... SO THEY BAKED A CAKE
by Winston Marks
(_illustrated by Tom Beecham_)
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Dynamic Science Fiction January 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He was tired of people--a "human interest" columnist,
who specializes in glamorizations of the commonplace
and sordid is likely to get that way. So ... this
starship seemed to offer the ideal escape from it all.
Sure, I was one of the tough guys who said it would be great, just
great, to get away from the boiling mess of humanity that stank up
every inhabitable rock on earth.
Not being the Daniel Boone type, this was my private qualification
for the job--being fed up to here with people, with the smothering
bureaucracy of world government, with restrictions and rationing and
synthetic diet supplements and synthetic blondes and mass hypochondria
and phony emotions and standing in line to get into a pay toilet.
I hated my profession, trying to wring glamorous interviews out of
bewildered heroes and press-agents' darlings and pompous politicians
and snotty millionaires and brave little wronged chorus girls. Their
lives were no more glamorous than their readers. They were the same
mixture of greed and fear and smelly sweat and deceit and two-bit
passion. My particular prostitution was to transform their peccadilloes
into virtues, their stubbed toes into tragedies and their fornications
into romance. And I'd been at it so long I couldn't stand the odor of
my own typewriter.
Of course, I was so thunderstruck at being chosen as one of the 21-man
crew for the _Albert E._ that I never got to gloating over it much
until we were out in deep space. Yes, it was quite an honor, to say
nothing of the pure luck involved. Something like winning the Luna
Sweepstakes, only twice as exclusive.
We were the pioneers on the first starship, the first to try out the
_Larson Drive_ in deep space. At last, man's travel would be measured
in parsecs, for our destination was 26 trillion miles down near the
celestial south pole. Not much more than a parsec--but a parsec,
nonetheless.
As a journalist, such distances and the fabulous velocities involved
were quite meaningless to me. My appointment as official scribe for
the expedition was not based on my galactic know-how, but rather on my
reputation as a Nobel-winning columnist, the lucky one out of fifty-six
who entered the lottery.
Larson, himself, would keep me supplied with the science data, and I
was to chronicle the events from the human interest side as well as
recording the technical stuff fed to me.
Actually, I had no intentions of writing a single word. To hell with
posterity and the immortality of a race that couldn't read without
moving its lips. The square case I had carried aboard so tenderly
contained not my portable typewriter, but six bottles of forbidden rye
whiskey, and I intended to drink every drop of it myself.
* * * * *
So, at last we were in space, after weeks of partying, dedications
and speech-making and farewell dinners, none of which aroused in
me a damned regret for my decision to forsake my generation of
fellow-scrabblers.
Yes, we were all warned that, fast as the _Larson Drive_ was, it would
take us over 42 years, earth-measured time, to reach our destination.
Even if we found no planets to explore, turned around and came right
back, the roundtrip would consume the lifetimes of even the new babies
we left behind. To me this was a perversely comforting thought.
All I wanted to know was how they expected me to live long enough to
complete the journey? I could think of pleasanter ways to spend my last
days than cooped up in this sardine can with a passel of fish-faced,
star-happy scientists.
I was 48 when we departed, which would make me a lucky 90 if I
was still wiggling when we hove into our celestial port. But the
mathematicians said to relax. Their space-time theory provided, they
claimed, a neat device for survival on our high-velocity journey.
The faster a body moves in reference to another, the slower time
appears to act on the moving body. If, they said, man could travel at
the speed of light, supposedly time would stand still for him. This, I
reflected, would mean human immortality--much too good for people.
Anyway, since our average velocity for the trip was planned to come out
around a tenth of the speed of light, to us on the _Albert E._, only
about five months would seem to have elapsed for the journey that would
consume 42-1/2 years, earth-time.
It seemed to me they were laying a hell of a lot of faith in a theory
that we were the first to test out. Our food, water and air-supplies
gave us a very small safety margin. With strict rationing we would be
self-sufficient for just 12 months.
That left us just two months to fool around looking for a place to sit
down. I mentioned this item to Larson on the second day out. I found
him at coffee mess sitting alone, staring at his ugly big hairy hands.
He was a tall Swede with a slight stoop and the withdrawn manner of a
myopic scholar.
As commander of the ship he had the right to keep aloof, but as scribe,
I had the privilege of chewing him for information. I said, "Skipper,
if it took us generations to discover all the planets in our own little
solar system, what do you figure the chances are of our spotting a
planet near our goal, in the short time of two months?"
* * * * *
He was silent while I drew my ration of coffee and sugar, then he
opened his hands and seemed to find words written on his palms. His
eyes never did come up from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. "If they
exist," he said slowly, "we might find one. We have better telescopes
and our vantage point in space will be superior."
