"The desert is slow ... but not unkind. There will be many things to
think on as you walk." Hanu leaned on his spear, regarding the sunken
wreck sitting before him. "Our old men go forth in the evening when
they no longer care to live. Our wicked pass from us across the sand,
for we do not kill. There is peace there ... and rest. What else, we do
not know. They never return."
A shudder passed over the beachcomber. Slowly he rose to his feet.
"No," he admitted, staring with a grudging, affectionate admiration at
the grey one. "You do not kill." Abruptly he offered his hand. "Before
I go?"
Hanu smiled, pulling his whisker. "You will go? The woman is already
gone and we will forget her like yesterday's tide, but we shall not
forget the man who was with us that far-off day. We shall not forget."
The pink-palmed, five-fingered hand clasped Thorne's. "Forget us not,
friend Thorne."
"I won't, Hanu. Goodby ... and thanks. It's all I can leave you, friend,
but I know it counts, even from a space-rat like myself." Abruptly he
wheeled and trudged away up the slope toward the higher trees back of
the beach. He did not look back, even when Hanu's spear plunged into
the sand twenty feet ahead and the grieving Martian wailed a piercing
call of farewell.
Taking the gift, Thorne staggered wearily on. Trees rose and fell about
him, rude, stubby giants with the fat, pulpy stems designed to catch
and store the precious polar waters melting before the first summer
sun. The ridge passed and the rolling, bushy foothills along the coast
led him endlessly down through the salt marshes where strange shapes
moved and stirred at sight of the alien intruder. Then the arid hills
beyond and, at last, cresting a bush-straggled rise, Thorne saw before
him the first dun sweep of the vast inland deserts that have laid Mars
waste and brought low a proud civilization.
He slept there that first night, hollowing a little scoop of reddish
sand for his ragged hip and a mound for his neck. For a time, after the
first quick darkness, he lay watching Mars' rolling moons wheel across
the horizon, silvering all the desolation and shimmering into a clear,
alien beauty the ruin time had brought.
Hanu, the chief, had been right. There were thoughts. But gradually the
bitterness and ache of defeat sank away on a flood-tide of weariness
and Thorne slept beneath the Martian moons.
* * * * *
An inquisitive sand-lizard, poking at his spear with its horny nose,
awoke him before dawn. Not hungry enough to destroy the little
monstrosity, Thorne shooed it away and scrambled up. There was a
thirst inside him blurring his vision ... but not for the water he was
abandoning. Again, as so often in the recent past, he would have sold
what remained of his soul for a bottle of the dreadful, numbing t'ang.
But here one was as remote as the other. He gritted his teeth and moved
slowly down the ridge toward the distant south.
Hour after hour plodded wearily on as the dull-eyed Earthling lurched
in a slow, dreadful stride farther and farther into the blazing Martian
desert. The hot sunlight glanced and blazed in glittering splendor from
his keen spearblade, slung across his back with a strip torn from his
ragged tunic. It scorched fiercely and persistently at the hat he had
made from a withered desert plant's dun leaf. It burned the reddening
sands to blister the man's half-bare soles through the torn pilot's
boots. It crisped the thin atmosphere to nostril-tingling flame....
From time to time he came on bushes, tiny, low-squatting bushes with
yellow pads for leaves and deadly stings for thorns. Their flesh was
death. Twice he passed a thin-stalked t'ang bush, hiding in the lee of
some crested dune, flaunting its crimson and black fruit at the weary,
shuddering traveler. There, too, was death. Thorne grinned. And what
else but the slower death and decay brewed from these devil-berries
drove him thus hopeless into the wastes to be at peace and die?
The second day he found a body. Perhaps one of the old men of Hanu's
wise, grave tribe, setting out into the sunset like Ulysses to seek one
last wonder before the long night overtook him. Perhaps a condemned
man sent gravely forth to wander and seek repentance before suffering
his natural penalty. Thorne could not tell. It was a skeleton by now.
A polished spear lay across the arching ribs and the bony hands were
clasped upon it in a strange gesture of resignation, as though the man
had laid himself down at last to rest.
