He put down the mike and stared morosely for a moment at the beautiful Eridanean scrollwood of his desktop. Wald coughed inquiringly and retrieved the aquavit.
“Excuse me, Robin,” he said, “but I should think that would work both ways.”
“So should 1. And yet the fact is that we’ve never picked up so much as a whisper from either Stevens or his agents.
I can’t think of any way that could be pulled, but evidently it can.”
“Well, let’s rethink the problem, and see what we get,”
Wald said. “I didn’t want to say so in front of the young lady, for obvious reasons1 mean Miss Lje, of course, not Margaretbut the truth is that the Dirac is essentially a simple mechanism in principle. I seriously doubt that there’s any way to transmit a message from it which can’t be detectedand an examination of the theory with that proviso in mind might give us something new.”
“What proviso?” Weinbaum said. Thor Wald left him behind rather often these days.
“Why, that a Dirac transmission doesn’t necessarily go to all communicators capable of receiving it. If that’s true, then the reasons why it is true should emerge from the theory.”
“I see. O.K., proceed on that line. I’ve been looking at Stevens’s dossier while you were talking, and it’s an absolute desert. Prior to the opening of the office in Rico City, there’s no dope whatever on J. Shelby Stevens. The man as good as rubbed my nose in the fact that he’s using a pseud when I first talked to him. I asked him what the T in his name stood for, and he said, ‘Oh, let’s make it Jerome.’ But who the man behind the pseud is …”