He paused. She thought. It is now about 11.03 by my watch, and there is so much I long to say. But it’s 11.06 and a bit by his time, and he already knows I can’t say anything. It’s such an effort of endurance, talking across this three and a bit minutes; we might just as well be talking across an interstellar distance.’
Evidently he too had lost the thread of the exercise, for he smiled and stretched out a hand, holding it in the air. Janet looked round. Clem Stackpole was coming out towards them with a tray full of drinks. He set it carefully down on the lawn, and picked up a martini, the stem of which he slipped between Jack’s fingers.
“Cheers!” he said, smiling, and, “Here’s your tipple,” giving Janet her gin and tonic. He had brought himself a bottle of pale ale.
“Can you make my position clearer to Janet, Clem? She does not seem to understand it yet.”
Angrily, she turned to the behaviourist. “This was meant to be a private talk, Mr. Stackpole, between my husband and myself.”
“Sorry you’re not getting on too well, then. Perhaps I can help sort you out a bit. It is difficult, I know.”
3.3077
Powerfully, he wrenched the top off the beer bottle and poured the liquid into the glass. Sipping, he said, “We have always been used to the idea that everything moves forward in time at the same rate. We speak of the course of time, presuming it only has one rate of flow. We’ve assumed, too, that anything living on another planet in any other part of our universe might have the same rate of flow. In other words, although we’ve long been accustomed to some oddities of time, thanks to relativity theories, we have accustomed ourselves, perhaps, to certain errors of thinking. Now we’re going to have to think differently. You follow me.”
“Perfectly.”
“The universe is by no means the simple box our predeces-sors’ imagined. It may be that each planet is encased in its own time field, just as it is in its own gravitational field. From the evidence, it seems that Mars’s time field is 3.3077 minutes ahead of ours on Earth. We deduce this from the fact that your husband and the eight other men with him on Mars experienced no sensation of temporal difference among them-selves, and were unaware that anything was untoward until they were away from Mars and attempted to get into communication again with Earth, when the temporal discrepancy at once showed up. Your husband is still living in Mars time.
Unfortunately, the other members of the crew did not survive the crash; but we can be sure that if they did, they too would suffer from the same effect. That’s clear, isn’t it?”
“Entirely. But I still cannot see why this effect, if it is as you say’”
“It’s not what / say, Janet, but the conclusion arrived at by much cleverer men than 1.” He smiled as he-said that, adding parenthetically, “Not that we don’t develop and even alter our conclusions every day.”
“Then why was a similar effect not noticed when the Russians and Americans returned from the moon?”
“We don’t know. There’s so much we don’t know. We surmise that because the moon is a satellite of Earth’s, and thus within its gravitational field, there is no temporal discrepancy. But until we have more data, until we can explore further, we know so little, and can only speculate so much.
It’s like trying to estimate the runs of an entire innings when only one over has been bowled. After the expedition gets back from Venus, we shall be in a much better position to start theorising.”
“What expedition to Venus?” she asked, shocked.
“It may not leave for a year yet, but they’re speeding up the programme. That will bring us really invaluable data.”
Future time with its uses and abuses She started to say, “But after this surely they won’t be fool enough” Then she stopped. She knew they would be fool enough. She thought of Peter saying, “I’m going to be a spaceman too. I want to be the first man on Saturn!”