"People say you are."
"People are wrong."
"Sometimes, but not always."
Farradyne grunted. "Not too long ago, someone accused me openly. The story started when someone suggested that the only way a guy could come from down on his bottom to the top of the heap in one large step was to be among the big-time operators. The heavy-sugar know-how. To the limited imagination, this meant running love lotus."
Mike Cahill was silent while the high-breasted waitress brought their drinks. After she left, Cahill lifted his glass to Farradyne. "Is you is or is you ain't?" he chuckled.
"I ain't," said Farradyne, drinking with Cahill.
"Stop sounding like a parrot. The tomato in the bar on Ganymede must have known something. You spent four years as flat on your duff as a musclebound wrestler and then you come bouncing along in a last-year model Lancaster. So since we know damned well that you're no hellblossom runner, where did you get the stack?"
"Thrift and good management."
"Maybe it's a rich uncle?"
"I'm just a capable operator."
"The label is sour, Farradyne."
"Then what do you make of this?" asked Farradyne, handing Cahill his license folder.
"It looks nice and legal, but it's as phony as a ten-cent diamond and both of us know it. So how did you get it—and the Lancaster to go along with it?"
Farradyne sipped his drink. "Look, Cahill, it just happens that I don't care to tell. This is a gentler version of the old bark, 'None of your blank business!' which I've always considered rude and which has started a lot of fights. But the fact remains that I am not telling."
"It might make a difference if you did."
"Let's stop fencing. I may be of use to you. It might be that you are a SAND agent and it might be otherwise, but I still may be of use to you either way. But the first time I start shooting off my trap, you'll get the idea that I'm not close-mouthed enough for whatever job you have in mind for me. So let's leave it this way, huh? I got a ticket that gets me in and out and a spacer that takes me there and back."
"And that's your story?"
Farradyne nodded, sipped his drink, and offered Cahill a smoke which Cahill took.
"We've had a rather moist spring," observed Cahill.
"It was moister on Venus," commented Farradyne.
"It's on Terra that the weather is fine," said Cahill. "The crops are coming up, I'm told, excellently. Nothing like fresh vegetables."
Farradyne nodded. "No matter how well we convert the planets to Terra-condition, nothing grows like on earth."
"Ever enjoy lying on your back in the sun in a field of flowers with nothing to do but get sunburned?"
"Not for a long time."
"Funny how a guy gets out of his kid-habits," mused Cahill. "And even funnier how he wants to go and do it all over again, but it's never quite the same."
"Yeah."
"Farradyne, you're not sold-up on this next jaunt to Terra, are you?"
"Just one passenger going to Denver."
"Mind if I buy a stateroom?"
"Not at all."
"I want to go pick flowers on Terra," yawned Cahill. "If you like, maybe we can pick some together."
"Maybe we can," said Farradyne, draining his glass and starting to get up. Cahill got up too and led the way out. Farradyne flagged down a taxicab. "Spaceport," he told the driver. "Coming?" he asked Cahill.
"Yeah."
VIII
Farradyne took the Lancaster up and set the course to Terra. As soon as he could spare time to think of anything but handling the ship, he began to wonder about Norma and Mike Cahill. She had not been visible when they arrived, but no doubt by now she had made her presence known. It bothered him a bit because he was as certain as a man can be that Cahill was a hellflower operator, and he did not want the man to get cold feet because Farradyne was connected with an addict, if even for a short hop.
So as soon as he could leave the board, Farradyne went down into the salon.
They had met. Norma, for the first time in her trip with Farradyne, was presiding over the dining table. She was wearing a slinky, sea-green hostess gown that scarcely existed above the waist and was slit on both sides to just below the knees. Her white, bare legs twinkled as she walked and almost forced the eye to follow them. She was giving Cahill all the benefit of her physical beauty, and Cahill was enjoying it. Farradyne had a hunch that Norma was about to start slipping him the old jealousy-routine. He wondered about his reaction. He was extremely wary of Norma, but he did feel a sort of responsibility for her. She might make him jealous, but it would not be the jealousy of passion or desire, but the jealous concern that stems from a desire to protect.
Norma's lissome figure vanished toward the galley, and Cahill wagged a forefinger at Farradyne.
"That dame's a blank," he said in a low voice.
"I know. She's not my woman, Cahill."
"Maybe not, but it sure looks like it from a distance. What are you doing with her?"
"Delivering her to her parents in Denver."
"That all?"
Farradyne nodded. "She latched onto me on Ganymede; she's the dame that made the loud announcement of my being a hellflower runner."
"Maybe she'll be right sooner or later. But you get rid of her, see?"
Farradyne nodded vigorously. "That I'll do. She's been hell on high heels to have around the joint."
"Looks like she might be fun."
"She hates my guts."
Cahill nodded. "Probably. They usually end up in a case of anger and violence. Tough."
Norma came back with a tray and set food on the table. They ate in silence, with Norma still giving Cahill the full power of her charm. Cahill seemed to enjoy her advances, although he accepted them with a calloused, self-assured smile. Once dinner was finished, Norma jumped up and began to clear the table. This act annoyed Farradyne because he could not account for it, and the only thing that seemed to fit the case was the possibility that Norma was acting as she did to soften his wariness of her; but she was carrying the thing too far.
As she left again, Farradyne turned to Cahill and asked, "How can a man tell a love lotus from a gardenia?"
"That takes experience. You'll learn."
"The thing that stops me," said Farradyne, "is that the Sandmen have been trying to stamp out the things for about forty years and they can't even tell where they come from."
"They'll never find out," said Cahill. "Maybe you won't either."
"But I—"
"Better you shouldn't. Just enjoy living off the edges. It's safer that way."
"Where are we going after we leave Denver?"
"I'm not too sure we're going anywhere."
"But—"
"I'm none too sure of you, Farradyne. You've some holes to fill in." Cahill lit a cigarette and leaned back, letting the smoke trickle through his nostrils. "I don't mind talking to you this way because it would be your word against mine if you happen to be a Sandman. Some of your tale rings true. The rest sticks, hard."
"For instance?"
