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.