The Steps of the Sun

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 reeling; 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.

I think that place reflected my time in prison more than anything else. I had learned to shoot passable nineball in jail and I had a billiard room put in my mansion, with a fine nineteenth-century mahogany table. I almost never played anymore, but I loved looking at the way the green baize surface glowed under the Tiffany lamps. I had been claustrophobic sometimes in my cell and couldn’t sleep; I had a whole floor of that place as my master bedroom, with a huge bathroom each for me and Anna and an unfinished pine floor big enough for basketball. I furnished the main living room in eighteenth century; I had fallen in love with that from a picture book at the prison library: English Eighteenth-century Houses. There were gold armchairs with white brocade seats and cloisonné snuffboxes and clocks with cherubs on their faces. I bought two Fragonards, and a chandelier from a French palace. But all I remember using that room for was playing three-card stud with my accountants. We didn’t entertain. Anna spent most of her time in the bedroom, reading or making hooked rugs.

During the redecorating Anna was living with her parents upstate, in their parsonage in Watertown, and on the night before she and our daughter Myra were to come and make a grand attempt at living with me, I went to the place and poured myself a tumbler of Japanese Campari in the cathedral-ceilinged kitchen and walked around in a kind of euphoric daze for hours. I allowed myself to imagine being a paterfamilias on the grand scale. Since Anna and I had only one child, it would be necessary for us to start breeding fast, but that seemed okay at the time. There was a big nursery on the top floor. What the hell; we could have six or seven kids and reverse the trend. I didn’t know anybody else who had children. There alone in that big spooky expensive place I visualized the bustle and warmed to it. Moonlight came through high casement windows onto the floor of my cavernous living room and glistened on the cherrywood grand piano. I sat on the bench and played “Stardust” and “Bridge over Troubled Waters” soulfully and drank more Campari. I got up and went to the billiard room and played myself a game of nineball. I still remember: I ran the first seven and then miscued on the eight. I walked down to the wine cellar and counted the whites, took the walnut and brass elevator up to the fourth floor and surveyed the guest suite, done in early twenty-first century, with everything pastel and puffy, even the kitchen and butler’s pantry. I smoked a Japanese cigar, drank a glass of Japanese whisky, turned on my Japanese music system for a while, glanced through the Japanese section of the Wall Street Journal and thought briefly of buying a resort hotel near Osaka. But I wasn’t really interested, and Japanese investments troubled me; I knew her depression would worsen from buying American coal, as indeed has happened. My spirit was troubled there in my mansion and I didn’t know why. Yes, I did. It wasn’t going to work out, and I knew it then.

I still had my methane-powered Bentley in those days, and I used it to pick up Anna at Grand Central the following morning. She had traveled second-class on a wood-burner, sitting erect on one of those plastic seats by dirty windows, and had brought exactly one small suitcase with her. Samsonite. That was Anna. It wasn’t exactly religion with her and she had taken no vows of poverty. But my God, did she gall me. Yet she wasn’t really stingy in the soul—just closed off somewhere. Often I would wind up spiritually on her side and cursing myself for being oafish and rich. Her suitcase was half full of books.

Anna and Myra and I lived in that mansion for eight months. Toward the end of it the student riots began. Things were bad all over and the students had decided capitalism was to blame. I had no real quarrel with that, although I felt the scarcity of fuels deserved at least equal billing. For a few days of it a lot of the sons and daughters of the upper-middle class decided I was the enemy, and I got edgy when they started chanting things like, “Belson go home.” Hell, I was home.

They hanged me in effigy, and it was a damned good effigy too. Art students. I’ll never forget that stuffed manikin with my steel-rimmed eyeglasses and my characteristic lumberjack shirt and the cigar. It looked so mournful being hanged under the gaslight there at Sixty-third and Madison, my replica head at one side as if in a daydream and my feet jumping around as drunken students jerked the rope. I stared at it a long time from my billiard-room window. Then they burned it and I gasped as it blackened. What a sensation! What a deadly preview! Still, I liked being the star of the show.