"Well, let's suppose you are a Sandman. Humans are a hard-boiled lot, but somehow I can't see killing thirty-three people just to establish a bad reputation. So that tends to clear your book. As to the chance of your laying low for four years until the mess blew over, I might buy that except for the place. A guy who can ultimately turn up with enough oil to grease his way into a reinstated license and a Lancaster Eighty-One isn't likely to spend four interim years living in a fungus-field."
"Maybe I hit it rich?"
Cahill laughed roughly. "Dug up a platinum-plated toadstool?"
"Maybe I just met up with the right guy."
"Blackmail?"
"That's a nasty word, Cahill."
"Sure is. What did he do?"
"Let's call it malingering. Let's say he played rough at the wrong time and might have to pay for it high at the present." Farradyne looked at the ceiling. "And maybe that isn't it."
Cahill laughed. "Have it your way, Farradyne. Tell me, do we have a lay-over at Denver or is it better if we take off immediately for Mercury?"
"Cinnabar or Hell City?"
"Cinnabar, if it makes any difference."
"Mercury, Schmercury, I didn't know there was anything there but the central heating plant for the solar system."
"Isn't much," admitted Cahill. "But enough. The—"
His voice trailed away as Norma's high heels came clicking up the circular stairway back toward the salon. "I thought I'd have a cigarette and a drink with company before I go to bed," she announced in a tone of voice that Farradyne had not heard her use before. With gracious deftness, she made three highballs of White Star Trail and water and handed two of them to the men. She let her fingers linger over Farradyne's very briefly, and over Cahill's longer. She lounged in a chair across the room from them, all curves and softness, with only that strange disinterested look in her eyes to give her away.
The evening had been a series of paradoxes; Norma's change from the vixen to the lady of languid grace did not ring true. He had been aware of her ability to reason coldly, brought about by her burned-out emotional balance which was so dulled that her thinking was mechanical and therefore inclined to be frightfully chilled logic. Norma had claimed that she knew the emotions by name and definition; that once she had felt them but now she only knew how they worked. Farradyne found it hard to believe that she was so well schooled in her knowledge that she could put on the act of having them when she obviously did not.
Yet it was only the blankness in her eyes that gave her away this evening. Otherwise she might have been a very charming companion.
She did not even force herself upon them; when her cigarette and her drink were gone, Norma excused herself quietly and went below.
"Me, too," said Cahill.
Farradyne led him down to a stateroom and waved him in. "See you in the morning," he said. Cahill nodded his good-night and Farradyne went to his own stateroom to think.
He hadn't done bad, he thought; he had been on the trail for less than a hundred hours and already had a lead. Obviously the Semiramide disaster was the tip-off; no Sandman would go that far to establish a shady reputation.
Farradyne was prepared to go on as far as he had to. The idea of actually running love lotus was not appealing, but the SAND office had been fighting the things for a half century, watching helplessly while the moral fibre of the race was being undermined, and somehow it was far better to let a few more lives be wrecked by hellflowers than to save a few and let the whole thing steamroller into monumental destruction. Farradyne still had to duck a few people who might like to nail his hide to a barn door, but sooner or later he would come out on top and then he could look his fellow man in the eye and ask him to forget one bad mistake.
Being on this first step eased his mind somewhat. He would be rid of Norma tomorrow morning and on his way with Cahill. He went to sleep easily for the first time since that meeting with Norma at Ganymede.
He dreamed a pleasant dream of freedom and success that ended with the bark of a pistol.
IX
Shocked out of his sleep, he lay stunned and blinking for a moment, then leaped out of bed and raced to the corridor. The light blinded him at first, but not enough to stop him from seeing Cahill.
Cahill came along the tiny corridor listlessly, blood dribbling from under his left arm, running down his fingers and splashing to the floor. On Cahill's face was a stunned expression, full of incomprehension, semi-blank. Blood ran down his leg, across his ankle, and left red footprints on the floor.
Through whatever haze clouded Cahill's eyes, he saw Farradyne. He stumbled forward and reached for Farradyne, but collapsed in midstep like a limp towel, to stretch out at Farradyne's feet like a tired baby. His voice sighed out in a dying croon that sounded like a rundown phonograph.
Behind him came Norma Hannon. Her eyes were blazing with an unholy satisfied light and her body was alive and sinuous. A tiny automatic dangled from her right hand. Her lips curled as she came up to Cahill and poked at the man's hand with her bare foot.
"He—" she started to cry in a strident tone. Then the semi-hysteria faded and she looked down at Cahill again, relishing the situation.
Farradyne shuddered. What had happened was obvious. Cahill had tried to force himself upon Norma; she had killed him. Apparently Cahill had not been able to do more than clutch at the deep neckline of Norma's nightgown, which was slightly torn.
He leaned back against the wall and saw things in a sort of horrid slow motion. Under any normal circumstance, no jury in the solar system would have listened to an attempt to prosecute her. Under any normal circumstance, Farradyne could bury Cahill at space and report the incident at the first landing. But Farradyne couldn't stand too much investigation. And Norma Hannon was a love-lotus addict—a 'blank,' in Cahill's words.
"Now what?" asked Farradyne bitterly.
"He—" Her eyes opened wide again as she relived the scene and relished the violence.
"Have your fun," Farradyne growled. "What did you do? Let him get all the way in before you plugged him? No warning at all?"
"I hoped it was you," she said. "I wouldn't have killed you." Her voice was calm; she might have been saying 'kiss' instead of 'kill'. "Him I did not like."
"And you like me?"
"You I save to hate tomorrow," she said matter-of-factly.
"Why didn't you save him?"
"What was he to you?"
"He was my source."
"Source?" Norma looked blank. Then understanding crossed her face. "Hellblossoms," she said with a sneer that twisted her face. She stepped past Cahill's body and handed the tiny automatic to Farradyne, who took it dumbly just because it was proffered. She went on into the salon and sat down.
Farradyne wanted to hurt her, to reach through that wall of emotional scar and make her feel something besides anger. Remorse, perhaps.
"Source," he nodded, following her. "Love lotus. I'd have given you one, Norma."
She made a sound like a bitter laugh. "No good, Farradyne. What good is one love lotus?"
"I don't know," he said simply. "I've never had one."
