...So They Baked a Cake, Winston K. Marks [free ebook reader for iphone .TXT] 📗
- Author: Winston K. Marks
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What would it be like when we got back? More people, less food, tighter rationing, crowding beyond conception.
Hell!
When the rest of the crew learned of our sharply-revised estimated time of arrival they came down with the same emotional cramps afflicting Larson and Hulbert. It was sickening, a bunch of so-called mature technicians and scientists moping around like a barracks full of drafted rookies, matching miniature billfold photos of cuties that were now approaching crone-hood. The whole venture had become a tragic affair overnight, and for the next few days all thoughts turned backward.
So nobody was remotely prepared for what happened. They were even unprepared to think straight—with their heads instead of their hearts. And Larson was worst of all!
On the last day Larson eased off our 1800-mile-per-second velocity, and as the stars started showing again, shifting from faint violet down into the more cheerful spectrum, spirits aboard began lifting a little.
I was in the control-room with Larson and Mac when we got our first inkling. Mac was fooling with the electronic search gear, sweeping for planets, when he gave a yip and pointed a jabbing finger at the scope.
"Audio," he stammered. "Look at that!" He lengthened the sweep and the jumble of vertical lines spread out like a picket fence made of rubber.
"A carrier wave with audio modulation," he said with disbelief all over his face.
Larson remained calm. "I hear you, lad. Don't shout." He studied the signal and frowned deeply. "It's faint, but you can get a fix."
As they played with the instruments I looked forward through the green shield that protected us from Alpha C's heavy radiation. Our destination star was now a brilliant blob dominating our piece of heaven. It was a difficult thing to grasp that we had travelled almost 26 trillion miles—in five days, ship's time.
Mac said, "It's a planet, sure enough, but that audio—"
Larson snapped, "Forget the audio! Give me a bearing, and let's be getting on course. That may be the only planet in the system, and I don't want to lose it."
His arms pumped and his big hands pawed at the controls as he brought the inertialess drive into manual manipulations.
For the next few, tense hours we stalked the planet at a discreetly low velocity. When his navigation problem was complete and we were on a slow approach orbit, Mac began playing with the communication rig again.
The ship's intercom was cut in, and we had to chase people out as excitement mounted over our discovery. Finally, when his elbow had been jostled once too often, Larson ordered the control room cleared of all hands but Hulbert and me.
When we were alone Larson said, "This is fantastic."
Mac's face was tied into an amazed scowl, too, as he studied the feeble little patterns on his wave analyzer. "You said it," he breathed. "We've got ourselves a sweet little earth-type planet, if we can believe the spectro, and unless I'm stark space-happy, there's something or somebody down there beaming a broadcast smack in our direction, following us around like the string on a yo-yo."
"How do you figure that?" Larson wanted to know.
Mac replied, "At this distance the field strength is too strong for anything but a beamed transmission. Mister, they have us bracketed."
Mac swung to the panel on his left and cut in the communication circuit. "It's strong enough to listen to, now. Let's see what kind of gibberish we can wring out of that carrier wave."
He threw a couple of switches and hunted for the exact frequency. A whisper and a rustle of the carrier brushed the speaker. Mac centered in and turned up the volume.
Then even I sucked air. A voice issued from the sound-cone. A man's voice: "—lcome to New Columbia. Welcome, Albert E. Come in, please. Welcome to New Columbia. Welcome, Albert E. Come in please."
It repeated over and over. Larson let his breath go first with a nervous snort. Mac and Larson both looked at me as if maybe I had something to do with it. Hands trembling, Mac picked up the microphone and reached for the transmitter switch. Larson grabbed the mike from his hand. "Not so fast, dammit!"
"But they know we're up here," Mac protested. "They even know the name of our ship!"
"And our language," I added. I wasn't bored any more.
Larson nodded slowly. "What kind of devilish intelligence have we run into? I need time—to think."
The way he said it sent a cold draught down my spine, and then my imagination started catching up to his. At our rate of approach to the star system, how could any living being have had time to sense our presence, pick our brains to learn our ship's name, our language, master our method of communication, contrive a transmitter and get on the air?
The magnitude of the accomplishment sent the importance of our little triumph of space travel tumbling into a cocked limbo of insignificance.
For a moment I considered the old curvature of space concept. Could we have somehow doubled back—completing a mystic circle? Was that old Sol up there burning through our green shield? What a laugh that would be! The mental giants of our times backtracking and circling like a tenderfoot lost in the woods on Lake Minnetonka.
Mac cut off the transmitter reluctantly, but he said, "Yeah, I guess I see what you mean, skipper." Larson got to his feet and paced the crowded wedge of space, punching a fist into his other hand with meaty slaps.
He stopped and listened to the soft muttering of the speaker and shook his head. "It makes no sense. It's impossible. Utterly impossible!"
The man's voice from the planet implacably continued repeating the message—no trace of an accent, nothing to suggest an alien origin in its tone, pitch or enunciation.
