Part 4

"Better you shouldn't. Just enjoy living off the edges. It's safer that way."

"Where are we going after we leave Denver?"

"I'm not too sure we're going anywhere."

"But--"

"I'm none too sure of you, Farradyne. You've some holes to fill in." Cahill lit a cigarette and leaned back, letting the smoke trickle through his nostrils. "I don't mind talking to you this way because it would be your word against mine if you happen to be a Sandman. Some of your tale rings true. The rest sticks, hard."

"For instance?"

"Well, let's suppose you are a Sandman. Humans are a hard-boiled lot, but somehow I can't see killing thirty-three people just to establish a bad reputation. So that tends to clear your book. As to the chance of your laying low for four years until the mess blew over, I might buy that except for the place. A guy who can ultimately turn up with enough oil to grease his way into a reinstated license and a Lancaster Eighty-One isn't likely to spend four interim years living in a fungus-field."

"Maybe I hit it rich?"

Cahill laughed roughly. "Dug up a platinum-plated toadstool?"

"Maybe I just met up with the right guy."

"Blackmail?"

"That's a nasty word, Cahill."

"Sure is. What did he do?"

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

Cahill laughed. "Have it your way, Farradyne. Tell me, do we have a lay-over at Denver or is it better if we take off immediately for Mercury?"

"Cinnabar or Hell City?"

"Cinnabar, if it makes any difference."

"Mercury, Schmercury, I didn't know there was anything there but the central heating plant for the solar system."

"Isn't much," admitted Cahill. "But enough. The--"

* * * * *

His voice trailed away as Norma's high heels came clicking up the circular stairway back toward the salon. "I thought I'd have a cigarette and a drink with company before I go to bed," she announced in a tone of voice that Farradyne had not heard her use before. With gracious deftness, she made three highballs of White Star Trail and water and handed two of them to the men. She let her fingers linger over Farradyne's very briefly, and over Cahill's longer. She lounged in a chair across the room from them, all curves and softness, with only that strange disinterested look in her eyes to give her away.

The evening had been a series of paradoxes; Norma's change from the vixen to the lady of languid grace did not ring true. He had been aware of her ability to reason coldly, brought about by her burned-out emotional balance which was so dulled that her thinking was mechanical and therefore inclined to be frightfully chilled logic. Norma had claimed that she knew the emotions by name and definition; that once she had felt them but now she only knew how they worked. Farradyne found it hard to believe that she was so well schooled in her knowledge that she could put on the act of having them when she obviously did not.

Yet it was only the blankness in her eyes that gave her away this evening. Otherwise she might have been a very charming companion.

She did not even force herself upon them; when her cigarette and her drink were gone, Norma excused herself quietly and went below.

"Me, too," said Cahill.

Farradyne led him down to a stateroom and waved him in. "See you in the morning," he said. Cahill nodded his good-night and Farradyne went to his own stateroom to think.

He hadn't done bad, he thought; he had been on the trail for less than a hundred hours and already had a lead. Obviously the Semiramide disaster was the tip-off; no Sandman would go that far to establish a shady reputation.

Farradyne was prepared to go on as far as he had to. The idea of actually running love lotus was not appealing, but the SAND office had been fighting the things for a half century, watching helplessly while the moral fibre of the race was being undermined, and somehow it was far better to let a few more lives be wrecked by hellflowers than to save a few and let the whole thing steamroller into monumental destruction. Farradyne still had to duck a few people who might like to nail his hide to a barn door, but sooner or later he would come out on top and then he could look his fellow man in the eye and ask him to forget one bad mistake.

Being on this first step eased his mind somewhat. He would be rid of Norma tomorrow morning and on his way with Cahill. He went to sleep easily for the first time since that meeting with Norma at Ganymede.

He dreamed a pleasant dream of freedom and success that ended with the bark of a pistol.

