“Captain,” the navigator said, “a message arrived when you were asleep.”
I nodded. “Later. How’s the garden?”
“Even better than we planned. You saw the roses. It came during the third week out…”
I stared at his chubby body, his balding head. “Bill. I said later.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Let’s look at the garden.”
We went across a catwalk and down a silky ladder with skid-resistant rungs. In the low gravity and with my splendid new muscles I felt like a youthful spider descending a spoke in her new web. I was wearing faded blue jeans and a gray tee-shirt, with gum-soled gym shoes. In low gravity it is easy to slip, and though your weight is slight your mass can bruise you.
It was breathtaking to see. There were tiers upon tiers of lush greens and yellow and red roses spotted among the food-bearing plants, far more dazzling to me than the stars outside. “The hanging gardens of Babylon” my mind said, almost aloud. There were heavy avocados and oranges and grapevines and potatoes in bloom and peas with blue flowers and great trailing vines of Kentucky Wonder Beans. The air was moist and pungent, hot on my cheeks. As we walked, in floating strides, through an airsealed doorway, warm air caressed our bodies. It was like a damp twilight in the tropics. Greenery and flowers and warm, moist air; my heart leaped up at it all. All of it mine.
I picked a tangerine from a heavy-laden tree in a copper pot, and peeled it. It was delicious.
“Okay, Bill,” I said. “I’m ready now to read that message.”
YOU ARE ORDERED HEREWITH TO PLACE YOURSELF UNDER HOUSE ARREST AND RETURN TO THE EARTH IMMEDIATELY. YOUR URANIUM FUEL IS CONFISCATED BY ORDER OF THIS COURT. YOU ARE CHARGED WITH VIOLATION OF THE ENERGY CODE OF THE UNITED STATES. YOU ARE HEREBY APPRISED THAT SPACE TRAVEL IS A HIGH CRIME AND MISDEMEANOR, PUNISHABLE BY A PRISON SENTENCE NOT TO EXCEED TWENTY YEARS, AND THAT WASTEFUL USE OF FUEL IS ALSO A HIGH CRIME AND MISDEMEANOR. YOU ARE SAID TO BE TRAVELING WITHOUT A VALID PASSPORT AND CONSPIRING WITH OTHERS TO VIOLATE THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES.
IF YOU FAIL TO APPEAR BEFORE THIS COURT BY 30 SEPTEMBER 2063, YOUR CITIZENSHIP WILL BE REVOKED AND YOUR PROPERTY CONFISCATED.
U.S. DISTRICT COURT, MIAMI
“What’s the date?” I asked Bill.
“October ninth, two thousand sixty-three.”
I was seated in the Eames chair in my stateroom. Bill stood silently by, waiting to see if there would be an answer.
I tossed the paper on my desk. “Tell them we’re sorry but we can’t turn around. Say the retros are malfunctioning.” There was a lacquered Chinese table by my chair. I set my coffee cup on it. “Nothing from Isabel?”
“Isabel?”
“Isabel Crawford. In New York.”
Bill shook his head. “No, Captain.”
“Thanks, Bill. I’d like to be alone for a while.”
“Sure, Captain,” he said, and left.
On my right was a deck-to-overhead bookshelf, curved with the slight curve of the ship’s hull. It was filled with books: novels, histories, biographies, psychology, poems. Way up on the top shelf, bound in leather, sat the seven volumes of American history written by my father, William T. Belson, Professor of History (ret.), Ohio University. I had owned them thirty years and had opened each of them once, for about a minute. I stared at them then, from my captain’s stateroom on this preposterous voyage of discovery, for a long time. But when I rose to pick a book it was The Ambassadors by Henry James.
FBR 793 became visible the day before planetfall. I first saw it as a small half-moon a hundred million miles from Fomalhaut. There was no real thrill; it was just there, another uninhabited celestial body, a planet called “near-dead” on the charts. No one had ever set foot on it; it had been studied from a ship in orbit around forty years ago. The ship that photographed it lacked fuel for landing and takeoff, even back in those uranium-rich days.
FBR 793 was the twenty-third extrasolar planet discovered, and, like all the rest, it was without advanced life forms. Whatever the official reasons for the explorations conducted by the United States, the People’s Republic of China and the Japanese, there had been only two real ones for sending ships out to interweave the Milky Way. One was the insane desire to find intelligent life somewhere other than on Earth—as if there wasn’t enough of it on Earth, and mostly in trouble! The other was the hope of cheap fuel.
Well. Nobody found life, intelligent or otherwise. And there weren’t many planets. Most stars didn’t have any. And nobody found uranium, or anything other than granite, limestone, chert, and desolation. The whole thing was a failure and it had been abandoned. I picked it up again in my middle age—in what they called a midlife crisis in the times my father wrote of. A geologist told me at a beach picnic once, while spitting watermelon seeds onto coral sand and stroking the brown arm of a languid woman, that he had seen photos of FBR 793 somewhere and they looked like safe uranium to him.
“What’s this ‘safe uranium’?” I said.
“Somebody at M.I.T. worked it out,” he said. “If uranium is formed under a gravity lower than Earth’s it would have different characteristics. It wouldn’t be radioactive except in a magnetic field.” He looked at me. “No meltdowns.”
“Jesus!” I said, “there’d be money in that.”
“You’d never be able to count it.”
I lay there and thought about that for a while. The tide was going out into the tranquil bay on which we lolled. It was about three in the afternoon and sunlight blazed on us. It was Jamaica, I think. I had worked at my desk in a hotel apartment that morning, had been unsuccessfully fellated at lunchtime, was bored with working out mergers, with pineapples and papayas, with Caribbean music, blow jobs that didn’t work, Blue Mountain coffee, counting my wealth. I was fifty and worth three billion. What the hell, I thought, space travel might be more fun than this. It beats suicide too. I started phoning geologists and the people who knew about the few mothballed spaceships that hadn’t been scrapped by the governments that owned them. That was how it started—Belson’s Bubble. Had that girl been more effective at lunchtime, it might not have happened.
In some ways I suppose my ambitions are stupid. I have more money than I can spend—have had that much since I was thirty-five. I own country homes, villas, a yacht, a mansion in New York; yet I want to call no place “home”; the last thing I want is a home. Often I stay in hotels or sleep in my car. I do not want a study like my father’s, some mute terrain of intellectual combat, some preserve of self-justification. I will flee from life in my own fashion, will slip around reality in whatever ways suit my temperament. I can afford it. I make my money in coal, the stock market and real estate, and I know the realities. Money does not follow fantasies, except in show business; and I am not in show business.
I looked at the planet—my planet—half-outlined by its sun, half dark, and I said, “We’ll call it Belson.” Why not? I’m getting on in years.
Belson it is, that big, smart, spherical marvel. When we got closer I saw it had rings. That hadn’t been in the reports, and was quite a surprise. My heart leaped up to see them through the windows of the bridge, red and lavender: the rings of Belson. I was really getting interested. We were a few light-hours away now, and Belson was huge on the screen, its surface a greenish-gray. I loved the rings.