Part 10

Warily he listened. There were no other sounds along the corridor but the one he expected, and soon the little flag on the lock went in and the door opened. Carolyn Niles came out in pajamas and coat, her eyes blinking slightly. "What's the--" Then she gasped. "Charles!"

"Howdedo. Any more hiding in the dark, Carolyn?"

"How did you get here?"

"I walked," he said flatly. He turned to Brenner. "You stay there, school-master. I'm scared to death and therefore a bit touchy."

Brenner shook his head, eyeing the gun. "Sure, you're scared. I'm scared, too."

"Relax--but do it slowly. Now turn around and make it hand over hand along toward the salon. You follow the gentleman," he said to Carolyn.

Farradyne followed them both, mentioning that if Brenner tried any tricks, Carolyn might get in the way of the shot intended for him. They went up the stairway, one, two, three, and floated into the salon, Farradyne having a bit of a time of it because of his full gun-hand. He hooked his legs around the guardrail and eyed them coldly.

"Carolyn, let's see how good a job you can do on Brenner's wrists with a chunk of this tape." He tossed the roll at her and she went to Brenner, who held his hands behind him while she ran tape around the wrists.

"I'd be willing to bet that's a slipshod job," said Farradyne. "But it will probably hold for a while. Carolyn, coast over here and sit in the straight chair."

Farradyne taped her to the chair by her wrists and ankles, and took a slight hitch in the hold-down strap. He added some security to Brenner's bonds and taped the man's ankles to the legs of the divan. Then he propped the still unconscious man up near Brenner and taped him similarly.

Now he took time to go below and collect the third man from his cabin and bring him up; the man struggled against the wide tape and glared at Farradyne over the plaster on his lips. Farradyne hurled him backside first at the divan and followed him, catching him on the rebound. He taped the man as he had the others, and then took a small flight to the bar, where he perched on top by hooking his feet around one of the bar stools.

"Aren't we a good-looking bunch?" he chuckled. "Shall we sing?"

"Stop it, Farradyne," snapped Brenner.

* * * * *

Farradyne's twisted smile faded.

"I'm telling who to do what, Brenner. We'll play this game according to my rules for a while."

"You can't get away with it."

"Nuts. I should think you would feel a bit awkward, for a conqueror."

"I can stand it for a time. But the sooner you free us, the--"

Farradyne laughed, one loud humorless bark. "So I'm still your prisoner?"

"In a way. You wouldn't want to die without telling what you know about us. You'll do anything to stay alive."

"You damn well bet! And I'll do anything to learn a bit more about it, too."

"You can't make me talk."

"Want to bet? I don't think I could squeeze anything out of you by torture, Brenner, but I have a hunch you'll sing loud and long after you watch me take Carolyn's fingernails off with long-nosed pliers, and listen to her screaming."

Carolyn looked at Farradyne coldly. "Charles, I don't think you have enough sadism to perform that operation on me."

Farradyne looked at her. He held enough dislike of what she stood for to do almost anything; but she was still a woman and he knew that she was right: he simply didn't have the requisite sadism. Even though it would be a just retribution.

Carolyn sniffed cynically, and Farradyne realized that he had mumbled the last few words of his thoughts. She repeated them: "Just retribution, perhaps, Charles--but have you the guts?"

He looked down at her. "No, it seems I haven't. But I've someone with me who might."

He took aim and sailed down the stairs. He soared around the stateroom corridor and ran full-tilt into someone coming the opposite way. He hurled the figure from him and recoiled, and when he caught himself again, he had one hand braced against the handrail and the pistol aimed at the middle of Norma's stomach. He let out his breath and relaxed his gun hand.

She looked at the gun and her face went white with the realization of how close it had been. She looked at him searchingly, as if seeking company for her fright. She apparently found it, for her face relaxed and she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then she fought the hem of her skirt down again and blushed.

Farradyne chuckled shakily. "Go into Number Four and swipe a pair of Carolyn Niles' pajamas," he said. "They don't float. Then come on up to the salon."

He turned and headed back slowly, stalling until he heard her return to the corridor.

