GEORGE O. SMITH (continued 3)

"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?"

Farradyne eyed Clevis carefully. "You are going to drive off with her."

"What makes you think I'm going to drive off with a doped-to-the-eyes hellflower addict?"

"Because one of the games I'm playing is nosey-nosey with Carolyn Niles, and there's going to be no addict cluttering up my spacer. She'd crumb up the whole deal for fair. You obviously know her, know where she belongs. Take her to a sanatorium. That'll keep her out of everyone's hair, especially mine, and she's on my trail."

"I guess this move is up to me. I hate to drop her in a sanatorium."

"What else can anybody do?" asked Farradyne, wistfully, spreading his hand.

"Not much, but I feel that I owe her more than that kind of handling. Not much more than a jail, you know." Clevis sighed.

"I can imagine. But what can you do for people cursed with a disease that no one knows how to cure?"

"Segregate 'em," growled Clevis. "Well, let's see what we can do about carting Norma out of the ship. When you ship out you will be followed at extreme military radar range. You'll have hard-boiled company watching you, Farradyne."

They went below and found Norma stretched out on the divan. She was sleeping, relaxed as a kitten, with one leg drawn up to uncover the other shapely leg. Her hands were outstretched over her head and open. Her breathing was regular, and normal. The hellflower still cast its heady perfume through the room, and Norma was smiling.

Farradyne plucked the flower from her hair. "This I'll need," he said quietly.

Clevis nodded. "I'll carry her," he said. The Sandman picked Norma up gently as she sleepily protested, but put her arms around Clevis' neck and her head against his cheek and let herself be carried from the salon.

Watching from the port, Farradyne reflected that they looked like a happy party-couple, leaving after too many cocktails, with the girl dozing on her man's shoulder.

Farradyne shrugged. Clevis had bought himself a bundle of trouble—when she awoke, with Clevis, and without the love lotus.... He smiled cynically, and went to bed....

Carolyn came aboard that evening and her first request was for her "gardenia." She put it in her hair and stood there inviting him with her eyes. Farradyne kissed her briefly and waved her to a seat.

"Tired of me, Charles?"

"I've had no time to get used to you, let alone tired of you," he told her. "But I'm more than a trifle curious about this trip we'll be taking in the morning."

"Why not let it wait until then?"

Farradyne looked at her boldly, made no attempt to hide his careful appraisal of her figure and face. She accepted his brazen eyeing and colored a bit. Then he said, "Let's admit it, there's nothing I'd rather do than spend the night making love. It's my favorite indoor sport. It's fun outdoors, too. But there are at least two things against it."

"Two?"

He smiled. "You've made affectionate noises and a few statements regarding your previous affections which lead me to believe that you would not applaud me if I slung you over one shoulder and carried you down to your stateroom. The second item is that the way to get ahead is to marry the boss' daughter, not make her your mistress. Also if you think for one moment that I have enough ice in my spine or hardening in my arteries to make with happy-talk from now until six ack-emma, you're wrong."

Carolyn leaned back and laughed.

"Carolyn, have you ever heard of noblesse oblige?"

"What has that to do with me—and you?"

"It applies. You are a damned attractive female, and as such you should not use this attraction unless you want the man you are luring. Follow?"

Carolyn nodded. "I'll behave," she said. "I like you, Charles. No other man has ever talked to me like that."

"Well, be careful or I'll prove to you that I am just like all the rest. Now, how about this other deal? Or should we talk about the weather—or chess, tiddly-winks, astronomy?"

"Astronomy. We see no stars on Mercury, you know."

"So it's up to the telescope. Come on."

Farradyne shook his head in amused concern. It was apparent that Carolyn liked to play with fire; either that or she wanted to show her own superiority to herself. She could hardly have known about the visit of Norma Hannon, so she would not be aware of the fact that Farradyne had been able to establish the validity of the hellflower. Mentally Farradyne kicked himself. All he had done was to put the woman on her guard. She knew it was a hellflower, she must know it. So this nice little game she was playing was known to be a game.

So that made it even—both of them knew it was the real thing, both of them knew she was immune.

This might be cricket, but it was not good management. This was not a contest for the Glory of Good Old Siwash or to win the Golden Fleece. This was a game where the loser never came to bat again, and once he was Out, started polishing the Golden Gates or riding gain on the servo-amplifiers for Mephisto's atomic hellfire. He had to pull a part of this play back out of danger.

He had pulled a fluff—the obvious way to remove it was to admit it.

In the darkened control room, Farradyne reached forward and removed the love lotus from her hair. He threw it into the chute that eventually led into the incandescent reaction blast.

