Part 1

_Tired of joy pills? Liquor? The idiot box? Try a fleck from ..._

THE HAPPINESS ROCK

By ALBERT TEICHNER

Illustrated by ADRAGNA

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories January 1964. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

It was a particularly good asteroid, a great jagged rock roughly four miles square on one side and two miles at its thickest. Within five minutes of sighting it they knew that its flatter side turned away from the sun more than seven times an Earth day. That meant they should be able to land for mineral specimens and still be off in time to avoid the heating phase for which they were not equipped.

"I'll go out," said Warrant Officer Cramer, a tan-skinned young man who was peering ahead even more earnestly than usual.

"I'm Captain of this tin crate so it's up to me," said Hartley. "Right?"

"Right in a wrong sort of way, _sir_. Just two men on board and you're pulling rank!"

For a moment Hartley looked irritated, then his blue eyes twinkled with laughter. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't."

"I've never been on an asteroid and I've been a little nervous about it. I don't want to keep barrelling around space with that kind of a faze-factor bugging the back of my mind."

The great flat side had just turned into shadow and Hartley started to ease the ship down. He said, suddenly bitter, "With all my experience the only thing the political brass lets me captain is a two-man scouter. Consider my rank unpulled--it's all yours Will."

Cramer gave him an appreciative glance and put on his outside gear.

"Let the Boy Scout have the dirty jobs," Hartley muttered, a nervous sneer twisting one side of his mouth. He idly adjusted for the descent onto the sheared stone face and, once Cramer was in the exit chamber, exchanged a parting wave with him through the quartz window.

_Queer duck, saying a thing like that_, Cramer thought as he opened the outer hatch. _A little too bitter about things for his own good sometimes._

But then his foot touched solid rock and he was too busy chipping specimens to worry about poor Nick. After each tiny chisel stroke his body bounced slightly away and, gripping the lead rope, he had to retrojet himself back into the circular light patch thrown by Scout III. The stuff was hard composition but, fortunately, with many straight stress lines so pieces slowly did come loose. One carefully placed blow, then a whirl of stars streaming across jet blackness, then a swing back into the light and another blow and another outward swing.

Suddenly a voice crackled in his ear. "You've been out fifty minutes, Will."

"It can't be!"

"Asteroid time's tricky when you're busy. How many chips you have?"

"About a dozen."

"How many do you want? Don't be such a glory boy, get in right now!"

* * * * *

As he pulled himself along the line and up through the hatch he realized that not only had he been undisturbed while on the rock but he hadn't even considered the possibility of becoming frightened! Pleased with himself, he closed the hatch door, raising the current in each magnetic lock to sealing maximum. As soon as the last bolt was sucked into place, his suit started decompressing while chamber pressure mounted in precise compensation. For a second he thought he saw a white speck eddy out of the specimen box attached to his belt but another did not follow. Anyway, suit vizors had a way of clouding up on the inside during chamber compression and that could play funny tricks.

Five minutes later, though, when he pulled off his helmet a little swarm of white specks welled up toward the ceiling. Then they were gone. _Funny_, he laughed to himself. "Funny, funny," he suddenly laughed aloud, "Talcum powder from the void!"

There was Hartley's face at the window, peering anxiously at him, and, for some inexplicable reason, that sight was even funnier. Shaking helplessly, Cramer slapped his knee and kept pointing at the face. _Life is so wonderfully wonderful!_ he said to himself, unable to utter anything aloud now. _Wonderful wonderfully!_

After a while Hartley opened the door to the front cabin and helped him to his cockpit seat. "Sorry, old man," Cramer gasped happily. "Don't know why I did that."

It was surprising how undisturbed by the private joke Hartley looked. He seemed to be too abstracted for that. "Feeling all right?" he finally asked.

"Perfect!" Cramer grinned, greeting the galactic reaches with a wave of his hand. "Isn't it a beautiful universe? I think I could count all the visible light sources out there in ten minutes if I wanted to. No, I don't want to count anything but my blessings, I just want to look."

