Between the rich oxygen and the dizziness of hunger, Jon was a bit delirious. But he answered honestly enough: "My guts feel as if they're chewing each other up. My bones ache. My joints creak. I can't coordinate I'm so hungry."
"That is the hemlock," Steel-Blue said.
It was when he quaffed the new and stronger draught that Jon knew that his hope that it was citric acid was squelched.
The acid taste was weaker which meant that the citric acid was the diluting liquid. It was the liquid he couldn't taste beneath the tang of the citric acid that was the corrosive acid.
On the fourteenth day, Jon was so weak he didn't feel much like moving around. He let the cylinder feed him the hemlock.
No. 1 came again to see him, and went away chuckling, "Decrease the dilution. This Earthman at last is beginning to suffer."
Staying alive had now become a fetish with Jon.
On the sixteenth day, the Earthman realized that the Steel-Blues also were waiting for the SP ship.
The extra-terrestrials had repaired the blue ship where the service station atomic ray had struck. And they were doing a little target practice with plastic bubbles only a few miles above the asteroid.