"He says If. You couldn't live without Time. You must have Time to do things in or where would you be? You'd have to swallow all the meals of your life at one mouthful and you'd bust. What comes next?"
"Another man says," Mollie read impressively, "that any schoolboy—any schoolboy," she repeated, fixing a stern eye upon her brother, "can see that, if the velocity of light has a given value with reference to the fixed stars, it cannot have the same value with reference to its source when this is moved relatively to the stars."
"Gee-whiz!" said Dick. "Next, please."
"A man says that perhaps things measured north and south are different from things measured east and west. We travelled north and south. Perhaps we stretched back in Time all of a sudden, like elastic."
"Couldn't be done. Elastic stretches both ways. If you tried to move north and south both at the same time you'd go off like a Christmas cracker. Next."
"A man says that our ideas of space and time may be all wrong."
"Aunt Polly will agree with him if we stand here much longer," said
Dick. "Next. Hurry up."
"You don't stop to think," Mollie said impatiently. "Try and think. Your head might just as well be a football. What I think is that if two un-understandable things are discovered about the same time they must belong to each other. Don't you see that?"
"They might," Dick said cautiously, "and then again they mightn't. I don't think myself that there's any use trying to understand things like Time-travelling and Relativity. People like us never will."
"I don't know that," said Jerry, who had been listening to the discussion in silence.