PLATINUM POHL (64 page)
Authors: Frederik Pohl
Sheffield Jackman’s log. Starship
Constitution.
Day 95.
Constitution.
Day 95.
According to Letski we are now traveling at just about 15 percent of the speed of light, almost 30,000 miles per second. The fusion thrust is operating smoothly and well. Fuel, power, and life-support curves are sticking tight to optimum. No sweat of any kind with the ship, or, actually, with anything else.
Relativistic effects have begun to show up as predicted. Jim Barstow’s spectral studies show the stars in front of us are showing a shift to the blue end, and the Sun and the other stars behind us are shifting to the red. Without the spectroscope you can’t see much, though. Beta Circini looks a little funny, maybe. As for the Sun, it’s still very bright—Jim logged it as minus-six magnitude a few hours ago—and as I’ve never seen it in quite that way before, I can’t tell whether the color looks bright or not. It certainly isn’t the golden yellow I associate with type GO, but neither is Alpha Centauri ahead of us, and I don’t really see a difference between them. I think the reason is simply that they are so bright that the color impressions are secondary to the brightness impressions, although the spectroscope, as I say, does show the differences. We’ve all taken turns at looking back. Naturally enough, I guess. We can still make out the Earth and even the Moon in the telescope, but it’s chancy. Ski almost got an eyeful of the Sun at full light-gathering amplitude yesterday because the visual separation is only about twelve seconds of arc now. In a few more days they’ll be too close to separate.
Let’s see, what else?
We’ve been having a fine time with the recreational-math program. Ann has taken to binary arithmetic like a duck to water. She’s involved in what I take to be some sort of statistical experimentation (we don’t pry too much into what the others are doing until they’re ready to talk about it), and, of all things, she demanded we produce coins to flip. Well, naturally none of us had taken any money with us! Except that it turns out two of us did. Ski had a Russian silver rouble that his mother’s uncle had given him for luck, and I found an old Philadelphia transit token in my pocket. Ann rejected my transit token as too light to be reliable, but she now spends happy hours flipping the rouble, heads or tails, and writing down the results as a series of six-place binary numbers, heads for 1 and tails for 0. After about a week my curiosity got too much so I began hinting to find out what she was doing. When I ask she says things like, “By means of the easy and the simple we grasp the laws of the whole world.” When I say that’s nice but what does she hope to grasp by flipping the coin? she says, “When the laws of the whole world are grasped, therein lies perfection.” So, as I say, we don’t press each other and I leave it there. But it passes the time.
Kneffie would be proud of himself if he could see how our recreation keeps us busy. None of us has managed to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem yet or anything like that, but of course that’s the whole point. If we could
solve
the problems, we’d have used them up, and then what would we do for recreation? It does exactly what it was intended to. It keeps us mentally alert on this long and intrinsically rather dull boat-ride.
solve
the problems, we’d have used them up, and then what would we do for recreation? It does exactly what it was intended to. It keeps us mentally alert on this long and intrinsically rather dull boat-ride.
Personal relationships? Jes’ fine, fellows, jes’ fine. A lot better than any of us really hoped, back there at the personal-hygiene briefings in Mission Control. The girls take the stripey pills every day until three days before their periods, then they take the green
pills for four days, then they lay off pills for four days, then back to the stripes. There was a little embarrassed joking about it at first, but now it’s strictly routine, like brushing the teeth. We men take our red pills every day (Ski christened them “stop lights”) until our girls tell us they’re about to lay off (you know what I mean, each of our individual girls tells her husband), then we take the Blue Devil (that’s what we call the antidote) and have a hell of a time until the girls start on the stripes again. None of us thought any of this would work, you know. But it works fine. I don’t even think sex until Flo kisses my ear and tells me she’s getting ready to, excuse the expression, get in heat, and then like wow. Same with everybody. The aft chamber with the nice wide bunks we call Honeymoon Hotel. It belongs to whoever needs it, and never once have both bunks been used. The rest of the time we just sleep wherever is convenient, and nobody gets uptight about it.
pills for four days, then they lay off pills for four days, then back to the stripes. There was a little embarrassed joking about it at first, but now it’s strictly routine, like brushing the teeth. We men take our red pills every day (Ski christened them “stop lights”) until our girls tell us they’re about to lay off (you know what I mean, each of our individual girls tells her husband), then we take the Blue Devil (that’s what we call the antidote) and have a hell of a time until the girls start on the stripes again. None of us thought any of this would work, you know. But it works fine. I don’t even think sex until Flo kisses my ear and tells me she’s getting ready to, excuse the expression, get in heat, and then like wow. Same with everybody. The aft chamber with the nice wide bunks we call Honeymoon Hotel. It belongs to whoever needs it, and never once have both bunks been used. The rest of the time we just sleep wherever is convenient, and nobody gets uptight about it.
