“That’s why we need something faster. For a long time our relativity theories discouraged hope of anything faster even the high-phase velocity of a guided wave didn’t contradict those theories; it just found a limited, mathematically imaginary loophole in them. But when Thor here began looking into the question of the velocity of propagation of a Dirac pulse, he found the answer. The communicator he developed does seem to act over long distances, any distance, instantaneouslyand it may wind up knocking relativity into a cocked hat.”
The girl’s face was a study in stunned realization. “I’m not sure I’ve taken in all the technical angles,” she said.
“But if I’d had any notion of the political dynamite in this thing”
“you’d have kept out of my office,” Weinbaum said grimly. “A good thing you didn’t. The Brindisi is carrying a model of the Dirac communicator out to the periphery for a final test; the ship is supposed to get in touch with me from out there at a given Earth time, which we’ve calculated very elaborately to account for the residual Lorentz and Milne transformations involved in overdrive flight, and for a lot of other time phenomena that wouldn’t mean anything at all to you.
“If that signal arrives here at the given Earth time, then aside from the havoc it will create among the theoretical physicists whom we decide to let in on itwe will really have our instant communicator, and can include all of occupied space in the same time zone. And we’ll have a terrific advantage over any lawbreaker who has to resort to ultrawave locally and to letters carried by ships over the long haul.”