HELLFLOWER

GEORGE O. SMITH

PYRAMID BOOKS
NEW YORK

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

HELLFLOWER
A PYRAMID BOOK
Published by arrangement with Abelard-Schuman, Inc.

Abelard-Schuman edition published 1953
Pyramid edition published November, 1957
Second printing February, 1969

Printed in the United States of America

PYRAMID BOOKS are published by Pyramid Publications, Inc.,
444 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A.

For Doña

IT LOOKED AS INNOCENT AS A GARDENIA ...

But the Hellflower's perfume turned any woman into any man's woman. The haunting, pungent scent aroused desires too fierce to be slaked by ordinary passions—and left its victims burnt-out husks!

Charles Farradyne knew that no woman could resist the Hellflower. Yet Carolyn, the girl he wanted above all to possess, smiled when he gave her the deadly bloom—smiled and inhaled the perfumed poison....

HELLFLOWER is the fantastic story of a lovely woman who was not quite human—and of a man who went through heaven and hell to win her.

The book had been thrown at Charles Farradyne. Then they had added the composing room, the printing press and the final grand black smear of printer's ink. So when Howard Clevis located Farradyne working in the fungus fields of Venus four years later, he found a beaten man who no longer burned with resentment because he was all burned out. Farradyne looked up dully when Clevis came into the squalid rooming house.

"I am Howard Clevis," said the visitor.

"Fine," mumbled Farradyne. "So?" He looked at one of the few white shirts in a thousand miles and grunted disapprovingly.

"I've a job for you, Farradyne."

"Who do you want killed?"

"Take it easy. You're the Charles Farradyne who—"

"Who dumped the Semiramide into The Bog, and you're Santa Claus, here to undo it?"

"This is on the level, Farradyne."

Farradyne laughed shortly, but the sound was all scorn and no humor. While his raw bark was still echoing in the room, Farradyne added, "Drop it, Clevis. With a thousand licensed spacemen handy everywhere, willing to latch onto an honest buck, any man that comes half way across Venus to offer Farradyne a job can't be on the level."

Clevis eyed Farradyne calculatingly. "I should think you might enjoy the chance."

"I'm a bum, but I'm no murderer."

"I told you—"

"You've said a lot of nothing. So you came here to offer me a legit?"

"Yes."

"It doesn't look good."

Clevis smiled calmly. He had the air of a man who knew what he was doing. He was medium tall, a sprinkle of gray in his hair and determined lines near the eyes and across the forehead. There was character in his face, but nothing to show whether this character was high or low. Just strong and no doubt about it. "I'm here, Farradyne, just because of the way it looks. The fact is that I need you. I know you're bitter, but—."

"Bitter!" roared Farradyne, getting to his feet and stalking across the wretched little room toward Clevis. "Bitter? My God! They haul me home on a shutter so they can give me a fair trial before they kick me out. You don't think I like it in this rat hole, do you?"

"No, I don't. But listen, will you?"

"Nobody listened to me, why should I listen to you?"

"Because I have something to say," said Clevis pointedly. "Do you want to hear it?"

"Go ahead."

"I'm Howard Clevis of the Solar Anti-Narcotics Department."

"Well, I haven't any. I don't use any. And I don't have much truck with them that do."

"No one is on trial here and nothing that you say can be used in any way. That's why I came alone. You're on the wrong trolley. But I'll tell you this, Farradyne, if I were in your shoes I'd do anything at all to get out of this muck field."

"Some things even a bum won't do. And I don't owe you anything."

"Wrong. When you dumped the Semiramide into The Bog four years ago, you killed one of our best operatives. We need you, Farradyne, and you owe us one. Now?"

"When I dumped the Semiramide no one would listen to me. Do you want to listen to me now?"

"No, I don't."

"I got a raw deal."

"So did the man you killed."

"I didn't kill anybody!" yelled Farradyne.

Clevis eyed him calmly even though Farradyne was large enough to take the smaller, older man's hide off. "I am not here to argue that point," he said. "And I don't intend to. Regardless of how you feel, I'm offering you a chance to get out of this mess. It's a space job."

"What makes you think I'll play stool pigeon?"

"It's no informer's job. It's space piloting."

"I'll bet."

"You bet and I'll cover it a thousand to one."

Farradyne sat down on the dingy bed. "Go ahead and talk, Clevis. I'll listen."

Clevis dug into his briefcase and brought out a flower. "Do you know what this is?" he asked, handing the blossom to Farradyne.

Farradyne looked at it briefly. "It might be a gardenia, but it isn't."

"How can you tell?" asked Clevis eagerly.

"Only because you wouldn't be coming half way across Venus to bring me a gardenia. So that is a love lotus."

Clevis looked a bit disappointed. "I thought that maybe you might have some way—"

"What makes you think I'd know more than a botanist?"

Clevis smiled. "Spacemen tend to come up with some oddly interesting specks of knowledge now and then. No, I didn't really hope that you'd know more than a botanist. But—"

"So far as I know, there's only one way of telling. That's to try it out. Thanks, I'll not have my fun that way. That's one thing you can't pin on me."

"I wouldn't try. But listen, Farradyne. In the past twelve years we have carefully besmirched the names and reputations of six men hoping that they could get on the inside. For our pains we have lost all six of them one way and another. The enemy seems to have a good espionage system. Our men roam up and down the system making like big-time operators and get nowhere. The love lotus operators seem to be able to tell a phony louse when they see one."

"And I am a real louse?"

"You've a convincing record."

Farradyne shook his head angrily. "Not that kind," he snapped. "Your pals sloughed off my license and tossed me out on my duff to scratch, but no one ever pinned the crooked label on me and made it stick."

"Then why did they take away your license?"

"Because someone needed a goat."

"And you are innocent?"

Farradyne growled hopelessly. "All right," he said, returning to his former lethargy. "So just remember that all the evidence was still my unsupported word against their assumptions. I was acquitted, remember? Lack of evidence stands on the books. But they took my license and tossed me out of space and that's as bad as a full conviction. So where am I? So I'll stop beating my gums about it, Clevis."