Her laugh was shrill. Then she bawled at him like a fishwife, "What an operator you are, Farradyne! You big fumbling boob with your stolen spacer and your forged license, making like a big wind and blowing like a breeze! Fah!"
She got up as suddenly as she had sat down. She paused on her way down the corridor to kick Cahill's head with her bare foot. The man's head moved aside limply.
Farradyne stayed where he was until he heard her door slam shut. Then he got up and went toward his own room, pausing at the door to look at Cahill. He should be moved, thought Farradyne.
He found himself looking down on the dead man with a strangely detached feeling, as if he were watching a rather poorly plotted play. He relived the scene although he tried to shut it out of his mind. Shutting out would not work, and so he went through it detail by detail, minutely, from the sound of the pistol shot to the last dying groan from Cahill's tortured throat. The memory of that dying sound jarred on Farradyne's nerves. There had been something strange about it—
It had been a discordant cry.
Farradyne found himself making a completely useless analysis, itemizing things that surely could not matter. The cry had been a discord.
His mind wandered a bit as he considered the word. A series of atonal notes do not make a discord. A discord comes when atonal notes are sounded at the same time. The former can be pleasant to the ear, the latter not.
And then a chill hit him. He felt like a man who has just been told that he had one more question to answer before winning the prize on a quiz show.
Cahill's moan had been a full discord.
With a sudden leap of the mind, Farradyne was back in the Semiramide, hearing three voices behind him. They had found one skeleton afterwards. Then his mind leaped to Brenner, who had emitted an approving grunt when he saw Norma come around the tail structure of the Lancaster with the sun shining through her skirt. He had no proof, no proof. Brenner's grunt had no discord but none the less a mingling of tones. Three voices? Maybe more?
Maybe he was not sure of the first. Brenner's sound had been very brief—maybe he was convincing himself. But Cahill's death-cry had been most certainly polytonal. And they both were love-lotus operators.
It might mean something or it might not. Farradyne put his head back and tried to make a series of sounds. He moaned. He gargled, and he tried to hum and say something at the same time. Maybe the stunt could be cultivated after much practise, and maybe it was used as a password.
More than anything Farradyne needed corroboration.
It was a weak hope, but he stepped over Cahill's body and rapped on Norma's door.
She opened the door after a moment and said, "Now what?"
He looked down into her glazed eyes, hoping to see some flicker of expression that showed some interest in anything. "Norma, you've a good logical mind—tell me, did you notice anything about Cahill's last cry?"
"No."
"Nothing odd?"
"I've not seen men die very often. What was strange about it?" The eyes unglazed a bit, but Farradyne could not tell whether this was awakened interest or merely the recapture of the feeling she had enjoyed before.
"It sounded to me like a discordant moan."
"It was discordant."
"Not the way you mean. It sounded to me like there were three or four distinct tones all going at once."
"Stop beating that dead horse," she told him flatly. "It's the same chorus you used to sing about the three people in your control room, remember?"
"Brenner made a sound like that, too," he said.
"A piglike sound," she said scornfully. "Forget it, Farradyne. Your evidence consists of one man surprised at the sight of a good-looking woman and one man whose throat was coming apart in death. Forget it." She shut the door to her room in his face abruptly.
Farradyne looked down at Cahill's body with regret. A gunman and a love-lotus operator was not likely to have his absence noticed among the kind of people who could afford to start asking questions of the officials, and there might be a chance that Cahill's absence would cause the same people to ask a question or two of Farradyne.
Farradyne would have liked to keep the body. But hauling a slain corpse—he did not consider it murder—into a doctor's office and asking for an autopsy on the throat could not be done. Nor could Farradyne do it himself. He could perform a fair job of setting a broken bone and he could treat a burn or a cut, but he would not recognize a larynx if he saw it.
Grunting distastefully, Farradyne hauled the body to the scuttle port and consigned it to space with a terse, "See you in Hell, Cahill!"
Sleep did not come to Farradyne for a long time.
X
The Lancaster came down at Denver; before Farradyne had the landing ramp out, a spaceport buggy came careening across the field to stop almost at the base of the ship.
"Farradyne?" said the man.
"You're the Bennington man?"
"Sidney Kingman," said the other, showing Farradyne a small case with an identification card and license. "Where is she?"
"Inside."
Kingman handed Farradyne an envelope. He pocketed it and led Kingman into the salon. Norma was there, sitting on the divan, smoking.
"Miss Hannon, Mr. Kingman."
"Another one of your friends?" she sneered.
"No. He's one of yours."
"I have no friends."
"Yes, you have, Miss Hannon. And you have parents—"
Norma leaped to her feet angrily. "You good-for-nothing bum!" she screeched at Farradyne.
"You wouldn't leave me alone, Norma," said Farradyne tiredly. "So I've brought you home."
"I'll come after you," she snarled.
"Not if I see you first," he told her. "This is it."
"I won't go!"
"You'll go," said Farradyne harshly, "if I have to clip you on the chin and help Kingman carry you out on a shutter."
For the first time, Farradyne saw tears of genuine sorrow. There was anger at him, too; but remorse was there a-plenty. "Why hurt them?" she asked. "Why can't they just call me dead and let it go at that? I'm worse than dead."
Then her face froze again and she looked at Kingman. "All right," she said in a hard voice, "let's go and hurt my folks to death. You money-grubbing ghouls."
She started towards the spacelock. Kingman followed. Her face wore a coldly distant expression as she left the Lancaster. Kingman's driver took them off. She did not turn back to look at Farradyne.
And that was that. Farradyne retracted the landing ramp, closed the spacelock, and not long afterwards hiked the Lancaster into the sky and headed for Mercury.
XI
Cinnabar was inside of the sunlight zone by a thousand miles and its sun was always in the same spot of the sky. It was a well-contrived city, built so that the streets were lighted either directly or from reflections. Cinnabar was also one of the show-cities of the solar system; but Farradyne found that it did not show him the right things. He could have learned more about hellflowers on Terra because New York had a larger Public Library than Cinnabar.