He found two more such skeletons before night. The spear of one lay
through the broken ribs, and he shuddered. The man had not waited.
Although his body, numbed and ravaged by the fires of t'ang, required
little now to sustain its life, it was weakening fast and a deeper
lethargy was creeping over him. He wondered when it would be that he,
too, must lie down at last, folding his hands on his breast, and watch
the sun go down or rise for the last time. Well, it would find him
ready.
For Hanu had been right and all his tribesmen in their strange,
funereal rites had known well what they had been about. The great,
eternal waste of rolling sand and barren rock, the solemn passing of
the ageless sun and silent moons had borne down upon Thorne until from
their unhurried peace had been born a quieter peace within his breast.
Hunger and thirst, numbed by the strain of the t'ang in his system,
faded almost unnoticed into a lethargy. Even the screaming need of the
drugging liquid which had tortured him at first was fading.
Soon there would be nothing left but the silent golden sun, the ruddy
sands ... and another quiet skeleton watching the brassy sky with dark,
unseeing eyes of bone. Thorne cracked his tortured lips in a grin. At
least it would not be in a gutter of Vulhan City or face down in the
flooding Nergal tide, a shoaling hulk....
Slowly he moved on through the night. He had lost track of how many
nights. It was cooler so. He watched Phobos rise in cool splendor
far across the sands, a thin black streak standing upright across her
shining disk. For a moment he stared in dull, uncomprehending wonder,
then bent his head and plodded quietly onward.
Why he walked he did not know, for he had long ceased to question this
strange, ultimate Odyssey on which he had embarked. He only knew he
must go on and on, the one unreasoning urge linking him to the old,
proud heritage of the pioneers of trail and sea and space. And for such
as he there was no turning back....
When he tripped upon a rotted balk of timber and pitched headlong to
the sand he did not know. For a moment he lay there, unmoving. Then,
with a sigh, he attempted to rise, but exhaustion swept over his
relaxed body in a shuddering flood and he sank back, asleep almost
before he touched the sand.
It was the growing heat of the sun that awakened him, well past
mid-day. Dull, lack-lustre eyes opened and stared unseeingly upward.
Grimy, wasted hands twitched weakly upon the sand. A faint breath like
a sigh crept between the cracked and swollen lips.
* * * * *
It was minutes later, as he instinctively groped for his friend's spear
to lay across his chest as had those others ere they died, that Thorne
came to realize he could not see the sun. Hot, dusty radiations danced
about over his head, and glimmering motes hung in the shadowy depths
beyond his weakened vision, but somehow, faintly, the realization of
shadow crept over his worn-out consciousness. With the realization came
a slowly growing perception of light as he focused his eyes upon the
tapering, unbelievable mass of the gigantic monolith looming over him.
Three thousand feet it leaped into the Martian sky, a ragged, broken
tower of grey-white stone, turreted with fantastic decay, eroded and
pitted by the storms and dust of twice ten thousand years.
He turned his head. Beyond it loomed another, only slightly less
massive, but far more eroded. Here and there, standing in a rough
semi-circle, other towers reared their broken heads into the brassy
bowl of the sky, mere shattered heaps of dusty rubble.
Slowly Thorne sat up. He was huddled at the base of the tallest
monument atop a sloping pile of broken sand and shards drifting down
from the decaying walls. Beneath him long gray shadows of what had once
been piers crept out into a low, extensive basin of sand, broken here
and there by heaped mounds jagged with age-greyed timber.
"Ships!" he whispered. "By all the Krue of Mars, ships!"
He dragged himself upright. A glance behind him showed him the futility
of hope. The tremendous edifice at whose base he had fallen had ages
since crumbled within itself until, collapsing inward, it had fused
into one solid pillar of worn masonry and powdered sand. The others
were even less preserved, but wrecked, shattered, decaying as they
were, there remained about their hoary turrets a splendor so great
he instinctively straightened his weary form. In the presence of so
magnificent a declaration by man, he took on a new dignity worthy of
their unyielding might.
