She leaned way back, arching her fine back. "I want to go out to
some dark gin mill and dance among the smoke and the natives and the
throbbing of tomtoms."
Their evening was a repetition of the evening on Mercury except that on
Terra it was dark outside. They danced and there was a steak dinner at
midnight, and there was Carolyn relaxed in his arms in the taxi on the
way back to her hotel at three.
He took her up to her room, and Carolyn came into his arms again, soft
and sweet. Her response was deep and passionate in a mature way that
Farradyne was not prepared for. The woman in his arms was all woman
and there could be no mistaking the fact, but there was also the
mysterious ability of the woman to know when to call a halt. She smiled
softly and put her head on his chest.
"It's been wonderful again, Charles," she said quietly. "I hope it
always is."
Farradyne rubbed his chin against the top of her head. Then Carolyn
swirled away. "It's incredibly late again. I'm going to come aboard
your ship at seven tomorrow night so we can take off before the crack
of dawn. This much I'll tell you and no more, now."
"But--"
"Easy, sweetheart, easy. Take it slow and lovely. Tomorrow night.
Tonight I need my beauty sleep."
He eyed her humorously.
"Think it doesn't help?" Then she laughed happily. "Charles, do me a
favor. Put this gardenia in your refrigerator for me. Please?"
Farradyne nodded dumbly. He watched Carolyn put the thing into its
plastic box, he watched her tie it up in the original ribbon. She
handed it to him, and then, chuckling because he had one hand full, she
came into his arms again for one last caress.
"Go," she told him with a wistful smile. "Go and dream about tomorrow
night."
Farradyne went, half-propelled by her hands, his reluctance partly
honest and partly curious. But he went.
On the street he hailed a taxi and spent the time on the way to the
spaceport wondering whether sharpers had clipped him for fifty for
a five-dollar gardenia. He wanted to toss the thing out of the cab
window, but he did not because Carolyn would ask for it tomorrow. He
even cursed himself for being willing to save it for her.
Farradyne walked into his spacer feeling like a man who had put his
last dollar on the turn of a card, and lost. Lost at least until he
could get somewhere and draw another stake from the bank. Futility and
wonder confused him; in one moment he was on top of the world with
everything going according to plan and the next his world was kicked
out from underneath him and he was dropped back into the mire of
fumbling, helpless ignorance again.
Farradyne walked into the salon of the Lancaster and stopped short. The
last peg had been pulled out of the creaky ladder of his success.
"What's the matter, Farradyne? Aren't you glad to see me?"
There was plenty the matter and he was not glad to see her.
Her eyes widened a bit and she came up out of her chair and toward
him. "Farradyne," she said, with more eagerness in her voice than he
had ever heard before, "you've brought me a love lotus!"
He let her have it, and watched as her rapid fingers tore away the
ribbon.
Norma lifted the flower from its nest in the box, buried her nose deep
in the center of the blossom and inhaled with a deep shuddering sob.
Her eyes closed, then opened serenely to look up at Farradyne from
beneath half-closed lids. She relaxed. The tension went out of her
body and she sank back against the cushions. She put her head back
and rested. And now Farradyne could see her face more clearly. Her
features had lost their chiseled immobility and her eyes had lost the
glassy stare. Her face became alive, and pleasant color flooded it.
Her muscles took on tone and Norma became alive and young-bodied and
beautiful. She was a new person.
Her lips parted slightly and curved into sweet lines. The hand that
held the flower lay idly on the seat beside her, the other lay palm
up on the other side. She looked like a young girl who had just been
kissed. Slowly, Norma lifted the blossom to her face and inhaled again
the fragrance from the center of the flower.
"Thanks, Farradyne," she said softly.
Farradyne's mouth was open and his mind refused to work on any but
the single thought. It was a hellflower. It had had no visible effect
on Carolyn--why? Then the attitude of the woman sitting on the divan
forced the other thought from his mind.
Not that Norma's attitude had changed in the past minute or so. She was
still relaxed, alive and obviously at peace with both the world and
herself. But Farradyne had been expecting much more; he had expected
an onslaught of passion, of hate, of violence, of emotion. It might be
either a demanding lust or the pleading languor of a woman bereft of
her defenses. Or.... But in any case Farradyne expected passion, of a
wanton depth.
