The Steps of the Sun

Chapter 9

We orbited a couple of times and then I gave the order to slip into warp. I began formulating messages to Earth in my head as the universe outside the portholes began to wrinkle.

Warp travel is a weird business, and although the physics of it doesn’t defy comprehension it does transfix it. Trying to picture it can glaze your eyes as speedily as three martinis on an empty stomach. It’s a matter of pressuring your vehicle into a place where the effects of movement are grossly exaggerated. Seven-league boots. It’s called “analogy travel” by some. When you’re doing it there’s a side effect that makes message-sending fast and easy; there’s no speed-of-light limit because messages don’t travel from or into spacewarp; they are, in a sense, already there.

From Belson there were the regular Einstein limits to contend with. I didn’t even have a radio. It would take twenty-three years for an FM “I love you, Isabel” to have gotten to New York, and another twenty-three for a geriatric “Too late, Ben” to come back. Like impotence, only worse.

When we were settled into the warp and the sense of no-time and loose space began to come down on us like the lull at the end of a party, Charlie asked me if I wanted to log the trip in chemical sleep.

“No, Charlie,” I said. “Let’s make this flight on coffee.”

My first message was to Isabel’s old address:

That felt good even though it had little hope of reaching her. Then I sent one to a friend in Chicago and told him to telephone Arnie my lawyer at his home:

The messages were sent scrambled. I had left decoders with the friend in Chicago, with Isabel, and with my brokers, to keep messages private in case I wanted to transmit buy-and-sell orders or do business in general.

I sent a few more messages on the lines of the one to Arnie, trying to find out about my bank accounts and how long it would take to get the uranium unloading problem solved. After about twenty hours my first reply came:

Well. What had I expected? I sent a message to Aaron, my accountant, telling him to try finding her for me.

Then I got a reply from Mel:

I smashed my Spode coffee cup on the deck when I read that one.

And right away this came in:

The sons of bitches. I added forty pounds to the spring tension of the Nautilus double shoulder machine, strapped myself in and heaved against a hundred-sixty-pound drag thirty times. Goddamn, I’m strong when I’m pissed. My muscles bulged beautifully. I felt ready for violence.

By the time we came out of the warp and could see Sol the size of a dollar in the ports from the bridge, I had received a greater accumulation of negative messages than Moses had on Sinai. All of my bank accounts were under court seizure. My apartment was sealed off and barricaded. There was a contingent of mounted police on round-the-clock vigil at Islamorada to arrest me if I landed there. Anna was suing for more alimony. My house in Georgia had been burned to the red clay under it by outraged conservationists. The U.S. Public Health Service and the Narcotics Bureau had warrants out for me as a dangerous drug addict. Isabel had gone to London in Hamlet in the company of the young actor who played Laertes. (I thought of trying to negotiate a Mafia hit on him when we got in orbit. It would have been a first.) Hamlet had closed in London; Isabel had left no address. My safe-deposit boxes, stock and bond certificates, and Aunt Myra’s set of Haviland china were all under government seals. As far as my legal status was concerned, any thug could probably knife me on the streets and not be prosecuted. Belson Enterprises in Peking, Belson Ltd. in Montreal, and Belson and Co. in New York were all shut down and their directors strapped by court orders. My wood lots stood idle. My car had been sold. The Pierre couldn’t take me.

“Let’s go into an orbit,” I said to Betty. “East to west.” She bobbed her head down over the console and began punching figures in. “I want to make a few passes over New York and Los Angeles while I decide where to set down.”

Don’t ever trim your beard in free fall. While we were getting into orbit I grabbed a pair of scissors and tried it. It was like leveling a table by sawing the legs: I wound up with a lopsided effect, but stopped in time.

We circled at a hundred twenty miles up; it was nighttime in North America, and although there was little cloud cover it was shocking how few lights there were to see, compared with the photographs taken fifty years ago from the weapons carriers and spacelabs that used to coast around up there. You could barely make out New York, Chicago and Los Angeles; they looked like small towns. Well, they were on their way to being small towns.