Anna saw that effigy too, I’m certain, from her bedroom window. She was a lot more cheerful the next morning. At breakfast she joined me for her Rice Krispies, and for a moment she even hummed a tune. But when I suggested we bounce around in our Louis Quinze bed for a while it was nothing doing. She wanted to finish Proust. I should have divorced her on the spot, citing cheerfulness toward effigy burning as grounds. Denial of conjugal rights. Overweening literacy.

I had never paid much attention to television, but when I moved into that mansion I decided to install the best. People told me the technology had been improved a lot and it was patriotic to patronize it. Since the death of Hollywood in the first part of the century and the demise of General Motors at about the same time, the United States had led the world in only two technologies: fast food and television. During the Depression of the 2050s holographic TV had improved enormously. So I had an RCA set installed in what had once been a third-floor sitting room. It consisted of six projection posts against the room’s longest wall, and I’ll never forget how I jumped when I first turned it on after the installers had left. A group of real people—dancing and singing frenetically—suddenly appeared in the room, life-sized and skimpily dressed, all of them grinning at me like idiots. The sound was real too, loud and sexy and terrible; it was Broadway synthetic music of the worst kind. It turned out they were doing a commercial for life insurance. I’d had no idea. And the whole thing only used a hundred and fifty watts. I left the set on, went to the bar in the next room, got myself some whiskey, and came back and joined my illusory guests, now a middle-class family in turmoil. A soap opera. It was quite a sensation to move among them, a drink in my hand, and hear talk of their electronic hysterectomies and multiple infidelities. They were very earnest. Things were pretty low in my life at the time. I seldom saw Anna, and Myra spent all her time with doctors and lovers. I ran my businesses pretty much from my head, and a dozen phone calls a day made up my labors. I was on hold-both financially and emotionally; I got hooked for a while on television. It was a sign that things were falling apart, that my plan of settling down in New York was unreal. Something in me welcomed the riots when they came. I haven’t watched TV since. I do believe that shooting morphine is better for the soul.

Anna was the child of an improbable marriage between a little dandy of a Presbyterian minister and a big-boned grand-lady Episcopalian. Her mother, who had never attended her father’s church, was far too grand to get out of bed before noon; she had lain on satin with her quilted robe and quilted eyepads while Anna took charge of two younger brothers.

I visited them one summer vacation, when Anna was home from Elmira College, where she studied French Literature. Her family kept her so busy, fixing this and taking care of that, that we hardly had any time together. She spent one morning preparing a Fourth of July picnic for all of us, and when the Fourth came her mother decided that Anna should put away the chickens she had roasted the day before and cook a ham instead.

“Mother,” Anna said, in despair, “I have to hang up the wash. And where will I get a ham on the Fourth of July?” She stood there looking at her mother, trembling.

“You’ll work it out, dear,” her mother said. She turned and walked back up the stairs to her bedroom.

And Anna did in fact work it out. She got the clothes dry and bought a ham and cooked it and had a picnic dinner for six people. That evening she cleaned up the kitchen, fixed the damper on the wood stove and rearranged the books in her father’s library.

“That girl sure is a wonder,” her father said sweetly, puffing his pipe. At the time, I thought so too.

I spent two days after they hanged and burned me in effigy getting police protection and having steel shutters put on the windows of the bottom two floors. It was a private police firm, a subsidiary of Cosa Nostra. There already was a high wall around the building with a stand of barbed wire on top. During this activity I hadn’t seen Anna or Myra, but when it was all over and I was in the billiard room one evening idly shooting the three ball around on the table, thinking things over, who should walk in but Anna. She was wearing a faded green housedress and she looked tired.

“Hi,” I said. “Where’ve you been lately?”

She frowned a little. “Around the house,” she said. “Staying out of your way.”

“You wouldn’t have been in the way. I’ve just been telling men where to put things.”

“You should have asked me to help.” Her voice was weary. “Ben, pour me a beer, will you?”

