Authors: Frederik Pohl
PLATINUM POHL (68 page)
Ref.: CONSIX T51/11055/*7
CLASSIFIED MOST SECRET
Subject: Transmission from U.S. Starship
Constitution.
Constitution.
The following message was received and processed by the decrypt section according to standing directives. Because of its special nature, an investigation was carried out to determine its provenance. Radio-direction data received from Farside Base indicate its origin along a line of sight consistent with the present predicted location of the
Constitution.
Strength of signal was high but within appropriate limits, and degradation of frequency separation was consistent with relativistic shifts and scattering due to impact with particle and gas clouds.
Constitution.
Strength of signal was high but within appropriate limits, and degradation of frequency separation was consistent with relativistic shifts and scattering due to impact with particle and gas clouds.
Although available data do not prove beyond doubt that this transmission originated with the starship, no contraindications were found.
On examination, the text proved to be a phonetic transcription of what appears to be a dialect of Middle Kingdom Mandarin. Only a partial translation has been completed. (See note appended to text.) The translation presented unusual difficulties for two reasons: One, the difficulty of finding a translator of sufficient skill who could be granted appropriate security status; two, because (conjecturally) the language used may not correspond exactly to any dialect but may be an artifact of the
Constitution’
s personnel. (See PARA EIGHT, Lines 43-49 below, in this connection.)
Constitution’
s personnel. (See PARA EIGHT, Lines 43-49 below, in this connection.)
This text is PROVISIONAL AND NOT AUTHENTICATED and is furnished only as a first attempt to translate the contents of the message into English. Efforts are being continued to translate the full message, and to produce a less corrupt text for the section herewith. Later versions and emendations will be forwarded when available.
TEXT FOLLOWS:
PARA ONE. The one who speaks for all [
Lt
.-
Col
.
Sheffield
H. Jackman?] rests. With righteous action comes surcease from care.
I [identity not certain, but probably
Mrs. Annette Marin Becklund, less probably one of
the other three female personnel aboard, or one of
their descendants
] come in his place, moved by charity and love.
Lt
.-
Col
.
Sheffield
H. Jackman?] rests. With righteous action comes surcease from care.
I [identity not certain, but probably
Mrs. Annette Marin Becklund, less probably one of
the other three female personnel aboard, or one of
their descendants
] come in his place, moved by charity and love.
PARA TWO. It is not enough to study or to do deeds which make the people frown and bow their heads. It is not enough to comprehend the nature of the sky or the sea. Only through the understanding of all can one approach wisdom, and only through wisdom can one act rightly.
PARA THREE. These are the precepts as it is given us to see them.
PARA FOUR. The one who imposes his will by force lacks justice. Let him be thrust from a cliff.
PARA FIVE. The one who causes another to lust for a trifle of carved wood or a sweetmeat lacks courtesy. Let him be restrained from the carrying out of wrong practices.
PARA SIX. The one who ties a knot and says, “I do not care who must untie it,” lacks foresight. Let him wash the ulcers of the poor and carry nightsoil for all until he learns to see the day to come as brother to the day that is.
PARA SEVEN. We who are in this here should not impose our wills on you who are in that here by force. Understanding comes late. We regret the incident of next week, for it was done in haste and in error. The one who speaks for all acted without thinking. We who are in this here were sorry for it afterward.
PARA EIGHT. You may wonder [
literally
:
ask thoughtless
questions of the hexagrams
] why we are communicating in this language. The reason is in part recreational, in part heuristic [
literally
:
because on the staff
hand one becomes able to strike a blow more ably
when blows are struck repeatedly],
but the nature of the process is such that you must go through it before you can be told what it is. Our steps have trodden
this path. In order to reconstruct the Chinese of the
I Ching
it was first necessary to reconstruct the German of the translation from which the English was made. Error lurks at every turn. [
Literally
:
false
apparitions
shout at one each time the path winds.]
Many flaws mark our carving. Observe it in silence for hours and days until the flaws become part of the work.
literally
:
ask thoughtless
questions of the hexagrams
] why we are communicating in this language. The reason is in part recreational, in part heuristic [
literally
:
because on the staff
hand one becomes able to strike a blow more ably
when blows are struck repeatedly],
but the nature of the process is such that you must go through it before you can be told what it is. Our steps have trodden
this path. In order to reconstruct the Chinese of the
I Ching
it was first necessary to reconstruct the German of the translation from which the English was made. Error lurks at every turn. [
Literally
:
false
apparitions
shout at one each time the path winds.]
