 What is the meaning of the lag between Herell’s radio and the Jodrell Bank?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963. Whatever it was, he had no business in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections—not that there were any, ever; but the reason there were none was that the check-sightings were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the locking mechanism visually. There simply was no way for him to get from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle on Starship Jodrell Bank to this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct a logical explanation for that with no trouble—maybe a subspace meteorite striking the Jodrell Bank , an explosion, himself knocked out, brought here in a suit ... Areas in it had the appearance of gratings; from them issued the pungent, distasteful halogen odor. Item, a short time ago—subjectively it seemed to be minutes—he had been aboard the Jodrell Bank with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee. "This is Herrell McCray," he said, "calling the Jodrell Bank ." "This is Herrell McCray, calling Jodrell Bank . This was ultrawave radio, something more than a million times faster than light, with a range measured, at least, in hundreds of light-years. Someone was watching Herrell McCray, with the clinical fascination of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new antibiotic—and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked, sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that may contain food. Indeed, they worked as well a yard or a quarter-mile away as they did when, rarely, they rested in the crevices they had been formed from in his "skin." At greater distances they worked less well, for reasons irrelevant to the Law of Inverse Squares. Hatcher's principal task at this moment was to run the "probe team" which had McCray under observation, and he was more than a little excited.
 Because the radio transmits faster than the speed of light, the lag indicates Herrell is nearly 500 light years away from his ship.
 Because the radio transmits faster than the speed of light, the lag indicates Herrell is nearly 400 lightyears away from his ship.  Because the radio transmits faster than the speed of light, the lag indicates Herrell is too far from his ship to ever be rescued.  Because the radio transmits faster than the speed of light, the lag indicates Herrell is nearly 500 light years away from his ship.  Because the radio transmits only a bit slower than the speed of light, the lag indicates Herrell is only 500 light years away from his ship.