The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 13

I left Sue on the train and felt no guilt in doing it. If that was what she wanted her life to be like, it was her business; I wasn’t prepared to dance her loser’s dance and get involved in waking her up and feeding her endolin and dragging her into Columbus with me and then hearing the apologies. She knew what I wanted with her, and I was beginning to see what she wanted. A few years ago I would have become involved, but not now.

In the station I walked directly to a pay phone, got the dollar for a local call and Ruth’s telephone number out of my billfold, and stood there for a long moment holding in my hand my worn old billfold and the paper Ruth had given me aboard the Isabel with her phone number and address. The little brass dollar was in the other hand. What was I doing, leaving one woman behind me and rushing to another? There in that badly lit train station in Columbus, Ohio, about seventy miles from the little town where I was born, I began to remember my nights on Belson. My shoulders and the backs of my legs tingled with the memory of the grass making its interstellar connection with my physical self. My heels felt sensitive; they remembered the tendrils that had penetrated them. A sigh arose from my soul, and I heard an old woman who stood at the viddiphone next to mine gasp softly, and I saw her turn to stare at me for a moment in alarm. Did I look like John the Baptist again? Had I sighed like a drunken beast, as Isabel claimed that I sighed in my sleep?

Here I was about to embark on another dubious sexual adventure, about to diddle with the life of a person who had shown more concern for me than I had ever shown for her—who might secretly love me, for all I knew—and I was going to do this questionable diddling while involved in whatever steps were necessary to find Isabel, make money, and get the uranium off my spaceship and away from L’Ouverture Baynes. All of this while staying out of prison. What was I doing? Where was my Belson calm, my Belson peace? I looked down at my hand. It was trembling. I jammed it, together with the billfold, Ruth’s paper and the dollar, back into my pocket. I turned away from the phone, walked out of the station and into an Ohio drizzle.

It was a five-block walk to the John Glenn Hotel. I was soaked by the time I got there and I dripped water onto the blue carpet at the desk while I registered. The clerk stared at me. I ignored him and signed, thinking of Belson nights.

I came for a moment out of this reverie when he asked if I would prefer a heated room, explaining crisply that the John Glenn had a splendid new coal furnace. There was an implication in his voice that I couldn’t afford it. Not exactly a stupid inference, considering my bedraggled state and lack of luggage; but bastards like that have no business trying to make their customers feel uncomfortable.

When I didn’t reply immediately he said, “Perhaps you would prefer one of our unheated singles, with the heavy blankets?”

I blinked at him. “Come off it,” I said. “I want a suite and I want it heated.” My voice was hoarse.

He just looked at me.

“What’s your best suite?”

“We have the Neil Armstrong Gallery on the third floor…”

“What’s a gallery?”

“Three rooms and a terrace.”

“Is it heated?”

“Every room.”

“I’ll take it.”

It was overpriced, and the gray sofa in the parlor had coffee stains on its arms. But there was space to move around in, and a combination kitchen and dining room of the kind that is dear to my heart. I christened it the Belson Grass Room and decided to use it for meditation.

I had to get out of my wet clothes and I didn’t have any dry ones. The suite was warm, so I undressed, wrung out my clothes, hung them on the shower rod in the bathroom and padded around naked. That turned out to be a good thing; it brought me back to my nights on Belson.

There was an oriental carpet under the table in the dining room. I pushed the table over against the wall and lay down naked on my back on the rug. The floor was warm and the carpet thick, with a slightly musty smell. After I had lain there awhile I began again to feel the tingling down my back, neck to heels, that I’d felt in the train station. The confused voices in my head, and the anger that had begun to gather in me while I was registering in the hotel, began to leave me. Eventually I dozed off.

I woke up late in the afternoon and just lay there and contemplated the state of my affairs for a while. What I needed first was money. More cash to supplement what Myra had given me and then some real money. I pushed myself up from the floor, padded into the bathroom to check my clothes. They were still damp. I went to the viddiphone by the living-room sofa and set its lens for a head shot, so my nakedness wouldn’t show. I seated myself, touched the switch on the phone, and told it to get me a banker I knew. His home phone. In fact he worked for me, since I owned about 40 percent of his savings and loan. And he owed me a favor.

He didn’t recognize me with the dyed hair and the beard. I identified myself, told him to keep quiet about my presence in Ohio and to have his savings and loan lend me a half million, in large bills. To fit my money belt. “I’ll think of something to give you a mortgage on, Gordon,” I told him. “Bring papers.”

He cleared his throat and looked humble. “Mr. Belson,” he said, with some of the soft-mouthed arrogance the hotel clerk had tried on me, “I’m not certain it would be within my authority. As much as I’d like to accommodate you…”

“I’ll accommodate your ass out of the loan business for the rest of your life,” I said. “You dumb son of a bitch. You have those bills here tomorrow morning or you’ll be sweeping streets for a living.” The pompous little fart. He was one of those Warren G. Harding types, with the silver hair at the temples and the grandfatherly ways. Probably younger than I. Ask him to break a law and he turns Sunday school. “Bring that money personally. If you don’t you’re a fiscal ruin.”

There was silence for a moment. I stared at him and let myself float on my rage.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Belson…” His voice was creaky.

“Forget it,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at ten.” I felt righteous, ready to excoriate greedy foolishness and malfeasance in general.

Gordon looked dazed; I felt suddenly a little dazed myself. “See you in the morning,” I said and hung up. Then I walked back through the dining room and out onto the terrace. This turned out to be a six-by-eight-foot permoplastic apron with an Astroturf rug on it. So much for Neil Armstrong. So much for his dumb remark about that first step. No feeling in it. No more life than Astroturf. At least I had announced the first human steps on Belson with a yelp and a broken arm.

But where was my peace—my Belson peace? My hands were trembling with anger.