She turned and her face was dim in the starlight.

"Why did you do that?" she asked.

Farradyne lied calmly, "Because when I give you your next corsage, it will be a bona fide gardenia if I have to get a pedigree from the guy who grew it."

Her smile was a trifle bitter. "What would you have done if it had worked?"

Farradyne laughed. "I didn't expect it to work."

"But—"

He went on swiftly. "Like several million other people I've been wondering how you can tell a gardenia from a hellflower. Honestly, I expected that you would take one look at the thing and then coldly inform me that you knew the difference. Then I was going to ask you to prove it. I was even going to be indignant over your thinking that I would do such a thing. Upset, fraught with unrequited love and all that bosh. I was prepared to maintain that I had bought the corsage in good faith and that some joker like Cahill had played a gag on me, just for kicks. Sooner or later you'd have told me how one could determine the difference." He laughed bitterly and it was not hard when he thought of Norma Hannon.

"Then," he went on, "you accepted it and put it in your hair, and I know damned well that you can tell them apart. That made me think, and I remembered that there are cases of women being immune. So I found myself sheepishly afraid to explain, and let it go at that. Carolyn, I just couldn't explain last night. But I do want to be honest with you."

He waited, hoping he had done a good job.

Carolyn put a soft hand against his face and then looked down. He reached for her chin and lifted it. She blinked a few times, and then smiled faintly. "Of course I knew what it was," she said. "And I know that I am immune, so I took it and wore it. I wanted to see how you would react. I wanted to find out why you did it. If you had done it for the usual reason, I was going to lead you on until you were incapable of control and then I was going to laugh at you and send you packing." She looked up at him shyly. "I didn't want to think it was for the usual reason."

She leaned toward him, but he took her by the shoulders and turned her to face the telescope. At this, Carolyn put her head back against his shoulder and rubbed her cheek against his.

"None of that," he said with a sharp laugh. "Hell, woman, you do fine without a hellflower."

She turned in his arms and melted against him. He held her close for awhile and then pushed her away from him. "We're running by the rules, remember?" he said softly. "No fair, Carolyn. Think of my poor, broken-down blood pressure, woman. Let's get back to astronomy. I may live longer that way."

Astronomy is a fascinating hobby. Besides, this study required quite a bit of close proximity, with his arms loosely around her so that he could handle the setting-wheels on the telescope or Carolyn leaning back against him as he looked over her shoulder to set the piece on another object in the sky.

At midnight Farradyne showed her to her stateroom, and it was only after he was in his own room that he remembered that she had carefully ducked the explanation of how he could tell a love lotus from a gardenia. He wondered at that. Maybe she thought he had not noticed the careful steering away from the subject—and maybe a man who was going into the business for what it was worth would not have noticed the evasion.

Then there was the question of his own moral sense. So far as he had appraised himself he had damned little such sense and most of this was a matter of personal taste rather than observance of a set of rules. More strange was the moral sense of the Niles family. It seemed to be high except for their completely amoral disregard for what happened to the hapless victims of their racket.

He went to sleep murmuring a line from a poem many hundreds of years old that he had read as a youngster.

"... their honor rooted in dishonor...."

Take-off was scheduled for six o'clock and Farradyne barely made it. Fortunately there was only an Albemarle Seventy-One coming in on a landing beam and he could take his Lancaster up with his eyes closed. The Tower signed him out with a few remarks about sleepy people who just got up and a yawn over the near-at-hand bedtime. Then the contact was closed and Farradyne was a-space on the next leg of his journey.

Free from the control board, Farradyne had two choices. In his role of lover he could rap on her door because he wanted to be near her, or he could let her sleep because he did not want to disturb her. He listened at her door on his way to the galley but he could hear nothing; apparently she did not snore. He went on down and built himself a plate of ham and eggs and a large pot of coffee, and thankful for the quiet and the solitude and the freedom, he ate his breakfast and then loafed in the salon, trying to plan his future course.

Carolyn made her appearance at ten o'clock and reproached him. He gave her the stock answer, against which there could be no rebuttal, and offered her breakfast. He was solicitous and gentle. He felt that with four hours of nerve-soothing quiet behind him, he could play it with a bit more relaxation.

"Where are we?" she asked.

"About a half-million miles out from Terra, I can figure it out for you if you want it precisely."

She smiled at him. "It's important. How close is that 'about' a half-million miles?"