She seemed so relaxed and tired and familiar that my tension dissolved. “Sure, honey,” I said. I went to the little bar at the end of the room and got two bottles of Peruvian beer and two glasses. Anna seated herself in a big velvet easy chair. I set the glasses on the table beside her and poured them both full, with big foamy heads. I pulled a smaller chair over to face hers, took one of the glasses, and sat down. Anna seldom drank, and I took this present willingness as a good sign. I sipped my beer slowly and waited for her to start a conversation. She clearly had something on her mind.

Finally she spoke up. “Ben,” she said, “I think I could go crazy in this house. There’s nothing here for me to do.”

I stared at her, crestfallen I guess. I had been hoping for something positive. “You should get out more,” I said. “Meet people. We could go to the theater or the ballet.” I felt stupid immediately, saying it. There were riots and demonstrations out in the streets of New York and I was one of the prime targets of them. My wife should hardly be out at soirees or politely applauding the ballet. I always seemed to be saying stupid things to Anna.

She just looked at me wearily. “It’s like it was when we lived at the Pierre, Ben,” she said.

“I don’t drink as much as I did then. And I’m home a lot more.”

She looked at me fiercely for a moment. “You were drunk all the time,” she said. “Or at least whenever I saw you, which wasn’t often. Now you’re drunk only part of the time.”

That was her first acknowledgment that I had cut down, and I was glad to hear it. “Look,” I said, “we could read books together, the way we did when we were first married. We should take a trip to Europe and go back to some of those places in Florence. Or that house in Brussels.”

She just looked at me and sipped her beer thoughtfully.

“Hell,” I said. “In a week I can be finished with these damned mergers and with a coal deal I’m trying to make. I’ll have time on my hands. We can get… can get reacquainted.” I looked toward the big casement windows that faced Madison Avenue, where my new floodlights made the tops of the two big maples glow theatrically, as though for a stage setting. Then I looked back at Anna and saw that she was crying. “What’s wrong, honey?” I said.

She went on snuffling for a minute and then took a substantial-looking handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and blew her nose powerfully. “Ben,” she said, “I had a miserable time when we went to Europe. I hated that house in Brussels. I spent the time hooking rugs and trying to get some heat in that kitschy place while you paced around and fretted and made three-hour phone calls. It was horrible.” She blew her nose again, more softly this time, and then looked at me balefully. “What makes you think it’ll be any different if we do it again?”

“I didn’t know…,” I said. “I thought you liked Europe that time.”

There was hatred in her eyes now and in her voice. “I told you a half-dozen times when we were there I wanted to go home. I told you I hated Belgium. I felt uncomfortable in the restaurants, and the movies were insipid.”

“Honey!” I said. “I remember.” Actually I hadn’t, until she spoke of it. I felt immediately guilty. But, damn it, it had been ten years before. “And didn’t I have French movies brought over and we showed them in the living room? And I got a good cook and we ate in.”

She stood up all of a sudden, with her half-finished glass of beer in her hand, and stared at me and said, levelly, “You son of a bitch, Ben. It was just like that. You did this for me and you did that. You were telling me then how you were going to straighten things out and how you were going to change. Well, you didn’t change and you’re not going to and I’m ill with it. I have a sickness unto death of hearing about you and what you are going to do and how things are going to be different. There are only two things you do, Ben; you make money and you talk about yourself. And I’m sick of both of them.” She stopped and finished her beer.

Something in me was cringing. I knew what she said was true. I was obsessed with myself and with making money. But, damn it, I did pay attention to her when she spoke up loudly enough to compete with the three-alarm fire that was sometimes going on in my head. I felt wretched. “Anna,” I said, in all sincerity, “what do you want?”

And then she did something I had never seen her do. She gripped her beer glass, swung her arm, and threw the glass like a hardball against the far wall. Straight as a rocket. It crashed, fell, tinkled on the floor.

“Jesus!” I said, impressed.

