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 .. .
7
IN THE "HONEYMOON HOTEL" OF THE STARSHIP CONSTITUTION Eve Barstow lay with her husband's arms around her, staring wide-eyed at the blank wall. They were not making love. They hadn't been, and it did not seem likely they would be.
Abruptly the lights went out, and then came on again in quick flashes as the ship's circuit breakers coped with an overload. "Shef's probably transmitting again," Eve guessed.
Her husband moved slightly in the cupped-spoons position behind her. "Uh-huh," he agreed, and yawned loudly. He sounded tired, but Eve knew that in fact he was simply bored.
The flickering of the lights was terribly annoying and, although neither Eve nor any other member of the crew was prone to such things as migraines, she could feel one coming on. Back on Earth she had never had headaches. Back on Earth she had never lain in her husband's arms and felt lonely, either.
Just outside the curtain that gave them all the privacy they had, Ann Becklund and Flo Jackman were disagreeing. Not just disagreeing. Eve could tell without seeing that they were facing each other across the dropline shaft, Ann with her hands on her hips, shouting, Flo with her arms outflung, shouting, the two of them almost drowning out the drone of the plasma generator. You got very few surprises when you lived on board the Constitution. Eve knew exactly how every member of the party stood, and spoke, and shaped his face, in every state of feeling of stimulus, because she had seen each one, again and again. The Constitution was pretty big, as spaceships go, but spaceships go rather many to the barrel, and the farthest any member of the party had been from any other in all the weeks and months since they took off was fifty-three feet. No, Eve thought, not true. Will and her husband had been three or four times that far away at least once—when they were outside the hull with the power cut off, studying the externalities of the drive. But she didn't want to think about that. She shifted uncomfortably on the rather hard foam mattress. Her husband didn't even notice. Honeymoon Hotel was a kind of special place for them—not just the way it had been for all the couples, of course. They'd practically built it. The curved couches themselves, one of which they were now lying on, had been vertical stress-bearing members for the extra bursts of acceleration when they rounded the Sun, before she and Jim had unshipped them and fitted them against the inner hull wall; the thin mattress had once been part of the protective foam for that same time . . . and when they fixed them up, what ribald jokes and squeezes and goosings went on. And how little since!