Farradyne leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes as he went through the familiar formula, tossing out the figures beyond three significants. It took him half a minute of plain mental arithmetic to come up with the answer, "Four hours at one gravity makes it six hundred sixty thousand miles. There's some error there, caused by the fact that our apparent gravity just at take-off was not much more than one-point-three, and the pull of the earth was replaced by true accelerations as the Terran gravity diminished. But those figures should be close enough."

"I didn't think you could guess that close."

"That was no guess, it was a practiced estimate. I can come closer than that with some thought. After all, a shoe salesman should be able to call off the sizes of the shoes he sees on the street, and you know the Classical Chinese Carpenter?"

"No."

"The Chinese Carpenter is an oriental who comes in and takes a careful look where the plaster fell out of the ceiling, and then goes away and cuts a hunk of plasterboard that exactly fits the holes without any cutting or even shaving."

Carolyn laughed politely.

"But this is neither here nor there. There are two things to consider: one is breakfast and the other is that we are on our way, but your pilot does not know where he's going."

"Can you strike a line between Terra and Polaris at a distance of three hundred million miles?"

"Duck soup," replied Farradyne. "But how fast?"

"Zero with respect to Terra at three hundred million."

"Let's go up and start computing," he suggested. "I'll construct you some grub after we get the first approximation and we get the ship on the preliminary correction course."

He led her up to the course computer in the control room where she added the time of rendezvous to the rest of the figures. He plucked at the keyboard steadily for a minute, then sat back while the calculator machine went through the program of arithmetical operations for which it was designed. He took the punched paper strip from the machine and fed it into the autopilot, and then said, "Now we'll go below and eat."

"You haven't been waiting for me?"

He nodded, hoping that he looked a bit lovesick.

"You shouldn't have."

They went below and she eyed the dirty dishes with womanly amusement. "You are a sweet sort of liar, Charles," she said, turning and coming into his arms.

He returned her kiss, thinking, these are the "dames" that try men's souls.

14

Carolyn's eyes were fastened on the telescope, her attention was rapt. There was a tiny signal pip at the extreme range on the long-range radar that controlled the telescope, but the object was still too far away. The range was closing slowly, but they would meet somewhere out there, three hundred million miles above Terra to the astronomical North.

Farradyne knew his instruments and his attention was therefore free to think of other matters. Carolyn was busy at the "scope," so Farradyne carefully and quietly slipped a long fluorescent lamp from its terminals and stood it carefully on one end beside him. He balanced it carefully and took a couple of silent steps toward Carolyn before the tube lost its balance and fell to the floor with an ear-shattering explosion.

It even shocked Farradyne, who knew it was coming.

Carolyn reacted like a person stabbed with a red-hot spear. Every muscle in her body tensed as her nervous system twitched and she stood there for a full ten seconds as stiff as a figure of concrete while the shock gripped her. Then adrenalin poured into her veins and she started to bundle up muscularly at the same time that she realized that there really was no danger. Farradyne could see the relaxation of her body taking place almost inch by inch.

The tension crept out of her silently until her breasts began to fall in a shuddering exhalation. Then she sighed, and her tuneful voice was a wordless trill of relief.

Farradyne's attention snapped into full awareness and he felt a thrill of exultation run through him. Carolyn Niles' voice was a quavering trill in three lilting tones.

Then the spell was gone and she relaxed against a brace holding one hand under her left breast and breathing heavily. "What on earth—?"

"Lamp fell out of its moorings," said Farradyne. "My fault. That's one of the pre-flight check-ups that I didn't have time to make this morning. Stay where you are and I'll clean up this mess."

"Do you mind if I sit down? I haven't been that startled in years. I thought the ship had exploded."

"Park yourself in the pilot's seat," he said. "But be careful. Broken fluorescent tubing is doubly dangerous. The gook they put on the inside is as poisonous as hell and the glass is as sharp as a razor."

She nodded and picked her way through the glass. She looked up at him and said, "You don't seem to have been startled at all."

"I had a few millionths of a second to get my nerves in readiness," he said. "I saw it come down. You took a beating."

"I guess I did," she admitted weakly.

Farradyne laughed; it was a forced laugh but he hoped it was convincing. "Someone told me once that when a person is excited he always reverts to his native tongue." Her eyes widened and her mouth started to open, but Farradyne went on as though he hadn't been watching avidly for some sign. "But I didn't think your native tongue was Upper Irish Banshee."

Her eyes half-closed and her mouth snapped back from slack wonder to toned self-control. "What did I say?" she asked with a half-humorous smile, which Farradyne knew to be false.

"It sounded like, 'I am slain to pieces' but I don't know Upper Irish Banshee very well."

"You're making fun of me," she complained pettishly.

