"For the present," President Johnson nodded. "We're not interested
in punishing a particular man. We have to give him all the joy-rope
he needs and hope that he, as the longest-run user, suffers the
consequences."
"I could keep taking it myself if you need a guinea pig."
"The rasher section of the public will supply enough guinea pigs," said
the General. "You'll stay here at HQ, looking over all the reports that
come in, Mr. Cramer, maybe your experience will help somewhere along
the line. If, after a few weeks, nothing shows up, we will crack down
on Hartley anyway."
"Not that it will do much good," said the President. "But we, too, need
our moments of purely personal satisfaction."
* * * * *
The following day Cramer was given a robot-run suite high in HQ Tower.
His human contacts were restricted to a few total security clears who
occasionally brought him messages too delicate for transmission on
the building's internal net. Inured to the isolation-training of the
spacenaut, he was not disturbed by the lack of company.
But within two days a message arrived that did disturb him. The
_Star-Seeker_, returning with its precious capsules of asteroid
bacteria, was still a week from Earth base and already one scout who
had somehow sampled germ-joy was under forcible restraint for trying
to get additional dosages. Medical analysis showed no physiological
addiction but it did indicate some purely psychological craving
triggered by merely one dose. The scout was not moved by the warnings
of the frost flake's possible danger since there was no binding proof
of it.
Chisholm had scribbled across the bottom of the document: 'This is
likely to become the classic form of our difficulty, the refusal to see
horror unless it can be shown. And here again it's happening to a Space
Service man!'
Cramer shuddered at that. The Service contained the cream of Earth's
manpower. If germ-joy could bring out their psychological weaknesses,
how much worse the effect was bound to be among the listless, bored
masses!
As the days went by there were occasional reports on Hartley's
activities. With Neilson's help his agents had smoothly eased into many
sectors of the scientific underground and huge quantities of money were
moving up through the distribution hierarchy. There were even spy reels
for him to run off on his projector, reels which showed the ex-Captain
looking fantastically youthful and self-satisfied.
Once in a while the bitterly ironic thought came to Cramer that maybe
Hartley was inadvertently on the right side. Suppose, just suppose that
germ-joy was actually _good_ for humanity! More than ever he longed
for some evil effect to become manifest even if it meant he, himself,
should be stricken by it.
Eventually he was summoned to Chisholm's office where several
scientists were gathered. The feed lines for a Medical Computer had
been set up there and he was put through another rigorous checkup. At
the end of a half-hour Dr. Jonas threw up his hands and said, "You're
in perfect health. Still no after effects--I don't think there'll ever
be any. How could there be?"
Chisholm considered Cramer almost resentfully. "You're too damned
healthy for our own good! Dr. Phillips here has equally bad news--he's
a biophysicist."
Phillips, a skinny, dark-haired man, tried to smile through his look
of bewilderment. "We've absolutely run through the testing gamut on
the stuff _Star-Seeker_ brought back. Ultra-high microscopy shows
no RNA or DNA in our frozen samples, in fact nothing to carry the
genetic pattern--yet we know it's alive! We've no way of coping with
something so radically different, something that breaks all the way
down the atomic scale so peacefully. It can only be controlled by some
_sub_-atomic patterns unknown to us."
"There's no way to probe it sub-atomically?" asked Cramer.
"Not at this fine a level. What methods we have show nothing
exceptional there after the silicon breaks down." He frowned in a
dreamy sort of way. "A lot of the tiniest subatomic bits are still a
total mystery, too small for our analytic tools to grapple with. If
this stuff would reappear in some analyzable form now we could learn an
awful lot about those unknown interactions. Fat chance of that, though!"
"We'll wait another week," said Chisholm, "then, if nothing's happened,
we'll pull Hartley and his crew in and hope the public won't end up in
his corner. There are probably several thousand regular users already.
We already have a few _scientists_ saying the stuff's all right, that
we should _encourage_ its use!"
"Idiocy," observed Phillips sadly, "is no respecter of high IQ's."
