"You see, my ignorant young friend"—the scientist almost did pur as one of the recording pens swung widely across the ruled paper—"it is as I told you—the lack of exact data upon even one tiny factor of this extremely complex phenomenon is calamitous. While my notes were apparently complete and were certainly accurate, our experimental tubes did not function perfectly. The time factor was irreconcilable—completely so, in every aspect, even that of departure from and return to normal space—and it is unthinkable that time, one of the fundamental units, is or can be intrinsically variable—"
"You think so?" Kinnison broke in. "Look at that"—pointing to the ultimate of timepieces, Cardynge's own triplex chronometer. "No. 1 says that we have been in this tube for an hour, No. 2 says a little over nine minutes, and according to No. 3 we won't be starting for twenty minutes yet—it must be running backward—let's see you comb that out of your whiskers!"
"Oh-h ... ah ... a-hum." But only momentarily was Sir Austin taken aback. "Ah, I was right all the time!" he cackled gleefully. "I thought it practically impossible for me to commit an error or to overlook any possibilities, and I have now proved that I did not. Time, in this hyperspatial region or condition, is intrinsically variable, in major degree!"
"And what does that get you?" Kinnison asked, pointedly.
"Much, my impetuous youngster, much," Cardynge replied. "We observe, we note facts. From the observations and facts we theorize and we deduce; thus arriving very shortly at the true inwardness of time."
"You hope," the Lensman snorted, dubiously; and in his skepticism he was right and Sir Austin was wrong. For the actual nature and mechanism of time remained, and still constitute, a mystery, or at least an unsolved problem. The Arisians—perhaps—understand time; no other race does.
To some of the men, then, and to some of the clocks and other time-measuring devices, the time seemed—or actually was?—very long; to other and similar beings and mechanisms it seemed—or was—short. Short or long, however, the Dauntless did not reach the Boskonian end of the hyperspatial tube.
In midflight there came a crunching, twisting cloonk! and an abrupt reversal of the inexplicably horrible interdimensional acceleration—a deceleration as sickeningly disturbing, both physically and mentally, as the acceleration had been.
While within the confines of the hyperspatial tube every eye of the Dauntless had been blind. To every beam upon every frequency, visible or invisible, ether-borne or carried upon the infinitely faster waves of the sub-ether, the murk was impenetrable. Every plate showed the same mind-numbing blankness; a vague, eerily shifting, quasi-solid blanket of formless, textureless grayness. No lightness or darkness, no stars or constellations or nebulae, no friendly, deep-space blackness—nothing.