Clevis smiled quietly. "You were a good pilot, Farradyne. Maybe a bit too good. Your trouble was being too sure of yourself. You collected a few too many pink tickets for cutting didoes and collecting women to show off in front of. They'd have marked it off as an accident if it hadn't been Farradyne. Your record accused you of being the hot-pants pilot, the fly-fly boy. Maybe that last job of yours was another dido that caught you. But let's leave the ghost alone. Maybe you've learned your lesson and are willing to make a stab at it again. We need you."

Farradyne grunted and his lips twisted a bit. He got up from the unmade bed and went to the scarred dresser to pour a stiff jolt from an open bottle into a dirty glass. He took a sip and then walked to the window and stood there, staring out into the dusk and talking, half to himself. Clevis listened.

"I've had my prayer," said Farradyne. "A prayer in a nightmare. A man fighting against a rigged job, like the girl in that old story who turned up in her mother's hotel room to find that every trace of her mother's existence had been erased. Bellhops, and cab driver, steamship captain and the hotel register, all rigged. Even the police deny her. Remember? Well, that's Farradyne, too, Clevis. Do you know what happened? My first error was telling them that someone came into the control room during landing. They said that no one would do that because everybody knew the danger of diverting the pilot's attention during a landing. No one, they said, would take the chance of killing himself, and the other passengers would stop anyone who tried to go up the stairs at that time because they knew the danger to themselves.

"Then they practically scoffed me into jail when I told them that there were three people in the room. A pilot might just as well be blindfolded and manacled to his chair during landing. He hasn't time to play games around tables and chairs. So I heard three people behind me and couldn't look. All I could do was to snarl for them to get the hell out. So then we rapped the cliff and dumped into The Bog, and I got tossed out through the busted observation dome. They salvaged the Semiramide a few months later and found only one skeleton in the room. That made me a liar. Besides the skeleton was of a woman, and they all nodded sagely and said, 'Woman? Well, we know Farradyne!' and I got the works. So," said Farradyne, bitter-sounding once more, "they suspended me and took away my license. No jobs for a man trained for space and nothing else. They wouldn't even let me near a spacer—maybe they thought I might steal one, forgetting that there is no place to hide. Maybe they thought I'd steal Mars, too. So if I want a drink they ask me if it's true that jungle juice gives a man hallucinations. If I light a cigarette I'm asked if it is real laughing grass. If I ask for a job they want to know how hard I'll work for my liquor, and so I end up in this godforsaken marsh, playing nurse-maid to a bunch of stinking toadstools." Farradyne's voice rose to an angry pitch. "The mold grows on your hide and under your nails and in your hair, and you forget what it's like to be clean and you lose hope and ambition because you're kicked off the bottom of the ladder, but you still dream of someday being able to show the whole damned solar system that you are not the louse they made you. Then, instead of getting a chance, a man comes to you and offers you a job because he needs a professional bastard with a bad record. It's damned small consolation, Clevis."

Farradyne sniffed at the glass and then threw it out the window with a derisive gesture. "I'll ask for a lot of things," he said quietly, now. "And the first thing is for enough money to buy White Star Trail instead of this rotgut."

"That can be done, but can you take it?"

"It'll be hard," admitted Farradyne. "I've been on this diet of soap and vitriol too long. But I'll do it. Give me a month."

"I can't offer you much," said Clevis. "But maybe this can be hope for you. Help us clean up the hellblossom gang and you'll do a lot toward erasing that black mark on your record."

"Just what is the pitch?"

Clevis took a small leather folder from his briefcase and handed it over. Farradyne recognized it as a space pilot's license before he opened it. He read it with a cynical smile before he asked, "Where did you get it?"

"It's probably the only official forgery in existence. The Solar Anti-Narcotics Department—SAND—has a lot of angles to play. First, that ticket is made of the right paper and printed with the right type and the right ink because," and Clevis smiled, "it came from the right office. The big rubber stamp, 'Reinstated,' is the right stamp and the initials are put on properly, but not by the right man. The license will get you into and out of spaceports and all the rest of the privileges. But it has no listing on the master log at the Bureau of Space Personnel. It's an excellent forgery, it will not be questioned so long as you stay out of trouble. The only people who will check on the validity will be the ones we hope to catch. When they discover that your ticket is invalid, you may get an offer to join 'em."

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime you'll be running a spacer in the usual way. We've a couple of sub-contracts you can handle to stay in business. You'll pick up other business, no doubt. But there are two things to remember, always."

"Two?"

"Two. The first is that you've got to play it flat, no nonsense. Just remember who and what you are. And just to make sure of it, I'll remind you again that you are a crumb with a bad reputation. You'll be running a spacer worth a hell of a lot of dough and there will be a lot of people asking a lot of other people how you managed the deal. Probably none of them will ever get around to asking you, but your attitude is the same as the known gangster whose only visible means of support for his million-dollar estate and his yacht and his high living is the small string of hot-dog stands or the dry-goods store. That he owns all these things is only an indication of thrift and good management."

"I get it," grinned Farradyne.

Clevis snapped, "This is no laughing matter. What goes along with this is important. You'll play this game as we outline it to you and in no other way. The first time we find you playing hanky-panky, we'll have you by the ears in the morning. And if you cut a dido and get pinned for it, there you'll be with a forged license and a spacer that will have some very odd-looking registration papers so far as the Master Log runs. And no one is going to admit that he knows you. Certainly the SAND office won't. And furthermore, if you do claim any connection at any time for any reason whatsoever, we'll haul you in for attempting to impersonate one of us. You're a decoy, a sitting duck with both feet in the mud, Farradyne, and no damned good to anybody until you get mired deeper in the same stinking mud. There'll be more later. Now for the second item."

"Second? Weren't there ten or twelve in that last delivery?" grunted Farradyne.

