He had spent little time in the blister. The long hours he logged in his lab were more than enough solitude. On the few occasions he had signed up for R and R, he found the view to be overwhelming. He had heard about “second sight,” the unexplained ability of astronauts to discern increasingly minute surface features with the unaided eye, but he had not detected any improvement in his visual acuity. In fact, he rarely knew what the hell was down below. The real world did not display political boundaries and neatly lettered names trailing away from perfectly circular cities. But on this evening he knew exactly where he was: three hundred miles above the Andes, whose spiny backs looked razor sharp beneath the broken cloud cover.
One of those valleys corkscrewing through the green was the Huallaga, the coca-producing capital of the world. He remembered the short days and endless nights of his own addiction. He would read of the DEA or the border patrol seizing tons upon tons of cocaine discovered in safe houses or barns. The law of supply and demand should have pushed the street price upward after such massive seizures. But the price never rose; sometimes it even declined. Were the drug kingpins dumb? Did they fail to notice that oil companies routinely used the news of even a minor spill as a pretext for jacking up prices? No, O’Donnell finally had realized. There was so much shit around that a twenty-ton seizure was as annoying as a fly alighting on the back of a bull.
The Andes slipped below the edge of the wide window, their spines deepening in the dying sunlight. O’Donnell activated the control that closed the clamshell. The session in the blister had not lit a path around the wall that suddenly had sprung up in front of him. But he felt strong enough to resume bashing his head.
O’Donnell headed toward the lab by way of Hab 2. The turkey he had eaten for dinner had been tough and stringy. He could feel the strands between his teeth.
He anchored himself in front of a hand basin and worked his toothbrush over his teeth and gums. The toothpaste had a slightly milky taste and seemed grittier than usual, but he didn’t mind. The grittier the paste, the cleaner his teeth. He rinsed his mouth with a jet of water that he spit into the vacuum vent of the basin. He was ready to attack his lab.
A strange sensation coursed through his body. The air around him suddenly thickened to the consistency of gelatin. His legs went numb. His arms filled with sawdust. The aisle tilted upward.
By the time he reached his compartment, he felt as if a helmet had closed over his head. His vision diminished to a pair of blurry pinholes swimming in a sea of purple. He groped for the door latch and tumbled inside, crashing into the far wall with enough force to cause pain. But the impact of the metal on the base of his neck felt like a punch through a pillow. The toothpaste and brush bounced out of his numb hand, whirling in the suddenly dazzling light from the passageway outside his compartment. The light was so bright that it hurt his eyes. He pawed at the door until it somehow closed.
In a detached way he knew what had happened. Someone had slipped him some shit. Powerful shit, and a lot of it. He tensed his muscles, gulped air into his lungs, tried to keep those two blurry pinholes from dissolving into the purple.
But it felt so good. So damned good. Why fight it?
Fuck the lab, he thought. So what if I lose a day. So what if I miss the deadline. I’ve worked hard. So very very hard. I need to rest.
The words seeped slowly through his brain, like heavy oil through a ton of cat litter. They stretched like long, never-ending strands of taffy. All he wanted was to drift . . . and drift . . . and . . . drift . . .
The sound of laughter awoke Lance. He could not tell if it had been in a dream or real. His eyes snapped wide open in the darkness. His compartment felt like the inside of a coffin, too confined, too close to the other people who shared Hab 2. He heard conversations, laughter, music. He knew that if he could find a quiet place away from everyone else, he would feel much better. He eased himself into the aisle, still in his sleep-rumpled coveralls. At the aft end of the module, two Japanese techs spoke quietly as they waited to use the Whits. He did not return their waves.