And finally I got a crashing headache.

Warp drives are much smoother than time drives. These Will-be Was engines had little jerks in them; and at each jerk, it felt like my head was going to splinter apart.

It was not until that creeping disc that marked Voltar time indicated noon the next day after departure that I began to recover. I was not well by any means. I just knew I didn’t feel quite so awful.

From time to time an engineer had stepped in. From the lack of expression on his swarthy, triangular Antimanco face, I might as well have been some engine part that needed regulating. But he did bring me more water and he brought me some food.

At thirty-six and a half hours from our departure — a bit past midnight on Voltar — just about when I had decided to sit up, there was a new flurry of lights. Glaring red, the sign said:

MIDPOINT VOYAGE

SHIFTING FROM ACCELERATION

TO DECELERATION SECURE LOOSE OBJECTS

Then: FASTEN GRAVITY BELTS

Then: DO NOT MOVE!

Then: HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS REVERSING

There was a moment when nothing had any weight. The (bleeped)[1] I. G. Barben pill bottle and the crumbs on the table drifted up.

Then: STAND BY FOR ROOM REVERSE

The gimbaled room turned. It was very disorienting to me. Fixed objects on the walls were in the same place but everything else had reversed. The sign went purple:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS SHIFTING TO AUTOMATIC

Then a green sign:

HYPERGRAVITY SYNTHESIZERS BALANCED ON AUTOMATIC

The (bleeped) I. G. Barben bottle and the dust of the pill clattered back down on the table. Then a red sign:

TIME DRIVES BEING REVERSED

There was a dreadful wrenching leap. A sort of a howl sounded through the ship. Then an orange sign:

DECELERATION NOW BALANCED AND COMPENSATED

YOU MAY UNFASTEN BELTS

YOU MAY MOVE FREELY

ALL IS WELL

Except me.

I felt like a wreck. And worse. During the brief moments of weightlessness, I had felt nauseated. I hate weightlessness. I probably never will get used to it. It does funny things to your muscles and heart operation and mine were in no condition to be tampered with.

With a feeble hand, I reached up to take the weight of a belt off my stomach and found something blocking my contact.

The envelope! It was still wedged under the gravity straps. I marvelled that my writhing had not dislodged it.

I felt confused anyway and the confusion of the arrival of this envelope hit me again.

Who could have put it in my pocket? Nobody had handed me any envelope at the departure party. Yet, here it was.

It was urgent color so I thought I had better open it.

A medallion fell out. It was one of the religious kind, a five-pointed star. On the back of each star point there was a tiny, almost imperceptible initial.

I opened the letter. It had no heading. But it did have a date-hour which showed it had been written just before departure had taken place.

It said:

Here is your crew control as promised. Each crew member is indicated by a letter on the back of a star point. These points have been matched to your individual left thumbprint and only you can work it. An outward stroke of your thumb on a star point will send an electric shock into the brain of that individual crew member. It will paralyze him temporarily.

By pressing the front of the medallion and at the same time stroking the star point of a crew member, a hypnopulse will be delivered to that individual.

Really, it should have cheered me up. I was in space with a crew of unreformed pirates and I certainly might need to paralyze them or give them a hypnotic command. Oh, I would wear the medallion all right, inside my tunic and close to the skin. Nobody would suspect. But I just wasn’t in any mood to be cheered up.

I looked at the medallion. The S on the top point could only mean Captain Stabb. I would look up the names of the rest.

I turned it over. It bore on the face the God Ahness, the one they pray to to avert underhanded actions. Then I chanced to turn the dispatch over.

There was a note on it! It was written with his left hand to disguise the writing. But it was Lombar Hisst!

It said:

You may have thought of this going-away party as a sarcastic way of showing the Grand Council the mission had actually left. You came within a dagger thickness of going too far. But as Earth has no way of knowing of the mission, the order has been stayed for now.

I felt my head spin in confusion. Lombar had been at the party!

What order had been stayed?

The date-hour showed it had been put in my pocket almost at the instant of departure. But nobody had been near me! He would never trust this to the crew. Never.

What order?

And then I knew what order he was talking about. The order he had given for some unknown person to kill me if Heller got out of hand and messed up by succeeding.

Did we have a stowaway?

My shaking began all over again.

I unfastened my belts. I had to dispose of this dispatch quickly. I made it over to the trash disintegrator. As I reached for the handle, a long blue spark snapped out and stung me.

Even the ship was striking at me!

I collapsed on a bench and wept.

About twelve hours later I was not as bad off for I had gotten about eight hours sleep, and although feeling depressed, I had decided I might possibly live.

For an hour or two I had simply lain there and done nothing else but curse I. G. Barben, all I. G. Barben pharmaceutical products, all directors of I. G. Barben. I even committed blasphemy and cursed Delbert John Rockecenter, the true owner — by nominee and hidden controls — of the company!

Although I had read about the cyclic effects of the drug, biochemical words are sort of cold and detached. They do not really carry the message that you get when you meet reality in the flesh. One always has the reservation “that it might happen to others, but it won’t happen to me.” How wrong that reservation was!

Oh, I understood the correct procedure: I knew that a real speed freak, which is what a habitual amphetamine user is called in English, simply would have popped another pill and gotten his euphoria all over again. And he would have kept right on repeating the cycle until he went into total psychotoxia and they had to lock him up as incurably paranoid. Speeders have other tricks, such as injecting it or combining it with barbiturates — downers — when they can’t sleep.

But none of that was for me now! I would prove my mother wrong: she used to say, “Soltan, you never learn anything!” Well, I had learned something now I would never forget! Amphetamines had given me the most horrible day of my life!

I ran out of curse words (and that is saying something, due to my association with the Apparatus) and got up to throw the bottle in the disintegrator. But I halted. I thought, if there is someone sometime I really hate-worse than Heller or his girlfriend-murderess Krak or my Chief Clerk Bawtch — I’d give him one of these speed pills! So I dropped them in with my valuables. Then I changed my mind again. It was impossible to hate anyone that much, so I threw them out.

When I lay back down, I saw the papers that Bawtch had left. I was pretty tired of these steel-alloy walls and I thought it would take my mind off things if I did some work.