Many flaws mark our carving. Observe it in silence for hours and days until the flaws become part of the work.
PARA NINE. It is said that you have eight days before the heavier particles arrive. The dead and broken will be few. It will be better if all airborne nuclear reactors are grounded until the incident is over.
PARA TEN. When you have completed rebuilding send us a message, directed to the planet Alpha-Aleph. Our home should be prepared by then. We will send a ferry to help colonists cross the stream when we are ready.
The above text comprises the first 851 groups of the transmission. The remainder of the text, comprising approximately 7,500 groups, has not been satisfactorily translated. In the opinion of a consultant from the Oriental Languages Department at Johns Hopkins it may be a poem.
/s/ Durward S. RICHTER
Durward S. RICHTER
Maj. Gen. U.S.M.C.
Chief Cryptographer
Commanding
Distribution: X X X BY HAND ONLY
The president of the United States (Washington) opened the storm window of his study and leaned out to yell at his Chief Science Adviser. “Harry, get the lead out! We’re waiting for you!”
Harry looked up and waved, then continued doggedly plowing through the dripping jungle that was the North Lawn. Between the overgrown weeds and the rain and the mud it was slow going, but the president had little sympathy. He slammed down the window and said, “Damn that man, he just goes out of his way to aggravate me. How long am I supposed to wait for him so I can decide if we’re gonna have to move the capital or not?”
The vice president looked up from her knitting. “Jimbo, honey, why do you fuss yourself like that? Why don’t we just move and get it over with?”
“Well, it looks so lousy.” He threw himself into a chair despondently. “I was really looking forward to the Tenth Anniversary parade,” he complained. “Ten years, that’s really worth bragging about! I don’t want to hold it the hell out in the sticks, I want it right
down Constitution Avenue, just like the old days, with the people cheering and the reporters and the cameras all over and everything. Then let that son of a bitch in Omaha say I’m not the real president.”
down Constitution Avenue, just like the old days, with the people cheering and the reporters and the cameras all over and everything. Then let that son of a bitch in Omaha say I’m not the real president.”
His wife said placidly, “Don’t fuss yourself about him, honey. You know what I’ve been thinking, though? The parade might look a little skimpy on Constitution Avenue anyway. It would be real nice on a kind of littler street.”
“Oh, what do you know? Anyway, where would we go? If Washington’s under water, what makes you think Bethesda would be any better?”
His secretary of state put down his solitaire cards and looked interested. “Doesn’t have to be Bethesda,” he said. “I got some real nice land up near Dulles we could use. It’s high there.”
“Why, sure. Lots of nice land over to Virginia,” the vice president confirmed. “Remember when we went out on that picnic after your second inaugural? That was at Fairfax Station. There was hills there all around. Just beautiful.”
The president slammed his fist on the coffee table and yelled, “I’m not the president of Fairfax Station, I’m the president of the U. S. of A.! What’s the capital of the U. S. of A.? Washington! My God, don’t you see how those jokers in Houston and Omaha and Salt Lake and all would laugh if they heard I had to move out of my own capital?”
He broke off, because his chief science adviser was coming in the door, shaking himself, dripping mud as he got out of his oilskin slicker. “Well?” demanded the president. “What did they say?”
Harry sat down. “It’s terrible out there. Anybody got a dry cigarette?”
The president threw him a pack. Harry dried his fingers on his shirt front before he drew one out. “Well,” he said, “I went to every boat captain I could find. They all said the same. Ships they talked to, places they’d been. All the same. Tides rising all up and down the coast.”
He looked around for a match. The president’s wife handed him a gold cigarette lighter with the Great Seal of the United States on it, which, after some effort, he managed to ignite. “It don’t look good, Jimmy. Right now it’s low tide and that’s all right, but it’s coming in. And tomorrow it’ll come in a little higher. And there’s going to be storms, not just rain like this, I mean, but you got to figure on a tropical depression coming up from the Bahamas now and then.”
“We’re not in the tropics,” said the secretary of state suspiciously.
“It doesn’t mean that,” said the science adviser, who had once given the weather reports over the local ABC television station, when there was such a thing as a television network. “It means storms. Hurricanes. But they’re not the worst things; it’s the tides. If the ice is melting then they’re going to keep getting higher regardless.”
