I felt like making a speech then, about my land and my people. About the Earth being a thousand Earths--a million--two billion--meaning a different thing to every individual whose home it was. How Jones, with his _uru_ drug, roaming the underworld of one city, had naturally seen only the dregs of its society--the users and pushers, the grifters and dreamers, the seekers after the big deal, the short cut, the unearned reward, the big fix. He hadn't seen the Earth I'd known once, the clean and straight world where you earned your way with dignity and integrity.... I didn't make the speech. I didn't have to, of course, because he read it all in my mind. I doubt if it meant anything to him. "Here," he said. He handed me a bowl of pungent green liquid. I didn't ask what it was. It was bitter and sickeningly warm but I drank every last drop. Jones watched me sadly. For just a moment I felt ashamed for having let him down. Then the whirling rushing took me up and flung me into space and the stars ran together as before. * * * * * I suppose Earth is the same as it ever was. Yet it seems to me now to be an infinitely better place than I remembered. Of course my viewpoint is different. Though I see out of only one eye now, I see much more. It is possible to look beyond the petty circle of addicts that had been my world. I am ashamed that I once was one of those poor deluded creatures, the cravers of the quick kick and the brief relief. They are noplace, going nowhere. They still talk of _yage_, the unreachable pie in their murky sky. They want to be up there, out and away, anywhere but here. They are fools. Uru taught me that. There is no real escape from here and now. Therefore that is the thing to embrace. The inner propinquity of the here, the time-extended everlastingness of the now. Crazy, Jack? No. I've gone scientific. I've gone back along the dreamy trail and found the place where I took the wrong fork. I'd followed that fork a little way but then turned back without giving it a fair shake. _Peyote's_ what I'm talking about, friend. The thing Jones ran down. Mescalin. That's right, back to the Indians. Only it's gone respectable since I've been away. They don't call it a fix, big or otherwise. Not the serious group of investigators I work with. It's called the Huxley effect. It's the study of _is_ness, if you know what I mean; the hereness and nowness that is the all of everywhere within. It's the slowing of time's rush to a standstill so you can spend a century studying the intricate truth-in-beauty of a detail in the wallpaper or the eloquent message of a rose petal. And if that's good enough for Aldous, Jack, it's good enough for me. I look and describe, and my one eye becomes a thousand. I talk and they tape-record. They publish and compare the perceptions with those of other subjects in other groups.