She held out a copy of the beautifully printed daily magazine. On the cover was the date, August V2, 504 (3002).
It was customary for terrestrials to use terrestrial dates wherever their outposts were located in the stellar system. But instead of using the terrestrial year--as shown in parenthesis on _The Sirian Daily Universe_--the year always was reckoned from the date when the planet was first visited by an expedition from the solar system. Although days were not always the same, twenty-four hour periods could be reckoned quite easily so that on some planets a single day might have more than one terrestrial date, and on others a single day would be a fraction of a legal day. The number of actual days usually was indicated by a Roman numeral preceding the Arabic figure. Thus August V2 indicated that Sirius had risen and set five times while the sun had done so twice during the month of August.
"Unbelievable!" I said. "How does it work?"
"It operates through time," Trella explained. "It takes a short cut between two parallel instants."
She took a guinea pig from a cage in the laboratory. She put the wriggling animal inside the quartz tube and strapped it firmly in the center.
She turned a switch on one of the boxes. A low hum arose from the atomic motor. Trella watched a dial located in the top of the quartz tube until an arrow pointed to a gold star. Then she pressed a button in the motor on the right side of the machine.
I noticed that the translator had controls that could be operated from inside the tube as well as from the outside.
There were two distinct gasps of the motor. Half of the guinea pig disappeared with the first gasp and the remaining half disappeared with the second.
Where the tube had been a second before, there was nothing now.
"He's on Proxima Centaur now," Trella said. "I managed to equip a laboratory there about two years ago. It was through that laboratory that Keeshwar learned of my experiments in translation. My men on Proxima will send back the guinea pig in a few minutes."
We sat down and waited. Trella explained the machine, although at the time the explanation was a little over my head. The actual translation was accomplished by the pushing of one motor and the pulling of another across an extra-dimensional space. Half of the object to be translated was hurled across space by the pushing of the first motor. The second motor, which operated automatically, began pulling the other half, including the first motor, after it as soon as it materialized at the end of the journey.