"Not from here, though. This rock makes its crazy wobble into sunlight soon and I'd rather be off it when the surface starts heating up."

Hartley eased the craft upwards, pulling her back a few dozen miles. Then he balanced the power exhausts into hover and took the specimen box from Cramer's belt. "You've got ecstasy of the space deeps, never can tell when that'll strike a man out there." He studied the little slate-blue chips inside. "You notice that white stuff, Will?"

"First thought it was just vizor clouding." He was thinking with extraordinary clarity even though he still felt wildly elated. "Seemed to happen after the temperature moved above water-freezing."

"Yeah. You did everything by the book, son, except the thing that justified your excursion in the first place. When you came in you merely forgot to seal the specimen box and set its cryogenic cell for deep freeze. Bringing the chips into human temperature range may have destroyed some of the specimen's value. Usually doesn't matter but in this case I wonder--"

"Gosh, that's awful! I'd be glad to go out again."

"No, you may have stupidly done a smart thing. But you'll really boggle it this time with the ecstasy clouding your mind."

"I'm thinking clearly, really I am."

"Can't be."

"Okay," he said, "test me. Give me some digits to multiply while you punch them on the computer."

"All right," Hartley muttered impatiently. "38,373 times 14,621 times 322. Satisfied?"

After a few seconds, "1-8-0-6-5-8-6-2-5-8-2-6."

Hartley pulled a strand of tape from the computer. "Repeat it slowly." Eyes widening, he followed the response on the tape. "You've got it right!"

"Satisfied? Seriously, though, it's nothing when you know the tricks. Old-time non-machine calculating was one of my hobbies when I was a kid."

"It isn't 'nothing.' Space ecstasy ruins a man's ability to think straight for hours. Plenty of bodies are still drifting around space because in the early days they neglected the proper safety checks." He stared through the magnifier at the asteroid, its flat face now glittering in sunlight. "Starting to feel the hangover headache?"

"No, just fine. Nick, I've never felt this good in my life!"

"We'll wait here an hour."

* * * * *

But after the hour was up Cramer was still grinning. "I'm ready to go out again," he said.

Hartley stared at him. "Then it _was_ that white stuff. Man, you've hit on something. There have been a few reports about this kind of untroubled ecstasy reaction but nobody ever spotted that powder. We're going back!"

When the asteroid was back in position again they dropped to the surface. Cramer started up but Hartley held him back in his seat. "This time I do pull rank. I'm going out myself."

Cramer shrugged. "I'm in too good a mood to offer the slightest protest."

"Your mood's why I'm going." He put on his suit and went into the rear chamber. A few minutes later he disappeared outside.

"Everything okay?" Cramer radioed.

"Sure thing. I'll be right back. This stuff flakes off like mica, easy to handle when you know the angles of the fault lines."

A few minutes later he was on board again. "You sure were fast!" Cramer exclaimed.

"Get the comp-decomp going and don't chew so much fat."

"Okay." He activated the self-compensating cycle and watched his superior through the glass. There it was again, a few specks from the specimen box. He, too, had forgotten the standard operating procedure! Then later, as Hartley took off his helmet, a swarm of them ascended like angry midges to the ceiling. In a few seconds the Captain was laughing more relaxedly than Cramer had ever seen him laugh before.

When Hartley came into the cockpit he exclaimed, "Wonderful! There's something like mica in these rocks and the powder's all over in the schists." He went to a corner and pulled some things out of an equipment cabinet but his back blocked Cramer's view. Still facing away, he headed back into the exit chamber. "Go out again," he said.

"But, Captain, you won't know what you're doing!"

Hartley gave an airy wave. "You did, didn't you?"

"Yes but--"

"No buts, my young friend. I'll be on the line. Anything goes wrong, you turn on the winch and I'll be wrenched right back in."

"We'll be orbiting into sunlight and--"

"Forget it, I'll be back on time. There are only two universal laws, son--get happy and stay happy." He shut the door, put on his suit and ordered a compression recycling. As soon as it was completed, he jetted himself through the escape hatch.

