FOUND YOU AT LAST!

I have finally tracked down this book.  I had read it as a teenager and remembered many of the plot points.  I remembered the main character's last name, Belson.  I remembered a scene where he steps out of his spaceship on a new world and puts his foot on the grass... which begins to scream from his crushing weight.  I remember the bleak world of 2063 where all fossil fuel is gone and uranium is also running out.  I recall the strange new element he discovers that is only radioactive in zero-G and how it makes him the wealthiest man on Earth.  Alas, I could never remember the book's title or the author's name.

Today I was doing a Google search for keywords "Belson," "screaming grass" and "depleted resources" and was taken to a thesis paper that references these words in a critical analysis of... Lo and Behold!  The Steps of the Sun by Walter Tevis.  That title on Amazon led me to this cover which I remember distinctly as one cool piece of sci fi novel cover art.  It was so impactful I copied the style of drawing and it became part of my own rendering style.

Now I can scratch one more enigmatic mystery from my past off my list as solved.  Now if I could only find that paper sack filled with eight rolls of 35mm film from our family vacation to California in 2000, which I lost and fear I may have accidentally thrown away.