I took in Edgar Rice Burroughs early in my life, washing him down with great draughts of mother’s milk.
Mother, needless to say, did not approve when she found out what sort of “trash” I was reading. For some reason I could never understand, The Wizard of Oz was good fare for children, but A Princess of Mars was not. (After I was grown up and had become a selling writer, I asked my beloved mother why she had differentiated between the two. “I was younger then,” she said, as though that explained it. Maybe it did.)
There are those who like the Tarzan series—certainly the most famous; there are those who like the Pellucidar series; and so on. Me, I love John Carter, Warlord of Mars.
Of late—like the past thirty years—there have been those who have said that the John Carter stories are not “true science fiction” because they lack scientific verisimilitude and because the latest scientific investigations have proven Burroughs wrong.
I have done my best to correct that erroneous attitude.
I am not at liberty to reveal whence I obtained the Xerox copy of this letter, nor why it was specifically sent to me rather than, say, Mr. Philip José Farmer, who would be far more qualified than I for the honor of putting it before the public. My duty, however, was clear, and with the kind co-operation of Dr. Isaac Asimov and Mr. George Scithers, it is herewith submitted for your perusal.
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 106 karads [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 with 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
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
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