She would not tell me any more than that.
So when I found next morning that every stellar-reporter in the class area was missing and that Dimples and her entire class had gone with them, I did not have to act astonished. About a third of the Institute—nearly a hundred students—were in that class, doing nothing else but build a complete catalogue of the stars and their planetary systems by means of the stellar-reporters. And the whole lot had gone!
David Adam Smith did not believe me, either, until he saw for himself. Then he sat down to work through the firing calibrators to find out where the stellar-reporters had been sent. He waved me away.
I went straight to the cellar beneath his private labs and reconverted John. He stepped off the maxima plate swiftly before the crystal could materialize him.
"Hey," I said, "you've reversed it."
"Naturally. It's a minor adjustment in the time-lag. Otherwise there would always have to be a second person present before you could get out of a crystal. We think that's what went wrong with poor Burns Gilbert. But we'll never know, I'm afraid. Let's get on."
We set the power cutter to work on the cellar ceiling.
It was only designed to cut rock specimens small enough to be brought back in the stellar-reporters that carried it, but after two hours we had a hole right up into the private labs.
I lifted John Thay and followed him up.