"No I'm not. Not really. Anyone can be scared right out of his skin when something like that happens unexpectedly."

"All right," she said, and the humor was gone from her voice. "So you are not making fun of me. You've been playing a very serious game with me, haven't you?"

Farradyne thought fast but came up with only, "What makes you think—"

"Let's drop our masks, Charles."

"Masks? Look, Carolyn, I'd rather go clean up this glass."

"Sweep it up, then. But while you're cleaning up, we'll talk seriously."

"About what?" He got a brush from the locker and a square of cardboard from the bottom of a ream of paper, and started to collect the debris.

"What do you know about our language?"

"Damned little. Frankly, I'd had only a very insecure suspicion right up to the moment that you admitted it that there was any language involved."

"So I gave it away myself?"

"Yes."

"I knew you were smart, Charles. But none of us thought that you were smart enough—"

"Thanks, m'lady."

"Stop it!" she cried. "What do you want of me?"

"What do I want of anybody?" he whispered in a voice thick with anger. "I had four brutal years clipped out of the middle of my life by a three-voiced unknown party who wanted to commit suicide bad enough to take thirty-three innocent victims along with him. They blamed it on Hot-Rock Farradyne, the spur-wearing spaceman." His voice came back and he was half-roaring. "I've seen the results of the hellflower in a ruined personality that might have been a brilliant and gracious woman. I've seen a man plugged through the middle, to die at my feet. And on top of that, I've seen a family of prosperous stability calmly making their place in 'society' by dealing in the stinking things that brought the ruin and the death to millions." His voice calmed to a cold, brittle determination. "What do I want of you? Your lovely, flawless hide skinned alive and spread seductively before a fireplace. That's all."

She shrank away from him; looked wildly at the stairway and back into his face as she realized there was no place in the spacecraft where she could hide.

He sneered at her fear. "I'm not going to hurt you, now." His voice was heavy with derision. "You're beneath my hurting you."

Carolyn drew herself together; somehow her self-confidence was returning; perhaps it was the realization that he was not going to do anything violent. "Why take your hatred out on me?" she asked. "Have I done anything but—"

"You?" he asked. "You? How in hell should I know what slimy game you are playing? You're all painted out of the same can, and the color is black. I know that I am not the guy responsible for the Semiramide affair, but who's to prove it? Who's the character that started tossing the con-rods out of the Lancaster? What was your former boyfriend doing on my ship? Setting me up for another kiss-off? Jesus Christ, woman, you'll be asking me not to take these things personally next!"

"You shouldn't. They're the fortunes of war."

Farradyne roared, so loud that his voice echoed and reechoed up and down the ship. "Fortunes of war be damned!" Then he stopped suddenly and looked at her again. "War?" he asked. "Between whom or between what and where? Who and what are you and your ilk? I—" He sat down and put one hand to his head. Carolyn started to speak. "Charles—" but he looked up and said, "Shut the hell up and let me think!"

"But I—"

"Shut up or I'll slap you shut!" Farradyne meant it, and Carolyn must have understood that slapping her senseless did not conflict with his aversion to violence. Not now. Not any more.

He had enough evidence to make a shrewd guess if he could only sort out the hodgepodge, throw out the dross, hang the material end to end and then take an impersonal look at it to fill in the gaps.

Some of it had to do with a combined suicide and wanton mass-murder in a wrecked spacecraft; he should study that incident with the view of discovering why it was done, and not why it had been done to Charles Farradyne. There were the Nileses who probably went to church on Sunday, belonged to the Chamber of Commerce and the Ladies' Aid and the Civic Welfare and considered running hellflowers a proper business. And the daughter, Carolyn, who wanted marriage and a home and a bunch of kids to bring up into the same hellish business so well run by their grandfather—just as she had been raised. Something important hinged on the triple-toned voice which now had become more than a hasty impression made under stress and excitement. Women who were immune to the solar system's most devastating narcotic and used their immunity to deal in the things with safety, bringing ruin to other women. It was more than jealousy between women, it went farther than that. It was a form of warfare, and this idea indicated an organization large and well-integrated; capable of out-maneuvering capable and brilliant men who had dedicated their lives to stamping out the racket—and who died under the juggernaut instead of destroying it.

Well, there it was and what could he make of it?

No, there was more to be added. Brenner-Hughes, who tried to remove the control rods of the reaction pile, and who was immune to marcoleptine. That was an oddly shaped piece of the puzzle that suddenly dropped into place with a click and coupled up two isolated chunks to make one solid corner.

