"Hadamite!" breathed Ted Wilson helplessly.
Hadamite, the synthetic drug, at once a curse and a blessing. A blessing to a sufferer, but a curse to one who finds the false world of self-satisfaction more pleasant than the work and worry and alternate periods of happiness and grief of reality.
Under hadamite, the slightest ambition becomes pleasantly real, desire becomes accomplishment, doubts disappear, and fears are overcome. And under hadamite life becomes so desirable that the mind refuses to return to reality. With an overdose, the mind accomplishes its aims, finds full satisfaction, then lies down to that final sleep with the complete knowledge that everything has been done, and that there are no more worlds to conquer.
Wilson rushed to the cabinet and scrabbled among the bottles and boxes there until he found the antidote. He filled the dropper on his way across the cabin and pushed the end into Norton's mouth with one hand while he levered Alice over on her back with the other. He discharged the contents of the dropper into Jock Norton's mouth, refilled it, and squirted another load between Alice's slack lips.
Brutally he pushed down and up, down and up on their chests until he heard the sogginess slurp down their throats.
Then he slugged Charles Andrews in the same way.
"Twenty damned seconds!" he snarled; in bitter realization that it would take him longer than that to carry one of them into his tender, let alone all three.
He was standing there in the middle of the cabin, his mouth set hard and his mind whirling with the futility of it, when Viggon Sarri's one-man fighter group closed down and clamped onto the hull. Wilson was cursing fervently when he felt those forces close down.
The cabin floor surged gently as a sideward vector of acceleration of Viggon Sarri's task force was applied.