IV The Falcon was drunk, completely, hilariously drunk. He sang a song about a girl with golden hair who rode a moonbeam in a race with the Venusian express, and he stopped now and then to breathe deeply, completely oblivious of the glances given him by the guards patrolling the catwalks above the manufacturing room. He pressed the slender shoots of _lanka_ weed into the cutters, drunkenly raked the chopped remnants into a basket. Lurching, he turned to the great kiln drier, dumped the basket load into the hopper, and closed the door. He adjusted the rheostat until a needle backed another on a dial, then went back to the cutter. He leaned against the machine, idly scratched the back of his neck with one hand, gazed blearily about the room. Then he slipped several vitamin and energy capsules from his pocket and swallowed them. He felt their quick power sealing through his body, felt the cloudy numbness lifting from his brain. He fought with a desperate effort to think clearly and concisely, for he knew that another few weeks in the _smothalene_ factory would kill him. He waited patiently, felt strength coming back to his mind. Men watched him with a blind calm curiosity, their faces, behind their filtration masks, indicating their wonder that he should still be as well as he was after several days in the polluted air of the factory. Duke Ringo had kept his threat; the Falcon had been compelled to work at the _lanka_ weed cutter without a mask. And those seven work periods had taken their toll of his rugged lithe strength. He was lucky that the machine filters permitted only the barest trace of the powder to get into the air, for a breath of the pure drug would kill him instantly, knotting his body with muscle-ripping cramps. The drug, _smothalene_, was the deadliest aphrodisiac discovered in more than a century. Its action was swift and diabolic, raising the rate of metabolism to an incredible height, literally burning the flesh from the body of the users. Such was its action, the user consumed fifty times his normal usage of oxygen, and consequently went on an oxygen-drunk that was more satisfying, more habit-forming, than any drug that could be found. Its final effect came in a spasmodic, hideous moment, when the cumulative effects of the drug literally exploded in a surge of unleashed power. Every bit of energy and life was sucked from the body, and the corpse became nothing but a desiccated mummy. The Falcon thought of that and many things, remembering the brushes his men had had with the smugglers, recalling the bodies of the _smothalene_ users he had seen. And he remembered, too, the accusations hurled at him and his brood, wild accusations that placed him and his men in the roles of mass murderers--as the _smothalene_ smugglers.