"That was only the beginning. The second is this. Do not, under any circumstances, make any attempt to investigate that accident of yours."

"Now look," snapped Farradyne hotly, "I've spent four years—"

"In the first place, nothing that you could possibly do would convince anybody that you were the innocent bystander. So—"

"But I'm telling you—"

"The game you are going to play will not permit you to make any attempt to clear up that mess. As a character of questionable background, your attitude must be that of a man caught in a bad show and forced to undergo visible suffering long enough for the public to forget, before you can resume your role of professional louse. Got this straight?"

Farradyne looked at Clevis, gaunt has-been looking at success. The window was dark now, but there were no stars visible from the surface of Venus, only Terra and Jupiter and Sirius and Vega and a couple of others that haloed through the haze. The call of the free blackness of space pulled at Farradyne. He turned back from the window and looked at the unmade bed, the insect-specked wall, the scarred dresser, the warped floor. His nose wrinkled tentatively and he cursed inwardly because he knew that the joint reeked of rancid sweat and mildewed cloth and unwashed human body, and his nose was so accustomed to this stink that he could not smell it.

Farradyne came to understand in those few moments while Clevis watched him quietly, waiting for his decision, that his oft-repeated statement that there were some things that even a bum wouldn't do was so much malarkey. Farradyne would have joined the hellblossom operators for an opportunity to get out of this Venusian mire. He turned to Clevis.

"Let's go," he said.

Clevis cast a pointed look at the dresser.

"There's nothing in the place but bad memories," said Farradyne. "I'll leave 'em here. Good, bad or indifferent, Clevis, I'm your man no matter how you want it played. For the first time in years I seem to want a bath and a clean shirt."

As Clevis headed toward the door Farradyne aimed a solid kick at the dresser, putting one more scar on its marred flank. "I'm behind you," he said.

He was rustier than he had realized. For it was not only four years away from the levers of the control room and the split-second decision of high speed, it was four years of rotting in skid-row. His muscles were stringy, his skin was slatey, his eyes were slow and he had lost tone. He was flab and ache and off his feed. He was slow and overcompensating in his motions. He missed his aim by yards and miscalculated his position and his speed and his direction so badly that Donaldson, who rode in the co-pilot's seat, sat there with his hands poised over the levers and clutched convulsively or pressed against the floor with his feet, chewing his lips with concern as Farradyne flopped the sky cruiser roughly here and there. They practiced on Mercury where the traffic was very light, in a Lancaster Eighty-One which was a fine piece of space-cruiser by any man's opinion, and Farradyne punished the ship like a recruit.

It took him a month to get the hang of it again. A solid month of severe discipline, living in the ship and taking exercise and routine practice to refine his control. He found that making the change from the rotgut jungle juice to White Star Trail was not too hard because his mind was busy all the time and he did not need the high-powered stuff to anesthetize. White Star Trail was a godsend to the man who liked the flavor of fine Scotch whiskey but could not afford to befog his coordination by so much as a single ounce of the pure quill. It was a synthetic drink that tasted like Scotch but lacked the alcoholic kick, and Farradyne learned soon enough that he could forego the jolt of high-test liquor in favor of the pleasant flavor because he had discovered ambition again.

Eventually they "soloed" him. Donaldson sat in the easy chair in the salon below talking to Clevis and he could hear them discussing problems unrelated to him. Their voices came over the squawk-box clear enough to understand. It gave Farradyne confidence. He took the Lancaster Eighty-One into the sky and circled Mercury for a landing, and for a moment relived that black day in his past, vividly.

He had called the spaceport, "Semiramide calling North Venus Tower."

"Aye-firm, Semiramide, from North Venus Tower."

"Semiramide requesting landing instructions, give with the dope, Tower."

"Tower to Semiramide. Beacon Nine at one hundred thousand feet, Landing Area Twelve. Traffic is One Middleton Seven-Six Two at thirty thousand taking off from Beacon Two and one Lincoln Four-Four landing at Beacon Seven. Keep an eye peeled for a Burbank Eight-Experimental that's been scooting around at seventy-thousand. That's all."

"Aye-firm, Tower."

Then had come the voice of a woman behind him. Just a murmur, perhaps a sigh of wonder from a woman who had just been shown for the first time in her life the intricacies of rack and panel, of meter and gage and lever and shining device that surround the space pilot to demand every iota of his attention during take-off or landing. In Farradyne's recollection, there were two kinds of people; one kind stood in the center of such an array and held their hands together for fear of upsetting something, and the other kind couldn't keep their hands off a button or a lever if it meant their own electrocution.

There were thirty-three people aboard, thirteen of them women and Farradyne wondered which of them it was. He didn't care. "Get the hell below," he snarled over his shoulder. The man who had brought her up made some sound. Farradyne was even shorter with the man. A woman might wander up, interested, but a man should know that this was a deadly curiosity. "Take her below, you imbecile," he snapped.

An older man chimed in with something that sounded like an agreement with Farradyne's order. There was a brief three-way argument that lasted until one of them had fallen for the lure of a dark pilot lamp and an inviting pushbutton. The Semiramide bucked like a wasp-stung colt and the silver-dull sky over Venus Spaceport whirled....

Farradyne was shocked out of this vivid daydream by the matter-of-fact voice of the Mercury Port's dispatcher, "Lancaster from Tower, you are half a degree off landing course. Correct."

Farradyne responded, "Instructions received, Tower. Will correct. Will correlate instruments after landing."

"Aye-firm, Lancaster Eighty-One."

Farradyne's remembrances ended and his solo landing was firm and easy; almost as good as he used to do in the days before....

He put it out of his mind and went below to Clevis and Donaldson. The latter asked him what had been the matter with the course.

"I hit a daydream of the Semiramide," admitted Farradyne.

"Better forget it," suggested Clevis, drily.

"I came out of it," said Farradyne shortly.

