The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  “How much money do you think it’s worth?”

  “Trillions,” I said. “It’s a fucking king’s ransom.”

  “Then why aren’t you more excited?” she said. “You’re supposed to be a… a tycoon.”

  That was a funny word for her and I had to laugh. “Ruth, I really don’t know. I think about hauling this cargo back to Chicago and New York and the things I have to buy and sell and all the wheeling and dealing I have to do and it just bores me.”

  She was still looking at me. She stopped walking and bent down and pulled a blade of grass and began chewing it. We all did that every now and then; the grass on Juno had a pleasant licorice flavor. In fact, I think it’s habit-forming. I thought sadly of Belson grass. And then Ruth said something that shocked me. It was as though she were reading my mind. “Something happened to you on Belson, didn’t it?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Was it morphine?”

  I thought for a minute. “No.”

  She nodded. “But it was something… something mystical,” she said.

  I was surprised at her knowingness about me, but I remained silent.

  “Come on, Ben,” she said. “It’s been written all over you since that morning we had to carry you back to the ship.”

  “Even during the picnic?” The picnic had been about a month before this.

  “Even during the picnic.” She smiled. “You were very sweet then and we all loved you. But a part of you was somewhere else.”

  “I was thinking about Isabel. A woman friend.”

  She frowned. “It was something else, Ben.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was.” But I didn’t want to talk to her about how it felt to hear the Belson grass, holding me in its thousands of gentle fingers, saying, “I love you.”

  “Come on, Ben,” Ruth said. “What’s the matter?”

  I looked at her closely. She was really very good-looking. “Well,” I said, “sex, for one thing.” I bent down and pulled a piece of licorice grass myself. “I’ve been impotent for the last couple of years.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  I laughed wryly. “Yeah,” I said, suddenly feeling very relieved.

  We had come to the rise and we began scrambling silently down the hill. When we were about halfway down I stopped and let Ruth go on ahead. I stood and looked around and then up ahead at the enormous valley that stretched ahead of me to the horizon. It was as splendid a vista as a man could ever want to see. I drew a deep breath of the delicious air and thought with a profound historical thrill, as deep as my genes: if mankind ever leaves a shattered Earth to live elsewhere in the universe, it should be for Juno. This was a second chance as vast and breathtaking as the one spread before the eyes of Columbus and his sailors—those rapt men from the alleys of Barcelona and Seville. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Planetfall had confused me; with the heavy rain, the frustration, I had missed this thrill at the time, intent merely on exploration and discovery. It had caught me now, after my conversation with Ruth. I was staggered by this planet, its breadth and diversity—its beauty and life. A part of me had been searching, all my life, for a home; my bags had always been packed. And here it was.

  I looked up. Two suns shone pleasantly down on my body. At night there would be a half-dozen moons. Everything about this place was generous, replete, fulfilling. I breathed as deeply as my lungs would allow, exhaled, and walked slowly down the rest of the hill, into the valley.

  Ruth was off a bit to my right and I started to walk toward her, but then decided to stay alone for a bit. I walked to my left, toward a small field of mushrooms that grew in Juno’s open suns. Ruth waved at me and I waved back and bent to picking, and after a while my exalted feelings began to leave. I began sweating. It was hot. I looked over toward Ruth; she was gathering the little red berries we had discovered a few days before. As I was looking toward her she stood up and arched her back and stretched. She was sweating too and the cloth of her blouse was clinging damply to her full breasts. How pleasant to see that!

  I took my shirt off and began working in earnest, pulling up the little gray mushrooms, dusting them off, and filling my bucket.

  I stopped for breath after a while and looked up. Ruth was standing near me barefoot, resting herself. Her hair was wet from perspiration. “Remember what Charlie said about UV,” she said. “You can get a burn from those suns.”

  That annoyed me a little. “I won’t get sunburned,” I said.

  “You’re the boss,” she said. And then, “Ben. I wish you weren’t impotent.”

  I felt relieved that she had said it. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Would you like to make love anyway?” she said.

  I must have just stared at her.

  “You know,” she said. “There’s a lot we could do…”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, coming out of it. She stepped closer and laid a hand lightly on my forearm.

  I was embarrassed. “Ruth,” I said, “you’re a fine woman. But I don’t think I’m ready yet…”

  She looked hurt for a moment. She let go of my arm and blushed. “Sure,” she said, “I understand.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt like a fool. A part of me would like to try myself with her on a field of spongy Juno grass under the palms. I could be an effective lover sometimes without the use of the essential. It had certainly been a long time. But I didn’t want to. “I’m really sorry, Ruth,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” her words said, but her voice said it wasn’t.

  ***

  When we got back to the ship at first sunset, I found I was badly sunburned.

  I had supper with the crew that night and they were high with excitement over the cargo, but I was miserable. I was painfully red and I felt foolish for letting myself get that way in the first place. I felt awkward about what had happened between Ruth and me.

  I was halfway through the meal before I thought of endolin and asked Charlie where he kept it. He got up from his roast beef and went to his sick bay and got some. It was a little plastic cup of dried leaves. I took a pinch, waited several minutes for the annoying pain on my back and shoulders to go away, and nothing happened. Charlie had returned to his roast beef and to a joke he had been telling the navigator. When we had arrived at dessert, he got up and came over to my seat at the head of the table.

