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?"

"It might be but it will be held confidential. I'm asking because we prefer to know the motives of clients. I'd like reassurance that our investigation will be made for a legal reason."

"I'll put it this way. I know Frank Hannon was killed in the wreck. I have reason to believe that he had a sister that disappeared afterwards. If this is true, I want to know, but I haven't time to find out through the usual channels. Fact of the matter is, I want no more information than I could get myself if I had time to go pawing through issues of newspapers of four years ago. No more. Is this reasonable enough?"

"It sounds that way. I'll look through our list of missing persons. I suggest that you either call back in a couple of hours or better that you call in person here at my office. There will be no charge for the initial search, but if this evolves into something more concrete—well, we can discuss the matter when you call. All right?"

"It's okay and I'll be in your office at four o'clock."

Farradyne hung up and considered. If Norma Hannon had a couple of grieving parents, he could hand her over to them and that would be the end of that. He lit a cigarette and smoked for a moment and then got up from the control console, snapped all the switches off and started for the spacelock.

He met Norma in the salon. She had changed from her white, silky, wide-skirted thing into a heavy satin housecoat that molded her arms to the wrists, clung to her waist and breasts and throat, and outlined her hips and thighs. Bare feet and painted toenails were provocatively visible below the hem as she sat there with her legs crossed, tossing her foot up and down.

"Thought we were about to take off again?" she asked. Her voice was soft and personal and friendly. She had obviously dropped the vindictive tones and was plying the affectionate line as smoothly as she could.

Farradyne shook his head. Having a plan of action made him feel better. "Got a call from the Tower," he said. "More business. I'll be back in a couple of hours."

Norma held up her hand for his cigarette and he gave it to her. She puffed deeply and offered it back. Farradyne refused it. The memory of her needling and her desire for violence had not had time to fade. Another twenty hours of this calmness and he would begin to look upon the sharing of a cigarette as a pleasant gesture of companionship.

Norma shrugged at his wave of the hand in refusal. "I'll be here when you get back," she said comfortably, wriggling down against the cushions, and giving him the benefit of an inviting smile. She looked for all the world like a woman who would be waiting patiently for her man to return to her.

Farradyne left the salon swearing under his breath. If this parking of her did not work, Farradyne was licked and he knew it.

Farradyne walked. He didn't like walking but he preferred it to remaining in the Lancaster with Norma for the next couple of hours. He tried to think, but he could not come to any conclusion because he had all his hope tied on the Bennington outfit and what they might turn up.

He was shown into the office of Peter Lawson, who was a bright-eyed, elderly man with a body surprisingly lithe for his years.

"Now, before we go any further," said Lawson, pleasantly, "I'd like to hear your reasons for becoming interested in this case."

Farradyne nodded. "As I told you, Frank Hannon was killed in an accident on a spacecraft I owned. That was four years ago. Recently I met Norma Hannon in a gin mill on Ganymede and she fastened onto me like a leech as a person to hate. You know the results of love lotus addiction?"

"Yes. Unfortunately, I do."

"Well, it occurred to me that one way of getting rid of Miss Hannon would be to turn her over to some relative or friend who would be deeply interested in her welfare. Does this add up?"

"Quite logical. Miss Hannon is where you can find her?"

Farradyne nodded, with a sour look on his face. "She's sitting in my salon waiting for me to come back so she can bait me some more."

"Why not just turn her over to the police?" asked Lawson, with a careful look at Farradyne.

"Look," said Farradyne testily, "I don't enjoy Miss Hannon's company, but I can't see jailing her. She isn't really vicious, she's just another unfortunate victim of the love lotus trap. Maybe I feel a bit concerned over her brother. Anyway, take it from there."

"Very well. I shall. The facts are these: Frank Hannon was a lawyer with a limited but apparently lucrative practice. Norma acted as a sort of junior partner whose ability with briefs and research made her valuable to her brother. The case history says that Frank Hannon had been on his way to Venus to place some case before one of the higher courts, the nature of which is not a matter for public discussion even at this late date. I don't know what it was myself.

"Then Frank was killed, and afterwards Norma dropped her study of law. Her brother's death seemed quite a blow to her. Before, she dated at random, nothing very serious. Afterwards she seemed to develop a strong determination to marry and have children, perhaps as a substitute for the gap left by the death of her brother. A man named Anthony Walton became number one boy friend after a few months and they were together constantly and seemed devoted to one another. She disappeared after a dinner date with Walton, and Walton is now serving a term on Titan Colony for possession of love lotus blossoms."

Farradyne shook his head. "The louse," he said.

"Everybody agrees."

"I don't know as much as I might about lotus addiction," continued Farradyne. "It all seems so quick. One moment we have a well-bred young woman with ideals and ambition and feeling and the next—?"

"It's a rather quick thing," said Lawson. "The love lotus or hellflower is vicious and swift. I've studied early cases. They all seem to have the same pattern. And oddly enough, love lotus is not an addictive drug in every case. It is not only an aphrodisiac; it also heightens the physical senses so that a good drink tastes better and a good play becomes superb. The touch of her man's hand becomes a magnificent thrill. And here is the point where addiction begins, Mr. Farradyne. If the woman's senses and emotions are treated only to the mild appreciation of food and drink and music and a gentle caress, the addiction may take years and years to arrive at the point where she cannot feel these stimuli without a sniff of hellflower. But if she should be so unlucky as to have her emotions raised to real passion during the period of dosage, it is like overloading the engine. You burn her out."

"I see. And there is no cure?"

"Some doctors believe that a long period of peace and quiet under conditions where the mildest of stimuli are available may bring the addict back. I am of the opinion that such a place does not exist. They fasten onto hate as an emotion that cuts through their burned-out emotions and if you should place them among completely bland surroundings they would find it possible to hate those that incarcerated them. It becomes almost paranoiac—anything you do is wrong."

"So I have discovered. But what do I do with Miss Hannon?"

"At the time of Miss Hannon's disappearance, her family offered five thousand dollars for her return."

"I'd be happy to deliver her FOB her own front porch," said Farradyne. "Can I hand her over to you and let you take it from there?"

"She would put up quite a ruckus," said Lawson. "I doubt that Miss Hannon will go home willingly. It is my opinion that her response to Walton's lovemaking was extremely high, so that the result was a quick blunting of her normal capabilities. After this, anger and shame would cause her—a proud woman of education and breeding—to hide where she could not be known, where she could possibly get the hellflower she needed. This would not be in the home of her parents. So she will not go home willingly, and the alternative is an appeal to the authorities. I doubt that such a course would be acceptable to either of us."

"You're right but—"

Lawson smiled. "I heard your offer to deliver her free to her home."

"So?"

"We'll help you. We'll have an operative collect Miss Hannon at the Denver Spaceport. All you have to do is live with this trouble for about fifty more hours. For delivering this information, and for taking Miss Hannon to Denver, we will be happy to divide the reward."

"I'll deliver Miss Hannon to Denver," he said, thinking that for twenty-five hundred he could stick cotton in his ears and sweat it out at about fifty dollars an hour.

"Good, Mr. Farradyne. I'll make arrangements to have our Mr. Kingman meet you at Denver."

Lawson handed Farradyne a few pages of dossier on the case and showed him out of the office. Farradyne took a deep breath and decided that what he wanted was a drink to his good fortune. He could look forward to getting rid of Norma Hannon, at last. He made the street and glanced around. Finding a small bar not far from the office door of the Bennington Agency, he went in to relax and think.

At a small table with a tiny lamp, he opened the papers that Lawson had given him, to read them more thoroughly. The waitress was high-breasted in a manner that invited him to look, but he merely barked, "White Star Trail," and went back to his reading.

"Spaceman?" she asked.

Farradyne nodded in an irritated manner. She flounced off after a moment of futile attempt to beguile a spaceman.

So when a moment later someone slid into the bench beside him, Farradyne turned to tell her to please go because he wasn't having any, thanks. Instead of looking into a vapidly willing face Farradyne's eyes were met by an equally cold blue stare from the face of a hard-jawed man dressed in a jacket tailored to half-conceal the shoulder holster he wore. Farradyne blinked.

"Farradyne?"

"So?" said Farradyne. He tried to think but all he could cover was the idea that someone was now playing games with guns.

"Hear tell you're running blossoms."

"Who says?"

"People."

"People say a lot of things. Which people?"

"Well, are you?"

"Who, me?"

"Can it!" snapped the newcomer.

Farradyne shrugged angrily. "What do you want me to do?" he asked in a mild tone. "You have the jump on me. You slide into my seat and bar my exit and then without introducing yourself you start asking questions that could get me twenty years in poor surroundings with bad company and no pay."

"Call me Mike. Michael Cahill is the name."

"Any identification that doesn't bark for itself?"

"It's usually good enough."

"Probably. But the numbers on its calling cards are always someone else's."

Mike laughed. "That's not bad, Farradyne. But so far as I know your number isn't among those present."

"I'll bet you could change a number fast enough."

"Could be," nodded Cahill. He turned over his shoulder and called to the waitress. "Hey, Snookey, make it two instead of one."

"Mine's White Star."

"That's all right with me. It's easier to drive this rod with a clear head."

"No doubt," said Farradyne. "So now that we are about to drink together let's face it. You had more in mind than to pass the time of day with a nervous spaceman who wanted to be alone."

"Correct. Or as you birds say, 'Aye-firm.' How's the hellblossom business?"

"That's easy to answer. I haven't any and I am not in the business. See?"

"People say you are."

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 waitress brought their drinks. When 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.

"Or is it maybe?"

"Maybe it's maybe."

"Stop sounding like a parrot. As I heard it that 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. Since we know damned well that you're no hellblossom runner, where did you get the stack?"

"Thrift and good management."

"Yeah. How'd you do it?"

"I told you."

"Maybe it's a rich uncle?"

"I haven't one. 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 is 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 it's none of your damned business! I am not talking."

"It might make a difference if you did."

"Let's stop fencing. I may be of use to you. Now it might be that you are a SAND agent and it might be otherwise, I still may be of use to you either way. But the first time I start shooting off my trap, you'll begin to 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. I have a ticket that gets me in and out and a spacer that takes me there and back."

"And that's your story?"

"That's my story. Finis." Farradyne sipped his drink and then 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 excellently, I'm told. 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 never quite makes it the same."

"Yeah."

"Farradyne, you're not sold up on this next jaunt to Terra, are you?"

"I've plenty of room. 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 of the joint. Farradyne flagged down a taxicab. "Spaceport," he told the driver. "Coming?" he asked Cahill.

"Yeah. Might as well. Nothing else to do this week. I'll go along—for kicks."

Farradyne took the Lancaster up and set the ship on its course to Terra. As soon as he could spare the 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 to 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 Veed down to about here and 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 slipped out of the salon toward the galley and as she disappeared Cahill wagged a forefinger at Farradyne.

"That dame's a blank," he said in a very low voice.

"I know. She's not my woman, Cahill."

