staying alongside a voice he can't follow — "I’m going to need to ask…"

Against Day's erudite unanswerable case, Gately's whole method is not counter-argument but a refusal to let the connection drop: he keeps announcing that he is staying with the speaker, and when the vocabulary outruns him he asks — without pretending to a comprehension he doesn't have — for it again in words he can follow, so he can be "right there alongside." The one working technology in the room is not being right; it is the plain willingness to remain a receiver, honestly, at the edge of one's depth.