The president drummed his fingers on the coffee table. Suddenly he shouted, “I don’t
want
to move my capital!”
want
to move my capital!”
No one answered. His temper outbursts were famous. The vice president became absorbed in her knitting, the secretary of state picked up his cards and began to shuffle, the science adviser picked up his slicker and carefully hung it on the back of a door.
The president said, “You got to figure it this way. If we move out, then all those local yokels that claim to be the president of the United States are going to be just that much better off, and the eventual reunification of our country is going to be just that much more delayed.” He moved his lips for a moment, then burst out, “I don’t ask nothing for
myself! I never have. I only want to play the part I have to play in what’s good for all of us, and that means keeping up my position as the
real
president, according to the U. S. of A. Constitution as amended. And that means I got to stay right here in the real White House, no matter what.”
myself! I never have. I only want to play the part I have to play in what’s good for all of us, and that means keeping up my position as the
real
president, according to the U. S. of A. Constitution as amended. And that means I got to stay right here in the real White House, no matter what.”
His wife said hesitantly, “Honey, how about this? The other presidents had like a Summer White House, and Camp David and like that. Nobody fussed about it. Why couldn’t you do the same as they did? There’s the nicest old farm house out near Fairfax Station that we could fix up to be real pretty.”
The president looked at her with surprise. “Now, that’s good thinking,” he declared. “Only we can’t move permanently, and we have to keep this place garrisoned so nobody else will take it away from us, and we have to come back here once in a while. How about that, Harry?”
His science adviser said thoughtfully, “We could rent some boats, I guess. Depends. I don’t know how high the water might get.”
“No ‘guess’! No ‘depends’! That’s a national priority. We have to do it that way to keep that bastard in Omaha paying attention to the real president.”
“Well, Jimbo, honey,” said the vice president after a moment, emboldened by his recent praise. “You have to admit they don’t pay a lot of attention to us right now. When was the last time they paid their taxes?”
The president looked at her foxily over his glasses. “Talking about that,” he said, “I might have a little surprise for them anyway. What you might call a secret weapon.”
“I hope it does better than we did in the last war,” said his wife, “because if you remember, when we started to put down the uprising in Frederick, Maryland, we got the pee kicked out of us.”
The president stood up, indicating the Cabinet meeting was over.
“Never mind,” he said sunnily. “You go on out again, Harry, and see if you can find any good maps in the Library of Congress where they got the fires put out. Find us a nice high place within, um, twenty miles if you can. Then we’ll get the Army to condemn us a Summer White House like Mae says, and maybe I can sleep in a bed that isn’t moldy for a change.”
His wife looked worried, alerted by his tone. “What are you going to do, Jim?”
He chuckled. “I’m going to check out my secret weapon.”
He shooed them out of his study and, when they were gone, went to the kitchen and got himself a bottle of Fresca from the six-pack in the open refrigerator. It was warm, of course. The Marine guard company was still trying to get the gas generator back in operation, but they were having little success. The president didn’t mind. They were his personal Praetorians and, if they lacked a little as appliance repairmen, they had proved their worth when the chips were down. The president was always aware that during the Troubles he had been no more than any other congressman—appointed to fill a vacancy, at that—and his rapid rise to Speaker of the House and Heir Apparent, finally to the presidency itself, was due not only to his political skills and knowhow, but also to the fact that he was the only remotely legitimate heir to the presidency who also happened to have a brother-in-law commanding the Marine garrison in Washington.
The president was, in fact, quite satisfied with the way the world was going. If he envied presidents of the past (missiles, fleets of nuclear bombers, billions of dollars to play with), he certainly saw nothing, when he looked at the world around him, to compare with his own stature in the real world he lived in.
He finished the soda, opened his study door a crack and peered out. No one was nearby. He slipped out and down the back stairs. In what had once been the public parts of the White House you could see the extent of the damage more clearly. After the riots and the trashings and the burnings and coups, the will to repair and fix up had gradually dwindled away. The president didn’t mind. He didn’t even notice the charred walls and the fallen plaster. He was listening to the sound of a distant gasoline pump chugging away, and smiling to himself as he approached the underground level where his secret weapon was locked up.
The secret weapon, whose name was Dieter von Knefhausen, was trying to complete the total defense of every act of his life that he called his memoirs.