"Maybe not," responded Cahill. "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's right."

"She isn't. I'm not."

Cahill grinned. "This much we know," he said.

"You do?"

"Yes. But maybe she'll be right sooner or later. But get rid of her, see?"

Farradyne nodded vigorously. "That I'll do. She has been hell on high heels to have around."

"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. But—"

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, who had undoubtedly seen many a hellflower girl, still seemed to enjoy her advances although he accepted them with a calloused, self-assured smile. Once dinner was finished, Norma 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. He did not think she was so unable to calculate; she must know that this act now pointed up her former disdain for any kind of cooperation.

As she left again, Farradyne turned to Cahill and asked, "How can a man tell a love lotus from a gardenia?"

"That takes experience, Farradyne. You'll learn."

"The thing that stops me," said Farradyne, "is that the Sandmen have been trying to stamp the things out 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. Remember that."

"Where are we going after we leave Denver?"

"I'm not too sure we're going anywhere. I'm not 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 late model 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 toad-stool?"

"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 maligning. Let's say he played rough at the wrong time and might have to pay high for it at the present." Farradyne looked at the ceiling. "And maybe that isn't it."

Cahill laughed. "Have it your way, Farradyne. Well, tell me, do we have a layover 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."

"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, Norma made three highballs of White Star 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 from them, all curves and softness, with only that strange, disinterested look in her eyes to give her away.

Farradyne found this a bit difficult to explain to himself. The evening had been a series of paradoxes; Norma's change from 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 mechanically unemotional and therefore inclined to be frightfully chilled logic. But Farradyne's grasp of the problem was incomplete. Norma had claimed that she knew the emotions by name and definition, that once she had felt them, but that 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.

She did not even force herself upon them; when her cigarette and her drink were gone, Norma got up, excused herself and quietly 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 goodnight and Farradyne went on to his own room to think.

He hadn't done bad. Of course he did not really know how far some of Clevis' other operators had gone, but Farradyne had been on the trail for less than a hundred hours and already had a lead. Obviously the fact of the Semiramide was the tip-off; no Sandman would go that far to establish a shady reputation.

Farradyne was prepared to go 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 by the nasty things 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 steamroll 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 of this mess and then he could look his fellow man in the eye and ask him to forget one bad mistake—that wasn't even Farradyne's so far as he himself knew.

Being on his first step eased his mind somewhat. He would be rid of Norma in the morning sometime and on his way with Cahill, and the future looked interesting, if not cheerful. He went to sleep easily for the first time since the meeting with Norma on Ganymede. He dreamed a pleasant dream of freedom and success that ended with the bark of a pistol.

Shocked out of his sleep, he lay stunned and blinking for a moment, and then leaped out of bed and raced to the corridor. The light blinded him 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 on 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 the haze that clouded Cahill's eyes, he saw Farradyne. He stumbled forward and reached out, but collapsed like a limp towel, to stretch out at Farradyne's feet like a tired baby. His voice sighed out in a dying moan that sounded like a rundown phonograph ... and then the shocking rattle of death.

Steps 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 in a sneer as she came up to Cahill and poked at the dead 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 idea.

Farradyne shuddered. Cahill probably had not been able to do more than clutch at the deep neckline of Norma's nightgown.

He leaned back against the wall and saw things in a sort of horrid slow motion. Under any normal circumstances, no jury in the solar system would have listened to an attempt to prosecute her. Under any normal circumstances, Farradyne could bury Cahill at space and report the incident at the first landing. But Farradyne couldn't stand too much investigation. Norma Hannon was a hellflower addict, a "blank," in Cahill's words; she couldn't bear investigation.

Worst of all was the loss of Cahill.

"Why?" asked Farradyne, bitterly.

"He—" Her eyes opened wide again as she relived the scene, relished the violence.

"Have your fun," gritted Farradyne.

"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 with matter-of-fact flatness.

"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 automatic to Farradyne, who took it dumbly because it was proffered. She went on into the salon and sat down.

Farradyne wanted to hurt her, to reach through that wall and make her feel something besides anger.

"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 lotus?"

"I don't know," he said simply. "I've never had one."

Her laugh was shrill and insane. Then she bawled at him like a fishwife. "What an operator you are. You big, fumbling boob with your stolen spacer and your forged license, making like a big wind. Fah!"

She got up as suddenly as she had sat down. She paused on her way down the corridor to kick Cahill's leg. Farradyne stayed where he was until he heard her door slam shut. He should be moved, thought Farradyne.

He found himself looking down on the dead man with a strangely detached feeling, as though he were watching a play. He relived the scene although he tried to shut it out of his mind. Shutting out would not work, so he went through it detail by detail minutely, from the sound of the pistol shot to the last dying groan from Cahill's throat. The memory of that dying wail jarred on Farradyne's nerves.

It was a discordant cry.

He 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 had 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 disconnect of the mind, Farradyne was back in the Semiramide, hearing three voices behind him. They found one skeleton, afterwards. Then his mind leaped to Brenner, on Mars, 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 been no discord but nonetheless a mingling of tones. Three voices? Maybe more?

Maybe he was not sure of the first. Brenner's voice had been very brief, maybe he was convincing himself. But Cahill's death cry was most certainly polytonal. And they were both lotus operators.

It might mean something, or it might not. Farradyne put his head back and tried to hum and say something at the same time. Perhaps the stunt could be cultivated after much practice, and perhaps it was used as a password.

More than anything, Farradyne needed corroboration.

It was a very weak reed, but he stepped over Cahill's body and rapped on Norma's door.

She opened the door after a moment and said, "Now what?"

"Norma, you claim I owe you something, but I think you now owe me something."

She made a scornful sound. "For killing your little chum out there?"

"Maybe," he said as shortly as he knew how.

"Go on, Farradyne, but make it good."

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 I mean. It sounded to me like there were three or four tones all going at once."

She snorted derisively. "Let me shoot you. I'll make a recording of your death cry and we'll see how well you sing."

"I'm serious."

"Stop beating that dead horse," she told him flatly. "It's the same chorus you used to sing about the three men in your control room, remember?"

"Brenner made a sound like that, too," he said.

"A pig-like sound," she said scornfully. "Forget it, Farradyne. You've convinced nobody but yourself, and 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. Not that Cahill's death touched him in any way but mild shock and distress at the loss of his link to the hellblossom gang. 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 a lot of questions of the officials, and there might be a fair chance that Cahill's disappearance would cause the same people to ask a question or two of Farradyne.

He 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. And although he knew better intellectually, he instinctively considered a vocal cord as a stretched string of some sort that vibrated in the air-stream.

Distastefully Farradyne hauled the body to the scuttle-port and consigned it to space with a terse, "See you in hell, Cahill."

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?" asked the man.

"You're the Bennington Detective Agency man?"

"Sidney Kingman," said the other, showing Farradyne a small case with 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. I have come to take you home."

Norma leaped to her feet. "You good-for-nothing bum!" she screeched at Farradyne. "Why did you do it?"

"You wouldn't leave me alone, Norma," said Farradyne softly. "So I've brought you home where they'll take care of you and keep you out of my hair."

"I'll come after you!" she raved. "I'll get you for this!"

"Not if I see you first," he told her. "This is it."

"Why do you hurt everything you touch?" she cried.

"Now who?"

"Me." For the first time, Farradyne saw tears of genuine sorrow. There was anger at him, too, but remorse there was a-plenty. "Why hurt my people!" 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. Let's get it over with. You pair of money-grubbing ghouls."

She started toward the spacelock, waving her forefinger at Kingman, who 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 ramp, closed the spacelock and not long afterwards hiked the ship into the sky and headed for Mercury.

Cinnabar was inside 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 by reflections. Cinnabar was also one of the show-cities of the system, but Farradyne found that it did not show him the right things. He could have learned as much about hellflowers on Terra merely because New York had a larger public library.

He 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 had 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 semi-refined thorium there would be a spot of fluorescent paint, normally invisible. He was to wash off this spot so long as he had nothing to report. If it remained, then something was wrong with Farradyne; he had not turned up 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 grow less and less likely. He felt as though he had been given up, in fact he got to the point where he wondered how a man could get a love lotus if he wanted one. The prevalence of the dope seemed high enough, but as far as Farradyne was concerned it was harder than buying a real gold brick. There did not seem to be any for sale. He thought that perhaps his method of attack was wrong, and yet he did not know how to correct it.

He cursed under his breath at the futility of it, and realized that his curse must have been audible because 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 he saw that the voice which had been low-pitched enough to have been the voice of a man had come from the throat of a tall, dark-haired woman who sat beside him at the bar. "Just wondering what strangers do for excitement on Mercury," he finished lamely.

"Spaceman?"

"Yes."

"I guessed it." She laughed in her low contralto. "But spacemen aren't the only ones who drink that watered-down whiskey."

"I know. But this time it is one."

She smiled again. "Is Cinnabar so inhospitable?" she asked.

"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 velocity of humanity. But anybody can find anything he wants 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 curtsey. 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. "We shall play it very bright and very interesting. You shall drive me home where we will have cocktails with my folks and you will meet them. You will be an old friend of Michael's, who is a sort of school-chum of my brother. After cocktails I will run upstairs to change and you will make polite conversation with my family—none of whom 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. This I will like because it's been some time since I have seen the insides of a spacer."

"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 handed it to Carolyn. She 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 house just outside the city limits.

She introduced him, and 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 unstern whenever he smiled, which was frequently. Carolyn's mother was tall and dark with only a sprinkle of gray. 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, stated friend of Robert Niles.

Mr. Niles mixed a pitcher of martinis and inquired about the spaceman business. Farradyne explained how it was. Mrs. Niles laughed at his story of fish one day and fins the next and said that she thought it couldn't be quite 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 countered with, "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 judgment 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, quite sure 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 he 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?"

A shiver crossed Farradyne's nerves and he felt the muscle-loosening tingle of fear. His thinking mechanism stopped functioning. His mind buzzed with a frenetic insistence that he say something, but he was completely unprepared. And he dimly knew that his long speechlessness was as damning as any story he could have prepared after such a pause. He thought all the way around in a circle, coming back to the fact that he should say something but that his mind was so busy insisting that he fill in this bizarre event that it did not furnish him with anything to say.

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. What he must do was act for the next moment because the passed moment was irreparable. One of two things was evident: either Cahill was a double-dealing rat or the man was hand in glove with the Niles and that meant—

Farradyne laughed at his own simplicity. It was a sort of brief, scornful bark.

"What is funny?" asked Mr. Niles.

"It just occurred to me—the brilliant concept that you people are either innocent or guilty."

"Very sage," commented Niles drily. "You don't seem quite that bright, Mr. Farradyne. Not even that bright. Now, what happened to Cahill?"

Only for a fleeting moment did Farradyne follow the possibility that Niles was innocent. There had been no attempt on Cahill's part to contact anybody from the time Farradyne met him until he saw him last alive. Ergo, the Niles must have been forearmed with Cahill's plan. This was the place that Cahill would have brought him; it had just taken him a bit longer to get here without the proper guide.

