to maintain his anonymity. The staff was in on the conspiracy, and the nurses smiled indulgently at him behind his back. But Sansome was too great a man to ridicule. The general feeling was the same as mine. He was older than he thought, not in body, but in over-tired nerves and exhausted mind. None contested his skill with the scalpel; but none gave ten cents worth of credence to his twist on the theory of evolution.
As Sara’s confinement proceeded with precise conformity to my expectations, I thought Sansome would lose heart—but he didn’t. He arranged to be present in the delivery room with as much interest as if we expected a breach birth of a two-headed panda.
I was unfortunately called to Baltimore at the last minute. I flew both ways, but my haste was in vain. Sara gave birth while I was still aloft.
I checked in with more excitement than I’d thought possible. I asked at the desk, “How’s Caffey?”
“Fine. Gave birth an hour ago. Beautiful little girl—”
I didn’t wait for more. I dashed upstairs to the maternity ward, where Sara had finally consented to be moved, and slipped into her room.
She was tired, but conscious. She smiled at me peculiarly.
“So it’s a girl!” I exclaimed. “Wait until I see Sansome. A beautiful, healthy, normal baby!”
A hand tapped me softly on the shoulder, and I turned to look into Sansome’s triumphant eyes.
“Without a navel,” he said.
…SO THEY BAKED A CAKE
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 42.5 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 airlock. 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