The letter itself is written in a bold, highly legible, masculine hand. The heading shows that it was written in Richmond, Virginia, and it is addressed to a numbered postal box in Nairobi.
The bracketed notes after certain of the writer’s expressions were added by myself, and I have appended a conversion table of equivalent units in three measuring systems.
—Randall Garrett
My dear Ed,
Since your secret retirement to Africa, we have had much less communication than I would like, but, alas, my duties at home have kept me busy these many years. It is, however, a comfort to know that, thanks to the Duke’s special serum, you will, barring accident or assassination, be around as long as I.
I am sorry not to have answered your last letter sooner, but, truth to tell, it caused me a great deal of consternation. I fear I had not been keeping up with the affairs of Earth as much as I perhaps should have, and I had no idea that the Mariner and Viking spacecraft had sent back such peculiar data.
One sentence in your last letter made me very proud: “I would rather believe that every man connected with NASA and JPL is a liar and a hoaxer than to believe you would ever tell me a deliberate lie.” But, as you say, those photographs are most convincing.
Naturally, I took the photoreproductions you sent to a group of the wisest savants of Helium, and bade them do their best to solve the problem. They strove mightily, knowing my honor was at stake. Long they pondered over the data, and, with a science that is older and more advanced than that of Earth, they came up with the answer.
The tome they produced is far longer and far heavier than any book you have ever published, and is filled with page after page of abstruse mathematics, all using Martian symbolism. I could not translate it for you if I wished.
In fact, I had to get old Menz Klausa to explain it to me. He is not only learned in Martian mathematics, but has the knack of making things understandable to one who is not as learned as he. I shall endeavor to make the whole thing as clear to you as he made it to me.
First, you must consider in greater detail the method I use in going to Mars. There are limitations in time, for one thing. Mars must be almost directly overhead, and it must be about midnight. To use modern parlance, my “window” is small.
At such times, Mars is about 1.31 x 106karads [4.88 x 107 miles] from Earth.
I call your attention to my description of what happens when I gaze up at the planet of the War God. I must focus my attention upon it strongly. Then I must bring to the fore an emotion which I can best describe as yearning. A moment’s spark of cold and dark, and I find myself on Mars.
There is no doubt in my mind that I actually travel through that awful stretch of interplanetary void. II is not instantaneous; it definitely requires a finite time.
And yet, for all that I travel through nearly fifty million miles of hard vacuum naked, or nearly so, I suffer no effects of explosive decompression, no lack of breath, no popping of the eardrums, no nosebleed, no “hangover” eyeballs.
Obviously, then, I am exposed to those extreme conditions for so short a time that my body does not have the time to react to them!
Consider, also, that the distance is such that light requires some 296 tals [262 seconds] to make the trip. Had I been in the void that long, I would surely have been dead on arrival. Quite obviously, then, when I make such trips, I am traveling faster than light!
There is, unfortunately, no way of telling how much faster, for I have no way of timing it, but Menz Klausa is of the opinion that it is many multiples of that velocity.
Now we must consider what is known to Earth science as the “time dilation factor.” I must translate from Martian symbols. but I believe it may be expressed as:
Tv = To [1-(v2/c2)]½
where Tv is time lapse at velocity v, To is the time lapse at rest, v is the velocity of the moving body, and c is the velocity of light.
The Martians, however, multiply this by another factor:
[( c-v ) / (c2-2cv+v2)½]½
Thus, the entire equation becomes:
Tv = To[1-(v2!c2)] ½. [(c-v)/(c2-2cv+v2) ½]½
As you can clearly see, as long as the velocity of the moving body remains below the velocity of light [443,778 haads per tal), the first factor is a positive number, and the second factor has a value of +1. This, I believe, is why it has never been discovered by Earth scientists; multiplying a number by +1 has no effect whatever, and is not noticeable.
When v is exactly equal to c, both factors become zero; in other words, the moving body experiences zero time. Its clock stops, so to speak.