"Okay?" Clevis looked at Donaldson. The pilot nodded. "Okay, Farradyne, you're ready. This is your ship; you're cleared to Ganymede on speculation. You'll play it from there. There's enough money in the strong-locker to keep you going for a long time on no pickups at all; you'll get regular payment for the Pluto run. Play it flat, and help us out. Just remember, no shenanigans."

"No games," promised Farradyne.

Clevis stood up. "I hope you mean that," he said earnestly. "If nothing else remember that your—er,—misfortune on Venus four years ago may have put you in a position to be a benefactor to the mankind you hate at the moment. I hope you'll find that they are as quick to applaud a hero as to condemn a louse. Don't force me to admit that my hope of running down the hellblossom outfit was based on a bum hunch. Don't let me down, Farradyne."

Clevis left then, before Farradyne could find words. Donaldson left with him, but stopped at the spacelock to hurl one sentence. "Pilots are a proud lot, Farradyne. Luck, fella."

An hour later Farradyne was a-space between Mercury and Ganymede. On his own in space for the first time in four long, aching years. Not quite a free man, but at least no prisoner. He took a deep breath once he was out of control-range and could put the Lancaster on the autopilot. Gone were the smells and the rotting filth of the fungus fields and here were the bright, clear stars in the velvety sky. Here was freedom—freedom of the body, at least. Maybe even freedom of the soul. But not freedom of the intellect, yet. He had a tough row to hoe and the tougher row of his innocence to turn up into the light of day. But for the first time since he was thrown flat on his face he felt he had a chance.

Eventually he hit the sack....

Ganymede was in nightfall and Jupiter was a half-rim over the horizon when he landed. He checked in at the Operations Office and listed his Lancaster as available for a pickup job. The clerk that took his license to make the listing raised a mild eyebrow at the big rubber stamp reading "Reinstated" across the face of the card, but made no comment. Farradyne's was not the only one so stamped and Farradyne knew it. Pilots had been suspended for making a bounce-landing with an official aboard or coming in too slantwise instead of following a beacon down vertically.

He folded the leather case and slipped it back in his pocket. He looked at the pickup list which was not too long. Farradyne knew that he had a fair chance of picking up a job here, and if he did it would add to whatever backlog Clevis had left him. The space business was an odd one and Farradyne found himself able to figure his chances as though he had not spent his time digging mushrooms on Venus. His chances were excellent; the pilot that owned his own ship outright was a rare one. The rest were mortgaged to the scuppers and it was a touch and clip job to make the monthly payments. Some pilots never did get their ships paid off but managed to scratch out a living anyway. A pilot with a clear ship could eventually start a string of his own. This was the ultimate goal which so many aimed at but so few achieved. With no mortgage to contend with, Farradyne could loaf all over space and still make out rather well, picking up a job here, a job there.

He waved a hand at the registry clerk and went out into the dark of the spaceport.

Rimming the edge of the field were three distant globs of neon, all indicating bars. One was as good as the next, so Farradyne headed toward the nearest. He entered it with the air of a man who had every right to land his ship anywhere he pleased and head for the nearest bar. He waggled a finger at the barkeep, called for White Star Trail, and dropped a ten-spot on the bar with a gesture indicating that he might be there long enough for a second.

Then he turned and hooked one heel in the brass rail, leaned back on the mahogany with his elbows and surveyed the joint like a man with time and money to spare, looking for what could be found.

Appropriately, it was called The Spaceman's Bar even though the name indicated a lack of imagination, for there were about sixteen hundred Spaceman's Bars rimming spaceports from Pluto to Mercury. The customers were about the same, too. There were four spacemen playing blackjack for dimes near the back of the room. Two women were nursing beers, hoping for someone to come and offer them something more substantial. Two young fellows were agreeing vigorously with one another about the political situation which neither of them liked. One character should have gone home eighteen drinks earlier and was earning a ride home on a shutter with a broken nose by needling a man who showed diminishing patience. A woman sat in a booth along the wall, dressed in a copy of some exclusive model. The copy had neither the material nor the workmanship to stand up for much more than the initial wearing, and it looked now as though she had worn it often. The woman herself had the same tired, overworked look as her dress. She was too young to have that look, but she had it and Farradyne wondered how she had earned it. He looked away, disinterested. He favored the vivacious brunette who sat gayly across the table from a young spaceman and enticed him with her eyes.

Farradyne shrugged, the girl had eyes for no one else and she probably couldn't have been pried away from her young man by any means, fair or foul. It occurred to Farradyne from the way she was acting, that if some other guy slipped her a love lotus, the girl would take a deep breath, get bedroom eyed, and then leave the guy to go looking for her spaceman. Farradyne grinned at the idea; the hapless spendthrift who bought the love lotus would probably go roaring back to the seller raising hob about being rooked on the deal because the lotus hadn't worked.

He finished his drink and then turned back to the bar for a refill. As he turned to face the road again he saw that a man had come in and was standing just inside the door, blinking at the light. He was eyeing the customers with a searching look.

Eventually he addressed the entire room, "Who owns the Lancaster Eighty-One that just came in?"

"I do," said Farradyne.

"Are you free?"

"Until the third of August."

"Terran, I see."

"Right. Anything wrong in being Terran?"

"Not at all. Just an observation. I'm Timothy Martin of the Martian Water Commission and I'd like to hire you for a trip to Uranus."

"My name is Charles Farradyne and maybe we can make a deal. What's the job, Mr. Martin?" Farradyne eyed the room furtively, wondering if the mention of his name would ring any cracked bells among the spacemen. It didn't seem to, and Farradyne did not know whether to be gratified at man's forgetfulness or depressed.

"Only three of us and some instruments," said Martin.

"That's hiking all the way to Uranus empty, you know."

"I know, but this is of the utmost importance. Government business."

"It's up to you; I'll haul you out there on a three passenger charter, since you probably haven't enough gear to make it a payload. Okay?"

"It's a bit high," objected Martin, "but this is necessity. Can you be ready for an early morning hop off?"