* * * * *
Here, then, lay one of those ancient citadels of a long-gone race,
the ancestors of the silent, peaceful Martians of today. A teeming
metropolis of the North, it had shrunk and perished with the death of
the drying seas whose disappearance had all but ruined the once-green
planet, leaving up the blowing sands its gigantic bones in grisly
memory of what once had been. And here, among these empty monoliths,
Thorne knew at last he had come to the end of the spaceman's trail. He
would go no farther.
Well, for such as he it should not be unwelcome. He took his hand from
the powdery wall and weakly shook his head. It was a tedious business,
this dying.
What it was that drew him out of the shadow and down the slope he never
knew. Perhaps it was the numb indifference of despair, perhaps only the
last, momentary flicker of that indomitable curiosity which had drawn
the Earthman adventuring across the world and now flings it light-years
wide over the Solar System. It served, nevertheless, to draw him
wearily down from the rubble beneath the gigantic tower into the low
basin which had been the tight harbor of this long-gone city of Mars.
Automatically he trudged onward, to bring up presently before one of
the low mounds dotting the harbor floor.
It had been a ship, he knew. What forgotten wood made up its mouldering
bones to outlast the crumbling stone of its home port he did not know,
nor greatly care. There had been so many great and wonderful things on
Mars forgotten long since by the sad, wistful remnants of her dying
peoples.
Lean, broken ribs thrust upward rudely through the golden sands,
wooden-pegged planks still clinging forlornly to their splintered
shafts. There had been metal, too ... copper, bronze, iron bolts,
and silver trim on the poop. All had long since been looted by the
wandering desert tribes who wandered furtively through these tremendous
monuments of their forgotten past.
From mound to mound Thorne trudged with a weary indifference. As well
to die thus on his feet as face up in the sun. For die he must. Water
there was none, and the only vegetation an occasional low death-bush
with utter agony buried in its flat, leprous leaf-pads. A cluster
of brilliant t'ang sprays glittered savagely in the shady lee of a
shattered wreck, and Thorne shuddered.
Here, too, death crept in wait, a death already fastened fang-deep in
his sodden, pain-wracked body from a score of dingy Vulhan t'ang-hells.
But what odds? The death from those dark and crimson fruits was quick
and terrible, perhaps, but only quicker than the fate already lying in
his veins. Let there be an end, even to this aimless wandering.
Slowly Thorne walked up to the bush. There were many, growing in
strange luxuriance along the dust-worn flanks of an ugly wreck
half-buried in the sand. Other wrecks flanked it, three of them, lean,
wicked skeletons of ancient Martian fighting ships, one with her broken
prow yet buried in the freighter's bulging side. He touched the nearest
plank and it drifted into powdered dust beneath his fingers, leaving a
round hole in the grey wall. Again he put his hand through the ship's
side. Another hole was puffed out as cleanly as by a dis-ray.
Curiosity stirred in him once more. Picking up a stone, he broke open
the wreck's side, bring down the entire flank in an almost soundless
crash of powdering timbers and dissolving decks. The hold, pierced upon
the farther side by the ram of the dead warship which had undoubtedly
sunk the two of them, lay open to the sunlight, barred by the ragged
shadows of the broken stern works.
"Jars," muttered Thorne. The hold had been packed to the deck with fat,
yet not ungraceful clay jars eight feet high and three wide. He lurched
through the opening he had made.
"Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," he mumbled. Maxfield Parrish jars,
Oriental and sinister enough to have held a pair of the ancient robber
band. He patted one, and weak though the blow was, the jar dissolved
into drifting mist.
Thorne stared.
Preserving the graceful shape of the vanished jar, a beautiful block
of some golden amber substance stood twinkling among its fellows. He
pounded another jar. It, too, shuddered into misty dust, leaving its
petrified contents, blazing like tawny fire in the Martian sun. Down
the long row Thorne went, poking and kicking. Jar after jar dissolved,
leaving a shimmering stack of solid amber blocks shaped with inhuman
perfection to the mound of the clay in which for countless forgotten
centuries they had been petrifying beneath the dying seas and deserts.
