“George,” said Maisie, “please shut up. I want to hear this.”
“Space,” said Pete, “is also finite.” He poured himself another drink. “You go far enough in any direction and get back where you started. Like an ant crawling around an apple.”
“Make it an orange,” George said.
“All right, an orange. Now suppose the first radio waves ever sent out have just made the round trip. In seventy-six years.”
“Seventy-six years? But I thought radio waves traveled at the same speed as light. If that’s right, then in seventy-six years they could go only seventy-six light-years, and that can’t be around the universe because there are galaxies known to be millions or maybe billions of light-years away. I don’t remember the figures, Pete, but our own galaxy alone is a hell of a lot bigger than seventy-six light-years.”
Pete Mulvaney sighed. “That’s why I say space must be warped. There’s a short cut somewhere.”
“That short a short cut? Couldn’t be.”
“But George, listen to that stuff that’s coming in. Can you read code?”
“Not any more. Not that fast, anyway.”
“Well, I can,” Pete said. “That’s early American ham. Lingo and all. That’s the kind of stuff the air was full of before regular broadcasting. It’s the lingo, the abbreviations, the barnyard to attic chitchat of amateurs with keys, with Marconi coherers or Fessenden barreters—and you can listen for a violin solo pretty soon now. I’ll tell you what it’ll be.”