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.

The tablet he had taken that morning was losing its effect, but he felt so pleased at what he was doing that he didn't mind even that. For the next half hour he would enjoy himself simply by looking at Louise, and thinking that now at last they would be united again, no longer kept apart by her silly ideas about doing something to save themselves. And then the drug would take effect, and they would feel themselves lifted to the stars together, never to come down to this substitute for Earth again until the beam failed, and they went out together to make the repairs, and the shadows closed in on them.

He had made sure that Louise had her back to him when he dropped the tablet into her glass, and he saw that she suspected nothing. She drank her wine, he noticed, without even commenting on the taste. He felt a sudden impulse to kiss her, and, somewhat to her surprise, he did so. Then he sat down again and went on with the dinner.

He waited.

An hour later he knew that he had made her happy. She was laughing as she hadn't laughed for a long time. She laughed at the humorous things he said, at the 

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