He 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 did not seem to shake.

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 hellflower addict. She hated my guts because I am Charles Farradyne and 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, who offered to come along after a bit of talk. Then during the night, Cahill made a pass at Norma, and she shot him. 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. Women are poison."

"I seem to have followed one of them like a 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 makes you assume that this purpose was anything beyond finding out about Cahill?"

"Because you have 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 hellflower running, it was for a purpose, too. I call the same logic in you, Niles."

"Please. Mister Niles. I'm a bit your senior."

"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 you weren't more than a few hundred feet from me all the while?"

"You are a blind man, Farradyne," she said calmly.

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. Of course, it does seem a bit hard to believe that a government operative would crash a spacer and kill thirty-three people just to establish a bad reputation, especially when his own neck was involved in the affair. Still, such a deal might have been managed. So we have been checking on you and from that angle you are clean. Then comes the question of Cahill. It might be that you thought turning in a hellflower operator would help to smooth your lot in life, mayhap get you a bit of a reward. So we waited. No Cahill. Cahill started to bring you here; he would either have turned up with or without you. Or he would have gotten in touch with us. Unless Cahill was dead. You would know the answer. Norma Hannon is keeping her mouth shut, so far as we know. Of course no one would believe a blank anyway, and she probably knows that. So it stands to reason that you know more about Cahill than anybody else."

"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 have been told time and again that the 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. 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, doubtless."

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 acceptance 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 has gone. If a man has a hidden 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," explained Niles, "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 never can tell until it is 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 that tried and failed."

"How normal are you?" demanded Niles. "We'd have less liking for a misogynist than for a satyr here."

Farradyne smiled serenely. "I have 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. For one thing, Farradyne, you'll be in no position to hurt anyone but yourself if you're playing games. Once we're really sure of you, it won't matter any more because you will be in a position to get hurt plenty. We'll try it, and see. Now, when do you go to Pluto?"

"I've some schoolteachers to haul out there tomorrow. I've taken them on—"

"Good. Gives you a good background without much labor. Now, when you land on Terra, you'll not bother posting your ship for a job because you have already contracted for a job. Carolyn will be there on a business trip for me 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 can tell you now, Farradyne: you will be an inbetweener, in fact almost the operator you set yourself up to be. But with one difference, we'll inform you just who is and who is not to be trusted. In other words, you'll have your regular customers and you will sell to no one else. They'll take your entire supply, pay for it and you will take your profit. The remainder you will use to purchase your supply from the upper source. Advancement may come slow or fast, depending on you. You'll get the details later, as for now—" 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 have a drink or two and maybe a bit of lovemaking, which is an entirely natural performance. And from this moment you will be Charles and I shall be Mr. Niles and we'll have no nonsense. Understand?"

"I do."

"Good. Now have another martini while Carolyn dresses for dinner."

Niles poured. Carolyn disappeared. Mrs. Niles leaned forward and asked, "Charles, why did you become a spaceman?" Her tone of voice and attitude made her seem like all the other fathers and mothers who have asked the same question. For the moment he forgot about her position in this odd scheme of things just because she looked precisely fitted to the role she played for public consumption. Almost mechanically, Farradyne began to explain. He knew the story by rote because he had told it so often in the same manner and to the same sort of person. This gave his mind a chance to consider them, partly.

Mr. and Mrs. Niles appeared to be the successful businessman and his wife. The aura of respectability extended to include the house and its spacious grounds, so that Farradyne burned with resentment at any proposition whereby he, who had not committed anything more than a few misdemeanors and some rather normal fun and games which are listed on the books but are likely to be overlooked, should be less cultured, less successful and 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 play the rough games and run up the score, according to Farradyne. Women occupied one of two positions: they were patterned after Farradyne's mother who had been a poised, mature woman of education and breeding, if a trifle puritanical; or they were slatterns and sluts and they looked as well as acted the part. So instead of Mrs. Niles presiding over the mansion as a gracious lady, she should be loud and cheap. That she was poised and gracious offended Farradyne's sense of fitness.

As for Carolyn, who was equally engaged in this loathsome game, Farradyne felt annoyed because there was nothing about her outward appearance that would permit him to scorn her. Like her parents, she gave the impression of success, as though the business they were all engaged in were both honorable and beneficial. Farradyne yearned for the moment when he could pull the pedestal out from under them and dump them into the mud where they damned well belonged.

Farradyne became, in those few moments, a more mature man. He understood Clevis' attitude. Always before, he wondered why a clever man would work for peanuts at a thankless job which included anonymity when he could have put his efforts into some sort of business and emerge wealthy and famous. Now Farradyne was beginning to understand the personal satisfaction that could be gained by following in the footsteps of a man like Clevis. In Niles' own words, some men like money, others like power and still others build model railroads. Well, some achieve their personal gain by rooting out the lice that undermine the moral fiber of the race, and this gives them the same satisfaction that amassing a billion dollars gives a man whose ambition is wealth.

Money had never been Farradyne's god. He had not wanted more than enough to exchange for the fun and games he preferred, and these did not come high. He found himself elated to have discovered a new outlet for his nervous energy and his urge to do something. Performing a thankless job in anonymity could provide for Farradyne a deep satisfaction in proving that he was smarter than people like Niles and family.

He smiled as his mouth got to the point in his story where he was telling about the time he had landed the training ship perfectly—but nine feet above ground, so that the ship dropped the nine feet and nearly flunked him out of spaceman's school. He knew that his smile was hypocritical and he enjoyed this sort of thing. If Niles could play the hypocritical game, so could Farradyne. But Farradyne could play it better because his own kind of hypocrisy was—he hated to call it righteous but could not find a better word to describe it. He could play Niles' game, and he could even go along with Mrs. Niles, although he wondered how a woman that looked as honorable as Mrs. Niles could justify her willingness to have a daughter engaged in the vile game of hellflower running. He could play their game because he would have little contact with them.

But he wondered whether he could play the game Carolyn expected. He did not know exactly what she expected but his guess was that anybody amoral enough to run dope would hardly cavil at anything else. He knew that many a man could lie in his teeth and play the role of spy convincingly, but when the role included making love to a woman whose background was distasteful to a man, Farradyne believed that this distaste would show through anything he did.

And then Carolyn came down the stairs in a white strapless evening dress and Farradyne knew that he was going to have trouble remembering that she was worthy of only shapeless, gray prison denim. "You have to dress, too, Charles," she said in a soft voice, reminding him of their plans for the evening.

Farradyne nodded and got up. He wondered how she could possibly act this part of a young, marriageable woman pleased with a date when at the same time she was engaged in a hellishly illegal operation. He realized at the same time that Carolyn had most likely spent her entire life this way and was attuned to it. Such was her natural way of living, and there was not going to be any possibility of weaning her into a life of honorable struggle.

Then she put her hand into his elbow and gave a little squeeze and Farradyne found it not too hard to put his personal attitude into a small compartment in his mind and half-close the door. The bait was very attractive and only the image of Norma Hannon and her dulled eyes remained with Farradyne to keep that compartment of his mind open to the character of Carolyn Niles.

In the salon of the Lancaster, Farradyne smiled knowingly. "The plan was to let you investigate this ship while I dressed, but I gather you have seen your share of spacers."

"I admit it," she replied. "For that I am sorry, Charles. But I couldn't very well have played the know-it-all, could I?"

"I suppose not. Well, park yourself somewhere while I get into whites."

She sat down and stretched. "A highball and a cigarette?" she inquired.

"The cigarette is easy," he said, handing one to her and flipping his lighter. "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. "Charles, please go dress but fast—I am rather more hungry than curious about the insides of a spacer."

"Of course." He turned to go.

"Charles?" 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?"

Farradyne wanted to hurt her. "How many men have you played this role for?" he asked.

A wry smile 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 was to play the suitor. He 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 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 which their attention can be directed. 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, Charles. 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," she said with a happy little nod of her head, "but, Charles, it isn't three men in my bedroom." Carolyn cocked an eyebrow. "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, 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 my skin off." Then to prove that she didn't really mean it, Carolyn kissed him again briefly, and ended it by rubbing her forehead against his chin.

Farradyne went to his stateroom and showered. He shaved, and 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 waiting for him calmly and patiently. She looked him over and nodded approvingly, then got up and rubbed her cheek against his, cooing pleasantly, but moved away again when he tried to kiss her.

Then 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 preference in 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 the door; 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 at her, leaning his head back so that he could see her face without looking crosseyed. "I'll bet you are a real hellion 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 is late, Charles, and you've just got to go." She hugged his head down so that he could look at her wrist watch on the arm about his neck. "It's five o'clock and you are 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 of her last embrace stayed with him. There were only three hours of sleep between the time he left her and the time of awakening for the take-off, but dreams of Carolyn filled them all. They were pleasant dreams and they were 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 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 notion of joining her, justifying himself by thinking that people who fall in love with love lotus addiction are the weaklings of the human race and could be eradicated to the advantage of the general level. This he recognized as sophistry.

But, be it as it may, Carolyn was a pleasant, attractive companion, and if her presence 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. 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, it was time to get out of 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 upon his progress. But in the meantime he would be seeing Carolyn Niles on Terra.

Farradyne began his check-up, already anticipating the reunion which was at least ten days away.

They came aboard a half hour later and Farradyne saw at once that this trip would be free of trouble and danger. They were all mild and wide-eyed curious. They obviously knew their place and how to go about in life with a minimum of friction.

Their leader was a Professor Martin, an agile gentleman of about sixty years who led them up the ramp and then stood there introducing each and every one of them to Farradyne as they came in. They became a sea of faces and a sound of disconnected names except for a few of the more vivid ones. Miss Otis, who giggled like a schoolgirl but hadn't been of schoolgirl age for at least thirty years; a Mr. Hughes, dark of skin and smiling, who tried to convey the impression that he knew his way around in space; a very prim dame named Miss Higginbotham who probably had every kid in her class scared of her; a Mrs. Logan who was far too beautiful to be part of Farradyne's narrow pattern for schoolteachers. Miss Tilden seemed to know something about spacing, and her friend, who was old enough to be Miss Tilden's mother, Miss Carewe, knew more about spacing than Miss Tilden. And a Mr. Forbes who seemed completely impressed by everything he laid eyes on.

And so they came, a prim and strait-laced lot, the like of which Farradyne had not seen in a long, long time.

Certainly nothing of the hellflower flavor among this group. It made Farradyne feel easier, and after a bit he began to smile at their innocence and their wholehearted interest. He came to understand that this trip was to be a bit different for them, or it could be if he cared to make it so. It was obvious that their previous hops had been made under pilots who treated them with the usual aloofness that spacemen hold for their passengers. Farradyne felt more sympathetic about them; he wanted to help, wanted to show them what could be seen.