The drizzle had lightened but I didn’t stay on the terrace. I had begun thinking of Neil Armstrong and of those bland, tightly smiling descendants of people like him, who were more and more coming to rule the world. The John Glenn Hotel, indeed. John Glenn had been orbited like a fetus a hundred years ago, crouched in the belly of the hurtling whale more for publicity reasons than for engineering ones, and the people of Ohio had allowed him to make laws for all of us because of it. What folly. What an omen! I’d have voted for him maybe, for his being a sound, middle-aged test pilot before the razzmatazz of NASA, but never for his orbits, those pawn moves in the unholy game my country was playing with Russia at the time. What dangerous idiots we were in those days, with our weapons and our paranoia!

These thoughts about the United States and its long tradition of folly were doing me no good. Why was I so angry? My nose was itching. I was catching cold.

My shorts in the bathroom, a sky-blue pair I’d worn halfway across the Milky Way and back, were dry enough to put on, since I’d draped them over a hissing radiator. I took a quick shower, got into the shorts, and with a restored sense of purpose went to the viddiphone in the parlor. For a moment I wanted to call Ruth, but I put that out of my mind. I told the machine to give me her brother’s number. I got him on the first try. “Howard,” I told him, “I need to see you and for God’s sake don’t tell anyone I’m in Columbus.”

I’d quieted down a bit by the time Gordon got to my room with the money. He tried to be hearty and companionable about it, but I wasn’t buying. I signed first-mortgage papers with him for a house I own in Key West and sent him on his way. Then I put what I could of the money into my belt, rolled the rest into a crapshooter’s roll and stuffed it in my jeans. When I put the belt on it was like putting a bicycle chain around my waist, but it’s the best way I know to carry liquid assets. They’d have to sever me to get at it.

Howard arrived a few minutes after Gordon left and I greeted him with a hug. It was good to see someone from the Isabel again.

“Well, Captain,” he said, “you look healthy. But I liked you as a blond.”

“Me too,” I said. “Let me get you a drink.”

I poured us both some Chinese wine. The living room had a fake fireplace with a pair of high-backed red armchairs by it; we sat in these facing each other. “Did you marry again, Howard?” I asked.

He shook his head slowly. “After the ship landed in Florida and the court let us go I was excited about finding a new wife. I felt…” He was sitting hunched over his wineglass and holding it in both hands. “I felt like a sailor in port, if you know what I mean.” He finished his wine. “But nothing happened.”

“You didn’t meet any women?”

“It seemed like a lot of trouble for nothing, once I got down to it. I took the bus to Columbus.” He smiled shamefacedly. “I suppose I’m getting older.”

I stared at him.

“I’m forty-four.”

I could have hit him with one of the artificial logs. But I didn’t do anything. The man had six divorces behind him. Maybe he knew something.

I got up and went to the bedroom. When I came back to my chair I handed him a packet. “Howard,” I said, “I need to have this analyzed by somebody who’s really good at it.”

“It looks like dope,” he said.

“It’s endolin. I want to find out if it can be duplicated.”

“I know just the man. A professor at Ohio State.” He held the packet in his hand as though weighing it. “Endolin didn’t look like this on Belson.”

“I learned a way to concentrate it.” I found myself getting more irritated with this conversation. Also, I was beginning to get a serious cold. I excused myself again and went to the bedroom for a handkerchief and blew my nose violently. My throat was sore and my skin felt prickly. I got out another pack of endolin and took a pinch, chasing it with the rest of my wine.

“Captain,” Howard shouted from the other room, “did the grass sing anymore?”

I felt annoyed with the question. “Yes,” I said, “once.”

He nodded. “Wasn’t the grass why you stayed? So you could hear it again?”

“I wanted to consolidate myself.”

“You could have done that on Juno.”

“I can be very self-defeating in how I live.”

He laughed as though I was joking, although I certainly wasn’t. “You know,” he said. “I wanted to stay myself.”

I stood in the doorway and looked at him awhile—at his sad face and stooped shoulders. He did look old. Then I said, “On Juno or on Belson?”

“Belson,” he said.

Oh yes, I thought, furious. There’s a lot of it going around.

I woke before dawn with my bedsheet wet from sweat and my nose and throat feeling stuffed with steel wool. My head throbbed. I got up shakily, feeling wretched, took some endolin and a glass of warm water and then got back in bed and waited. After a few minutes the throbbing stopped and I felt the fever abate, but the baroque world of predawn sickness was enveloping my spirit.

Eventually I fell asleep again, or something like asleep, with twisting around and fighting with the sheets, which would not seem to get straight and smooth no matter what I did. I remember sitting up in bed sometime that morning after the sun had risen and shouting, “Motherfuckers motherfuckers motherfuckers!” and trying to get the top sheet to cover my toes. “Motherfuckers!” Someone below me pounded on the ceiling and, fuming, I became quiet again.

I slept till ten and felt better when I awoke, again, to wet sheets. I called room service and got four soft-boiled eggs and a bloody mary. Then I put on my jeans and my red shirt, went to the living room and called Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals.

It took about an hour of switching around from office to office before I could get anybody important—which really meant anybody Chinese. She was a junior vice-president in charge of Development and clearly a fan of the National Cultural Revival: Pear Blossom Loo. A young woman of about thirty, with black bangs above a face as inscrutable as a cue ball. Nice teeth, though, as well as I could see. I was sitting with the shades down and in dim light to make sure I wasn’t recognized.

“Miss Loo,” I said, “my name is Ben Jonson. I’m a professor of biochemistry at Stanford and I’ve developed an analgesic substance that should be of interest to you.”

“I see,” she said. “The Research Division of Lao-tzu International is not here. Not in Columbus. Bogota.”

My fever was coming back and for a minute I just wanted to hang up and go back to bed and drink bloody marys. Damn these uptight Chinese women! Damn doing business anyway! But I pulled myself together as well as I could and tried to sound charming. “Of course,” I said, “but the research is done. What you need to do is test it out. That’s not really research.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jonson,” she said, “we do not have the personnel or the equipment in Columbus to do what you say.”

