I hadn’t thought of obsidian being slippery. The reports hadn’t said anything about it. But it sure was. Belson was a glass planet. And who needed that?
I had a fever the next day while my six geologists and four engineers started seismic testing for uranium ore. Toward evening, huge booming explosions began to rock the ship while I lay dazed with morphine, and spooned myself full of vichyssoise and lemon mousse. Boom! My small Corot fell from the wall. After dark I invited Ruth, the pilot, to watch the movie with me. She accepted graciously enough and I kept my hands to myself. Chemical euphoria was my real companion.
I’d never had morphine before and something in me knew, the minute it began to diddle my nervous system, that this was heavy magic indeed. I felt the thrill of danger in it. There was a sufficiency to it, a filling of empty spaces in the soul, that had snagged my bewildered spirit instantly, right out there on the dark slippery surface of a brand-new planet. It was splendid chemistry; when I awoke the next morning not giving a damn for the world I had come to explore but only wanting my fix, I was suddenly frightened. When Charlie came into my stateroom with his syringe I was even more frightened. I told him to forget it, to find me some aspirin. It took him half an hour to find some. That’s the modern world for you. Here we were on a spaceship with the most advanced geologic and exploratory equipment and with a sick bay to rival Johns Hopkins. We had a drug synthesizer; we had a computer that could take out your appendix; and the doctor had to borrow aspirin from the man in charge of the engine room. I felt my destiny was trying to force me into becoming a morphine addict.
The aspirin helped the pain a bit, but I was edgy. What the hell, I thought, and told Charlie to give me a half dose of morphine. Oh yes.
There are few things in this world that do what they promise, and fewer still that deliver more than you expected. Morphine is one of those; it promised only relief and it carried heart’s ease in its wake. It was chemical bliss for my cluttered soul. I felt the hook. What the hell. You could go the route of De Quincey and Coleridge and all those other sad losers. But I had controlled a lot of things in my life before, and I figured, Few things are as good as this chemical. I’ll ride it for a while. I knew enough to suspect it might be riding me, but I felt I could handle that too. There would be a piper to pay. But that would be in due time.
I found soon enough I could lower the dose and still get what I wanted. The mornings of the next three weeks I rode a low morphine euphoria and roamed Belson in a nuclear jeep, my arm in a sling and Ruth at my side, playing music on the little ball recorder. It was Così fan tutte mostly. I think people who record live performances are jerks; still, I do it myself sometimes for the hell of it. It gives me something to think about during the dull passages, with the little meters and the tone controls to check. I had recorded Così fan tutte that night with Isabel at the Met. I kept to one shot of morphine a day; in the afternoons, when it wore off, my price was a headache, for which the remaining aspirin served until it ran out. I would visit the seismic sites, driving across the slick obsidian, listening to arias composed light-years away in Austria, and even when my soul was not singing along from the alkaloid chemistry at work on my brain, it still greeted the strangeness of a new planet with thrilling of the nerves. There wasn’t much to see on Belson, but I had come to love the place.
The first time I found the grass and drove on it, it screamed like a tormented woman under the jeep’s tires. And when I stopped and got out I found the grass I had crushed was bleeding, bleeding on my shoes and on the tires of the car. It was the red of real blood and enough to disconcert the most euphoric of men. I was shocked deeply. I got the jeep off it as gently as possible.
That night after dinner I found out from the chief engineer, who was also a biophysicist, that the grass was nothing like Earth grass and was incomprehensible to him. It was brown, about a foot high, and did not grow on the surface at all. It was the upper ends of some long, tenuous filaments that went down through the obsidian miles beneath the surface, far below our powers of investigation. No man on board and no equipment either was strong enough to uproot a blade of it. Nor could it be severed. It screamed and bled when crushed, but no one had the foggiest idea why or how. And crushing it did not kill or break it. If it was alive, that is. The biophysicist’s name was Howard. He said the grass was some kind of a polymer. Big deal. So is nylon.
And then one twilight, when we were all on board ship eating leg of lamb together, we began to hear something faint and musical coming from outside. For a moment we all froze. I got up and opened the hatchway. It was the sound of singing, coming from a field of grass that began a few hundred yards west of the ship. I went out with the doctor and we walked carefully on the slippery surface, under the light of Belson’s setting sun, toward the grass. The grass was singing. It came from all around us.
And the weirdest thing, the thing that raised the small hairs on the back of my neck, was that the voice and the melody were human—as human as any of us. You could not distinguish words, yet what it sang sounded like words. It sang loudly and it sang softly and the melody kept changing. For a moment, startled, I thought I heard strains from Così fan tutte. Sometimes the grass undulated as it sang, and sometimes it was still. When it moved, the long shadows on it from the low sun rippled with the music. I had never seen anything more beautiful, had never heard anything so moving. For a moment I feared it was the effect of that morning’s morphine, but I looked around me at the crew members—at the other six men and the eleven women—and I saw they were transfixed by it too. They were astonished and as moved as I.
Howard fell on his knees by the grass, holding his head close to the sound. I could see that he was crying. Ruth stood by me, staring ahead of herself. Nobody spoke. I was weeping too.
Then the sun set and a moment later the music stopped. Someone turned on a flashlight. We walked silently back to the ship, and when we got there some of us got drunk. There was little to say. It had been the most powerful esthetic experience I had ever felt and was in itself worth the voyage, if anything could be. I had my recorder with me and had had the presence of mind to record part of it, erasing most of the precious Così fan tutte in the process. But the grass was better than Mozart, and besides, I was tired of Italian arias. I told no one that night of my recording, since no one was talking much.
The next morning one of the engineers found a scraggly plant growing in a fissure in the obsidian near the ship. That area had been studied closely before and nothing had been found growing. The plant was not like the grass. It did not bleed and you could pick it. Howard took it to his lab for analysis. I was curious; had the singing made it grow?
I played the recording in my stateroom while eating my breakfast croissant, but the music wasn’t the same. It was good, but the resonance was gone. It sounded like a big choir and that was all.
By afternoon Howard had analyzed the sample as far as he could. Howard is a thin, stoop-shouldered man, with nicotine stains on his fingers. I found him in his lab, reading a printout. He was smoking a cigarette and looked tired. I asked him what he had found out.
“Well,” he said,” it’s a salicylate, like one of the organics you find in willow bark and that we’ve been synthesizing on Earth for centuries. But there’s something I don’t understand about the molecule.”