“End of run,” Babcock announced. The ticking stopped and I rubbed my ears.
“Dr. Babcock?”
“ “Huh?”
“How can you tell one tick from another?”
“Eh? You can’t. But O’Toole can, he’s got it all down on film. Same at the other end. Don’t worry about it; just try to stay in time.”
This silliness continued for more than an hour, sometimes with Pat sending, sometimes myself. At last O’Toole looked up and said, “Fatigue factor is cooking our goose, Doc. The second differences are running all over the lot.”
“Okay, that’s all,” Babcock announced. He turned to me.
“You can thank your brother for me and sign off.”
Commander Frick and Anna left. I hung around. Presently Dr. Babcock looked up from his desk and said, “You can go, bub. Thanks.”
“Uh, Dr. Babcock?”
“Huh? Speak up.”
“Would you mind telling me what this is all about?”
He looked surprised, then said, “Sorry. I’m not used to using people instead of instruments; I forget. Okay, sit down. This is why you m-r people were brought along: for research into the nature of time.”
I stared. “Sir? I thought we were along to report back on the planets we expect to find.”
“Oh, that- Well, I suppose so, but this is much more important. There are too many people as it is; why encourage new colonies? A mathematician could solve the population problem in jig time-just shoot every other one.”
Mr. O’Toole said, without looking up, “The thing I like about you, Chief, is your big warm heart.”
“Quiet in the gallery, please. Now today, son, we have been trying to find out what time it is.”
I must have looked as puzzled as I felt for he went on, “Oh, we know what time it is … but too many different ways. See that?” He pointed at the display scope, still tirelessly making a peak every second. “That’s the Greenwich time tick, pulled in by radio and corrected for relative speed and change of speed. Then there is the time you were hearing over the earphones; that is the time the ship runs by. Then there is the time you were getting from your brother and passing to us. We’re trying to compare them all, but the trouble is that we have to have people in the circuit and, while a tenth of a second is a short time for the human nervous system, a microsecond is a measurably long time in physics. Any radar system splits up a microsecond as easily as you slice a pound of butter. So we use a lot of runs to try to even out our ignorance.”
“Yes, but what do you expect to find out?”
“If I ‘expected,’ I wouldn’t be doing it. But you might say that we are trying to find out what the word “simultaneous” means.”
Mr. O’Toole looked up from the console. “If it means anything,” he amended.
Dr. Babcock glanced at him. “You still here? ‘If it means anything.’ Son, ever since the great Doctor Einstein, ‘simultaneous’ and ‘simultaneity’ have been dirty words to physicists. We chucked the very concept, denied that it had meaning, and built up a glorious structure of theoretical physics without it. Then you mind readers came along and kicked it over. Oh, don’t look guilty; every house needs a housecleaning now and then. If you folks had done your carnival stunt at just the speed of light, we would have assigned you a place in the files and forgotten you. But you rudely insisted on doing it at something enormously greater than the speed of light, which made you as welcome as a pig at a wedding. You’ve split us physicists into two schools, those who want to class you as a purely psychological phenomenon and no business of physics-these are the ‘close your eyes and it will go away’ boys-and a second school which realizes that since measurements can be made of whatever this is you do, it is therefore the business of physics to measure and include it … since physics is, above all, the trade of measuring things and assigning definite numerical values to them.”
O’Toole said, “Don’t wax philosophical, Chief.”