Incredibly hard and smoother than glass, their sleek flanks ripped and
gleamed, shimmering in the bars of sunlight slanting down through the
rotted deck. But other than these, the ship lay bare and lifeless.
"Frozen oil," mumbled Thorne, turning away at last. Even had he been
able to melt and eat the stuff, the thought of prolonging life had
become insupportable. Weakly he stumbled toward the broken wall he had
pushed in to enter. Here there was naught for him, but beyond, in the
shadows, lay the deadly t'ang and its berries. Well, it had begun this
ghastly Odyssey and it was fitting it should end it in the only way it
could be ended.
He groped in the shadows for his spear. Lifting it, he thrust a plank
into drifting dissolution, clearing a way out. For a moment, staring
at the sunlight beyond the opening, he did not see. Then his eyes
were drawn to the blade of his spear as it sagged in his lax grasp,
for, resting on the sand within the ship's overcast, it gleamed with
a strange radiance. White fire blazed intermittently along its wide,
polished blade.
* * * * *
Thorne frowned. He lifted the blade. In the sunlight the light dancing
on his spear became white-hot, intolerable. He thrust it back into
the shadows where a broken bit of deck overhung the ruined hold. A
shattering blaze of cold, blue-white light blasted along the hammered
steel, casting its eery radiance upon Thorne's bearded, dusty face in
a wild dance of light and dark. It gleamed madly in his mad, staring
eyes. It shook like flame in his trembling hands, then fell like a
shooting star upon the dusty sands as the weapon sagged from his
relaxing grip. Slowly Thorne pivoted, his wild eyes fixed in awed amaze
upon the rows and heaps of amber jars lying in such glowing luster
among the fallen wreckage of the deck he had shattered. Sunlight ran
and danced mockingly along their smooth flanks, sparkled and blazed
with a fierce glow upon curve and highlight. He dropped his eyes to the
fallen spear, blazing like a meteor in the dusk, half-buried in the
sand, then lifted them again to the fabulous wealth lying before him.
"Vadirrian oil!" he whispered, choking.
Steel-hard, imperishable, the few fragments of the ancient oil of the
Vadirrian tree which had been such a common article of commerce in
the olden days commanded today a price so astronomical men were made
wealthy for life through the discovery of a mere pinhead scrap or
drifting grain. Radio-activated through the ages by the action of Mar's
inner core, it had come to mean salvation in scores of the terrible new
plagues introduced among the planets by the advent of space-travel.
There were perhaps no more than six to eight ounces in the hospitals of
the entire Universe at the present time, worth over three hundred and
sixty billion credits. Here, in perfect condition, lay sixty tons.
He had come into the desert seeking death and the release it brought;
he had found fortune inestimable. The irony of his plight brought a
wry, bitter smile to his cracked lips, for, after all, he could hardly
be said to have been cheated of his earlier aim. Fortune or none,
death sat grinning at him from the broken timbers of the ancient ship,
gleaming from the petrified oil still in its original shape from jars
now dust and less than dust. Without food or water, he stood already
dead and nothing here in the shadows could save him from the inexorable
end he had so persistently sought.
Thorne stumbled from the freighter and stood once more in the hot,
bright Martian sunlight. The giant tower of the deserted city loomed
behind him, but he did not look that way. He stared a moment at the
blade of his spear, faintly gleaming even in this bright glare, then
all around him at the rolling desolation which had once been the proud,
rich harbor of the great city now mouldering in silence along the
powdered quays behind him. There was no life.
Blindly he moved away, scuffing through the sand. The excitement of
his find wore down and the griping pangs of torment again seized and
wrenched at him. Yet it was not with the same aimless shamble with
which he had entered the sunken harbor bowl that he left it, but,
instinctively, he found himself trying to follow his own plainly marked
trail across the shallow sand hills. He might make it.
