Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

I sent a few more messages on the lines of the one to Arnie, trying to find out about my bank accounts and how long it would take to get the uranium unloading problem solved. After about twenty hours my first reply came:

MISS CRAWFORD NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS.

Well. What had I expected? I sent a message to Aaron, my accountant, telling him to try finding her for me.

Then I got a reply from Mel:

SORRY, BEN. I CAN’T HELP. THEY’LL DISBAR ME IF I ADVISE YOU.

I smashed my Spode coffee cup on the deck when I read that one.

And right away this came in:

THE ISABEL IS FORBIDDEN TO LAND AT THE ISLAMORADA SPACEPORT BECAUSE OF HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS. REPEAT: DO NOT LAND AT ISLAMORADA.

The sons of bitches. I added forty pounds to the spring tension of the Nautilus double shoulder machine, strapped myself in and heaved against a hundred-sixty-pound drag thirty times. Goddamn, I’m strong when I’m pissed. My muscles bulged beautifully. I felt ready for violence.

By the time we came out of the warp and could see Sol the size of a dollar in the ports from the bridge, I had received a greater accumulation of negative messages than Moses had on Sinai. All of my bank accounts were under court seizure. My apartment was sealed off and barricaded. There was a contingent of mounted police on round-the-clock vigil at Islamorada to arrest me if I landed there. Anna was suing for more alimony. My house in Georgia had been burned to the red clay under it by outraged conservationists. The U.S. Public Health Service and the Narcotics Bureau had warrants out for me as a dangerous drug addict. Isabel had gone to London in Hamlet in the company of the young actor who played Laertes. (I thought of trying to negotiate a Mafia hit on him when we got in orbit. It would have been a first.) Hamlet had closed in London; Isabel had left no address. My safe-deposit boxes, stock and bond certificates, and Aunt Myra’s set of Haviland china were all under government seals. As far as my legal status was concerned, any thug could probably knife me on the streets and not be prosecuted. Belson Enterprises in Peking, Belson Ltd. in Montreal, and Belson and Co. in New York were all shut down and their directors strapped by court orders. My wood lots stood idle. My car had been sold. The Pierre couldn’t take me.

“Let’s go into an orbit,” I said to Betty. “East to west.” She bobbed her head down over the console and began punching figures in. “I want to make a few passes over New York and Los Angeles while I decide where to set down.”

Don’t ever trim your beard in free fall. While we were getting into orbit I grabbed a pair of scissors and tried it. It was like leveling a table by sawing the legs: I wound up with a lopsided effect, but stopped in time.

We circled at a hundred twenty miles up; it was nighttime in North America, and although there was little cloud cover it was shocking how few lights there were to see, compared with the photographs taken fifty years ago from the weapons carriers and spacelabs that used to coast around up there. You could barely make out New York, Chicago and Los Angeles; they looked like small towns. Well, they were on their way to being small towns.

I sat at one of the tables on the bridge puffing a cigar and watching a dark North America go by, saw the penumbra of dawn over the Pacific and then morning and then noon over Australia and South China. What a lovely blue ball that Earth is! You can’t beat it for a place to live. Even with all those bastards down there trying to do me in.

After our fourth orbit I made my decision. “Betty,” I said, “can you find Washington and bring us down there?”

She didn’t look up from the console. “Washington, D.C.?”

“Yes.”

“Certainly, Captain. On the White House lawn?”

“We don’t want that kind of attention. How bad a hole would the Isabel make in a football field?”

“Pretty bad. More crater than hole.”

I thought about that for a minute. “If there’s anybody there—a night football game or something—can you change your mind and pull back up into orbit?”

She turned her rice-paper face up to me and said, “Are you out of your mind , Captain?”

“I was afraid of that.” I looked at my watch. August 23, a little past midnight. Well, there wouldn’t be any ball games. “Get out your Washington map and bring us down in Aynsley Field. How long will it take?”

“One hour twenty-three minutes after we leave orbit.”

She was very sharp. “How many G’s?”

“Twelve at maximum, for thirty seconds.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it after one more time around. I’ve got some things to pack.”

“Yes sir, Captain.”

Bill put Washington into the course console and brought a map of the city onto the screen. He turned lacquered knobs. The two coordinate lines appeared and jiggled a bit and then settled on a black rectangle not far from the Congressional Shelter Complex. Then he pushed a lever in slowly and the map expanded until the rectangles filled the screen and the outlines of Aynsley Field were recognizable. You could see the grid lines of the football field, and the end zones. He gripped a handle and a clear black dot appeared on the screen; he twisted the handle, pushed it forward and the dot found the center of the field. Then he threw the “Lock” switch and the dot locked itself in place. “All set, Betty,” he said.

Betty threw a couple of switches and said, “We have our trajectory, Captain, and our atmosphere entry point.”

I really loved all this. Like Ruth, I’d watched spaceship shows on TV as a kid. Even though the actual doing of it-determining a point to drop out of orbit and a trajectory to ride down on—was no more difficult than getting a manicure, there was panache to it. Especially with our bright-red Chinese equipment.

I flipped on the intercom. “This is the Captain. We’ll drop out of orbit next time around, in about two hours. Tie everything down for twelve G’s.” Then I drew a breath. “I’ll be the first person off the ship, and I’m going to run for it. You people are all still citizens and they won’t give you too hard a time. I’m the one they want. I’ll get you your salaries and bonuses as soon as I’m able. For God’s sake don’t tell anyone we’ve been to Aminidab. The important thing is to get the uranium out of here. We’ll all be rich. I’ll be in touch.”

The endolin packets were still in Mimi’s gym bag in my stateroom. The gym had a first-aid cabinet; I got a handful of big stretch-Synlon bandages out and, winding them around myself, managed to tape about eight pounds of concentrated endolin to my chest and two or three pounds to each arm. Enough for all the hangovers in Los Angeles. I left my legs free, for running.

Surprise was clearly the thing. They would be expecting me, but they’d be expecting a middle-aged, potbellied billionaire like one of those Texas fatties. Hell, past middle age; I turned fifty-three the day before we landed.

They’d know I was there and they’d have a half hour to be ready. Their radar would have picked up the Isabel even before we entered our orbit, but they had no way of knowing where I’d try to set down. Once we left orbit, it would take about three minutes for them to get a fix on our trajectory and conclude I was coming down over Washington; that was the scary part for me, since Washington sure had the wherewithal to blow the Isabel out of the sky as if she were an ICBM hot from Aberdeen. That was unlikely, though, since they weren’t dumb enough to think I’d attack the United States. What they would do, in the half hour they had after they’d figured we’d come down at Aynsley Field, would be to surround the ship with military police, wait for the landing area to cool, and arrest me. Then into the Chateau d’lf with me, while Baynes and his cronies figured out what to do with my uranium.