"You be there with your gear and we'll hike it at dawn." He turned to the barkeep and wagged for a refill, then indicated that Martin be served. The government man took real bourbon but Farradyne stuck to his White Star Trail. The two of them clinked glasses and drank. Farradyne was about to say something when he felt a touch against his elbow. Her glazed eyes were small and glittering, and her face was hardened and thin-lipped.

"You're Charles Farradyne?" she asked in a flat voice. Beneath the tone of dislike and distrust the voice had what could have been a pleasant throatiness if it had not been strained.

Farradyne nodded.

"Farradyne—of the Semiramide?"

"Yes." He felt a peculiar mixture of gratification and resentment. He had been recognized at last, but it should have come from a better source.

She shut him out by turning to Martin. "Do you know whom you've hired?" she asked in the same flatness of tone. Profile-wise, she was not much more than a girl. Maybe twenty-three at the most. Farradyne could not explain how a woman that young could possibly have crammed into the brief years all the experience that showed in her face.

Martin fumbled for words. "Why, er—" he started, lamely.

"This rum-lushing bum is Charles Farradyne, the hot-rock that dumped his spacer into The Bog."

"Is this true?" demanded Martin of Farradyne.

"I did have an accident there," said Farradyne. "But—"

The woman sneered. "Accident, you call it. Sorry, aren't you? Reeking with remorse. But not so grief stricken that you'll not take this man out and kill him the way you killed my brother."

Farradyne grunted. "I don't know you from Mother Machree," he said. "I've had my trouble and I don't like it any more than you do."

"You're alive, at least," she snarled at him. "Alive and ready to go around skylarking again. But my brother is dead and you—"

"Am I supposed to blow out my brains? Would that make up for this brother of yours?" demanded Farradyne angrily. Some of the anguish of the affair returned. He recalled all too vividly his own mental meanderings and the feeling that suicide would erase that memory. But he had burned himself out with those long periods of self-reproach.

"Blow your brains out," advised the girl, sharply. "Then the rest of us will be protected against you."

"I suppose I'm responsible for you, too?" he asked bitterly.

Timothy Martin gulped his drink down. "I think I'd better find another ship," he said hurriedly.

Farradyne nodded curtly at Martin's back. He looked down at the girl. He felt again the powerful impulse to plead his case, to explain. But he knew that this was the wrong thing to do. Martin had refused the job once Farradyne had been identified. This might be the start of the game that Clevis wanted. Farradyne could louse it up for fair by saying the wrong thing here and now. So instead of making some appeal to the woman, Farradyne eyed her coldly.

There was something incongruous about her. She looked like the standard tomato of the spacelanes; she dressed the part and she acted it. The rough-hewn language and the cynical bitterness were normal enough but her acceptable grammar and near-perfect diction were strange. He had catalogued her as a drunken witch but she was neither drunk nor a witch. Nor was she a thrill-seeking female out slumming for the fun of it. She belonged in the "Spaceman's Bar" but not among the lushes.

He caught it then. He had been too far from it for too long. The glazed, bored eyes, the completely blasé attitude gave it away first; then the fact that she had become animated at the chance to start a scene. Dope is dope and all of it works the same way. The first sniff is far from dangerous, but the second must be larger, and the third larger still until the body craves a massive dose. In some dope it is physical, in others the effect is mental. With the love lotus it was emotional. The woman had been on an emotional toboggan; her capacity for emotion had been dulled to such an extent that only a scene of real violence could cut through the emotional scars to give her a reaction. Someone had slipped the girl a really topnotch dose of hellflower.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Norma Hannon," she snapped. "And I don't suppose you remember Frank Hannon at all."

"Never met him."

"You killed him."

Farradyne felt a kind of hysteria, he wanted to laugh and he knew that once he started he could not stop easily. Then the feeling went away and he looked around the room.

Every eye in the place was on him, but as he looked at them and met their eyes, they looked down or aside. He knew the breed, they were spacemen, a very strange mixture of high intelligence and hard roughness; Farradyne knew that to a man they understood that the most damaging thing they could do to him was to deny him the physical satisfaction of a fight. He could rant and roar and in the end he would be forced to leave the joint. It would be a lame retreat, a defeat.

He looked back at the girl. She stood there in front of him with her hands on her hips, swaying back and forth and relishing the emotional stimulus of hatred. She wanted more, he could see. Farradyne wanted out of here; the girl had done her part for him and could do no more. To take her along as a possible link to the hellblossom operators was less than a half-baked idea. She would only make trouble because trouble was what she relished.

"I've got it now," she blurted. Her voice rose to a fever-pitch, her face cleared and took on the look of someone who is anticipating a real thrill. Norma Hannon was at that stage in addiction where bloody, murderous butchery would thrill her only to the same degree as a normal woman being kissed goodnight at her front door. "I've got it now," she said, and her voice rang out through the barroom. "The only kind of a rascal that could dump a spacer and kill thirty-three people and then turn up with another spacer, is a big-time operator. You louse!" she screamed at him. Then she turned to the rest of the room.

"Fellows, meet Charles Farradyne, the big-time hellflower operator!"

Farradyne's nerves leaped. He knew his spacemen. A louse they could ignore but a dope-runner they hated viciously. Their faces changed from deliberate non-recognition of him to cold and calculated hatred, not of Farradyne, but of what he represented. Farradyne knew that he had better get out of here quickly or he would leave most of his skin on the floor.

Something touched him on the shoulder, hard. He snapped his head around. The bartender had rapped him with the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun.

"Get the hell out of here, Farradyne," said the barkeep between narrowed lips. "And take your rotten money with you!"

He scooped up the change he had dropped beside Farradyne's glass and hurled the original ten-dollar bill at him. It went over the bar and landed in a spittoon between the brass rail and the bar.

"Pick it up," growled the barkeep coldly. He waved the shotgun and forced Farradyne to retrieve the soggy bill. "Now get out—quick!" Then his voice rose above the growing murmur of angry men. "Sit down, God dammit! Every bloody one of you sit the hell down! We ain't going to have no trouble in here!" He covered the room with the shotgun.

