Starburst

6

Message received from Shef Jackman, Day 130.

IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME, HASN'T IT? I'M SORRY. CALL ME A lousy correspondent. There's so much to keep me busy, and I just don't get around. Like the last two days, I was playing 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 it was going really well until Jim came to collect her for their weekend. "Give my regards to Kneffie," he said, and then I happened to think I owed you a report. So here it is—better late than never, ha-ha, right?

In my own defense, though, it isn't only that we've been busy with our things. It takes a lot of energy for these chatty little letters. Some of us aren't so sure they're worthwhile. Just this talking to you, you know, the way you people talk to each other, takes a lot more of my own personal energy than, gosh, I don't know, than the whole eisteddfod we had the other night, but there's the ship's reserve to be con­sidered, too. The farther we get, the more power we need to accumulate for a transmission. Right now it's not really 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 this is one grand damn experiment and you're a big part of it yourselves, and we need to know what you're doing, all of it. So we usually do tell just about every­thing. Well, almost just about, ha-ha.

Anyway, 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 I can't really answer. We have a rule that we don't criticize, or even talk about, what anyone else is doing until they're ready. And Jim 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 it was all right for Jim to go ahead with it. (On the other hand, Will Becklund had no business being there, so that part was his own fault.)

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 occulting disk in the spotting telescope to block out 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 all right, but I guess what we're seeing is ultraviolet when it's home.

I don't know if all of you understand this "starbow" effect. I've just begun to, myself. It's like—oh, say, like you can only see one octave on a piano keyboard. Somebody slides the piano a couple of inches to the left. So what used to be the A-flat is now maybe the C-sharp, but it looks like the same A-flat. It sounds like A-flat; it's the same number of keys down from the upper limit of your vision.

Let me tackle it a different way. See, the way your eye perceives color is, photons hit the organic dyes in the retina. The photon has its own energy. Ping go the dye molecules sensitive to that much energy, and we say, aha, that one's blue. Another one comes by a little less energetic, and it excites some other molecules, and we say, ah, green. Okay?

Now we get relativistic. Because we're moving away from the photon—or it's moving away from us, makes no difference—it loses a little energy. So that first one arrives a little tired out. Has a little less energy. It started out blue, but now it's weakened down to green, and that's what we see.

Or anyway, that's what we're supposed to see. Right now we're seeing more in front than I expected to and less behind. Behind, mostly just blackness. It started out like, I don't know what you'd call it, sort of a burnt-out fuzziness, and it's been spreading over the last few weeks. Actually in front it seems to be getting a little brighter. I don't know if you all remember, but there was some argument about whether we'd see the starbow at all, because some old guys ran computer simulations and said it wouldn't happen. Well, something is happening! It's like Kneffie always says, theory is one thing, evidence is better, so there! (Ha-ha.) Of course, all this relativistic frequency shifting means that every time we transmit we have to figure our velocity in and retune accordingly, which is another reason why, all in all, I don't think I'll be writing home every Sunday, between breakfast and the ball game, the way I ought to!

But don't worry. The mission's going fine. Well, almost fine. Well, I might as well tell the truth and say, yes, there are a few little things. Nothing big. The structural damage was really minimal, absolutely. A few sort of personal problems. Jim Barstow has a bee in his bonnet, and not just because of what happened to the ship. But all he's done is sort of hint about it. Well, more than hint. He and Ski had practically a big fight just before they tested out the power- plant modifications, and they wouldn't tell the rest of us what it was about until they were sure. I guess they're not sure yet. But if it was anything really urgent I'm sure they'd tell us.

No more of that. Let's talk about the good things. The "personal relationships" keep on being just great. We've done a little experimental research in that area too that wasn't on the program, but it's all okay. No problems. Worked out fine. 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 stripy 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 it was worth seeing 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. Needs the stalks for his researches, he says. He is making do with flipping his ruble 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 more 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 and besides all our frozen meats were cut off the bone to save mass. I wish they hadn't saved quite so much. I know you couldn't think of everything, but, after all, there's no Seven-Eleven on the corner to run to out here.

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 it's fun trying to use it to talk to each other. We're all pretty well convinced that a,universal grammar is feasible, 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 in 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, by 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. Ha-ha.) Most of the senses available are too limited to convey much, like body orientation, or are diflicult to generate properly, like smell. By the way, we thought of checking out the existing "artificial languages," so we put Will Becklund under hypnotic regression to recapture the Esperanto he'd learned as a kid. Looks like a blind alley. Doesn't even convey as much as standard English or French. (But we'd like to investigate the others, so list appended of texts requested for Volapiik, Interlingua, Latine sine flexione, and so on. And, listen, please don't be so chintzy with your transmissions, will you? You've got more power than we do!)

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 asked if she could fill them for the practice and they let her. I don't mean practice in filling teeth, I mean practice in using 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 handicrafts. The trouble is there's so much of them. Everybody has something he's personally pretty pleased with, like Barstow's proof of most of the classic math problems and my own multimedia adaptation of Sur le pont d'Avignon. It's hard to decide among them, especially when we have to watch our power drain a little bit for a while. So we took a vote and decided the best thing was Ann's verse retelling of War and Peace. As you can guess, it runs pretty long! I hope the power holds out. I'll transmit as much of it as I can .. .