Farradyne tried everything he could think of but made no progress. His trail had turned to ice after Cahill's death. He loafed and he poked his nose in here and there and drank a bit and varied his routine from man-about-town to the spaceman concerned about his future. There was only one bright spot: his listing had been tentatively taken up by a group of schoolteachers on a sabbatical, who had seen Mercury and now wanted a cheap trip to Pluto. Farradyne accepted this job for about three weeks later. It gave him a payload to Pluto, and when he got there it would be time to do the subcontracting job Clevis had set up as a combined source of revenue and a means of contact. Once each month Farradyne was to haul a shipment of refined thorium ore from Pluto to Terra, a private job that paid well. In the meantime, Farradyne could nose around Mercury to see what he could see. Then he could haul his schoolteachers to Pluto and pick up his thorium, which definitely made his actions look reasonably normal to the official eye.
On the end of the drums of refined thorium there would be a spot of fluorescent paint, normally invisible. He was to wash this spot off so long as he had nothing to report; if it remained then something was wrong with Farradyne, or he had something to report. Clevis would know what to do next.
And so Farradyne watched the date grow closer and closer and his hopes of having something to report dimmed.
He cursed under his breath at the futility of it, and realized that his curse must have been audible when he felt a touch on his elbow and a voice asking, "Is it that bad?"
He turned slowly, his mind working fast to think of something to say that would not be leading in the wrong direction. "I was—" he started, and then saw that the voice, which had been low-pitched enough to have been the voice of a rather small, thin man, had come from the throat of a tall dark-haired woman who sat beside him at the bar. "—just wondering what strangers did for excitement on Mercury," he finished lamely.
"Spaceman?"
"Yes."
She laughed in her low contralto. "I guessed it. Is Cinnabar so inhospitable?"
"To strangers it seems so."
"To me it seems quite normal. It makes the rest of the solar system sound like a very exciting place."
"Born on Mercury?"
"No," she said, shaking her head. "I was born on Venus. I spent four years on Terra before my folks brought me to Mercury. But my last space trip took place when I was nine. Tell me, what is New York like?"
"Buildings and people and mad rushing around. Any change in the last hundred years has been for taller buildings, more people, and a higher general velocity of humanity."
"But—"
"I know, the way I put it sounds a bit harsh. But anybody can find anything they want somewhere in New York if he has the money to buy it."
She smiled calmly. "I'll show you that Cinnabar is not an inhospitable place," she said. "You may take me to dinner if you wish."
"I wish," he chuckled. "And since we haven't a mutual friend to introduce us, I'm Charles Farradyne."
"How do you do?" she said solemnly, putting a lithe hand in his. "I'm Carolyn Niles." She took a little step out from the bar and made him a slight curtsy. He saw that she was almost as tall as he was, and he grinned as he thought that her figure was far better than his.
"How shall we meet?" he asked.
"We shall not meet," said Carolyn. "You shall drive me home where we will have cocktails with my folks. You will be an old friend of Michael's, who is a sort of school-chum of my brother. After cocktails I will change and you will make polite conversation with my family—none of which eat personable young men, though they may scare them to death by having father show them the fine collection of Terran shotguns he owns. Then we will go out to your spacecraft, and you will change while I roam around and investigate the insides."
"Done," agreed Farradyne.
Something rapped him on the elbow and he had to look down before he saw a boy of ten or so with a green-paper lined box containing flowers. The young merchant had an eye for business; he eyed Farradyne knowingly and smiled at Carolyn fetchingly. "Corsage? One dollar."
Farradyne grinned—and then almost recoiled before he realized that nowhere in the solar system could a love lotus be purchased for a dollar. These were definitely gardenias. He bought one to cover up his confusion, and as he handed it to Carolyn he wondered whether having a good-looking woman in a car outside a florist shop might not be the password to the purchase of the hellflower. Carolyn pinned the gardenia in her dark hair as she smiled her thanks, then led him from the bar to an open roadster almost as low and long as the curb it was parked against. Carolyn handed him her keys and Farradyne drove according to her directions until they came to a rather large rambling home just outside of the city limits.
He was received graciously. Her father was a tall, distinguished man with a dab of gray at the temples and a rather stern face that became completely friendly whenever he smiled, which was very frequently. Carolyn's mother was tall and dark with only a sprinkle of gray; Carolyn's stature seemed natural in that tall family. The brother was not present, which made it completely easy for Farradyne who could not have given any account of his friendship for the unknown Michael.
Mr. Niles mixed a pitcher of martinis and inquired about the spaceman business. Farradyne explained how it was. Mrs. Niles laughed at his story about fish one day and fins the next and said that she thought it couldn't be that bad, really. Farradyne grinned. Mr. Niles observed that a man who can operate a spacer and pay off a mortgage on the craft must not be entirely penniless or without prospects.
Mrs. Niles added, "I suppose it takes money to operate, Mr. Farradyne."
"A fair amount. A spaceman begins to think in large figures so much that he wonders how he can get along on a more humanly reasonable amount. To clear a reasonable standard of living, a rather staggering amount of money comes in one hand and goes out the other. Operating expenses are high, but so are charges."
"But do you land on Mercury often, Mr. Farradyne?"
Farradyne smiled. "Perhaps less frequently in the past than in the future."
"Now, that's sheer flattery," laughed Carolyn.
"Better enjoy it," observed her father with a chuckle. "Charles, you are welcome here any time you land."
"Thank you," smiled Farradyne. "But all things considered, I should think that you'd take a dim view of any man that brought your daughter home wearing a gardenia."
"Gardenia—oh. You mean that it might be—" Mr. Niles laughed. "I think that Carolyn has enough judgement to take up with the right kind of young man, Charles."
"Of course," said Mrs. Niles. "Robert and Michael wouldn't stay friends with the wrong kind."
"So, you see?" laughed Mr. Niles.
"By the way," asked Mrs. Niles, "how is Michael?"
"Quite well, the last time I saw him," said Farradyne, knowing that this was the right thing to say at any time.
"You're sure?"
"Of course."
"I'm very happy to hear it," said Mrs. Niles. "We knew he was with you, but we didn't know how long he stayed."
Farradyne gulped imperceptibly, and hoped that they did not notice. "You did? Then he must have mentioned me."
"Oh, he did. Tell me, Charles, what happened to Michael?"
"Did something happen to him?"
Mr. Niles eyed Farradyne rather pointedly. "Mike took off with you from Mars. He did not land at Denver, Mr. Farradyne. So what happened to Mike Cahill?"
