Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

I’d had Henri Bendel’s send over a set of steel cookware, but all I ever used of it was one big pot. Sometimes the small saucepan for thickening gravy. Twelve hundred dollars, plus the 12 percent New York City tax and eighty dollars for delivery, and all I used was two pans. The damned roasting pan didn’t even have a rack in it; I had to balance the meat on top of the carrots and onions to keep it from boiling. But my pot roasts were terrific. I served them with strawberry jam on the side, and a Bibb and arugula salad. Chocolate mousse for dessert. If my alienated member had been less shy, I could have gotten into the pants of every actress on Broadway that season, from the quality of my pot roast and the big wood fires I had in my living room to eat them by. Not to mention my charm, good looks and money. Ah well! What really happened was that I made a lot of women furious with me for not even trying . What I wanted was to eat with them and look at them and talk. Sometimes I did try rolling around in the bed, but I knew before I started that it would come to grief and anger. And it always did. I got some heady oral satisfactions with women whom schoolboys would have given their souls to fondle: a Belgian movie star, two leading ladies, a diva, a ballet dancer, the estranged doxy of a uranium man even richer than I, a handful of courtesans who did sex more dexterously than Chinese women assembled radios. The oral satisfactions were nice, but I’d have been better nourished eating fruit. Some very huffy women left that apartment in the mornings.

I had sense enough to realize it was a midlife crisis. I’d been studying the history of the uranium explorations and had come to feel—as a lot of well-informed people felt—that the government had stopped looking for uranium at just the wrong time. It had been the repercussions of all those wasted voyages and all the spent nuclear fuel that finally brought about the CEASE agreement, banning space travel. “Use the fuel at home!” President Garvey had shouted in her school-teacherly way, and a lot of politicians had breathed sighs of relief.

But the fact was that safe uranium was just around the corner. A lot of experts felt that way; but no government was willing to take the risks anymore. Just one space voyage would use about 6 percent of the Earth’s entire supply of uranium. Enough to heat Shanghai for ten years. You couldn’t go out into the Milky Way without putting the ship into a spacewarp, and you couldn’t do that without a few trillion megawatts at your disposal.

I had been toying with the idea for two or three years, ever since that conversation in Jamaica with the geologist. I did some talking around and found the thing was like ESP, a lot of knowledgeable people were believers; it was just that governments were uptight about it. And private industry was afraid to touch it—especially in those unprofitable times. Hell, the prime rate was 4 percent.

The SALT talks were still going on—SALT 17, in fact—after a hundred years. But it took exactly six months of martinis and tea in Geneva for the whole goddamned world to decide to quit looking for uranium in space. We could still bomb one another into radioactive dust at the touch of a few well-placed fingertips; but we would now sit and freeze because the gamble for energy scared the politicians more than the gamble with Armageddon did. Well. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I figured it would cost me about eight hundred million to outfit a ship, hire a crew, and go to Fomalhaut. If I could find uranium and bring it back in quantity my profits would be almost beyond measure. Eight hundred million was half of what I was worth. If I lost it all I would still be rich, would still have more money than I could spend in a long lifetime. What the hell. I was getting tired of pot roasts and of angry women. I was unmarried. I hadn’t used my stock exchange seats for a half-dozen years, and interest rates were abysmally low. And I am a restless man. I had been looking, unconsciously, for something big to put money into. What the hell, I might captain a spaceship off to the stars. Captain Belson. Why not?

It was insane for me to spend that cold winter in New York with temperatures at twenty below zero when I could have gone to the Yucatan in my boat. Getting coal for a boat was easy enough; transportation came under a special heading in the Energy Act. But the Wit’s End stayed tied up in the East River that winter and got its hull cracked when the river froze solid in January. It didn’t bother me much when that happened, though; I had my mind by then on other modes of transport; I had begun buying the Flower of Heavenly Repose and the uranium the trip would take. It was as complicated as preparing a small nation for war and I was thankful to throw my energies into it. I had six telephone lines put into my apartment in the Pierre and eventually installed a staff of five men and seven women on the two floors above mine. When the first warm day finally came, in June, we all toasted the spring together in my living room and got pleasantly drunk on Moët et Chandon. One of my purchasing agents was an amiable fat lady named Alice. She wore pink coral jewelry and sipped her champagne like a bird. Alice asked me what we would call the ship. Peking had just agreed to sell. I tossed off a fizzy mouthful before I spoke. “ Isabel ,” I said. “The ship is the Isabel .”

Belson has a diameter half that of Earth’s—about four thousand miles. It is a great deal denser, though; the gravity is over half of Earth’s. I weigh a hundred thirty pounds here; I’m two twenty in New York. Six feet four. Since Belson has no oceans, there is actually a lot more land area than on Earth.

There was no way we could explore it all. My experts back home had picked three sites from the old photographs and we tried each of the three. They were all in the same general vicinity on the planet, each a few hundred miles from the other. We had two jeeps for getting around. You could drive on the obsidian easily enough, although it was rough on the lower back and you had to watch out for skids. I wished I had been able to bring an airplane and the fuel to operate it; I would like to have explored more. But my geologists had assured me, after studying the pictures, that it wouldn’t be worth it. If there was uranium it would be within three hundred miles of where we landed, and the rest of the planet’s surface would be the same as where we were. Belson had almost no geological features—at least few were detectable. There was no food and little water.

Negative reports kept coming in from the tests. It was beginning to look bad. We had discovered moonwood—a lovely mineral material that could be sawed and hammered and had a silvery surface; but it would hardly be profitable to export it. At that distance even gold wouldn’t pay its own freight. Only uranium could really justify the trip. And it was beginning to look like there wasn’t any.

When I was fourteen I worked up the temerity to ask my father’s advice on choosing a profession. I was a tall and gangly kid then with platinum-blond hair and muscles too weak to hold my body up properly—or so it felt anyway. I was awed by my father and by his silences. I stood in the doorway to his study for about ten minutes staring at those forget-me-nots on the wall and at the array of diplomas below them before he looked up and nodded toward me.

“Father,” I said, feeling awkward and callow, “I need your advice.”

He nodded again, hardly seeming to see me. There was a mild scowl on his perfectly shaven face. He was wearing a brown sweater and brown flannel trousers; there was gray hair at his temples but the rest of his hair was black. I was the only blond in the family.