"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.