"Where does that idea get us? I might think that their time was intrinsically variable, as well as being different from ours, if it was not for the regular alternation of night and day—of light and darkness, at least—that Peg and I saw, and which affected the whole country, as far as we could see. So that's out.
"Maybe they treated you two to a dose of suspended animation or something of the kind, since you weren't going anywhere—Nope, that idea doesn't carry the right earmarks, and besides it would have registered as such on Martin's Norlaminianly psychological brain. So that's out, too. In fact, the only thing that could deliver the goods would be a sta—but that'd be a trifle strong, even for a hyperman, I'm afraid."
"What would?" demanded Margaret. "Anything that you would call strong ought to be worth listening to."
"A stasis of time. Sounds a trifle far-fetched, of course, but—"
"But phooey!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Now you are raving, Dick!"
"I'm not so sure of that, at all," Seaton argued stubbornly. "They really understand time, I think, and I picked up a couple of pointers. It would take a sixth-order field—That's it, I'm pretty sure, and that gives me an idea. If they can do it in hypertime, why can't we do it in ours?"
"I fail to see how such a stasis could be established," argued Crane. "It seems to me that as long as matter exists time must continue, since it is quite firmly established that time depends upon matter—or rather upon the motion in space of that which we call matter."
"Sure—that's what I'm going on. Time and motion are both relative. Stop all motion—relative, not absolute motion—and what have you? You have duration without sequence or succession, which is what?"
"That would be a stasis of time, as you say," Crane conceded, after due deliberation. "How can you do it?"
"I don't know yet whether I can or not—that's another question. We already know, though, how to set up a stasis of the ether along a spherical surface, and after I have accumulated a little more data on the sixth order it should not be impossible to calculate a volume-stasis in both ether and sub-ether, far enough down to establish complete immobility and local cessation of time in gross matter so affected."