Excuse my getting personal, but you told me you wanted to know everything, and there’s not much else to tell. All systems remain optimum. We check them over now and again, but nothing has given any trouble, or even looked as though it might be thinking about giving trouble later on. And there’s absolutely nothing worth looking at outside but stars. We’ve all seen them about as much as we need to by now. The plasma jet thrums right along at our point-seven-five Gee. We don’t even hear it anymore.
We’ve even got used to the recycling system. None of us really thought we’d get with the suction toilet, not to mention what happens to the contents, but it was only a little annoying the first few days. Now it’s fine. The treated product goes into the algae tanks, feces and urine together. The sludge from the algae goes into the hydroponic beds, but by then, of course, it’s just greeny brown vegetable matter like my father used to get out of his mulch bed. That’s all handled semiautomatically anyway, of course, so our first real contact with the system comes in the kitchen. The food we eat comes in the form of nice red tomatoes and nourishing rice pilaf and stuff like that. (We do miss animal protein a little; the frozen stores have to last a long time, so each hamburger is a special feast, and we only have them once a week or so.) The water we drink comes actually out of the air, condensed by the dehumidifiers into the reserve supply, where we get it to drink. It’s nicely aerated and chilled and tastes fine. Of course, the way it gets into the air in the first place is by being sweated out of our pores or transpired from the plants (which are irrigated direct from the treated product of the reclamation tanks), and we all know, when we stop to think of it, that every molecule of it has passed through all our kidneys forty times by now. But not directly. That’s the point. What we drink is clear sweet dew. And if it once was something else, can’t you say the same of Lake Erie?
Well. I think I’ve gone on long enough. You’ve probably got the idea by now: We’re happy in the service, and we all thank you for giving us this pleasure cruise!
Waiting for his appointment with the president, Dr. Knefhausen reread the communique from the spaceship, chuckling happily to himself. “Happy in the service.” “Like wow.” “Kneffie would be proud of himself”—indeed Kneffie was. And proud of them, those little wonders, there! So brave. So strong.
He took as much pride in them as if they had been his own sons and daughters, all eight of them. Everybody knew the Alpha-Aleph project was Knefhausen’s baby, but he
tried to conceal from the world that, in his own mind, he spread his fatherhood to include the crew. They were the pick of the available world, and it was he who had put them where they were. He lifted his head, listening to the distant chanting from the perimeter fence where today’s disgusting exhibition of mob violence was doing its best to harass the people who were making the world go. What great lumps they were out there, with their long hair and their dirty morals. The heavens belonged only to angels, and it was Dieter von Knefhausen who had picked the angels. It was he who had established the selection procedures (and if he had done some things that were better left unmentioned to make sure the procedures worked, what of it?). It was he who had conceived and adapted the highly important recreation schedule, and above all he who had conceived the entire project and persuaded the president to make it come true. The hardware was nothing, only money. The basic scientific concepts were known; most of the components were on the shelves, it took only will to put them together. The will would not have existed if it had not been for Knefhausen, who announced the discovery of Alpha-Aleph from his radio-observatory on Farside (and gave it that name, although as everyone realized he could have called it by any name he chose, even his own) and carried on the fight for the project by every means available until the president bought it.
tried to conceal from the world that, in his own mind, he spread his fatherhood to include the crew. They were the pick of the available world, and it was he who had put them where they were. He lifted his head, listening to the distant chanting from the perimeter fence where today’s disgusting exhibition of mob violence was doing its best to harass the people who were making the world go. What great lumps they were out there, with their long hair and their dirty morals. The heavens belonged only to angels, and it was Dieter von Knefhausen who had picked the angels. It was he who had established the selection procedures (and if he had done some things that were better left unmentioned to make sure the procedures worked, what of it?). It was he who had conceived and adapted the highly important recreation schedule, and above all he who had conceived the entire project and persuaded the president to make it come true. The hardware was nothing, only money. The basic scientific concepts were known; most of the components were on the shelves, it took only will to put them together. The will would not have existed if it had not been for Knefhausen, who announced the discovery of Alpha-Aleph from his radio-observatory on Farside (and gave it that name, although as everyone realized he could have called it by any name he chose, even his own) and carried on the fight for the project by every means available until the president bought it.
It had been a hard, bitter struggle. He reminded himself with courage that the worst was still ahead. No matter. Whatever it cost, it was done, and it was worthwhile. These reports from
Constitution
proved it. It was going exactly as planned, and—
Constitution
proved it. It was going exactly as planned, and—
“Excuse me, Dr. Knefhausen.”
He looked up, catapulted back from almost half a light-year away.
“I said the president will see you now, Dr. Knefhausen,” repeated the usher.
“Ah,” said Knefhausen. “Oh, yes, to be sure. I was deep in thought.”
“Yes, sir. This way, sir.”
