The Addicts, Joseph Samachson [novels for beginners .txt] 📗
- Author: Joseph Samachson
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She nodded. She said quietly, "The beam must be kept in order."
"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.
He said bitterly, "You're the addict now and I'm cured."
She stopped smiling and said quietly, "Jim, listen to me. You're wrong, completely wrong. I didn't give you the antidote, and you didn't give me the drug."
"I put it in your wineglass myself."
She shook her head. "That was a tablet I substituted for yours. It's an anti-virus dose from our medicine chest. You took one of the same things. That's why you feel so depressed. You're not under the influence of the drug any more."
He took a deep breath. "But I'm not cured?"
"No. I knew that I wouldn't be able to slip you the antidote. The taste is too strong. Later you'll be able to start taking the drug again. That is, if you want to, after experiencing for a time what it is to be normal. But not now. You have to keep your head clear. You have to think of something to save us."
"But there's nothing to think of!" he shouted angrily. "I told you that the drug doesn't affect the intelligence!"
"I still don't believe you. If you'd only exert yourself, use your mind—"
He said savagely, "I'm not going to bother. Give me those marak tablets."
She backed away from him. "I thought you might want them. I took no chances. I threw them out."
"Out there?" A horrified and incredulous look was on his face. "You mean that I'm stuck here without them? Louise, you fool, there's no help for us! The other way, at least, we'd have died happy. But now—"
He stared out the window. The shadows were there in full force. Not one now, but two, three—he counted half a dozen. It was almost as if they knew that the end had come.
They had reason to be happy, he thought with despair. And perhaps— he shrank back from the thought, but it forced itself into his mind—perhaps, now that all happiness had gone, and wretchedness had taken its place, he might as well end everything. There would be no days to spend torturing himself in anticipation of a horrible death.
Louise exclaimed suddenly, "Jim, look! They're frolicking!"
He looked. The beasts certainly were gay. One of them leaped from the airless surface of the asteroid and sailed over its fellow. He had never seen them do that before. Usually they clung to the rocky surface. Another was spinning around oddly, as if it had lost its sense of balance.
Louise said, "They've swallowed the tablets! Over a hundred doses—enough to drug every beast on the asteroid!"
For a moment Palmer stared at the gamboling alien drug addicts. Then he put on his spacesuit and took his gun, and, without the slightest danger to himself, went out and shot them one by one. He noted, with a kind of grim envy, that they died happy.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Addicts, by William Morrison
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