... 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, justgreat, to get away from the boiling mess of humanity that stank upevery inhabitable rock on earth.
Not being the Daniel Boone type, this was my private qualificationfor the job—being fed up to here with people, with the smotheringbureaucracy of world government, with restrictions and rationing andsynthetic diet supplements and synthetic blondes and mass hypochondriaand phony emotions and standing in line to get into a pay toilet.
I hated my profession, trying to wring glamorous interviews out ofbewildered heroes and press-agents' darlings and pompous politiciansand snotty millionaires and brave little wronged chorus girls. Theirlives were no more glamorous than their readers. They were the samemixture of greed and fear and smelly sweat and deceit and two-bitpassion. My particular prostitution was to transform their peccadilloesinto virtues, their stubbed toes into tragedies and their fornicationsinto romance. And I'd been at it so long I couldn't stand the odor ofmy own typewriter.
Of course, I was so thunderstruck at being chosen as one of the 21-mancrew for the Albert E. that I never got to gloating over it muchuntil we were out in deep space. Yes, it was quite an honor, to saynothing of the pure luck involved. Something like winning the LunaSweepstakes, only twice as exclusive.
We were the pioneers on the first starship, the first to try out theLarson Drive in deep space. At last, man's travel would be measuredin parsecs, for our destination was 26 trillion miles down near thecelestial south pole. Not much more than a parsec—but a parsec,nonetheless.
As a journalist, such distances and the fabulous velocities involvedwere quite meaningless to me. My appointment as official scribe forthe expedition was not based on my galactic know-how, but rather on myreputation as a Nobel-winning columnist, the lucky one out of fifty-sixwho entered the lottery.
Larson, himself, would keep me supplied with the science data, and Iwas to chronicle the events from the human interest side as well asrecording the technical stuff fed to me.
Actually, I had no intentions of writing a single word. To hell withposterity and the immortality of a race that couldn't read withoutmoving its lips. The square case I had carried aboard so tenderlycontained not my portable typewriter, but six bottles of forbidden ryewhiskey, and I intended to drink every drop of it myself.
So, at last we were in space, after weeks of partying, dedicationsand speech-making and farewell dinners, none of which aroused inme a damned regret for my decision to forsake my generation offellow-scrabblers.
Yes, we were all warned that, fast as the Larson Drive was, it wouldtake us over 42 years, earth-measured time, to reach our destination.Even if we found no planets to explore, turned around and came rightback, the roundtrip would consume the lifetimes of even the new babieswe left behind. To