Farradyne left. It was an ignominious retreat but it kept him a whole skin. He burned inwardly, he wanted to have it out, but this was the game Clevis wanted him to play and it was the price of his freedom from the fungus fields. So he left, burning mad. He took it on the run to his Lancaster, knowing that the barman would hold the room at bay only until a bare escape was made.

He took the ship up as soon as the landing ramp had been retracted and only then did his nerves calm down. He looked at the whole affair—he seemed to have started with a bang. If Clevis wanted a decoy, what better decoy than to make a noise like a small guy muscling in on a big racket? The word would travel from bar to bar, from port to port until it reached the necessary person.

Time was unimportant now. The word must get around. So instead of driving to some definite destination, Farradyne set the Lancaster in a long, lazy course and let the big ship loaf its way into space.

Big Jupiter and tiny Ganymede were dwindling below by the time Farradyne was finished at the control panel. He was hungry and he was tired, so he was going to eat and hit the sack. He turned and saw her.

Norma Hannon sat in the computer's chair behind the board. Her hands were folded calmly and her body was listless. She had been quietly waiting for him to get finished with the important part of his piloting before she started anything. Farradyne grunted uncertainly because he was completely ignorant of her attitude, except perhaps the feeling that she would enjoy violence.

"Well?" he said.

"I caught the landing ramp as it came running in."

"Why?"

"You owe me a couple," she told him. "You're a lotus runner, you can give me one. Simple as that."

"How do you figure?"

"You killed my brother," she said. There was more vigor in her tone as the anger flared again. "So you owe me more than a couple of blossoms for it, at least."

"What makes you think—"

"Another thing," she interrupted. "I wanted to come along with you."

"Now see here—"

"Don't bother pretending you give a damn for the lives of the people you sell those things to. Run your dope and get your dough and skip before you have to see the ruin you bring." The flare of anger was with her and she wriggled in her chair with an animal relish that was close to ecstasy.

"But I can't—"

"Keep it up," she said. "You'll satisfy me, one way or another." She eyed him critically. "You can't win, Farradyne. I've had my love lotus, and all that is left of my feeling is heavy scar-tissue. Pleasure and surprise are too weak to cut through; only a burning anger or a deep hatred are strong enough to make me feel the thrill of a rising pulse. I can get a lift out of hating you, but if you kissed me it would leave me cold." She paused speculatively. "No, would it? Farradyne, come here."

"But why?"

"Because I hate your guts. Of all the people in the solar system, I hate you the most. I can keep telling myself that you killed Frank, and that does it. And I add that you are a love lotus runner and in some way part and parcel of this addiction of mine and that builds it up. Now if you came over and kissed me, I'd let you and the very thought of being kissed and fondled by such a completely rotten reptile as Farradyne makes me seethe with pleasant anger."

Farradyne recoiled.

"Afraid?" she jeered, wriggling again. "You know, as a last thrill I might kill you. But only as a last thrill. Because then the chance to hate you actively would be over and finished and there could be no more. So between hating your guts and getting an occasional hellflower from the man I hate, I can feel almost alive again."

Farradyne shook his head. This sort of talk was above and beyond him. No matter what he said or did it was the wrong thing, which made it right for Norma Hannon.

He did not know much about the love lotus. All he knew was from hearsay. But that did not include this sort of completely illogical talk. Like many another man, Farradyne had always scorned the use of any chemical means to lower the inhibitions of a woman. He wanted them to love him for himself, not because of a sniff of perfume that made them any man's woman.

Seeing this end result actually made Farradyne feel better about the lot he had been cast in. If Clevis was the kind of man who boiled inwardly from a sense of outraged civic responsibility, Farradyne was beginning to feel somewhat the same.

He looked at Norma Hannon more critically. She had been a good-looking woman not too long ago. She had probably laughed and danced and fended off wolves and planned on marriage and happy children in a pleasant home. Someone had cut her out of that future and Farradyne felt that he wanted to get the man's neck between his hands and squeeze. He shook himself and wondered whether this addiction to hatred were contagious.

He said softly, "Who did it, Norma?"

Her eyes changed. "I loved him," she breathed in a voice that was both soft and heavy with another kind of anger than the violence she had shown just a moment before. This was resentment against the past, while her previous flare had been against the physical present. "I loved him," she repeated. "I loved the flat-brained animal enough to lead him into the bedroom if that's what he wanted. But no, the imbecile thought that the only way I would unfreeze was with a hellflower. So he parted with half a hundred dollars for one. The idiot could have rented a hotel room for a ten-dollar bill," she added sourly. "Or bought a marriage license and had me for the rest of his life for five."

"Why didn't you refuse it?" he asked. "Or didn't you know that it wasn't a gardenia?"

Norma looked up with eyes that started to blaze, but they died and she was listless again. "Maybe because people like to flirt with danger," she said. "Maybe because men and women don't understand each other."

"That's the understatement of the century."

There was no flicker of amusement in her face. "Look at it this way," she said. "I did say I loved him. So naturally he wouldn't be the kind of man who would bring me a love lotus. Or if he did I could wear it for the lift they bring without any danger, because any man worth loving would not take advantage of his sweetheart while she's unable to object. So I wore it and when I woke up after a real orgy instead of a mild emotional binge, I was on the road toward having no feelings left. I've been on the road ever since and I've come far."

She looked at him again. "See what you and your kind have done?" she demanded. Farradyne knew that she was whipping herself into a fury again. "I was a nice, healthy woman once, but now I'm a burned out battery. It takes a spot of violence to make me feel anything. Or maybe a sniff from a lotus. Maybe by now it would take more than one."

"But I haven't any."

She snarled at him. "You can afford to part with one stinking flower."

Norma leaped out of her chair and came across the room, her face distorted, her hands clutching at his face. Farradyne fought her away, and saw with dismay the look of animated pleasure on her face. It was an unfair fight; Farradyne was trying to keep her from hurting him without being forced to hurt her. She went at him with heel and fingernail and teeth.