* * * * *

He went up first and helped her make the curve around the railing at the top. Solicitously, Farradyne steered her to the divan and fastened the seat-strap.

Then he faced Carolyn and the rest. "Speaking of retribution," he said slowly, "I'd like you to meet a woman I know. Miss Norma Hannon. She's a love-lotus addict, you know. Whatever she is and whatever she does is basically your own damned fault." He said directly to Carolyn, "I couldn't do it. But I think that Miss Hannon might enjoy a bit of an emotional binge with the people who fed her the first hellflower and caused the death of her brother."

Farradyne turned and sailed across the salon to land at Norma's side. He reached out and removed the love lotus from Norma's hair, and re-crossed the room to hurl it into the disposal chute.

"Just sit there quietly until the effects of that thing wear off," he told her. "I'm going to make a tour of inspection."

Farradyne turned and dived down the stairway again. He did not know how long it might take, especially after Norma had been literally sleeping in a smothering roomful of the things for hours. Probably take long enough for them all to get the whim-whams just thinking about it, he concluded.

He conned every stateroom on his way down. He was reasonably certain that the ruckus would have awakened them all, but he wanted to make sure that no one of them was lying doggo until he could make his bid. They were all empty. Farradyne went on down in the Lancaster, checking the supply-rooms, the galley, the workshop, the other cargo lock, the storage room. He looked into the inspection cubbies and wiring hatches until he had covered every nook and cranny in the Lancaster that was large enough to contain a human being.

The ship was clean.

He stopped once more to eye the four metal cases bolted to the floor. He went up, then, all the way.

"Any talk?" he asked brightly as he soared through the salon.

"Farradyne, you can't do this!" rasped Brenner.

Farradyne ignored him. Norma was still sitting on the divan, in the same position. But her face was losing its softness and her attention was no longer diverted so easily. "I'm waiting," she told him as he passed upward to the control room.

Somehow, Farradyne believed that she would not have very long to wait.

XXIV

Farradyne again ignored the oddness of the sky to examine the small auxiliary panel fastened to one edge of the main control panel. It contained a small meter calibrated in arbitrary units of three colors. The needle stood high, about three-quarter scale, in the middle of the blue region. Below the meter was the toggle switch, and on either side of the switch were flat buttons, blue to the right and red to the left. Behind the panel was a metal box; emerging from the box a cable no longer than a lead pencil snaked away into the maze of wiring behind the main equipment.

He considered the thing carefully. Booby traps were unlikely, but there were destruction-charges used to prevent the capture of secret equipment.

The destruction triggers usually were protected switches, placed in such a position and built in such a manner that when the crew wished to destroy their secret devices, they had to do it deliberately.

So Farradyne eyed the small panel critically and decided that while there must be some destruction-device included in such a highly secret piece of gear, it was not on the front panel where it might be pressed accidentally or in the heat of excitement. He was even certain that not very much could happen if he tinkered with the switches, so long as he was in space and a few light years from anything large and hard. It was also extremely unlikely that any gear of this sort would be easy to foul-up. The destruction of the gadget in space would leave the ship and crew marooned in the void between the stars.

He took the cross-bar toggle in his hand and pulled. It resisted his efforts, and so he tried pushing. It moved down in a wide arc and as he moved the switch down, the pressure of the drive suddenly caught up with the seat of his pants and Farradyne was sitting in his pilot's chair instead of floating above it by a fraction of an inch. He thrust the toggle all the way down and a full one-gravity of force came on.

Above his head the stars resumed their familiar appearance.

The needle on the meter stayed where it was, at three-quarter scale.

Farradyne chuckled aloud. _He had it now._ One button to start the equipment for warm-up period; the toggle to control its functioning; and the other button to cut the gear off when the flight was concluded. It was as simple as that, and although Farradyne had sat in many a spaceman's bar and heard arguments as to the possibilities of exotic operation of alien equipment, he knew that mechanical and electrical principles are universal and that their exploitation would most likely lead toward universal simplification.

Then, being practical, Farradyne dropped the subject and began to think about where he was, where he had come from, and where he was going. He put his eye to the point-of-drive telescope and caught a small star on the cross-hairs. This was undoubtedly Sol, considerably tinier than its appearance from Pluto, but of the right color. A true stellar point, it was, which meant that he must be light years from it.

