"There are dozens, hundreds, thousands, countless hordes of them ... out there. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the stars!"
"Here comes the pitch," Pat said quietly. "A fast curve, breaking inside."
("Pat, what the deuce is he driving at?")
"He's a real estate agent."
Pat was not far off: but I am not going to quote the rest of Mr. Howard's speech. He was a good sort when we got to know him but he was dazzled by the sound of his own voice, so I'll summarize. He reminded us that the Torchship Avant-Garde had headed out to Proxima Centauri six years back. Pat and I knew about it not only from the news but because mother's brother, Uncle Steve, had put in for it—he was turned down, but for a while we enjoyed prestige just from being related to somebody on the list—I guess we gave the impression around school that Uncle Steve was certain to be chosen.
Nobody had heard from the Avant-Garde and maybe she would be back in fifteen or twenty years and maybe not. The reason we hadn't heard from her, as Mr. Howard pointed out and everybody knows, is that you don't send radio messages back from a ship light-years away and traveling just under the speed of light. Even if you assumed that a ship could carry a power plant big enough to punch radio messages across light-years (which may not be impossible in some cosmic sense but surely is impossible in terms of modem engineering)—even so, what use are messages which travel just barely faster than the ship that sends them? The Avant-Garde would be home almost as quickly as any report she could send, even by radio.
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!"
• Dr. Mabel looked upset and Mr. Howard butted in soothingly. "Nobody has been suppressing knowledge, Mr. Graham, and Dr. Abernathy is preparing an article for publication in the Physical Review. However I admit that the Foundation did ask him not to give out an advance release in order to give us time to go ahead with another project—the one you know as 'Genetics Investigations'—on a crash- priority basis. We felt we were entitled to search out and attempt to sign up potential telepathic teams before every psychological laboratory and, for that matter, every ambitious showman, tried to beat us to it. Dr. Abernathy was willing—he doesn't like premature publication."
"If it will make you feel better, Mr. Graham," Dr. Mabel said diffidently, "telepathy doesn't pay attention to the inverse-square law either. The signal strength was as strong at half a billion miles as when the paired telepaths were in adjoining rooms."
Graham sat down heavily. "I don't know whether it does or it doesn't. I'm busy rearranging everything I have ever believed."
The interruption by the Graham brothers had explained some things but had pulled us away from the purpose of the meeting, which was for Mr. Howard to sell us on signing up as spacemen. He did not have to sell me. I guess every boy wants to go out into space; Pat and I had run away from home once to enlist in the High Marines—and this was much more than just getting on the Earth-Mars-Venus run; this meant exploring the stars.