He gave up. Taking a cold aim at the point of her jaw, Farradyne let her have it. Norma recoiled a bit and her face glowed even more. In his repugnance at hitting a woman he had not struck hard enough. She came after him again, enjoying the physical violence, looking for more of the same. Farradyne gritted his teeth and let her have it, hard.

Norma collapsed with a suddenness that scared him. He caught her before she hit the metal floor and carried her to the salon below, where he laid her on the padded bench that ran along one wall. His knowledge of things medical was not high, but it was enough to let him know that she did not have a broken jaw. Of one thing there was no doubt: Norma was out colder than he had ever seen man or woman.

He carried her to one of the tiny staterooms, and stood there contemplating her and wondering what to do next. He would have been puzzled as to the next move if Norma had been a completely normal woman. As it was, Farradyne decided that no matter what he did it would be wrong. She would be as angry at one thing as at another. The cocktail dress would not stand much sleeping in before it came apart at the seams, but she would surely rave if he took it off to save it for tomorrow. If he left her in it, she would rave at him for letting her ruin the only thing she had to wear.

Farradyne gave up and slipped the hold-down strap across her waist and let it go at that.

He would take what happened when she woke up.

Then he went to his own stateroom and locked the door because he didn't want any more ruckus and confusion. He slept fitfully even though the locked door separated him securely from both amour and murder—both of which added up to the same end with Norma.

It was a sixty-hour trip from Ganymede to Mars. Each hour was a bit more trying than the one before. Norma bedeviled him in every way she knew. She found fault with his cooking but refused to go near the galley herself. She objected to the brand of cigarettes he smoked. She made scathing remarks whenever he touched an instrument, reminding him of his incompetence as a pilot. She scorned him for refusing to bring her the lotus.

By the time Farradyne set the Lancaster down at Sun City on Mars, he had almost arrived at the point where her voice was so much meaningless noise.

He landed after the usual discussion of landing space and beacon route with Sun Tower, and Farradyne found time to wonder whether the word about his affiliation had been spread yet. For the Tower operator paid him no more attention than if he had been running in and out of the spaceport for years.

He pressed the button that opened the spacelock and ran out the landing ramp.

"This is it," he said flatly.

"This is what?" she asked negatively.

"The end of the line."

"I'm staying."

"No, you're not."

"I'm staying, Farradyne. I like it here. You go on about your sordid business, and see that you get enough to spare a couple for me. I'll be here when you return."

Farradyne swore. She had moved in on him unwanted and had ridden with him unwanted. If she wanted to, she could raise her voice, and brother, that would be it. One yelp and Farradyne would spend a long time explaining to all sorts of big brass why he was hauling a woman around the solar system against her wishes. A phenomenal quantity of sheer hell can be raised by any woman merely by making a howl of shocked surprise, putting on a look of wounded dignity and pointing a finger at any man within a pebble's throw. Even men who have been rooked in this ladylike maneuver are inclined to lean the other way and convict the man when a woman plays that trick.

So grunting helplessly, Farradyne left her in the Lancaster and went to register at Operations. He was received blandly, just as he had been received on Ganymede. Then he headed into Sun City to stall a bit. He went to a show, had a drink or two, prowled around a bookstore looking for something that might inform him about the love lotus and then bought himself some clothing to augment his scant supply. He succeeded in forgetting Norma Hannon for four solid hours.

Then he remembered, and with the air of a man about to visit a dentist for a painful operation, Farradyne went reluctantly back to his ship.

The silence that met him was reassuring. Even if she had been sound asleep, the noise of his arrival should have roused her so that she would come out to needle him some more. He looked the ship over carefully, and satisfied himself that Norma Hannon was not present.

This was too good to miss.

He raced to the control room, punched savagely at the button that closed the spacelock and fired up the radio. "Lancaster Eighty-One calling Tower."

"Go ahead, Lancaster."

"Request take-off instructions. Course, Terra."

"Lancaster, is your passenger aboard?"

"Passenger?"

"Check Stateroom Eight, Lancaster. Your passenger informed us that she was going into town, that you were not to leave without her."

"Aye-firm, I will check." Farradyne snarled at the closed microphone. Willfully abandoning a passenger would get him into more trouble than trying to explain the reason for the presence of his guest. Norma had done a fine job of bolting the Lancaster to the landing block in her absence.

He waited fifty seconds. "Tower from Lancaster Eighty-One. I will wait. My passenger is not aboard."

"Lancaster. Hold-down Switches to Safety, Warm-up Switches to Stand-by. Power Switches to Off. Open your port for visitor."

"Visitor, Tower?"

"Civilian requests conference about pickup job. Are you free?"

"I am free for Terra, Tower."

"Prepare to receive visitor, Lancaster. Good luck on job."

"Aye-firm. Over and off."

Farradyne went below and rode the bottom step of the landing ramp on its way out of the spacelock. He reached the ground about the same time as the arrival of a port jeep, which brought his visitor to him.

"You're Charles Farradyne? I'm Edwin Brenner. I'm told you are free for Terra. Is that right?"

"That's right."

Brenner nodded. He looked around. The jeep was idling and making enough noise so that the driver sitting in the machine could not possibly hear anything that was being said. The driver was not even interested in them; something in the distance had caught his eye and he was giving it all his attention. Satisfied, Brenner leaned forward and in a low voice said, "Let me see what you've got."

Farradyne shook his head. "Who, me?" he asked.

"You. I'm in the market. If they're in good shape, we can make a deal."

Farradyne felt that this was as good a time to play cagey as any. "I don't know what you are talking about."

"No? I hardly think you are telling the truth."

Farradyne grinned broadly. "So I'm a liar?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"Look, Brenner, I don't know you from Adam's off ox. From somewhere, you have the idea that I am a runner and you want to get into the act. In the first place I am not a runner and in the second place you have about as much chance of getting into a closed racket with that open-faced act of yours as you have of filling a warehouse with heroin by asking the local cops where to buy it."

