An Open Letter to Voyager 2 By John Updike Dear Voyager: This is to thank you for The last twelve years, and wishing you, what's more, Well in your new career in vacant space. When you next brush a star, the human race May be a layer of old sediment, A wrinkle of the primates, a misspent Youth of some zo”morphs. But you, your frail Insectoid form, will skim the sparkling vale Of the void practically forever. As The frictionless light-years and aeons pass, The frozen points that from Earth's vantage held Their mythic patterns firm will shift and melt; No wide-dish radios will strain to hear Your whispered news, nor poets call you dear. Ere then, let me assure you, you've been grand --- A little shaky at the outset, and Arthritic in the swivel-joints, antique In circuitry, virtually deaf, and weak As a refrigerator bulb, you kept Those picture postcards coming. Signals crept To Pasadena, where they were enhanced Until those planets clear as daylight danced. The stripes and swirls of Jupiter's slow boil, Its crazy moons, one cracked, one fried in oil, One glazed with ice, and one too raw to eat, Still cooking in the juice of inner heat, Arrived on our astonished monitors. Then, next, after a station break of years, Fat Saturn rode your feeble beam, and lo! --- Not corny as we feared, but art deco --- The hard-edge, Technicolor rings, as thin As cardboard, broader than Lake Michigan, And casting flashlit shadows. Planet three Was Uranus (accented solemnly By anchormen on the first syllable, Lest viewers think the "your" too personal): A glassy globe of gas upon its side, Its nine dark, close-knit rings at last descried, Its corkscrew-shaped magnetic passions bared, Its pocked attendants digitized and aired. Last loomed, against the Oort cloud, blue Neptune, Its counterrevolutionary moon, Its wispy arcs of rings and whitish streaks Of unpredicted tempests --- thermal freaks, As if an unused backyard swimming pool, Remote from stirring sunlight, dark and cool (Sub-sub-sub-freezing), by itself would splash. Displays of splendid waste, of rounded trash! Your looping miles of guided drift brought home How barren cosmic space would be to roam. One awful ball succeeds another, none Fit for a shred or breath of life. Our one Delightful, verdant orb was primed to cede The H2O and O and N we need. Your survey, in its scrupulous depiction, Purged from the solar system science fiction --- No more Uranians or Io-ites, Just Earthlings dreaming through their dewy nights. You saw where we could not, and dared to go Where we could scarcely dream; you showed A kind of metal courage, and faithfulness. Your cryptic, ciphered, graven messages Are for ourselves, designed to boomerang Back like a prayer from where the angels sang, That shining ancient blank encirclement. Your voyage now outsoars mundane intent And joins matter's blind motion. Au revoir, You rickety free-falling man-made star! Machines, like songs, belong to all. A man Aloft is Russian or American, But you aloft were simply sent by Man At large. Sincerely yours, A fan.