Part of this desire to help them have a good time was born in the idea that someday Farradyne would probably be looking for some character witnesses and if he treated these schoolteachers with cordial interest and a willingness to explain and demonstrate his spacecraft, they would be inclined to accept him as a man of understanding, honesty and ability.

They took off after Farradyne delivered a very short talk on the rigors of take-off maneuvering and the necessity of staying strapped down whenever the spacer was about to cut didoes.

It was even less of a strain than Farradyne anticipated. They helped. Miss Carewe was a home economics teacher and she took care of the galley in a highly efficient manner. Mr. Forbes taught manual training or something of the sort; he requisitioned an oilcan and removed the squeaks from a couple of doors and took care of some of the minor details that Farradyne was inclined to ignore because he had other things on his mind. Someone, Farradyne never found out who, made beds and policed the ship, cleaning the salon and passengers' quarters until the rooms and hallways shone. Whoever it was did not recognize the faint stains of blood apparently, because there were no questions asked about the evidence of Mike Cahill's death.

Miss Tilden spent quite a bit of time making a small oil painting for the space above the bar which she said looked vacant. The degree of their tolerance was high, too. None of them cared for drinking, but they approved of Farradyne and his White Star Trail.

In return, Farradyne took them into the control room and showed them how the ship was run. Professor Hughes toyed with the computer by the hour because he was a mathematics teacher, and Miss Tilden listened to Farradyne by the hour as he recounted some of his adventures in space because she was a teacher of modern history.

The beautiful Mrs. Logan taught science, so Farradyne took her below to explain the atomic pile and how it worked.

With a pre-recorded tape from the course computer running through the autopilot, Farradyne pointed out the motion on the control rods that regulated the activity of the pile. Above the pile, he explained, was a huge tank of water that was used as a reaction-mass. Water was fed through the pile and its energy was raised to some tremendous degree, then hurled out through the throat of the reaction motor.

Mrs. Logan then pointed to the series of little ports in the hull.

Farradyne explained, "Now and then it is necessary to replace the control rods because they become transmuted into metals that have too little absorption factor. To get rid of them on a spaceport would mean the trouble of disposing of quite a bit of metal that is dangerously radioactive. So we take the convenient method of tossing them out in space where they can't harm anything."

"But where do they land?" she asked. "Isn't that dangerous?"

"Not at all. We use discretion. Look. In a few hours we will be halfway to Pluto. Our velocity will be tremendous because we have been accelerating all the way from Mercury. To land on Pluto we'll have to make a turn-over at halfway and start decelerating. If I wanted to replace control rods, I'd do it just before turn-over. The velocity of the ship and the rods would be a good many times the escape velocity of the entire solar system, so the rods would continue on and on, and actually they'd pass out of the solar system beyond Pluto in a matter of hours. Long before we got there."

"But supposing one did land on Terra, for instance?"

"It would make an interesting looking meteorite; it would melt in mid-air. Then the total radioactivity would spread thin and do no damage."

She was satisfied, and Farradyne led her back to the salon.

For the first time in years Farradyne began to feel at ease with the universe. His mind, previously busy with his main problem, found time to consider other things. And, like the rest of the spaceman breed, Farradyne was something of a gadgeteer.

Spacing, in a sense, was very much like the manning of a sailing ship of the nineteenth century. When something needed attention, in space it was during maneuver for landing, take-off, or turn-over; on sea it was coming about on a tack or setting sail, a full-time attention was necessary. Between periods of activity, the spaceman sat on his duff and waited for one of the silent twinkles to detach itself from the stellar curtain above his observation dome and become a planet or destination.

Some spacemen reverted to the point where they built spacecraft in old bottles, others spent their time in tinkering.

Farradyne had always been one of the latter. And so as his mind felt at ease, he began to tinker with the gear down in the repair shop. It was a small room below the passenger section hardly large enough to hold the machinery it contained. But Farradyne, like many of his fellows, enjoyed making things, repairing things and generally experimenting. Every spaceman hoped to come up with something that would make him rich and famous, and some of them had done it. They had plenty of time, a good grasp of things scientific as well as manual dexterity.

So Farradyne tinkered happily.

The shop was silent; the usual milling around of his passengers stopped as they went to bed. Now there was only the occasional groan of metal-upon-metal or the faint whine as a motor somewhere wound up to do some automatic job. The click and clack of relays were just barely audible; they would have been unheard by someone whose training had been other than that of a spaceman. In the background was the muted sibilant of the reaction motor, a sound like the shush of a distant seashore. Farradyne heard these sounds unconsciously. They were as pleasant to the ears of the spaceman as the sounds of a sailing ship were to the old-time seaman.

But another faint sound came to disturb him, rising up into the level of audibility very slowly.

It was a ringing in Farradyne's ears.

Ringing in the ears can come from too much alcohol, or a shot of dope, or a slap on the side of the head. Or a change in air-pressure. Farradyne had not been drinking nor taking the needle, but he had spent many years in an environment where the supply of air was important. He had become oversensitive to it. He sniffed automatically, the gesture of a man who has reason to suspect the quality of the air he is breathing. He shook his head. He did feel a bit light-headed. There was the bare trifle of a dull pain above his eyes and a sting in his nose. He sneezed and brought forth a dribble of blood.

Farradyne raced aloft; he could settle nothing standing in the workshop. The bulkhead door between the hold of the Lancaster and the passengers' section was closed. He pushed it and it opened with slight difficulty to let a blow of air hit his face. He grunted in puzzlement. Any change in air-pressure in any part of the ship should have started a clangor of the puncture alarm, a racket loud enough to waken the dead.

He went through the stateroom corridor and listened carefully as he went. Some rooms were silent and others sounded like the song of the cross-cut saw working its way through a burl of maple. There were gradations of snores between these extremes. Nothing that a suspicious man could put his finger on. He did not pause in the salon, which was silent and darkened, but not completely black. There was nothing out of the way here.

In fact the only thing that was out of line was the queer fact that the ship was silent when the alarm should have been sounding. He went up to the control room.

Lamps told him the story in a series of quick appraisals, because of some long-forgotten genius that had insisted that whenever possible, warning devices should not be fused, should not be turn-offable and should not be destructible. The Lancaster was a fine ship, designed well, but a frontal attack on a panel with metal cutting tools made the exception to the "whenever possible" part of the design of warning signals.

The ship's bell-system had been opened like a tin can.

But the pilot lamp system was strung here and there behind the panels and it would have taken a major overhaul to ruin it; the saboteur would have spent all night opening cans instead of doing his dirty work. Farradyne should have been asleep, then he would not have noticed the blaze of lamps.

They told him the tale in a glance. The low-pressure portion of the ship was down in the pile-bay, and the reason was that one of the scuttle-doors was open. The pressure in the reaction-mass bay was low, and now that Farradyne had come aloft, the pressure in the upper levels was as low as 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 space-suit and clawed the thing from its hook. He started down the stairway on a stumbling run, getting into the suit by leaps, 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. So he stumbled and he fell against the walls, and the tanks of his back rapped against his shoulder-blades, and the helmet cut a divot out of the bridge of his nose. Luckily it did not make him bleed, but it hurt like the very devil.

He zipped up the airtight clotures 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 enough, even though it was sharp, and picked up a fourteen-inch half-round wood-working rasp. He hefted it in his gloved hand and it felt about right.

The air-break on the topside was open, and Farradyne closed it. He fretted at the seconds necessary to equalize the pressure, and 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 stopped, his attention attracted by this trifle of evidence. It was neither wool nor cotton, but a match torn from a giveaway book and used to light a cigarette for Mrs. Logan a good many hours before.

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 space-suit 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 that one glance; it was the sort of thing that he would do if sabotage were his intention. The single scuttle-port 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, unwieldy, 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 toward some anonymous star at about eight gravities of acceleration. The passengers and crew would be helpless—and dead long before they got within any appreciable fraction of a distance to any planet.

Maybe two or three of the rods had been scuttled already. The rest, functioning on the automatic, would have been shoved in farther 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 the supply could not be stopped.

Then—and Farradyne had to admire the vandal's precautions—he would make his way to the escape hatch and let the helpless passengers go on ... and on....

Victims of another case of "Lost in Space."

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 for calling and a small and expensive chemical motor for mild maneuvering, even though it would not be strong enough to permit planetary landing. The man had friends, obviously, lying in wait out there, who would pick him up.

A parcel of ice-cold-blooded murderers.

Farradyne saw the man through a red haze that clouded down over his eyes. His evaluation of the act was made in a glance, and in the bare instant that it took for Farradyne to see the man he got his feet in motion. He plunged forward with a bellow that hurt his own ears.

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 upward at his face. The blade jabbed at the face glass and blunted slightly before Farradyne's eyes, splintering the glass and sending a shard or two against his cheek.

Farradyne's second swing caught a shoulder and sent the man staggering back; the knife came up and the gleaming edge sliced close to Farradyne's arm. The man stumbled and fell, and Farradyne came forward to take advantage of the opportunity. The long lever used to handle the radioactive control rod chopped against Farradyne's shins and cut his feet out from under him; he landed on his face and the other man kicked out with heavy space boots. The heels rammed Farradyne's helmet hard down into his shoulders, and the top of his helmet hit the top of Farradyne's head, stunning him.

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 splintered 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 the gloved hands to go skittering across the deck.

The man left Farradyne to scramble across the floor after his knife. Farradyne jumped to his feet, took three fast steps and leaped, coming down with both feet on the man's back. The other collapsed and Farradyne fell, turning his right wrist underneath him. The other made a kick that caught Farradyne in the side, turning him over. And as Farradyne rolled, the bent hand touched metal and he came out of the roll clutching a heavy pair of repair pliers. He could cut bolts with them, and had.

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; he opened the jaws and bit down, twisting and pulling.

A three-cornered tear ripped and came away with the point between the jaws until the heavy outer cloth gave way. The knife came up and bit through Farradyne's suit across the knuckles of the hand that held the pliers. Farradyne kicked, sent the killer staggering and followed him probing at the tear to get at the thin inner suit. The other man struggled, hurled Farradyne back, but Farradyne staggered back with the thin lining between the jaws of the pliers. The suit ripped and there came a puff of white vapor as the air blew into the void.

The struggling killer stopped as though shocked by an electric current; he stood there stiffly, his hands slowly falling to his sides, limp. Farradyne took a step back, breathing hard. He could see now that his head was not jerked back and forth behind the cracked glass. He peered, in time to watch the froth of blood foam out of Hughes' nose.

Hughes! The math professor. The wise guy who had created the part of dumb bunny by making sounds of knowing too much, who pretended to know his way around in space.

Farradyne wondered whether Hughes had cried out in a polytonal voice—then he hauled him into the air-break and slammed the door shut. He felt for a pulse and found one fluttering; he turned him on his face and pumped the ribs in, out, in, out, wondering whether he was wasting his time.

