"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.