He was less satisfied with the world than the president. He could have wished for many changes. Better health, for one thing; he was well aware that his essential hypertension, his bronchitis, and his gout were fighting the last stages of a total war to see which would have the honor of destroying their mutal battleground, which was himself. He did not much mind his lack of freedom, but he did mind the senseless destruction of so many of his papers.
The original typescript of his autobiography was long lost, but he had wheedled the president—the pretender, that is, who called himself the president—into sending someone to find what could be found of them. A few tattered and incomplete carbon copies had turned up. He had restored some of the gaps as best his memory and available data permitted, telling again the story of how he had planned Project Alpha-Aleph and meticulously itemizing the details of how he had lied, forged and falsified to bring it about.
He was as honest as he could be. He spared himself nothing. He admitted his complicity in the “accidental” death of Ann Barstow’s first husband in a car crash, thus leaving her free to marry the man he had chosen to go with the crew to Alpha Centauri. He had confessed he had known that the secret would not last out the duration of the trip, thus betraying the trust of the president who made it possible. He put it all in, all he could remember, and boasted of his success.
For it was clear to him that his success was already proved. What could be surer evidence of it than what had happened ten years ago? The “incident of next week” was as dramatic and complete as anyone could wish. If its details were still indecipherable, largely because of the demolition of the existing technology structure it had brought about, its main features were obvious. The shower of heavy particles—baryon? perhaps even quarks?—had drenched the Earth. The source had been traced to a point in the heavens identical with that plotted for the
Constitution.
Constitution.
Also there were the messages received, and, take them together, there was no doubt that the astronauts had developed knowledge so far in advance of anything on Earth that, from two light-years out, they could impose their will on the human race. They had done it. In one downpour of particles, the entire military-industrial complex of the planet was put out of action.
How? How? Ah, thought Knefhausen, with envy and pride, that was the question. One could not know. All that was known was that every nuclear device—bomb, powerplant, hospital radiation source or stockpile—had simultaneously soaked up the stream of particles and at that moment ceased to exist as a source of nuclear energy. It was not rapid and catastrophic, like a bomb. It was slow and long-lasting. The uranium and the
plutonium simply melted in the long, continuous reaction that was still bubbling away in the seething lava lakes where the silos had stood and the nuclear power plants had generated electricity. Little radiation was released, but a good deal of heat.
plutonium simply melted in the long, continuous reaction that was still bubbling away in the seething lava lakes where the silos had stood and the nuclear power plants had generated electricity. Little radiation was released, but a good deal of heat.
Knefhausen had long since stopped regretting what could not be helped, but wistfully he still wished he had the opportunity to measure the total heat flux properly. Not less than 10
16
watt-years, he was sure, just to judge by the effects on the Earth’s atmosphere, the storms, the gradual raising of temperature all over, above all by the rumors about the upward trend of sea level that bespoke the melting of the polar ice caps. There was no longer even a good weather net, but the fragmentary information he was able to piece together suggested a world increase of four, maybe as many as six or seven degrees Celsian already, and the reactions still seething away in Czechoslovakia, the Congo, Colorado, and a hundred lesser infernos.
16
watt-years, he was sure, just to judge by the effects on the Earth’s atmosphere, the storms, the gradual raising of temperature all over, above all by the rumors about the upward trend of sea level that bespoke the melting of the polar ice caps. There was no longer even a good weather net, but the fragmentary information he was able to piece together suggested a world increase of four, maybe as many as six or seven degrees Celsian already, and the reactions still seething away in Czechoslovakia, the Congo, Colorado, and a hundred lesser infernos.
Rumors about the sea level?
Not rumors, no, he corrected himself, lifting his head and staring at the snake of hard rubber hose that began under the duckboards at the far end of the room and ended outside the barred window, where the gasoline pump outside did its best to keep the water level inside his cell low enough to keep the water below the boards. Judging by the inflow, the grounds of the White House must be nearly awash.
The door opened. The president of the United States (Washington) walked in, patting the shoulder of the thin, scared, hungry-looking kid who was guarding the door.
“How’s it going, Knefhausen?” the president began sunnily. “You ready to listen to a little reason yet?”
“I’ll do whatever you say, Mr. President, but as I have told you there are certain limits. Also I am not a young man, and my health—”
“Screw your health and your limits,” shouted the president. “Don’t start up with me, Knefhausen!”
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