It was in the future days—I know time tells strange tales—that the idea first came to me. We had discovered long before how to transmit objects by dematerialising them in one place, translating them into the basic energy of their matter, and directing this energy to another place for rematerialisation. You will appreciate that this in itself had given rise to some pretty wild theories about the Resurrection of Christ. However, in working out how to apply this principle across galactic distances, we accidently discovered a way of tracking the light of past events. As you know, you see a thing when light is reflected from it to your eye. That light never dies but hurtles away, out through space, at the speed of 186,000 miles per second. Somehow, one of our team was able to draw up the formula for finding and reconvening the light of past events, and for showing us these events on the face of our computer.

To put it crudely, this involved a leap ahead of the light, by a short-cut method, encountering the light and bringing its information back, by short-cut, almost instantaneously to our computer which translated it into vision on its face. A few seconds was all the computer needed to intercept and interpret events of thousands of light-years’ distance.

Even though we could do this with light only, and not with sound, an extraordinary amount of excitement was generated, and many people used the machine to witness once more the happy events of their childhood, etc. On the whole, though, this shattered too many illusions, and it hurt and embarrassed some very nice people indeed. More caution was used.