The grain of sand on the minima plate flicked out of our time-space and
reappeared on the maxima plate ten times larger. I picked it up and
carried it back to the minima plate, repeated the process and went on
until the grain of quartz was more than four feet long.
"Why don't you do it in one jump instead of walking backwards and
forwards?" John Thay asked.
"Can't," I said. "It's got to be a perfect model of the crystal lattice
of quartz. If you calibrate it for too big a jump in size it gets
distorted. No one knows why."
"You don't tell us, Morry. Hell, the marvel is that it works at all."
I threw the four-foot-long crystal over to John and he put it in the
trailer, after nearly losing it on the slight breeze. It is difficult
to disbelieve your eyes and remember that an overblown specimen has
very little more than its original weight. The grain of quartz was
merely expanded. Its molecular and nuclear structure stretched out
in a magnified volume of space. It was almost all holes, an open
arrangement of spaces between the force points of its matter; a direct
magnification of the original without any other change.
We used these specimens in the Desert Institute because everyone
could see the details of the crystal lattice for themselves, instead
of having to use an electron microscope. It removed the practical
difficulties of the principle of indeterminacy, David Adam Smith said.
If light was too coarse to let him see the contents of a nucleus, he
was damned well going to bring the nucleus up to a size where he could
see it. And so he did, eventually, with this apparatus.
I was one of the very few students ever allowed to touch the apparatus,
probably because he thought I was too dumb to do anything with it.
There were several sets but they never left the Institute. The world
was not ready for them, he said.
There was quite a lot of stuff that David Adam Smith kept to himself in
the Institute. Not because the world was unready, but simply because he
didn't think he would get maximum applause at that particular time. He
only produced inventions at the right theatrical moment. David Adam
Smith was quite a ham.
I was not supposed to tell anyone how this apparatus worked, but the
three of them sitting facing me in the shade were not going anywhere
after this. I didn't think it mattered. If you are not chosen at birth
for emigration within the System, and if you also fail at the Institute
or one of the dormitory-universities, you're just an extra unit of
overpopulation.
* * * * *
I thought I'd give them something to think about instead of brooding
over the bubble dancer and their expulsion.
"Of course it works," I said. "It's only Einstein with a twist."
The three of them laughed.
"No, really. You know the clocks that go out on every stellar-reporter
and come back to the Institute with dope on the composition of this and
that place in the Galaxy? You were advanced students, you must have
sent them off every day, well, wasn't the clock always slow when it
returned?"
"Against the dispatching room clock, of course it was," John agreed.
"And if there was enough spare material left on Earth to send people
apart from emigrants, a man would be younger than his twin when he
returned."
"Well," I said, "that's what happens here, except that a specimen
goes out off a minima plate and comes back onto the maxima plate so
fast that the time component is negligible. All that happens is that
it gets moved outside the local space-time reference. It doesn't
exactly go anywhere, I suppose. But instead of consuming less time on
this shift out and in again, the time stays constant and it reappears
occupying more space. And there you are, with a magnified version of
the original."
There was a silence.
"Have you ever put anything living on the plate, Morry?"