Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

The other people in the crew were supposed to have been using the gym but probably hadn’t. They were clearly bothered by the sudden increase in weight. But my muscles were ready for it and it felt good to have heft for a while again. I did a lot of walking that last day in transit, through the engine room, the garden, across the bridge, through the storage and equipment and research rooms. Whenever I passed a port I looked out to see my enlarging planet, Belson. I spoke to no one. The landing would be done by automatic equipment, with the pilot at ready to override if necessary. The pilot was a middle-aged woman with red hair; I had hired her with the possibility of sex in mind—there was something motherly about her and I am drawn to that.

I had no real ambitions for Belson, and I had come to see that. If I found uranium it would be a pleasure, but what the hell. Maybe I had really come all this way to give the place a name, to stake out an unworldly home for myself. Belson had a breathable atmosphere and mild temperatures; a man could live there if he had food and water enough. But the image of myself as the first extraterrestrial hermit had no appeal then and I shook it off.

It was my accountant, a gentle and paunchy Jew named Aaron, whom I first told of my plan to hunt uranium in space. “What for?” he said. He was drinking a Perrier. We were at P. J. Clark’s and it was November and already snowing heavily outside the windows.

I looked at him and finished my rum and Coke. “Money.”

“You need more money?” Aaron said.

I laughed wryly. “Adventure.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “A man can have adventure easier.”

“The world needs energy,” I said. “Nobody’s going to solve the nuclear-fusion problem. The oil’s gone—except for what the military has stashed away. They’ve shut down the fission plants because the uranium’s dangerous. And we may be headed into an ice age. Somebody’s got to find power somewhere, Aaron, or we’ll all freeze.”

“Four bad winters don’t make an ice age,” Aaron said. “There’s wood enough to keep us warm. The population’s going down, Ben. It’ll work out.” He fished the lime from his Perrier and licked at it speculatively. “They tried going out in ships when we were kids and they gave it up. Experts. Now they’ve made it against the law. There’s nothing in space but grief.”

I liked Aaron. He was solid, and serious, and smart. He liked playing devil’s advocate with me. And he had made me think. “Okay,” I said, “it isn’t adventure.”

“What is it then?”

I smiled at him. “Mischief.”

He looked at me and frowned. “I’m having a hamburger,” he said, and waved for a waiter. “Mischief I can believe. We’ll call it exploration for mineral resources and I’ll try for tax credits. Let’s eat our lunch and talk about something cheerful.”

I ordered a rare steak and a chocolate mousse and a mug of beer. That night I called Isabel and took her to see Così fan tutte at Lincoln Center. At intermission I told her I was planning to try space travel. She took it in, but with astonishment. We were in my box on red velvet seats, and I was half drunk. The music was grand. During the second act I turned toward her, planning to reach my hand gently up her gorgeous dress, and saw that she was furious.

“What’s wrong, honey?” I said.

She looked at me as though she were looking at a disorderly child. “I think you’re running away.”

I left New York the next day, to begin my search for a ship. Sometimes the city depresses me, now that there are so few taxis and cars and no trees in Central Park and half the restaurants I knew in my twenties have gone out of business. Lutèce and The Four Seasons are gone, but there’s a midtown wood-stand where Le Madrigal used to be. And the stores! Bergdorf-Goodman is gone, and Saks and Cartier; Bloomingdale’s is a Greyhound bus depot. Everybody travels on bus or train because you can’t run an airplane on coal. I’ve never felt that anyplace in this world was really my home. Why not try another world?

The landing was perfect, with only slight help needed from the pilot. We came down at a spot where it was morning, as light as a feather. Outside the portholes Belson’s surface gleamed a shiny grayish-black. Obsidian. At a distance was a field of something resembling grass. The sky was a musty green and had clouds like Earth clouds. Cirrostratus and cumulonimbus, high and white. It looked good to me.

The pilot shut off the engine. The silence was overwhelming. No one spoke.

I looked across the bridge at Bill, the navigator. He was recording the landing in the ship’s log. That seemed only proper; I felt traditional, and wished for a ship’s orchestra to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

After a few moments Bill said, “I’ll put on a helmet and step outside.”

“Hold it,” I said. “ I’m going to be the first man to step out there. The readings on the gauges are all right by me; I’m not wearing a helmet.” I was shocked by the energy in my voice after the calm I had felt while landing.

Isabel told me that night after the opera, “Ben, I wish you knew how to take it easy. I wish you didn’t rush around so much,” and I said, “If I didn’t rush around I wouldn’t have so much money and I wouldn’t have you here by this marble fireplace taking off your clothes.” Isabel was wearing a blue half-slip and blue stockings. Her naked breasts were like a little girl’s and my heart went out to them while the big logs flickered and I still heard Mozart tingling in my ears. We didn’t live together anymore, but we were still close at times.

What I’d said made her angry. “I’m not with you because of your money, Ben.”

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I know you’re not. It’s just that I’m in some kind of hurry all the time, and I don’t know how to stop. Maybe this trip is what I need.”

She looked at me hard for a moment. Her face was beautiful in its concentration and her skin glowed in firelight. Isabel is a Scot and it was that Scottish skin of hers—and her lovely voice—that had drawn me to her years before. “I hate you for wanting to risk your life,” she said. “You don’t need to risk it, Ben. There’s nothing to prove.”

Oh Jesus, she was right. There was nothing to prove then and there’s nothing to prove now. And I knew it. I think I’m addicted.

So I rushed out the hatch of that spaceship onto the dark obsidian surface of Belson in the morning and slipped and broke my right arm. While my seventeen subordinates watched from the big portholes on the bridge, I did a slip and a slide and a cartwheel and was flat on my ass with my right arm under me bent like a paperclip and me screaming. It hurt like hell. The air of Belson was clear and it smelled pleasantly musty; I savored the smell even over the horrible goddamned pain. “Son of a bitch,” I said.

Charlie got to me with a hypodermic of morphine. He helped me back to the ship and into my stateroom before X-raying and then setting the arm. It was compound and broken in two places. What a fucking mess! But the morphine felt wonderful.

I hadn’t thought of obsidian being slippery. The reports hadn’t said anything about it. But it sure was. Belson was a glass planet. And who needed that?

I had a fever the next day while my six geologists and four engineers started seismic testing for uranium ore. Toward evening, huge booming explosions began to rock the ship while I lay dazed with morphine, and spooned myself full of vichyssoise and lemon mousse. Boom! My small Corot fell from the wall. After dark I invited Ruth, the pilot, to watch the movie with me. She accepted graciously enough and I kept my hands to myself. Chemical euphoria was my real companion.