It was quite a shame. Even one's well-earned perquisites were devalued. Sometimes abolished entirely. His lecture tour had been interrupted, and finally terminated, by ridiculous demonstrators. In Pittsburgh it was illegal aliens demanding an end to deportation to Mexico. In Cleveland, Detroit, and two universities in Ohio, it was protest against the President's decision to assist friendly African governments against their Moslem revolutionaries. In every city, everywhere, there was a constant outcry from the unemployed and the welfare clients. And such terrible injustice! For none of these things, not one of them, was in any sense the proper responsibility of Dieter von Knefhausen! In the fabric of society the seams were pulling loose!
But, of course, Knefhausen had not chosen this time. It was simply the time he had been born in. The prudent man wasted no tears in bemoaning the absence of what simply no longer existed. The prudent man used his strength on achieving what was possible, and Dieter von Knefhausen had achieved very, very much!
The door opened, and the usher looked in. Knefhausen shook himself and focused on what had been before his unseeing eyes all along: new turmoil at the outside gates, a thin blue cloud of tear gas, distant, furious shouting. "Ah, King Mob is busy," he observed.
The woman glanced at him incuriously. "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 yet another Marine corporal with a weapon, which one could understand. But there were four other men in the room. Knefhausen recognized them as Murray Amos, the President's personal secretary; the Secretary of State; the Speaker of the House; and, of all people, the Vice President. How extraordinary, Knefhausen thought, for what was described as a confidential briefing for the President alone! But he rallied quickly.
"Excuse me, Mr. President," he said cheerfully. "I thought you were ready for our little talk, but perhaps that silly girl has brought me in too soon."
"No, I'm ready, Knefhausen," said the President. The cares of his years in the White House rested heavily on him today. He looked very old and tired, and the famous overbite was very clear. "You will tell these gentlemen what you would have told me."
"Ah, yes, I see," said Knefhausen, 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 understand what was in his thoughts. "Yes, to be sure. Here is something, Mr. President. A new report from the Constitution! Very gratifying! It was received by burst transmission from the Lunar Orbiter via Goldstone just an hour ago, and has just come from the decoding room. Let me read it to you. Our brave astronauts are proceeding splendidly, just as we planned. They say—"
"Don't read it to us just now," said the President harshly. "We'll no doubt want to hear it, but first there's something else. I want you to tell this group the full story of the Alpha- Aleph project."
"Ah, yes, Mr. President, the full story." Knefhausen hung on gamely. "Of course. You wish me to begin with the very beginning, when first we realized at the lunar 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 data!"
"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 are right and we are lying to the world! Tell them why we sent those human beings on a suicide mission, with orders to land on a planet that we have always known does not exist!"
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!