"Maybe," he said as shortly as he knew how.
"Go on, Farradyne, but make it good."
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 I mean. It sounded to me like there were three or four
tones all going at once."
She snorted derisively. "Let me shoot you. I'll make a recording of
your death cry and we'll see how well you sing."
"I'm serious."
"Stop beating that dead horse," she told him flatly. "It's the same
chorus you used to sing about the three men in your control room,
remember?"
"Brenner made a sound like that, too," he said.
"A pig-like sound," she said scornfully. "Forget it, Farradyne. You've
convinced nobody but yourself, and 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. Not that Cahill's
death touched him in any way but mild shock and distress at the loss of
his link to the hellblossom gang. 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 a lot of questions of the officials, and
there might be a fair chance that Cahill's disappearance would cause
the same people to ask a question or two of Farradyne.
He 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. And although he knew better intellectually, he instinctively
considered a vocal cord as a stretched string of some sort that
vibrated in the air-stream.
Distastefully Farradyne hauled the body to the scuttle-port and
consigned it to space with a terse, "See you in hell, Cahill."
6
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?" asked the man.
"You're the Bennington Detective Agency man?"
"Sidney Kingman," said the other, showing Farradyne a small case with
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. I have come to take you home."
Norma leaped to her feet. "You good-for-nothing bum!" she screeched at
Farradyne. "Why did you do it?"
"You wouldn't leave me alone, Norma," said Farradyne softly. "So I've
brought you home where they'll take care of you and keep you out of my
hair."
"I'll come after you!" she raved. "I'll get you for this!"
"Not if I see you first," he told her. "This is it."
"Why do you hurt everything you touch?" she cried.
"Now who?"
"Me." For the first time, Farradyne saw tears of genuine sorrow. There
was anger at him, too, but remorse there was a-plenty. "Why hurt my
people!" 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. Let's get
it over with. You pair of money-grubbing ghouls."
She started toward the spacelock, waving her forefinger at Kingman, who
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 ramp, closed the spacelock
and not long afterwards hiked the ship into the sky and headed for
Mercury.
7
Cinnabar was inside 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 by
reflections. Cinnabar was also one of the show-cities of the system,
but Farradyne found that it did not show him the right things. He could
have learned as much about hellflowers on Terra merely because New York
had a larger public library.
He 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 had 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 semi-refined thorium there would be a spot
of fluorescent paint, normally invisible. He was to wash off this spot
so long as he had nothing to report. If it remained, then something
was wrong with Farradyne; he had not turned up 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 grow less and less likely. He felt
as though he had been given up, in fact he got to the point where
he wondered how a man could get a love lotus if he wanted one. The
prevalence of the dope seemed high enough, but as far as Farradyne was
concerned it was harder than buying a real gold brick. There did not
seem to be any for sale. He thought that perhaps his method of attack
was wrong, and yet he did not know how to correct it.
He cursed under his breath at the futility of it, and realized that his
curse must have been audible because 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 he saw that the voice which had been low-pitched enough to
have been the voice of a man had come from the throat of a tall,
dark-haired woman who sat beside him at the bar. "Just wondering what
strangers do for excitement on Mercury," he finished lamely.
"Spaceman?"
"Yes."
"I guessed it." She laughed in her low contralto. "But spacemen aren't
the only ones who drink that watered-down whiskey."
"I know. But this time it is one."
She smiled again. "Is Cinnabar so inhospitable?" she asked.
"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
velocity of humanity. But anybody can find anything he wants 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 curtsey. 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. "We shall play it very bright and
very interesting. You shall drive me home where we will have cocktails
with my folks and you will meet them. You will be an old friend of
Michael's, who is a sort of school-chum of my brother. After cocktails
I will run upstairs to change and you will make polite conversation
with my family--none of whom 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. This I
will like because it's been some time since I have seen the insides of
a spacer."
"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 handed it to Carolyn. She 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 house just
outside the city limits.
She introduced him, and 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 unstern whenever he smiled, which was
frequently. Carolyn's mother was tall and dark with only a sprinkle of
gray. 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, stated friend of Robert Niles.
Mr. Niles mixed a pitcher of martinis and inquired about the spaceman
business. Farradyne explained how it was. Mrs. Niles laughed at his
story of fish one day and fins the next and said that she thought
it couldn't be quite 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 countered with, "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 judgment 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, quite sure 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 he 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.