Hughes groaned painfully. His groans echoed and reechoed in the tiny space, but Farradyne could not hear more than the wreaking moan of a man hurt very deeply. Hughes stirred and opened one eye. Then he closed it again and sobbed under his breath. Farradyne checked the heart and found it beating weakly; the pulse was not fluttering any more, and the breath was coming naturally, even though the man's chest heaved high and dropped low and there was a foghorn sound in the throat as he gasped huge lungfuls of air.

Whatever, Hughes would give Farradyne no trouble for some time. Farradyne carried the unconscious man to his stateroom and dropped him on the bed. Then he went below and closed the little hatches, reinserted the control rod, and wondered whether missing a few would louse up his landing.

He went up to the control room and replaced the wiring torn out of the audible-alarm system. The phalanx of warning lamps had winked out and the clangor of the alarm did not come.

Farradyne went back to Hughes; the man was in a semicoma.

"Can you hear me?" demanded Farradyne.

Hughes roused slightly and looked at Farradyne through heavy eyes, mumbling unintelligibly.

"You dirty louse!" fumed Farradyne. "I'd have let you die if it hadn't occurred to me that you might be good for some information. What makes, Hughes? Or should we have an accident below?"

Hughes mumbled something that sounded like defiance.

"Think your friends will give you a raise for this fumble?" jeered Farradyne.

Hughes roused a bit more and looked at Farradyne more directly. "Smart guy," he said in a toneless voice, "you can't—"

Farradyne smiled cynically. "Yes, I can and I have," he snapped. Then he leaned down and put his face close to Hughes' and said carefully, "Hughes, sing me a trio."

Hughes' control was good. His eyes widened only a sliver and the catch in his breath was faint; anybody not watching for these signs of sudden alarm would not have noticed anything amiss. Then the eyes dimmed again and Hughes said, weakly, "Sing nothing."

"What's your pitch, Hughes?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"The hell you don't," said Farradyne harshly. "And if you won't talk without it, I can make you yelp real loud. First I break all your fingers, one by one, and then your toes, and then if you're still playing stupid, there's always the trick of slipping a soldering iron under your armpit and then plugging it in. Between the time the current goes on and the time you really start to feel it burn should be long enough to make a lot of gab."

Hughes looked at Farradyne directly. "You'd better kill me," he said flatly. "Because you can't hold me."

"I'll make you a bet," sneered Farradyne. "I'll bet that I can hang onto you, and if I do, you'll pay off by talking. Even-steven, Hughes."

Farradyne went to his small medicine chest and came back with a hypodermic, which he loaded with deliberation. He made a dramatic scene out of pushing the plunger, watching the droplet form on the end of the needle and then adjusting that dose against the scale on the side of the cylinder.

"Marcoleptine," he said conversationally. "A fine pain-killer, Hughes. Just the thing a man would do to help a very ill comrade. It'll keep you quiet until we can discuss the situation without having your screams disturbing the passengers. Slip me your arm, old man. This won't hurt much."

Hughes mouthed a curse, but Farradyne paid no more attention to the man's objections than he would have to the objections of a child. Farradyne caught Hughes' wrist and brought the man's hand up under his armpit, then braced his forearm under Hughes' elbow. Then he lifted an arm-bar, which raised Hughes' shoulder from the cot; Farradyne slid the needle into the elbow easily with his free arm, probed for the vein and discharged the hypodermic.

"I wonder," mused Farradyne aloud, "whether marcoleptine is really non-habit-forming." He sat there on the edge of the bed watching Hughes very carefully. Hughes struggled to keep his eyes wide, fighting off the narcotic. But then the eyelids grew heavier and started to close.

In a weakened, drugged voice, Hughes mumbled, "Easier to slip under—now—can't do anything—will ..." and he was gone. His breathing grew regular and his body was completely flaccid. Farradyne waited until Hughes was well under the dope and then he stopped watching the man critically and began to plan his next move.

Hughes was going to be a sick man. Therefore the marks of battle should not be visible to his companions when they wanted to look in on the ill professor. Farradyne got a washcloth, soaped it well and went to work. He let the hot cloth soak into Hughes' face for a minute or two massaging the face under the cloth with agile fingers. Then he began to scrub.

The caked blood came away. And so did some dark pigment that stained the cloth. The dark-complected Hughes lightened in color; the lines in his face seemed to become less deep as the shadowing pigment was washed away. Schoolteacher Hughes came off into Farradyne's washcloth and what was left was the would-be hellflower trader, Brenner.

"Brenner," breathed Farradyne in astonishment.

But the dope had taken effect and Brenner was out cold. Farradyne bemoaned his enthusiasm for doping the man because questions would fall on deaf ears. Then Farradyne took a more rational view. There would be plenty of time to question the hellflower operator after the schoolteachers left. Meanwhile, Brenner would be kept doped, quiet and nailed-down for the duration. He left Brenner and went to his own bed where—to his surprise—he went to sleep at once instead of lying awake with the myriad questions in his mind....

He carried his book on Medicology with him to the breakfast table the following morning, and at the questioning looks, Farradyne made his announcement, "We have a sick man aboard. Hughes."

Professor Martin asked, "What happened, Mr. Farradyne?"

"It must have been about midnight, I was working below. I heard a rather strange noise up in the passengers' section and went up to find out what was going on. I found Mr. Hughes coughing and sneezing in the passageway, obviously in distress. I inspected him as best as I knew how and we got out my Medicology and compared symptoms. I'll read this section:

"'Coryosis, one of the nine allied infections which are frequently grouped under the ambiguous term "Common Cold," is extremely contagious but fatal only in cases of extreme sensitivity. Treatments consist of isolation amounting to a formal quarantine, and frequent injections of MacDonaldson's Formula 2, Ph-D3; Ra7. The patient is to be kept warm at all times and must remain quiet.'

"So we went to his cabin and I slipped him a shot and he went to bed. Now I'll read a bit more:

"'Contagion measures: Since the source of infection is a filterable virus, care must be taken to remain outside of the twenty-foot range of water droplets resulting from a cough or sneeze. All things touched by the patient must be either sterilized or burned. It is suggested that only one person tend the patient and that this person be immunized with MacDonaldson's Formula at regular intervals. Visiting should be discouraged, and if necessary must be carried on at a distance and for a very few minutes only. The incubation period is very short; the duration of coryosis is approximately fourteen days. It is, however, possible for a re-infection to take place which often resembles the initial infection, thus giving rise to the six-week cold.'

"There's more along this line but I think we have the picture well enough," Farradyne concluded.

Professor Martin's face was grave. "What must we do?" he asked anxiously.

"Nothing," said Farradyne firmly.

"But he shouldn't stay on Pluto."

"That is correct. Pluto is very cold, even with the Terra conversion program going on. Mr. Hughes should be returned to Terra."

"But—"

Farradyne smiled. "I've got to make a freight pickup on Pluto for Terra," he said quietly. "I'll take Mr. Hughes back home."

"That would be very considerate of you, Mr. Farradyne."

Farradyne shook his head in disclaimer. "It's only what any man would do," he said. "What do we know about Mr. Hughes?"

Miss Tilden said, "Not very much, I'm afraid. Mr. Hughes teaches Ancient History in Des Moines, Iowa. He joined us on Mercury, you know."

"No," said Farradyne, "I didn't know. I thought you were all together."

"Apparently Mr. Hughes was traveling alone until he heard of our group," offered Professor Martin. "He was, he said, seeking a reduced-rate trip to Pluto—as we were—when he noticed our flight-plan filed on the bulletin board. He got in touch with me and offered to join."

Farradyne nodded. "There's really plenty of time," he said. "No use getting excited. I'll contact the Des Moines Board of Education later—after we've made our landing and take-off, and are close enough to Terra to make the radio effective. It'll save us some money that way." The latter, he thought, would appeal to these people.

It was left that way. Farradyne did not assume for one moment that Hughes was a complete fake. One of two ideas was certainly true: either there was a real schoolteacher named Hughes who looked like the made-up Brenner, or Brenner had been masquerading as Hughes and really taught school in Des Moines when he was not peddling hellflowers.

There were more important things to be considered, too. Was there another hellflower operator in the ship? Farradyne watched them all like the proverbial hawk but he could see no evidence of another hellflower man. He decided to take no chances; it would be very much like the higher-ups in this racket to have put a second operator aboard the Lancaster to take over in the case of Brenner's failure; the second undercover man could escape as easily as could Brenner and in the same way as soon it became evident that the Lancaster had been properly sabotaged. To forestall this possibility, Farradyne built a small photoelectric alarm and put it across the stairway that led from the passengers' cabin to the below-deck section of the ship.

Some of Hughes' friends went with Farradyne to watch him tend the stricken one. They stood in the doorway while Farradyne gave Hughes his shot of marcoleptine out of an ampoule carefully labeled "MacDonaldson Formula 2, Ph-D3; Ra7." There was no doubt in their faces; Farradyne was a fine man, doing all he could to relieve the illness of another man.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Farradyne was asked periodically about Hughes' condition and he replied carefully and cheerfully, once going so far as to remark with a slightly bitter laugh, "Hughes will probably feel fit as a fiddle by the time I get back to Terra, and he'll then hate me for lugging him home. But we couldn't leave him on Pluto with that coryosis, could we?"

Since none of them cared to have a man coughing and sneezing in their midst, they all agreed solemnly.

Then, inevitably, the trip wore to a close. Pluto loomed large in the sky, and Farradyne went below to see Hughes-Brenner about an hour before they were due to land.

Farradyne found Brenner awake but logy. "How do you feel?" he asked Brenner.

"I feel dopy," admitted Brenner dully.

"Good. You've been a very sick man, Brenner. Or should I call you Hughes? Which is your name?"

"What difference can it make?"

"I like to know these things," said Farradyne. "I seem to collect a lot of information, one way and another, and I admit a lot of it is useless, but I find it interesting. For instance, Brenner, can you make that triple-tongued sound?"

"What triple-tongued sound?"

"Come off it, Brenner. You know what I'm talking about."

"Do I?"

"You do and I intend to find out," said Farradyne. He loaded his needle and approached Brenner with it. "This is for the last time, Brenner. And I've ideas on how to make a man talk—or sing a trio."

"You're a devil from hell," Brenner snarled.

"And you're an angel from heaven, ripping out the control rods to give us the Long Ride? Brenner, I owe you a lot that I'm going to collect. You'll wish you had died, Brenner. And you probably will die not long after your friends find out that you've talked."

Brenner eyed Farradyne wearily. "You haven't won your bet yet," he said. "And even if you do, there's the problem of extracting payment."

Farradyne shrugged. "You'll talk," he said flatly. Then he reached for Brenner's arm, imprisoned it so that Brenner could not move without dislocating the shoulder, and slid the needle home. "Just to be sure," he told the man, who was showing all the defiance that a man in a weakened condition could display, "I gave you a slightly larger dose. The Medicology says that this is accepted practice with marcoleptine, when the patient is in some danger of an excitement-crisis."