“What I want,” Anna said, “is for those rioters out there to come and get you personally and hang you. And then burn you. I hate your insides, you self-centered son of a bitch.”

I just stared at her. I had sensed that she was furious for a long time—years, I think. And there it was. It seemed to clear the air in the room.

“Damn your egomaniacal soul,” she said, and then turned and left the room.

I sat there for about twenty minutes. Then I got up, went to the pool table, racked the balls into their triangle, broke the rack, and started shooting straight pool. I ran all fifteen of them. But my stomach was in a knot. I was a son of a bitch. Self-centered and money crazy.

When the Mafia first came out of the closet, merged with the Teamsters and listed itself on the New York Exchange, I stayed away from the stock. Cosa Nostra Industries. I was suspicious, despite the predictions of better shipping of goods across the country. Well, as usual, I was right; shortages got worse in New York, and the arrival of food and goods became even more whimsical. During that time in my mansion there were never any potatoes available except on the black market, but there was an abundance of pears. Damned good ones top. After I finished running that rack of balls on the pool table, I went down the elevator to the living room, where there was a big Sèvres bowl of yellow and red Bartletts. I began eating them and pacing around, dripping juice on the floor for a while until I got a plate and held it under the current pear. They were remarkable—as succulent as fruit could be—and I must have eaten a dozen of them. “Orally deprived,” the Great Orbach had said of me, “lacking in deep and vital nourishment inside.” It was sure true. My mother’s breasts had looked like rotten turnips to me. When I drank I drank seriously. Planning a real estate sale or a merger I could chew my thumbs until they blistered. If I didn’t have the metabolism of a Brazilian fire ant I’d be fat. But I only sleep three or four hours a night and I’m normally pretty lean.

So I gobbled down those pears in my guilt and anger and helplessness and remorse over Anna. We had been married fifteen years and it seemed to be only grief. I ate another pear, dribbling juice down my chin, striding across the living room in my lumberjack boots. Jesus! I thought, what does she want?

I said that aloud, What does she want?, several times, and then realized I was fighting back the answer. It was obvious: she wanted me to care about her. And the truth of it was that I didn’t. Not anymore. Anna bored me. There was a sweetness in her somewhere—a kind of lost child—that appealed to me strongly. There was that intelligence that had drawn me to her in the first place. But right now it was all dust and ashes. It wasn’t enough. I ate another pear, more slowly this time. It would have tasted better with a little hard cheese, but that was two floors below, in the kitchen. I pictured Anna’s face as it had looked in that parsonage with her cultivated, genteel family. She had seemed so smart, straightforward and fresh. So unlike anybody else I knew. She’d had a nice round bottom then too, and big, amused eyes. Talking to her was like talking to an old friend. She didn’t flirt. She wasn’t devious. I felt I should grab her right then and marry her.

I proposed after we had known each other three months and she accepted. She told me the truth: she wanted to get out of that place near Canada, see the larger world. She didn’t want to finish college and be a schoolteacher. She wanted something “different” she said. Well, I never found out what that “different” thing was—although God knows I tried to. And she never did either. She didn’t know what she wanted; how in the hell was I supposed to?

I took her to an inn in Jamaica for our honeymoon; we stayed in a suite with a private swimming pool and private dock and our own croquet course. The bedroom was enormous, with white furniture and beds and white walls. There were nineteenth-century British paintings of flowers and horses and landscapes on the walls and three vases of flowers in the room. We had two bathrooms, tiled and huge, with a giant bowl of hibiscus in each—pink for her and blue for me. There was a stone balcony forty feet long over the rocks where the Caribbean splashed in clear blue and foam.

It was our wedding night. I had undressed quickly in my bathroom and was lying, wearing only a pair of black briefs, on one of the two king-sized beds, my hands behind my head. I was pretty inexperienced sexually myself, and Anna was a virgin.

So much for the Fergusson pill and the “liberation of the body”—I was as scared of sex as they had been in the Middle Ages. So was Anna. We had talked about it.