He did not, of course. Weakened and broken by his long, waterless march
into the desert, sapped by his own excesses, he followed his trail for
mile after mile until it blurred and spun before his eyes and melted
at last into one blinding haze of flaming Martian heat. The trail
vanished, though he did not know he had wandered from it. Presently he
knew nothing but that, somehow, he must keep going on and on. Why, he
could no longer remember, but the dim, instinctive urge was there and
served to motivate him when he would have fallen to die with the others
over whose mummies he more than once stumbled.
The hunger was the worst. The terrible ravages of t'ang had somewhat
blunted his need for liquids, but he still could starve. Yet here and
there upon his way he chanced on little bushes and clumps of plants,
thick-leaved, leprous, yellow and blue and horrid purple, essence of
poisonous death to all things Terrestrial or Martian.
Here and there, also, he encountered dried mummies or the skeletons of
such weird Martian life as had succumbed to hunger and tasted the spiny
death blooming across the desert sands. And there were t'ang bushes,
heavy with the bright red and purple berries whose fermented juice had
wrought him such deadly havoc. Thorne stared dully, conscious of the
fitness of things which set these horrors blooming only in such fatal
wastelands.
He moved on and on, his eyes aching to the ceaseless play and
counterplay of mirages and kindred phantoms that swept the changing
landscapes like magic lanterns. Again and again he found himself
walking into the streets of a dead city, or perhaps one peopled by
living beings. But even as his feet touched the cobbled walks the
phantom dissolved and he plunged into a marsh that vanished as quickly
when he bent to taste the water splashing about his torn feet. It was
the final blow and he went down heavily and lay sprawled there on the
powdery, dusty slope where no marsh had lain for ten thousand years.
* * * * *
An hour later he wearily opened his eyes. The sun was lower, but the
heat and pain had not lessened perceptibly. A hundred feet away a
little copse of t'ang bushes flowered gracefully in thin sprays of twig
and serried little fruit arching up and out like frozen fountains of
death. Thick-leaved, monstrous cactus plants crouched in the scanty
shade flung by the taller t'angs. Cruel rows of gleaming spines thrust
outward belligerently, as though there were creatures even on waterless
Mars mad enough to rend and tear their poisonous flesh for the pitiful
moisture distilled from her lean breast. He grinned weakly and began
crawling forward. Mirages, at least, need no longer haunt his wheeling
brain.
He ate the plants. Stripping the t'ang bushes of their scarlet,
bursting rows, he gobbled down the berries like peanuts. It no longer
mattered that death salted the repast. But here, deep in the desert,
the berries were dry and flat, insufficient for his need. Recklessly
he tore open the broad-leaved plants at his feet, slicing and ripping
their hideous flesh with his spear, and gulping great chunks of the
dripping pulp as avidly as though he ate in silken Kyra, the pleasure
dome on Io. No plant escaped him.
He destroyed them all, eating what he would of their softer hearts.
When he had wiped out the little group, he lurched onward to another,
and another, sampling each and devouring many to their very roots.
Although he had eaten enough pulped death to destroy a city, the
counter-action of varying poisons neutralized each other for a while,
but he could not go on forever.
Within an hour, as he stumbled on, revived for the moment by this foul
repast, the pains struck him down as though by lightning, stiffening
his weakened body from head to toe in a fiery spasm. A great ball of
flame burst in his belly and spread scintillating all through his
frame until he screamed aloud and made no sound in the doing, until he
twitched and writhed no more, until he lay at last in the cooler shades
of night ... a limp, white thing across an ancient dune of Martian
sand, one more thing for the quiet, dreaming desert to claim and softly
fold away in her drifting dust with other remnants of the past.
* * * * *
But Geoffrey Thorne was not of the past. That he was of the present,
and not good, he became painfully aware some time later. There was a
low humming, drumming roar in his ears, and the bed on which he lay
vibrated softly. He did not open his eyes. Here was another mirage, and
a cruel one. He had not thought to die dreaming of the old days when
Geoffrey Thorne was among the great ones of the space-world. He lay in
a rocket bunk--and the ship was in motion.