IX

Shocked out of his sleep, he lay stunned and blinking for a moment, then leaped out of bed and raced to the corridor. The light blinded him at first, but not enough to stop him from seeing Cahill.

Cahill came along the tiny corridor listlessly, blood dribbling from under his left arm, running down his fingers and splashing to the floor. On Cahill's face was a stunned expression, full of incomprehension, semi-blank. Blood ran down his leg, across his ankle, and left red footprints on the floor.

Through whatever haze clouded Cahill's eyes, he saw Farradyne. He stumbled forward and reached for Farradyne, but collapsed in midstep like a limp towel, to stretch out at Farradyne's feet like a tired baby. His voice sighed out in a dying croon that sounded like a rundown phonograph.

Behind him came Norma Hannon. Her eyes were blazing with an unholy satisfied light and her body was alive and sinuous. A tiny automatic dangled from her right hand. Her lips curled as she came up to Cahill and poked at the man's hand with her bare foot.

"He--" she started to cry in a strident tone. Then the semi-hysteria faded and she looked down at Cahill again, relishing the situation.

Farradyne shuddered. What had happened was obvious. Cahill had tried to force himself upon Norma; she had killed him. Apparently Cahill had not been able to do more than clutch at the deep neckline of Norma's nightgown, which was slightly torn.

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

"Now what?" asked Farradyne bitterly.

"He--" Her eyes opened wide again as she relived the scene and relished the violence.

"Have your fun," Farradyne growled. "What did you do? Let him get all the way in before you plugged him? No warning at all?"

"I hoped it was you," she said. "I wouldn't have killed you." Her voice was calm; she might have been saying 'kiss' instead of 'kill'. "Him I did not like."

"And you like me?"

"You I save to hate tomorrow," she said matter-of-factly.

"Why didn't you save him?"

"What was he to you?"

"He was my source."

"Source?" Norma looked blank. Then understanding crossed her face. "Hellblossoms," she said with a sneer that twisted her face. She stepped past Cahill's body and handed the tiny automatic to Farradyne, who took it dumbly just because it was proffered. She went on into the salon and sat down.

Farradyne wanted to hurt her, to reach through that wall of emotional scar and make her feel something besides anger. Remorse, perhaps.

"Source," he nodded, following her. "Love lotus. I'd have given you one, Norma."

She made a sound like a bitter laugh. "No good, Farradyne. What good is one love lotus?"

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

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

She got up as suddenly as she had sat down. She paused on her way down the corridor to kick Cahill's head with her bare foot. The man's head moved aside limply.

* * * * *

Farradyne stayed where he was until he heard her door slam shut. Then he got up and went toward his own room, pausing at the door to look at Cahill. He should be moved, thought Farradyne.

He found himself looking down on the dead man with a strangely detached feeling, as if he were watching a rather poorly plotted play. He relived the scene although he tried to shut it out of his mind. Shutting out would not work, and so he went through it detail by detail, minutely, from the sound of the pistol shot to the last dying groan from Cahill's tortured throat. The memory of that dying sound jarred on Farradyne's nerves. There had been something strange about it--

It had been a discordant cry.

Farradyne found himself making a completely useless analysis, itemizing things that surely could not matter. The cry had been a discord.

His mind wandered a bit as he considered the word. A series of atonal notes do not make a discord. A discord comes when atonal notes are sounded at the same time. The former can be pleasant to the ear, the latter not.

And then a chill hit him. He felt like a man who has just been told that he had one more question to answer before winning the prize on a quiz show.

Cahill's moan had been a full discord.

With a sudden leap of the mind, Farradyne was back in the Semiramide, hearing three voices behind him. They had found one skeleton afterwards. Then his mind leaped to Brenner, who had emitted an approving grunt when he saw Norma come around the tail structure of the Lancaster with the sun shining through her skirt. He had no proof, no proof. Brenner's grunt had no discord but none the less a mingling of tones. Three voices? Maybe more?