I sat at one of the tables on the bridge puffing a cigar and watching a dark North America go by, saw the penumbra of dawn over the Pacific and then morning and then noon over Australia and South China. What a lovely blue ball that Earth is! You can’t beat it for a place to live. Even with all those bastards down there trying to do me in.

After our fourth orbit I made my decision. “Betty,” I said, “can you find Washington and bring us down there?”

She didn’t look up from the console. “Washington, D.C.?”

“Yes.”

“Certainly, Captain. On the White House lawn?”

“We don’t want that kind of attention. How bad a hole would the Isabel make in a football field?”

“Pretty bad. More crater than hole.”

I thought about that for a minute. “If there’s anybody there—a night football game or something—can you change your mind and pull back up into orbit?”

She turned her rice-paper face up to me and said, “Are you out of your mind, Captain?”

“I was afraid of that.” I looked at my watch. August 23, a little past midnight. Well, there wouldn’t be any ball games. “Get out your Washington map and bring us down in Aynsley Field. How long will it take?”

“One hour twenty-three minutes after we leave orbit.”

She was very sharp. “How many G’s?”

“Twelve at maximum, for thirty seconds.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it after one more time around. I’ve got some things to pack.”

“Yes sir, Captain.”

Bill put Washington into the course console and brought a map of the city onto the screen. He turned lacquered knobs. The two coordinate lines appeared and jiggled a bit and then settled on a black rectangle not far from the Congressional Shelter Complex. Then he pushed a lever in slowly and the map expanded until the rectangles filled the screen and the outlines of Aynsley Field were recognizable. You could see the grid lines of the football field, and the end zones. He gripped a handle and a clear black dot appeared on the screen; he twisted the handle, pushed it forward and the dot found the center of the field. Then he threw the “Lock” switch and the dot locked itself in place. “All set, Betty,” he said.

Betty threw a couple of switches and said, “We have our trajectory, Captain, and our atmosphere entry point.”

I really loved all this. Like Ruth, I’d watched spaceship shows on TV as a kid. Even though the actual doing of it-determining a point to drop out of orbit and a trajectory to ride down on—was no more difficult than getting a manicure, there was panache to it. Especially with our bright-red Chinese equipment.

I flipped on the intercom. “This is the Captain. We’ll drop out of orbit next time around, in about two hours. Tie everything down for twelve G’s.” Then I drew a breath. “I’ll be the first person off the ship, and I’m going to run for it. You people are all still citizens and they won’t give you too hard a time. I’m the one they want. I’ll get you your salaries and bonuses as soon as I’m able. For God’s sake don’t tell anyone we’ve been to Aminidab. The important thing is to get the uranium out of here. We’ll all be rich. I’ll be in touch.”

The endolin packets were still in Mimi’s gym bag in my stateroom. The gym had a first-aid cabinet; I got a handful of big stretch-Synlon bandages out and, winding them around myself, managed to tape about eight pounds of concentrated endolin to my chest and two or three pounds to each arm. Enough for all the hangovers in Los Angeles. I left my legs free, for running.

Surprise was clearly the thing. They would be expecting me, but they’d be expecting a middle-aged, potbellied billionaire like one of those Texas fatties. Hell, past middle age; I turned fifty-three the day before we landed.

They’d know I was there and they’d have a half hour to be ready. Their radar would have picked up the Isabel even before we entered our orbit, but they had no way of knowing where I’d try to set down. Once we left orbit, it would take about three minutes for them to get a fix on our trajectory and conclude I was coming down over Washington; that was the scary part for me, since Washington sure had the wherewithal to blow the Isabel out of the sky as if she were an ICBM hot from Aberdeen. That was unlikely, though, since they weren’t dumb enough to think I’d attack the United States. What they would do, in the half hour they had after they’d figured we’d come down at Aynsley Field, would be to surround the ship with military police, wait for the landing area to cool, and arrest me. Then into the Chateau d’lf with me, while Baynes and his cronies figured out what to do with my uranium.

