Part 1

SOLID SOLUTION

By JAMES STAMERS

Illustrated by GRAY

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine April 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Brilliant? A genius? David Adam Smith had the brains of fifty men--very literally!

Three students were expelled for bringing the bubble dancer into the Desert Institute, Lee White, Burns Gilbert and John Thay. The Director did not like any of them. He liked me, Morris. I was his stooge, his squirming straight man. I was useful for his jokes.

"We know calculus is a method of measuring uncircular curves, such as beer barrels ... but I fear Morris has allowed that thought to absorb him, hig, hig, hig, hig."

That was one of Professor David Adam Smith's favorites. Or:

"If you will visit me this afternoon, Morris, I will give you personal tuition in astrophysics ... beginning with the more complicated parts of the alphabet, hig, hig, hig."

But he owned the Desert Institute. He was the only living authority on geology, terrestrial or extraplanetary, and there was a waiting list of students....

On their last afternoon, I was sent with the disgraced three on a specimen-collecting tour of the desert. It was my routine job but a real disgrace to them. I often thought the only reason David Adam Smith allowed me to stay on as a student, apart from offering him a target for sneering at, was because of my muscles. I could handle the long specimen trailer and heave boulders about more easily than the others.

"Do not sneer at Morris, gentlemen. Science tells us brain size is related to surface area. You should expect in Morris a potentially great brain therefore ... if Morris were not devoted to obstructing science, hig, hig, hig."

The other three, Lee, Burns and John, were about six feet tall, slim, dark haired and handsome. But we were collecting specimens, not running for Miss Earth 2430. My extra seven inches in height extends more or less proportionately in my reach and thickness of shoulder. Anyway, they were depressed at being expelled, so I let them sit in the shade of the trailer while I set up the specimen plates and power unit, minima stand here, maxima stand there, controls on the sand beside them.

"I don't expect you've done this elementary stuff for a couple of years," I said. "So ... don't walk on the plates and don't touch the dial or the red and blue buttons."

"Hell, Morry, we know."

"Okay, okay. Only it's more tricky than it looks."

* * * * *

The whole desert belonged to David Adam Smith, which showed his political pull. Who else on Earth was allowed a whole _room_ to themselves, even--except maybe the Planetary Salvager, and the heads of the Material Recovery subdivisions and top Government people like that. But David Adam Smith had to have a complete desert. He ruled from the Holiday Probable centers of Reno to the gambling computers of Las Vegas, where the bubble dancer had come from.

I put a single grain of sand on the minima plate and stood clear.

"Press the blue button, Burns."

Burns wasn't even listening.

"Burns," I repeated.

"Hell, Morry, who cares about these damned specimens? How would you like to be expelled? No classification, no chance of a job, spend the rest of your life in a compulsory Holiday Reservation."

"How does he get away with it," muttered Lee, looking around at the open desert and the bare hills on the skyline. "Tomorrow we'll be back in a ten-to-a-room bachelor unit in the Nebraska suburbs, with a fine view of continuous rooftops to the Gulf, the Atlantic and the Great Lakes, and the nearest geological specimen at the bottom of the community hydroponic tanks. And here he is--the only David Adam Smith, the one original--with a desert of his own. It makes me sick."

John Thay shook his head.

"That's just emotional reaction, Lee. We were all busting ourselves to be admitted, to be one of the select three hundred. Just because we're being slung out doesn't mean the whole Desert Institute is no good. You know perfectly well why he has the place reserved."

"I know his excuse. I can just see him, flapping his cloak at the Salvagers and croaking, 'I don't care what you want to do with the ground, gentlemen. I must have open spaces to live in. Am I or am I not the only leading scientist of importance who has retained his sanity and continued to produce discoveries of unique value? Where is Firnivale, Williams, Hutk, Marrpole, and so on and so on? Lost. Missing. Probably in a sodden stupor in one of the South American City-States. I tell you, science cannot produce anything in laboratories. Science must have room to breathe!'"

It was a stock student's speech.

I waited for the other two to round it off.

"And why, Professor Smith," said Burns imitating a heavy official voice, "have you alone retained your faculties?"

"Because, dear sir," Lee answered in David Adam Smith's thin voice, "I never admit more than three hundred students to the Institute. And because apparently I have the only mind capable of absorbing the weight of modern knowledge without much strain."

"You do not dislike yourself, Professor."

"I give credit where it is due, dear sir." Lee stopped and continued in his normal voice. "The trouble is, he _does_ produce the stuff. He's supposed to be a geologist, but there hasn't been an invention for the last decade that he didn't master-mind."