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

It might mean something or it might not. Farradyne put his head back and tried to make a series of sounds. He moaned. He gargled, and he tried to hum and say something at the same time. Maybe the stunt could be cultivated after much practise, and maybe it was used as a password.

More than anything Farradyne needed corroboration.

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

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

* * * * *

He looked down into her glazed eyes, hoping to see some flicker of expression that showed some interest in anything. "Norma, you've a good logical mind--tell me, did you notice anything about Cahill's last cry?"

"No."

"Nothing odd?"

"I've not seen men die very often. What was strange about it?" The eyes unglazed a bit, but Farradyne could not tell whether this was awakened interest or merely the recapture of the feeling she had enjoyed before.

"It sounded to me like a discordant moan."

"It was discordant."

"Not the way you mean. It sounded to me like there were three or four distinct tones all going at once."

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

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

"A piglike sound," she said scornfully. "Forget it, Farradyne. Your evidence consists of one man surprised at the sight of a good-looking woman and one man whose throat was coming apart in death. Forget it." She shut the door to her room in his face abruptly.

Farradyne looked down at Cahill's body with regret. A gunman and a love-lotus operator was not likely to have his absence noticed among the kind of people who could afford to start asking questions of the officials, and there might be a chance that Cahill's absence would cause the same people to ask a question or two of Farradyne.

Farradyne would have liked to keep the body. But hauling a slain corpse--he did not consider it murder--into a doctor's office and asking for an autopsy on the throat could not be done. Nor could Farradyne do it himself. He could perform a fair job of setting a broken bone and he could treat a burn or a cut, but he would not recognize a larynx if he saw it.

Grunting distastefully, Farradyne hauled the body to the scuttle port and consigned it to space with a terse, "See you in Hell, Cahill!"

Sleep did not come to Farradyne for a long time.

X

The Lancaster came down at Denver; before Farradyne had the landing ramp out, a spaceport buggy came careening across the field to stop almost at the base of the ship.

"Farradyne?" said the man.

"You're the Bennington man?"

"Sidney Kingman," said the other, showing Farradyne a small case with an identification card and license. "Where is she?"

"Inside."

Kingman handed Farradyne an envelope. He pocketed it and led Kingman into the salon. Norma was there, sitting on the divan, smoking.

"Miss Hannon, Mr. Kingman."

"Another one of your friends?" she sneered.

"No. He's one of yours."

"I have no friends."

"Yes, you have, Miss Hannon. And you have parents--"

Norma leaped to her feet angrily. "You good-for-nothing bum!" she screeched at Farradyne.

"You wouldn't leave me alone, Norma," said Farradyne tiredly. "So I've brought you home."

"I'll come after you," she snarled.

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

"I won't go!"

"You'll go," said Farradyne harshly, "if I have to clip you on the chin and help Kingman carry you out on a shutter."

For the first time, Farradyne saw tears of genuine sorrow. There was anger at him, too; but remorse was there a-plenty. "Why hurt them?" she asked. "Why can't they just call me dead and let it go at that? I'm worse than dead."

Then her face froze again and she looked at Kingman. "All right," she said in a hard voice, "let's go and hurt my folks to death. You money-grubbing ghouls."

She started towards the spacelock. Kingman followed. Her face wore a coldly distant expression as she left the Lancaster. Kingman's driver took them off. She did not turn back to look at Farradyne.

And that was that. Farradyne retracted the landing ramp, closed the spacelock, and not long afterwards hiked the Lancaster into the sky and headed for Mercury.

XI

Cinnabar was inside of the sunlight zone by a thousand miles and its sun was always in the same spot of the sky. It was a well-contrived city, built so that the streets were lighted either directly or from reflections. Cinnabar was also one of the show-cities of the solar system; but Farradyne found that it did not show him the right things. He could have learned more about hellflowers on Terra because New York had a larger Public Library than Cinnabar.