He waited until Brenner's eyes closed and the breathing became deep and regular. Then Farradyne left Brenner, went aloft and made contact with Pluto Spaceport. He came down with one hand poised above the power lever; at the first glimmer of any hanky-panky, Farradyne was going to slam the power home and take off for space at full power. Questions could be asked afterwards.

The landing was as good as any that Farradyne had ever made, but he was almost a nervous wreck worrying about the possibility of a recurrence of the Semiramide incident. He relaxed only after he had peeked, unobserved, at Hughes, still doped, and then led the covey of schoolteachers down the landing ramp.

It was a happy parting, with just the right tone of regret and a large amount of congratulations as to his ability, helpfulness and willingness to explain things to them that other pilots brushed away. They shook his hand and Miss Carewe permitted him to kiss her cheek and called him "Son" and Miss Tilden giggled and lifted her face for a chaste peck. Mrs. Logan's lips were warm and soft but completely uncooperative.

Then Professor Martin made an "ahem" in his throat and said, "Young man, we've all decided that you should have something to show our gratitude. Unfortunately it cannot be expensive or exotic although we have all agreed that an appropriate gift should be both. So since we cannot go to the high extreme that we all feel, we have decided that the next best thing is something completely valueless except for its sentiment."

He fumbled in his side pocket and brought out a small piece of slate, broken from some outcropping, somewhere.

"On this slate we've signed our names with a sharp instrument. I hope you like it, Charles."

Farradyne took the bit of slate. It said, "To Charles Farradyne, Pilot First Class, in memory of a very pleasant flight." It was signed by all of them.

"Thanks," he said, shortly. A lump hit his throat and his eyeballs stung. He felt ashamed. He had been playing games and holding high intrigue almost under their noses and they had responded with this very simple gesture of sincerity: Pilot, First Class—with a forged license and a record of hell-raising. "Thanks," he said again.

"It's signed by everybody but Mr. Hughes," said Professor Martin. "But you can ask him to sign it before you leave him. He will be happy to, I know."

There was a sound at the spacelock. "I'll sign it now!" said Hughes.

They all whirled. Hughes, eyes alight, the smile on his pale face eager, came down the ramp with his suitcase in one hand.

"But you—" said Professor Martin.

Hughes laughed and his voice was hearty, "I kept telling Mr. Farradyne that he was too heavy with the medicine." Hughes poked Farradyne humorously on the shoulder. "Coryosis, Mr. Farradyne, is nowhere near as violent an illness as you have been led to believe. Our ancestors called it the common cold and most of them spent a few weeks each year fighting one form or another, frequently several forms at the same time. Sleep and isolation cured me. I'm quite all right now."

"You're certain?" Farradyne managed.

"I'll let any doctor on Pluto look down my throat," promised Hughes. "And I'll go back with you if he doesn't say I'm fit. I'm a bit pale, I admit, and I won't regain my color until we get back sunward, but I'm telling you that I am quite cured of my brief encounter with coryosis."

The spaceport bus came to a stop at that moment and Hughes, pausing to scratch his name on the plaque, thanked Farradyne for the thorough medication that had kept him quiet, got on the bus, waved and was whisked away.

Farradyne, stunned, could only wave like a reluctant schoolboy.

So Hughes-Brenner disappeared again, wandering away under the protection of a group of honest, unsuspecting human beings who would have been aghast at the first cry of villain against one of their number.

Farradyne felt like a seven-year-old who had just been trapped into admitting that he has been a naughty boy. But out of the maze of items one thing was obvious.

Hughes or Brenner or whatever he called himself was a very extraordinary man. He had been able to walk off the ship with his eyes bright and his system hale, when he should have been flat on his spine with a brainful of marcoleptine. And marcoleptine was one of the most completely paralyzing drugs that had ever been synthesized. Hughes had feigned his doped slumber and his helplessness because he had known that Farradyne would not attempt to ask questions until he had Hughes alone. He had also lulled Farradyne into thinking him drugged so that he could come out nice and easy to join his fellow-travelers in such a way as to turn Farradyne's own explanation against him. Then he had walked away without a murmur of dissent from Farradyne who had no legal right to raise a cry against him.

Hughes-Brenner was a very remarkable fellow.

Farradyne watched the truck bringing out his shipment of refined thorium ore. Outpointed, outsmarted, outnumbered, the evidence he had was so very meager. He sneered at himself. Evidence? It was more a mere belief.

But what was a case history but snippets and bits of inconclusive evidence that somehow fitted together like the sections of an interlocking jigsaw puzzle? What did he have to fit together? A common pattern of love lotus background. A man who died with a discordant moan. A man who grunted in a polytone when surprised, and who could take a paralyzing dose of marcoleptine and then walk out jauntily. A family of apparently well-to-do formality with a proud place in the community, and a girl who worked hand-in-glove with hellflower manipulators but who obviously had never had her delicate nose near one of the hellish things. Or maybe she was immune, as Hughes was immune to marcoleptine? And did she make multiple-toned sounds when she was startled?

A few very remarkable people....

Farradyne took off for Newark with his cargo, still trying to think the matter out. Two things were certain: Farradyne himself was afraid to take a needleful of marcoleptine because he knew damned well that he was not immune; Farradyne could not make a polytonal sound with his vocal cords.

He sat in the salon, alone and quietly thinking, and finally realized that he was completely isolated from everyone else in the solar system. He could sing crazily or go to bed, and no one would know which he did.

He essayed a sound. It sounded like the croak of a Terran tree-frog. He made the whimper of a cocker spaniel and succeeded in getting a cramp in his throat trying to get down an octave below his normal register. He hummed and he spoke in a falsetto that made his tongue ache way down deep in back, and he tried humming and speaking and groaning at the same time and the result of that was a toneless croak.

It struck him funny after a bit, and while he was laughing at himself, he concocted a ludicrous picture of himself kissing Carolyn Niles, and she responding in a three-toned moan.

Alone and lost in his own thoughts, Farradyne slipped deeper and deeper into his daydream, until he answered her throaty little sound with an audible reply.

"I love you," he said, straining at his vocal cords. It sounded like an over-age choir boy whose voice was not ready to stay in one key yet. Soprano and baritone and tenor sounded the words, but they came out in sequence instead of all at once. A bit sing-songy, like Chinese.

The sound, at discordant odds with the smooth, pleasant daydream, jarred Farradyne's mind into wakefulness. The chances were that if he had been able to create a three-toned reply he might have gone on with the pleasant reverie. But now aware, Farradyne tried it again.

"I love you," he said aloud. He was not particularly aware of the meaning of the words, they had just been appropriate to the dream. If Farradyne had been daydreaming about dinner he probably would have been trying the strange triple tone on, "Please pass the mashed potatoes."

He tried it again. What Farradyne wanted to do was to say "I" in F; "Love" in A Natural; and "You" in E Flat, which would have been a nice chord in B Flat Minor and somehow appropriate to the context of the words. "I hate you" would have been just as likely.

Old Brenner-Hughes might have said, "That's very neat!" when he had seen Norma Hannon with the sun shining through her skirt. Or its equivalent, all coming out in one surprised grunt.

Carrying this line of thought still farther, Farradyne considered the original saboteur, who might have said, "That takes care of you, Farradyne," as he clobbered the relays in the Semiramide. And Mike Cahill, who might have cried, "I've been shot!" or more probably something completely unprintable.

Farradyne sat bolt upright. As a countersign to tell another hellflower operator your own identity it was a fine job. But could a whole language be constructed out of this three-tongued hodgepodge?

Or was his entire trend of thought based upon the ultimate hope of discovering something that would absolve him from the responsibility of the wreck of the Semiramide? Actually, what did he have to go on? An exclamation, a surprised grunt, a death cry. Absolutely nothing but his own suspicion. That plus the fact that Farradyne's ship had been subjected to some intercepted sabotage, by a hellflower operator, who had made a sound that might have been polytonal.

If nothing else, the fact that the dope-running gang was trying to clip him was enough for Farradyne to seek Clevis' help. He went down into the hold and started to wash the ends of the thorium drums.

Then he spent a lot of time tinkering with a little semi-circle of soft plastic material across the opening of which he stretched two, thin, flat strips of hard-surfaced waterproofed paper. As a boy, Farradyne had been bilked out of fifty cents for a gadget advertised in a cheap magazine that purported to give the user the powers of ventriloquism. It hadn't enabled Farradyne to throw his voice into a trunk but it had made a rather interesting bird call. Such a gimmick now might enable him to make a multiple tone.

Farradyne spent the remaining time of his trip from Pluto to Terra building the gizmo and practising with it until he could make a very odd moaning cry in three notes. Meanwhile he wondered whether Carolyn Niles would actually be on Terra to meet him.

Farradyne wondered how soon the fuss would start once the drums of refined thorium went under some hidden beams of ultra-violet light. He watched the drums being trundled off, and they disappeared, and Farradyne waited and watched until it was evening in that part of New Jersey, but no one came on the double-run to ask him leading questions.

He took off about nine o'clock, finally, and made the looping run from New Jersey to Los Angeles in time to get him there just about dusk.

He checked into the control tower.

"Regular listing?" asked the registration clerk, looking at the license without turning an eyebrow.

"No, I've a charter run," said Farradyne.

"Then why register here?"

Farradyne thought fast. "This is one of those things," he said. "A darned good hope but no down payment. I was told to land here this evening and if nothing had changed while I was on the run to Pluto and back, I could have a rider to Mercury. But if this passenger does not show up, I want to be registered for anything heading Mercury-ward. I'll be going there in two days anyway, but I'd rather go loaded."

"Reasonable. Tell you what, Farradyne, I'll make yours a tentative listing. If your passenger doesn't show by tomorrow morning, you'll go up on the board as having registered tonight."

"Thanks," said Farradyne. He took the opened license back and slid a finger into an inside slip-pocket. "Got a picture here you might be interested in. A portrait of one of our early presidents."

"I'm a bit of a collector," said the clerk.

"Well, in that case, you can have it for the favor. I just keep it around for a curiosity."

The clerk pocketed the bill easily and Farradyne went over to the mail-listing window. "Anything for Charles Farradyne?"

"Expecting something?"

"At least one, a payment voucher from Eastern Atomic. Come yet?"

The mail clerk disappeared; came back with one envelope. "Nothing from Eastern Atomic," he said. "But here's a letter for Charles Farradyne, Pilot of ship's registry Six-Eight-Three, a Lancaster Eighty-One. That must be yours."

"It's mine. But keep an eye peeled for a landwire payment voucher, will you? I had to leave Newark before it was ready and the guy at the shipping office said he'd notify the company that the stuff was received at port, and that I'd be in Los Angeles. Okay?"

"Aye-firm."

The letter was from Carolyn. A brief note telling him that she would be ready for the trip on the morning of the fifth. This suited Farradyne; he had been afraid that Carolyn might be waiting at the spaceport for him, and that they'd be taking off before Clevis had a chance to find out about the washed drum-ends.