Thinking all this out calmed my spirit immensely. With a few minutes left before touchdown, the G forces had leveled off. I got out of my landing seat, grabbed the scissors and finished trimming my beard, steady as a rock this time. By then the touchdown counter had started and a red light was blinking over the mirror in the head where I’d been doing this barbering. I set the scissors down, got back into my chair and belted myself in with about three seconds to spare before the Isabel burned herself into Aynsley’s midfield. I could see nothing through the porthole; rippling heat from our retros crimped the outside air. Suddenly the shudder of the landing began to massage my spine like a demon chiropractor, yet the effect was soothing. I literally felt the Isabel burn her way twenty feet into topsoil and bedrock like a white-hot coin dropped onto butter. She trembled, gave a sigh, settled in, and came to rest back on the planet where she was made—where we were all made.

I undid my belt and lit a cigar. I looked out the stateroom window and son of a bitch if I didn’t see a goalpost! Judging by the distance, Betty must have brought us down right on the fifty-yard line. What an encouraging thing for a first sight on Earth in nine months! What an emblem for my plans! Ben Belson, broken-field runner. I bent over and retied my shoes. Outside, the ground was smoking; there were spotlights bearing down on us and smoke rose foggily into the beams.

The Isabel has two exit hatches. On Belson and Juno, where low gravity and a hard surface had made for less devastating setdowns, we could merely walk out the bottom one, and down a short stairway to the terrain. But for landings like this there was a hatchway thirty feet up, just off the mess hall. And the Isabel, being Chinese, had a special gimmick; I was counting on it to add to the surprise. I’d studied spaceships before buying this one and knew that a U.S. or Russian craft might have to wait eight hours for the ground to cool after Betty’s hot-pilot landing, before anybody tried getting out and walking. But the Isabel had a foldout, magnesium-alloy footbridge that could arch its way over the hot circle of earth the engines had made; it could be sent out thirty feet away from the upper hatch. The only thing was I’d never tested it. On the blueprints it looked flimsy. And I’m no compact Chinese astronaut.

There was no time to sit agonizing about that one. I checked the tapes that held the endolin to my body, made sure I had my billfold, which held exactly forty dollars, some credit cards and a photograph. I patted the pocket of my plaid lumberjack shirt, my basic space-travel shirt; there were three cigars and a lighter. I checked my wristwatch; it was 2:43 A.M., Wednesday, August 23, 2064. I left my cabin, chugging with adrenalin, and scrambled up the ladder to the messroom. The hatchway was just past the dining table.