Farradyne put himself in the position of Professor Martin, who might have been a survivor of the Lancaster foundering. Martin might ask why someone had tried to kill him, just as Farradyne had so often asked himself why Party X had tried to kill Farradyne in the Semiramide. The answer was that Brenner-Hughes had not directed his efforts at Martin, but at Farradyne, who had some knowledge that was dangerous to the hellflower ring. Martin would have been the same sort of innocent victim to the second episode as Farradyne had been to the first. Party X had wrecked the Semiramide because there was someone aboard with dangerous knowledge. There was a coldly operating group of persons, immune themselves to drugs, who were efficiently undermining the rest of the human race by preying on weakness, lust and escapist factors that lie somewhere near the surface in the strongest of human characters.

He raised his head and looked at Carolyn Niles.

She faced him squarely and asked, "Have you figured it out?"

"I think so," he said coldly. "There are a couple of gaps yet which you can fill in."

"What makes you think I'll do it?"

"You'll do it," he said in a brittle voice. "For instance, what are you, real or artificial mutant?"

Her laugh was strained and cynical. "Brilliant!" she said. "Homo Superior, Charles."

"All right then, keep it clammed. But we'll find out."

"You haven't found out yet," she remarked pointedly.

"We didn't always have electric lamps, either."

Carolyn shook her head in a superior manner. "You did not discover this thing either," she said calmly. "You were shown most of it deliberately."

"Indeed?" His voice was sarcastic.

"We knew that someone high-up and undercover had furnished you with a spacecraft and a forged license and set you to running into us, hoping that your reputation would establish you as a racketeer. He used you efficiently, so we used you more efficiently. There are two ends to a fishline, Charles, and the fish and the fisherman never meet until one pulls the other in. We caught Howard Clevis on the wrong end of the line, so to speak. We also—"

"You caught Clevis?"

"As soon as we knew who your contact was we pulled him in. So if you are expecting a flight of military craft to come racing up in time to intercept the rendezvous ship we have out there, forget it. The military are still on the landing blocks at the spaceport."

Farradyne whirled and peered into the radar. The single pip was close and closing the range swiftly but there was nothing else on the "scope." It was a huge ship, if the size of the radar response meant anything and Farradyne peered into the coupled telescope.

Nothing like it could ever have been built in secret anywhere among the habitable planets of the solar system. The size of it was such that the metal alone, even if one piece were placed with each manufacturer to conceal the process, would have attracted notice, and the rest of the project would require the resources of a planet to feed it and the men that built it. It would be like trying to build a four-hundred-inch telescope in secret; the very least that could happen would be some avid press agent taking note of a massive casting and using it in an advertisement, and that would start the parade.

Farradyne turned away from the telescope. "Baby, what a sucker you played me for!" he jeered. "So I was to be your lover, your husband? Together, hand in hand we go to cement the first interstellar union. The mating of a jackass and a triple-tongued canary, that the fruit of such union will be half-assed and bird-brained." Farradyne's voice went hard. "Well, if it's war your people want, we'll give it to you!"

Farradyne strode across the room toward the controls and as he came, Carolyn's hand moved swiftly, catching up the microphone in a single swoop and bringing it to her mouth. She had had the radio turned on all the while, obviously, and Farradyne's tirade had been going out.

Carolyn cried a sing-songy rhythm into the mike. It reminded Farradyne of an exotic trio chanting a ritual celebration of some heathen rite of sacrifice.

He slapped the microphone out of her hand; the thing hurled out to the end of its cord and jerked free, to crash against the far wall leaving the cord-ends dangling open like a raw sore.

He caught her by the hair, lifted her out of the seat and hurled her across the room. She fell and went rolling in a welter of arms and legs until she came up against the wall beside the mike. She scooped it up and hurled it at Farradyne's head, but he caught it in one hand and dropped it to the floor.

He dropped into the seat and hit the levers with both hands. The Lancaster surged upward, throwing Carolyn back to the floor in a painful heap. The acceleration rose to three gravities, then to four.

"This trick we take," he gloated.

Carolyn moaned; it sounded like attempted laughter.

He looked into the radarscope and saw that despite his four gravities of acceleration the monstrous spacecraft was matching him and closing the range.

15

Farradyne watched Carolyn uncaringly as she fought herself out of the crumpled position and succeeded in flopping over on her back where the four gravities were not making her body press against her arms and legs. She spreadeagled on the floor and her chest labored with the effort. Then she relaxed, because four gravities are not too uncomfortable when lying on the back, even though the floor below is hard.

"Forget it, Charles," she said slowly, and with some difficulty. "You can't run away from a ship—that can go—faster than light."