She also suggested as a postscript that she might possibly be at her hotel and free about nine any evening, and there was some reference to her being a bit squeamish about the dark. Farradyne was half-inclined to believe her. Carolyn Niles lived on Mercury—a planet that knew no night.

He looked at his watch, he had a couple of idle hours left. He started to wander the streets of Los Angeles, wondering just how a man went about buying a hellflower. He had done that before, but that was on Mercury where such things might be more difficult to find. There were two places in America where, for generations, a man could get anything he had enough money to buy and knew where to look. He was in one; the other was three thousand miles across the continent, in New York. All that remained was the problem of finding out where to look.

Farradyne had to admit he had a difficulty. He was in a position similar to a teetotaler in a prohibition area who suddenly decides to buy a drink and cannot, from lack of experience, locate a speakeasy. And dope, which had been with the human race ever since the first caveman took a bite out of a bit of saw-toothed weed, and was sold on the street by peddlers, was singularly hidden from the clutch of a man who just casually wanted to collect a packet.

So Farradyne spent some time wandering. He went into a florist shop and tried to buy a corsage. He could buy a corsage for a few dollars, but not for fifty. At least, for fifty he could get nothing smaller than a garland.

In one place Farradyne tried his tonal throat gadget. The florist eyed him curiously and asked him if he had something wrong with his throat.

And then, about fifteen minutes before he reached Carolyn's hotel a man sidled up alongside him and said, "Say, Jack, lookin' for somethin'?"

"Who isn't?"

"Might be able to fix you up, Jack. Got five?"

Farradyne knew that this was not the price, so he looked at his watch and said, "I've got fifteen."

"Won't take that long. Try the stand in the Essex Lounge."

Farradyne blinked. The Essex was no more than six years old, right in the middle of the city, and considered one of the plush joints of Terra. Selling hellflowers at the Essex was like selling the things on the steps of the Terran Capitol Building.

"Yeah?" he asked sourly.

"Yeah. Tell 'em Lovejoy sent you to pick up his flowers. Cost you fifty, Jack. Willin' to pay?"

"I've got it; and I'm willing."

"See ya, Jack."

The character sidled away, leaving a slight scent of decaying cloth mingled with a faint fragrance of gardenia. It was, according to Farradyne's standards, one god-awful mixture.

Farradyne went to the Essex and into the florist shop. A girl who was undeniably beautiful came forward. Farradyne smiled knowingly.

"I'm a friend of Mr. Lovejoy," he said. "He asked me to stop by and pick up his corsage."

"Of course." The girl disappeared and returned with a transparent plastic box containing a gardenia—or a love lotus. "That will be five dollars," she said with a piercing look at Farradyne.

Farradyne took a fifty out of his wallet and handed it to her. She rang up five on the register, and Farradyne walked out, wondering if anybody ever considered that Mr. Lovejoy must have a number of peculiar habits and rather easy-going friends that could be imposed upon.

At Carolyn's hotel a few minutes later, the desk clerk informed him that Miss Niles was expecting him and he should go right up.

Carolyn greeted him warmly, took him by the hand and drew him into the hotel room. Once the door was closed she came into his arms and kissed him, not too fervently, but very pleasantly, with her body pressing his briefly. Then she moved out of his arms and accepted the flower. "Lovely," she said.

She opened it and breathed the fragrance deeply. She held the white flower at arm's length, admiring its beauty. Then she held it to her nose and took a deep breath, letting the fragrance fill her lungs.

Farradyne's mind did a flip-flop. First he felt like a louse, as she smiled at him over the edge of the flower and then took another sniff of the fifty-dollar blossom. "Maybe," she said archly, "I shouldn't do this."

Well, she was immune—or she wasn't. Could be that it wasn't even a hellblossom. But she should know. He hoped his smile was honest-looking. "You are stuck already," he grinned wolfishly.

Carolyn took another luxuriant breath and tucked the blossom in her hair. She came into his arms and kissed him sweetly. Then she relaxed, leaning back in his arms to look into his eyes. "I'm not afraid of you, Charles," she said in a low, throaty voice.

"No?"

She laughed at him and then turned out of his arms. She went to a tiny sideboard and waved a hand at glasses and a bottle of Farradyne's favorite liquor. He nodded, and she mixed. "Don't disappoint me, Charles," she said.

"How?" he asked, wondering what she was driving at, and feeling that this had nothing to do with hellflowers.

She handed him the highball.

She sipped at her drink and flirted with him over the top of the glass for a moment. "I don't think anybody will call me overinflated if I admit for a moment that my family is a long way from poverty; if, for an instant, I admit that I know that I am very well equipped with physical charm. I also flatter myself that I have a mind large enough to absorb some of the interesting factors of this rather awesomely beautiful universe."

"I will grant you the truth of all three."

"Thanks," she said with a sly-looking smile. "But the point is, Charles, that a girl with a bit of money in the top of her stocking—and a brain in her head—wonders whether the gentleman is interested in the money, or the shape of her stocking. She is more interested in having the man want her for the aforementioned brain, I think. She'd like to feel that the gentleman in question would still be interested if the shape of the stocking changed for the worst with age and the money disappeared."

Farradyne looked at her and wondered again what she was and what she was after. If nothing else, Carolyn was a consummate actress. He wanted very much to take his face in his hands and ponder this problem deeply, but there was no time. He had to reply at once or have the appearance of a man who must make a careful answer. He walked across the room and took Carolyn by the shoulders and shook her gently. He bent down and kissed her and he found that the warm and eager response was back again, even though he touched her only with his lips and his hands on her warm shoulders.

"Let's leave it just that way," he told her. "Sooner or later something will give me away—and then you will know whether I am after your body, your money or your mind." Farradyne kissed her again, and again lightly. "Until you know, nothing I say will convince you of anything."

Farradyne still had her shoulders under his palms; Carolyn moved forward into his arms and rested against him. She put up her face for his kiss, and held herself against him, close. Then she said dreamily, "You're a nice sort of guy, Charles, and I'll be very happy to leave it that way. Maybe you'll be the one who stays."

Farradyne recoiled mentally and hoped that his instinctive revulsion was not noticed. It was too easy to forget what Carolyn represented when Carolyn went soft and sweet and eager. He wanted to be a male Mata Hari; he wanted to lure her on, to caress her into breathless acquiescence and then walk out with a cold smile to show his contempt.

Then he relaxed—and hoped that the muscles of his body had not undergone the change that his mind had—and decided if this were part of the game he had to play to cut the hellblossom-hellflower-love lotus ring out of the human culture, it was nice work. He recalled reading in history, as a child, another, but mild drug, marijuana, had multiple names.... His job would have been infinitely more difficult if Carolyn had been a gawky ugly duckling with buck teeth and a pasty complexion.

"Charles," she breathed, "take me out into the dark?"

He laughed lightly. "Where?"

She leaned way back, arching her fine back. "I want to go out to some dark gin mill and dance among the smoke and the natives and the throbbing of tomtoms."

Their evening was a repetition of the evening on Mercury except that on Terra it was dark outside. They danced and there was a steak dinner at midnight, and there was Carolyn relaxed in his arms in the taxi on the way back to her hotel at three.

He took her up to her room, and Carolyn came into his arms again, soft and sweet. Her response was deep and passionate in a mature way that Farradyne was not prepared for. The woman in his arms was all woman and there could be no mistaking the fact, but there was also the mysterious ability of the woman to know when to call a halt. She smiled softly and put her head on his chest.

"It's been wonderful again, Charles," she said quietly. "I hope it always is."

Farradyne rubbed his chin against the top of her head. Then Carolyn swirled away. "It's incredibly late again. I'm going to come aboard your ship at seven tomorrow night so we can take off before the crack of dawn. This much I'll tell you and no more, now."

"But—"

"Easy, sweetheart, easy. Take it slow and lovely. Tomorrow night. Tonight I need my beauty sleep."

He eyed her humorously.

"Think it doesn't help?" Then she laughed happily. "Charles, do me a favor. Put this gardenia in your refrigerator for me. Please?"

Farradyne nodded dumbly. He watched Carolyn put the thing into its plastic box, he watched her tie it up in the original ribbon. She handed it to him, and then, chuckling because he had one hand full, she came into his arms again for one last caress.

"Go," she told him with a wistful smile. "Go and dream about tomorrow night."

Farradyne went, half-propelled by her hands, his reluctance partly honest and partly curious. But he went.

On the street he hailed a taxi and spent the time on the way to the spaceport wondering whether sharpers had clipped him for fifty for a five-dollar gardenia. He wanted to toss the thing out of the cab window, but he did not because Carolyn would ask for it tomorrow. He even cursed himself for being willing to save it for her.

Farradyne walked into his spacer feeling like a man who had put his last dollar on the turn of a card, and lost. Lost at least until he could get somewhere and draw another stake from the bank. Futility and wonder confused him; in one moment he was on top of the world with everything going according to plan and the next his world was kicked out from underneath him and he was dropped back into the mire of fumbling, helpless ignorance again.

Farradyne walked into the salon of the Lancaster and stopped short. The last peg had been pulled out of the creaky ladder of his success.

"What's the matter, Farradyne? Aren't you glad to see me?"

There was plenty the matter and he was not glad to see her.

Her eyes widened a bit and she came up out of her chair and toward him. "Farradyne," she said, with more eagerness in her voice than he had ever heard before, "you've brought me a love lotus!"

He let her have it, and watched as her rapid fingers tore away the ribbon.

Norma lifted the flower from its nest in the box, buried her nose deep in the center of the blossom and inhaled with a deep shuddering sob. Her eyes closed, then opened serenely to look up at Farradyne from beneath half-closed lids. She relaxed. The tension went out of her body and she sank back against the cushions. She put her head back and rested. And now Farradyne could see her face more clearly. Her features had lost their chiseled immobility and her eyes had lost the glassy stare. Her face became alive, and pleasant color flooded it. Her muscles took on tone and Norma became alive and young-bodied and beautiful. She was a new person.

Her lips parted slightly and curved into sweet lines. The hand that held the flower lay idly on the seat beside her, the other lay palm up on the other side. She looked like a young girl who had just been kissed. Slowly, Norma lifted the blossom to her face and inhaled again the fragrance from the center of the flower.

"Thanks, Farradyne," she said softly.

Farradyne's mouth was open and his mind refused to work on any but the single thought. It was a hellflower. It had had no visible effect on Carolyn—why? Then the attitude of the woman sitting on the divan forced the other thought from his mind.

Not that Norma's attitude had changed in the past minute or so. She was still relaxed, alive and obviously at peace with both the world and herself. But Farradyne had been expecting much more; he had expected an onslaught of passion, of hate, of violence, of emotion. It might be either a demanding lust or the pleading languor of a woman bereft of her defenses. Or.... But in any case Farradyne expected passion, of a wanton depth.

He was wholly unprepared for this calm return to young and healthy womanhood.

