If Lee White could get in and out of a crystal safely--and he seemed
to be unchanged after having just done so--he could travel inside a
stellar-reporter with the other delicate mechanisms.
I had never been promoted to those classes, but I knew the
stellar-reporters were baby rockets that gouged specimens from the
planets they were sent to, measured, recorded, and brought themselves
back on the same tracker path. When they were not burned up in stars,
that is.
But if the three of them were willing to take that chance, I was not
going to get in the way.
"I may not be as bright as you three," I said. "But even I can see you
may have something here. If you survive the journey. You don't need to
threaten me about telling you how this specimen collector works. I'll
help anyway."
We prepared the specimens I set out to get, then experimented.
I could not get used to seeing each of them inside an expanded grain of
sand, but the pore structure and the crystal lattice itself seemed to
leave them room to breathe. They could even move about, within small
limits.
The crystal had to be expanded up to a reasonable size before it was
safe to be transmitted into it, for an unexpanded quartz crystal would
be immediate suffocation. The force vortices of the quartz nuclei, even
when expanded, seemed to have no effect on a living body. It was a
solid solution, as John said.
"The ideal," he added, "would be for us to coach Morry up to the
stellar-reporter class levels. But I think we had better start
meanwhile. No sense wasting time."
"I think so, too," I said.
* * * * *
Before we left the open desert, I unpacked the apparatus so they could
examine it. They thought they could make sets without much difficulty.
The apparatus was largely an electrically inhibited accelerator, they
said.
I knew the desert quite well, including the areas where the Institute
radar boundary fogged out and where people could crawl in a few hundred
yards without being detected.
"That's all we need," Burns said. "If we plant another set of plates
and power controls out there, and Morry keeps burying prepared crystals
in advance, he can meet us there, do the conversion and bring each of
us in in a half-inch crystal in his pocket."
"Then what?" I asked.
"Then you hand us over to little Dimples. She'll get us into the right
stellar-reporters together with a reduced set of plates and controls
so that we can reconvert on the planet. We can travel in the specimen
grabber. That will dump us out immediately the stellar-reporter lands."
I knew little Dimples by sight. She was a plump redheaded student in
their class.
"You can't all go," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because I can't leave the Institute grounds. Anyway, where are
you going to collect the other emigrants from, once you're out on a
habitable planet at the back end of the Galaxy?"
"He's right."
We talked it out as I drove the trailer back to the Institute. Two
of them would go immediately, each to a different planet on the
list. They would return to report and be sent out again on the
next stellar-reporter collecting data from that planet. Meanwhile,
the third would be expelled. He would spend his compulsory Holiday
selecting people for despatch. I would meet them at the boundary,
convert them and carry the crystals in, for Dimples to insert into the
stellar-reporters.
They disappeared into the metallurgical labs as soon as I pulled up in
the main courtyard. The Director missed them by micromillimeters.
David Adam Smith was a small man. With his cloak and large hearing aid
and long thin face, he always made me think of a grounded bird. He came
hopping over the tiles with short quick steps, peering at the specimens
and at me.
"Go out again tomorrow," he snapped. "I want some copper chloride
specimens."
"Would you like me to drive the bubble-dancer to transportation?" I
asked.
"Who? Oh, that girl. No, Morris, I sent her away. You'll have to
confine yourself to the curriculum, I fear, hig, hig, hig."
That was odd because I thought I was about the only person in the
Institute who could drive a land-vehicle. The roads outside were built
over and everyone used jets. But I wouldn't have put it past him to
have made the girl walk out of the desert, or to have sent her in his
own space-glass jet, depending on how he assessed her publicity value.