Part 3

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.

THE END