“Look,” I said, “you have a Shartz Analyzer, don’t you?”

“We have several.”

“That’s all you need for now.” I sneezed suddenly. “We’ve run tests for a year at the University. It kills pain as well as morphine and it’s not a narcotic.”

“I’m not certain, Mr. Jonson, that Lao-tzu…”

“Come on, Miss Loo!” I said. “You look like a smart woman to me. This will take a half hour of your time and it can give you the most profitable pill since Glandol, or time-release Valium. Since Fergusson, for Christ’s sake. Do I sound like a lunatic?”

“Yes you do, Mr. Jonson,” Pear Blossom said crisply. I found myself staring at a blank viddiphone screen. She had hung up on me. “Son of a bitch!” I said and began sneezing. Then the sneeze turned into a cough. I got up and went to the bathroom and coughed and sneezed and spat voluminously into the toilet, occasionally stopping long enough to shout, “Motherfucker!” Whoever was below me pounded the ceiling again. I could picture some chubby, balding druggist hitting upward with a broom handle. I went on coughing, bent over and holding my belly. My nose was running.

Eventually the coughing stopped. I called room service for two bloody marys and then reached out for the Repeat button on the phone to get Pear Blossom back, but interrupted myself with another fit of coughing. What the hell, I thought, and called Ruth.

She came on looking sweet and chubby and a little disheveled. Good old Ruth! I thought, and my heart warmed at the sight of her there in front of me.

She was staring at me, apparently not sure who it was. “Ben?” she said.

“That’s right, Ruth,” I said warmly, with the cold now in my voice, since my nose was plugged up. “I’m in Columbus.”

She kept staring. Then suddenly she looked almost awed. “Oh Ben,” she said, “I thought I’d never see you…”

“I’m at the John Glenn, Ruth.” Just then a knock came on the door. “Wait a minute,” I said. I left the phone and walked over, opened the door and took the tray with the drinks from the waiter. I pulled a fifty from my jeans pocket, handed it to him and went back to the phone. “Ruth,” I said, “you don’t know how much good it does just to see your face.” I guzzled one of the bloody marys and snorted.

Ruth looked worried. “Are you drunk, Ben?”

“I’m sick, Ruth honey. I’ve got a cold. It feels… interstellar.”

She looked relieved. “Do you want me to bring you some hot soup? I go to work in twenty minutes, and I could drop by…”

“Ruth,” I said, interrupting, “I want more than soup. I’d like to move in with you for a week or two, while I get over this thing. I need to get a World Viddiphone Line and I need a set of barbells…” I sneezed again. “How about it?”

She hesitated, started to say something. Then she said, “Are you all right, Ben? Weren’t the police…?”

“I eluded them, Ruth, as the papers said.”

“Oh,” she said. “Ben, you look strange. Did you kick it? Morphine?”

I was starting to feel angry again. “Yes. I changed a lot, on Belson. Can I come and stay for a week?”

She looked at me silently for a moment. Then she shook her head. “Ben, it’s too late for that. I have a man living with me. I can bring you some food, and a doctor if you need one…”

It was a setback for my vanity, but I managed to hide it well enough. “I’ll be all right, Ruth.”

She smiled sadly. “Sorry, Ben.”

After talking with Ruth I sipped another bloody mary and permitted myself the old childhood gloom, then shook it off. What the hell, it was time to be grown-up about it. I’d tried the alternative enough in my life. There was business to take care of, and Isabel to locate. I pressed the Repeat button on the phone twice and got Lao-tzu again.

“Pear Blossom Loo, please,” I said.

The head on the screen disappeared and was replaced by that of Pear Blossom’s secretary. He put me through to Pear Blossom with some reluctance.

When she saw me she looked ready to hang up again. “The Research Division of Lao-tzu is in Bogota, Colombia, Mr. Jonson.”

I kept my composure, although I felt like throwing an ashtray at her disembodied head. “Miss Loo,” I said, “I’ll be in your office tomorrow afternoon. Do you really want me going to Parke-Davis first?”

“I will be in conference all day tomorrow.” Her face was a study in blank dislike.

“I’ll be there anyway,” I said, and hung up. Her head and shoulders disappeared from the screen.

I fumed around the room for a while after that, cursing China in general and Chinese bureaucrats in particular. What Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals needed was somebody like Arabella Kim to run it, with her good wrinkled face and tobacco-stained teeth. It was about noon, and there were things I wanted to do in Columbus—like getting a set of barbells—before going out to Lao-tzu in the morning, but I was beginning to feel as if I wouldn’t be able to do any of it. This cold, or whatever it was I had, was bad. I was sticky from sweat and my nose and throat were stinging. I took endolin and it kept down the pain, but it didn’t do anything for the cold itself. I knew what I needed was a transfusion from Belson grass, but that was out of the question. I climbed into bed, jabbed out my cigar in an ashtray, put a pillow over my head, and passed out. Falling asleep, I wondered briefly about Sue—about where the train would have been when she came to and found me gone.

I awoke late in the afternoon feeling feverish, dazed and unworldly. I knew I was sick, but I also knew it was only a cold. Something deeper was troubling me, some old loneliness. I’d had a Private World Line installed in the room and could talk through scrambled microwaves with considerable security to any phone in the world. I could do therapy this way. I sat up in bed, adjusted the sheets, relit my cigar, and called Orbach.

Orbach came on with his usual somberness. “Hello, Benjamin,” he said. “Welcome back into the world.”

“Orbach,” I said, “can you spare me an hour? Things are happening.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I have a patient arriving. I can connect you with my surrogate…”

“Orbach!” I said, desperate. “I don’t want to talk to a computer. Give me twenty minutes.”

Orbach looked at me sadly. “I’m truly sorry, Benjamin,” he said. “I can give you the noon hour on Thursday.”