But she had not said anything to prepare me for what happened next. We had gotten off the plane still wearing the dressup clothes from the wedding. She came abruptly out of her bathroom now, with her white blouse still on and with some kind of godawful sexless rubber girdle on her bottom. She walked over to the bed in her matter-of-fact way, planted her feet like a shortstop, turned her back to me and said, “I can’t get this thing off.” I was sort of spellbound by all this. It was Anna’s way of behaving all right, but I had expected something different for a wedding night. I sat up in bed, reached over and unhooked a little steel hook at the top of the thing. It felt to my fingertips like Rubbermaid.

“That’s better,” she said and then proceeded to loop her thumbs under the waistband of that damned rubbery white garment, pull it down an inch and then, abruptly, let it go with a loud pop. She breathed an audible sigh of relief. She took it off an inch at a time that way. Pop, pop, pop, I can still hear it.

I had not expected Anna to act like a courtesan. But, Jesus, she seemed to be trying to tell me something awful with this.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “what’s going on?”

Her voice was taut. “I just couldn’t get the thing off,” she said.

“Why did you wear it in the first place?” She didn’t need a girdle. Her ass was fine.

Then she began to cry.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. That must have been the first of a million times I was to say that. I’m sorry, honey. Christ! I should have read the handwriting on the wall right then and bolted back to New York. Let my lawyers handle the annulment. But, as usual, I thought it over and figured I was in the wrong. If only I could trust my feelings with women the way I do with money! I’d be as fulfilled as a fat Japanese Buddha floating on a lotus leaf.

“The lady at the store told me I needed something to wear under the suit, and I bought it. I wanted to look right for you.”

I shook my head. She turned to look at me, standing there with a white Synlon blouse on and that big dumb rubber thing lying on the floor like a discarded chastity belt. Chastity belt is right. I’ve learned since that there are nuns everywhere.

“Well, she should have sold you a pair of scissors to get it off with.” I was trying to be amusing. But it wasn’t funny. Goddamn it, it was terrible. I felt like a son of a bitch for being angry. I had loved her for her plainness, hadn’t I? What did I expect? Poor girl—how could she know how to be graceful on her bridal night?

Anna looked devastated. “I’m sorry, Ben,” she said. “I guess I don’t know how to be a bride.”

“Honey,” I said, “it’s okay. Just throw that thing away and get yourself naked and come back. If you feel self-conscious naked, wear something. Just something that isn’t made of rubber.”

She smiled. “Okay,” she said, and went back into her bathroom.

She came back after a while wearing a white gown. She had put on perfume. She lay in bed by me and we talked and both of us got to feeling better, but something in me was apprehensive. We didn’t make love until the morning, after breakfast. She bled a little on the sheets. When I walked out of the shower afterward I saw that she had the sheets off the bed and was in her bathroom grimly rinsing the blood out. My stomach sank. But I said nothing to her. What the hell, I thought. She’ll change. But she didn’t.

After two hours or so of eating pears in the living room, I went into a bathroom and threw up. Then I went to the phone and called Arthur Freed, one of my lawyers, got him out of bed, and told him I wanted to get a divorce and I was willing to pay substantial alimony.

I still felt sick and my mouth was full of a sour-sweetish taste from all the pears. But something in my heart felt lighter. I had been putting off that divorce for fifteen years.

I’d been seeing Isabel from time to time, ever since I’d backed a revival of a play she had a small part in. I waited until sunup and called her and asked her to have breakfast with me. She agreed, sleepily. By nine that morning I was in her apartment and we got into her loft bed together, while her two big, loutish pussycats watched me fumble, moan and fail. I had become impotent. Son of a bitch!