He squinted through the point-of-departure periscope and cut the drive so that the flare would not blind him. Behind was the constellation of Lyra and on the cross-hairs was another tiny star of no particular consequence.

He got out his Spaceman's Star Catalog and opened it to Lyra. Among the listings were several semi-dwarfs of the F, G and K classifications and one of them, about twenty-seven light years from Sol, was located in the right position, so far as Farradyne could determine--

The sound of a whimper cut into his thoughts, and he remembered the possibilities of the scene down in the salon. He snapped on the intercom and listened, wondering whether he could actually sit there and let Norma go to work on Carolyn. Man's inhumanity to man was a pale and insignificant affair compared to the animal ferocity of a woman about to settle up a long-standing account with another woman.

His curiosity got the better of him. He sauntered down the stairs. Norma stood before the bound Carolyn, her eyes glassy and her face impersonal. In one hand she held a small bottle of acid from Farradyne's workshop and in the other hand she held a little pointed glass-bristle brush. As Farradyne came down the stairs, Norma dipped the brush in the acid and approached Carolyn, holding the brush as she would a pencil.

Farradyne said, "Wait."

* * * * *

Norma looked at him. "Don't stop me," she said. "I'm going to write 'Hellflower' across that alabaster forehead."

Farradyne shuddered. His imagination had stopped working at the point of removing fingernails and applying cigarettes to the skin. Now it leaped forward. A formerly flawless skin covered with scar-tissue lettering of accusals, viciousness, and probably lewdness.

"Are you ready to talk?" Farradyne asked Carolyn.

"I'll talk. I'll talk because you'll never get a chance to use the information."

"You talk, and I'll take my chances on that."

Norma frowned. "Please, Farradyne?"

"Maybe later," he said soothingly. "Go sit down and wait."

Norma turned and headed for the divan.

"Spill it," he said to Carolyn. "What the hell's going on, and why?"

"This is war," she said.

"Like hell it's war. This is backstabbing. But it'll be war as soon as we can fight back."

"It is war," she repeated. "The process should not be unfamiliar to you; you've done it yourselves time and again. First you weaken the enemy by undermining his resources, by lowering his resistance, by turning his efforts towards advancement against some stumbling block. Then--"

"I presume that doping the women of a race with hellflowers is an honorable practise?" sneered Farradyne.

"It is better than dropping a mercurite bomb. We got to interstellar space first and met another people as racially jealous as we are: your people. We could have made a landing openly, but if we had, the warfare you're threatening would have happened long ago. And there would be nothing left of either of our people but smouldering planets to mark the meeting-place of two stellar peoples."

"You can say this, knowing that no Solan has the barest inkling of how this doodad in the hold can permit us to travel faster than light?"

* * * * *

Carolyn looked at him contemptuously. "You're an idealist, Charles," she said. "I'll tell you what would happen. You'd greet us with cheers and invite us in--long enough to steal our warp-generator. You'd trade us your medical science for our chemistry and your electronics for our gravities, and then you'd meet us face to face to prove to yourselves that even though you got a second-place start, you could move faster and hit harder than we could. You'd carry your war to us, and we'd carry our war to you, and there would be cause and effect, and attack and retaliation, with each blow a bit more vicious until your people would be planting mercurite at the same time we were. And then, as I say, the next interstellar race to visit this region of the sky would find the radioactive remains of two ex-cultures. I know, because both our people come of the same stock."

"All right," he snapped. "So you've justified your actions to yourself."

"_Of course._ Everybody is self-justified."

"And you justify the doping of our race by calling it better than meeting us face to face."

"Remember your own history. Even before the First Atomic War everybody realized that warfare was a bankrupt measure, to be undertaken only after all else failed. You conducted your conflicts under cover, by boring from within, by undermining the national structure. Similarly, when your people have been lowered in resistance, we shall move in quietly and make of you an asset to our economy, instead of a ruined structure that must be helped."

"Wonderful. However, I don't cotton to the idea of being an abject supplicant to your superior kind."