* * * * *
The week went by more and more slowly in Cramer's tower suite and all
the reports only confirmed the General's forebodings about the spread
of germ-joy's appeal. Someone else had somehow brought in a batch and
was distributing it through a new, completely independent set-up. And
everywhere there were vague rumors of a beneficial substance that
'they', the eternally conspiratorial 'they' of undefinable higher
authority, were keeping from popular use.
Then, on the seventh day, Cramer had the rash.
It encircled only the wrist of his left hand but the red splotches
itched so violently that he immediately called in the medical team. By
the time the doctors arrived it was already subsiding. A sample from
the splotch area, though, showed a significant trace of silicon but
none of the bacteria.
"Somehow the element reformed!" Phillips exclaimed. "We're approaching
the breakthrough!"
Cramer watched the splotches shrink into themselves, fearfully
wondering what the next phase would be. But, an hour later, this turned
out to be bitterly anti-climactic for the assembled group. A urinalysis
showed that his body had thrown off an amount of silicon roughly
equivalent to the amount he must have taken in through the flakes.
"Looks like you've passed through your crisis," Jonas said. "You're in
perfect shape again."
The scientists all looked crushed but their mood changed to annoyance
when they saw Cramer's enthusiastic grin. "Don't you see?" he said. "If
this happened to me, it should be happening to Hartley too. He got his
first sniff only a little while after I did, so the incubation period's
the same for him!"
"Unless the large amount he's taken in since then actually confers
immunity," Phillips muttered.
Cramer's face fell but he persisted. "We have to find out one way or
the other, don't we?"
"No doubt about that!" Phillips called Chisholm's office and explained
what had happened.
"Then the operation's on," the General told him, happy to be acting at
last. "Hartley's at Neilson's place and we have to get him. Bring along
all the test equipment you'll need."
* * * * *
When they broke into the vast penthouse apartment they found nobody
around. As they went through one empty chamber after another, they
became increasingly nervous. "The building's been thoroughly staked
out," Chisholm fumed. "We know he hasn't left this floor."
Then, in the last chamber, they found him. He was lying on a silken
couch, breathing heavily, and when they came closer they saw that all
visible parts of his body were covered with angry splotches.
"Get the cameras going," barked the General.
"No, do something for me," Hartley gasped, staring in horror at his
hands as if waiting for something to appear there. "All ran away, all
of them."
As they watched, the splotches on the back of each hand exploded into
running sores. While an assistant took a sample from one of the evil,
flowering things, Jonas held an anaesthetic bottle to the sinking
man's nostrils. But it had no effect and he only groaned the louder,
demanding surcease.
More sores opened up on the neck while most of the team frenziedly
attended to the Analyzer. One of them came up to the foot of the
couch where Cramer was standing with Chisholm and Jonas and whispered
to them: "Now it's a silicon _virus_ and it's inducing massive
flash-cancers!"
Phillips was too absorbed in some abstruse calculation to look toward
the couch any more. "What a breakthrough!" he suddenly exclaimed.
"We'll be able to extrapolate the interactions now!"
"Any danger of catching anything from him?" Chisholm asked, looking at
the pullulating mass.
Jonas glanced at a report tape that had been handed to him. "No, you
don't pick up carcinomas that way. And we know from Cramer's experience
today that the victim only erupts into this when a certain critical
intake has been exceeded."
There was one final gasp and Hartley lie dead, his mouth the only
remaining recognizable feature. Chisholm steeled himself to look at the
human wreckage with the objectivity of the nearby camera. "Horrible,
but it would have been worse if it hadn't happened, if we didn't have
this proof. A different kind of horror, social and slow, but even
worse. This way only a few die, not the race."
Cramer heard the General pick up a phone and ask for President Johnson,
and all about him there was the clamor of excited researchers getting
on with their jobs. But he could not turn away from the ugly spectacle
of this death quite yet, nor could he feel any exultation before
it even though he knew this outcome was the most desirable of all
available possibilities. When you had sailed across the farther deeps
with one comrade you had to remember him for whatever had been best in
him, not worst.