recorded, rebroadcast, and erasable — "What Traub heard as Fourier Transforms…"
What Traub heard as Fourier Transforms Whale heard as Furrier Transforms. But also, as a consequence, erasable, Hal had said. By whom?
Context
Hal, being weird before the match, reaches the book's coldest description of selves as signal: everyone in the locker room reduced to stored routines that can be called up and rebroadcast on schedule, human beings as recordings of themselves. The joke sharpens the dread — the one line of Hal's that anyone repeats gets mis-received on the way (Fourier heard as Furrier), so even the thesis about garbled rebroadcast is itself garbled in rebroadcast — and the unanswered "By whom?" leaves the erasing hand a blank the scene never fills.