* * * * *
Dimples was pretty, a trifle Venusian in her plumpness but very
intelligent. We met by the fountain in one of the smaller courtyards.
John Thay, she told me, had volunteered to remain but I was to collect
the other two from the boundary.
"They won't be too heavy will they, Morry?"
"Three or four pounds. Living substance modifies in some way, or it may
be the effect of being in solid solution in an expanded lattice."
"But you can take them down to half an inch?"
"I hope so."
We arranged to meet just before the afternoon session the next
day, so that Lee and Burns would be sent off in the afternoon
stellar-reporters with as little delay as possible.
They were there at the boundary when I drove up the next day. Their
converter worked. They were embedded neatly in the quartz crystals. I
took them in, handed them to Dimples and that was that.
Neither Burns nor his stellar-reporter returned.
We never knew what happened. Some of the little rockets did fail. Not
many. But it was his misfortune to be in one that did not come back.
Lee White did return safely, and was sent out again to his chosen
planet.
We began to handle crystals regularly. John sent each emigrant with
a miniature converter and controls, which I reduced on the edge of
the desert and handed to Dimples, who inserted the crystal and the
miniature converter into the next stellar-reporter due for Lee's
planet. He was accumulating heaps of converters on his planet, but we
could not risk leaving an emigrant helpless in his crystal when the
stellar-reporter dumped it on the far planet. This way they rolled out
together on arrival.
We must have sent out two hundred emigrants of all kinds, for John
was sending in a mixed selection to give the far planet every chance
of a successful settlement, when Dimples met me at the fountain and
cried--moistly--all over my arm.
"Oh, Morry," she wept. "He's found out."
"He," obviously, was David Adam Smith.
"How do you know? What did he say?"
"He hasn't said anything. But I saw one of the emigrants in his private
lab! I shouldn't have been there, and he didn't know I was. But I saw
him with one on his desk."
"Sure about it?"
"Absolutely certain. It looked like one of the men with a beard we sent
through about a month ago. Do you remember?"
"But how did he get hold of him?"
"I can't think. The stellar-reporters are going off all right. I
thought they were coming back empty. I've had to let the rest of my
class know, so that we could keep the records faked. We can't account
for two hundred stellar-reporters all to the same planet, Morry, so I
had to."
I sent the next bunch of emigrants back with a message to John Thay.
He came the next afternoon and we met on the edge of the desert. I
explained what had happened.
"Is Dimples certain?" he asked.
"The man had a beard and was still in his crystal, the way we sent him
off."
John shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, Morry, it can't be helped. There's only one course now. We must
get hold of any crystals in the hands of David Adam Smith and send them
off again--unless you and Dimples and all of us want to end up in a
satellite penitentiary. I expect he's preparing a case against us now.
With his influence he can make it stick. No doubt about that."
Illegal emigration, criminal use of the Institute property--oh, from
that angle there was enough to have us all put away in space all right.
I had no doubt that David Adam Smith would do it, too.
* * * * *
"Now, his weakest point," John said, "is his vanity. That, as we know,
is immense. Who else would run an Institute for three hundred students
with himself as the sole Director? So, if we can arrange something to
keep him occupied for a day or two, we may be able to break up into
his private labs through the floor. I know for a fact the walls and
ceilings are studded with alarms. But we thought of booby-trapping him
when we were expelled, and the floor seemed the best way in."
"And the diversion?"
"You'd better take me in now in your pocket. I want to have a word with
Dimples' class."
He stepped on the maxima plate. I converted him down, buried the plates
as usual and went back to the Institute.