"Overdose" por Aranha Robinson , publicado pela primeira vez em Galáxia , setembro de 1975 , disponível no Arquivo da Internet .
Um tipo hippy de roda livre foi lançado no Vietnã. Isso não parou seus modos de contra-cultura, como ele tomou LSD antes de ir em patrulha na selva.
Na verdade, ele tomou STP , que parece ser uma gíria para um tipo de droga alucinógena:
Six hours later I was back in the jungle. I had a pair of pants, some four and a half bricks from the General's private stash, a compass, two Dylan albums and (although I was not to know it for weeks) a heavy dose of clap. I felt great, and it was all thanks to General Fonebone. If Suzy had not found life in Vietnam so boring, she would never have gone rummaging and uncovered the General's Secret Stash, a fell collection of strange tabs and arcane caps. She had induced me to swallow the largest single tab in the bunch, an immense purple thing with a skull embossed on it above the lone word: "HEAVY," and it appeared in retrospect to have been a triple tab of STP cut with ibogaine, benzedrine, coke and just a touch of Bab-O.
Eu acredito que o soldado se separou do resto de sua unidade, e no processo descobre um alien malévolo que parece um ovo grande (IIRC).
And just before I hit, I saw something coming over the rise, and I knew that my mind had truly blown at last.
Coming toward me was a sixteen-foot-tall poached egg with pimples.
O alienígena parece alimentar-se de pensamentos ou talvez de energia mental.
This world would simply have to serve. Somewhere on this planet must exist a life-form of sufficient vitality to fill Yteic-Os's reserve cells with The Force, and heshe was not called The Voracious for nothing. [. . . .] Yes, no doubt of it, a sentient life-form, just brimming with The Force! Yteic-Os sent a guarded probe, yelped with joy (well, not precisely) as heshe learned that this planet was crawling with sentient beings. What a bountiful harvest!
[O soldado] percebe que está perdendo seu próprio espírito criativo e teme que ele acabe sendo um "quadrado".
I was being drained of originality, of wit, of inventiveness, of all the things that made life groovy. I had a grim vision of myself a few years hence, a short-haired square working in a factory living contentedly in Scarsdale with a frigid wife and a neurotic Pekingese, stumbling over the Cryptoquote in the Daily News and drinking Black Label before the T.V. A grimmer vision I can't imagine, but I still missed it when, with a sucking sound, it disappeared into the poached egg.
Eu me lembro que o soldado percebe que a criatura é uma ameaça, e começa a usar sua imaginação (e seu estado alterado) para criar alucinações selvagens para dominar a criatura alienígena.
Desperately I rammed my forebrain into low gear and cut in the afterburner. I dug into the tangled whorls of my cerebrum for all the creativity that heredity and environment had given me, and began to hallucinate as fast and as intricately as I could. I prayed that the poached egg would O.D.
No final, ele prevalece sobre a criatura alienígena com uma alucinação final massiva, que fez a criatura explodir, deixando "ovo salpicado" em todos os lugares.
And when I could see again, there was scrambled eggs all over the place.
O último parágrafo acontece alguns anos depois. Ele é um banqueiro ou algo assim agora, usa terno e gravata, bebe uísque e assim por diante. A torção sendo, ele se tornou o tipo de estabelecimento que ele odiava antes de seu encontro com "O Ovo".
I live a perfectly content life now that the war is over. Got me a wife, a nice little one-family in Scarsdale that I'll have entirely paid off in another twenty-five years, and a steady job down at the distributing plant—I get to bring home unlimited quantities of Black Label.
But sometimes I drink a little too much of it, and my wife Mabel says when I'm drunk—aside from becoming "disgustingly physical"—I often babble a lot. Something about having saved the world. . . .