In a cover article a few years ago, Newsweek called me “a scrappy child of the times” and went on to speak of those “times” as being “the orphan offspring of the twentieth century.” In its half-assed way Newsweek was right. My father buried his life in the past; I live very much in my own century. I was born in 2012, when population in the industrial societies was plummeting. It’s a wonder I was born at all. The last gas station in America closed when I was four. Faster-than-light travel was perfected when I was seven, and when I was in high school the frenetic search through the stars for uranium was on, with hundreds of ships like the Isabel scanning the Milky Way for what the Tribune called “the galactic Klondike.” Fuel for that venture reduced the world’s supply of enriched uranium by half. God knows how much was thrown into the stratosphere during the Arab Wars, blowing up those half-empty oil wells and the spanking new concrete universities that dotted the sands of the Persian Gulf.

If my century is the “orphan” of the twentieth, it is the 1990s that conceived my times. More precisely, the year of conception was 1997, when Fergusson invented his pill.

Fergusson was a cranky old celibate whose contraceptive had all the necessary characteristics: it was cheap, easy and safe, and you didn’t have to remember to take it more than once. It was also nonsexist; a man or a woman could get sterile with the same pill. The first Fergusson kits came out several years before my birth, and it is to my everlasting astonishment that neither my mother nor my father took one of the reds and prevented me and this account of them from coming into being. A kit was a small plastic bottle with two pills—one red and one green. If you swallowed the red you were sterile and you remained that way until you took the antidote—the green pill. You were sterile for a weekend in Mexico City or for your lifetime, as you chose. A Fergusson kit cost almost nothing to manufacture; they sold for the price of a Pepsi-Cola—two dollars. The World Health Organization gave them out free in Latin America and India. The Roman Catholic Church nearly strangled on its apoplexy; the Pope crinkled his wise old Japanese eyes in pain. The press and pulpit were full of talk about God-given procreation and the warmth of families. People nodded agreement sagely and took the pill. Minority groups shouted “chemical genocide” and maternity wards closed down. Bantu tribesmen gave their young reds as part of traditional puberty rites. No igloo in the Arctic was without them. And everywhere the greens were left over. They seldom got taken. “Collective suicide” Osservatore Romano called it. A few dutiful Irish had broods of sulking babies; the rest of mankind breathed a sigh of relief. The price tag had finally been removed from copulation. The next generation was half the size of the previous one.

Myra was born from my deliberate taking of a green on a Friday night. At the first sign of Anna’s pregnancy, I popped a red.

During the nine months I lived in that mansion and tried to be a family man I would, from time to time, feel guilty about my style of life and about all the money I had. I have always been a Communist manqué, perhaps even more so than Isabel. And Isabel was born in a Communist country and went to Maoist schools. My parents seldom spoke at the dinner table in more than grunts; when they did speak it was usually to remind me that a family of six in India could have been fed on the vegetables I didn’t want to eat. I silently wished in those days that I had a postpaid jiffy bag by my plate, into which I could dump my uneaten Spam and mail it off immediately to some address in New Delhi. I still pay a dole in guilt for my affluence.

Sometimes I would roam through the long hallways and parlors of my big house and find myself thinking, “What a waste!” I would decide glumly to turn the place into a shelter for homeless drunks or a hospital, that I myself really needed no more than a single room. But then I would console myself, as one does at such times, by thinking of worse cases. If I looked across the street from my big dining-room window I could see the facade of a mansion bigger than mine, with a brass plaque that read THE PENNY NEWTON MEMORIAL SHELTER. Penny, dead a dozen years, was the last of that family of oil barons and electronics wizards; she had put her hundreds of millions into endowing a five-story mansion to be used as a home for stray cats. There were about six thousand pussycats living across the street from me, and brigades of uniformed men searched the city for more, while a staff of veterinarians and nutritionists kept the residents glossy-coated and bright-eyed. There were still plenty of families in Harlem with rickets and frostbite. Ratbite too. What the hell, at least I had earned my money. Penny had done nothing in her entire life but attend the ballet, play whist and accumulate dividends from the fortune her father had cheated other people out of. My general feeling was that the wealth of most of my neighbors was as unearned and as trivially spent; Penny’s cat home was merely more blatant. Property is theft.

