Some fuzzbrain asked about messenger rockets. Mr. Howard looked pained and tried to answer and I didn’t listen. If radio isn’t fast enough, how can a messenger rocket be faster? I’ll bet Dr. Einstein spun in his grave.
Mr. Howard hurried on before there were any more silly interruptions. The Long Range Foundation proposed to send out a dozen more starships in all directions to explore Sol-type solar systems for Earth-type planets, planets for coloniza tion. The ships might be gone a long time, for each one would explore more than one solar system.
“And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where you are indispensable to this great project for living room-for you will be the means whereby the captains of those ships report back what they have found!”
Even Pat kept quiet.
Presently a man stood up in the back of the room. He was one of the oldest twins among us; he and his brother were about thirty-five. “Excuse me, Mr. Howard, but may I ask a question?”
. “Surely.”
“I am Gregory Graham; this is my brother Grant Graham. We’re physicists. Now we don’t claim to be expert in cosmic phenomena but we do know something about communication theory. Granting for the sake of argument that telepathy would work over interstellar distances-I don’t think so but I’ve no proof that it wouldn’t-even granting that, I can’t see where it helps. Telepathy, light, radio waves, even gravity, are all limited to the speed of light. That is in the very nature of the physical universe, an ultimate limit for all communication. Any other view falls into the ancient philosophical contradiction of action-at-a-distance. It is just possible that you might use telepathy to report findings and let the ship go on to new explorations-but the message would still take light-years to come back. Communication back and forth between a starship and Earth, even by telepathy, is utterly impossible, contrary to the known laws of physics.” He looked apologetic and sat down.
I thought Graham had him on the hip. Pat and I got good marks in physics and what Graham had said was the straight word, right out of the book. But Howard did not seem bothered. “I’ll let an expert answer. Dr. Lichtenstein? If you please-”
Dr. Mabel stood up and blushed and giggled and looked flustered and said, “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Graham, I really am, but telepathy isn’t like that at all.” She giggled again and said, “I shouldn’t be saying this, since you are telepathic and I’m not, but telepathy doesn’t pay the least bit of attention to the speed of light.”
“But it has to. The laws of physics-”
“Oh, dear! Have we given you the impression that telepathy is physical?” She twisted her hands. “It probably isn’t.”
“Everything is physical. I include ‘physiological,’ of course.”
“It is? You do? Oh, I wish I could be sure … but physics has always been much too deep for me. But I don’t know how you can be sure that telepathy is physical; we haven’t been able to make it register on any instrument. Dear me, we don’t even know how consciousness hooks into matter. Is consciousness physical? I’m sure I don’t know. But we do know that telepathy is faster than light because we measured it.”
Pat sat up with a jerk, “Stick around, kid. I think we’ll stay for the second show.”
Graham looked stunned. Dr. Mabel said hastily, “I didn’t do it; it was Dr; Abernathy.”
“Horatio Abernathy?” demanded Graham.
“Yes, that’s his first name, though I never dared call him by it. He’s rather important.”
“Just the Nobel prize,” Graham said grimly, “in field theory. Go on. What did he find?”
“Well, we sent this one twin out to Ganymede-such an awfully long way. Then we used simultaneous radio-telephony and telepathy messages, with the twin on Ganymede talking by radio while he was talking directly-telepathically, I mean-to his twin back in Buenos Aires. The telepathic message always beat the radio message by about forty minutes. That would be right, wouldn’t it? You can see the exact figures in my office.”
Graham managed to close his month. “When did this happen? Why hasn’t it been published? Who has been keeping it secret? It’s the most important thing since the Michelson-Morley experiment-it’s terrible!”