* * * * *

Again he was back very quickly but this time, as soon as the helmet came off, he whipped out a specimen slide from an inner pocket, waved it gaily through the talc cloud (_again_, he had left the box unadjusted!) and slipped the slide into a portable pocket microscope. He gripped the scope in his eye like a monocle and stood spellbound for five minutes until with a shout of joy he let the little electronic cylinder drop into his hand. "I'm going back out," he said.

"But, Captain Hartley, you'll get caught on the heating surface."

"Open the cockpit door!" As soon as he came in, he sat down at the controls and lifted the craft off. "See, Cramer, I can think straight, too, under the influence. You were right this time and I've listened."

Then he switched to hover.

"We're not going back _again_, sir, are we?"

"Of course," Hartley grinned. "After all, I made the same mistake you did. Twice I've let the temperature of the specimen box dekelvinise!"

Despite his continuing sense of well-being, Cramer felt uneasy, but there was nothing he could put his finger on so he didn't protest. Anyway, he could see Hartley would not be swayed now from whatever was his strange purpose.

A few hours later they settled back on the asteroid and the Captain went out once more. Cramer tried to watch what he was doing but Hartley was too huddled over the fault he was working for much to be seen. An hour later he came back in, and made some fix notations in his log book as soon as his suit decompressed.

They took off immediately. "This time the box stays locked," he said, pointing at the lid dial which showed the tiny atomic power unit inside was keeping the core's contents at Kelvin 90. Then he radioed the mother ship for a directional beam and locked the craft on automatic pilot. He glanced thoughtfully at his assistant. "When we come in _I'll_ make the report."

"But I know that's standard, Captain, I learned it the first month at the academy."

"Just wanted to make sure you remembered. How do you feel, Will?"

"Perfect."

"No after effects! Same with me!" He thumped Cramer's back in a hail-fellow-well-met spirit and Cramer thought, _Not such a bad guy sometimes_.

* * * * *

But, of course, that little outburst of camaraderie had to stop short as soon as they debarked inside the mother ship. The _Solar Pioneer_ was strictly spit-and-polish, all twelve hundred feet of it, and as they came out of the scout craft hangar, there were brisk salutes to be exchanged and data registration books to countersign. General Chisholm, a natty man with brightly burnished swagger stick to match, was personally on hand to greet them.

"Anything of interest to report, Captain?" he snapped.

"Fairly routine, sir." He gave Cramer a silencing glance.

"That's the trouble, Captain, the whole voyage has been. You're the last craft in so we're heading back to Earth now."

Hartley held out the specimen box. "We spotted a good landing asteroid--one side flat as a mesa. Composition fairly similar to granite and mica."

"Nothing else?"

Cramer started to open his mouth but Hartley broke in; "Nothing, sir," he answered.

"The white stuff, sir," said Cramer, holding chin and stomach in.

The General glared directly at him. "You're out of order, Mister."

"Yessi--"

"Then don't say another word." He pulled out a little black book, made a notation and looked at Hartley as if no one else were there. "What's this about?"

"Nothing important, sir. We didn't have the specimen box set cryogenically a few times and when the temperature went up to human normal in the compression cycle chamber little water crystals flew out."

"Well, nothing unusual about that."

"But, sir," Cramer protested, "they couldn't have been just water."

"Silence!" Chisholm roared and two of his staff officers at the bend of a corridor turned to watch the fun. "Consider yourself under Probationary discipline, Mister Cramer. Informality's natural and permissible on a front-line craft like a scouter but chain of command has to be _absolute_ on a dreadnought, you know that."

"I'm very sorry this happened, sir," Hartley apologized.

"When we land he's under your probationary control for the first five days of Earth leave. It's up to you to teach him how to stay in line." He rubbed his brush mustache thoughtfully. "To begin with, though, it might be good to take him along to Analysis Lab just to show him how wrong he probably is even about the specimens. Any objections to that, Mister?"

"No sir!" he said, more hopeful now of exposing Hartley.

"A very good idea, sir," Hartley nodded unexpectedly.