After several days of it, the loading got to be routine, although some crew members continued to go around in a kind of protracted excitement. I was neither thrilled nor glum, but I realized my emotional distance from the ore that continued to pile up had separated me from the crew too, canceling the picnic as it were. I made the motions of supervising the work, but I gave no orders or instructions. It was Annie with her tanned, serious face and her quickness who ran the show. Under her supervision the raw Juno subsoil was fed into machinery that refined and compacted it and processed the pure uranium into heavy yellowish pellets about the size of a twenty-dollar coin but an inch thick. The Isabel had brought a supply of boron moderators just in case radioactivity had to be contended with, and these were, on Annie’s orders, placed between the pellets. Stacks of twenty pellets alternating with twenty moderators were then covered with transparent, high-density sheaths. The result looked like some kind of gargantuan candy roll or parfait; it would be placed carefully in a plastic case along with nineteen others of its kind. The cases were numbered and loaded into the Isabel’s storage by a crane.

This was not a neat and smooth operation, as in a Japanese holovision factory. Nobody wore a white lab coat, and there was a lot of dust, noise, confusion and sweating. But the boxes, looking sturdy and potent, were stacking up in the holds at an exhilarating pace—exhilarating to the others, if not to me.

I worked out in the gym every morning during these days. I took Artaud, my trainer, off the work crew for enough time to help me get the zero-gravity springs off the machines and replace them with weights, but I didn’t need his help in working out. The crew was invited to use the gym too; but I was usually in there alone, shortly after a light breakfast, putting myself through a pretty grueling sequence. It would be painful sometimes, doing repeated movements against those weights, but it accomplished something very necessary for my spirit.

After working out I showered heavily, dried off with one of the Isabel’s heavy towels, dressed in jeans and lumberjack shirt, and went outside to make a show of being the captain of this busy and cheerful crew. Every now and then I lent a hand if one of the conveyor belts jammed or a slowdown cropped up along the line. In the afternoons I would go to my stateroom and spend some time trying to plan out my course of action when I returned to Earth with the Isabel’s cargo. I would try to concentrate on some of the basic decisions: should I set up my own power plants or try merging with businesses like Con Ed? Should I merely sell uranium, confining myself to the fuel market in the way I had started out, hauling coal in a wagon? Should I buy more ships and have a fleet of them ferrying fuel to Earth? Should I go into the electric-car business or even the lighting and small-appliance business, which would be booming as electricity became abundant again? I somehow could not really focus on these questions. It lacked substance. It all seemed foregone.

At night I had supper at my desk and then played solo chess or read. I usually drank, alone.

One morning in the gym, during the second week of loading, another person came in just after I had started working out. It was Howard, dressed in yellow shorts, looking skinny and embarrassed. Howard is an intellectual, he’d been a professor of biochemistry somewhere for years, and he looked comical standing in the hatchway.

“Come on in,” I said, heaving my legs up against a hundred and fifty pounds.

He seemed heartened by that. He came over and strapped himself into the hip-and-back machine, next to mine.

“Did you warm up first?” I said.

He nodded. “Stationary running, in the mess hall.”

I grunted and continued. For a while we both worked silently. We unstrapped and changed machines; Howard moved to the leg raise I’d just left and I moved to the leg curl. He set the weights down to sixty and we began working our machines in unison. “Captain,” Howard suddenly said, panting, “do you have trouble sleeping here? With the short days and the two suns?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t say that I was usually drunk by the time I turned in.

He nodded. “One of those suns is always coming up just when I’m going to sleep.”

“Close down the hatch by your bunk,” I said. “Put a pillow over your head.”

“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “I could do that.”

For a while there was silence except for the squeaking of the cams and the clunking of the weights in their tracks. When we got up to switch to the next machines he spoke again. “I keep thinking about my wives when I go to bed.”

“Wives?” I said.

“Six.”

That was a serious number. But I didn’t want to talk about women just then. “Where are you from, Howard?”

He lay down on the leg-curl bench and awkwardly got his heels under the lifter. “Columbus, Ohio.”

