"You dare not hurt me," said Urushkidan with a smug expression, "or you will neber get away."
He went over to the desk and began investigating the drawers again. "Where do tey keep teir tobacco? I cannot work witout my pipe."
"Jovians," said Ray glumly, "don't smoke. They consider it a degenerate habit."
"What?" The Martian's howl rattled the coffeepot on the hotplate. "No tobacco?"
"Only your own supply, back in Ganymede City, and I daresay the Jovians have confiscated and destroyed it by now. That puts the nearest cigar store somewhere in the Asteroid Belt."
"Oh, no! Te new cosmology ruined by tobacco shortage." Urushkidan stood thinking a moment, then came to a sudden decision. "Tere is no help for it. If te nearest tobacco is millions of miles away we must build te faster-tan-light engine at once."
Ray made no attempt to follow the Martian's long-winded equations in detail. What he was interested in was making use of them, and he proceeded with slashing approximations that brought screams of almost physical agony from Urushkidan.
Essentially, though, he recognized that the scientist's achievement lay in making what seemed to be a final correlation of relativity and wave mechanics, something which even the Goldfarb-Olson formulas had not fully reached.
Relativity deals with solid bodies moving at definite velocities which cannot exceed that of light, but in wave mechanics the particle becomes a weird and shadowy psi function and is only probably where it is. In the latter theory, point-to-point transitions are not velocities but shifts in the node of a complex wave. It turned out that the electronic wave velocity—which, unlike the group velocity, is not limited by the speed of light—could be imparted to matter under the right conditions, so that the most probable position of the electron went from point to point at a bewildering rate. The trick was to create the right conditions.