"Mud in your eye," he said and it wasn't any good, but it would have to do.
He put the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and tilted back his head.
Gagging, he snatched the bottle from his lips.
It wasn't whisky and it was awful. It was gall and vinegar and quinine, all rolled into one. It was a brew straight from the Pit. It was all the bad medicine he had taken as a boy, it was sulphur and molasses, it was castor oil, it was—
"Good God," said Frederick West.
For suddenly he remembered the location of a knife he had lost twenty years before. He saw it where he had left it, just as plain as day.
He knew an equation he'd never known before, and what was more, he knew what it was for and how it could be used.
Unbidden, he visualized, in one comprehensive picture, just how a rocket motor worked ... every detail, every piece, every control, like a chart laid out before his eyes.
He could capture and hold seven fence posts in his mental eye and four was the best any human ever had been able to see mentally before.
He whooshed out his breath to air his mouth and stared at the bottle.