He wondered whether Norma would react normally to a gesture of affection and absently he took a step toward her. He felt once again that flush of pity for her and righteous anger for the rotten devils that had done this to her; he wanted to comfort her. She had changed visibly from a hardened woman whose beauty was stiff and unnatural to a girl whose loveliness was vivid enough to shine through the hard facade of heavy makeup.

"Norma," he said.

She smiled at him warmly but shook her head. Her arms raised as she tucked the hellflower in the heavy hair over one ear. The gesture slimmed her waist and raised her breasts, and through the triangle of her arms he could see her eyes. They were sultry as they contemplated him, but she shook her head.

"No," she said and Farradyne stopped. "You are a nice sort of fumbling idiot, Charles, and I've stopped hating you for the moment, but that doesn't mean I want any part of your caresses."

"I—"

She smiled at him knowingly. "You were, Charles. You were. But don't." The odor of the love lotus, identical to the heady perfume of a gardenia, permeated the room and Norma sniffed at the air, lifting her face as she inhaled. "The smell of this is all I want."

Farradyne looked down at her and swore under his breath. This was the story then. The future under such conditions must be insufferable. He contemplated a man with an addicted wife; he would go on slaving night and day to buy this damnable and beautiful hellflower for her just to see her make this swift, sweet return to the normal woman he had once known, only to discover time and again that she had no use for him.

A smile crossed her face and Farradyne realized that Norma had dozed off in an ecstasy of relaxation. He wondered what to do next; his mind was mingled with the desire to protect her by letting her sleep the effects of the love lotus off, and the certain knowledge that if he did, Norma would never leave him in time for his meeting with Carolyn Niles. Of the two, the latter was by far the more important.

As Farradyne stood there wondering what to do, a knuckle-on-metal rap came at the spacelock and he turned to see Clevis standing there. He waved Clevis in.

Clevis came through the inner lock and caught sight of Norma. He stopped stock-still and looked the woman over from head to toe and back again. His eyes were bleak, his face bitter and hard as he turned away from Norma to face the other man.

"Farradyne, is this the contact you've managed to make?" The tone was heavy with sarcasm.

Farradyne shook his head sourly. "She's the one that got me started on the road to find out—" He was about to explain but Clevis cut him off with a scowl.

"You do seem to have started," said Clevis. "That's a real hellflower she's doping, you know. If I'd known—"

"Oh, for God's sake, listen!" snapped Farradyne. His shout rang through the salon and echoed up and down the ship's corridors. Norma stirred and came awake. She looked at Farradyne happily first, then her eyes settled on Clevis.

"Company? Hello, Howard," she said cheerfully.

"How do you do?" said Clevis, coldly.

"Not bad, thank you. In fact, I'm feeling in very topnotch shape, thanks to Mr. Farradyne."

"You're—"

"I must admit. A shame, too, but there it is."

"There's a reward out for you, Miss Hannon."

Norma's eyes twinkled a bit. "I know. He tried to collect on it. In fact, I think he did collect on it. But I couldn't sit around and watch a couple of fine old people tearing their hearts out over the ruin of their daughter. That's a hell of a way to end an otherwise happy existence—a son killed, a daughter doped. So I left."

Farradyne looked at Norma and Clevis sharply, he was lost; he could only wait for Clevis' next move.

Clevis shrugged, Norma nodded and relaxed again. She said, quietly, "If you gentlemen want to talk business, do it somewhere else. Or better, Charles, may I have my old room again for the night?"

Farradyne nodded, speechless in his furious bewilderment, and led Clevis up into the control room. Here, in a low voice, he explained how Norma had announced his connection with the hellflower racket, how Cahill had been killed and how he had picked up Carolyn Niles and the subsequent sabotage by Brenner, sometimes called Hughes, and the rest of it. At the end he spread out his hands and said, "This isn't hard work and good management, Clevis. But here I am. It isn't even good thinking, but I have a couple of questions that I'd like to have answered."

"Yes?"

"Carolyn Niles wore the hellflower for six or seven hours without turning a corpuscle. Norma Hannon proved that it was no gardenia. There is something fishy here. Does medical history indicate any immunes to the love lotus?"

"Some. Not many. Some doctors have even gone so far as to claim that the hellflower is no more dangerous than tobacco."

Farradyne swore. "Not according to Norma Hannon, it isn't," he said harshly.

Clevis eyed Farradyne carefully. "You're not a bit soft-headed over Norma, are you?"

"I doubt it," said Farradyne honestly. "She's a poor kid that got clipped and it makes my blood boil, and I want to go out and rap a half-dozen scum-brained heads together for what they did to her. Norma, she'd be the kind of woman I could fall in love with, Clevis, but Norma is a real blank. You know, if you doped up enough women with hellflowers, the birthrate would take a decline that would alarm a marble statue."

"It's something to think about," nodded Clevis.

"Of course, I've never seen a woman after she has just taken her first sniff so I don't know what it really adds up to, and I don't know how long after the first sniff a woman's libido is still capable of being excited, or even how high the libido can get under hellflowers. But by the time they get to Norma's state, a love lotus only changes their attitude from a completely scar-tissued emotional system to something barely normal whose only desire is to sniff the flower." Farradyne shook his head roughly. "Anyway," he said, after a moment of thought, "you can get a couple of ships to follow me day after tomorrow morning. We're going out somewhere—destination unknown—to make a rendezvous with someone who is high-up. And no matter what, Clevis, I think it wise for you fellows to keep on my trail, because at least one faction of their gang is out to clip me hard. Sooner or later—if my luck holds out as it has—they'll be sending someone of large proportions to clobber me and then I'd like to have your gang move in fast. Preferably before the clobbering gets too thick. And there's more to it—"

"Give," said Clevis in a flat tone.

"All right, you asked for it." Farradyne took the throat-whistle out of his pocket and tucked it back against the curve of his tongue. He tried it and produced a three-toned sound, brief and musical.

"That's the sort of thing I was telling people about," he said. "At the Semiramide's crack-up. Three voices, I thought—then."

"That's the sort of half-witted story you tried to use at your trial."

"That's the sort of noise that Cahill made as he died. It's the sort of noise made by Brenner-Hughes. Clevis, could it be the rudiments of some odd new language?"

"How could you use it?"

"I don't know. Maybe a polysyllabic word like 'manifest' might turn out to be a single chord with certain articulation spoken in three distinct tones."

"How would you articulate?" asked Clevis.

"Well, you'd have to utter the same vocal sound sequence for all registers of the word. The word I just used for an example is a rather complicated series of sounds, with definitions I am not familiar with, like dental fricative, and sub-dental stop. Regardless of the names of the tongue-flappings," said Farradyne, "the word itself would have to be revised in pronunciation."

Clevis shook his head. "With a gizmo such as you are choking on," he said, "you'd have a hard time making a tone other than the one it's tuned for. You're asking a lot, Farradyne. Furthermore, I gather that you have a fair-to-middling ear."

"It isn't absolute pitch by a hell of a long way, but it is good enough to make my face turn sour when the third violinist hits a crab on his strings."

Clevis leaned back in the chair. "I'd be in bad shape," he said. "I'm tone-deaf. Someone would say, 'Clevis, have a drink?' and I'd shake my head because it sounded like 'Do you like radishes?'"

Farradyne eyed Clevis for a moment. "Supposing for the moment that this odd evidence I have—"

"Based upon a grunt, a cry and an exclamation."

"—is true. Then mightn't they prefer to let people into their organization who, they know, have a good pitch sense?"

Clevis looked back at Farradyne. "We've spent years following less rational will-o-the-wisps than that. Perhaps we should follow this crackpot idea for a couple."

"Well, let me toss you one more. During the next few days I am going to startle Carolyn Niles, and I hope she cries out or whatever in three notes. Then I'll have a tie-up."

"How so?"

"She has a hellflower-operator background. She'll have a three-noted cry. And she'll be immune to the God damned flowers her gang deals in. And there is something more than money in this."

"Okay, for the time being that's your game. But in the meantime, what are you going to do with Norma?"

Farradyne eyed Clevis carefully. "You are going to drive off with her."

"What makes you think I'm going to drive off with a doped-to-the-eyes hellflower addict?"

"Because one of the games I'm playing is nosey-nosey with Carolyn Niles, and there's going to be no addict cluttering up my spacer. She'd crumb up the whole deal for fair. You obviously know her, know where she belongs. Take her to a sanatorium. That'll keep her out of everyone's hair, especially mine, and she's on my trail."

"I guess this move is up to me. I hate to drop her in a sanatorium."

"What else can anybody do?" asked Farradyne, wistfully, spreading his hand.

"Not much, but I feel that I owe her more than that kind of handling. Not much more than a jail, you know." Clevis sighed.

"I can imagine. But what can you do for people cursed with a disease that no one knows how to cure?"

"Segregate 'em," growled Clevis. "Well, let's see what we can do about carting Norma out of the ship. When you ship out you will be followed at extreme military radar range. You'll have hard-boiled company watching you, Farradyne."

They went below and found Norma stretched out on the divan. She was sleeping, relaxed as a kitten, with one leg drawn up to uncover the other shapely leg. Her hands were outstretched over her head and open. Her breathing was regular, and normal. The hellflower still cast its heady perfume through the room, and Norma was smiling.

Farradyne plucked the flower from her hair. "This I'll need," he said quietly.

Clevis nodded. "I'll carry her," he said. The Sandman picked Norma up gently as she sleepily protested, but put her arms around Clevis' neck and her head against his cheek and let herself be carried from the salon.

Watching from the port, Farradyne reflected that they looked like a happy party-couple, leaving after too many cocktails, with the girl dozing on her man's shoulder.

Farradyne shrugged. Clevis had bought himself a bundle of trouble—when she awoke, with Clevis, and without the love lotus.... He smiled cynically, and went to bed....

Carolyn came aboard that evening and her first request was for her "gardenia." She put it in her hair and stood there inviting him with her eyes. Farradyne kissed her briefly and waved her to a seat.

"Tired of me, Charles?"

"I've had no time to get used to you, let alone tired of you," he told her. "But I'm more than a trifle curious about this trip we'll be taking in the morning."

"Why not let it wait until then?"

Farradyne looked at her boldly, made no attempt to hide his careful appraisal of her figure and face. She accepted his brazen eyeing and colored a bit. Then he said, "Let's admit it, there's nothing I'd rather do than spend the night making love. It's my favorite indoor sport. It's fun outdoors, too. But there are at least two things against it."

"Two?"

He smiled. "You've made affectionate noises and a few statements regarding your previous affections which lead me to believe that you would not applaud me if I slung you over one shoulder and carried you down to your stateroom. The second item is that the way to get ahead is to marry the boss' daughter, not make her your mistress. Also if you think for one moment that I have enough ice in my spine or hardening in my arteries to make with happy-talk from now until six ack-emma, you're wrong."

Carolyn leaned back and laughed.

"Carolyn, have you ever heard of noblesse oblige?"