There was a porthole in the door about a foot across; I had to stoop to look out. There wasn’t much to be seen: white vapor rising from the ground, and searchlights. Near the door-release handle was a switch that controlled the footbridge. I flipped its safety off, took a breath, and pulled it. A servo motor began whirring. I looked out the porthole again but could see nothing. The glass had steamed over. I waited, chomping my cigar and feeling my heart beat like a rubber mallet, until the whirring stopped. I grabbed the lug wheel in both hands and spun it. The hatchway lugs pulled in and there was a hiss as the Belson pressure inside the ship equalized with the 14.7 Earth pressure; I could feel warm Earth air rushing in to mingle. I heaved the hatchway open into the breeze; some papers on the table behind me rippled and swooshed to the deck. I looked out. Searchlights. Warm night air. Earth! I looked down. There was my narrow, shiny bridge, looking as if made of aluminum foil, as if the weight of a teddy bear would collapse it. Up ahead were lights, steam, the shadows of some kind of equipment. I stuck my head out and looked straight down, to one side of the bridge. Heat from molten ground hit my face. A siren was going somewhere in the distance. Right at the base of the ship was the rim of a serious crater; it actually glowed with a muted crimson. Black, acrid smoke was rising from it. It looked like Dante’s hell and smelled like it too. I pulled my head back in the doorway, took a deep breath, and hit the bridge running. It swayed and bobbed sickeningly under my feet. I could hear it creak; a vision of myself being dropped into liquid stone pierced my mind like a spear. I ran on, trying to soften the pounding of my Adidas. Halfway across I looked up ahead. I could see the end of the bridge, swaying from side to side. The fucker had never lowered itself on the turf! It was about fifteen feet above the ground! For a moment I almost turned to go back aboard the Isabel, to wait till everything cooled. But if I did there would be at least four men with adamant-steel handcuffs to hold me till the warrants arrived. To hell with that. I did not want to continue my spiritual growth in a federal prison. I kept on going. At a distance I heard someone shouting, but I could see no one. Past the midmark on that Japanese Garden bridgeway my weight started pushing it down. It fell about three feet and stuck, jarring the teeth in my jaws and vibrating like a drumhead. I could feel heat from the walking surface penetrating the soles of my shoes; if I stood there long my feet would start cooking. Life gets that way at times. The wise man profits from the hot foot. I was thinking like a fortune cookie, but I’ll stick by it still. I ran on to the end of the bridge, stopped, and began to jump up and down, shouting, “Goddamn you, you Chinese puzzle, you fucking aluminum chopstick! Get your ass down.” Thump, thump! It was like Anna taking off her girdle. That goddamned thing! And hot as blazes by now too. The sirens got louder. The bridge dropped another couple of feet and stuck again. I saw two men in uniform suddenly emerge from the shadows below me, looking up puzzled. A searchlight fanned across my chest and face. What the hell. I jumped.

I landed on what must have been Astroturf, fell forward, and rolled. No pain. The surface felt springy, a little like Belson grass. I sat for a moment and shook my addled brains clear. In front of me was a goalpost! I had landed in the end zone! Six points. From my right the two men were approaching me. They were about ten feet away. Cops. But no guns—or none in sight. They seemed a bit dumbfounded. I stood up, looked quickly around. Lots of bleachers. To one side were a couple of trucks, one of which had headlights pointing toward me. Clearly the Army, since only the Army had trucks. Some women with rifles stood by them. Near them were men in business suits. No one was moving in my direction. They were all just watching the show.

The cops walked up, a little more composed by now. One of them came very close to me and put his face in mine. I suddenly realized I was still smoking my cigar, had held it in my teeth through the whole jump, tumble and roll act. “Are you Mr. Belson?” he said, just a shade impolitely.

I’d never hit anyone before in my life. What I did was just extend my right arm the way you do in the Nautilus pectoral machine; in the back of my head was the memory that I’d increased the drag in that machine to a hundred eighty pounds the Thursday before. I caught him in the neck with my forearm and he fell like a stone. Jesus Christ, I’d no idea it was so easy!

The other cop seemed undissuaded by this display of muscle, or he was too confused by it all to react properly. Maybe he had lost heart when he looked up to see me jumping up and down, with my lumberjack shirtsleeves rolled up and a cigar in my mouth, on the end of that flimsy Chinese cantilever. Strong men could quail at such a sight. Anyway, he was not forewarned by his partner’s sudden drop and I punched him out with a right cross to the jaw. Then I took off running. I doubled back past the Isabel’s crater, looked around and saw an open place in the grandstand facing the fifty-yard line. There were no people or vehicles that I could see in that direction. I poured it on and ran that way, through a gate that, mirabile dictu, was open, and out onto a sidewalk. I looked up and down an avenue; it was deserted. Down the street was the Washington Monument, big and clean in the moonlight. I ran that way. Back at the stadium I heard trucks moving up, and people shouting. I ran on, took a left at the bottom of the street and a right at the end of the next one, to confuse the trail. I really stretched my legs. I ran like a night wind down those dark Washington streets, past the shells of old slum houses and then down the Mall, where I ran even more gaily on grass. If you could sing while running, with your chest at the bursting, I would have sung a hallelujah chorus of my own devising. Goddamn, it was good to be home!