And, directly before him he watched the oscilloscope as it transformed the audio signal into a visual one.
To Freya Holm he said, "Yes, there is a cycle. You can see it, even though you can't hear it. This aud track is continuous, running over and over again. Hence the man's right; it's a fake."
"Could Rachmael ben Applebaum have — "
"No," Matson said. "I've sequestered an aud copy from the UN info archives; it agrees. Rachmael didn't tamper with the tape; it's exactly what he claims it to be." He sat back, pondering.
Strange, he thought, that von Einem's Telpor gadget works only one way, radiating matter out... with no return of that matter, at least by teleportation, possible. So, rather conveniently for Trails of Hoffman, all we get via Telpor as a feedback from Whale's Mouth is an electronic signal, energy alone... and this one now exposed as a fake; as a research agency I should have discovered this long ago — Rachmael, with all his creditors hounding him jet-balloonwise, keeping him awake night and day, hammering at him with countless technological assists, impeding him in the normal course of conducting routine business, has detected this spuriousness, and I — damn it. Matson thought, I missed, here. He felt gloomy.
"Cutty Sark Scotch and water?" Freya asked.
He nodded absently as Freya, who was his mistress, disappeared into the liquor antechamber of the villa to see if the 1985 bottle — worth a fortune — were empty yet.
But, on the credit side, he had been suspicious.
From the start he had doubted the so-called "Theorem One" of Dr. von Einem; it sounded too much like a cover, this one-way transmission by the technicians of THL's multitude of retail outlets. Write home from Whale's Mouth, son, when you get there, he thought acidly; tell your old mom how it is on the colony world with its fresh air, sunshine, all those cute little animals, those wondrous buildings THL robots are constructing...