He had never thought of his invention in terms of money before, but rather in terms of the immense boon it would be to all humanity, taking it for granted that his own compensation would be just and adequate. But now he was racking his brain for a way to turn it into money—lots of money—and quickly. He had exhausted all his own resources in building the one model he had, and the power bills were eating him up. If they were not paid by the end of the week, Titan Power would attach his laboratory and its contents, which was the same as saying Carmichael would.
Antichron—what were its chief virtues? What could he cash in on now? For he must not only save what he had, but construct other machines to introduce to the public. He sat up and looked at his model thoughtfully. It was a clumsy-looking device, a monster machine taking up the whole side of the room. Its main feature was a six-foot-square crystal window, framed by shiny steel panels studded with knobs, dials, glowing tubes, buttons and cranks. The crystal resembled an ordinary televise scanner of the type used by Etherways, except that it was thicker and double-faced. Whatever form of energy, whether heat, electricity or light, impinged on one face was immediately transmitted to the other. Where it differed from the standard models was that its two faces could be split apart when subjected to antichronic stresses, and separated by any number of millions of miles. But the same antichronic stresses also created a warp in space-time so that the interval seemed not to exist. It was a window that with the proper manipulations of its complex controls could be made to look upon any spot in the universe and receive energy impulse from it then.
That "then" was its great virtue. Long before space travel was an actuality, mathematicians had known that there was no such thing as simultaneity. Time, like space, was relative. They had had their first practical demonstration of it when they tried to use two-way television between the Earth and Moon. Radio waves took a little over a second to travel each way. A man would speak, then wait for two seconds before his answer began coming back to him. Later, that time lag became almost intolerable. From Callisto it was three quarters of an hour—you activated the machine, waited forty or so minutes for it to light up, and then you waited an equal period for the inquiring face looking at you to register understanding and begin his reply. Obviously, where an hour and a half intervened between question and answer, sprightly conversation was impossible. The antichron would cure that. With the space between warped out of existence, instantaneous response could be had.
"Why ain't I rich, huh?" repeated Kellog, sourly, and began thinking on how men got rich. Not by inventing useful things or hard work, necessarily. He thought of Carmichael's career, and Aalman's, and those of others. They had one common denominator—they were men who bought and sold, bought cheap and sold dear. And where did they find their sellers and buyers? Why, on the Stock Exchange, of course. Kellog's eyes lit up and he almost trembled with excitement as the full implications of that chance thought dawned upon him. He jumped up and called Wade to him.
"How much money have we?" he asked excitedly.
Billy Wade pulled out a wallet and squinted at its contents.
"There's about a thousand here of my own and the three thousand you gave me to keep for the power bill."
"Willing to gamble?"
Wade just grinned and handed over the money.
"Quick, now. Grab the current 'Ephemerides' and find the Earth's present position and rate of relative movement. Then look up the exact latitude and longitude of the lower tip of Manhattan Island—that's in New York."