Brenner smiled. "I can see you're cagey," he said. "I don't blame you. In fact, I'd not have come out here asking like an open-faced fool if I hadn't been completely out of stock. I'm a bit desperate." He went into an inside pocket and came out with an envelope. "This is a credential or two," he said, "so that when you return this way, we can maybe do business. The usual way, you know. No questions, or witnesses. Okay?"

"I'll be back—maybe, Mr.—er, Brenner."

"You get the idea."

"I'll—" Farradyne's voice trailed away as he caught sight of the object that had held the interest of the jeep driver. It was Norma Hannon, who came around the fins of the Lancaster with the sun behind her.

Her errand had been shopping. The overworn cocktail dress was gone and in its place was a white, silky number that did a lot of fetching things to her figure. She had also taken the complete course at some primpmill. She was another woman. Not even Farradyne, who had seen her for days, could have been convinced that this beautiful perfection was not Norma's usual appearance.

Farradyne was silent. But as Brenner caught sight of her coming around the sunlit tail of the ship, with enough sun shining through her to make the pulses jump he made a throaty discord.

"Hello," she said brightly, as though she and Farradyne were reasonably close acquaintances, but in a tone that indicated that she was paid passenger and he the driver of the spacer. "I've some parcels being delivered in a bit. We'll wait, of course?"

Farradyne agreed dumbly.

Norma nodded coolly to Brenner and said, "I'm going on in," as though she did not want to interfere with any business that might be going on between the two men. She went up the ramp displaying a quantity of well-filled nylon at every step.

The roar of the jeep's engine snapped Farradyne's attention back to Brenner—or where Brenner had been standing. The jeep was taking Brenner away in a cloud of spaceport dust.

Farradyne shrugged. That was not the man he really wanted. Call it close but no cigar. Farradyne did not want a man to buy love lotus, he wanted a seller of the things, a shipper, a character from the upper echelon. There might be an avenue through Brenner, but he doubted it.

With a sigh, Farradyne went into the Lancaster. Norma rose from the divan along the end of the salon and whirled like a mannequin, her silken skirt floating. She stopped and let the skirt wrap itself around her thighs. "Like it?" she asked.

"It's very neat," he replied flatly. "But where did you get the wherewithal?"

"I figured you owed me something so I took it out of the locker in the control room. You left the key dangling conveniently in the lock."

Clevis had left Farradyne quite a bit of operating money but far from enough to go cutting a silken swath across the average fashion mart. "What's the grand idea?" he asked.

"You're a cold-blooded bird. You don't give a hoot that you and your cowboy-spacing killed my brother and that you and your kind made it possible for some lecher to dope me out of my feelings. I'm told that half-decent gangsters send flowers to a rival's funeral, but you wouldn't part with even a love lotus you aren't paid for. So if you won't give me one, I'm going to force it out of you."

"But—"

"You get the idea," she said, smoothing a nonexistent wrinkle over one round hip. "But I'm honest. You've some change coming." She put her hand down in the space between her breasts and brought forth a small roll of bills which she handed to him. Dumbly, he took them.

They were warm and scented with woman and cologne and would have been hard on Farradyne's blood pressure if it had not been for the anticipatory glitter in Norma Hannon's eyes. There was a small commotion at the spacelock. Farradyne looked to see three men coming in with fancy-wrapped boxes. He groaned and went aloft to the control room. Norma had run the gamut without a trace of a doubt.

Farradyne sat before his control panel with his head in his hands and tried to think this affair out to a logical conclusion. There had to be some way out of it all. The only alternative was to go on hauling Norma back and forth, being the brunt of her needling and her viciousness and getting nothing done because of it. The mess had started off bad enough, but had now deteriorated until at the present moment the future looked completely hopeless.

Norma's needling and goading had been hard enough to bear. Her in-between offers of affection had been less difficult because she had not made an attractive picture in the first place and she had not let him forget her attitude in the second. But he realized that she was a smart enough woman; if anything, having her emotional balance dulled had put her in a rather interesting class of intellects. She was able to analyze a situation without being involved emotionally herself in the analysis. She was smart enough and unencumbered enough to realize that playing soft-pedal on the hate theme might eventually get her what she needed.

He was willing to bet his spare money that the boxes she was now receiving contained whatever could be purchased of the most seductive clothing she could find. And included in that basic idea was, most likely, a sharp appreciation of what Farradyne would consider exciting. Acres of exposed skin or rank nudity would pall on him. He knew it and he bet she knew it, too. So she would come out with some little items that might cover her from toe to chin in such a way as to make him wonder about what was underneath: probably simple stuff with a lot of line and fine fit and a semi-transparent quality that compelled the eye. If she coupled this program with a soft voice as she was most likely to do now that she had shucked the sleazy costume, Norma Hannon would be well nigh irresistible. And if she even once got the idea that Farradyne felt protective about her or angry at the man who doped her, she would see to it that she stopped raving at him. It would demolish the barrier completely. Before this happened, he had to park her somewhere that would be binding.

Had she parents? Friends?

He hit the control panel with his fist. He hated to think of it, but he might be able to drop her in one of the sanatoriums that had been set up for love lotus addicts. They did little good for the victims, but did serve to keep them out of other people's hair—and he had to get rid of her.

It should be parents first.

Farradyne's forefinger hit the radio button viciously. "Tower? Connect me to the city telephone."

"Aye-firm, Lancaster. Wait five."

A few seconds later he was asking for the Bennington Detective Agency, an outfit that was system-wide and which advertised enough to make him remember the name. He got a receptionist first and then a quiet-voiced man named Lawson.

Farradyne came to the point. "I want any information you can collect about the family of a man named Frank Hannon who was killed in the wreck of the Semiramide in The Bog, on Venus, four years ago."

"You're Charles Farradyne. The same Farradyne?"

"Maybe, but is that important?"