"Overdose" av Spider Robinson , först publicerad i Galaxy , september 1975 , tillgängligt på Internetarkiv .
En frihjulig hippy-typ har ritats i Vietnam. Detta har inte stoppat hans motkultur sätt, eftersom han har tagit LSD innan han går på patrull i djungeln.
Egentligen tog han STP , som verkar vara en slang term för en sort av hallucinogent läkemedel:
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.
Jag tror att soldaten separeras från resten av hans enhet och upptäcker i processen en illvillig främling som ser ut som ett stort ägg (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.
Äggalien tycks föda på tankar eller kanske mental energi.
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!
[Soldaten] inser att han förlorar sin egen kreativa ande och fruktar att han kanske blir en "fyrkant".
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.
Jag kommer ihåg att soldaten inser varelsen är ett hot och börjar använda sin fantasi (och hans förändrade tillstånd) för att skapa vilda hallucinationer för att övermanna den utomjordiska varelsen.
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.
I slutändan råder han över den utomjordiska varelsen med en massiv slutlig hallucination, som orsakade varelsen att explodera, och lämnar "splattered egg" överallt.
And when I could see again, there was scrambled eggs all over the place.
Den sista stycket tar ställen några år senare. Han är bankir eller något nu, bär en kostym och slips, dricker scotch och så vidare. Vridningen blev, blev han etableringstypen han avskedade inför sitt möte med "Ägget".
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. . . .