Well. When they woke me up they were clearly excited. Nineteen planets had been spotted and we were still quite a distance away. You can’t pop out of a warp near a star; you pull out a few thousand million miles away and then creep up on it. We were still creeping.
I felt fine and saw I was back in shape again. I drank my coffee and headed for the bridge. There was Aminidab, and there, like specks of light, were its planets. They looked like dust motes by a light bulb.
Aminidab turned out to have, all told, thirty-four. I was exultant and gave orders to work out a path for a quick photographic circuit of each.
“That’ll take a lot of time,” Ruth said. “And fuel.”
“I know it,” I said. “But, Ruth, there’s going to be uranium on one of them or more. Come on. Let’s go for it.” For the time I had forgotten Earth and Isabel. I could smell success and it was turning me on. I wanted uranium. Of course I wanted uranium for the money it could make me and for the simple success of my voyage and to confound my enemies back on Earth. But I wanted, more importantly, to provide the world with safe and easy power again; in the days before leaving I had daydreamed of finding trillions of tons of it on some far-off planet. It was possible. It didn’t have to be as scarce, even with its half-life, as it was on Earth. There were younger planets. There might be vast mountains of it somewhere—mountain ranges even. Yet it was, I knew, a daydream of an impotent man: endless potency.
The third planet we photographed looked so good to me and to the geologists that I ordered a landing right there. It was a dense little world, half under water and with a lavender sky. We skimmed over part of its surface, in low orbit, gawking. There was plant life all over. The oceans were pink. I liked it. Not with the deep affection I felt for Belson, but I felt sanguine about this planet. It looked young. It had energy.
We found a kind of mossy plain and landed. This time Ruth did the landing herself and made a good, simple job of it. My respect for her doubled. Ruth was a good woman; she just didn’t have much to say. Her red hair had gotten very long on the trip and I liked the way it fell over her competent shoulders. But when I praised her for the landing she seemed cool when she thanked me. Something was going on there, and it must have gotten worse during my long sleep.
Before opening up we checked the atmosphere. There was a lot of oxygen—twice that of Earth. The rest was nitrogen and traces of inert gases like argon and xenon. We had better be careful about fires, the doctor said, and not breathe too deeply. You could addle your brains with too much oxygen.
The plain we were on was about ten miles from a place that had photographed out as mildly radioactive. There was a lot of water on this world, and if the uranium turned out to be there we could stay indefinitely. I liked the idea of exploring. What the hell, it looked a little like Jamaica, except the colors were all wrong. Orange tree trunks, for instance. The gravity was eight-tenths Earth-normal and there were heavy pink clouds in the sky. We touched down in a storm of warm, tropical rain. It kept up for two days. How it all drained off I don’t know. It was a furious, drenching downpour and it pounded on the ship’s hull like hail on a plastic roof; the noise was almost deafening. It was frustrating. We didn’t dare go out for fear of being drowned. Here we were on this lively planet, ready to get our jeeps out and throw ourselves into the explorer’s dream of a lifetime, an adventure beyond the childhood imaginings of any of us, and we had to stay inside because of rain.
I finished The Ambassadors, had a morose and silent dinner in my stateroom with Ruth, who excused herself right after the mousse, and lay on my bunk, listened to the rain and thought about my early days in Athens, Ohio.
When I was a kid in Athens there were horses everywhere. The Energy Acts of those days classified burros and horses as solar—since they ate vegetation—and a person could have as many as he could afford. Athens was a hilly place, with its small university built two hundred years ago in the Appalachian foothills; and although people had bicycles, horses were the best way to get around. It’s a lovely little town still, I suppose, although I haven’t been there for twenty years. We had a sweet-tempered chestnut mare named Juno, and some nights when Father was reading in his study and Mother was asleep on the living-room couch I would go out to the garage and sleep with Juno, lying on her moist and tickly straw, soaking in her body warmth and her body smells, listening sometimes to the fluttering and groaning noises she made in her sleep. Juno died when I was fifteen, and I mourned her more than I would mourn either of my parents.
My father supplemented his professor’s income by having Juno serviced and selling the foals. She never failed to produce, bless her heart. She gave birth to a succession of colts in deep, rich, glossy browns and blacks, and she nursed them with love and patience, watching them grow and urging them on. Her grief when Father sold them was, to me, palpable. I could feel her mourning. I made a special point of sleeping with her on the nights after a colt of hers had been taken away, regardless of how cold it might be in the garage, and she would nuzzle me in her sleep sometimes and the garage would fill for a moment with the resonance of her doleful, motherly voice in its sad whinnying. I knew how she felt. I would have whinnied along with her had I known how.
When Juno died she wasn’t replaced. My father had taken an early retirement to do research, and the three of us were on a reduced income and couldn’t afford a horse. Father hardly went anywhere anyway, and Mother had undergone two bad falls from Juno. Juno’s body was sold to the recycling plant on the edge of town and I retreated farther into myself and my dreams of wealth. There was no one left in that grim household to love.
I remember my mother coming out to the garage one night when Juno was still alive and I was lying against her flank half-asleep, dreaming already of stock-market quotations and of the killings I would make. Mother was wearing a pink chenille bathrobe. She had a candle in her hand and her face was as puffy as bread dough and her hair wild. “My God!” she said, seeing me. “You fool. That horse could roll on you and kill you. Or kick you to death.”
I opened my eyes and stared at Mother. I could have stood up, easily, and beaten her senseless. Juno wouldn’t hurt me. I stared at Mother and said nothing.
Mother suddenly seemed to weaken and become confused. She put a hand to her forehead, and even in candlelight I could see the blue veins in it and the trembling. She looked at Juno and spoke as if to her. “What’s going to become of me?” she said. Juno was silent. So was I. Mother turned and went back to the house. About a half hour later I got up from the straw and went through our vegetable garden to the living-room window and looked in. There sat Mother on the sofa with her robe open and a drink in her hand, staring at the gray floor of our living room. The study candles were out; my father was in bed. It was about three o’clock in the morning; I could tell that by the stars. In those days we still were allowed electric light until 10 P.M., but it was far later than that. Mother had lit six candles and was sitting there as though hypnotized, the flesh on her cheeks sagging, her breasts exposed, sagging, her arms sagging at her sides. Whenever I hear the phrase “spiritual bankruptcy” I think of Mother sitting there, an empty woman.