  “How’re you feeling, Captain?” he said.

  I looked up at him. “How long since I took it?”

  He checked his watch. “A dozen minutes.”

  “Well, it isn’t working,” I said.

  “Give it a few more minutes,” he said.

  I looked at him. “It’s not going to work, Charlie.”

  “I’ll get you some more,” he said.

  I looked at him. “Don’t bother,” I said. “Get some morphine.”

  He stared at me for a minute. “Ben,” he said, “you kicked it…”

  Inside, I was as astonished as he was. As far as I knew, I had hardly missed my chemical euphoria since the trip from Belson to Juno, and yet here I was with my attention suddenly fixed on wiping out the discomfort of a goddamn sunburn with, as they say, morphia. I was not only astonished; on some quiet level of perception and feeling, I was terrified. But my voice was unruffled and I felt outwardly as calm as a madonna. “Get me fifty milligrams, Charlie. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Ben,” he said, “we jettisoned what I had left. Remember?”

  “I remember,” I said. “But you can make it. Go make me some.”

  The ship had a drug synthesizer. For some reason you couldn’t make aspirin with it, but you could make atropine, propranolol, prednisone, and two hundred milligrams of morphine sulphate a day—enough to keep a heavy spirit permanently afloat.

  Charlie shook his head. “Ben,” he said, “as your doctor I can’t allow it.”

  I stood up. I’m pretty tall and Charlie isn’t; I towered over him. “Charlie,” I said, “I am the captain of this ship. You
aren’t making a house call. Get me that morphine.”

  He said nothing and went and got it. I took the syringe from him right there in front of everybody at the mess table and shot myself in the throat with it, just like they do in the movies. Doing it I was outwardly calm, slightly theatrical. Inside I was astonished. I sat down again and waited. The fear went away. Euphoria settled over my unquiet spirit like a luminous dust.

  ***

  So I was hooked after all. Part of me thought, with wonderment: if I was going to do this, why didn’t I do it with booze back in my forties in New York City? They have spiffy hospitals there for the well-heeled lush, and a man can ricochet around with a liquor habit for years and hardly suffer from it at all. I had sure come close to going that way—close enough that Anna thought I was an alcoholic. Her position was biased, however; I was drunker than usual around her. Anyway, here I was twenty light-years away from methadone centers and rehabilitation programs and emergency rooms, turning my bloodstream into a chemical bath for my brain. I am at heart a gambler and I am drawn to the edge. I stood now at an edge I had not dreamed of visiting until I broke my arm in my puppydog rush onto the slick black surface of Belson, my namesake planet.

  It was then I made the decision to stay on when the Isabel went back with its cargo of uranium. I would write out instructions to Aaron and to Met Luk San and to Arnie; they would start buying utilities for me, selling my six million acres of woodlands, putting me in the electric-automobile business and, most of all, into the business of selling safe uranium. The instructions could be sent the minute the ship got into space-warp; they could get the whole thing started and when I got back to New York I would do the necessary tinkering with it. My uranium was in itself a brute fact; any bright student at the Harvard Business School—that training ground for fledgling swindlers—could work out a reasonable plan for making ten billion dollars from the Isabel’s first cargo. There was a lot of rationalization in that; I knew I should get my ass back on Earth if I wanted things to go right, that you didn’t send boys to do men’s work. But down deep I didn’t care. I wasn’t ready to get involved. I might lose a few billion by not being there to decide whether to start buying electric clock factories or get into the highway construction business, but damn it, everything was going to start paying off like a gambler’s dream when all that power hit the hungry world. There was no way to lose, if I sold my wood, coal, solar plants and shale oil convertors and bought everything else in sight. Anyway, I had enough money already. And the Isabel now had enough uranium to buzz around the cosmos forever. Meanwhile I would have my fling with euphoria. I couldn’t O.D.; the synthesizer wouldn’t produce it that fast. What the hell, I had planned suicide once, in Mexico. People do that all the time; they did it over the Dow Jones Average back in the last century, dropping themselves onto Wall Street like garbage, over margin calls. Reason would dictate that if a man is ready to kill himself he should try something outrageous first.

  I think the crew would have been less shocked if they found I had slit my throat, when I told them I was going to stay. “Look,” I said, “it’s nothing personal. I’m going to stay on until you people get back and I’m going to stay high on morphine while I do it. I’ll kick the habit in sleep on the way back. I know what I’m doing.”

  But they looked at me as though I had gone berserk.

  The night before the ship was to return to Earth I went to my stateroom alone and had a thoughtful supper of veal and Juno mushrooms with a half bottle of claret. It was dark outside my porthole; none of the moons was in view. I turned on the ball recorder and played the song of the Belson grass and let a pleasant melancholy suffuse my spirit. I had a small power hypodermic filled with morphine sulphate near my bedside. It was made of glass and chromium, like a fine camera. The sight of it was a deep comfort. The claret’s alcohol felt good in my veins—a shy, chaste sprinkle of euphoria; but morhpine was more to the point.

