After a while he stood up, but as soon as he was on his feet he felt deathly sick, and knew it was the radiation sickness. The door was only two feet from him, for the balloonbed when inflated half filled his room. He got to the door and opened it and went through it. There stretched the endless linoleum corridor, heaving slightly up and down for miles, and far down it, very far, the men’s room. He started out toward it, trying to hold on to the wall, but there was nothing to hold on to, and the wall turned into the floor.

“Easy now. Easy there.”

The elevator guard’s face was hanging above him like a paper lantern, pallid, fringed with graying hair.

“It’s the radiation,” he said, but Mannie didn’t seem to understand, saying only, “Take it easy.”

He was back on his bed in his room.

“You drunk?”

“No.”

“High on something?”

“Sick.”

“What you been taking?”

“Couldn’t find the fit,” he said, meaning that he had been trying to lock the door through which the dreams came, but none of the keys had fit the lock.

“Medic’s coming up from the fifteenth floor,” Mannie said faintly through the roar of breaking seas.

He was floundering and trying to breathe. A stranger was sitting on his bed holding a hypodermic and looking at him.

“That did it,” the stranger said. “He’s coming round. Feel like hell? Take it easy. You ought to feel like hell. Take all this at once?” He displayed seven of the little plastifoil envelopes from the autodrug dispensary. “Lousy mixture, barbiturates and Dexedrine. What were you trying to do to yourself?”

It was hard to breathe, but the sickness was gone, leaving only an awful weakness.

“They’re all dated this week,” the medic went on, a young man with a brown ponytail and bad teeth. “Which means they’re not all off your own Pharmacy Card, so I’ve got to report you for borrowing.