"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.
"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.