the strategist doping inside his own window — "The 'drines didn't seem to be…"
The 'drines didn't seem to be kicking in. Instead of the surge of stomachless competitive verve, all Pemulis felt was a slight unpleasant spaciness and a kind of enforced-feeling dryness in his eyes and mouth, like he's facing into a warm wind.
Context
The book's great chemical strategist caught by his own compulsion: for a spot on the WhataBurger plane he breaks a personal honor-code and takes pre-match Tenuate inside the very thirty-day clean-urine window his and Hal's whole future hangs on — "cavalier" given the 36-hour elimination curve, the risk-calculus he'd normally never fumble overridden by the want. And the awful joke of it is that the 'drines aren't even working; the dryness is Seldane, not Tenuate, the pills crossed with the antihistamine, which is the accident that will end his E.T.A. career. The one who games every urine test is undone by needing the edge badly enough to dose himself the one afternoon it mattered not to.