Read Ebook: The happiness rock by Teichner Albert Adragna Robert Illustrator

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Ebook has 269 lines and 12816 words, and 6 pages

"Yes but--"

"No buts, my young friend. I'll be on the line. Anything goes wrong, you turn on the winch and I'll be wrenched right back in."

"We'll be orbiting into sunlight and--"

"Forget it, I'll be back on time. There are only two universal laws, son--get happy and stay happy." He shut the door, put on his suit and ordered a compression recycling. As soon as it was completed, he jetted himself through the escape hatch.

Again he was back very quickly but this time, as soon as the helmet came off, he whipped out a specimen slide from an inner pocket, waved it gaily through the talc cloud and slipped the slide into a portable pocket microscope. He gripped the scope in his eye like a monocle and stood spellbound for five minutes until with a shout of joy he let the little electronic cylinder drop into his hand. "I'm going back out," he said.

"But, Captain Hartley, you'll get caught on the heating surface."

"Open the cockpit door!" As soon as he came in, he sat down at the controls and lifted the craft off. "See, Cramer, I can think straight, too, under the influence. You were right this time and I've listened."

Then he switched to hover.

"Of course," Hartley grinned. "After all, I made the same mistake you did. Twice I've let the temperature of the specimen box dekelvinise!"

Despite his continuing sense of well-being, Cramer felt uneasy, but there was nothing he could put his finger on so he didn't protest. Anyway, he could see Hartley would not be swayed now from whatever was his strange purpose.

A few hours later they settled back on the asteroid and the Captain went out once more. Cramer tried to watch what he was doing but Hartley was too huddled over the fault he was working for much to be seen. An hour later he came back in, and made some fix notations in his log book as soon as his suit decompressed.

"But I know that's standard, Captain, I learned it the first month at the academy."

"Just wanted to make sure you remembered. How do you feel, Will?"

"Perfect."

"Anything of interest to report, Captain?" he snapped.

"Fairly routine, sir." He gave Cramer a silencing glance.

"That's the trouble, Captain, the whole voyage has been. You're the last craft in so we're heading back to Earth now."

Hartley held out the specimen box. "We spotted a good landing asteroid--one side flat as a mesa. Composition fairly similar to granite and mica."

"Nothing else?"

Cramer started to open his mouth but Hartley broke in; "Nothing, sir," he answered.

"The white stuff, sir," said Cramer, holding chin and stomach in.

The General glared directly at him. "You're out of order, Mister."

"Yessi--"

"Then don't say another word." He pulled out a little black book, made a notation and looked at Hartley as if no one else were there. "What's this about?"

"Nothing important, sir. We didn't have the specimen box set cryogenically a few times and when the temperature went up to human normal in the compression cycle chamber little water crystals flew out."

"Well, nothing unusual about that."

"But, sir," Cramer protested, "they couldn't have been just water."

"I'm very sorry this happened, sir," Hartley apologized.

"When we land he's under your probationary control for the first five days of Earth leave. It's up to you to teach him how to stay in line." He rubbed his brush mustache thoughtfully. "To begin with, though, it might be good to take him along to Analysis Lab just to show him how wrong he probably is even about the specimens. Any objections to that, Mister?"

"No sir!" he said, more hopeful now of exposing Hartley.

"A very good idea, sir," Hartley nodded unexpectedly.

They proceeded two hundred yards toward the stern where the Specimen Analysis Laboratory was located. In one long room there was a row of totally automatic equipment for both deepfreeze and normal temperature breakdowns. Sommers, the chief chemist, set the specimen box in a large, sealed chamber with one transparent side. When the inside temperature matched that within the box itself fine robot fingers unlocked it, withdrew samples and shifted them toward various test compartments. Meanwhile, Chisholm explained about the crystal cloud to the chemist.

Hartley impassively considered the shocked expression on Cramer's face.

"Confined to quarters for the rest of the voyage," snapped the General, turning his back on the miscreant.

"Sure, right here." He pulled a pocket inside out. A few tobacco shreds were clinging to the lining. "Go ahead, tell them more and you'll keep getting into deeper trouble. Nobody will believe you anyway."

Saying nothing, Cramer stepped into his little windowless cabin and listened as his door was locked from the outside. He broke open an emergency ration bar, munching sullenly until the idea came to him that the asteroid experience had to involve some new kind of drug Hartley wanted to keep to himself. He would have to convince the authorities that the matter warranted further investigation, chain of command rules or no rules.

Meanwhile, there was a week of isolation to be filled. There were thirty courses on his shelf to choose from, various things he had planned to learn when the occasion arose. Now there'd be enough time to absorb two of them. He set up the audio-visuals and started on the intensive twenty-four hour regimen that permitted even sleeping hours to be pedagogically fruitful.

"That powder was a drug," Cramer said as soon as they were alone in the cab. "You think you can turn it to private advantage but the idea's insane--everybody knows the dangers of drugs."

"That's the beauty of it--it isn't a drug." Hartley leaned back and crossed his legs. "There wasn't any after-effect, was there?"

"Doesn't mean a thing--drugs only do their real damage after repeated dosages. Joy can't be this free--you have to pay for it at horribly compounded interest when it comes this easily."

"I'm willing to wager we're going to find this stuff perfect, no side effects at all and--"

"The cry down through the ages, Captain, all drugs have been evil but this newest one is the exception. Until it turns out to be the same narcotic chimera, pure hell."

"--and, Mr. Cramer, it isn't a drug."

He threw up his hands. "A chemical working like that one did isn't a drug!"

"Did you ever hear of a narcotic drug that was alive?"

"That's what I said," he smirked.

"But then--. You mean it's a germ?"

"Ah, getting smart at last!"

"Then we're infected and you want to corrupt other people the same way."

"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."

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