"Of course not. I can detect a match flame at fifteen feet."
"You ought to go to Duke University sometime and have Rhine take a look at you."
"I did. All he said was 'Hmm,' and I joined the other statistics."
There was silence for a while, interrupted at one point by a muffled "Damn!" from Phil peering into the electron microscope, and the warm sun lay across Katherine's lap. Finally he straightened up and switched off the current. "Well, it's there, all right," he said, and got up and went to the couch and sat at her feet.
"What is?"
"The red shift."
"Aren't you confusing things?" she said. "You're not in the observatory now, Buster; this is the lab. I thought the red shift was the recession of the distant galaxies ... whatever 'red' is."
"Quite right, Holmes. However, in this case, it's the recession of the not-so-distant atoms. They are small-sized solar systems, too, in a way, and when I say 'red' I mean something I can only infer mathematically, because I'm not dealing with light in the ordinary sense."
"You mean they're receding?"
"Only in this context," he said. "Motion is length over time; in this case, it's length over hyper-time, so they're still here in the lab."