following something I could
not see. Sick inside, I turned to Albrecht and read confirmation in his
drawn, blanched face.

"Captain," he said, "I suspected that we might find something like this
when we first came out of hyperspace and the big sleep. The recorders
showed we'd exceeded light-speed in normal space-time just after the
transition. Einstein theorized that time would not pass as swiftly to
those approaching light-speed. We could safely exceed that speed in
hyperspace but should never have done so in normal space-time. Beyond
light-speed time must conversely accelerate!

"These people haven't seen _us_ yet. They certainly just observed our
landing. As we suspected, they probably do have speech and radio--but we
can't pick up either. We're seconds ahead of them in time and we can't
pick up from the past sounds of nearby origin or nearby signals radiated
at light-speed. They'll see and hear us soon, but we'll never receive an
answer from _them_! Our questions will come to them in their future but
we can never pick answers from their past!"

"Let's go, Harry," I said quickly.

"Where?" he asked. "Where can we ever go that will be an improvement
over this?" He was resigned.

"Back into space," I said. "Back to circle this system at a
near-light-speed. The computers should be able to determine how long and
how slow we'll have to fly to cancel this out. If not, we are truly and
forever lost!"

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from _Fantastic Universe_ January 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.

End of Project Gutenberg's Lost in the Future, by John Victor Peterson

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