Perhaps that's what threw Larson so hard. If there had been the faintest taint of other worldliness about it, I think he'd have hauled stakes and gotten us out of there. But the song of the siren was too powerful—the irresistible mental image of a fellow human out here in the bottom of space was salt in the bleeding wounds of Larson's loneliness.
He stared out where the planet must be, some million miles before us. Suddenly the tenseness relaxed from his face and he got the damndest expression of mixed incredulity, hopefulness and sorrow. Tears began welling from his eyes and streaming down the rugged contours of his cheeks.
It didn't add. Nor could I reason a motive for his laconic command: "Intersection orbit, Mr. Hulbert. We'll take her down," he said quietly. That was all. He hunched over the control board and moved things according to Mac's computations.
Soon I could make out the planet. We came in from an obtuse angle with its sun, so it showed first as a crescent of pale, green silver. Then it filled the viewing dome, and Mac began working the homing equipment. "May I acknowledge their message now, skipper?"
Larson shook his head with compressed lips.
"But if we are going in anyway—" Mac argued.
"No!" Larson exploded. Then his voice softened. "I think I know the mystery of the voice," he said. "It must be, it must be! But if it isn't—if I'm wrong—God alone knows. We must chance it. I don't want to know differently—until it's too late."
This was just real great. Larson had some fantastic notion, and he wanted it to be true so damned badly that he was taking us into blind jeopardy when we had the means to probe it first. Real scientific, that.
Humans! Men, and their so-called sense of reason! Larson was a crowning example of the sloppy-hearted thing I was fleeing when I embarked on this joy-ride, and now it would probably be my undoing.
We were homing in on the transmission from "New Columbia", easing down into the atmosphere, and now clouds and land and water formations took shape. The beam led us to the sunlit rim of dawn, and suddenly we were hovering over a great forest, slit at intervals with streaks of glittering blue that looked like deep, wide rivers.
Now Mac touched a switch, and the CW whistle gave us a tight audio beam to follow to the source of the signal. Larson switched to the micro landing controls to ride in like a jet liner on the Frisco-Shanghai run. We slanted gently down until the forest became trees, and the little blue-green splotches were lush, grassy meadows.
And there was the tower, and the low buildings—and the spaceship!
Something happened to me inside when I saw that. It was a kind of tremolo feeling, like a note in a new symphony, a note that springs free and alone, wavering uncertainly, and you don't know which way it will turn.
In seconds that seemed like hours, we were on the ground, the ramp was jammed out and Larson was blundering down it crying like a baby.
I stood in the port breathing the warm air redolent with exotic new scents and yawped like an idiot, trying to make sense of the huge banner strung a hundred yards across one whole side of the little village. The banner read:
WELCOME, HANS!
WELCOME ALBERT E.
WE KNEW YOU WERE COMING,
SO—
And near the center of the banner was the largest chocolate cake, or facsimile thereof, in all creation. It must have been ten feet high and twenty feet in diameter.
But Hans Larson wasn't amused by the cosmic gag. He galloped off that gang-plank like a love-sick gorilla. And I'm a comet's uncle if Tina wasn't there, racing out to meet him, Larson had guessed the truth, and no wonder he hadn't had the guts to test it beforehand!
By the time I got down, out and over to where they were all wrapped up mingling tears, I had it pretty well doped out myself.
I don't know why we had figured that all progress and improvement in interstellar flight would cease just because we had left earth. The eternal, colossal conceit of men, I guess.
When our last signal back to earth had given the okay sign, sure, they started building bigger ships and recruiting another crew. But by the time that the Albert E. II, was ready to take off for a more extended expedition, the Larson Drive was now the Larson-McKendrick Drive, with a velocity of a full half the speed of light, some five times our velocity.
Somehow, Tina had managed to get herself in the party, as Hans had sensed she would. And the time-differential, as it worked out, wasn't serious at all. Tina had been only 32 when we left her on earth. Including the year and a half she had already been with the colony on New Columbia, she was still quite a bit younger than Hans, and just twice as pretty as the day of their separation.
The tremolo note was rising now, the soft, mystic pitch of excitement inherent in the new world.
I turned to Mac, who was grinning like to split his face. I said, "Looks like you were wrong, old boy—about the impossibility of colonizing."
He nodded his head readily, but he wouldn't tear his eyes away from that monsterous, preposterous chocolate cake. The attraction, I discovered, was a little bevy of on-lookers who stood at its base. They were a dozen or more most attractive colonists in the younger age-bracket and unmistakably of the opposite sex.
Mac said, "Yeah, I was wrong about colonizing prospects. Dead wrong. Aren't you glad?"
And now the tremolo feeling split into a crescendo of sub-harmonics and overtones, a magnificent chord of attunement with life and humanity everywhere in the universe. And all at once I knew I was glad, happy as hell to see these people from the old hometown of earth.
End of Project Gutenberg's ...So They Baked a Cake, by Winston Marks
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