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 shru