"Pity he can't think of some way of speeding up the emigration," John said. "If only we could leave Earth!"

* * * * *

I walked over and pressed the blue button myself.

The grain of sand on the minima plate flicked out of our time-space and reappeared on the maxima plate ten times larger. I picked it up and carried it back to the minima plate, repeated the process and went on until the grain of quartz was more than four feet long.

"Why don't you do it in one jump instead of walking backwards and forwards?" John Thay asked.

"Can't," I said. "It's got to be a perfect model of the crystal lattice of quartz. If you calibrate it for too big a jump in size it gets distorted. No one knows why."

"You don't tell us, Morry. Hell, the marvel is that it works at all."

I threw the four-foot-long crystal over to John and he put it in the trailer, after nearly losing it on the slight breeze. It is difficult to disbelieve your eyes and remember that an overblown specimen has very little more than its original weight. The grain of quartz was merely expanded. Its molecular and nuclear structure stretched out in a magnified volume of space. It was almost all holes, an open arrangement of spaces between the force points of its matter; a direct magnification of the original without any other change.

We used these specimens in the Desert Institute because everyone could see the details of the crystal lattice for themselves, instead of having to use an electron microscope. It removed the practical difficulties of the principle of indeterminacy, David Adam Smith said. If light was too coarse to let him see the contents of a nucleus, he was damned well going to bring the nucleus up to a size where he could see it. And so he did, eventually, with this apparatus.

I was one of the very few students ever allowed to touch the apparatus, probably because he thought I was too dumb to do anything with it. There were several sets but they never left the Institute. The world was not ready for them, he said.

There was quite a lot of stuff that David Adam Smith kept to himself in the Institute. Not because the world was unready, but simply because he didn't think he would get maximum applause at that particular time. He only produced inventions at the right theatrical moment. David Adam Smith was quite a ham.

I was not supposed to tell anyone how this apparatus worked, but the three of them sitting facing me in the shade were not going anywhere after this. I didn't think it mattered. If you are not chosen at birth for emigration within the System, and if you also fail at the Institute or one of the dormitory-universities, you're just an extra unit of overpopulation.

* * * * *

I thought I'd give them something to think about instead of brooding over the bubble dancer and their expulsion.

"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?"

"The grasshopper? No. A little stunned, maybe. But perfectly well."

I went back to the plates and started another quartz grain. John, Lee and Burns sat and gabbled to each other.

"If the crystal lattice was expanded to start with...."

"Relative to its size, the crystal would be full of breathing holes...."

"You could take in nutrient through a lattice as big as that. It would be relatively porous...."

"... molecular pressure...."

"... shift that battery and move the galvanometer...."

"... take out most of the instruments and fake up the records from the previous trip...."

"If we weren't being expelled this evening," said John.

They looked at me.

"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.

"You're not going to be expelled, Morry. Not if you do as we ask."

"And if you don't," Burns said, still rubbing his jaw, "we'll tell the dear Director that you explained how his specimen collector works."

"Then you'll be expelled with us, Morry."

"He's going to get tired of having you around to laugh at one day, Morry. Then you'll be out anyway."

"No use appealing to him with the broad theme, I suppose?"

I look at John Thay.

"What broad theme?" I asked.

"Do you know what you've got here, Morry? You have the only mass escape route from Earth."

"You're euphoricked!"

"No, we're not. Do you know how many habitable planets we've listed? Over three hundred and fifty. We've sent stellar-reporters out and back every day and we know. They're listed back there at the Institute. We can reach them on the hyperspace transmitter, you know that. The only things that stop a mass emigration are David Adam Smith, the small size of the transmitter and the impossibility of building enough ships to carry everyone. The alloy supply only just covers the standard emigration program. But a stellar-reporter comes back with the data, is re-set and goes out again and comes back again. Don't you see, Morry?"

"No," I said, "I don't."

"Look. If you can use the same ship over and over again, the shortage of alloys doesn't matter provided you can build the first ship."

"Okay," I said, "but a stellar-reporter isn't a ship, unless you're a two foot midget and...."

I stopped.

If Lee White could get in and out of a crystal safely--and he seemed to be unchanged after having just done so--he could travel inside a stellar-reporter with the other delicate mechanisms.

I had never been promoted to those classes, but I knew the stellar-reporters were baby rockets that gouged specimens from the planets they were sent to, measured, recorded, and brought themselves back on the same tracker path. When they were not burned up in stars, that is.

But if the three of them were willing to take that chance, I was not going to get in the way.

"I may not be as bright as you three," I said. "But even I can see you may have something here. If you survive the journey. You don't need to threaten me about telling you how this specimen collector works. I'll help anyway."