He was wholly unprepared for this calm return to young and healthy
womanhood.
He wondered whether Norma would react normally to a gesture of
affection and absently he took a step toward her. He felt once again
that flush of pity for her and righteous anger for the rotten devils
that had done this to her; he wanted to comfort her. She had changed
visibly from a hardened woman whose beauty was stiff and unnatural to a
girl whose loveliness was vivid enough to shine through the hard facade
of heavy makeup.
"Norma," he said.
She smiled at him warmly but shook her head. Her arms raised as she
tucked the hellflower in the heavy hair over one ear. The gesture
slimmed her waist and raised her breasts, and through the triangle of
her arms he could see her eyes. They were sultry as they contemplated
him, but she shook her head.
"No," she said and Farradyne stopped. "You are a nice sort of fumbling
idiot, Charles, and I've stopped hating you for the moment, but that
doesn't mean I want any part of your caresses."
"I--"
She smiled at him knowingly. "You were, Charles. You were. But don't."
The odor of the love lotus, identical to the heady perfume of a
gardenia, permeated the room and Norma sniffed at the air, lifting her
face as she inhaled. "The smell of this is all I want."
Farradyne looked down at her and swore under his breath. This was the
story then. The future under such conditions must be insufferable. He
contemplated a man with an addicted wife; he would go on slaving night
and day to buy this damnable and beautiful hellflower for her just to
see her make this swift, sweet return to the normal woman he had once
known, only to discover time and again that she had no use for him.
A smile crossed her face and Farradyne realized that Norma had dozed
off in an ecstasy of relaxation. He wondered what to do next; his mind
was mingled with the desire to protect her by letting her sleep the
effects of the love lotus off, and the certain knowledge that if he
did, Norma would never leave him in time for his meeting with Carolyn
Niles. Of the two, the latter was by far the more important.
13
As Farradyne stood there wondering what to do, a knuckle-on-metal rap
came at the spacelock and he turned to see Clevis standing there. He
waved Clevis in.
Clevis came through the inner lock and caught sight of Norma. He
stopped stock-still and looked the woman over from head to toe and back
again. His eyes were bleak, his face bitter and hard as he turned away
from Norma to face the other man.
"Farradyne, is this the contact you've managed to make?" The tone was
heavy with sarcasm.
Farradyne shook his head sourly. "She's the one that got me started on
the road to find out--" He was about to explain but Clevis cut him off
with a scowl.
"You do seem to have started," said Clevis. "That's a real hellflower
she's doping, you know. If I'd known--"
"Oh, for God's sake, listen!" snapped Farradyne. His shout rang through
the salon and echoed up and down the ship's corridors. Norma stirred
and came awake. She looked at Farradyne happily first, then her eyes
settled on Clevis.
"Company? Hello, Howard," she said cheerfully.
"How do you do?" said Clevis, coldly.
"Not bad, thank you. In fact, I'm feeling in very topnotch shape,
thanks to Mr. Farradyne."
"You're--"
"I must admit. A shame, too, but there it is."
"There's a reward out for you, Miss Hannon."
Norma's eyes twinkled a bit. "I know. He tried to collect on it. In
fact, I think he did collect on it. But I couldn't sit around and watch
a couple of fine old people tearing their hearts out over the ruin
of their daughter. That's a hell of a way to end an otherwise happy
existence--a son killed, a daughter doped. So I left."
Farradyne looked at Norma and Clevis sharply, he was lost; he could
only wait for Clevis' next move.
Clevis shrugged, Norma nodded and relaxed again. She said, quietly, "If
you gentlemen want to talk business, do it somewhere else. Or better,
Charles, may I have my old room again for the night?"
Farradyne nodded, speechless in his furious bewilderment, and led
Clevis up into the control room. Here, in a low voice, he explained
how Norma had announced his connection with the hellflower racket,
how Cahill had been killed and how he had picked up Carolyn Niles and
the subsequent sabotage by Brenner, sometimes called Hughes, and the
rest of it. At the end he spread out his hands and said, "This isn't
hard work and good management, Clevis. But here I am. It isn't even
good thinking, but I have a couple of questions that I'd like to have
answered."
"Yes?"
