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 pick-up job. The clerk that took his
license to make the listing raised one 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. 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 pick-up list, which was not too long. He had a fair chance of
picking up a job, and that would add to whatever backlog Clevis had
left him. Farradyne found himself able to figure his chances as though
he had not spent his time digging mushrooms on Venus. The pilot that
owned his ship outright was a rare one. The rest were mortgaged to the
scupper 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 rake in the dough,
and 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 and 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
towards the nearest. He entered it with the air of a man who had every
right to land his ship anywhere he pleased and then hit the nearest
bar. He waggled a finger at the barkeep, called for White Star Trail,
and dropped a ten-spot on the bar with an air that indicated 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. The glass in
his hand dangled a bit and his posture was relaxed.
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.