"That's when the creatures will get me," he said, almost with
satisfaction. "I may kill one or two of them, although the way I feel
toward everything, I hate to kill anything at all. But you know,
sweetheart, that there are more than a dozen of them altogether, and
it's clumsy shooting in a spacesuit at beasts which move as swiftly as
they do."
"And if you don't succeed in fixing what's wrong, if they get you--"
She broke down suddenly and began to cry.
He looked at her with compassion, and smoothed her hair. And yet, under
the influence of the drug, he enjoyed even her crying. It was, as he
never tired of repeating to himself and to her a wonderful drug. Under
its spell, a man--or a woman--could really enjoy life.
Tonight she would begin to enjoy life along with him.
* * * * *
Their chronometer functioned perfectly, and they still regulated their
living habits by it, using Greenwich Earth time. At seven in the
evening they sat down to a fine meal. Knowing that tomorrow they might
die, Louise had decided that tonight they would eat and drink as well
as they could, and she had selected a Christmas special. She had merely
to pull a lever, and the food had slid into the oven, to be cooked at
once by an intense beam of high-frequency radiation. Jim himself had
chosen the wine and the brandy--one of the peculiarities of the marak
was that it did not affect the actual enjoyment of alcoholic drinks in
the slightest, and one of the sights of the Solar System was to see an
addict who was also drunk.
But it was a rare sight, for the marak itself created such a pervading
sensation of well-being that it often acted as a cure for alcoholism.
Once an alcoholic had experienced its effect, he had no need to get
drunk to forget his troubles. He enjoyed his troubles instead, and
drank the alcohol for its own sake, for its ability to provide a
slightly different sensation, and not for its ability to release him
from an unhappy world.
So tonight Palmer drank moderately, taking just enough, as it seemed
to him, to stimulate his brain. And he did what he now realized he
should have done long ago. Unobserved, he placed a tablet of marak in
his own wineglass and one in Louise's. The slight bitterness of taste
would be hardly perceptible. And after that Louise would be an addict
too.
That was the way the marak worked. There was nothing mysterious about
the craving. It was simply that once you had experienced how delightful
it was, you wouldn't do without it.
The tablet he had taken that morning was losing its effect, but he felt
so pleased at what he was doing that he didn't mind even that. For the
next half hour he would enjoy himself simply by looking at Louise, and
thinking that now at last they would be united again, no longer kept
apart by her silly ideas about doing something to save themselves. And
then the drug would take effect, and they would feel themselves lifted
to the stars together, never to come down to this substitute for Earth
again until the beam failed, and they went out together to make the
repairs, and the shadows closed in on them.
He had made sure that Louise had her back to him when he dropped the
tablet into her glass, and he saw that she suspected nothing. She drank
her wine, he noticed, without even commenting on the taste. He felt a
sudden impulse to kiss her, and, somewhat to her surprise, he did so.
Then he sat down again and went on with the dinner.
He waited.
An hour later he knew that he had made her happy. She was laughing as
she hadn't laughed for a long time. She laughed at the humorous things
he said, at the flattering way he raised his glass to her, even at what
she saw through the window. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was
laughing at nothing at all.
He tried to think of how he had reacted the first time he had taken
the drug. He hadn't been quite so aggressively cheerful, not quite
so--hysterical. But then, the drug didn't have exactly the same effect
on everyone. She wasn't as well balanced as he had been. The important
thing was that she was happy.
Curiously enough, he himself wasn't happy at all.
It took about five seconds for the thought to become clear to him,
five seconds in which he passed from dull amazement to an enraged and
horrified comprehension. He sprang to his feet, overturning the table
at which they still sat. And he saw that she wasn't surprised at all,
that she still stared at him with a secret satisfaction.
"You've cured me!" he cried. "You've fed me the antidote!"
And he began to curse. He remembered the other time she had tried it,
the time when he had been on the alert, and had easily detected the
strange metallic taste of the stuff. He had spat it out, and under the
influence of the drug from which she had hoped to save him, he had
laughed at her.
Now he was unable to laugh. He had been so intent on feeding the tablet
to her that he had forgotten to guard himself, and he had been caught.
He was normal now--her idea of being normal--and he would never again
know the wonderful feeling the drug gave. He began to realize his
situation on this horrible lonely asteroid. He cast a glance at the
window and at what must be waiting outside, and it was his turn to
shudder.
He noticed that she was still smiling.