Hellflower (1957)

by George O. Smith

  So as soon as he could leave the board, Farradyne went down to the salon.

  They had met. Norma, for the first time in her trip with Farradyne, was presiding over the dining table. She was wearing a slinky, sea-green hostess gown Veed down to about here and slit on both sides to just below the knees. Her white, bare legs twinkled as she walked and almost forced the eye to follow them. She was giving Cahill all the benefit of her physical beauty, and Cahill was enjoying it Farradyne had a hunch that Norma was about to start slipping him the old jealousy routine. He wondered about his reaction. He was extremely wary of Norma, but he did feel a sort of responsibility for her. She might make him jealous, but it would not be the jealousy of passion or desire, but the jealous concern that stems from a desire to protect.

  Norma’s lissome figure slipped out of the salon toward the galley and as she disappeared Cahill wagged a forefinger at Farradyne.

  “That dame’s a blank,” he said in a very low voice. “I know. She’s not my woman, Cahill.”

  “Maybe not” responded Cahill. “But it sure looks like it from a distance. What are you doing with her?”

  “Delivering her to her parents in Denver.”

  “That all?”

  Farradyne nodded. “She latched onto me on Ganymede; she’s the dame that made the loud announcement of my being a hellflower runner.”

  “Maybe she’s right.”

  “She isn’t. I’m not.”

  Cahill grinned. “This much we know,” he said. “You do?”

  “Yes. But maybe she’ll be right sooner or later. But get rid of her, see?”

  Farradyne nodded vigorously. “That I’ll do. She has been hell on high heels to have around.”

  “Looks like she might be fun.”

  “She hates my guts.”

  Cahill nodded. “Probably. They usually end up in a case of anger and violence. Tough. But—”

  Norma came back with a tray and set food on the table. They ate in silence, with Norma still giving Cahill the full power of her charm. Cahill, who had undoubtedly seen many a hellflower girl, still seemed to enjoy her advances although he accepted them with a calloused, self-assured smile. Once dinner was finished, Norma began to clear the table. This act annoyed Farradyne because he could not account for it, and the only thing that seemed to fit the case was the possibility that Norma was acting as she did to soften his wariness of her, but she was carrying the thing too far. He did not think she was so unable to calculate; she must know that this act now pointed up her former disdain for any kind of cooperation.

  As she left again, Farradyne turned to Cahill and asked, “How can a man tell a love lotus from a gardenia?”

  “That takes experience, Farradyne. You’ll learn.”

  “The thing that stops me,” said Farradyne, “is that the Sandmen have been trying to stamp the things out for about forty years and they can’t even tell where they come from.”

  “They’ll never find out,” said Cahill. “Maybe you won’t either.”

  “But I—”

  “Better you shouldn’t. Just enjoy living off the edges. It’s safer that way. Remember that.”

  “Where are we going after we leave Denver?”

  “I’m not too sure we’re going anywhere. I’m not 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 bard-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 late model 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 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 hell-flowers 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 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 inane. 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.

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

  “Norma, you claim I owe you something, but I think you now owe me something.”

  She made a scornful sound. “For killing your little chum out there?”

  “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 i
t 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.