There was a yelp from behind him and he whirled to see Norma Hannon about to letter something on Brenner's forehead.

He raced across the floor and caught her hand just before the acid-laden brush touched Brenner's skin. "Norma," he said quietly. "Don't."

She looked up at him reproachfully. "You promised me--"

"Later."

"That's what you're always saying," she complained. "Then all you do is talk a lot of guff with that female over there."

"Okay. I forgot." He turned to Brenner. "Next question: how do we navigate that ka-dodie of yours?"

Brenner laughed harshly. "You know so much, why don't you go ahead and try it?"

"Now, Farradyne?" pleaded Norma.

"Not yet. I'm going to try his suggestion." Farradyne inspected the tapings and satisfied himself. Then he turned toward the stairway.

"Wait," said Brenner testily. "Take her with you, dammit. I don't want my face lettered with words found in washrooms."

"Somehow it seems appropriate."

"All right. The toggle fades the generator on and off. The red button stops the equipment. The green button is for start. Wait until the meter reads in the upper block before using the toggle. The speed for this particular equipment is approximately two light years per hour in Solarian measurement. We're about six hours from Sol now. Go ahead and run us close to Sol so we can finish this gambit."

* * * * *

Farradyne took Norma by the hand and led her up the stairs. She protested and hung back--but once in the control room, she crossed briskly and turned the intercom so that sound from the salon would come through clear and strong, but sound from the control room would not go out. Then she turned from the panel and faced Farradyne with the beginning of a soft smile on her face.

"That was the hardest job I've ever had," she breathed.

Visibly, she relaxed. An aliveness came around her eyes and her mouth spread into a brief smile. She snapped her bottle of acid into one of the many spring-holds in the control room. Then she walked over to the co-pilot's seat and dropped into it. She rested, with her head tilted back.

Farradyne watched with puzzlement. "Norma," he asked, "how long after a sniff of love lotus does the effect last?"

"Seldom more than an hour. I have been free of it for quite some time."

"But you had a hell of a dose."

She took a deep breath. "I could feel it leaving," she said. "The effects faded after you took the flower out of my hair, but instead of fading away with a dulling of the senses, the urges I felt diminished without leaving me emotionless. I think I'm cured of it."

Farradyne recoiled a bit.

"No, Charles, this is no trick. This is not an attempt to lead you on. I'm cured, I think, honestly."

"But how?"

"One thing no one has tried is to place the addict in a veritable bath of the things. Perhaps that did it--an overdose--Anyway, it's wonderful to feel normal again." She sat up in the chair and leaned toward him. She reached for his hand and drew him forward and kissed him on the lips. For a moment they clung together, then she moved away from him slowly. "It's all back again," she said quietly. "The quickened pulse and the pleasant tingle. I'm a woman again, Charles. Let's go home so I can enjoy it."

It was almost too good to be true--but it had to be.

Farradyne gave her hand a squeeze. "Done!" he said. His other hand lifted the cross-bar toggle, and the pressure of the springed seats threw them up against their hold-down straps.

Two light years an hour. Farradyne ran the Lancaster for exactly six hours and then cut the superdrive. Together, they inspected the heavens and found a brilliant yellow star on their quarter. Farradyne turned the Lancaster to face it and raised the toggle slowly; Sol changed color, racing toward the blue and the violet first, then turning a dull red and raising through the spectrum again until it became violet once more. It went through another spectrum-change and grew in size like a toy balloon hitched to a high-pressure air line, until its flare frightened the pilot. He shoved the toggle down and Sol winked back into the familiar disc of blinding white, about the size as seen from Mars.

Farradyne oriented himself, consulted the spaceman's ephemeris and pointed at a large unwinking point. "Home," he said.

Two light years an hour. Farradyne went to the computer and made some calculations. He returned, pointed the Lancaster at Terra and flicked the toggle up and down, counting off a few seconds for drive. Sol whiffled past, changing in color as its position changed in the astrodome; and when Farradyne drove the toggle down, Terra was a distinct disc in the sky above them.

XXV

Farradyne said, "Norma, hike below and see that our visitors stay taped to their chairs. I'm going to land this crate without interference."

