A light. His hand crawled, finger walking across the crimson carpet to the grouping, found the metal tube and flew back to his chest. He fumbled with the trigger. His muscles were lethargic and he pressed it hard with a childish impatience.
Perseverance.
Now the metal tip glowed orange as the radioactive motes in the tube destroyed themselves with rigid self-control. Careful suction, then, and a cubic foot of tobacco smoke howled down his esophagus into his lungs, examined each feathery cranny and left by muscular contraction.
It tasted bad, but he'd expected that it would.
He didn't have to smoke all of it. The habit decently required only that he take a puff, leave it smolder, take another, allow himself to be scorched and futilely try to set the bed afire.
He watched the smoke being plucked from the air by the purifiers to be expelled with other smokes, smells and gases into an atmosphere that consisted of little else.
His last night's pleasure stirred, vainly fought the inevitable and fluttered its hands. "You awake, Soldier?"
The room glowed with a rosy light.
"Approximately."