"Something funny about this equation. The shift of the spectrum lines can't be accounted for by distortion through space alone."
With wrinkled brow, he stared for many minutes at the bit of paper he held in the white circle of light. Suddenly he seized a pencil and figured rapidly.
"I have it! The light was bent through time! I should have recognized these space-time coordinates."
He calculated again.
"Yes. The scene we saw in that circle of light was distant from us not only in space but in time. The Valhalla probably hasn't sunk yet at all. We were looking into the future!"
"But how can that be? Seeing things before they happen!"
I have the profoundest respect for Charlie King's mathematical genius. But when he said that I was frankly incredulous.
"Space and time are only relative terms. Our material universe is merely the intersection of tangled world lines of geodesics in a four-dimensional continuum. Space and time have no meaning independently of each other. Jeans says. 'A terrestrial astronomer may reckon that the outburst on Nova Persei occurred a century before the great fire of London, but an astronomer on the Nova may reckon with equal accuracy that the great fire occurred a century before the outburst on the Nova.' The field of this meteorite deflected light waves so that we saw them earlier, according to our conventional ideas of time, than they originated. We saw several hours into the future.
"And the amplified field of the magnet, though strong enough to move Virginia through space, was not sufficiently powerful to draw her back to us across time. Yet she must have felt the pull. Some dreadful thing may have happened. The problem is rather complicated."