Alayna gave a short gasp that ended in a sob of torment. Then she ducked under one of those great arms and left the room. Only then did the man move. He stepped backward and slammed the door before Roal's astonished senses could lead him to make a motion.
He tried the door uselessly.
During all that long interval of Alayna's outburst he had held his breath against the rising smoke from the wine glass. Now he plunged down on the soft couch in the center of the room. Gladly, he noticed that the artificial lights in the room were dimming. From his jacket he extracted a brown capsule and broke it between his teeth, covering his act so that anyone spying upon him might not detect the capsule. Then, as his vision grew spotty from lack of oxygen, he allowed himself to breathe cautiously.
The secret antidote against the effects of harmeena had never been tried before.
It had been prepared by chemists of the SBI from analysis of the bodies of dead miners who were known to be addicts. Every agent of the SBI carried the antidote. None had ever had the opportunity to try it before. Roal prayed that it might work.
The lights had dimmed completely now. But the gas from the dissolving pellets in the wine glass was filling the room with luminescence. Its ghostly glow swirled and twisted like crazed demons and poured into every corner and crevice of the room.
Upon this ghostly screen Roal knew that the wild dreams and fantastic visions induced in his brain by the drug should be projected. He waited in tense anxiety, hoping they would not come, hoping that the antidote the SBI chemists had devised was correct.
The visions did not come. That screen of luminous gas remained blank. But it spun and swirled about him as if it were a living thing and realized the defeat he had administered to it.
It seemed to spin tentacles that leaped out and beat upon him, twisting and dragging at him as if to beat down his last resistance. A wild impulse to laugh back at the ghost demons possessed Roal. He almost gave way to it.
Then sweat broke out upon his brow. Perhaps this was evidence in itself that the drug was prevailing against his senses in spite of the antidote.