"I can try."

"You can't win."

The radio speaker came alive, "Surrender, Farradyne! Stop and submit or we fire!"

Farradyne's lips tightened as he fought the controls so that the ship slid sidewise, putting another vector in its course. He twirled the volume knob to zero on the radio with a violent twist of his wrist. "They're your friends, and they don't mind killing you," he sneered.

"I'm not afraid to die."

"I am," grunted Farradyne. "I have some knowledge that I don't want to die without telling."

"That's why I'm willing—to keep you from telling."

His hands danced on the levers and the Lancaster turned end for end and sped back at the huge craft almost on a sideswiping course. Out here intrinsic velocity meant nothing, the only thing that counted was the Lancaster's velocity with respect to the velocity of the spacecraft from the stars. He had one advantage, his ship was smaller and therefore it must be more maneuverable. Furthermore he had the advantage of surprise. He could go where he pleased, and the other pilot must follow him. Since Farradyne's changes of pace and course would come without warning, each switch would take a few fractions of a second to follow. On land a few fractions of a second mean little, but in space they mean miles. On land a quartering flight meant closing of the range; in space where the pursuer could not dig a heel into the ground and turn on a dime, quartering flight meant adding another vector to the course.

He widened the gap.

Somehow Farradyne realized that because a ship could exceed the speed of light, it did not follow that the ship would be able to catch an elusive quarry.

He looked at Carolyn, plastered against the floor by four gravities and realized that her race could be no more hardy than his, and therefore four gravities was about all they could take over an extended period of time. Maybe the more hardened space-dogs could take five or six, with training and special seats and wearing equipment. His outfit protected him more than the flimsy stuff she wore.

Here at least he was on an equal footing with the other spacer. It was obvious to Farradyne that interstellar velocities did not depend in any way upon reaching that speed by plain acceleration. A force field of some unknown kind was needed, and this force field must not be one that permitted the body to stand, say a thousand gravities or this force field would go on and the other ship would catch him as easily as a greyhound could catch a rabbit—and here in space there were no brambles in which to hide.

He snapped his Lancaster around and crossed behind the course of the other ship. Again he widened the gap.

He had only one thing to worry about. To the present moment and until it became evident that he would get free of pursuit, this new and sudden enemy was hoping to take him alive. So until it became evident that he could make his escape he had nothing to fear. Once he was free of them, he would have to face the terror of target-seeking missiles capable of several hundred gravities of acceleration and equally capable of turning in midflight if he managed to make them miss him.

He wished desperately for a cargo of bowling balls or steel castings that he could strew in his wake. He cursed his lack of foresight in not having the control rods replaced, because a few of them might have done the trick.

Farradyne stopped cursing. He struggled to the computer and played a long tune on the keys, ignoring the fact that the enemy had finally lined up on his course from behind again and was closing range. Recollection of Brenner-Hughes and the depredations in the pile-bay had started a train of thought that Farradyne followed with growing interest. It was long and involved and it depended upon a large amount of luck, good planning and ability. He hoped all three were with him.

The Lancaster made one more complex turn as the end of the punched tape entered the autopilot. Then, if Farradyne's computations were correct, the Lancaster's nose was pointed at Terra.

The spaceliner behind, fooled again, made a turn and began to pick up the space that had been lost.

Farradyne saw that he had plenty of time. He waited until the punchings on the tape cut the drive a bit, and then he went below and came back into the control room with Brenner-Hughes' space-suit. He got out patching material and carefully repaired the triangular rip. He cleaned out the strong-locker, putting the greenbacks into one of the many pouches of the suit. Then he set about checking it, testing the air-supply and purifier, filling the food pouch and the water tank. Men had been known to last seventy-two hours in a suit like this without any discomfort other than the confinement. The primary danger was running out of oxygen and the secondary danger was thirst. How much longer than the three days depended upon the character of the man and when he had last eaten and taken his fill of water.

The suit was checked to Farradyne's satisfaction and he started to put it on. "How handy are your friends with that big spacer?" he asked.

"Good enough," she said.

"You'd better pray for them to be better," he said. "Because your life depends upon how handy they are."

"Charles, you can't possibly make it."

Farradyne paused; he wanted to take time for a last cigarette. He lit one and puffed before he said, "Honeychild, I could outguess that gang until Sol freezes over, except that sooner or later they'll get sick and tired of the chase and end it by launching a target-seeking missile and that would be that. I have no intention of sitting here and letting them catch me, either."

"So what are you going to do?"

