Neither Burns nor his stellar-reporter returned.
We never knew what happened. Some of the little rockets did fail. Not many. But it was his misfortune to be in one that did not come back.
Lee White did return safely, and was sent out again to his chosen planet.
We began to handle crystals regularly. John sent each emigrant with a miniature converter and controls, which I reduced on the edge of the desert and handed to Dimples, who inserted the crystal and the miniature converter into the next stellar-reporter due for Lee's planet. He was accumulating heaps of converters on his planet, but we could not risk leaving an emigrant helpless in his crystal when the stellar-reporter dumped it on the far planet. This way they rolled out together on arrival.
We must have sent out two hundred emigrants of all kinds, for John was sending in a mixed selection to give the far planet every chance of a successful settlement, when Dimples met me at the fountain and cried—moistly—all over my arm.
"Oh, Morry," she wept. "He's found out."
"He," obviously, was David Adam Smith.
"How do you know? What did he say?"
"He hasn't said anything. But I saw one of the emigrants in his private lab! I shouldn't have been there, and he didn't know I was. But I saw him with one on his desk."
"Sure about it?"