A hard, rough hand shook his shoulder. "Ye're awake, lad." The voice,
like the hand, was hard, yet not unkind. It was strangely familiar and
he opened his eyes. The grizzled face staring down at him broke into a
short, choppy smile. "Easy lad, easy. Just lie still."
"Captain Fraser!" Thorne mumbled. "Joy Fraser ... how ... am I on your
ship?"
"Sure, sure, Thorne." Fraser patted his shoulder. "Ye're on the
_Moonfire_, an hour out of Vulhan City. I'll get ye to a hospital quick
as I can."
"Hospital? What hospital? I feel--ghaaaa!" Thorne fell back heavily,
gagging, as he remembered the incredible miscellany he had been gnawing
just before it had struck him down in agony. Death-agony, he had
thought, but yet--apparently....
"Ye're ghostly, lad," rumbled the long-faced Scotchman, pushing down
the impatient derelict. "Were ye lost long in the sand?"
"I don't know. A long time ... a long ... time...." Thorne lay still
for a while, his hand over his eyes.
There was a strange, puzzled look in Fraser's eyes as he watched the
man who had once been his friend. Jeff Thorne had been among the best
of five worlds, and now....
"Could I get ye anything, lad?" he asked, gently. The other shook his
head.
"I feel all right," he said, finally. "Dead-tired, but all right."
"Pumped water into ye," Fraser grinned. "Soaked ye in it. Ye lay in ma
bath near five hours, out and all. Does wonders up here."
"You must have worked miracles, Joy," acknowledged Thorne, wonderingly.
"What did you do? I know I was dying."
The rocket captain looked down, flushing miserably. He picked at a
fleck on his purple tunic.
"Well, lad, you know ... we hear things in the trade. I knew ... you
drank t'ang. So I remembered I had a bottle. Stuff in the armory for
trading, ye remember. You had half a glass."
Thorne smiled wryly. "Yes? Thanks, Fraser. You took a risk, dispensing
the stuff without a permit, but the patient--" His eyes widened and he
came suddenly to his elbow, disregarding Fraser's attempt to thrust him
down in the bunk again. "Half a glass, you said?"
"Sure, lad. That's all." He looked anxiously at the bearded derelict.
"Ye don't mean it was too much?"
"No, no, nothing like that," Thorne waved aside the other's troubled
protest, his brows knitting. He had had more than that before, but even
to stronger men than himself such a dose meant stunned, broken stupor
that might well last from two to four days. Yet he felt nothing.
"Fraser, when you found me, where was I?"
"Out cold on a sand-hill, lad. O'Leary spotted you from the engine room
as we sailed by. Ye had a Martian spear ... and something else I want
to talk to you about later."
Thorne did not catch the other's meaning, but pressed on. "There was no
city near?"
"City!" Fraser stared. "Ye mean ... oh, ye mean a deserted city, eh?
No, there was no city. No cities in those parts to my knowledge. Mirage
country, ye know, lad. One o' them?"
"Could you remember--were there plants near me--Martian desert plants
like cactus--maybe t'ang bushes?"
"Can't say, Thorne. None right near ye, anyhow. Just clear sand. Why?"
"Could you find the spot again?"
"Sure. Right in the log. Aimin' to go back?"
"Perhaps ... some day. But you don't understand, Joy. Those plants ...
I had been eating them."
Fraser started back in horror, coming to his feet as his stool
clattered across the smooth steel floor. "But my Lord, man ... them
things is fatal! One nibble and ye're a cooked goose!"
"I know. I've seen men who died that way, and I wanted to go out as
quickly. I couldn't take it any more. But I ate everything--all colors
and all the tastes you could find in your foulest nightmares. I even
ate the t'ang berries. Am _I_ dead?"
"Lord knows why you ain't, lad!"
"I know I ate the things, Joy. But that's not what I meant. Perhaps the
things counteracted themselves in me, I ate so many. I meant the t'ang."
"You--it didn't affect you!" Fraser eyed his patient in growing
astonishment. There were no indications Thorne had sopped up a heavy
dose of the lethal drug.