Farradyne reached up and stopped the clock. "I've punched a very interesting autopilot tape. It'll dodge and swoop along at about four gravities and lead your pals a long and devious way after you and I part company. Four gee is enough to keep you flat on your attractive behind so you can't louse it up. Since you can't measure time too accurately, when they grab you, you won't be able to tell 'em just when I took off and they'll have a fine time combing space for a man-sized mote, making his course to Terra."

"Charles?"

Farradyne snubbed his cigarette out and dropped on his hands and knees so that he could look down into her face. "You've pitched me many a low, soft curve to the inside," he told her quietly. "Now you are lying there looking helpless, with those big eyes telling me that I am leaving you here to die. Good act, Carolyn, but this time you didn't think it out far enough. By now you should have known Farradyne well enough to realize that staying here will kill us both because I won't be taken alive! By scramming, maybe we'll both live. This is one battle you lose. And the last. But maybe we'll meet somewhere again to take it up later."

He bent down with a cynical smile and kissed her on the lips. To his surprise he found her lips responsive, but he had neither the time nor inclination to carry the emotion any further.

"So long, Carolyn," he chuckled. "Some of this has been a lot of fun."

He finished donning the space-suit and then with a careless wave of his hand he went down the stairs. She was not looking at him, but at the ruined microphone and the raw cord-ends, and the radio equipment far out of her reach. Panic showed in her face and it gave her some strength, but not enough to fight the four gravities that held her flat.

Then as Farradyne lost sight of her, his jaunty self-confidence faded. Up until not too long ago he had been complimenting himself on being able to find out more about the hellflower operation than the Sandmen. Now he knew the hellflower gang had been using him in a more efficient manner than Clevis and the Solar Anti-Narcotics Department. It became obvious to Farradyne that fighting a gang of cut-throats and fighting an enemy race of intelligent people were about as different as he really was from the brilliant operator he imagined himself to be.

It also required that he change his plans for escape. He knew that he could flee the big ship and had a fine chance of being picked up by a Space Guard scooter as soon as he could get within calling distance of Luna.

But the chances were high that the hellflower people would have their entire undercover outfit alerted and at the first touch of radio call they would be swarming the neighborhood to pick him up. He would call and several ships would answer; there would be a lot of calling back and forth with the result that some "commercial spaceliner" would pick him up, reporting the incident to the Space Guard, who would not even take off from the station on Luna. Then Farradyne would be delivered right back to the place he was leaving now.

He paused by the spacelock and cracked the big portal, and stood there eyeing the huge starship, a tiny dot in the distance below, visible only because its reaction flare limned the ship, making an annular object against the cold twinkling stars. He kept the spacelock open long enough to make it look like a real escape to Carolyn, who would be watching the indicator lamp and marking the time.

Then he closed the spacelock and went down and down in the Lancaster until he found the lowermost inspection cubby. He crawled in and closed the hatch behind him. He settled down to wait with about the same amount of wondering concern as the school boy summoned to the principal's office without being told why.

Even the small amount of evidence that he now could use had been given to him as bait to catch the one man who would be willing to listen to him. He groaned and swore aloud and the sound of his voice echoed and reechoed within the confines of his helmet.

Time creaked past and the Lancaster turned and curved according to the punchings on the autopilot tape. Farradyne had only one prayer—that the enemy would not get tired of the chase and fire a missile that would end the whole game with a wave of intolerable heat and indescribably bright light. Only Carolyn's presence aboard might prevent that until the last moment.

Then the hour-period ended with the Lancaster pointing up and a quartering course from Terra and Sol and a long, long way from the point of supposed escape. Not long after that Farradyne felt the clink of the magnetic grapples.

He tensed again. Would they fine-comb the Lancaster? Or would the inevitable question and answer session that must ensue, once they found Carolyn alone, convince them that he had abandoned ship? Would they take her off and blast the Lanc' or would they deem it of value and keep it?

His mind went on and on—how good was the radar? How alert was their radar operator? Were both good enough to state unequivocally that there had been no minute object leaving the ship on a tangential course, or would there have been the usual clutter of noise and interference and lack of anticipation so that someone could assume that he had left the ship? Someone was going to get chewed for it in any case. Then assuming that the enemy considered the ship valuable, where would they take it and what would they do with it?

Far from feeling gratified at his maneuver, Farradyne was only satisfied to be alive and temporarily out of the hands of the enemy. What happened from here on in must be played by ear against an unknown score for three voices.

