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.