"Luckily, I could call my shot. A straight fast ball. Not a curve. A straight—"
Jonathan blinked. He stopped, choking; eyes wide.
"Maybe," he whispered. "Maybe—"
The others grew quiet, watching. They felt his intense excitement, saw his hands quiver, and the way his lips twitched. Adatha Za clung to his arm and her eyes were pools of purple hunger.
It wasn't too fantastic—yet.
It all depended on straight lines and curves, and whether a straight line can ever be curved. The shortest distance between two points. If the straight line could be moved to turn, then he was wrong.
But if he were right! If this type of straightness could not curve, then it might conceivably eat its way through a universe which was based on something that should curve: light.
Dr. Wooden and he had made strides in their experiments on light rays derived from calcatryte. They had explored the quantum theory, had forced homogenous light against a metal plate and seen the electrons it extracted from it. This light energy had been partially turned into the kinetic energy of the bombarded electrons of metal.
From this it had been a step upward in discovering that calcatryte yielded a photon shower of such terrific concentration that it ate right through the metal plate; had given no evidence of stopping until they had constructed the plasticite screen: pure black, coated with a fine dust of calcatryte itself.