I PAUSE HERE IN my records of Project Pharos (which is proceeding to my complete satisfaction, though I have not yet received replies to one-tenth of the invitations I have sent to prominent members of the astronomical community to witness the greatest event of this, or, dare I say? any other age: the establishment of communications with a race from another world) to comment upon a lesser matter, of a personal nature, which is causing me not inconsiderable distraction. I refer, of course, to the increasingly irrational behaviour of my daughter Emily. Since her return from Dublin she has floated around Craigdarragh as if in a daydream, paying only the scantest attention to her father and his epochal work, her head filled rather with fantastic notions about faeries and mythological creatures haunting Bridestone Wood. I can not comprehend, much less tolerate, my daughter’s absolute insistence upon the objective truth of these fantastical notions. And as if this were not enough, she has now intimated to me that she wishes to borrow one of my portable cameras with which I am charting the progress of the Altairii vessel to take a series of photographs of these “faery folk” at play in the woods around the demesne. Is she doing this out of spite for me and my rational, scientific philosophy of life in a pique of adolescent rebellion? We had the most fearful row, Emily insisting that she was not a little girl any longer, that she was a woman and that I treat her accordingly; I arguing with gentle persuasiveness and calm rationality that to be treated like a woman, she cannot revel in childish hysteria. Alas, nothing was resolved, and I fear that, as in every other decision regarding our daughter, Caroline will refuse to support me and side with Emily.
But that I had more time to spend with Emily! Maybe then she would not have wandered heedless into these realms of fantasy and whimsy! I fear I have not of late been a proper father to her, but the advent of the star folk of necessity turns all our human relationships on their heads.
Finally, the electrical fluctuations that bedevilled the house at Easter have resumed and are more frequent and of longer duration. I shall have to have words with Mr. Michael Barry of the Sligo, Leitrim, Fermanagh, and South Donegal Electrical Supply Company, and with his dour employee, Mr. MacAteer. The disruptions to my work at this advanced stage of the experiment are bad enough. What is intolerable is that the electrical supply for the pontoon lanterns should be unreliable, and fail at the most inopportune moments!
Finally, and I mean quite finally, as in the proverbial dromedary’s straw, for several weeks the tenant farmers have been complaining of attacks on their poultry runs—as if I were somehow responsible for their domestic security. Well, what do I discover this morning but that the same damn vermin has broken into the Craigdarragh pens, and in an act of sheer, wanton destruction, ripped the heads off five birds. As if my burden were not heavy enough. Alas, I have not the time for a detailed investigation of the distractions; the demands of the Altairii are paramount.