"Of course it works," I said. "It's only Einstein with a twist."
The three of them laughed.
"No, really. You know the clocks that go out on every stellar-reporter and come back to the Institute with dope on the composition of this and that place in the Galaxy? You were advanced students, you must have sent them off every day, well, wasn't the clock always slow when it returned?"
"Against the dispatching room clock, of course it was," John agreed. "And if there was enough spare material left on Earth to send people apart from emigrants, a man would be younger than his twin when he returned."
"Well," I said, "that's what happens here, except that a specimen goes out off a minima plate and comes back onto the maxima plate so fast that the time component is negligible. All that happens is that it gets moved outside the local space-time reference. It doesn't exactly go anywhere, I suppose. But instead of consuming less time on this shift out and in again, the time stays constant and it reappears occupying more space. And there you are, with a magnified version of the original."
There was a silence.
"Have you ever put anything living on the plate, Morry?"
I blushed. John had a knack of uncovering safely hidden facts.
"Well, I did make a small mistake once. A grasshopper got on the plate when I wasn't looking. I was magnifying an alumino-silicate and a few seconds after I got the specimen up to size, the grasshopper appeared in the middle of it. I had to reverse the specimen back to get it out. Meant picking the crystal off the plate fast, before the insect came through, but I managed it."
"Was it hurt?"