“I don’t want Thursday,” I said. “Give me your computer.”

“It’s good to see you back safely, Benjamin,” the Great Orbach said. There was a slight click and the screen went milky white. Then Orbach’s synthesized voice came from the speaker. “Hello, Benjamin,” it said. “We can talk if you’d like.”

“Hell yes, I’d like,” I said.

“You sound angry,” the voice said.

“I’d like to talk to my mother,” I said grimly. What the hell.

“Your mother is dead, Benjamin.”

“I’ve heard that you machines can fake it.”

“I don’t know the voice,” the machine said. “I know parts of the personality, from your remarks in the office. Perhaps you can help me.”

I nodded. I’d been offered the chance to do this before but refused it as being too contrived. “First, she was a woman. Of sorts.”

“Yes,” said Orbach’s voice, now female.

“I want you to be her at about thirty-five, when I was a teenager. There was a nervous quaver in her voice. She was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1987 and she spoke with an Ohio accent. She was a narcissistic drunk and she tried to be casual in her speech, but the self-regard and worry were always there.”

There was a pause and then the machine said, in a genteel, quavering female voice, “Do I sound like your mother now, Benjamin?”

“That’s pretty good,” I said grimly.

“If you have a picture I’ll put it on the screen and animate it.”

“I’m not sure…” I said. But I was sure. I was faking it for the benefit of the machine. I did have my mother’s picture in my billfold; I’d carried it for over thirty years and never told a soul. I reached over to the table beside the bed, took my billfold, opened it, slipped out a polychrome holo card and squeezed it on. And there sat Mother with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, looking at the camera in a patronizing way. Her brow was furrowed half in irony and half anxiety. Her hair needed combing. I stared at her for a long time, unsure what I was feeling.

“Hold it toward the viewing lens, please.” It was the machine speaking but I almost jumped; it had come to seem very like Mother’s voice.

I held the picture toward the tiny lens at the bottom of the set, and a moment later the face reappeared on the screen. I leaned back in bed, my head propped slightly against the wall, and puffed my cigar. My palms were sweating and my mouth was dry. “Hello, Mother,” I said.

The face moved, quite naturally, talking. “Hello, Benny,” it said. It was uncanny. I felt frightened.

“Are you drunk, Mother?” I said.

“Hardly,” she said. “It’s ten in the morning.”

“Oh,” I said. Somehow the wind had all gone out of my sails. “What year is it?”

She looked down toward her watch. Mother always wore a watch, which may be why I’d never worn one until recently. Until leaving Isabel. “It’s June 8, 2024,” she said. “And I feel like hell.”

“I hate to see you drinking and smoking like that, Mother,” I said. “It makes me nervous.”

She looked at me and then puffed her cigarette. “You’re just a child, Benny,” she said. “You have no idea how badly I feel. And your father’s no help…”

Some of my anger was coming back. “Have you ever asked him for help?” I said.

“What good would that do? You have no conception of what it’s like to deal with that man…”

“Damn it, Mother!” I shouted. “You’ve never noticed, have you? You’ve never seen me trying to get him to talk to me…” And I broke off, startled to hear the quaver in my voice like that in the voice of the woman in front of me.

“He used to hold you on his lap when you were a baby. It was only after you got loud and had dirty fingernails all the time…”

“Mother,” I said, “you’re trying to blame me. Damn your soul.”

She laughed, a cruel little self-regarding laugh. “You were hyperactive, Benny. And loud. A real pain in the neck…”

I stared at her, telling myself, It’s only a machine, a computer in an analyst’s office on Third Avenue in New York. It isn’t even her voice. It doesn’t really sound like her. Yet I saw myself as a small boy, dirty-nailed and loud and squirming and I felt hatred toward the child I saw, toward what that mechanical voice had sketched for me so blithely. “Mother!” I said. “Stop it!”

She looked at me and then took a knowing sip from the glass in her hand.

“Mother.” I could hear the pain in my voice as though it were someone else’s. “I was only a little kid.”

She seemed not to hear me. “I never should have had a child.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” I said.

She laughed a little more easily this time and finished her drink. “You were a trial to me even before you were born, Benny. You almost tore out my liver with your feet.” She looked meditative. “That’s all you were when I was pregnant with you: elbows and feet.”

“Goddamn it!” I said, sitting upright in bed. The sheet fell away from me. I was naked there in front of her, exposed. “Goddamn it, you were supposed to be my mother.”

Somehow she had gotten another glass of what must have been gin and she took a long swallow from it. “To tell the truth, Benny, you were a mistake,” she said. “I had too much to drink at the wedding, and took the wrong Fergusson.”

“Orbach!” I shouted at the machine, “how can you know that? You’re not her.”

Mother’s picture remained on the screen, motionless now, and Orbach’s voice came on, mechanically synthesized. “It is inferable,” the voice said gravely, “from your memories and dreams. You are not being toyed with in therapy. You hear from your mother what you yourself believe to be true.”

I lay back in bed again and started to pull the sheet over my body, but did not. I puffed my cigar deeply for a moment, nursing myself as always, and said, “Bring her back and let her talk.”

“Benny,” she said, more brightly now, “you were sweet enough in your way, but you never knew what I was going through. You would slobber kisses on me when I was hung over, and try to crawl in bed with me in the mornings, and when you were two you kept hugging your father’s leg until I had to pull you away. You weren’t like other children, with good manners and an ability to entertain themselves. You wanted attention all the time, and I was having problems myself. Your father ignored me. The other faculty wives made me a pariah. Life was very difficult for me.”

I watched her with appalled fascination, remembering every phrase of it from one time or another. As she went on drinking and talking her face became more relaxed and pleasant. She looked younger and I saw, suddenly, that her breasts were still high under her pale-blue housedress and not the sagging old woman’s breasts of the night she had sat with the candles going. “I know I have drunk a bit too much to be the best of mothers,” she was saying, “but other mothers get some help from their husbands.”