Farradyne gulped, and this time it was a full-throated gulp that left him with his Adam's Apple high in his throat. Carolyn cooed, "Yes, Charles, what happened to Michael Cahill?"
XII
Farradyne felt a muscle-loosening tingle of fear. His thinking mechanism stopped functioning. His mind buzzed with a frenetic insistence that he say something, but being so completely unprepared he could not say anything. And he dimly knew that his long speechlessness was as damning as any story he could have prepared after such a pause. Perhaps he would have been stunned short this way even if he had concocted some story on the offhand chance that someday the question might come up. But it had come like this, from an unexpected quarter and he was both shocked and unprepared.
Then it occurred to him that he need not say anything. The die had been cast and he stood accused, twice; once by the Niles Family and once by his own shocked reaction. He must act for the next moment, because the passed moment was irreparable. Farradyne laughed at his own simplicity—a brief scornful bark.
"What is funny?" asked Mr. Niles.
"It just occurred to me that you people are either innocent or guilty."
"Very sage," commented Niles, drily. "Now, what happened to Cahill?"
Farradyne leaned back, trying to relax. He took a sip of his martini, not that he wanted it, but to see if his hand were still trembling. It wasn't.
He said, "If you knew Cahill and his whereabouts, you also know quite a bit about me. You'll have heard that I was recognized in a bar on Ganymede by a woman named Norma Hannon, who is a love-lotus addict. She hated my guts because her brother was among those present when I had the accident in The Bog. She hung onto me for the emotional ride it gave her. I succeeded in locating the home of her parents and was going to take her home when I met Cahill. He came along. Then during the night, he made a pass at Norma, and she shot him for it. I put his body out through the scuttle port."
"Cahill was always a damned fool," nodded Niles. "He was a dame-crazy idiot and it served him right. Some men prefer money, power, or model railroads, Farradyne. Women are poison."
"I seem to have followed one of them like the little lamb," said Farradyne. "But I was picked up and brought here for a purpose, so let's get down to cases."
"You're a rather quick-on-the-trigger man, aren't you? What gives you to assume that this purpose was anything beyond finding out about Cahill?"
"Because you've tipped your hand," said Farradyne, feeling more at ease. "You could have accomplished the same thing by tipping the police and waiting for the case to be newscast. If Cahill admitted to hellblossom running, it was for a purpose, too, Niles."
"Please.MisterNiles. I'm a bit your senior, Farradyne."
"All right. Mr. Niles. I've learned one thing so far: I can tell a love lotus operator from the rest of the system."
"How?" They all leaned forward eagerly.
"Because it is the real operators that take an amused view of my alleged machinations. They know the facts."
"Very sage. You are a bit brighter than you appeared a moment ago."
"May I ask why you let me cool my heels for almost a month before you hauled me in?" He looked at Carolyn with a wry smile. "I would make a mild bet that you weren't more than a few hundred feet from me all the while."
"You're a blind man, Farradyne," she said.
Mr. Niles smiled knowingly. "There are a lot of unexplained items in your past, Farradyne. We never could be too sure that you were not a Sandman. So we've been checking up on you and for that angle you are clean. Then comes the question of Cahill. It might be that you thought turning in a love-lotus operator would help to smoothe your lot in life, mayhap get you a bit of reward. So we waited. No Cahill. Cahill started to bring you here; he would have turned up either with you or without you. Unless he were dead. You would know the answer."
"No more than I've told you. Cahill came and made me a sort of sidelong offer."
"That much of it rings as true as the other. But there are still holes in your story."
Farradyne nodded. "Let's put it this way: There are ways of getting money and things. I found one way, which is an obvious fact. But I've been told time and again that the first entering wedge to a full confession is a willingness to talk. Do you follow me?"
"I do. But—"
Farradyne smiled. "I don't care to face it. Not in company, Mr. Niles." Farradyne's emphasis on the 'Mister' was heavy with sarcasm.
Niles looked at him piercingly. "You are a bit belligerent and a trifle sure of yourself. Close-mouthed and apparently able to get along. You'll be out on a lonely limb for some time, Farradyne, but we can use you."
"I can use the sugar," said Farradyne.
"Naturally. Anybody can use money. In fact everybody needs money, and so, Farradyne, what visible means of support have you?"
"I've a subcontract. Once each month I'm to lug a load of thorium refines from Pluto to Terra."
"It's a start but it isn't enough."
"I'll pick up more."
Niles leaned back and put the tips of his fingers together pontifically. "One of the hardest jobs in this business is to justify your standard of living. The financial rewards are large and the hours involved are small. It is patent that a man who has not been granted a large inheritance, or perhaps stumbled on a lucrative asteroid, cannot live in a semi-royal manner without having to work in a semi-royal fury. One of the great risks in this business is the accepting of a recruit whose appearance causes discussion. The day when a man can build a fifty thousand dollar home on a five thousand dollar salary without causing more than a raised eyebrow is gone. If a man has a large income, he must appear busy enough to warrant it—or at least provide a reasonable facsimile."
"This I can understand."
"For a job like this," Niles went on, "we prefer the natural-born spaceman, with sand in his shoes or space-dust in his eyes. Because the man with a bad case of wanderlust always looks busy even when he is idling. You seem to be that sort, but we can never tell until it's tried. Unless, of course, you turn out to be woman-crazy."
"I'm a normal-enough male," said Farradyne. "I'll remind you that Cahill was the guy who tried and failed."
"How normal are you? We'd have less liking for a misogynist than for a satyr here."
Farradyne smiled serenely. "I had enough sense to keep my hands off Norma Hannon, but I have enough red blood to come home with Carolyn. That good enough?"
Niles thought a moment. "Could be. Anyway, we'll find out. We'll try it and see. Now, when do you go to Pluto?"
"I've some schoolteachers to haul out there tomorrow."
"Good. Gives you a good background, without much labor. Now, when you land on Terra, you'll not post your ship because you have already contracted for a job. Carolyn will be there on a business trip and will have chartered your ship for a hauling job back to Mercury. During this trip you will get some more details on how you are to operate. This much I will tell you now, Farradyne: you'll be an inbetweener. Advancement may come fast or slow, depending on you. You'll get the details later; as for now, however—" Niles leaned back in his chair and smiled. "Farradyne, you met my daughter in a cocktail lounge and several people heard the two of you planning an evening together. So you will go dancing and dining and from this moment on you will be Charles and I will be Mister Niles and we'll have no nonsense, understand?"
