“Father,” I said, feeling awkward and callow, “I need your advice.”
He nodded again, hardly seeming to see me. There was a mild scowl on his perfectly shaven face. He was wearing a brown sweater and brown flannel trousers; there was gray hair at his temples but the rest of his hair was black. I was the only blond in the family.
“I’ve been thinking…,” I said, groping. “About what kind of work I’ll do.”
He nodded again, still silent. I felt cosmic pressures in my skull.
“I mean I should study something in college…,” I said with a lameness that bordered paralysis, suddenly aware that college was two years away. Why was I asking such dumb questions of a man so clearly occupied with universals?
He spoke, and his voice came as if from the bottom of a well. “What talents do you have?” he said.
I could think of nothing. I felt as ungifted as a tree stump. Actually, I could play the piano very well, was a whiz at mathematics and physics, had a passable singing voice, had written a two-act musical comedy for my high-school drama class, and could read poems in Chinese. I managed to forget all this in the presence of my father’s clear unawareness of any of it. “I don’t know,” I said. Thinking of those words now, I still wince with embarrassment.
“Well,” he said, with a distance as great as that of the broad gray Atlantic, “what can I say?” And he turned back to his book.
My mother was equally helpful. I popped the same question to her after she had just come back from a bridge party and was pouring herself a screwdriver in the kitchen. The sink was full of chipped dirty dishes; a Picasso clown hung askew over the stove, with grease on the frame. “Benny,” she said, “I am not a vocational counselor. And your hair needs combing.”
With that kind of help I decided to take my instructions in life from the outer world. And the outer world, shrinking into itself as it was in those sad, cold days, had this advice for me: make money. It seemed like a good idea. And it was; in the stock market I found my authentic talent.
And yet somehow here on Belson, when the Isabel was still my home, I didn’t stop to think of what a money-maker endolin could be. It is remarkable stuff—the genuine anodyne. But I was wrapped up in my morphine highs then and in my theory of the planet’s intelligence and in brooding about Isabel and in the strange soothing my spirit was given just in riding a jeep across vast plains of obsidian in the afternoons, skirting fields of Belson grass and drinking in the musty smell of the warm Belson air.
The grass never sang again for us. The seismic studies revealed no uranium but a lot of lead. I was getting out of shape again, even though I worked out on the machines every now and then. It was time to head back to Earth, to have myself put to sleep again. So I thought. We gathered a couple of crates full of endolin and about eighty large slabs of moonwood. The navigator and I worked out a route home, planning to pop out of our self-generated spacewarp at a different set of stars from the ones we had drawn energy from on the way out; I gave instructions to be awakened a day before we arrived at one called Aminidab, a never-visited star that had looked right to some people at M.I.T. I told the doctor to jettison the rest of his morphine. I would go cold turkey the easy way: unconscious. I could have wept. Not for the morphine, which I knew I would have to give up soon anyway if I didn’t want to addle my life forever, but for Belson. I loved Belson and didn’t want to leave.
The night before we left was a bright one, with both moons up and full. I gave myself a double injection of morphine and went out for a final barefoot stroll. I walked along the edge of the grass in a fine euphoric high for miles. The grass was silver in the moonlight, and the vast, dry, serene emptiness was like the desert in an Henri Rousseau painting. The obsidian felt warm beneath my feet. Sometimes the grass sighed gently and I sighed back at it. I felt as I had never felt before the warm spiritual presence of that lonely planet, the only one of its sun. I had become ecstatic with morphine and with my sensitivity to impending loss. My neck tingled. I began to talk to the grass. I told it how I felt. It seemed to sigh in response. I told it about Isabel and about my impotence with her and it sighed with me. I told it about my daughter Myra and her arthritis, about her poor, painful life. I talked about how my world was growing cold and empty after millennia of vigor and bounce. I became higher, more mystical, moved by what I was saying and by the splendid isolation I had here in my far corner of the Milky Way. I forgot the people back on the ship and felt alone with Belson, my Belson. It seemed to me then that Belson was the finest and biggest thing I had ever known. The rings came out in the night sky and glowed on my body.
After a while I lay drunkenly in ring light on the grass, gently so as not to bruise it or make it bleed. It seemed to embrace me with a million small fingers. In my head I began to hear something like words. At first they made no sense, but after a while they became clearer. It was the grass speaking to me: I could tell by the cadence, which was the same as the singing. The words were both in my head and outside, murmured by the grass. What they said was, “I love you.”
They had to come and find me in the morning and they carried me back to the ship. The doctor said I must have overdosed. I told them nothing but asked if anyone had heard the grass speak the night before. No one had.
We delayed leaving for a day while Charlie gave me some psychological and motor tests. I did fine on them. I knew I had had no overdose and I knew that Belson had said it loved me, but I also knew to keep my mouth shut about it. The next day we brought the coils around the ship to within a half degree of zero Kelvin, and when superconduction was in effect we generated the field and slipped into our warp. We popped out fifty hours later, two light-years away, and soaked up energy from a nearby sun. You cut the uranium bill in half that way. It was a reddish sun with no planets and had none of the zip of Fomalhaut. I was already homesick for Belson. I could have cried again. I had the doctor put me to sleep. All the way to Aminidab I dreamed of New York and Isabel and of the voice of the grass saying, “I love you.”
The way I felt about Belson’s intelligence was something like the way I feel about the stock market. The market is a dumber entity; it is blown around by half-baked gusts of emotion. The way to handle it is to learn everything you can about it and then depend on intuition. The intuition may feel mystical; but, in my case anyway, it isn’t. I know what I’m doing with the market and I have the bank accounts to testify to that. I never developed a profession for myself after those consultations with my parents, but I’m not a fool. I trust my mystical feelings. I believe that Belson loves me.
When I was about twelve I played an old game called Monopoly with a kid I knew. My father had given me the game for Christmas; it was something from his collection of memorabilia from the twentieth century. And maybe it was a subliminal nudge toward the robber-baron capitalism I was eventually to espouse for myself, to fill in the time. The kid’s name was Toby. We played in the living room of his house for a dollar a game. Toby was a rich kid by my standards of the time. My family lived in a permoplastic bungalow near the campus; his had a fourteen-room stone mansion. Toby’s father was a judge and owned an alcohol-powered car. Toby himself was a ferocious competitor, more so than I; but I always won. I picked up all the necessary principles of the game the first time around. The basic philosophy was to go for broke, take every sensible risk you could. It was a solemn lesson for me. It was that philosophy that helped send me to Belson, and it was that philosophy that made me overrule my navigator and choose a potentially wasteful stopover at Aminidab. All I knew about Aminidab was that it was a sun of the same spectral type as Sol. No one had ever gone near enough to see if it had planets, but the astronomy people at M.I.T. had picked it as a good risk. After all, for all the exploring that had been done in the twenty-first century, not one star in a million, in the Milky Way alone, had been observed closely enough to see planets. Computers had decided on the ones to look at. There are a whole lot of stars out there. They haven’t been counted yet. It is gratifying to think they never will be.