"You did it, darling!" Polly released her lips long enough to say. "They're gone, every one of them! And so is the Complex."
"Huh?" Bill and I stared.
Then Bill grabbed his brother.
"You mean Mike isn't—?" he began.
"Of course not," the Professor snapped. "He never was." Then he turned to Mike.
"What capacitance were you using when you picked up the Thing's radiations?" he demanded. "What power factor? What wave form? Sine wave or flat top or sawtooth? Did you have the transportation grid shielded or were you getting a reinduction feedback?"
"Father!" Polly said sternly. "Later!"
Mike reached in his pocket and handed his fancy graphs to the Professor, who seemed to understand them at a glance.
"Oh," he said. "There's just enough similarity of wave form here so the telepathic inertia influences directed at the Cultural Emissaries would heterodyne in their receiving organs and be re-emitted exactly on a generalized human brain-wave pattern.
"And that makeshift capacitance bar you rigged just happened to sensitize the set to the Thing's own wave form."