He was a sorry-looking specimen, and I remembered that the
fifty-year-old scientist had left behind a youngish wife who adored the
ground he walked on. The handsome, blonde woman had stood heroically
beside the ramp and watched, dry-eyed, as her husband ascended.
There had been no visible exchange of farewells at the end, as he stood
beside me in the air-lock. They just stared into each other's eyes
oblivious to all but the maudlin sorrow of their separation.
Then the portal had closed and widowed her, and I had the feeling that
Larson was going to tear at the great, threaded door with his bare
hands and renounce the whole project. But he just stood there breathing
a little heavy and clenching those tremendous hands until it was time
to take off. In a way I envied him an emotion that was long dead in me,
dead of the slow corrosive poison of contempt for the whole human race.
Dead and pickled in the formaldehyde of ten thousand columns for which
the syndicates had paid me nothing but cold money.
Here was a man whose heart could still love, and I hated him for it.
I said, "You look like you still have regrets. Maybe this isn't worth
your personal sacrifices, after all. If we don't find an inhabitable
planet we won't have accomplished much."
"You are wrong," he said quickly. "We have already served our purpose."
"Testing the Drive, you mean?"
He nodded. "This morning in our last radio contact with earth I
dispatched the word. The _Larson Drive_ is successful. We have
passed from our solar system on schedule, and our measurements of
ship-objective time check out with the theory--roughly, at least."
He spread his hands out on the table. "This was our primary goal.
The expedition ahead is subsidiary. Colonization may result from our
exploration, true; but now we have opened the universe."
It was nice to know that things were progressing as planned. I asked,
"What do you mean about things checking 'roughly'? Is there some error?"
He nodded and swallowed the dregs from the magnesium cup. "A
considerable error, but it's on the safe side. Our velocity checks
perfectly, but our estimate of the time-shrinkage factor is so far off
that Mr. Einstein's formulae will take some major revision to reconcile
what has happened."
"We'll arrive sooner than planned?"
Larson nodded again. "According to shipboard elapsed time we will
arrive in the vicinity of our destination in just ninety-two hours from
now--a total of 122 hours since take-off. You were worrying earlier
about our scanty supplies; this should put your mind at rest."
It didn't displease me. The lack of privacy on this tin bathtub was
even worse than I had anticipated. The news came as sort of a reprieve.
I looked at Larson, and suddenly I knew why the long face. His Tina!
For her, ten years would already have passed, and as we sat there
talking, weeks of her existence were fading into oblivion--and Hans
Larson was begrudging every second of it. Damned fool, should have
stayed at home.
I left him brooding into his empty cup and went forward to the little
control dome. One wonderful attribute of the _Larson Drive_ was that
there was no acceleration discomfort. Gravity was nullified at the
outset, and ship's gravity was kept at an comfortable one-half "g".
* * * * *
Mac Hulbert, chief navigator, was alone up there, one foot cocked up
on the edge of the broad instrument-board that looked like a cluttered
desk-top with handles. He was staring out into the void.
Yes, void! They had said it would be black in space, but not even a
glimmer of light showed through the transparent dome. As you looked
to the side and back, faint, violent specks seemed to catch at your
peripheral vision, but it was impossible to focus on a single heavenly
body.
Mac didn't turn or greet me. His face was no longer that of the
carefree adventurer with whom I had tied on a fair binge less than a
week ago.
"Getting you down, too, Mac?" I asked. He was about the only one aboard
I could even tolerate. He wasn't as sour on humanity as I, but he
granted me the right to my opinions, which was something.
"God, yes!" he said. "Skipper tell you about the time-error?"
I said, "Yes, but what's there to be sad about? You don't mind that
part, do you?" To my knowledge, Mac hadn't left anything behind but his
dirty laundry.
Hulbert was in his mid-thirties, slender, balding and normally as
cheerful and stupidly optimistic as they come. Now he looked worse off
than Larson.
"Yeah, I mind that," he said kind of resentfully. "I thought we'd have
more time to--sort of get used to the idea of--well, outgrowing our
generation. But think, by now many of my older buddies will be dead. A
dozen World Series will be over. Who knows, maybe there's a war going
on back there?"
Of all the morbid nonsense. Yearning for the obituary column, the
sports page and the headlines. But then people are rarely sensible
when something disturbs their tidy little universe that they take for
granted.
It was a little terrifying, though, staring out into that smothering
lamp-black. We were moving so fast and living so slowly that even the
light-waves from the galaxies toward which we moved had disappeared.
We were reversing the "redshift" effect of receding light sources. We
approached the stars before us at such a velocity that their light
impinged at a rate above the visible violet spectrum.