"Are you sure about the grasshopper, Morry?" Burns asked.
I nodded.
I had no warning. I had just put a half-inch expanded grain on the minima plate, when Lee White walked onto the maxima and Burns pressed the red button.
There was a flicker and White appeared, half an inch tall, in the middle of the expanded quartz crystal on the minima plate. He was able to move his arms. He seemed to be saying something that amused him. I knocked Burns away from the controls, pressed the blue button, whisked the empty crystal off the maxima plate as it came through and only just got it out of the way before Lee White reappeared on the maxima plate, his normal size again.
"Well, it works," he said.
"You crazy?" I yelled at him.
"Just think," Burns said, sitting up and holding his jaw. "The number of times we've watched this fella pressing his red and blue buttons, and dismissed it as elementary stuff for beginners."
They calmed me down and apologized for doing a thing like that. Hell, I would have been expelled too if I had gone back to the Institute with one of them missing. David Adam Smith had a very elaborate hearing aid, but it never enabled him to hear excuses. Students only on Institute property, no readmittance for expelled students—and certainly no expelled students locked up in a lab specimen.
I suppose they would have thought it funny to sit in a crystal and make faces at David Adam Smith. They were wild, all three of them, and had been since they were admitted. I had no desire to be expelled with them.