But at last a thing was announced that switched the endeavor of the scientists to a new line. The impossible was done. Einstein had said that it was impossible to signal faster than light. But it had at last been done. A scientist had signaled the seventy-five million miles from Earth to Venus in so short a time that the carefully prepared cathode ray oscillograph could not detect it. The signal was sent by radio and by the new method exactly simultaneously, and when they reached the station on Venus, the difference in time was just long enough for the radio to make the trip. It was a modification of something that we know in our day, a modification possible only to these descendants of ten billion years of science. Phase velocity we know. When X-Rays pass through certain materials, the index of refraction is less than one, and this can only be true if the velocity in those materials is greater than the velocity of light. The true velocity of the rays is not, but there is a second velocity, the phase velocity, that under those circumstances is greater than the velocity of light.
Phase velocity is due to a wave traveling along the wave chain. A man can go faster than the train he is riding on by walking toward the engine, but practically speaking he cannot reach the station before the train. Similarly, the phase velocity cannot reach the station before the light or X-Rays do. But for countless ages the light has poured forth from the sun, and a message sent down that long train would be able to go many, many trillions of miles at a speed far greater than that of light. That was the new hope of life. For man must escape from the dying sun or perish with it. And now the experiments were pushed forward with new hope.
Then a brilliant young physicist, scarcely through the seventy-year course in one of the great technical institutes, devised a new machine that brought the idea considerably closer to complete success. Television had been invented many years ago and constantly improved. Long since had they gotten away from the scanning apparatus, and the principle was well nigh forgotten, but in some dusty, neglected volume Morus Tol discovered the diagrams. And, with a simple arrangement of known machines, he made a wonderful mechanism that had been worked on for many, many ages. He made a scanning machine that worked in the fourth dimension, thereby being enabled to scan all the other three simultaneously. His first experiments led to amazing images, which, thrown on a fourth dimensional screen, could be seen to pick up solid bodies. The work of lifting them was done by the motor driving the fourth dimensional projector. The drag of the body's weight tended to throw the image out of adjustment, but by making a very powerful motor, they could show the image of a man lifting thousands of pounds! The images were absolutely solid. The man did no work.
And then came new developments. The experiments were safer now. Wherever danger was incurred, the scientist merely made his image do the actual experiment! But Morus Tol still led the field. It was he who finally developed the apparatus that could project the images and have them come into three dimensions, being without the aid of a projector at the receiving end. Already the machines had been used in connection with the phase-velocity signaling system.
It was while he was working on the development of his apparatus that the fatal accident occurred and killed him. Luckily he had kept a careful record of all his experiments, and men were able to duplicate them with the aid of the remnants of his apparatus. He had been working on the actual making of the images; he wanted to be able to keep them real without the machine; in other words, he wanted to give them actual existence; he wanted to reconstruct, atom for atom, the object under his fourth dimensional scanner.
He had been trying to find some ray that would respond to the individual characteristics of the atoms under consideration. He had found it, but finding it he had met his death. The ray had attacked him somehow. It does not seem likely that he experimented on himself without trying it on some inanimate body first. But perhaps he did. At any rate, it did what he hoped, it scanned him, and recognized each individual atom, and each separate molecule, and as far as it went, it was successful. But in scanning him the ray released all the energy in the atoms of his body. He was killed instantly and most of his apparatus was utterly ruined. However, enough was saved to make a beginning possible for the others. And on this basis they built.
As the ray scanned and recognized an atom it drew out its energy, to leave it free. This had fused the apparatus, stopped the ray, and killed the scientist. Knowing the danger, others experimented. By draining the energy away safely they scanned a small object, and sent the signals to another station where, by feeding the necessary energy into the machine, they were able to reconstruct it. The first step had been taken.
But it required many years to develop this apparatus. Now came the greatest problem of all. They must find some means to send the material image to a predestined terminal without having a station there to receive it. This could be done with a three-dimensional shadow image. Could they do it with the solid bodies?
The ten thousand years had dwindled steadily—five thousand had passed before the development of the fourth dimensional scanning. Morus Tol was still a young man when he was killed, but with four thousand two hundred years yet to go, they met their hardest problem, and they were without a genius to solve it.