He paused for emphasis. “Or into the past!”

An eager interest flashed in the Astrarch’s eyes. Brek felt confidence returning. His breathless voice grew smoother.

“Remember, the principle is totally new. The achronic field can be made a thousand times more sensitive than any telescope — I believe, a million times! And the achronic beam eliminates the time lag of all electromagnetic methods of observation. Timeless, paradoxically it facilitates the exploration of time.”

“Exploration?” questioned the dictator. “Aren’t you speaking rather wildly, Veronar?”

“Any range finder, in a sense, explores time,” Brek assured him urgently. “It analyzes the past to predict the future — so that a shell fired from a moving ship and deflected by the gravitational fields of space may move thousands of miles to meet another moving ship, minutes in the future.

“Instruments depending on visual observation and electromagnetic transmission of data were not very successful. One hit in a thousand used to be good gunnery. But the autosight has solved the problem — now you reprimand gunners for failing to score two hits in a hundred.”

Brek caught his breath. “Even the newest autosight is just a rough beginning. Good enough, for a range finder. But the detector fields can be made infinitely more sensitive, the geodesic integration infinitely more certain.