"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."