The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  Later that night I found myself briefly alone with Ruth and almost told her about my sexual problem. I wasn’t sure that I was still impotent; I just had, then, a lack of interest that might have merely been desuetude—a kind of “solitary confinement blues,” as some of my friends in prison used to call it. I spent two years in a prison in New Jersey, back when I was young and in too much of a hurry to assemble my first ten million. It had to do with price-fixing. Alleged. I managed to get market reports in my cell and found ways of sending out buy-and-sell orders. I was worth about twelve million when I got out, so the experience paid off well enough, although I did get restless in jail. When I left I had managed to corner the marijuana market in the prison; it had been done largely in a spirit of play. That was the only real price-fixing I ever did: I got it up to three hundred an ounce for mediocre Jamiacan and passed my holdings on to a friend—a murderer and there for life—who was grateful to take over. He sends me Christmas cards and an occasional moody letter. Eduardo had murdered two wives; I knew how he felt.

  Most of us didn’t sleep that short night, our first in the open for some time. The first sun, the little one, was back up three hours after the big one had set, and it made a pleasantly soft light to explore by.

  The forest was made up of those trees with slim orange trunks. The trunks were warm and leathery to the touch; the leaves were membranous and translucent, with a kind of ivory-colored Spanish moss hanging from some like old lace; they rustled pleasantly in the grapey wind. We looked for fruit but there was none. The forest was large and the trees were all alike. We kept on walking through it. There was little chance of getting lost, but just to be sure I marked our path occasionally with a page from The Ambassadors, which had somehow wound up in my jacket pocket. After a while the second sun came up, the light changed from red to yellow, and it began to get warm. The spongy grass became harder underfoot as its moisture evaporated. I was getting hot and sticky and was thinking about going back to the ship for the nuclear jeep when we came up over a slight rise and Ruth, who was the first up there, shouted, “Wow!” and we all came up alongside her and gaped. Below us stretched a broad valley all the way to the horizon, with trees and bushes and plants: brown and crimson and mauve and yellow. The small hairs on the back of my neck prickled.

  We were all still a bit high from the picnic and from being up all the brief night; we rushed down the hill and started looking at the different plants, first in childish delight and then trying to find things that seemed edible. I found some long pods growing from a yellow bush and picked them; they were slippery and smelled grassy in my hand. Ruth found something that looked like an avocado, and Howard found stalks like celery. We began gathering in earnest, shouting at one another when we found something that looked good. You could move fast and easily in that gravity and we were all over the place. Nobody dared bite into anything yet; it all had to be tested first for poisons and digestibility. We loaded ourselves with this astonishing harvest, laughing and joking. It was a profound release after the long trip from Belson and the days of waiting in the rain.

  We found a lot of things that looked like food. Howard and Sato, our biophysicist and our physiologist, checked them out with beakers and computers and lab mice and found that half of them were indeed edible. Protein, carbohydrates, fats. Just like Earth. My yellow pods had little orange peas in them that tasted like almonds. Howard’s stalk was as crisp as celery but tasted like fish. And someone had picked mushrooms that looked suspiciously like Earth mushrooms and in fact tasted like mushrooms. Sato muttered something about “interstellar spores” and I shrugged. I didn’t really care if they were fungoid cousins of what grew on Earth, carried here by astral winds or by the hand of God; they were nearly as good as morels and they would be splendid on steaks or in an omelet. The big orbiculate leaves of the orange-trunked trees were edible but tasted like kerosene. There was a plant that was like wheat, and I later got some kernels from it and ground them up and made a few passable loaves of bread. I had learned to bake during those morose days at the Pierre. The flavor was slightly acid but it worked out fine with the mushrooms when you fried them and made a mushroom sandwich.

  I was really beginning to feel good with the crew. The picnic had begun it, and finding new foods and sharing them cemented it; we had become a family. When I saw Sato walking hand in hand with Mimi, I felt a warmth in me that I had never felt, even for my daughter Myra with her unlucky body and her doleful eyes.

  I went to bed early that night and dreamed for a while of Myra.

  ***

  The next morning everyone was a bit tired at breakfast. But by the second cup of coffee we were all charged up again. Within a half hour our chief engineer, Annie, was outside in her overalls supervising the unloading of the two nuclear jeeps and then having a plant wipe installed on the front of the bigger one. Mimi and Sato left their breakfasts half finished and went off to the equipment lockers to break out the uranium detection and sampling gear. The geologists started a discussion of three possible mining sites that our computers had picked from the infrared photos, taken while the ship was in orbit. The nearest site was seventeen miles away, but the likeliest was six miles farther. The basic problem was ground transportation. You could hardly use the Isabel for short hops.

  I finished off my pancakes and bacon and stayed out of it for a bit. But when I’d had my second cup of coffee I spoke up. “Let’s go for the big one first,” I said. “Annie can go in front with the wipe and we’ll follow with the gear.”

  Arturo looked up from his charts. “What about the seismics?” Arturo was chief geologist and looked testy.

