"Just think," Burns said, sitting up and holding his jaw. "The number of times we've watched this fella pressing his red and blue buttons, and dismissed it as elementary stuff for beginners." They calmed me down and apologized for doing a thing like that. Hell, I would have been expelled too if I had gone back to the Institute with one of them missing. David Adam Smith had a very elaborate hearing aid, but it never enabled him to hear excuses. Students only on Institute property, no readmittance for expelled students--and certainly no expelled students locked up in a lab specimen. I suppose they would have thought it funny to sit in a crystal and make faces at David Adam Smith. They were wild, all three of them, and had been since they were admitted. I had no desire to be expelled with them. "You're not going to be expelled, Morry. Not if you do as we ask." "And if you don't," Burns said, still rubbing his jaw, "we'll tell the dear Director that you explained how his specimen collector works." "Then you'll be expelled with us, Morry." "He's going to get tired of having you around to laugh at one day, Morry. Then you'll be out anyway." "No use appealing to him with the broad theme, I suppose?" I look at John Thay. "What broad theme?" I asked. "Do you know what you've got here, Morry? You have the only mass escape route from Earth." "You're euphoricked!" "No, we're not. Do you know how many habitable planets we've listed? Over three hundred and fifty. We've sent stellar-reporters out and back every day and we know. They're listed back there at the Institute. We can reach them on the hyperspace transmitter, you know that. The only things that stop a mass emigration are David Adam Smith, the small size of the transmitter and the impossibility of building enough ships to carry everyone. The alloy supply only just covers the standard emigration program. But a stellar-reporter comes back with the data, is re-set and goes out again and comes back again. Don't you see, Morry?" "No," I said, "I don't." "Look. If you can use the same ship over and over again, the shortage of alloys doesn't matter provided you can build the first ship." "Okay," I said, "but a stellar-reporter isn't a ship, unless you're a two foot midget and...." I stopped. 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.