"No. I feel nothing. Just like I'd had a good sleep, though I'm still
worn out and weak. Dead tired and hungry, but I have no thirst. And my
craving for the stuff is classic, Joy."
"I've heard that, lad." Fraser shook his head, remembering the wild
tales.
"I don't _want_ a drink, Joy!"
* * * * *
Thorne struggled to a seat on the edge of the bunk, unshaven, his hair
brush-wild, his eyes red and rheumy, a derelict to the soles of his
torn boots. Yet he did not want a drink, he whose passion had been
drink, whose only joy and only thought had been drink until it had
swept him from the heights to such depths that even a Martian refused
longer to shelter him and sent him forth into the desert to find death.
"Maybe ye've just been numbed," suggested Fraser. "I gave ye half a
glass, I told ye."
"It should have laid me out cold."
"Anyone else it would," returned Fraser, somewhat brutally. "You been
lapping it up so thick you might be a little immune, ye know. I took
the chance."
"It wouldn't have made any difference if I had been laid out another
day or two, anyhow," Thorne returned, as brutally. "I might be getting
a little thick. I could take more than I could at first. But I wanted
it just as bad, or worse. Now I don't want it. Have you any left?"
"Most of the bottle."
"May I have a glass?"
Fraser snorted, his Scotch coming through almost visibly. "Don't want
it, eh?" He pulled a squat, green bottle from the wall cabinet beside
the bunk. "Just how big a glass, Mr. Thorne?"
"Full."
He filled the glass and handed it in stony silence to the ex-pilot.
Thorne took it and looked into the turgid green depths. He smelled
the sweet, cidery odor. He passed it to and fro under his nose. No
reaction. Nothing.
"It's just water, Joy." He looked up at Fraser, wide-eyed, grinning.
"It's high-test Royal Seal," retorted the freighter captain. "It cost
me plenty and you know it."
"Yes, but--to me--me, the biggest sot on Mars--it's just water! No
taste, no smell, no nothing." He lifted the glass to his lips. There
was a short pause. Slowly he lowered his hand, a glare of madness
in his eyes. Fraser drew back, but, fascinated, made no effect to
interfere.
"It's still ... water, Joy. Water. Tastes like water, smells like
water. The stuff doesn't affect me at all." He flung up his hand,
gulping down the terrible t'ang like mad, spilling it down his stubby
chin and staining his rags a dirtier color than before. Only when the
last drop had vanished did he lower the glass, and Fraser, watching
in amazement, saw that no tinge of exhilaration swayed his patient. A
thimblefull of the stuff would set off a jag in an ordinary man that
made a whiskey-drunk look like an ice-cream festival. Thorne, saturated
with the wicked juice, sat in quiet, deliberate possession of his every
sense and faculty.
"I've had my drink, Joy. I didn't want it, except as I would want
any drink when thirsty. I didn't taste a thing. I feel nothing." He
stumbled erect, holding onto the upright of the bunk. "I'm tired,
dead-tired. I could sleep a week. But I'm not drunk, Joy. I'm not
drunk. I can't get drunk. Never again. I can't be poisoned. I'm
saturated with poison. You'll have to shoot me to get rid of me, Joy."
"We don't want to get rid of you, Jeff." There were unaccustomed lines
in the freighter captain's face and a softness which had not been there
since he bade goodby to his children back on Earth five months ago.
"We've hated to lose you. And now you're back again, you want us to
shoot you!"
Their hands met and wrung hard together. "Welcome back!" It was a
pleasant thing for the derelict Thorne to hear once more. But he knew.
"I can't come back, Joy, though I thank you. I'm a t'ang drinker and,
as such, I lose all rights."
"You're cured, man! You've proved that. You're alive! The berries and
leaves you ate destroyed your craving. We can prove it in any court of
law, any space commission. Drink a barrel of the stuff in their faces."
"Perhaps I'm cured. I think so now, but there may be a relapse. Anyhow,
cured or not, there's a strict law on the books and it isn't going to
be lifted to allow me to return to Earth or any of the Lines. Too many
aren't cured."