  I picked up the syringe speculatively, held it up to the light on my desk. The addict falls in love with the tools; I found the syringe a pleasure merely to hold lightly in my hand. Phallic. Soon I would force the drug into my neck, not far from the jugular vein, in what I had come to call the “Dracula spot”—halfway between brain and heart.

  I set it down for a moment. There was a knock at my locked door. I was startled and annoyed. I got up from my chair and opened the door. It was Ruth. She was wearing her plain khaki pilot’s uniform, but her hair and skin looked fresh and bright.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, Ben. I want to talk to you.”

  “Okay,” I said and let her come in. She seated herself on the edge of my bed and I went back to my Eames chair.

  “Ben,” she said, awkwardly. “We may not see each other again.”

  That was a surprise. “You’re coming back with the ship, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I only signed up for one voyage. I don’t think I should be away from my eight-year-old any longer than that.”

  I was impatient with this. “I’m sorry to lose you as a pilot,” I said. “Mel should be able to get someone else, though.”

  “Ben, I want to give you my address and telephone number in Columbus, Ohio. I’d like to stay in touch.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, Ruth.” She handed me a square of paper with writing on it and I slipped it into my billfold where I keep papers with such things on them as the names of Isabel’s cats and last September’s price of wheat in Chicago. There’s a forest of random information in there waiting for me to broadcast it into my central computer in Atlanta.

  I felt something else was called for from me. “Ruth,” I began, “it’s a pity we didn’t become lovers.”

  She shook her head. “That’s okay now,” she said. “But I don’t think you should stay on Juno. What if you get sick or break a leg?”

  “I won’t get sick,” I said. “The microorganisms for that aren’t around here. And I won’t break a leg in this gravity. I’ll be okay.”

  “Ben,” she said. “It seems so damned foolish. You need to be on Earth, selling the uranium. Making deals.”

  I was beginning to get angry. I didn’t need this motherly concern. “Damn it, Ruth, I know what I’m doing. I’m sending back enough instructions to keep my people in New York busy for a year. I need time to myself. I need to ride my morphine habit, too…” I nodded toward the hypodermic on the table.

  Her face opened a bit at this frankness. “Are you really hooked, Ben?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I love it a lot.”

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Why should a man so lively and strong and rich…? Hell, Ben, there’s so much to you. You don’t need drugs.”

  Somehow I became furious at this. I could have slapped her. “How do you know what I need?” I said. “How in hell do you know what goes on inside me?”

  She stared at me. “I’m sorry. But I think you’re a fool to spend months on Juno alone. You can withdraw from your habit in a long sleep. You did it before.”

  “I want to do it this way, Ruth. I’m fifty-two years old and I know what I want to do for myself. I’m not ready to go back to New York and start making money. I have a dozen people whom I trust to run my businesses. I’m on vacation.” I settled back into my chair.

  She sat and looked at me for a long time. “Okay, Ben,” she said, and stood up. “I’ve said what I had to.”

  I could see that she was really pretty and kindhearted and something inside me reached out to her. But I pulled back from the feeling. I did not want to make love to her and I wanted to be alone with my hypodermic. I held my hand out to her. I was shocked to see that it was trembling.

  She shook it and left. There was ice in my stomach. Old, glacial ice.

  I locked the cabin door behind her, picked up my syringe and lay back on the bed. I held the head of it to my neck, just below the mastoids, and gently squeezed the handle. Oh yes. Comfort came down. />
  And as my high settled in for the night a relay somewhere in my head clicked into place and my decision veered toward its real direction. I would not stay on Juno. It was not Juno my heart longed for, with all its abundance of life and power. Not Juno at all.

  Chapter 5

  I looked at them all sitting around the table, drew in a breath and said, “We’ll activate the ship’s coils at nine A.M. tomorrow. The Isabel should be in orbit by noon and into a warp an hour after.” My head ached, but my mind was clear.

  “Terrific, Captain!” Charlie said. Ruth smiled toward me. Everyone looked cheerful. They had known we would be leaving tomorrow, but this was the first official announcement of it.

  “Before you start planning your homecomings, I have some news for you that you won’t like,” I said. I paused only a second. “We are taking a detour by Belson. I’m staying there.”

  ***

  They were dismayed and they fussed and fumed about it. I thought for a while they might even mutiny. But eventually they accepted it. We were, as I had said, in our warp shortly after lunchtime the next day. By suppertime I was in my chemical sleep. Twelve days. That was the time from Aminidab to Fomalhaut. It was taking them twenty-four days out of their way home, and I didn’t blame them for being pissed. But there was enough fuel for it and I promised them all a bonus for the extra time.

  When I came out of my sleep and went up to the bridge and looked out the window, there was Belson at about the size the moon is when seen from Earth. It looked as empty as the moon. I had awakened with cold in my gut and remembered no dreams; the sight of that planet of black glass sent a deep chill into my soul; it was all I could do not to quail at it and tell Ruth not to land. Where did these spooky feelings come from, anyway? I had never felt anything but love for Belson—even when it had broken my arm.