  We argue that ``effective'' superluminal travel, potentially caused by the
tipping over of light cones in Einstein gravity, is always associated with
violations of the null energy condition (NEC). This is most easily seen by
working perturbatively around Minkowski spacetime, where we use linearized
Einstein gravity to show that the NEC forces the light cones to contract
(narrow). Given the NEC, the Shapiro time delay in any weak gravitational field
is always a delay relative to the Minkowski background, and never an advance.
Furthermore, any object travelling within the lightcones of the weak
gravitational field is similarly delayed with respect to the minimum traversal
time possible in the background Minkowski geometry.