However, when v exceeds c, the equation assumes the form:
Tv=To(xi)(i)
where i is the square root of minus one, and x is a function of v.
If the second, or Martian, factor is neglected, it is obvious that the experienced time of the moving body would become imaginary, which is unimaginable in our universe.
However:
(xi) (i)=xi2=-X
In other words, if the body is moving at greater than the velocity of light, the elapsed time becomes negative. The body is moving backwards in time!
According to the most learned savants in Helium, this is exactly what happened to me. Indeed, so great was my velocity that I traveled an estimated 50,000 years into the past!
Thus, the Mars that I am used to has, in Earth terms, been dead for fifty millenia.
This explanation seemed perfectly sound when Menz Klausa first elucidated it, but suddenly a thought occurred to me.
Why did I always go forward in time when I returned to Earth?
For surely that must be so, else I could not be here today. If that formula I quoted were true, when I returned the first time, I should have found myself a hundred thousand years in the past, in about the year 98,000 B.C. Considering the number of trips I have made, I should, by now, be somewhere back in the Miocene.
However, that, too, is explained by our Martian theorists. Another factor comes into play at ultralight velocities, that of gravitation field strength. At light velocity, this factor accounts for the gravitational red-shift of light when it is attempting to escape from a strong gravitational field, and the violet-shift when the light is falling toward the gravity source.
At velocities greater than that of light, the factor becomes +1 when the direction of travel is from a greater gravitation field force to a lesser one, and -1 when the direction is from a lesser to a greater. Thus, when I return to Earth, the negative time factor becomes positive, and I go into the “future” of Mars, which is your “present.”
I trust that is all very clear.
Unfortunately, there is no way I can translate the gravity factor into Earth’s mathematical symbolism. I can handle simple algebra, but tensor calculus is a bit much. I am a fighting man, not a scientist.
By the way, it becomes obvious from this that the Gridley Wave is an ultralight and trans-time communicator.
Another puzzle that the photos brought out was that they show no trace of the canals of Mars. And yet, Giovanni Schiaparelli saw them. Percival Lowell not only saw them, but drew fairly accurate maps of them. I can testify to that, myself. And yet they do not show on the photographs taken from a thousand miles away. Why?
The answer is simple. As you know, certain markings that are quite unnoticeable from the ground are easily seen from the air. An aerial photograph can show the San Andreas Fault in California quite clearly, even in places where it is invisible from the ground. The same is true of ancient meteor craters which have long since weathered smooth, but have nonetheless left their mark on the Earth’s surface. From an orbiting satellite, more markings become visible when there is a break in the cloud cover.
Many modern paintings must be viewed from a distance to understand the effect the artist wished to give. Viewed under a powerful magnifying glass, a newspaper photo becomes nothing but a cluster of meaningless dots. One is too close to get the proper perspective.
Thus it is w
ith the canals of Mars, long since eroded away, from your viewpoint in time. In order to see those ancient markings properly, you have to stand back forty or fifty million miles.
But what is going to happen to the Mars I love? Or, from Earth’s viewpoint, what did happen to it?
According to Menz Klausa, that is explained by one significant feature on the photos you sent.
Remember, even “today” (from the Martian viewpoint), Mars is a dying planet. Our seas have long since vanished; our atmosphere is kept breatheable only by our highly complex atmosphere plant. Martians have long since learned to face death stoically, even the death of the planet. We can face the catastrophe that will eventually overtake us.
From Earth’s viewpoint in time, it happened some forty thousand years ago. A great mountain of rock from the Asteroid Belt—or perhaps from beyond the Solar System itself—came crashing into Mars at some 24 haads per tal [10 miles per second]. So great was its momentum that it smashed through the planetary crust to the magma beneath.
The resulting explosion wrought unimaginable havoc upon the planet—superheated winds of great velocity raced around the globe; great quakes shook the very bedrock; more of the atmosphere was literally blown into space, irretrievably lost.
