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."