Farradyne nodded.
"Good. Now, let's have another martini while Carolyn dresses for dinner."
Niles poured. Carolyn disappeared. Mrs. Niles leaned forward slightly and asked, "Charles, why did you become a spaceman?"
Farradyne blinked. His impulse was to ask in turn why they had become hellflower operators. He stifled the impulse because there was something strangely odd about this set-up. Her question was quite normal to the background she appeared to fill as matron of a happy, successful family.
The aura of respectability extended far, to include the home and its spacious grounds, so that Farradyne burned with resentment at the social structure whereby he, who had committed no more than a few misdemeanors, should be less cultured, less successful, less poised than this family of low-grade vultures. If anything, the attitude of Mrs. Niles shocked him more than the acts of her husband. Men were the part of the race that played the rough games and ran up the score while women occupied one of two positions: they were either patterned after Farradyne's mother or they were slatterns and sluts who looked as well as acted the part. It offended Farradyne's sense of proportion that Mrs. Niles was gracious and well-bred instead of being loud and cheap.
Farradyne labeled it a form of hypocrisy and yearned to pull the pedestal out from under them and dump them into the mud where they all damn well belonged.
Farradyne matured a bit in those few moments of thinking. He had often wondered why a clever man like Clevis would work at a dangerous, thankless job in complete anonymity when he could have put his efforts into business and probably emerge wealthy and famous. He began to understand the personal gratification that could be his in working to rid the human race of its parasites. In Niles' own words, some men like money and some want power and others build model railroads; neither money nor power were god to Farradyne, who had always been restlessly happy with just enough money and power to exchange for the fun and games to be found in being alive.
Farradyne was just discovering the threshold of a new outlet for his wealth of nervous energy, and he looked forward to it eagerly.
Blandly, he started to outline a semi-humorous tale of his life and adventures to Mrs. Niles, exaggerating his own early fumblings in a casual way. She listened with amused interest, just as any mother might use in hearing the background of a young man who was interested in a daughter.
But in the back of Farradyne's mind was the niggling fear that he would not be able to act the part of convincing suitor to the girl whose background, attitude, and character he detested. He knew that a man can lie in his teeth and play the role of spy convincingly, but he believed that the truth of his feelings would be evident when it came to making love to the enemy.
And then Carolyn came down the stairs in a white strapless evening dress and Farradyne changed his mind. It was going to be extremely easy for him to put his personal attitudes in a small compartment of his mind and slam the door.
"You've got to dress too, Charles," she said in a soft voice. It was low and intimate, unlike a woman of her type.
He nodded and got up.
Carolyn tucked her hand under his elbow and gave a little squeeze; the last image of Norma Hannon's lackluster eyes faded out of his mind and Farradyne became the man his role so urgently demanded.
XIII
In the salon of the Lancaster, Farradyne smiled knowingly. "The plan was to let you investigate the ship while I dressed," he said. "But I gather that you've seen you share of spacers."
"I admit it," she replied. "For that I'm sorry, Charles."
"Well, park yourself somewhere while I get into whites."
She sat down and stretched. "A highball and a cigarette?" she asked.
"The cigarette is easy," he said, handing one to her and flipping his lighter. While she puffed, he went on, "But the highball may be more difficult. I've nothing but White Star Trail aboard."
She nodded at him. "With water," she said. She relaxed into the cushions. Farradyne went and mixed her highball. She sipped it and nodded approvingly. He turned to go.
"Charles?"
He stopped. Carolyn put her glass on the tiny tray and parked her cigarette. She rose and came forward, lifting her hands to put them on his shoulders. He stood woodenly. "Charles," she asked in a soft voice, "Are you unhappy because I am not the girl you hoped I'd be?"
"How many men have you played this role for?" he asked.
Carolyn smiled, a wry smile that twisted her face. "I should slap your face for that," she said. "Because when I tell you the answer you won't believe me."
Caution came to him. He was the rookie hellflower operator, not the young man who has discovered that his girl has been playing games behind his back. He tried to fit himself into her picture and decided that according to her code of loused-up ethics she might possibly be thinking of a future: a pleasant home with rambling roses and a large lawn and a devoted husband and maybe a handful of happy children all creating the solid-citizen facade for dope running, just as her parents were doing. If this were the case, Farradyne must carry roses for his wife in one hand, toys for the kids in the other, and his hip pocket must be filled with hellflowers.
He played it. He relaxed and put his hands on her waist. "I admit to being a bit of a louse," he said, with a brief laugh. "But that's because I'm a bit new at a very rough game."
She leaned forward a bit. "Even rough games have their rules."
"I'll play according to the rules—as soon as I learn them."
She looked up at him. "You know them," she said quietly. "All men and women learn them at home, in school, in church. They're sensible rules and they keep people out of trouble, mostly. If you adhere to the rules, people will have nothing to attract their attention. That's what father was trying to say when he suggested that you provide a visible means of support for yourself. Play by these rules and we'll get along. It's especially important when we must not have people looking in our direction, Charles."
She sighed and leaned against him softly. "You asked me a question. The answer is three. One of them preferred a blonde and they are living quietly and happily on Callisto. The second couldn't have jelled because he was the kind of man who would work eighteen hours a day. Some men are that way and some women like it that way, but not me. The third, Charles, was Michael. Mike didn't last long. Only long enough to prove to me that he was a woman-chaser. The fourth could be you, and maybe there mightn't be a fifth."
"Three men in your life," he said.
She smiled up into his eyes. "Three men in my life—but, Charles, not three men in my bedroom." Carolyn cocked an eyebrow at him knowingly. "The only way the fourth will get in is to make sure there won't be a fifth. So now you know. You can play it from there."
His arms did not slip around the slender waist, but the hands pulled her close to him. He kissed her gently, and for a moment she clung to him with her body. Her response was affectionate but only bordering on passion. Then she leaned back and smiled into his face. "You need a shave," she told him. "So let go of me until you can kiss me without scratching." Then to prove that she didn't really mean it, Carolyn kissed him, briefly, and ended it by rubbing her forehead against his chin.