But it left no impact crater like those of the Moon. The magma, hot and fluid, rushed up to form the mightiest volcano in the Solar System: Mons Olympus.
And the damned thing landed directly on our atmosphere plant!
However, we won’t have to worry about that for another ten thousand years yet. Perhaps I won’t live that long.
Give my best regards to Greystoke. Your Aunt Dejah sends her love,
All my best,
Uncle Jack
REFERENCE TABLE
MARTIAN/ENGLISH AND MARTIAN/METRIC
DlSTANCE: Martian – English - Metric
Circumference: 360 karads - 13,392.6 miles - 21,551.38 km
1 karad: 100 haads - 37.20167 miles - 59.86494 km
1 haad: 200 ads - 1964.248 feet - 59,864.94 cm
1 ad: 10 sofads - 9.82129 feet - 299.3247 cm
1 sofad: [n/a] - 11.78555 inches - 29.93247 cm
TIME UNITS: Martian - Terran
1 day: 10 zodes - 24 hours, 37 minutes, 22.58 seconds
1 zode: 50 xats - 2 hours, 27 minutes, 44.26 seconds
1 xat: 200 tals - 2 minutes, 57.26 seconds
1 tal: [n/a] - .886291 seconds
VELOCITY OF LIGHT:
ENGLISH: 186,282 miles per second
METRIC: 2.99793 x 1010 centimeters per second
MARTIAN: 443,778 haads per tal
SURFACE GRAVITY OF MARS:
ENGLISH: 12.9 feet/second2
METRIC: 392 centimeters/second2
MARTIAN: 1.27 ads/tal2
PREHISTORIC NOTE
By Randall Garrett
Sprague, in his more serious moments, writes historical works. Since I don’t want to make this introduction longer than the piece itself, I will merely say that it is a touch of Robert E. Howard as by L. Sprague de Camp with a soupcon of Ferdinand Feghoot.
Of all the antedeluvian empires. perhaps the most stable and longest-lived was the Double Kingdom of Mekh-Pyget.
The two kingdoms were forcibly combined (c. 1250 BD) through the able generalship of Prince Ahlmos, eldest son of the then King of Mekh. The Prince presented the King with the crown of Pyget. thus making his father the first ruler of the Double Kingdom.
Within the year. the old King died, and his son then reigned as the first King Ahlmos. (There were fourteen of that name.) The father’s name. unfortunately, has not come down to us, for his grandson. Vekos I, hated the old man and had his name excised from the histories and effaced from all monuments.
The sixty-one kings following Vekos I. including their names and genealogies. are well documented. It is only as we approach the end of the Antedeluvian Age that another void appears.
The naval architect Zuizudras built his great vessel during the reign of King Damnir. fifteenth and last of his name. King Damnir XV died only ten months before the onset of the Great Catastrophe. leaving his only son as heir. But since this sovran had no opportunity to build monuments to himself. as was the custom. his name has not been preserved.
Nonetheless, because of this custom of monument building or a millennium and a quarter. we have a nearly complete list of he Kings of Mehk-Pyget, from Ahlmos I to Damnir the Last,
—The Annals of Unrecorded History
“REVIEWS IN VERSE”
By Randall Garrett
I started writing these things in 1951, with no notion whatever that they were publishable, except perhaps, in a fanzine. (A “fanzine,” for those of you who do not dig the slang of science fiction fans, is a “little” magazine published by a fan or fans in order to get things in print which the professional magazines (“prozines”) won’t buy. Many of them are very good. Those which are not die quickly and are called “crudzines.” Back in ‘51, most of them were mimeographed or even hectographed. Today, most are offset. With the exception of a very few, payment is in free copies of the issue in which one’s work appears. Nearly every professional author has had offbeat work appear in a fanzine.)
