me! I should have recognized
these space-time coordinates."

He calculated again.

"Yes. The scene we saw in that circle of light was distant from us not
only in space but in time. The _Valhalla_ probably hasn't sunk yet at
all. We were looking into the future!"

"But how can that be? Seeing things before they happen!"

I have the profoundest respect for Charlie King's mathematical genius.
But when he said that I was frankly incredulous.

"Space and time are only relative terms. Our material universe is
merely the intersection of tangled world lines of geodesics in a
four-dimensional continuum. Space and time have no meaning
independently of each other. Jeans says. 'A terrestrial astronomer may
reckon that the outburst on Nova Persei occurred a century before the
great fire of London, but an astronomer on the Nova may reckon with
equal accuracy that the great fire occurred a century before the
outburst on the Nova.' The field of this meteorite deflected light
waves so that we saw them earlier, according to our conventional
ideas of time, than they originated. We saw several hours into the
future.

"And the amplified field of the magnet, though strong enough to move
Virginia through space, was not sufficiently powerful to draw her back
to us across time. Yet she must have felt the pull. Some dreadful
thing may have happened. The problem is rather complicated."

* * * * *

He lifted his pencil again. In the glow of the little electric lantern
I saw his lean young face tense with the fierce effort of his thought.
His pencil raced across the little pad, setting down symbols that I
could make nothing of.

My own thoughts were racing. Seeing into the future was a rather
revolutionary idea to me. My mind is conservative; I have always been
sceptical of the more fantastic ideas suggested by science. But
Charlie seemed to know what he was talking about. In view of the
marvelous things he had done that night, it seemed hardly fair to
doubt him now. I decided to accept his astounding statement at face
value and to follow the adventure through.

He lifted his pencil and consulted the luminous dial of his wrist
watch.

"We saw that last scene some twelve hours and forty minutes before it
happened--to put it in conventional language. The distortion of the
time coordinates amounted to that."

In the light of dawn--for we had been all night at the meteor pit, and
silver was coming in the