"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