“The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton” (Amazing Stories March 1939)

Bloch, Robert. “The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton.” Amazing Stories, March 1939. pp. 78-85.
https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v13n03_1939-03/page/n77/mode/2up

The story describes a voyage to Mars made by the titular solitary genius, a man who has mastered every aspect of science and mathematics in order to craft his spaceship. Supported by his technicians, he lifts off from Earth and is immediately shocked by the violence of the experience. The ship shudders and shakes so much that he is afraid for his life. Not only that, every instrument onboard shatters, leaving him hopelessly isolated in the self-steering ship and unable to measure even the passage of time. He tries to remain in control of himself and of his rhythms, but he soon begins to forget when he last ate or slept or any other detail of his life that might give him a sense of the passing of time. Right from the start of his twenty-year journey, the stakes are high for Clayton as he battles to maintain his sanity. 

In all of his testing, he did not anticipate the debilitating vibration, the force he felt would drive him insane. He has vivid dreams of landing on Mars where he is at first attacked by the tree-like denizens and then by a mechanical god who seeks to devour him. One dream casts Mars as a vision of hell, complete with the grasping damned who seek to lure Clayton to the underworld. Each time he wakes up to find himself still on the ship but changed. He sees himself in a mirror, and he has grown impossibly old in a short amount of time. He is nearly unrecognizable to himself. He imagines himself spinning hopelessly out of control and far past Mars, never to return. He imagines that humanity is destroyed by pestilence, famine, disease, war, meteor, or supernova. Despite the waves of terror he is subject to, he stays focused on his mission. Finally, with a thud, he feels the ship land. The violent shuddering has stopped, and Clayton can barely stand. He opens the hatch, and in rushes his assistant who does not recognize the old man who has collapsed into his arms. Clayton has been in the malfunctioning ship for only one week and has never left the surface of the Earth. He explains as he is dying in his assistant’s arms that he lost track of time.

In addition to the focus on the psychological aspects of Clayton’s traumatic experience, the most interesting part for me about this fine story is the application of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to the experience of Clayton in his “journey” to Mars. Time dilation affects both the Earth-bound observer and Clayton in strange ways. Clayton has traveled great distances—but (probably) only in his mind. That Clayton emerged as an old man from his ship is a remarkable moment, and maybe especially because there are witnesses. Oh, one other sting about this particular issue of Amazing Stories. Just before Bloch’s story is a true landmark in the field of SF: the debut story by one of the all-time greats! “Marooned off Vesta” was the third story that the eighteen-year-old Isaac Asimov had ever written and the first one he published. It is a pretty good story about a desperate situation and some creative problem solving. It is available in archive.org in the issue that is linked with this Bloch story.