"The solar beam! It propagates at C2!"
"Oh, now look. Nothing can travel that fast!"
"Maybe this isn't something!"
"It has energy, energy has mass, mass cannot travel faster than the limiting speed of light."
"O.K. It can't do it. But unless my measurements are all haywire, the beam gets to Sol and back at C2. I can prove it."
"Yeah? How? You couldn't possibly measure an interval so small as two times sixty-seven million miles—the radius of Venus' orbit—traversed at the speed of light squared."
"No. I admit that. But, Don, I got power out of Sirius!"
"You WHAT?" yelled Channing.
"Got power out of Sirius. And unless I can't use a micro-clock, it figured out from here to Sirius and back with the bacon in just about ninety-three percent of the speed of light, squared. Seven percent is well within the experimental error, I think, since we think of Sirius as being eight-and-one-half light-years away. That's probably not too accurate as a matter of fact, but it's the figure I used. But here we are. Power from Sirius at C2. Thirty-five billion miles per second! This stuff doesn't care how many laws it breaks!"
"Hm-m-m. C2, hey? Oh, lovely. Look, Walt, let's run up and take a whirl at Wes Farrell's detector. I'm beginning to envision person-to-person service, ship-to-ship service, and possibly the first Inter-planet Network. Imagine hearing a play-by-play description of the Interplanetary Series!"