We prepared the specimens I set out to get, then experimented.

I could not get used to seeing each of them inside an expanded grain of sand, but the pore structure and the crystal lattice itself seemed to leave them room to breathe. They could even move about, within small limits.

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.

"You can't all go," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because I can't leave the Institute grounds. Anyway, where are you going to collect the other emigrants from, once you're out on a habitable planet at the back end of the Galaxy?"

"He's right."

We talked it out as I drove the trailer back to the Institute. Two of them would go immediately, each to a different planet on the list. They would return to report and be sent out again on the next stellar-reporter collecting data from that planet. Meanwhile, the third would be expelled. He would spend his compulsory Holiday selecting people for despatch. I would meet them at the boundary, convert them and carry the crystals in, for Dimples to insert into the stellar-reporters.

They disappeared into the metallurgical labs as soon as I pulled up in the main courtyard. The Director missed them by micromillimeters.

David Adam Smith was a small man. With his cloak and large hearing aid and long thin face, he always made me think of a grounded bird. He came hopping over the tiles with short quick steps, peering at the specimens and at me.

"Go out again tomorrow," he snapped. "I want some copper chloride specimens."

"Would you like me to drive the bubble-dancer to transportation?" I asked.

"Who? Oh, that girl. No, Morris, I sent her away. You'll have to confine yourself to the curriculum, I fear, hig, hig, hig."

That was odd because I thought I was about the only person in the Institute who could drive a land-vehicle. The roads outside were built over and everyone used jets. But I wouldn't have put it past him to have made the girl walk out of the desert, or to have sent her in his own space-glass jet, depending on how he assessed her publicity value.

I forgot about it while carting off the specimens.

* * * * *

Dimples was pretty, a trifle Venusian in her plumpness but very intelligent. We met by the fountain in one of the smaller courtyards. John Thay, she told me, had volunteered to remain but I was to collect the other two from the boundary.

"They won't be too heavy will they, Morry?"

"Three or four pounds. Living substance modifies in some way, or it may be the effect of being in solid solution in an expanded lattice."

"But you can take them down to half an inch?"

"I hope so."

We arranged to meet just before the afternoon session the next day, so that Lee and Burns would be sent off in the afternoon stellar-reporters with as little delay as possible.

They were there at the boundary when I drove up the next day. Their converter worked. They were embedded neatly in the quartz crystals. I took them in, handed them to Dimples and that was that.

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?"

"Absolutely certain. It looked like one of the men with a beard we sent through about a month ago. Do you remember?"

"But how did he get hold of him?"

"I can't think. The stellar-reporters are going off all right. I thought they were coming back empty. I've had to let the rest of my class know, so that we could keep the records faked. We can't account for two hundred stellar-reporters all to the same planet, Morry, so I had to."

I sent the next bunch of emigrants back with a message to John Thay. He came the next afternoon and we met on the edge of the desert. I explained what had happened.

"Is Dimples certain?" he asked.

"The man had a beard and was still in his crystal, the way we sent him off."

John shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, Morry, it can't be helped. There's only one course now. We must get hold of any crystals in the hands of David Adam Smith and send them off again--unless you and Dimples and all of us want to end up in a satellite penitentiary. I expect he's preparing a case against us now. With his influence he can make it stick. No doubt about that."

Illegal emigration, criminal use of the Institute property--oh, from that angle there was enough to have us all put away in space all right. I had no doubt that David Adam Smith would do it, too.

* * * * *

"Now, his weakest point," John said, "is his vanity. That, as we know, is immense. Who else would run an Institute for three hundred students with himself as the sole Director? So, if we can arrange something to keep him occupied for a day or two, we may be able to break up into his private labs through the floor. I know for a fact the walls and ceilings are studded with alarms. But we thought of booby-trapping him when we were expelled, and the floor seemed the best way in."

"And the diversion?"

"You'd better take me in now in your pocket. I want to have a word with Dimples' class."

He stepped on the maxima plate. I converted him down, buried the plates as usual and went back to the Institute.

I gave the crystal to Dimples.

"Meet me here in an hour," she said.

An hour later, she was back.

"Here, Morry. This is the power slicer from a shovel. There's one in every stellar-reporter for cutting rock specimens. John says you can come up from the cellar with that. Do you know what he means?"

"Yes. What's he doing with you?"

"You'll see. Just come to our class area tomorrow as if you're delivering specimens. Put the crystal with John in it in your pocket and go and report to the Director exactly what you found in our area--apart from the crystal, of course. You are to release John from that when you get to the cellar, immediately after David Adam Smith goes hurrying out to see what happened to us."

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."