A lonely asteroid lighthouse. Two people. One drug that makes everything bearable, including the alien creatures circling outside. Jim Palmer has been floating on marak, and he's decided his wife Louise is miserable because she won't join him. His solution: make her an addict too, so she can finally understand his contentment. But Louise has her own answer to Jim's twisted gift an antidote slipped into his final dose. Suddenly sober, Jim faces the terrifying clarity he's been running from, along with the very real monsters waiting to breach the lighthouse walls. What follows is a brutal meditation on what we do in the name of love, on who has the right to make choices about another person's mind, and on whether sobriety is salvation or its own kind of death. Samachson wrote this in 1952, decades before addiction narratives became literary staples, and the novella still cuts deep. The dramatic irony is devastating: the man who wanted to save his wife by destroying her mind must now save them both with a clear one.
