog, burning with euphoria. Sometimes there were nightmares. I saw in sharp detail De Quincey’s three old women, constructing themselves with gold knitting needles, their bodies self-knitted and self-purled for me. One resembled Aunt Myra, but when I spoke her name she looked away. Eventually all three burst into white flame and I heard myself screaming.

At the start of the fourth month I stayed on my back in bed for over four days, until the Shartz machine’s morphine reserve was gone. When I finally got out of bed I fell to one knee and thought for a while of never getting up. I might have stayed there and died if I hadn’t been hungry. There was a large pail of water by my bedside, but no food. I hadn’t eaten in four days. My stomach felt stuck together and my head was primarily a pulse.

I pulled myself up and slowly walked outside, like a sleepwalker. It was midday and I squinted. At first I thought I was seeing another hallucination: the plants in my garden were black. I blinked and stared and scratched my funky armpits. Hair came out and stuck under my nails. For some reason the soles of my feet were sore. It was no dream. My garden had died. Black as sin. I fell once on my way to the lettuce—my dear lettuce. The leaves were like huge flakes of ash and they became powder in my trembling hand.

I stooped to my carrots and dug three up with my fingernails; what was beneath the ash leaves were brown crumbly shafts with a sour smell to them. I sat in the center of my garden, surrounded by ash and bad smells, and I remembered lying on my bed in chemical bedazzlement and looking out the door to see a black rain falling from the lavender sky and smoke rising from my garden as the rain hit my beloved plants. I had taken it for hallucination, on a par with the three self-knitted maiden aunts—the kind of thing that goes away. It didn’t go away.

I lit a cigar and continued sitting. My hands still shook but my head was beginning to clear. What I needed was a dozen raw eggs and a bottle of whiskey, but I let the cigar be my pacifier while I added it up. Clearly there was more to this planet than met the eye. It had pulled a fast one on me, with its death rain. What would have happened to my body had I been outdoors during the rainfall? Would my skin have gone the way of the lettuce? Must I now escalate my imitation of Robinson Crusoe and make myself an umbrella out of what was available? I dropped that for a while and thought of food. The Isabel would not be back for months. I had four boxes of irradiated meat behind the cabin and two dozen cartons of dried food by my sink. There was a large supply of vitamin pills and protein tablets.

I had a frightening thought, bit down on my cigar and pushed myself up. I padded back to the cabin and then around it, to where the meat was stored in sealed plastic cartons. My premonition was right; the rain had eaten through the cartons, turning them gray. Inside each, where lamb chops and steaks and pot roasts had lain ready for cooking in molecular suspension, now lay stacks of individually wrapped hockey pucks—dark and shriveled and smelling to high heaven or whatever it was above the inscrutable Belson sky. I stepped back from the smell and stared upward for a long while with an Old Testament feeling, wondering what celestial visitation this perverse planet had prepared for me. In my mind were the words spoken to Job: “I alone am escaped to tell thee.” Son of a bitch.