They proceeded two hundred yards toward the stern where the Specimen Analysis Laboratory was located. In one long room there was a row of totally automatic equipment for both deepfreeze and normal temperature breakdowns. Sommers, the chief chemist, set the specimen box in a large, sealed chamber with one transparent side. When the inside temperature matched that within the box itself fine robot fingers unlocked it, withdrew samples and shifted them toward various test compartments. Meanwhile, Chisholm explained about the crystal cloud to the chemist.

"That must have been an exceptional batch," Sommers said, as he studied the response dial. "_Very_ little moisture here. Nothing important to that one way or the other, though. Matter of fact, nothing important to these specimens in general--usual asteroid run."

Hartley impassively considered the shocked expression on Cramer's face.

"Confined to quarters for the rest of the voyage," snapped the General, turning his back on the miscreant.

* * * * *

As Hartley led his ward to scout quarters, he kept shaking his head. "Shouldn't make trouble like that, Cramer. See where it gets you? I can't get ahead in this man's service so how far do you think _you_ can go?"

"But you didn't tell him the most important thing. And the material in the lab didn't give off _any_ whiteness even when its temperature was raised. I don't think you put in any new chips the third time you went out--I think you're trying to hide something!"

"Sure, right here." He pulled a pocket inside out. A few tobacco shreds were clinging to the lining. "Go ahead, tell them more and you'll keep getting into deeper trouble. Nobody will believe you anyway."

They stopped by the Recreation Room entrance to watch a foursome at ping pong. It was a good game, requiring special skill since the artificial gravity of the dreadnought-class craft varied slightly from that of Earth, "Come along," Hartley said finally, "no human company for you until touchdown. When we're on _terra firma_ I'll show you how silly you've been and you can get in on the ground floor for something really big."

Saying nothing, Cramer stepped into his little windowless cabin and listened as his door was locked from the outside. He broke open an emergency ration bar, munching sullenly until the idea came to him that the asteroid experience had to involve some new kind of drug Hartley wanted to keep to himself. He would have to convince the authorities that the matter warranted further investigation, chain of command rules or no rules.

Meanwhile, there was a week of isolation to be filled. There were thirty courses on his shelf to choose from, various things he had planned to learn when the occasion arose. Now there'd be enough time to absorb two of them. He set up the audio-visuals and started on the intensive twenty-four hour regimen that permitted even sleeping hours to be pedagogically fruitful.

A week later, as the _Solar Pioneer_ settled in its magnetic cradle near Paris, he found himself master of _Old Sanskrit_ (his eighth language) and _Luna: History of the First Settlements_. He also found himself once more face to face with the problem of Hartley's devious scheming. A Probationer's badge was given him to wear before the Captain took him off the ship. Hartley accompanied him in a RobotCab toward the tower city twenty miles down the Seine from the ancient arrondissements.

"That powder was a drug," Cramer said as soon as they were alone in the cab. "You think you can turn it to private advantage but the idea's insane--everybody knows the dangers of drugs."

"That's the beauty of it--it isn't a drug." Hartley leaned back and crossed his legs. "There wasn't any after-effect, was there?"

"Doesn't mean a thing--drugs only do their real damage after repeated dosages. Joy can't be this free--you have to pay for it at horribly compounded interest when it comes this easily."

"I'm willing to wager we're going to find this stuff perfect, no side effects at all and--"

"The cry down through the ages, Captain, all drugs have been evil but this newest one is the exception. Until it turns out to be the same narcotic chimera, pure hell."

"--and, Mr. Cramer, it isn't a drug."

He threw up his hands. "A chemical working like that one did isn't a drug!"

"Did you ever hear of a narcotic drug that was alive?"

"Alive? Did you say _alive_?"

"That's what I said," he smirked.

"But then--. You mean it's a germ?"

"Ah, getting smart at last!"

"Then we're infected and you want to corrupt other people the same way."

"Nobody can be infected." Eyes glittering, he watched the first vast metropolitan tower grow ahead of them. "The germs die after a few minutes of body warmth--die and _completely_ disintegrate. I saw it through the eye-socket microscope!"