  “We won’t do seismics. I have a hunch we won’t need them here. This first time out I’m going to put my faith in a shovel.”

  Arturo looked at me with dismay for a moment. Then he said, “Captain, with all respect, we have to zero in on a thing like this. You can’t just start digging…”

  He was sitting across the table from me. I stood up with a cigar in one hand, reached the other hand out to his chart, and pointed to a spot where a group of computer-drawn lines converged. “We’re looking for a mineral with an atomic weight of two thirty-five,” I said. “And there is something very heavy right there—twenty-three miles from here.”

  “Captain, the photo equipment isn’t capable of that kind of discrimination. It could be thorium or actinium. It could be lead.”

  “We’ll see what it is,” I said.

  ***

  In an hour we had our two-jeep caravan set up. I sat with my Sears, Roebuck shovel in the driver’s seat of Annie’s jeep, and the other one followed with three geologists and their equipment. Annie had a wipe cylinder installed on each of the front fenders and she blasted while I drove at a steady five miles an hour. At first she was very careful and businesslike with the big silver tubes, but after a bit she started getting into it and operated the controls as though she were firing six-guns: Zip! Trees and bushes puffed away in pink bursts of cloud. Zap! Great lavender flowers vanished as we humped and rocked our way along the denuded ground, and stands of leaves the size of rowboats fell into dust.

  I had fed Arturo’s chart into the jeep’s readout machine; my navigating behind all this molecular devastation consisted of keeping two little green lights on the dash superimposed. More accurately, bringing them back together every time I hit a big hump and they veered apart.

  It took four and a half hours to get there and I suspected the three behind us wanted a break. But I didn’t want to stop and we pushed on until the beeps of the homing device on the dash got loud enough to let me know we were very near our destination. I pulled up, turned off the ignition and got out. I was shaky from the ride but excited. I could smell uranium. Or, more precisely, money.

  The other three came dragging up in a minute, looking dusty and weary, and I handed out beers from the back seat. Then I took my shovel and pointed toward a rise just ahead. It was a kind of grassy hillock about the height of my mansion in New Yor
k. We all took long swigs of beer and then I said, “I think that’s an outcropping and I think it’s what we’re looking for.” I looked at Arturo, who had been in the second jeep. “What do you think?”

  He nodded a bit coldly. “That’s where the lines on the chart converge,” he said. “But there’s nothing radioactive around here. It’s probably lead.” He was holding a Geiger counter.

  “If it’s safe uranium it won’t affect a counter,” I said.

  “Don’t be sure,” Arturo said. “Nobody’s ever seen safe uranium. It’s only an educated guess.” He looked skeptically toward my hill. “Maybe a hopeful guess.”

  “This is one hell of a time for that kind of talk,” I said. “I’m going up.”

  Before anyone could say anything, I had started up the hill. It was overgrown with some kind of matted, pinkish vegetation, with no handholds; but in the light gravity and the good shape I was in I managed to scramble my way up. I looked back and saw the rest of them beginning to climb. I turned back to the summit I stood on. It was a flat place, a bit larger than a pool table. I took a firm grip on my shovel and started digging.

  By the time the others were on top and were standing, sweating and a bit annoyed, looking at me, I had dug through the topsoil. I raised a shovel load now of a mustard-colored mass and held it out toward them. It was very heavy stuff, whatever it was. “I’m no geologist,” I said. “Can somebody tell me what this is?”

  Annie was the first to reach for it. She took a pinch between her fingers and sniffed it. Then she took the equipment case from her shoulder and got some little electronic machines out. Arturo did the same. When he felt the stuff and its heaviness and then rubbed some in the palm of one hand, he showed surprise but said nothing. The four of them worked on the samples for several minutes in increasing but silent agitation. I felt excitement growing in me. It was like the feeling you get when a stock begins to move up and you sense that it’s going to go through the roof.

  Annie spoke first. “My God!” she said, “I read uranyl nitrate at eight-six percent.”

  “Unstable but not radioactive,” Arturo said in a hushed voice.

  “I cannot believe this,” Mimi said, with a thrill in her voice. Suddenly she stood up. My heart had begun pounding like a triphammer. She threw her thin arms around me and hugged me with astonishing strength.

  I hugged her back, and then the others piled around us in a big huddle of arms and bodies. “I believe it,” I said. It turned out the whole hill and the ground for acres around it were 86 percent uranyl nitrate—a U236 compound and yet as safe as buttercups. The other 14 percent would be no trouble for the Isabel’s refining equipment. The only problem was getting it to the ship; we had a hold capacity of sixty tons. Hauling that much ore twenty-three miles in jeeps would be a pisser. The best idea was to take the Isabel up into orbit and bring her back down again as close to the hill as possible.

  But when I told Ruth that was what I wanted, she said, “Look, Ben. Maybe I can jockey the ship over without all that fuss.”