Now you’re blaming him, I thought. You’ll blame anybody. Like me with Isabel. I writhed with this for a moment, lost in a confusion of myself and my chattering mother there on the screen. It wasn’t really Mother anyway, only a simulacrum. And neither am I, I thought. I am not my mother either, but only a likeness when it comes to love.

“I had the whole work of rearing you,” she said. “He did not lift one finger. Not one.”

“Mother,” I shouted from the bed. “You goddamned fraud. You could have loved me anyway. You could have let me love you…”

“Benjamin,” she said sternly, “you are getting an erection. Cover yourself.”

I looked down. It was true. I stared at myself for a long moment, bedazzled. I was shameless; I kept getting harder.

“Well,” she said in some kind of crazy voice that was half coy and half reproachful, “I’m glad to see that you’re normal. It’s more than I can say for your father in there.”

I stared at her on the screen. “Shut up!” I said. “Won’t you please just shut up?”

Her eyes began to glaze. “Benny,” she said, “you’ll never know what it’s been like for me all these years. God knows I’ve tried. I’ve tried to be a good wife and mother and nobody cares anything for me.”

“Mother,” I said, “I cared. I tried to love you and you pushed me away, just like Daddy. The two of you were a fucking team…”

“You don’t have to use that language,” she snapped. “You’ve forgotten how I nursed you, and fed you…”

“That’s not how it was, Mother,” I said. “You used to feed me Franco-American spaghetti out of a can. Half the time you didn’t trouble yourself to heat it.” I stared at her. “You were too drunk, Mother.”

She looked down at her lap a moment and then took another drink. Her voice had become low and her eyes seemed to look inward as they had that night on the couch, with the candles. “You can abuse me all you like, Benjamin, with your gutter language. But the truth is I’m your mother and I did my best for you.”

I sat up in bed, feeling something about to burst in my head. “It wasn’t your best and it wasn’t enough,” I said.

For a long moment we were both silent, staring at one another. I realized, with a shock, that she was much younger than I. Prettiness and weakness met in her face, already showing incipient ruin. My hatred for that face was insatiable; I wanted to crush it like a rotten grapefruit between my hands.

During all this my prick had remained erect. Mother looked at me awhile in a kind of crazy, muted contemplation. Then she said, “I used to wash your thing for you, Benny, when you were little, and cute. You always enjoyed it.”

“Mother,” I said, “I was not a toy. God did not give you something to fool around with when you had me.”

She smiled a faint, smug smile. “Why is your penis so hard, Benny?”

“Why do you think?” I found myself shouting. “And you aren’t worth it. You’re nothing.”

I was sitting straight up in bed. I reached forward abruptly and slammed the telephone’s “off” switch with the heel of my hand. Her face, with its smug, flirtatious smile, vanished into the electronic limbo it had been generated from.

I finished my cigar slowly and got Orbach’s machine on the phone again. This time the screen was blank. “I hope you are better, Benjamin,” the machine said in Orbach’s normal voice.

“I don’t know. I’m not as angry.”

“And things are clearer?”

“Things are,” I said. “I had an erection while I was looking at her.”

“Congratulations!” the machine said. “Would you like to talk with your father?”

I reached for another cigar and held it for a while in my hand. Then I shook my head. “My father’s dead,” I said.

“Yes,” the machine said, “he is dead.”

“Then I’ve done enough,” I said.

In an hour the fever was down and my head was clear. It was getting dark outside, and the rain had stopped. I looked at my watch. Eight o’clock. I would be going out to Lao-tzu in the morning and I needed to do some research first. And I was hungry.

I phoned room service for a hamburger and a glass of ginger ale. Then I called the one local taxi and reserved him for eight in the morning. I hung up, pushed the “Library” button on the viddiphone and began tracking down what was available on Lao-tzu. There was a good deal, much of it in the Shanghai People’s Library.

I found two histories of the company, going back to its origins on a Nanking back street in the nineteenth century, and books about the founder. There were annual reports and stock prospectuses in English and Chinese, and a lot of miscellaneous works on the drug business in China. I put it all on “Hold.”

On a hunch I checked U. S. Political Science and struck it rich there too: a holo movie called L’Ouverture Baynes—Man of the Times, and a book from the University of Kentucky Press, Kentucky Political Campaigns in the 2050s. I had texts of these printed out.

My hamburger arrived on a pewter plate with grapes and cheese cubes and Roquefort dressing and piles of evil-looking lettuce: clearly a Renaissance Pope Sandwich. I signed the bill and turned on the TV, switching it to play the material I had on “Hold” on the viddiphone. I threw away the lettuce and began eating, as an introduction to the Chinese ethical drug business came on. There was a panoramic shot of Chang An in Peking and crowds of healthy, prosperous Chinese. “Welcome to China!” a saccharine voice proclaimed. I sighed, had a drink of ginger ale, and called room service again for a pot of coffee. It was going to take a lot of caffeine to get through all this.

About the time my pitcher of coffee arrived, Howard called to say he’d gotten the report on endolin. There was no way to analyze it completely and no way whatever to synthesize it. I was delighted. I thanked him for his help and told him I had to get busy. Then I instructed the viddiphone to select out for me all the information on analgesics and to read it aloud, in English. I poured a cup of coffee and settled back in my chair.

At Lao-tzu in the morning Pear Blossom’s secretary told me icily that she was in conference. I told him I’d wait, plumped myself into an armchair and opened my Kentucky Politics printout, brought along for just this purpose. I lit a cigar. It must have been thirty years since anybody had made me wait in an outer office, cooling my heels like a porno-videosphere salesman, but I managed it all right. Pear Blossom came in a little over an hour later dressed in a gorgeous lavender shift and high heels. She saw me sitting there and looked away coolly, about to hurry into her office. Nice legs.