Farradyne went to his stateroom and showered. He shaved. He dressed carefully in white slacks and shirt and the last remaining holdover from a Victorian period, a dark necktie. He returned to the salon to find Carolyn finished with her highball and cigarette and waiting for him calmly and patiently. She looked him over, then got up and rubbed her cheek against his and cooed pleasantly, but moved away when he tried to kiss her.
She tucked her hand under his elbow and said, "Dinner, man-thing."
Farradyne chuckled. "Dinner," he repeated.
She hugged his arm. He led her down the landing ramp and into her car, and at her direction drove to her choice of a dinner spot. The food was good. Carolyn was a fine dancer with a high sense of rhythm and a graceful body. Farradyne decided that if this were a thankless job that gave no chance for fame and fortune, there were plenty of very pleasant facets to it. Her shoulder rubbed his as he drove her home hours later.
He handed her out of the car and walked to the front door with her. She gave him her key and he opened her door and she walked in, to wait for him just inside. She came into his arms as the door closed behind them and she clung to him, returning his kiss and his embrace; matching his rising fervor with a passion of her own. They parted minutes afterward. Farradyne moved her slightly, settling her body into a more comfortable fit against him.
"It's late," she breathed.
Farradyne chuckled. "With the sun shining like that?"
She kissed him, amused. "It's always like that, silly. You're on Mercury, remember?"
Farradyne held her close and kissed her again. A minute passed before he came up for air. He looked down at her, leaning his head back so that he could see her face without looking cross-eyed. "I'll bet you're a real mush-face in the dark."
Carolyn laughed, and shook her head. "Like all the rest of the women on Mercury, I'm scared to pieces of the dark. But it's late, Charles, and you've just got to go." She hugged his head down so that she could look at her wrist watch on the arm about his neck. "It's five o'clock and you're to take off at nine. Charles, please don't crack up just because of lack of sleep."
"Okay," he said regretfully. "Okay."
She held him close. "It's been a nice evening, Charles. So kiss me good bye, and remember that it won't be long until I see you on Terra."
"It gets dark on Terra," he told her. He tightened his arms and she pressed against him.
Against his lips she murmured, "I might not be afraid of the dark—Charles."
The promise in her last embrace stayed with him. There were only three hours of sleep between the time he left her and the time of awakening to prepare for the take-off, but dreams of Carolyn filled all of them. They were pleasant dreams and unpleasant dreams; he saw Carolyn coming to him with her past renounced, he saw her coming to him as a secret agent who was in the hellish business for the same reason as he was. And he dreamed of her waving him a good-bye with her dark eyes filled with tears as she was taken off to the Titan Penal Colony. He even entertained notions of joining them, justifying himself by thinking that people who fall in with love-lotus addiction were the weaklings of the human race anyway, and could be eradicated to good advantage of the general level. This reasoning he recognized as sophistry.
But be it as it may, Carolyn was an attractive woman, and if her companionship could only be known for a very short time, it was none the less pleasant. It was a rough game they were playing and many people were bound to get hurt. But more people—innocent people—would get hurt if he called it off. So by the time Farradyne and his dreams came to the conclusion that he could afford to take what pleasure out of life this situation offered for the moment and let Tomorrow exact its tribute when Tomorrow came, it was time to get out of his bed and start the pre-flight check-off.
He had work to do. Schoolmarms to haul to Pluto and some refined thorium ore to bring to Terra. He would make no signal this trip; he was still far from being on the inside. Maybe the next. Or the one after that, depending on his progress. But in the meantime, he would be seeing Carolyn Niles on Terra.
Farradyne began his check-up, already anticipating the reunion.
XIV
Farradyne watched them carefully as they came aboard and after he had seen them he breathed a sigh of relief. There was something prim and straitlaced about them all, and they would give him no trouble. It was going to be a breeze.
There were a few whose faces and names correlated; the rest became a confusing background of nonentities, uninteresting and bland. Professor Martin was an elderly gentleman who herded them all into place efficiently, and who knew enough about spacing to handle the job. He took over and left only the running of the Lancaster to Farradyne. There was a Miss Otis who giggled like a fifty year old schoolgirl; a Mrs. Logan who probably had all of the boys in her class drooling; a Miss Tilden who was old enough to be Farradyne's mother and a Miss Carewe who was old enough to be Miss Tilden's mother and who also knew her way around space, apparently. Miss Higginbotham was the she-dragon type and Mr. Hughes was the know-it-all type.
He left them alone. They ran the galley and policed the joint and made the beds, and one of them made a small water-color to hang in the empty space over the tiny bar and Miss Carewe requested an oilcan because she hated squeaky doors.
Beyond that, Farradyne saw little of them. He used his spare time tinkering down in the tiny workshop, or demonstrating how the atomic pile was controlled by the damper rods.
He was happy and free from care, even though the bunch of them took over the more comfortable parts of the ship and left him only the control room above and the lower reaches of the ship, below the salon and the passenger's cabins.
He sat for long hours, thinking idly. He was lulled by the noises of the ship itself; the faint sound of metal on metal, an occasional groan of a plate or the creaking of a point. The moaning cry of a motor winding up to take care of some automatic function and the click and clack of relays and circuit breakers and the peculiar hum of the servodynes that maintained the correct level of pile activity. The muted sibilance of the reaction motor created a threshold level of something like a constant heavy exhalation or the sound of seashore from a distance.
And then a few hours before turnover there came another sound that bothered Farradyne. It was a faint ringing in his ears.
He knew that ringing in the ears can come of too much alcohol, a box on the side of the head, certain diseases—or a change in air pressure. He was healthy, had not been drinking, no one had clipped him; but he had spent a number of years in an environment where the air pressure was damned important—
He sneezed and brought forth a tiny trickle of blood!
He couldn't believe it; any such change in air pressure would make alarms ring like the crack of doom all over the ship and there would be a lot of activity from the air-pressure regulators.
He hurried aloft to the control room, pausing briefly to listen to the snoring along the curved corridor of the passenger's section.