Farradyne tried everything he could think of but made no progress. His trail had turned to ice after Cahill's death. He loafed and he poked his nose in here and there and drank a bit and varied his routine from man-about-town to the spaceman concerned about his future. There was only one bright spot: his listing had been tentatively taken up by a group of schoolteachers on a sabbatical, who had seen Mercury and now wanted a cheap trip to Pluto. Farradyne accepted this job for about three weeks later. It gave him a payload to Pluto, and when he got there it would be time to do the subcontracting job Clevis had set up as a combined source of revenue and a means of contact. Once each month Farradyne was to haul a shipment of refined thorium ore from Pluto to Terra, a private job that paid well. In the meantime, Farradyne could nose around Mercury to see what he could see. Then he could haul his schoolteachers to Pluto and pick up his thorium, which definitely made his actions look reasonably normal to the official eye.

On the end of the drums of refined thorium there would be a spot of fluorescent paint, normally invisible. He was to wash this spot off so long as he had nothing to report; if it remained then something was wrong with Farradyne, or he had something to report. Clevis would know what to do next.

And so Farradyne watched the date grow closer and closer and his hopes of having something to report dimmed.

He cursed under his breath at the futility of it, and realized that his curse must have been audible when he felt a touch on his elbow and a voice asking, "Is it that bad?"

He turned slowly, his mind working fast to think of something to say that would not be leading in the wrong direction. "I was--" he started, and then saw that the voice, which had been low-pitched enough to have been the voice of a rather small, thin man, had come from the throat of a tall dark-haired woman who sat beside him at the bar. "--just wondering what strangers did for excitement on Mercury," he finished lamely.

"Spaceman?"

"Yes."

She laughed in her low contralto. "I guessed it. Is Cinnabar so inhospitable?"

"To strangers it seems so."

"To me it seems quite normal. It makes the rest of the solar system sound like a very exciting place."

"Born on Mercury?"

"No," she said, shaking her head. "I was born on Venus. I spent four years on Terra before my folks brought me to Mercury. But my last space trip took place when I was nine. Tell me, what is New York like?"

"Buildings and people and mad rushing around. Any change in the last hundred years has been for taller buildings, more people, and a higher general velocity of humanity."

"But--"

"I know, the way I put it sounds a bit harsh. But anybody can find anything they want somewhere in New York if he has the money to buy it."

* * * * *

She smiled calmly. "I'll show you that Cinnabar is not an inhospitable place," she said. "You may take me to dinner if you wish."

"I wish," he chuckled. "And since we haven't a mutual friend to introduce us, I'm Charles Farradyne."

"How do you do?" she said solemnly, putting a lithe hand in his. "I'm Carolyn Niles." She took a little step out from the bar and made him a slight curtsy. He saw that she was almost as tall as he was, and he grinned as he thought that her figure was far better than his.

"How shall we meet?" he asked.

"We shall not meet," said Carolyn. "You shall drive me home where we will have cocktails with my folks. You will be an old friend of Michael's, who is a sort of school-chum of my brother. After cocktails I will change and you will make polite conversation with my family--none of which eat personable young men, though they may scare them to death by having father show them the fine collection of Terran shotguns he owns. Then we will go out to your spacecraft, and you will change while I roam around and investigate the insides."

"Done," agreed Farradyne.

Something rapped him on the elbow and he had to look down before he saw a boy of ten or so with a green-paper lined box containing flowers. The young merchant had an eye for business; he eyed Farradyne knowingly and smiled at Carolyn fetchingly. "Corsage? One dollar."

Farradyne grinned--and then almost recoiled before he realized that nowhere in the solar system could a love lotus be purchased for a dollar. These were definitely gardenias. He bought one to cover up his confusion, and as he handed it to Carolyn he wondered whether having a good-looking woman in a car outside a florist shop might not be the password to the purchase of the hellflower. Carolyn pinned the gardenia in her dark hair as she smiled her thanks, then led him from the bar to an open roadster almost as low and long as the curb it was parked against. Carolyn handed him her keys and Farradyne drove according to her directions until they came to a rather large rambling home just outside of the city limits.

