He smiled and told me to relax. He meant it literally.
"Lie down on the bed," he said. "Take your coat off. No, don't roll up your sleeve."
He pulled down a blue shade over the single window and the room got dim. Sunlight squeezed through the cracks at the edges and made shimmering little patterns on the walls and ceiling.
He took a cigaret holder out of his pocket. It was green, like jade, and carved around its fat middle was a design of some kind. I couldn't make it out, even when I held it in my hand.
Jones put a cigaret in the holder. It looked like an ordinary king-size smoke and I told him so.
"That is correct," he said. "It is not the cigaret that provides the effect, but the uru in the holder. The smoke travels over the uru and activates it. Enough of it is absorbed by the warm smoke for the desired result. Do not inhale too deeply the first time."
I took a short drag, half suspecting he was conning me. Nothing happened right away. It didn't taste any different from any cigaret smoked through a holder. I took another drag, deeper this time.
I was off.
I became a tiny replica of myself, swimming effortlessly within my own eyeball, looking down the length of that other me lying on the bed. My feet looked a mile away. I moved them and it seemed to take almost a minute for the impulse to communicate itself from my mind along the vast body.
Then I lost interest in my body as the flecks of sunlight on the ceiling became tiny planets, whirling in perfect, intricate orbits around a fiery blue-white sun.