“No.” She wanted to say more. To a stranger in a train, perhaps she would have done; here, she could not deliver.
Seeing nothing more was to be said on that subject, Mrs.
Westermark said, “I was going to tell you, Janet, that I thought perhaps it would be better if the children didn’t come back here while things are as they are. If you want to go and see them and stay with them at your parents’ house, I can look after Jack and Mr. Stackpole for a week. I don’t think Jack wants to see them.”
“That’s very kind, Mother. I’ll see. I promised Clemwell, I told Mr. Stackpole that perhaps I’d go and watch him play cricket tomorrow afternoon. It’s not important, of course, but I did sayanyhow, I might drive over and see the children on Monday, if you could hold the fort.”
“You’ve still plenty of time if you feel like going today. I’m sure Mr. Stackpole will understand your maternal feelings.”
“I’d prefer to leave it till Monday,” Janet saida little distantly, for she suspected now the motive behind, her mother-in-law’s suggestion.
Where the Scientific American did not reach Jack Westermark put down the Scientific American and stared at the table top. With his right hand, he felt the beat of his heart. In the magazine was an article about him, illus-trated with photographs of him taken at the Research Hospital. This thoughtful article was far removed from the sensa-tional pieces that had appeared elsewhere, the shallow things that referred to him as The Man That Has Done More Than Einstein To Wreck Our Cosmic Picture; and for that very reason it was the more startling, and presented some aspects of the matter that Westermark himself had not considered.
As he thought over its conclusions, he rested from the effort of reading terrestrial books, and Stackpole sat by the fire, smoking a cigar and waiting to take Westermark’s dicta-tion. Even reading a magazine represented a feat in space-time, a collaboration, a conspiracy. Stackpole turned the pages at timed intervals, Westermark read when they lay flat.
He was unable to turn them when, in their own narrow continuum, they were not being turned; to his fingers, they lay under the jelly-like glaze, that visual hallucination that represented an unconquerable cosmic inertia.
The inertia gave a special shine to the surface of the table as he stared into it and probed into his own mind to determine the truths of the Scientific American article.
The writer of the article began by considering the facts and observing that they tended to point towards the existence of local times’ throughout the universe; and that if this were so, a new explanation might be forthcoming for the recession of the galaxies and different estimates arrived at for the age of the universe (and of course for its complexity). He then proceeded to deal with the problem that vexed other writers on the subject; namely, why, if Westermark lost Earth time on Mars, he had not reciprocally lost Mars time back on Earth. This, more than anything, pointed to the fact that local times’ were not purely mechanistic but to some extent at least a psycho-biological function.
In the table top, Westermark saw himself being asked to travel again to Mars, to take part in a second expedition to those continents of russet sand where the fabric of space-time was in some mysterious and insuperable fashion 3.3077 minutes ahead of Earth norm. Would his interior clock leap forward again? What then of the sheen on things earthly?
And what would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleisto-cene infancy, humankind had lived?
Impatiently he thrust his mind forward to imagine the day when Earth harboured many local times, gleaned from voyages across the vacancies of space; those vacancies lay across time, too, and that little-understood concept (McTag-gart had denied its external reality, hadn’t he?) would come to lie within the grasp of man’s understanding. Wasn’t that the ultimate secret, to be able to understand the flux in which existence is staged, as a dream is staged in the primitive reaches of the mind?