I played my ace in the hole immediately: I spoke to her in Chinese, using the Tradition-Revival forms. “Gracious flower of the arching pear tree,” I said, freezing her in her tracks. “I address you unworthily and my outlander’s tongue is lame with its mockery of yours.” In fact, I was speaking Chinese beautifully and Pear Blossom, judging from her face, knew it. “…yet even my poor discourse might add treasure to the bursting storehouse of the exalted Lao-tzu.”

“I’ll give you ten minutes,” Pear Blossom said.

I followed her into her office, a packet of endolin in my hand.

It took them four days to make the first offer. It was absurdly low, as I explained to Pear Blossom and her boss. By that time they had figured out who I was and had come to take me seriously. They also knew, of course, what endolin could do. They wanted it. Oh yes. It tingled my capitalist balls to sense that.

They doubled the offer the next day, and I told them again what I wanted. Three hundred million for the fifty pounds I had and for a 40 percent option on imports.

They walked out on that, as I thought they might.

The following day we met in a bigger room, with gray silk wall hangings. There was a new person among them, a very old woman in a blue robe, just arrived by plane from Peking. Pear Blossom introduced her to me as Mourning Dove Soong and I knew immediately who she was.

I spoke to her in Chinese. “I am filled with pride to address the distinguished chairperson of the world’s most formidable drug company.”

She nodded without smiling. “You ask too much for your endolin. A headache is a headache. Aspirin is a fine drug.”

This was just what I wanted. My heart felt light. It is exhilarating to see research pay off.

“I agree heartily,” I said. “I often buy aspirin from Bayer—a fine company—or Norwich, though that firm tediously outsells Lao-tzu throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and the Gold Coast. Upjohn also purveys a fine U.S.P. aspirin, to be found in twice as many American stores as the Lao-tzu product, unquestionably worthy though the latter is. One might weep at the thought.”

Mourning Dove was looking at me thoughtfully, holding a glass of plum wine. Pear Blossom and her boss were on the sofa. I sat in an armchair.

“One must also regard,” I said, “those merciful aids to the arthritic which are made with an analgesic as a component. Tao, the illustrious nine-way arthritis remedy, has sadly lost millions of dollars to Anacin alone over the past seven quarters. The new plant in Rio de Janeiro for the manufacturing of Tao will be forced to close, at embarrassing cost, if this tendency is not reversed. Worker riots are spoken of publicly. One wonders what the addition of endolin, in trace amounts, might do to this unhappy competition with Anacin. Then we must consider light anesthesia for minor surgery, and the hospital market…”

Mourning Dove was lighting a cigarette, much as Humphrey Bogart might have. “We’ll buy it,” she said.

I could have hugged her. “Splendid!” I said, in English. “Let’s sign the papers here tomorrow.”

Mourning Dove nodded, and sipped her wine. “I understand you have no present citizenship, Mr. Belson,” she said.

“All too true.” I said in English, still feeling some of the Chinese way of speaking in my head. “I have no nationality whatever at present.” I hesitated. “Perhaps you and I are sharing a thought.” My research had told me Mourning Dove was not only Chairperson of Lao-tzu International; she also sat on the Committee for the Enlargement of the People. The Immigration Bureau.

“Perhaps. Would you like to be Chinese?”

“Mourning Dove, you are marvelous!” I said. “You and I understand each other very well.”

“Yes,” she said unsmiling, in her soft, gravelly voice. “I’m certain it will help with your plans, to be free of legal encumbrances. Our embassies protect the People, Mr. Belson.”

“Oh, don’t I know it,” I said, exuberant. I had planned to go for this but hadn’t been sure it would work. As a Chinese I could have lawyers; I could use the whole string of multinational and world courts to go after the Isabel.

“Yes,” Mourning Dove said. “It will make our contract safe from red tape. And from publicity.”

“I’m right with you, Mourning Dove,” I said. “Do I need to pass any tests? I’ve read Confucius and the sayings of Chairman Mao. I have a pair of Qin horses by my croquet court in Atlanta, and my sweetheart, Isabel Crawford, is a Maoist.” I was high and feeling a bit silly. And I was really liking Mourning Dove, in whose eyes I had begun to detect amusement.

“None of that will be necessary,” Pear Blossom said coolly. “It’s a matter of form with the Committee for Enlargement, in Peking. The People’s Republic does not require performances from prospective citizens.”

Mourning Dove ignored her and smiled faintly at me. “Many of the Qin horses are exquisite,” she said. “I am pleased with your judgment.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for coming all the way from China.”

The forms were sent to Columbus by Transpacific Xerox, and by the next afternoon I was Chinese. I signed three papers in the presence of witnesses, made a ceremonial bow, and promised to be orderly in the arrangement of my household. Why not? I could have signed my name in script, but my professor of Chinese had shown me the calligraphic way and I did it like that, using a brush:

I became a compatriot of Confucius and Mao with a few strokes. A small world, if you know the right people. Chinese Belson.

I remained undeceived, however, aware that my being Chinese made the endolin contract safer for them. The papers were ready right after the naturalization papers. I signed them briskly. I was now not only a Chinese, but a rich Chinese.

After I left Lao-tzu with a plastic card that identified me as a Chinese national, my taxi took me to The People’s Bank of Shanghai, Columbus Branch, where I set up some accounts. I’d taken a check for ten million from Lao-tzu, for good faith and to tide me over until the transfer of funds was finished. The only possible snag was in Lao-tzu’s getting the endolin from the Isabel. I wouldn’t have any more cash from them until that was brought off. Since the People’s Republic maintained a big staff in Washington, and since even L’Ouverture couldn’t buck the State Department where Chinese relations were concerned, I hoped they’d have it within a week. I’d told Pear Blossom how to find it in the Isabel’s cabin. Pear Blossom was clearly the sort of person who got hold of what was rightfully hers.

