Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

When they knocked me out I regressed like a shot to my childhood on Earth and stayed there in a kind of wakeful dream for two months. At times I would become aware of the throbbing of the ship’s engine, of the sleek tubes that fed me, of the machines that exercised my body and of the soft voice of my trainer, but for most of the voyage I was back in my father’s house in Ohio with the smells of his cigar smoke and of his books and the awe I had felt as a child toward the certificates and diplomas on the wallpapered wall over his desk. There were faded blue flowers on that paper; it seemed I could see them more clearly from captain’s quarters on my interstellar ship than I had as a child. Forget-me-nots. There was a brownish stain near the ceiling over a framed diploma that read DOCTEUR DE L’UNIVERSITÉ HONORAIRE. I sat on the green-carpeted floor and stared silently at the stain. My father, silent also, read from an old book in German or French or Japanese, stopping every now and then to make a note on a three-by-five card or light a cigar. He never looked at me or acknowledged my presence. Mother was out; Father was stuck with keeping me. I felt guilty: Father was busy, his work was important, I was a trouble to him. I must have loved him terribly—his rare, shy smile, his quietness. I did not even hope that he would someday explain his work to me. When he died I still knew nothing about that ancient history he spent his life brooding over. I have never read his books. I had him buried in a fine cemetery, glad to be old enough and with money enough to do it right and well. I was twenty-three when he died and already rich. My father was a scholar—world-famous I was told by Mother—and his style was genteel poverty. I loved him ardently, in silence.

I nearly awoke once here on the ship, when my trainer had allowed his attention to lapse and one of the exercise machines was straining the muscles of my abdomen. I found myself for a moment lying on my back on a red leather bench, groaning upward against steel springs in the ship’s gym and with hot tears flooding my face. I had just come from my dream trip to Father’s study, awakened fleetingly by pain. The trainer’s face was tight with anxiety. As if through a partition I heard his alarmed voice saying, “Sorry, Captain Belson,” and I muttered something about love and fell back into my chemical sleep. The astonishing thing was the tears. I had not cried at my father’s funeral. I had never mourned him. I had hardly thought of him for thirty years. And here I was at the age of fifty-two, somewhere out in the black reaches of the Milky Way, weeping copiously for him. In sleep I returned to his study and sat cross-legged on his floor, silent. I watched his concentration at his desk. Somewhere outside of me I heard the hum of the ship and exulted, propelled beyond the speed of light toward constellations totally outside my father’s understanding.

They woke me two weeks before planetfall. There was a crew of seventeen. I owned the ship; I had bought it a year before. We were heading toward an unexplored planet of the star Fomalhaut, known as FBR 793. It was my first voyage away from Earth.

I have always come awake quickly. There is something feral in me and I welcome it when I awaken. I was on my back in my stateroom and the ship’s doctor and navigator were standing by my bed. The doctor was holding a cup of coffee out to me. I ignored it for a moment while I looked around. The room had been painted a pale blue as I had instructed; I could dimly remember the smell of fresh paint in my sleeping nostrils. There was a porthole to my right and one crystalline star, blindingly bright against velvet black, was almost centered in it. I stretched my arms, my legs, twisted my head on my neck. There was strength in my body; I could feel it in my pectorals, my biceps, the muscles of my thighs; the sense of power went through me like a quiet euphoria. I felt my belly; the paunch was gone.

I looked back toward the doctor, reached out steadily and took the cup. There was a white porcelain vase with red roses in it on the desk by my bed.

“Thank you for the flowers,” I said.

“Glad we could grow them,” the doctor said. “How’s your head? Any hangover?”

“Not a bit, Charlie,” I said. It was true. I felt wonderful. I sipped the coffee and felt it penetrate the raw emptiness of my stomach.

“For god’s sake don’t drink it fast,” Charlie said. “Bad enough to drink it at all.”

I had told them to have coffee ready. “I know myself well enough,” I said, and continued sipping.

“It’s a new self,” the doctor said.

I looked at him over the edge of the cup, over the little red stripe that went around its porcelain edge. “Charlie,” I said, “it’s a new self but it still likes coffee.” I finished half of it and set the cup down. Then I got out of bed, a bit slowly. I was naked and tanned. I looked good. The blond hair on my arms and legs had been bleached a pale yellow by the ultraviolet lamps. “Let’s go to the bridge,” I said.

“Okay,” the navigator said, startled.

“And while I’m dressing, see if you can find me a sandwich.”

We were still too far to see the planet. I could have slept another week, since there was very little for me to do when awake. There was little for anyone to do on the ship. But two months’ sleep had been enough to get me into shape and to avoid serious boredom. I wanted to do some reading. I wanted the feel of being the owner-captain of a spaceship. I was the first man in history ever to own one and I wanted to savor the experience.

The bridge was a semicircle twenty feet across, at right angles to the ship’s acceleration. The acceleration was continuous at one-fifth G even in spacewarp, and it gave us enough weight to walk. For exercise I used springs over cams—zero-gravity Nautilus equipment. There was no such thing as an intergalactic Olympics; had there been, these machines would have prepared the athletes. I felt ready to go for a gold medal.

The sandwich turned out to be Virginia ham and gruyère. With all the cold and the vacuum around us, food-keeping was easy and we had plenty. It was a good sandwich, but half of it filled my shrunken stomach. I gave the other half to the navigator. “How’s the uranium?” I said.

“Fine,” he said. “Exactly as computed. We could repeat the voyage without refueling.”

The bridge was mostly empty deck, carpeted in beige. Its heart was a pair of red computer consoles and a panel of switches. Nothing more complicated than a locomotive. There were six rectangular portholes, and the stars seen through them were splendid, but after a while boring. I had seen them before my sleep and was impressed, but only briefly. The first sight is spectacular; there is no cold mountain sky on Earth that reveals the stars so brilliantly. But I find the sea on an ocean voyage more continuously interesting. It has life in it, while this interstellar panorama, however dazzling, has none. If it should really be, after all, the visible manifestation of a god, I refuse to be awed. I have no need for an inscrutable deity; my father’s inscrutability was sufficient. I have enough to do with my life. I need no gods too distant to reveal themselves to me, no presence behind the stars’ glitter.

I am no mad Ahab. I am a businessman, looking for uranium. The Earth had wasted almost all she had. I gathered together what I could to power this old Chinese ship and was staking half my fortune on a Schliemann-like hunch that a planet of Fomalhaut would have uranium. “Belson’s Bubble” was what the Chicago Tribune had called it. Well, to hell with the Chicago Tribune .