ten light years per
double-second. Make it ten thousand times as long, and we are traveling
fifty thousand light years per ten-thousand-seconds. This is the
principle--but there is a drawback. We might increase the velocity by
slowing time passage, that is, if it takes me a year for one heartbeat,
two years to raise my arm thus, and six months to turn, my head, if all
my body processes are slowed down in this way, I will be able to live a
tremendous length of time, and though it takes me two hundred years to
go from one star to another, so low is my time rate that the two hundred
years will seem but a few minutes. I can then make a trip to a distant
star--one five light years distant, let us say, in three minutes to me.
I then will say, looking at my chronometer (which has been similarly
slowed) 'I have gone five light years in three minutes, or five thirds
light years per minute. I have exceeded the speed of light.'

"But people back on Earth would say, he has taken two hundred years to
go five light years, therefore he has gone at a speed one fortieth of
that of light, which would be true--for their time rate.

"But suppose I can also speed up time. That is, I can live a year in a
minute or two. Then everyone else will be exceedingly slow. The ideal
thing would be to combine these two effects, arranging that space about
your ship will have a very rapid time rate, ten thousand times that of
normal space. Then the speed of radiation through that space will be
1,860,000,000 miles per second, and a speed of 1,000,000,000 miles per
second would be possible, but still you, too, will be affected, so that
though the people back home will say you are going far faster than
light, you will say 'No, I am going only 100,000 miles per second.'

"But now imagine that your ship and surrounding space for one mile is at
a time rate 10,000 times normal, and you, in a space of one hundred feet
within your ship, are affected by a time rate 1/10,000 that, or normal,
due to a second, reversing field. The two fields will not fight, or be
mutually antagonistic; they will merely compound their effects. Result:
you will agree that you are exceeding the speed of light!

"Do you understand? That is the principle on which your ship operated.
There were two time-fields, overlapping time-fields. Remember the
terrible speed with which your ship landed, and yet there was no
appreciable jar according to the men? The answer of course was, that
their