Weinbaum rescued the bottle hastily. “So go on, Thor.”
“Oh.” Wald biinked. “Yes. Well, what we know now is that the geometry which applies to ultimate particles, like the positron, isn’t Euclidean at all. It’s Pythagoreana geometry of points, not lines. Once you’ve measured one of those points, and it doesn’t matter what kind of quantity you’re measuring, you’re down as far as you can go. At that point, the Universe becomes discontinuous, and no further refinement is possible.
“And I’d say that our positron-frequency measurements have already gotten that far down. There isn’t another element in the Universe denser than plutonium, yet we get the same frequency values by diffraction through plutonium crystals that we get through osmium crystalsthere’s not the slightest difference. If J. Shelby Stevens is operating in terms of fractions of those values, then he’s doing what an organist would call ‘playing in the cracks’which is certainly something you can think about doing, but something that’s in actuality impossible to do. Hoop.”
“Hoop?” Weinbaum said.
“Sorry. A hiccup only.”
“Oh. Well, maybe Stevens has rebuilt the organ?”
“If he has rebuilt the metrical frame of the Universe to accommodate a private skip-tracing firm,” Wald said firmly, “I for one see no reason why we can’t countercheck him hoopby declaring the whole cosmos null and void.”
“All right, all right,” Weinbaum said, grinning. “I didn’t mean to push your analogy right over the edge1 was just asking. But let’s get to work on it anyhow. We can’t just sit here and let Stevens get away with it. if this frequency angle turns out to be as hopeless as it seems, we’ll try something else.”