Back at the hotel I called London; first a retired actor I knew and then a theatrical agency. No luck from either. There was a subsidiary of Belson Tile and Marble in Fleet Street. I called its director and told him to find out what he could about an actress named Isabel Crawford. I’d call him back next week. His eyes bulged out to see his actual boss talking to him. “Certainly, Mr. Belson,” he said. “We shall put our shoulders to the wheel.”

When I’d done what I could about finding Isabel, I called the Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, George Kavanaugh. I’d known him when he was a coal broker. We talked about Baynes, who was up for election in November. “Is he unbeatable?” I asked, after we’d finished the amenities.

“Maybe,” George said. “He won strongly last time.”

“Who’s running against him?”

“Mattie Hinkle. Liberal democrat.”

“What chance?”

“A Chinaman’s.”

“Watch your language, George,” I said. “I’m no person to talk to about Orientals that way.”

“Some of my best friends are Chinese,” George said.

“I believe it. What’s Hinkle’s program? What’s she promising?”

George scratched his head. “Shit, Ben, I don’t know. Reform, I suppose. She should try to get him from the Left.” Suddenly he looked at me hard. “Didn’t you escape from the Marines or something, Ben? In Florida?”

“It was two private cops, George, and it was Washington. You said from the Left?”

“Unemployment might work.” He paused and grinned. “God, Ben, you always were a live one. Betty says you ought to be in movies.”

“I don’t have the time, George. How can I get in touch with this Mattie Hinkle?”

“Try Miyagawa and Sumo in Louisville.”

“Okay, George,” I said. “Thanks for the information. And don’t tell anyone I called you.”

“Mum’s the word, Benny. Where are you calling from anyway?”

“I’m staying at a hotel,” I said. “In Los Angeles.”

Miyagawa and Sumo was an ad agency. I told them I was Aaron Fine, borrowing the name of my friend and accountant. I said I represented an organization backing liberal causes. The man on the phone was a clerk in the agency and clearly bored by all this. “We have impressive sums at our disposal, for key candidates,” I said levelly.

“Oh?” He looked more interested. “May I ask the name of your organization?”

“Something in the order of fifty million dollars,” I said.

He stared at me and set down his coffee cup. “That figure is hard to believe.”

“Do I look crazy?”

“No, sir…”

“Look,” I said, “I’d like to talk to either Miyagawa or Sumo.”

“They’re both in conference,” he said, for the second time. This time he seemed less sure.

“Well,” I said, “I’m going to hang up and have my bank send a million for the campaign to show good faith. Then I’ll call back and I want to speak to both of them.” I hung up.

I called the People’s Bank and told them to phone a million to Louisville. A certified check would pop out of a slot in the agency’s phone in a half minute. I called back and, sure enough, I was talking to two polite Japanese. By that time I’d invented an organization. “I represent the Friends of the Poor. We have been taking an interest in the campaign of Mattie Hinkle.”

They both nodded sagely and the smaller of them spoke. “Ms. Hinkle thanks you for sharing.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “What Friends of the Poor is concerned with right now is Ms. Hinkle’s stand on safe uranium.”

“Safe uranium?” the smaller one said. I took him to be Sumo.

“The uranium aboard the spaceship in Washington. The uranium Senator Baynes won’t release for use in power plants.”

“You say it’s safe uranium?”

“I can explain later. The main issue now, for Friends of the Poor, is Ms. Hinkle’s stand on that uranium.”

They hemmed and hawed for a bit and then admitted Ms. Hinkle had no opinion on the Isabel’s uranium. They would be glad for me to enlighten them both on the issue.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, and hung up.

The next morning Pear Blossom called to say the endolin was off the Isabel and in the Chinese Embassy in Washington. I asked about Baynes.

“He did not involve himself,” Pear Blossom told me coolly. She was a shade more civil, now that I was Chinese myself, but she still could project a lot of dislike.

“Baynes didn’t try to interfere?”

“He was out of town. My colleagues went through the Department of State.”

“Pear Blossom,” I said, “can I come out this afternoon for my three hundred million?”

“Two hundred ninety million dollars,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Can I get it today?”

Pear Blossom looked petulant about it. I could see how it hurt her actuarial soul to part with that kind of money. She’d been boggled when Mourning Dove agreed to my terms, even though she must understand the drug market well enough to appreciate the impact endolin would make. “Mr. Belson,” she said, “Lao-tzu is paying you over sixty thousand dollars an ounce for endolin. I feel we should attempt to market before…”

“Come on, Pear Blossom,” I said. “You know I get the money when your embassy gets the endolin. Our embassy. There are forty-five thousand milligrams in a pound. You’ll recover half your investment in six months. You have an exclusive on imports. You’ve got a bargain.”

She shrugged wearily. It was the first human gesture I’d seen her make and my heart warmed to her. “Come on, Pear Blossom, honey. It’s going to double the business for you. You’ll be a company hero. Don’t weaken.”

And suddenly I was astonished to see her, there on my big viddiscreen, smiling at me. “Okay, Mr. Belson. I’ll have your check ready.” What nice teeth she had!

Pear Blossom had thawed enough to be downright agreeable. She congratulated me in Chinese and gave a demure bow as I took the little plastic check. The weather was getting cool and she wore a tight lavender sweater and Synlon jeans. “Pear Blossom,” I said, “how’d you like to join me for breakfast?” We were sitting in her big antiseptic office. Behind her desk was a huge photograph of the Chinese Olympic Soccer Team.

“That would be pleasant,” she said, almost bowling me over. I really hadn’t expected it. “There’s a cafeteria on the second floor.”

It was about ten-thirty in the morning and we had the room to ourselves. I had figs and a pot of green tea; Pear Blossom had coffee and a danish. After we’d finished I looked for a few moments at the array of photos of bright pill bottles on the walls and then smiled at her. “You really look good in that sweater,” I said.

Insensitive as Pear Blossom might seem, she appeared to be alert to the vibrations in my words. “Oh?” she said, coolly.

