"Meet me here in an hour," she said.
An hour later, she was back.
"Here, Morry. This is the power slicer from a shovel. There's one in
every stellar-reporter for cutting rock specimens. John says you can
come up from the cellar with that. Do you know what he means?"
"Yes. What's he doing with you?"
"You'll see. Just come to our class area tomorrow as if you're
delivering specimens. Put the crystal with John in it in your pocket
and go and report to the Director exactly what you found in our
area--apart from the crystal, of course. You are to release John from
that when you get to the cellar, immediately after David Adam Smith
goes hurrying out to see what happened to us."
She would not tell me any more than that.
So when I found next morning that every stellar-reporter in the class
area was missing and that Dimples and her entire class had gone
with them, I did not have to act astonished. About a third of the
Institute--nearly a hundred students--were in that class, doing nothing
else but build a complete catalogue of the stars and their planetary
systems by means of the stellar-reporters. And the whole lot had gone!
David Adam Smith did not believe me, either, until he saw for himself.
Then he sat down to work through the firing calibrators to find out
where the stellar-reporters had been sent. He waved me away.
I went straight to the cellar beneath his private labs and reconverted
John. He stepped off the maxima plate swiftly before the crystal could
materialize him.
"Hey," I said, "you've reversed it."
"Naturally. It's a minor adjustment in the time-lag. Otherwise there
would always have to be a second person present before you could get
out of a crystal. We think that's what went wrong with poor Burns
Gilbert. But we'll never know, I'm afraid. Let's get on."
We set the power cutter to work on the cellar ceiling.
It was only designed to cut rock specimens small enough to be brought
back in the stellar-reporters that carried it, but after two hours we
had a hole right up into the private labs.