  And she did. We got everything back on board, strapped ourselves into our bunks, and Ruth brought the Isabel shuddering up to a few hundred feet of altitude, tilted her forward for a moment, and then brought her shuddering back down on her own white tail flame. It was a gorgeous maneuver; I was astonished that it could be done at all.

  When we stepped out a half hour later over smoking ground, we stood twenty yards from my hill of uranium. Ruth stood beside me looking modest but clearly pleased with herself. I turned and shook her hand warmly.

  ***

  The next morning we opened the big hatchways and lowered the processing machinery to the surface. The two enjays—the nuclear jeeps—were fitted with backhoes, and Mimi and Sato each drove one while Annie had the metallurgical plowing equipment taken out and got it in place. By afternoon, fourteen people were working together and a steady stream of uranyl nitrate was moving along conveyor belts.

  The Isabel, seated on her retros as she was, is nearly as tall as the Washington Monument, and a great deal thicker. I walked around her several times while the preparation of this cargo was getting underway, the piling-up of our bonanza, and then I stopped for a long silent look at the heavy boxes now escalating their way up to the empty holds. The thrill of discovery was gone. I watched this accumulation of potential wealth with something like weariness. It was beyond doubt the apex of my financial career and a mineral find almost beyond the dreams of Cortez in Mexico, yet I found myself without enthusiasm. Maybe I’m just tired, I thought. I went back on board and into my stateroom, took a bottle from the cabinet and poured myself a stiff drink. The Isabel was shuddering as her holds began to fill. I took a long swallow of Bourbon and sat wearily in my Eames chair. What it all meant for me then was merely more money. I had won my original gamble and was bringing off a coup that would stagger the financial communities of the world. Juno uranium could reverse the decline of New York, of the whole United States. If an ice age really was on its way, this uranium would keep the people of the world from freezing, would open up new possibilities even for the poorest. Especially for the poorest. And I could be, in a few years, the richest man alive.

  I finished my whiskey and poured another. I felt weary. I felt as though I had done nothing and solved nothing.

  Chapter 4

  I believe that in the twentieth century a person could become a billionaire on four or five correct guesses and on being in the right place at the right time three times. The United States economy underwent a steady expansion during that century. A tenacious but lucky fool could quadruple his inheritance with less skill than it took to win at Monopoly. Quite a few tenacious and lucky fools did just that, and then went on to work widespread mischief with their radio stations and their crusades for Christ—that Gentile, middle-class Christ of the Texas billionaire!—and their John Birch societies and their general loutish arrogance.

  There are still men and women of that kind around and I know some of them pretty well. I don’t socialize with them at their prayer breakfasts and their Permastone country-squire mansions, but I sell real estate to them from time to time. They are a rarer breed in the twenty-first century than in the last two. Ours is a dwindling economy. Energy sources and population have been shrinking for seventy years. If a person in 1940 had bought almost anything, from canned-soup factories to Australian ranchland, and hung on to it for twenty years, he would have enriched himself enormously and along the way gained a reputation for perspicacity. His sons and daughters would have been written about in the papers as though their lovers and their art purchases and their drug addictions were of national importance.

  Well, it doesn’t work that way anymore. If you hang on to what you own, it loses value. Markets keep getting smaller; there are fewer people to buy canned soup. Even with the Chinese now using armpit sprays and mascara and perfumed toilet paper, the world market keeps getting smaller.

  I have several ways I rely on for making money; the chief one is knowing when to sell and what to sell for. There are lots of things for sale out there and, as always, some are bargains but most are not. I buy the bargains and I know how and when to sell them. I am not a producer of wealth or of much that society needs or wants; most people like me are the same and always have been; we are really people who are either smart enough or powerful enough or rich enough to begin with, to be able to take advantage. Marx called us jackals, and, as usual, Marx was right. I’m worth about two billion and I sometimes hate myself for it.

  When I was in my late thirties and making a lot of money in the declining real estate market, I went through a period of a few years collecting impressive-looking buildings on bankruptcies and by finding weaknesses in the networks of mortgages that were common in those days. It was easy, once you grasped that things were going bad faster than anybody else thought they were. It was the 2040s, the time of the uranium bust. Nobody was having any babies; the military had its crude hands on all the crude oil; whole industries were reelin
g; just taking the Mercedes limousines away from all those gray-templed hustlers who sat on their boards had thrown most U.S. corporations into tailspins. I was selling short like a mad Arab at a bazaar; I rescued real estate from the courts, spiffed up its paperwork, found ways of unloading it and then found ways of writing it off. Jolly times, if you had the nerve. During all this a lot of buildings passed through my hands and I hung on to a few that suited my fancy. I wound up owning what had once been a fine arts museum in San Francisco, which I lived in for six months because of some tax advantages. I also owned a house in Georgia, four banks in Dallas, the Japan Camera Center in Chicago, two solid blocks of Park Avenue in New York, and a baroque, five-story mansion at Sixty-third and Madison. I decided one rainy Thursday to make it my family home; I spent three months knocking out walls and redecorating—over fifty workmen would be there sweating away at any given time.