"Carolyn Niles wore the hellflower for six or seven hours without
turning a corpuscle. Norma Hannon proved that it was no gardenia. There
is something fishy here. Does medical history indicate any immunes to
the love lotus?"
"Some. Not many. Some doctors have even gone so far as to claim that
the hellflower is no more dangerous than tobacco."
Farradyne swore. "Not according to Norma Hannon, it isn't," he said
harshly.
Clevis eyed Farradyne carefully. "You're not a bit soft-headed over
Norma, are you?"
"I doubt it," said Farradyne honestly. "She's a poor kid that got
clipped and it makes my blood boil, and I want to go out and rap a
half-dozen scum-brained heads together for what they did to her.
Norma, she'd be the kind of woman I could fall in love with, Clevis,
but Norma is a real blank. You know, if you doped up enough women with
hellflowers, the birthrate would take a decline that would alarm a
marble statue."
"It's something to think about," nodded Clevis.
"Of course, I've never seen a woman after she has just taken her first
sniff so I don't know what it really adds up to, and I don't know how
long after the first sniff a woman's libido is still capable of being
excited, or even how high the libido can get under hellflowers. But by
the time they get to Norma's state, a love lotus only changes their
attitude from a completely scar-tissued emotional system to something
barely normal whose only desire is to sniff the flower." Farradyne
shook his head roughly. "Anyway," he said, after a moment of thought,
"you can get a couple of ships to follow me day after tomorrow morning.
We're going out somewhere--destination unknown--to make a rendezvous
with someone who is high-up. And no matter what, Clevis, I think it
wise for you fellows to keep on my trail, because at least one faction
of their gang is out to clip me hard. Sooner or later--if my luck holds
out as it has--they'll be sending someone of large proportions to
clobber me and then I'd like to have your gang move in fast. Preferably
before the clobbering gets too thick. And there's more to it--"
"Give," said Clevis in a flat tone.
"All right, you asked for it." Farradyne took the throat-whistle out of
his pocket and tucked it back against the curve of his tongue. He tried
it and produced a three-toned sound, brief and musical.
"That's the sort of thing I was telling people about," he said. "At the
Semiramide's crack-up. Three voices, I thought--then."
"That's the sort of half-witted story you tried to use at your trial."
"That's the sort of noise that Cahill made as he died. It's the sort of
noise made by Brenner-Hughes. Clevis, could it be the rudiments of some
odd new language?"
"How could you use it?"
"I don't know. Maybe a polysyllabic word like 'manifest' might turn out
to be a single chord with certain articulation spoken in three distinct
tones."
"How would you articulate?" asked Clevis.
"Well, you'd have to utter the same vocal sound sequence for all
registers of the word. The word I just used for an example is a rather
complicated series of sounds, with definitions I am not familiar with,
like dental fricative, and sub-dental stop. Regardless of the names of
the tongue-flappings," said Farradyne, "the word itself would have to
be revised in pronunciation."
Clevis shook his head. "With a gizmo such as you are choking on," he
said, "you'd have a hard time making a tone other than the one it's
tuned for. You're asking a lot, Farradyne. Furthermore, I gather that
you have a fair-to-middling ear."
"It isn't absolute pitch by a hell of a long way, but it is good enough
to make my face turn sour when the third violinist hits a crab on his
strings."
Clevis leaned back in the chair. "I'd be in bad shape," he said. "I'm
tone-deaf. Someone would say, 'Clevis, have a drink?' and I'd shake my
head because it sounded like 'Do you like radishes?'"
Farradyne eyed Clevis for a moment. "Supposing for the moment that this
odd evidence I have--"
"Based upon a grunt, a cry and an exclamation."
"--is true. Then mightn't they prefer to let people into their
organization who, they know, have a good pitch sense?"
Clevis looked back at Farradyne. "We've spent years following less
rational will-o-the-wisps than that. Perhaps we should follow this
crackpot idea for a couple."
"Well, let me toss you one more. During the next few days I am going to
startle Carolyn Niles, and I hope she cries out or whatever in three
notes. Then I'll have a tie-up."
"How so?"
"She has a hellflower-operator background. She'll have a three-noted
cry. And she'll be immune to the God damned flowers her gang deals in.
And there is something more than money in this."
"Okay, for the time being that's your game. But in the meantime, what
are you going to do with Norma?"