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“I understand. Professor Faress was actually performing the experiment. You told Professor Dandrik what had happened. What then?”

“Why, Your Majesty, he simply declared that the limit of accuracy had been reached, and ordered the experiment dropped. He then reported the highest reading before this anticipation effect was observed as the newly established limit of accuracy in measuring the velocity of accelerated micropositos, and said nothing whatever in his report about the anticipation effect.”

“I read a summary of the report. Why, Professor Dandrik, did you omit mentioning this slightly unusual effect?”

“Why, because the whole thing was utterly preposterous, that’s why!” Dandrik barked; and then hastily added, “Your Imperial Majesty.” He turned and glared at Faress; professors do not glare at galactic emperors. “Your Majesty, the limit of accuracy had been reached. After that, it was only to be expected that the apparatus would give erratic reports.”

“It might have been expected that the apparatus would stop registering increased velocity relative to the light-speed standard, or that it would begin registering disproportionately,” Faress said. “But, Your Majesty, I’ll submit that it was not to be expected that it would register impacts before emissions. And I’ll add this. After registering this slight apparent jump into the future, there was no proportionate increase in anticipation with further increase of acceleration. I wanted to find out why. But when Professor Dandrik saw what was happening, he became almost hysterical, and ordered the accelerator shut down as though he were afraid it would blow up in his face.”

* * * * *

“I think it has blown up in his face,” Prince Travann said quietly. “Professor, have you any theory, or supposition, or even any wild guess, as to how this anticipation effect occurs?”

“Yes, Your Highness. I suspect that the apparent anticipation is simply an observational illusion, similar to the illusion of time-reversal experienced when it was first observed, though not realized, that positrons sometimes exceeded light-speed.”

“Why, that’s what I’ve been saying all along!” Dandrik broke in. “The whole thing is an illusion, due—-“

“To having reached the limit of observational accuracy; I understand, Professor Dandrik. Go on, Professor Faress.”

“I think that beyond 16.067543333-1/3 times light-speed, the micropositos ceased to have any velocity at all, velocity being defined as rate of motion in four-dimensional space-time. I believe they moved through the three spatial dimensions without moving at all in the fourth, temporal, dimension. They made that kilometer from source to target, literally, in nothing flat. Instantaneity.”

That must have been the first time he had actually come out and said it. Dandrik jumped to his feet with a cry that was just short of being a shriek.

“He’s crazy! Your Majesty, you mustn’t … that is, well, I mean–Please, Your Majesty, don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s raving!”

“He knows perfectly well what he’s saying, and it probably scares him more than it does you. The difference is that he’s willing to face it and you aren’t.”

The difference was that Faress was a scientist and Dandrik was a science teacher. To Faress, a new door had opened, the first new door in eight hundred years. To Dandrik, it threatened invalidation of everything he had taught since the morning he had opened his first class. He could no longer say to his pupils, “You are here to learn from me.” He would have to say, more humbly, “We are here to learn from the Universe.”

It had happened so many times before, too. The comfortable and established Universe had fitted all the known facts–and then new facts had been learned that wouldn’t fit it. The third planet of the Sol system had once been the center of the Universe, and then Terra, and Sol, and even the galaxy, had been forced to abdicate centricity. The atom had been indivisible–until somebody divided it. There had been intangible substance that had permeated the Universe, because it had been necessary for the transmission of light–until it was demonstrated to be unnecessary and nonexistent. And the speed of light had been the ultimate velocity, once, and could be exceeded no more than the atom could be divided. And light-speed had been constant, regardless of distance from source, and the Universe, to explain certain observed phenomena, had been believed to be expanding simultaneously in all directions. And the things that had happened in psychology, when psi-phenomena had become too obvious to be shrugged away.