"Exactly. Now we are in position to go ahead with the lights, detectors,
and so on. The energy aspect of the rays you can best understand as
simply a vibration in the ether--an extremely high frequency one.
While not rigidly scientific, that is close enough for you and me.
Nobody knows what the stuff really is, and it cannot be explained or
demonstrated by any model or concept in three-dimensional space. Its
physical-mathematical interpretation, the only way in which it can be
grasped at all, requires sixteen coordinates in four dimensions, and
I don't suppose you'd care to go into that."

"I'll say I wouldn't!" she exclaimed, feelingly.

"Well, anyway, by the use of suitable fields of force it can be used
as a carrier wave. Most of this stuff of the fields of force--how to
carry the modulation up and down through all the frequency changes
necessary--was figured out by the Martians ages ago. Used as a pure
carrier wave, with a sender and a receiver at each end, it isn't so
bad--that's why our communicator and radio systems work as well as they
do. They are pretty good, really, but the ultra-light vision system
is something else again. Sending the heterodyned wave through steel
is easy, but breaking it up, so as to view an object and return the
impulses, was an awful job and one that isn't half done yet. We see
things, after a fashion and at a distance of a few kilometers, by
sending an almost parallel wave from a twin-projector to disintegrate
and double back the viewing wave. That's the way the lookout plates and
lenses work, all over the ship--from the master-screens in the control
room to the plates of the staterooms and lifeboats and the viewing-areas
of the promenades. But the whole system is a rotten makeshift, and...."

"Just a minute!" exclaimed the girl. "I and everybody else have been
thinking that everything is absolutely perfect; and yet every single
thing you have talked about, you have ended up by describing as
'unknown,' 'rudimentary,' 'temporary,' or a 'makeshift.' You speak as
though the entire system were a poor thing that will have to do until
something better has been found, and that nobody knows anything about
anything! How do you get that way?"

"By working with Brandon and Westfall. Those birds have got real brains
and they're on the track of something that will, in all probability, be
as far ahead of Roeser's Rays as our present system is ahead of the
science of the seventeenth century."