My inspiration for this work was a New Yorker named Newman Levy. By profession, he was a lawyer, but as a hobby he constructed light verse. (And “construct” is the word! Good light verse is an engineering problem, since, unlike “serious” poetry, it should be absolutely perfect in meter, rhyme, and sense.) During the Roaring Twenties, Newman Levy turned out dozens of them, and many were, like mine, “Reviews in Verse”—although he never used that phrase that I know of.
Levy’s Opera Guyed, published by Alfred Knopf, is almost a textbook on How To Do It. So is his Theater Guyed. Many of his works are quoted and printed today (the copyright has run out) without giving the author’s name. Do you remember “Thais”?
One time in Alexandria, in wicked Alexandria,
Where nights were wild’ with revelry, and life was but a game,
There lived, so the report is, an adventuress and courtesan,
The pride of Alexandria, and Thais was her name.
Or his takeoff on W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain,” the story of the Immor(t)al Sadie Thompson, which begins:
On the isle of Pago Pago,
Land of palm trees, rice, and sago,
Where the Chinaman and Dago
Dwell ‘mid natives dusky-hued.
Lived a dissolute and shady
Bold adventuress named Sadie;
Sadie Thompson was the lady,
And the life she lived was lewd.
And the final line is an absolute smasher!
Levy was a master of double and triple feminine rhyme, and of mosaic rhyme (“report is, an”—” courtesan”). His stuff rolls off, the tongue.
So I decided to try to do for science fiction what Newman Levy had done for opera and the theater.
One evening, at a party in New York, someone asked me to recite one of my reviews for the group. Since I am about as bashful and modest as Isaac Asimov, and for similar reasons, I acceded to the request.
There is an old one-liner: “He asked me if I like card tricks; I said no; he showed me ten.”
I think I had to be shut up with a fire extinguisher.
But sitting in that crowd was a gentleman named Robert A. W. “Doc” Lowndes, who was then editor of Original Science Fiction Stories, Future Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Quarterly.
Doc Lowndes, bless ‘im, said: “If you’ll type those up and bring them to my office, I’ll buy ‘em.”
And he did.
WARNING: IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE ORIGINAL STORY, PLEASE DON’T READ MY VERSE FIRST. GO OUT AND BUY, BEG, OR BORROW A COPY OF THE ORIGINAL WORK AND READ IT. THEN READ THE VERSE.
AFTER ALL, WHO WANTS TO KNOW THE WHOLE PLOT OF A STORY BEFORE READING IT?
ISAAC ASIMOV’S
“THE CAVES OF STEEL”
By Randall Garrett
; Many years ago, John Campbell made the flat statement that it was impossible to write a science fiction detective story. The hero can always whip out his hyperinductivizer and re-create the scene of the crime in toto, or he can get into his handy-dandy time machine and go back to watch the murder being committed, or he can read all the suspects’ minds, or...
In other words, since anything can happen in a science fiction story, the job is too easy. No suspense. And no need for a detective.
Now, every time John made a flat statement like that, at least one of his authors would try to prove him wrong. And very often succeeded. The idea was to prove John wrong and make him pay for it. It was a game we all loved.
The first to succeed at the detective story game was Hal Clement, with “Needle.” The question was: “Where is the alien hiding?” It was strictly fair; all the clues were given and the reader had a fair, honest chance of finding out where the critter was hidden before the author told him.
But...It wasn’t a formal detective story.
In the strictly formal detective story, there must be a detective, either amateur or professional, and he must solve the crime -usually murder. In “Needle” the crime is an alien one, and so is the detective. There is no murder, and the detective does not solve the puzzle. His host, a human boy, does. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a good story, but you have to stretch things pretty thin to call it a formal detective story.
However, “Needle” paved the way. You can write a formal detective story of science fiction, but first you must define your parameters! You must make it perfectly clear that the detective can not pull rabbits out of hats or superscience gadgets out of his home lab.
Takeoff! Page 25