Lamps told him the story in a series of quick appraisals, because of some long-forgotten genius who had insisted that, whenever possible, warning devices should not be fused, should not be turn-offable, should not be destructible. The Lancaster was a fine ship, designed well, but a frontal attack on a panel with metal-cutting tools consists of making the exception to the 'wherever possible' part of the design of warning signals. The ship's bell-system had been opened like a tin can.
But there was another warning system: the pilot-lamp system, which was strung here and there behind the panels and it would have needed a major overhaul to be ruined; the saboteur would have spent all night just opening cans instead of doing his dirty work inside them. Farradyne should have been asleep; then he would not have noticed the blazing lamps, which told him exactly what was amiss in the ship, and where.
They told him the tale in a glance:
The low-pressure center of the ship was down in the pile-bay, and the reason was that one of the little scuttle-doors was open. The pressure in the reaction-mass bay was low, and now that Farradyne had come aloft, opening the upper levels, the pressure here was as low as down in the reaction-mass bay.
As he watched, another one of the scuttle ports swung open and its warning lamp flared into life.
Farradyne went into action. He ripped open the cabinet that held his spacesuit and clawed the thing from its hook. He started down the stairway on a stumbling run, getting into the suit by leaps and jumps and pauses. He realized that he could have moved faster if he stopped to do one thing at a time, but his frantic mind would not permit him to make haste slowly. He stumbled and bounced off walls, and the tanks on his back rapped against his shoulder blades and the helmet cut a divot out of the bridge of his nose.
He had zipped up the airtight closures by the time he reached the little workshop, and he ducked in there to get a weapon of some sort. He reached past the hammer, ignored the obvious chisel because it was not heavy, even though it were sharp, and picked up a fourteen-inch half-round rasp. He hefted it in his gloved hand and it felt about right.
The air-break on the topside was still open, and Farradyne closed it. He fretted at the seconds necessary to equalize the pressure, but used them sensibly to check the workings of the space suit. He also located the cause of the air-leakage; normally the air-break doors were airtight. A sliver of wool or cotton string lay in the rubber gasket and produced a channel for the escape of some of the air into the pile-bay. Farradyne stooped, as anyone will, his attention attracted by this trifle. It was neither wool nor cotton, but a match torn from a giveaway book.
He threw it aside and went in, his attention once more on the important business before him. He ran along the curved corridor—
And there, a figure in a spacesuit was quietly levering one of the control rods out of its slot and preparing to hurl it into the void.
Farradyne understood the whole act in one glance; it was the sort of thing that he would do if sabotage had been his intention. The single scuttleport had been opened first by hand. Then the saboteur had scuttled the stock of spare control rods, and since the Lancaster was reasonably new, there had been quite a batch of them. Furthermore they were long, unwieldly, heavy things that took time to handle. Naturally, this was the first act, because the next act would cause the ship's acceleration to rise. The rise in acceleration would make the rods too heavy to carry and would also cause investigation as soon as people became aware of the increasing pressure.
Then the working rods would be hurled out, leaving the ship heading hell-bent out of the galaxy at about eight gravities of acceleration. The passengers and crew would be helpless.
Maybe two or three rods had been scuttled already. The rest, functioning on the automatic, would be shoved in further to compensate; Farradyne could feel no change in the acceleration pressure. But once the working rods were all the way home, the removal of the next would cause the ship to take off, literally, with the throttle tied down. Farradyne was willing to bet the rest of his life that the safety-valve that furnished the water-mass to the pile was either welded open or damaged in such a way that supply could not be stopped.
Then—and Farradyne had to admire his precautions—the vandal would make his way to the escape hatch, hit the void, and let the helpless passengers go on and on and on.
The saboteur was well prepared. His suit was a high-efficiency job capable of maintaining a man alive for a long time in space. It had a little radio and a small and expensive chemical motor for mild maneuvering. The man had friends, obviously, lying in wait out there ahead, who would pick him up.
A passel of ice-cold-blooded murderers.
Farradyne saw the man through a red haze that clouded up over his eyes. His evaluation of the act was made in a glance, in the bare instant that it took for Farradyne to see the man and then get his feet in motion. He plunged forward with a bellow that hurt his own ears.
The airlessness kept the sound in; the killer was not aware of Farradyne until the heavy file crashed down on the top of his helmet, putting a half-inch dent in the steel.
XV
The man whirled and sent a heavy-gloved hand back against Farradyne's face-glass. Farradyne lifted the file for a second swing and caught the gleam of a heavy knife just as it swung upwards at his face. The blade jabbed at the face-glass and blunted slightly before Farradyne's eyes. The glass crazed, clouding Farradyne's vision.
Farradyne's second swing caught a shoulder-pad and sent the man staggering back; the knife came up again and the gleaming edge sliced space close to Farradyne's arm. The man stumbled and fell, and Farradyne moved forward. The long lever used to handle the radioactive control rod chopped against his shins and cut his feet out from under him; he landed on his face in position to let the other man kick out with heavy spaceboots. The heels rammed Farradyne's helmet hard down into the shoulders and the top of the helmet hit the top of Farradyne's head, stunning him slightly.
The other scrambled forward and landed on Farradyne's back. He pulled up and back on the fittings of Farradyne's helmet until the pilot's spine ached with the tension. Then the man thrust forward and slammed Farradyne's face down on the deck. The safety glass cracked further and there came the thin, high screech of air escaping through a sharp-edged hole.
Farradyne lashed out and around just in time to parry a slash of the knife. Blade met file in a glint of metal-spark and both weapons were shocked out of and gloved hands to go skittering across the deck.
The man left Farradyne to scrabble across the floor after his knife. Farradyne jumped to his feet, took three fast steps and leaped to come down with both feet on the man's back. The other collapsed and Farradyne fell, turning his right wrist painfully underneath him. The other made a kick that caught Farradyne in the side, turning him over. And as Farradyne rolled, his bent hand touched hard metal and he came up out of the roll clutching a heavy pair of spaceman's repair pliers.
He faced the killer, standing again, armed again; spaceman's pliers against assassin's knife. He plunged forward and felt the knife bite against his suit; he swung the pliers as a club and caught the killer's upper arm, then opened the jaws and bit down, twisting and pulling.