Part 2

It was called 'The Spaceman's Bar,' like sixteen hundred other 'Spaceman's Bar's 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 with a lot of patience, which was running out. A woman sat in a booth along the wall, dressed in a copy of some exclusive model that had neither the cloth nor the workmanship to stand up for more than the initial wearing, and looked already as if she had worn it often. The woman herself had the same tired, overworked look. She was too young to have that look, and Farradyne looked away, disinterested; he favored the vivacious brunette that 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 spaceman by any means. It occurred to Farradyne that, judging by the way she was acting, 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.

* * * * *

As far as Farradyne could tell, there was not a love lotus in the place, which hardly surprised him because he did not really expect to find one in a place such as this. He turned back to the bar for a refill. When he got it, he turned to face the room again and saw that a man had come in and was standing just inside the door, blinking at the lights. 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."

"I'm Timothy Martin of the Martian Water Commission. 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 the name would ring any cracked bells among the spacemen. It did not seem to, and Farradyne did not know whether to be gratified at the forgetfulness or depressed at his lack of notoriety.

"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," Martin grunted, "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." Farradyne 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, and Farradyne was about to say something when he felt a touch against his elbow. It was the girl in the over-tired cocktail dress. Her glazed eyes were wide and glittering, her face hard and thin-lipped.

"You're Charles Farradyne?" she asked in a flat voice. Beneath a tone of distrust and hatred the voice had what might 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 who you've hired?" she asked with the same flatness of tone. Profile-wise, she looked about twenty-three at most. Farradyne wondered how a woman that young could possibly have crammed into the brief years all of the experience that showed in her face.

Martin was fumbling for words. "Why, er--" he said 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. 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 at the time, 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 am responsible for you, too?" he asked bitterly.

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

Farradyne nodded curtly at Martin's back, then looked down at the girl. He felt again the powerful impulse to plead his case, to explain, to show his innocence. 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 what 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 they should not have been expressed in acceptable grammar and near-perfect diction. 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--

* * * * *

And then he caught it. He had been too far from it too long. The glazed, bored eyes, the completely blase attitude were the tip-off; then the fact that she had become animated at the chance to start a scene of violence. 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. With some dope the effect is physical, with others it is mental. With love lotus it was emotional. The woman had been on the emotional toboggan; her capacity for emotion had been dulled to such an extent that only a scene of real violence could cut through the scars to give her a reaction. Someone had slipped the girl a really top-notch 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 met their eyes they looked down or aside or back to their own personal affairs. He knew the breed--spacemen, a strange mixture of high intelligence and hard roughness. Farradyne knew that to a man they understood that the most damaging thing they could do 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 her; 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 the addiction where bloody murderous butchery would thrill her about to the same degree as a normal woman being kissed good-night 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, calling:

"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--

Their faces changed from deliberate dis-recognition of him to cold and calculated hatred, not so much of Farradyne as of what he represented in their minds. 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 on the shoulder with the muzzle of a double-barrelled shotgun.

"Get the hell out of here," said the man from 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 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, 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 to hold them.

Farradyne left quickly. He burned inwardly, he wanted to have it out; but this was the game Clevis wanted him to play--it was the price of his freedom from the fungus fields. He took it on the run to his Lancaster, knowing that the barkeep would hold the room until escape was made.

He took the ship up as soon as the landing ramp was retracted and only then did his nerves calm down. 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.

IV

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 and so he was going to eat and hit the sack. He turned from the board and saw her.

Norma Hannon sat in the computer's chair behind the board. Her hands were folded calmly and her body was listless. Farradyne grunted uncertainly because he was absolutely ignorant of her attitude, except perhaps the feeling that she would enjoy bloody violence.

"Well?" he said.

"I caught the landing ramp as it came running in," she said quietly.

"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.

"What makes you think--"

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

"Now see here--"

"Don't be stupid," she said sharply. "I've no passion for you. I'm a love-lotus addict, remember?"

"Then why--?"

"Don't 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 feelings 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, "Now, would it? Come here and kiss me."

"Why?"

"Because I hate your guts, Farradyne. 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, Farradyne. 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, making me hate you even more, 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, and that from hearsay. But it did not include this sort of illogical talk. 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 a gang of 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 and violence were catching.

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 the resentment against the past, while her previous flare of anger 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 a half-a-hundred dollars for one. He 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 really 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 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 that road ever since and I've come a long way."

She looked at him again. "So you 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--a tired engine. 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 bared her teeth at him. "You can afford to part with one stinking flower."

"I haven't--"

* * * * *

Norma leaped out of her chair and came across the room, her face distorted, her hands clawing at his face. Farradyne fought her away, and saw with dismay the look of animated pleasure on her twisted face. It was an unfair fight; Farradyne was trying to keep her from hurting him without being forced to hurt her, while 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. He had not struck her hard enough because of his repugnance at hitting a woman. 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 this time.

Norma collapsed with a suddenness that scared him. He caught her before she hit the metal floor and carried her to the salon where he placed 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 Farradyne had ever seen man or woman.

He carried her below, to one of the tiny staterooms.

He stood there, contemplating her and wondering what to do next. He would have been puzzled as to the next move even if Norma had been a completely normal person. As it was, Farradyne decided that no matter what he did it would be wrong. 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. He shrugged and slipped the hold-down strap across her waist and let it go at that.

Then he went to his own stateroom and locked the door against any more of this ruckus and confusion. He slept fitfully even though the locked door separated him from both amour and murder--either of which added up to the same end with Norma Hannon.

V

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 presumed incompetence as a pilot. She scorned him for refusing to open his hold and bring her the love lotus she craved.

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

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

"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. For I'll be here when you get back."

The woman's eyes glinted with hatred and determination.

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 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.

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 Lake 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, bought himself some clothing to augment his scant supply. He succeeded in forgetting about Norma Hannon for a solid four 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 would have awakened her so that she would come out to needle him some more. He looked the ship over carefully, satisfying 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 communications 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 on an errand, that you were not to leave without her."

"Aye-firm. I will check." Farradyne grimaced at the closed microphone. Willfully marooning a passenger would get him into more trouble than trying to account 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 pick-up job, Lancaster. Are you free?"

"I am free for Terra, Tower."

"Prepare to receive visitor, Lancaster. Good luck on the 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 with the arrival of a port jeep, which brought his visitor to him.

"You're Charles Farradyne? I'm Carl 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, as though he did not know what Brenner was talking about.

"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're talking about," he said.

"No? I hardly think you're telling the truth, Farradyne."

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