* * * * *

Cramer felt the first cold horror brush his brow like the substanceless touch of the wings of the angel of death, but he managed to stifle his incipient protest. It was more important than ever now that he find out what was being planned. "That _is_ peculiar. I don't know whether it could be called a drug or not."

"It isn't one. But a name's not important one way or the other except sometimes for legal purposes. The important point's that here's something without any bad side effects because the body utterly destroys it." He pulled a cylinder from his pocket. It was the smallest deepfreeze unit generally available. "At least 100 cc in dormant _pure_ form inside this cryogenic package."

"That's what you were doing on the asteroid, gathering your own private stock!"

"Naturally. I saw that the powder lay in the schists and just scraped the stuff in and sealed it up." He patted the insulating ceramic. "Now we're going to see a friend of mine and, if I'm right, we have five millon dollars in the palm of my hand."

"Why are you telling me this?" Cramer demanded.

"Because it's simpler to have you in on it than on the outside. Not that you'll be able to do anything even if you remain so naively Boy Scoutish about it. Who's going to believe your story at this stage of the game? There's an even better reason why you'll keep quiet, though, but I won't tell you that until later."

Cramer was still considering how he might snatch the capsule away when the Captain dropped it back into a self-locking pocket of his suit. The cab had stopped before the sleekest tower on Boulevard Radial. Hartley jumped out, waving for Cramer to follow.

The elevator had several other people in it, all of whom eyed the Probationary badge with distaste. Any attempt to subdue Hartley would receive no support from these super-respectables.

The two of them got off at the eighty-seventh floor and were ushered into a vast, luxuriously-decorated chamber. About a dozen men and women were scattered about the room, boredly watching a color symphony unfold on one wall. They were all dressed in the sort of highest fashion glitter which evoked as much disgust as amusement among most space workers. But Hartley was obviously not typical of his breed; he enjoyed coming among these people, livening up as soon as he saw them.

A tall, blonde man came slowly toward them, wearily rejoicing. "So glad to see you, Hartley. Ah, a Probationary in tow--well, any Probationary is a fellow friend in the kingdom of chaos."

Hartley perfunctorily introduced them, then glanced around. "Drinking nectar?"

"It kills time, can't do any damage and--I know what you're going to say," he grinned, "it's a bore!"

"Well, it is, you should be on to something stronger."

"You gone space gaga?"

"Not at all, Neilson."

"Who would bother with what isn't safe? Everyone knows down to the last nerve tremor the consequences of really good stimulants. We've seen it, smella- and feela-visioned it through social indoctrination procedures to the point where no one would dare. All we can do is stick to the legally permissible alkaloid-heightened caffein derivatives."

"Suppose I told you there is something new, something perfect _and_ safe?"

"I'd say gaga again, sheer lunacy!"

"All right, just listen." He recounted their experiences on the asteroid and, despite himself, Neilson began to show real interest.

"And you have a capsule?"

"Yes, want to try a fleck? That's all you need, I think."

"Oh no!" Neilson exclaimed. "Not until I've run the tests."

"Well, that's what I'm here for. You're a biochemist, you have all the equipment."

* * * * *

Cramer looked disdainfully at the man. The type was common enough--probably knew next to nothing about his specialty. But--and this was what made it doubly revolting--he didn't have to know in order to be an expert. Good equipment could do _all_ the work in most cases.

Neilson waved languidly toward his other guests, mumbling, "See you shortly," and let the pair through a series of golden rooms to his Analyzer Laboratory. There he took the capsule from Hartley and placed it in a cryogenic tester similar to the one aboard the _Solar Pioneer_. After temperature adjustments were made, tiny filament hands began lifting out specimen flecks and shifting them to various test sections.

"Odd stuff," murmured Neilson as he surveyed the preliminary sheet punched out by the reporting machine. "It's a living organism and--and it's _silicon_-based! That's a real weird one. Its biological action in the human body wouldn't be like any narcotic, completely new. Can't read the next stuff--ah, here's the translation--heightened hormone discharges, not one of which is detrimental. Metabolic cycle of bacteria somewhere between three and four hours."