* * * * *

He was received graciously. Her father was a tall, distinguished man with a dab of gray at the temples and a rather stern face that became completely friendly whenever he smiled, which was very frequently. Carolyn's mother was tall and dark with only a sprinkle of gray; Carolyn's stature seemed natural in that tall family. The brother was not present, which made it completely easy for Farradyne who could not have given any account of his friendship for the unknown Michael.

Mr. Niles mixed a pitcher of martinis and inquired about the spaceman business. Farradyne explained how it was. Mrs. Niles laughed at his story about fish one day and fins the next and said that she thought it couldn't be that bad, really. Farradyne grinned. Mr. Niles observed that a man who can operate a spacer and pay off a mortgage on the craft must not be entirely penniless or without prospects.

Mrs. Niles added, "I suppose it takes money to operate, Mr. Farradyne."

"A fair amount. A spaceman begins to think in large figures so much that he wonders how he can get along on a more humanly reasonable amount. To clear a reasonable standard of living, a rather staggering amount of money comes in one hand and goes out the other. Operating expenses are high, but so are charges."

"But do you land on Mercury often, Mr. Farradyne?"

Farradyne smiled. "Perhaps less frequently in the past than in the future."

"Now, that's sheer flattery," laughed Carolyn.

"Better enjoy it," observed her father with a chuckle. "Charles, you are welcome here any time you land."

"Thank you," smiled Farradyne. "But all things considered, I should think that you'd take a dim view of any man that brought your daughter home wearing a gardenia."

"Gardenia--oh. You mean that it might be--" Mr. Niles laughed. "I think that Carolyn has enough judgement to take up with the right kind of young man, Charles."

"Of course," said Mrs. Niles. "Robert and Michael wouldn't stay friends with the wrong kind."

"So, you see?" laughed Mr. Niles.

"By the way," asked Mrs. Niles, "how is Michael?"

"Quite well, the last time I saw him," said Farradyne, knowing that this was the right thing to say at any time.

"You're sure?"

"Of course."

"I'm very happy to hear it," said Mrs. Niles. "We knew he was with you, but we didn't know how long he stayed."

Farradyne gulped imperceptibly, and hoped that they did not notice. "You did? Then he must have mentioned me."

"Oh, he did. Tell me, Charles, what happened to Michael?"

"Did something happen to him?"

Mr. Niles eyed Farradyne rather pointedly. "Mike took off with you from Mars. He did not land at Denver, Mr. Farradyne. So what happened to Mike Cahill?"

Farradyne gulped, and this time it was a full-throated gulp that left him with his Adam's Apple high in his throat. Carolyn cooed, "Yes, Charles, what happened to Michael Cahill?"

XII

Farradyne felt a muscle-loosening tingle of fear. His thinking mechanism stopped functioning. His mind buzzed with a frenetic insistence that he say something, but being so completely unprepared he could not say anything. And he dimly knew that his long speechlessness was as damning as any story he could have prepared after such a pause. Perhaps he would have been stunned short this way even if he had concocted some story on the offhand chance that someday the question might come up. But it had come like this, from an unexpected quarter and he was both shocked and unprepared.

Then it occurred to him that he need not say anything. The die had been cast and he stood accused, twice; once by the Niles Family and once by his own shocked reaction. He must act for the next moment, because the passed moment was irreparable. Farradyne laughed at his own simplicity--a brief scornful bark.

"What is funny?" asked Mr. Niles.

"It just occurred to me that you people are either innocent or guilty."

"Very sage," commented Niles, drily. "Now, what happened to Cahill?"

Farradyne leaned back, trying to relax. He took a sip of his martini, not that he wanted it, but to see if his hand were still trembling. It wasn't.