"It's a start. You have to start somewhere. Radio—know its start? The first message was sent across the ocean a few hundred years ago from one man to the other after they had made a complete plan as to time, date, location and frequency, and also the transmitted message. Sure enough, they got through. That, too, was under the ideal test conditions. So when we finally assembled the half-a-hundred separate circuits and devices that made it look as though we might have a space detector, we put up targets, aimed our equipment, and looked for a response where there should be one."
"We don't know where our target is," objected Wilson.
"And we haven't yet fired up this equipment to seek a target of unknown position and range," admitted Allison. "But this gear is better than nothing."
Again the green spots flickered in the dome over their heads.
"What do all those spots mean?" asked Wilson.
"Those are false targets, probably caused by background noise. Although the infrawave is noiseless, we still seem to be getting it. Dr. Friedrich disagrees. He claims this is not noise, but interferences. However, the good doctor is not at all certain that the so-called interferences come from localized conditions within the equipment or from external sources."
Wilson shrugged. "I don't see how it's done with a radiation type that has neither a directional quality nor a velocity of propagation."
"Do you understand Accum?"
"I stopped shortly before Matrix. Accumulative Math is so much pothooks on a sheet of paper to me."
"Um. Then I'd find it hard to explain. The theory seems to be demonstrable, and the accumulative mathematics upholds the experimental evidence. But there hasn't yet been an acceptable verbal description of what happens."