I think the crew would have been less shocked if they found I had slit my throat, when I told them I was going to stay. “Look,” I said, “it’s nothing personal. I’m going to stay on until you people get back and I’m going to stay high on morphine while I do it. I’ll kick the habit in sleep on the way back. I know what I’m doing.”
But they looked at me as though I had gone berserk.
The night before the ship was to return to Earth I went to my stateroom alone and had a thoughtful supper of veal and Juno mushrooms with a half bottle of claret. It was dark outside my porthole; none of the moons was in view. I turned on the ball recorder and played the song of the Belson grass and let a pleasant melancholy suffuse my spirit. I had a small power hypodermic filled with morphine sulphate near my bedside. It was made of glass and chromium, like a fine camera. The sight of it was a deep comfort. The claret’s alcohol felt good in my veins—a shy, chaste sprinkle of euphoria; but morhpine was more to the point.
I picked up the syringe speculatively, held it up to the light on my desk. The addict falls in love with the tools; I found the syringe a pleasure merely to hold lightly in my hand. Phallic. Soon I would force the drug into my neck, not far from the jugular vein, in what I had come to call the “Dracula spot”—halfway between brain and heart.
I set it down for a moment. There was a knock at my locked door. I was startled and annoyed. I got up from my chair and opened the door. It was Ruth. She was wearing her plain khaki pilot’s uniform, but her hair and skin looked fresh and bright.
“What is it?” I said.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Ben. I want to talk to you.”
“Okay,” I said and let her come in. She seated herself on the edge of my bed and I went back to my Eames chair.
“Ben,” she said, awkwardly. “We may not see each other again.”
That was a surprise. “You’re coming back with the ship, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I only signed up for one voyage. I don’t think I should be away from my eight-year-old any longer than that.”
I was impatient with this. “I’m sorry to lose you as a pilot,” I said. “Mel should be able to get someone else, though.”
“Ben, I want to give you my address and telephone number in Columbus, Ohio. I’d like to stay in touch.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, Ruth.” She handed me a square of paper with writing on it and I slipped it into my billfold where I keep papers with such things on them as the names of Isabel’s cats and last September’s price of wheat in Chicago. There’s a forest of random information in there waiting for me to broadcast it into my central computer in Atlanta.
I felt something else was called for from me. “Ruth,” I began, “it’s a pity we didn’t become lovers.”
She shook her head. “That’s okay now,” she said. “But I don’t think you should stay on Juno. What if you get sick or break a leg?”
“I won’t get sick,” I said. “The microorganisms for that aren’t around here. And I won’t break a leg in this gravity. I’ll be okay.”
“Ben,” she said. “It seems so damned foolish. You need to be on Earth, selling the uranium. Making deals.”
I was beginning to get angry. I didn’t need this motherly concern. “Damn it, Ruth, I know what I’m doing. I’m sending back enough instructions to keep my people in New York busy for a year. I need time to myself. I need to ride my morphine habit, too…” I nodded toward the hypodermic on the table.
Her face opened a bit at this frankness. “Are you really hooked, Ben?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I love it a lot.”
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Why should a man so lively and strong and rich…? Hell, Ben, there’s so much to you. You don’t need drugs.”
Somehow I became furious at this. I could have slapped her. “How do you know what I need?” I said. “How in hell do you know what goes on inside me?”
She stared at me. “I’m sorry. But I think you’re a fool to spend months on Juno alone. You can withdraw from your habit in a long sleep. You did it before.”
“I want to do it this way, Ruth. I’m fifty-two years old and I know what I want to do for myself. I’m not ready to go back to New York and start making money. I have a dozen people whom I trust to run my businesses. I’m on vacation.” I settled back into my chair.
She sat and looked at me for a long time. “Okay, Ben,” she said, and stood up. “I’ve said what I had to.”
I could see that she was really pretty and kindhearted and something inside me reached out to her. But I pulled back from the feeling. I did not want to make love to her and I wanted to be alone with my hypodermic. I held my hand out to her. I was shocked to see that it was trembling.
She shook it and left. There was ice in my stomach. Old, glacial ice.
I locked the cabin door behind her, picked up my syringe and lay back on the bed. I held the head of it to my neck, just below the mastoids, and gently squeezed the handle. Oh yes. Comfort came down.
And as my high settled in for the night a relay somewhere in my head clicked into place and my decision veered toward its real direction. I would not stay on Juno. It was not Juno my heart longed for, with all its abundance of life and power. Not Juno at all.
Chapter 5
I looked at them all sitting around the table, drew in a breath and said, “We’ll activate the ship’s coils at nine A.M. tomorrow. The Isabel should be in orbit by noon and into a warp an hour after.” My head ached, but my mind was clear.
“Terrific, Captain!” Charlie said. Ruth smiled toward me. Everyone looked cheerful. They had known we would be leaving tomorrow, but this was the first official announcement of it.
“Before you start planning your homecomings, I have some news for you that you won’t like,” I said. I paused only a second. “We are taking a detour by Belson. I’m staying there.”
They were dismayed and they fussed and fumed about it. I thought for a while they might even mutiny. But eventually they accepted it. We were, as I had said, in our warp shortly after lunchtime the next day. By suppertime I was in my chemical sleep. Twelve days. That was the time from Aminidab to Fomalhaut. It was taking them twenty-four days out of their way home, and I didn’t blame them for being pissed. But there was enough fuel for it and I promised them all a bonus for the extra time.