Norma nodded and went down to the salon. "They're still penned," she reported over the Intercom.

Farradyne said "Aye-firm," and then made his first ranging-radar contact with Terra. He set his declaration drive accordingly and the integrator-needle crept over to the center-scale zero, informing Farradyne that zero separation from the surface of the spaceport would result in zero velocity of the Lancaster.

Then Farradyne fired up the radio and called: "Washington Tower. This is a Lancaster Eighty-One requesting landing instructions. Registry Six Eight Three. Farradyne piloting."

"Tower to Six-Eight-Three. Take Beacon Nine at one twenty thousand, Landing Area Five. Traffic is zero-zero, but eight, repeat, eight, Spaceguard cutters are in formation at sixty thousand." The voice changed in tone slightly. "Spaceguard, Code Watchung. Calling Watchung."

"Watchung to Tower, go ahead."

"Tower. Watchung, ware away from Beacon Nine. Lancaster Eighty-One coming in. Give position and course."

"Watchung to Tower: position azimuth six-seven zero, altitude sixty thousand, distance nine miles. Course twenty-seven North azimuth. Will miss Beacon Nine by thirty-three miles. Recheck?"

"Recheck and aye-firm, Watchung. Tower to Six-Eight-Three: did you follow that?"

"Aye-firm!" called Farradyne.

"Watchung to Six-Eight-Three: pilot identify yourself."

"Pilot Farradyne here, Watchung."

"Aye-firm. Watchung Five, assume command of Six, Seven, and Eight. Take alert pattern at two hundred thousand feet and stand by, Watchung Two, Three, and Four compute and take closing course on Six-Eight-Three and convoy to Landing Area Five. Farradyne, prepare to accept convoy."

"Deny, Watchung. Request reason."

"Prepare to accept inspection, Six-Eight-Three."

Farradyne growled angrily and dropped the radio formalities. "Why?" he snapped.

"You are suspected of hauling a cargo of love lotus. Prepare to stand inspection upon landing."

From down in the salon came the sound of cynical laughter. Brenner said, "We'll let your own people punish you, Farradyne. Hellblossom running, resisting arrest, kidnaping, operating with a forged license, a ship with a questionable registry!"

Farradyne knew what Brenner meant. Taped tight in his ship were Carolyn Niles, daughter of one of Mercury's leading citizens, and a schoolteacher named Hughes. There would be a lot of other witnesses prepared to perjure him into three hundred years of hard labor on Titan. He wondered how the enemy managed this; certainly they had not been prepared to lose their captured spacecraft so quickly. Yet the counter-preparations looked as though such an eventuality had been expected.

"Six-Eight-Three, respond!"

Farradyne snapped his mike-switch and said, "I resent the accusation, and demand an explanation!"

"There is no accusation, Farradyne. We have an anonymous tip-off. You are not accused of illegal operations, only suspect. Will you permit inspection?"

"No!" snapped Farradyne. "Deny!"

"Code Watchung: intercept Six-Eight-Three! Prepare to fire."

"Fire and be damned," said Farradyne in a growl. His hand reached for the toggle and shoved it home for ten seconds. When he turned the ultradrive off, they were far a-space and the radio was silent.

"Give it up, Charles," said Carolyn from below.

"Go to hell!"

Brenner said, "You might as well, Farradyne. No matter how you figure it, you'll either be grabbed by your own people or get picked up by ours. We can't lose."

* * * * *

Going below, Farradyne faced them. "And what happens if I dump you out of the spacelock and your cargo of hellflowers with you?"

"You could do that to Cahill," said Carolyn, "because Cahill was not registered as a paying passenger. I am, and when the authorities find me missing you'll be called to account."

"Just what do you suggest?" Farradyne asked.

"Surrender and turn this ship over to us. You will be detained as a prisoner of war and imprisoned among your own kind."

"Doing what kind of prison labor? Growing hellflowers?"

"Not at all. That, we wouldn't consider ethical."

"It's a cockeyed code of ethics you jerks have," growled Farradyne. "I suppose you want a gold medal for doping our women instead of dropping mercurite bombs and killing them."