"The human mind cannot really understand a million of anything. Yet your father, an immensely wealthy man, gave you clear title to a million credits in cash, to train you in finance in the only way that really produces results—the hard way of actual experience. You lost a lot of it at first, of course; but at last accounts you had got it all back, and some besides, in spite of all the smart guys trying to take it away from you. The fact that your brain cannot envisage a million credits has not interfered with your manipulation of that amount, has it?"
"No, but that's entirely different!" she protested.
"Not in any essential feature," he countered. "I can explain it best, perhaps, by analogy. You can't visualize, mentally, the size of North America, either, yet that fact does not bother you in the least while you are driving around on it in an automobile. What do you drive? On the ground, I mean, not in the air?"
"A De Khotinsky sporter."
"Um. Top speed a hundred and forty miles per hour, and I suppose you cruise between ninety and a hundred. We'll have to pretend that you drive a Crownover sedan, or some other big, slow jalopy, so that you will tour at about sixty and have an absolute top of ninety. Also, you have a radio. On the broadcast bands you can hear a program from three or four thousand miles away; or, on short wave, from anywhere on Tellus—"
"I can get tight-beam short-wave programs from the Moon," the girl broke in. "I've heard them lots of times."
"Yes," Kinnison assented dryly, "at such times as there didn't happen to be any interference."
"Static is pretty bad, lots of times," the heiress agreed.
"Well, change 'miles' to 'parsecs' and you've got the picture of deep-space speeds and operations," Kinnison informed her. "Our speed varies, of course, with the density of matter in space; but on the average—say one atom of substance per ten cubic centimeters in space—we tour at about sixty parsecs an hour, and full blast is about ninety. And our ultra-wave communicators, working below the level of the ether, in the subether—"