“Explain,” Thor Wald said, looking intense.
“Just as you assumed, every Dirac message that is sent is picked up by every receiver that is capable of detecting it Every receivermcluding the first one ever built, which is yours, Dr. Wald, through the hundreds of thousands of them which will exist throughout the Galaxy in the twenty-fourth century, to the untold millions which will exist in the thirtieth century, and so on. The Dirac beep is the simultaneous reception of every one of the Dirac messages which have ever been sent, or ever wilt be sent. Incidentally, the cardinal number of the total of those messages is a relatively small and of course finite number; it’s far below really large finite numbers such as the number of electrons in the universe, even when you break each and every message down into individual ‘bits’ and count those.”
“Of course,” Dr. Wald said softly. “Of course! But, Miss Lje … how do you tune for an individual message? We tried fractional positron frequencies, and got nowhere.”
“I didn’t even know fractional positron frequencies existed,”
Dana confessed. “No, it’s simpleso simple that a lucky layman like me could arrive at it. You tune individual messages out of the beep by time lag, nothing more. All the messages arrive at the same instant, in the smallest fraction of time that exists, something called a ‘chronon.’ “
“Yes,” Wald said. “The time it takes one electron to move from one quantum-level to another. That’s the Pythagorean point of time measurement.”