“Isn’t that where Ruth’s from?”

“Yes. Ruth’s my sister.” He strained to lift the weights but nothing happened.

“I’ll get it,” I said. He was trying to do the hundred pounds I’d been using. I set it back to forty. I was a bit shocked to think of this skinny guy as the brother of Ruth, with her hefty build. “I didn’t know that,” I said. “You sure don’t look alike.”

“I favor our mother.”

I seated myself in the overhead press and began working.

“Ruth’s a smart one,” he said.

I didn’t reply. Howard annoyed me, as much in his tone of voice as anything. I knew that if some part of me had given up back when I was a dirty-kneed kid I could have grown up to be like him. I pushed hard at the weights, repeating fast until I could feel the sweat pop out and hear myself groaning with the effort. If my father had seduced me into imitating his aloofness and if my mother had hidden her chaos and self-hate better, instead of letting it all hang out there in the kitchen where gin bottles outnumbered spice jars…

I finished, unstrapped and wiped the sweat off with a towel. The hatch was open and from outside came the muted shouts and grinding sounds of the loading operation. I waited for Howard to finish and then said, “I’ve had women troubles lately myself. How do you feel about marriage, after six tries?”

He puffed heavily for a while. Then he said, “I’m not sure. Every time I do it I have high hopes. But then the fighting starts.”

I took a towel from a hook on the bulkhead and handed it to him, for the sweat. “Over what?”

“Money. Sex. The way she dresses. What we eat.” He dabbed at his chest and armpits. “You know.”

“I know.” I wrapped my towel around my neck and did a few knee bends. Outside the porthole I heard Annie shouting orders to someone.

“Are you married now?” I said.

“No. But I think about trying again.”

“Maybe that’s why you can’t sleep.”

“Could be.”

I finished my workout in silence and showered before Howard was through his. During my shower it occurred to me that I might not go back to Earth with the Isabel.

The next morning I decided to go back to the valley by our original landing site and pick some food. I wanted to get away from all the activity around the ship. Annie had worked out an improved system by then that didn’t require the smaller jeep. I had the earth-moving rig taken off it and invited Ruth to go along with me. She accepted, and we took off on the long drive. We didn’t talk much during the trip. I drove it at fifteen miles an hour and had to pay attention to the road.

I parked at a place where Annie’s road came within a few hundred yards of the valley. We got out, carrying buckets for the food we were going to pick, headed into the forest, and began walking along one of the lanes between orange-trunked palms. “Ruth,” I said, “how’d you come to be a star pilot? Is it something you dreamed about when you were a kid?”

She looked over at me. “I took it as an elective in college.”

“An elective?” I said. “What kind of college gives electives like that?”

“Ohio State. I was studying to be a railroad engineer. That was my dream when I was a kid. I wanted to pull the cord that blows the whistle.”

I knew what she meant. “Have you ever done it?”

“Nope.” There was a hint of melancholy in her voice. “I never have.”

I started to say something else when she went on. She seemed looser now and eager to talk. “There was a course in astronavigation on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and it fit my schedule. I had thermodynamics and steam-power systems in the mornings, and I wanted something simple after lunch. I thought astronavigation would be easy, because nobody was piloting spaceships anymore.”

“Why were they teaching it at all?”

“Well, they still had the equipment. The Sony Trainer and videospheres from the days of the Uranium Bust. Their landing simulator was a dream. I made an ‘A’ in the course, and took another. It was still a glamour course.”

“Really?” I said. “It must have been twenty years since anybody had flown a spaceship…”

“You’re forgetting the TV shows,” she said. “Remember those space adventure stories?” She stopped walking for a moment and looked over at me, with her eyes just a bit wide. She looked very attractive that way. “You know,” she said, “we’ve actually done what they were doing in those shows. We’ve found uranium!” I thought Ruth was an unemotional type; this was the first time I had heard a thrill like that in her voice. It was a pleasure to see her like that. “We sure have,” I said.

“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.