They passed a window and there was a quick glimpse of the turmoil at the gates, picket signs used like battle-axes, a thin blue cloud of tear gas, the sounds of shouting. “King Mob is busy today,” said Knefhausen absently.
“There’s no danger, sir. Through here, please.”
The president was in his private study, but to Knefhausen’s surprise he was not alone. There was Murray Amos, his personal secretary, which one could understand; but there were three other men in the room. Knefhausen recognized them as the secretary of state, the Speaker of the House and, of all people, the vice-president. How strange, thought Knefhausen, for what was to have been a confidential briefing for the president alone! But he rallied quickly.
“Excuse me, Mr. President,” he said cheerfully. “I must have understood wrong. I thought you were ready for our little talk.”
“I am ready, Knefhausen,” said the president. The cares of his years in the White House rested heavily on him today, Knefhausen thought critically. He looked very old and very tired. “You will tell these gentlemen what you would have told me.”
“Ah, yes, I see,” said Knefhausen, trying to conceal the fact that he did not see at all. Surely the president did not mean what his words said; therefore it was necessary to try to see what was his thought. “Yes, to be sure. Here is something, Mr. President. A new report from the
Constitution
! It was received by burst transmission from the Lunar Orbiter at Goldstone just an hour ago, and has just come from the decoding room. Let me read it to you. Our brave astronauts are getting along splendidly, just as we planned. They say—”
Constitution
! It was received by burst transmission from the Lunar Orbiter at Goldstone just an hour ago, and has just come from the decoding room. Let me read it to you. Our brave astronauts are getting along splendidly, just as we planned. They say—”
“Don’t read us that just now,” said the president harshly. “We’ll hear it, but first there is something else. I want you to tell this group the full story of the Alpha-Aleph project.”
“The full story, Mr. President?” Knefhausen hung on gamely. “I see. You wish me to begin with the very beginning, when first we realized at the observatory that we had located a planet—”
“No, Knefhausen. Not the cover story. The truth.”
“Mr. President!” cried Knefhausen in sudden agony. “I must inform you that I protest this premature disclosure of vital—”
“The truth, Knefhausen!” shouted the president. It was the first time Knefhausen had ever heard him raise his voice. “It won’t go out of this room, but you must tell them everything. Tell them why it is that the Russians were right and we lied! Tell them why we sent the astronauts on a suicide mission, ordered to land on a planet that we knew all along did not exist!”
Shef Jackman’s journal, Day 130.
It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? I’m sorry for being such a lousy correspondent. I was in the middle of a thirteen-game chess series with Eve Barstow—she was playing the Bobby Fischer games, and I was playing in the style of Reshevsky—and Eve said something that made me think of old Kneffie, and that, of course, reminded me I owed you a transmission. So here it is.
In my own defense, though, it isn’t only that we’ve been busy with other things. It takes a lot of power for these chatty little letters. Some of us aren’t so sure they’re worthwhile. The farther we get the more power we need to accumulate for a transmission. Right now it’s not so bad yet, but, well, I might as well tell you the truth, right? Kneffie made us promise that. Always tell the truth, he said, because you’re part of the experiment, and we need to know what you’re doing, all of it. Well, the truth in this case is that we were a little short of disposable power for a while because Jim Barstow needed quite a lot for research purposes. You will probably wonder what the research is, but we have a rule that we don’t criticize, or even talk about, what anyone else is doing until they’re ready, and he isn’t ready yet. I take the responsibility for the whole thing, not just the power drain but the damage to the ship. I said he could go ahead with it.
We’re going pretty fast now, and to the naked eye the stars fore and aft have blue-shifted and red-shifted nearly out of sight. It’s funny, but we haven’t been able to observe Alpha-Aleph yet, even with the disc obscuring the star. Now, with the shift to the blue, we probably won’t see it at all until we slow down. We can still see the Sun, but I guess what we’re seeing is ultraviolet when it’s home. Of course the relativistic frequency shifts mean we need extra compensating power in our transmissions, which is another reason why, all in all, I don’t think I’ll be writing home every Sunday, between breakfast and the baseball game, the way I ought to!
But the mission’s going along fine. The “personal relationships” keep on being just great. We’ve done a little experimental research there too that wasn’t on the program, but it’s all okay. No problems. Worked out great. I think maybe I’ll leave out some of the details, but we found some groovy ways to do things. Oh, hell, I’ll give you one hint:
Dot Letski says I should tell you to get the boys at Mission Control to crack open two of the stripey pills and one of the Blue Devils, mix them with a quarter-teaspoon of black pepper and about 2 cc of the conditioner fluid from the recycling system. Serve over orange sherbet, and oh boy. After the first time we had it Flo made a crack about its being “seminal” which I thought was a private joke, but it broke everybody up. Dot figured it out for herself weeks ago. We wondered how she got so far so fast with
War and Peace
until she let us into the secret. Then we found out what it could do for you, both emotionally and intellectually: the creative over the arousing, as they say.
