“So?”
“That’s a pun,” Galloway broke off to explain. “The things we put in the locker went into time. Their time-rate remained constant, but not the spatial relationships. Two things can’t occupy the same place at the same time. Ergo, your suitcase went into a different time. Now plus x. And what x represents I don’t know, though I suspect a few million years.”
Vanning looked dazed. “The suitcase is a million years in the future?”
“Dunno how far, but—I’d say plenty. I haven’t enough factors to finish the equation. I reasoned by induction, mostly, and the results are screwy as hell. Einstein would have loved it. My theorem shows that the universe is expanding and contracting at the same time.”
“What’s that got to do—”
“Motion is relative,” Galloway continued inexorably. “That’s a basic principle. Well, the Universe is expanding, spreading out like a gas, but its component parts are shrinking at the same time. The parts don’t actually grow, you know—not the suns and atoms. They just run away from the central point. Galloping off in all directions… where was I? Oh. Actually, the Universe, taken as a unit, is shrinking.”
“So, it’s shrinking. Where’s my suitcase?”
“I told you. In the future. Inductive reasoning showed that. It’s beautifully simple and logical. And it’s quite impossible of proof, too. A hundred, a thousand, a million years ago the Earth—the Universe—was larger than it is now. And it continues to contract. Sometime in the future the Earth will be just half as large as it is now. Only we won’t notice it because the Universe will be proportionately smaller.”
Galloway went on dreamily. “We put a workbench into the locker, so it emerged sometime in the future. The locker’s an open window into a different time, as I told you. Well, the bench was affected by the conditions of that period. It shrank, after we gave it a few seconds to soak up the entropy or something. Do I mean entropy? Allah knows. Oh, well.”
“It turned into a pyramid.”