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."