Dot Letski says I should tell you to get the boys at Mission Control to crack open two of the stripey pills and one of the Blue Devils, mix them with a quarter-teaspoon of black pepper and about 2 cc of the conditioner fluid from the recycling system. Serve over orange sherbet, and oh boy. After the first time we had it Flo made a crack about its being “seminal” which I thought was a private joke, but it broke everybody up. Dot figured it out for herself weeks ago. We wondered how she got so far so fast with
War and Peace
until she let us into the secret. Then we found out what it could do for you, both emotionally and intellectually: the creative over the arousing, as they say.
Ann and Jerry Letski used up their own recreational programs early (real early—they were supposed to last the whole voyage!), so they swapped microfiches, on the grounds that each was interested in an aspect of causality and they wanted to see what the other side had to offer. Now Ann is deep into people like Kant and Carnap, and Ski is sore as a boil because there’s no
Achillea millefolium
in the hydroponics garden. Needs the stalks for his researches, he says. He is making do with flipping his rouble to generate hexagrams; in fact, we all borrow it now and then, but it’s not the right way. Honestly, Mission Control, he’s right. Some thought should have been given to our other needs, besides sex and number theory. We can’t even use chop bones from the kitchen wastes, because there isn’t any kitchen waste. I know you couldn’t think of everything, but still—Anyway, we improvise as best we can, and mostly well enough.
Achillea millefolium
in the hydroponics garden. Needs the stalks for his researches, he says. He is making do with flipping his rouble to generate hexagrams; in fact, we all borrow it now and then, but it’s not the right way. Honestly, Mission Control, he’s right. Some thought should have been given to our other needs, besides sex and number theory. We can’t even use chop bones from the kitchen wastes, because there isn’t any kitchen waste. I know you couldn’t think of everything, but still—Anyway, we improvise as best we can, and mostly well enough.
Let’s see, what else? Did I send you Jim Barstow’s proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture? Turned out to be very simple once he had devised his multiplex parity analysis idea. Mostly we don’t fool with that sort of stuff anymore, though. We got tired of number theory after we’d worked out all the fun parts, and if there is any one thing that we all work on (apart from our private interests) it is probably the calculus of statement. We don’t do it systematically, only as time permits from our other activities, but we’re all pretty well convinced that a universal grammar is feasible enough, and it’s easy enough to see what that leads to. Flo has done more than most of us. She asked me to put in that Boole, Venn and all those old people were on the wrong track, but she thinks there might be something to Leibniz’s “calculus ratiocinator” idea. There’s a J. W. Swanson suggestion that she likes for multiplexing languages. (Jim took off from it to work out his parity analysis.) The idea is that you devise a double-vocabulary language. One set of meanings is conveyed, say, by phonemes—that is, the shape of the words themselves. Another set is conveyed by pitch. It’s like singing a message, half of it conveyed by the words, the other half by the tune. Like rock music. You get both sets of meanings at the same time. She’s now working on third, fourth, and nth dimensions so as to convey many kinds of meanings at once, but it’s not very fruitful so far (except for using sexual intercourse as one of the communications media). Most of the senses available are too limited to convey much. By the way, we checked out all the existing “artificial languages” as best we could—put Will Becklund under hypnotic regression to recapture the Esperanto he’d learned as a kid, for instance. But they were all blind alleys. Didn’t even convey as much as standard English or French.
Medical readouts follow. We’re all healthy. Eve Barstow gave us a medical check to make sure. Ann and Ski had little rough spots in a couple of molars so she filled them for the practice more than because they needed it. I don’t mean practice in filling teeth; she wanted to try acupuncture instead of procaine. Worked fine.
We all have this writing-to-Daddy-and-Mommy-from-Camp-Tanglewood feeling and we’d like to send you some samples of our home handicrafts. The trouble is there’s
so much of it. Everybody has something he’s personally pretty pleased with, like Barstow’s proof of most of the classic math problems and my multimedia adaptation of
Sur le pont d’Avignon.
It’s hard to decide what to send you with the limited power available, and we don’t want to waste it with junk. So we took a vote and decided the best thing was Ann’s verse retelling of
War and Peace.
It runs pretty long. I hope the power holds it. I’ll transmit as much of it as I can … .
so much of it. Everybody has something he’s personally pretty pleased with, like Barstow’s proof of most of the classic math problems and my multimedia adaptation of
Sur le pont d’Avignon.
It’s hard to decide what to send you with the limited power available, and we don’t want to waste it with junk. So we took a vote and decided the best thing was Ann’s verse retelling of
War and Peace.
It runs pretty long. I hope the power holds it. I’ll transmit as much of it as I can … .
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