_Once he had been a tall, straight spaceman, free as the
galaxies. Now Joel Latham was a tsith-addict, a beach-comber
at Venusport. Maybe he'd get one last chance...._
* * * * *
His sleep-drugged mind was slow to respond. He was lying face down, he
knew that. And he ought to get up. If he didn't get up he would drown.
Something hot and heavy, like a huge hand, was pressing him deeper
into the brackish mire. He pondered. Perhaps it were better to drown.
For a moment he allowed himself the luxury of the thought, then
decided against it. Plenty of time later for drowning. First there was
something he had to do!
So it was that Joel Latham, Earthman, age thirty, occupation space
drifter, avocation tsith drinker, awakened on this most momentous of
mornings.
Moaning in protest, he slowly rolled himself over. The sun slapped him
hard against the eyes. He blinked against the pain and saw that he was
still in Venusport; rather he was at the edge of the swamp near the
sprawling compound. Overhead the ionic field was aglow, humming
softly, beating back the obscurant mists.
He managed to stand up. Some of the pallid-faced gweels, out in the
swamp, stopped their work to stare at him. Latham grimaced. Every
fiber of him, especially his brain, seemed to have been squeezed dry.
Then it came. He felt it coming and there was nothing he could do to
stop it. The hammering nausea took him suddenly about the middle,
bending him double.
"I'm an Earthman," Joel Latham groaned aloud. That was invariably the
first reaction of the tsith hound, at least with Terrestrials who
indulged in the deadly stuff; a piteous protest half in defiance, half
in despair. The nausea reached up through his stomach, through his
chest and into his throat. It became more than nausea. It grew thorns
that stabbed inwardly, jagged edges that sawed away at his brain with
a terrible need. He fell forward on hands and knees ... and that's
when he saw the little Martian who crouched a few feet away, watching
him.
"I went through mine a few minutes ago," the Martian said in a
monotone. "Yours will go away presently."
"I know ... it will. Been through this ... before."
"You obviously have. Many times."
Many times was an understatement, Latham thought wretchedly. But this
was one of the worst ones, even worse than the time on Callisto.
Thinking about it didn't help.
He turned his gaze back to the Martian. That didn't help either.
Most Martians are lean and brown and ugly. This one was that, and
more. What had once been clothes were tattered and spattered with
swamp mud. The hair was a wisp, the teeth only a memory. The skin was
tight and leathery across the bony structure of the face, the eyes
distended and yellow, the unmistakable sign of a tsith hound.