“Is it possible that he’s using his own initials?”
“No,” Weinbaum said. “Only the dumbest ever do that, or transpose syllables, or retain any connection at all with their real names. Those are the people who are in serious emotional trouble, people who drive themselves into anonymity, but leave clues strewn all around the landscape those clues are really a cry for help, for discovery. Of course we’re working on that anglewe can’t neglect anything but J. Shelby Stevens isn’t that kind of case, I’m sure.”
Weinbaum stood up abruptly. “O.K., Thorwhat’s first on your technical program?”
“Well … I suppose we’ll have to start with checking the frequencies we use. We’re going on Dirac’s assumption and it works very well, and always hasthat a positron in motion through a crystal lattice is accompanied by de Broglie waves which are transforms of the waves of an electron in motion somewhere else in the Universe. Thus if we control the frequency and path of the positron, we control the placement of the electronwe cause it to appear, so to speak, in the circuits of a communicator somewhere else. After that, reception is just a matter of amplifying the bursts and reading the signal.”
Wald scowled and shook his blond head. “If Stevens is getting out messages which we don’t pick up, my first assumption would be that he’s worked out a fine-tuning circuit that’s more delicate than ours, and is more or less sneaking his messages under ours. The only way that could be done, as far as I can see at the moment, is by something really fantastic in the way of exact frequency control of his positron gun. If so, the logical step for us is to go back to the beginning of our tests and rerun our diffractions to see if we can refine our measurements of positron frequencies.”