What the hell? I thought. “You’re really a very dandy looking young lady,” I said. “It’s a nice fall day outside. Why don’t you let me take you for a spin in my taxi?” Pear Blossom was probably in her late twenties; it occurred to me I hadn’t touched the firm skin of a really young woman in a coon’s age. Her jet-black Chinese hair shone in the fluorescent lights and her skin was flawlessly white.

Unfortunately, at my question her eyes had turned to something resembling Belson obsidian. “Mr. Belson,” she said, in the voice you use for lunatics, “what do you have in mind?”

I almost backed off, but I felt I’d be damned if I would. “Sex,” I said.

She put her little white hands firmly on the table and leaned toward me, speaking very distinctly. “You old man,” she said in the crispest English I’d ever heard. “You crazy, arrogant old man. I don’t want your body touching mine.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, grabbing what composure I could from what was flying out every window in the big room. I could see myself in her eyes: a clumsy old Caucasian wanting to soil her body with lecherous hands.

“I’m going back to my office, Mr. Belson,” she said, as distant as Fomalhaut. She got up and walked off, paying my check as she left the cafeteria.

I guess humility is good for you, if it can be kept to short bursts. It took me about three minutes to recover and remember how I really wasn’t a dirty old man and that my body was in terrific shape. Besides, I was rich, and gentle, and good with children. I was helpful to the downtrodden. I made excellent fettuccine. Ruth liked me. Anna probably loved me. Isabel ditto, if she still remembered me. I’d cured Myra.

I took the check out of my shirt pocket and read the figures again. I began to feel better.

I hadn’t bought Chinese securities for years, had never held a seat on the Peking exchange, and knew next to nothing about how to beat Chinese income taxes. But I didn’t want to put my money in anything American, for fear of Baynes’s tying it up. I’d have to get a Chinese lawyer, a Chinese broker and a Chinese accountant, for openers, and I didn’t want to spend the time right then doing research. I’d done a thorough study of gold about five years before, and there is nothing more comfortably international. What I did was take a quick look at current prices, sigh a little, and buy two hundred fifty million worth of Chinese gold. That meant a new number would be placed on a list in Zurich. The simplicity of gold always scares me. Thirteen thousand four hundred a troy ounce. All it’s really good for is filling teeth.

The other forty-eight million went into three bank accounts: one Chinese, one Japanese, and one—for sentiment—Scottish. Using the Chinese account and my Chinese name, I bought a five hundred thousand, paid-up American Express card, for traveling.

Back at the hotel that afternoon my passport card was already in the phone slot, with a scowling hologram of my face on one side and the crimson symbols for the People’s Republic on the other, together with the usual date and place-of-birth information and warnings against travel in Russia, Cuba or Brazil. I slipped the card into my billfold, called Miyagawa and Sumo, and told them I wanted to speak to Mattie.

They put her on immediately. She came on the screen as a stocky, no-nonsense type in her mid-fifties, with glasses and closely cut hair. There was a matronly toughness to her, but her voice was soft. “My agency finds no record of a Friends of the Poor,” she said, straight-out. “How do you account for that, Mr. Fine?”

I’d figured that might happen, since Miyagawa and Sumo had time to check it out.

“Look, Ms. Hinkle,” I said, “I’ll be straight with you. I’m not Aaron Fine, I’m Ben Belson. I want you to beat L’Ouverture Baynes so I can get my spaceship back.”

She peered at me through her glasses for a moment, impassively, and then said, “That’s pretty blatant, Mr. Belson.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “Illegal in every way.”

“I understand you’re not even an American citizen.”

“That’s right, too,” I said. “They took it away from me.” I decided the best defense was no defense at all. She’d have to make up her own mind, if she wanted me to buy her the election.

She pursed her lips and thought about it a moment. “Mr. Miyagawa said you spoke of several millions.”

“Fifty. I can let you have it in gold. Five million at a time. I’ll give you a number of an account in Zurich; you have it transferred where you want it.”

“People get long prison terms for less,” she said.

“That’s the truth,” I said.

“How can I know you aren’t setting me up for just that? How can I know this phone call isn’t being recorded?”

I was lighting a cigar as she said these things. I took a big puff and then set it in a hotel ashtray. “Well,” I said, “you can never be sure. Anyway, I don’t think my phone is tapped. To answer your first question, why would I want to set you up for anything? So Baynes could beat you? You know as well as I do he’s already got you beat.”

She pursed her lips again, in a schoolteacherly way. “I have other enemies,” she said.

“I don’t doubt it. You’ll just have to assess the risks. You know who your enemies are; you’ll have to figure out why I would be working for them.”

She nodded. “May I call you back?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry. I’m keeping my whereabouts a secret. I’ll call back at noon tomorrow. Shall I go ahead and set up that Swiss account?”

“Don’t do that,” she said. “Just call. I’m addressing a D.A.C. meeting at noon, so make it at eleven.”

“What’s D.A.C.?” I said.

“The Daughters of the American Confederacy,” Mattie Hinkle said.

I sat there and fidgeted for a minute. Then I decided to go ahead with it despite Mattie. I punched my Bank Dispatch code into the phone and had Shanghai send a twenty-million credit to Geneva under the rubric FRIENDS OF THE POOR FOR MATTIE HINKLE and a notification to Miyagawa and Sumo.

If I didn’t hear anything for a week I’d send the rest of it.

I slept well that night and dreamed beatifically of money. Not of graphs on production charts or shorts in corn futures or even of bank accounts, but of crisp green beautifully engraved bills and brightly minted coins. For a while during the night I was a baby wrapped in new thousand-dollar bills, as though in swaddling clothes. I gurgled with the joy of contact with all that sweet money while older folk moved slowly by me, their steps taken as if in a sea of molasses, themselves dressed soberly in gray and brown suits, disdaining my infantile garment of cash. I smiled at them all.