"Yes, sir," he said, spinning about and commencing to do dexterous things with the flashy array of bottles behind the bar and a tall frosty mixer.
"Down the hatch," he smiled, setting the glass of shining chartreuse liquid before me.
I nodded, and took a sip. It was good, whatever it was. It was a little nose-tingling, like a stinger, and yet there was something, a not unpleasant bitterish aftertaste. The glass fell from my suddenly numb fingers and shattered loudly on the bar. I tried to get up, and couldn't.
The floor of the bar was warping, tugging at me. I was unconscious halfway down.
9
My first awareness was the whine of the converters, audible everywhere in Marsport, if not by ear, then by the soles of one's feet. Their thundering dynamos plunged potent destructive rays against the Martian sands, leaving in their wake invisible fountains of nascent oxygen and shimmering puddles of orange-white molten iron. They went on day and night without ceasing, partly to keep the mining companies on Earth from losing their franchises with Tri-Planet, but primarily to keep the Marsport populace from tumbling down in the streets with cyanosed lips and glazing eyes, as the breathable atmosphere sloughed away over the hilltops.
So I knew that I was in Marsport, at least. But not much else. My hands, when I tried to move them, proved to be bound, and tightly, at that. My fingers felt swollen and numb when I tried to flex them. There was something, a hood, a sack, a cloth, over my head, fastened about my throat, impairing my breathing slightly and my vision altogether.
I found, though, that I could move my legs, but it was little help when I wouldn't know where they were carrying me if I chanced using them. For all I knew, I was lying on my back atop a precipice. Moving about could be disastrous.
So I lay still and spent my time wondering why that bartender should have slipped me a mickey.