The drive of the Lancaster dropped from four gravities to about one, and Farradyne could hear, dimly, the clumpings of heavy feet coming in through the rooms above him. Then the drive diminished again, remaining at about a quarter-gravity or maybe less, and there were sounds of feet above his head. He tensed and he tasted the acid in his mouth; he found his heavy automatic and clutched it clumsily in the heavy space-glove. Capture might be preferable to death, except that Farradyne was fairly well convinced that the enemy could not permit him to stay alive with what he knew about them, even though it was precious little and unsupported.

The cubby he was hiding in was angularly shaped; to one side was space beyond the hull-plates. Inside was the water-jacket that cooled the throat of the reaction motor. Farradyne moved quietly around the central pillar until he was on the opposite side from the inspection hatch and settled down again.

On the plates above his head there were footsteps and the scraping of something heavy being hauled across the deck.

He heard the sound of triple-tongued voices barking musical and discordant sounds, distorted and muffled by the deck and the helmet he wore. One fiddled with the inspection hatch and Farradyne found the scuttlebutt and valved the air out into space knowing the enemy would have a hard time cracking the hatch against the pressure of one atmosphere. They gave up after a moment; then came the sound of drilling on the deckplates above him. A cloud of whitish vapor spurted downward and the sound of alien voices rose sharply as the drill came through. Three more spurts of escaping air blasted downward and skirred around the room to go in a fading draw toward the scuttlebutt.

Plugs filled the four holes and Farradyne turned his head torch on them. They were heavy self-tapping bolts being turned in from above.

The maneuver was repeated three times, ninety degrees apart. Then there was a softer sound of scraping and gradually the clumping of feet and the sound of men at work faded away.

Farradyne took a deep breath and realized that his skin was itching from the cold perspiration of fear that bathed him. The taste in his mouth was brackish and his heart was pounding, his breath shallow and rapid. He opened his mouth to gasp and discovered that he had been clenching his teeth so hard that his jaw ached and his molars hurt.

He closed the scuttlebutt, but did not valve any air into his hiding place. He put the top of his helmet against the deckplate above him and listened. Far above he could hear them, still at work but they were going higher and higher in the ship. He relaxed, waiting....

Three more hours passed, as nerve-wracking a three hours as Farradyne had ever spent. Then, with absolutely no warning the drive went off completely. He floated from the deck and scrabbled around to grab a stanchion. He held on, finally getting his magnetic shoes against a girder where they held him at an odd angle.

The drive went on to a full one gravity and hurled Farradyne flat against the bottom of the cubby, wrenching his ankles slightly. The drive went off again, on and finally off. This time it stayed off.

Floating free, with only his feet for mooring, was like resting in a tub of body-temperature water, and as the lulling muscle-freeing sensation went on and on, Farradyne dozed. From the doze, which was fitful for quite some time, he dropped off into a deep slumber.

16

Farradyne awoke to the pressure of about one gravity and he consulted his watch. Either fourteen hours had passed, or thirty-eight, but he could not believe the latter. A full clock-around was hardly possible for Farradyne, even when he was dead tired, so one clock-around plus fourteen hours was unthinkable.

He put his slumber at fourteen hours and then set his mind on other, more important things.

The ship was silent. His suit hung from him limply, indicating that air had seeped into the cubby again. He tried the scuttlebutt but no hiss of air came. The Lancaster was a-planet.

It might be Terra, Venus or Pluto according to the pull of gravity, but Farradyne did not think it likely to be any one of the three. He suspected that whatever the gizmo was the enemy had installed on the deck above him, it had something to do with transcending the limiting velocity of light. He was probably grounded on enemy soil ... somewhere.

For a moment his mind grappled with the problem of interstellar travel and lost the fight. It was possible, proven by the starship of the aliens. But to come aboard with a gadget under one arm and install it, like putting in a radio set, seemed entirely too simple. On the other hand, Farradyne was sufficiently aware of basic physics to understand that anything that could be used to create a condition where gross matter could exceed the velocity of light would be something that did not have to perform in conjunction with a matter-operated reaction motor. He remembered, dimly, some fanciful theories written by some of the white-tower boys in one of the big universities. These had been experiments in field-theory and group-theory which had indicated that under certain conditions, some rather minute spherical volumes of space could be made to misbehave.

The difference was that with the physicists and their operations, a vast room full of gear had been used to make a five millimeter sphere, and the contrast was marked.

The meat of this matter was that the gizmo that made it possible to travel faster than light must be some sort of field-generator, and such a field-generator might well be packaged in small form for installation. Whatever the science and whatever the location, Farradyne could not hope to learn anything penned up here.

Again he listened. The ship was silent as the proverbial grave. He cracked the inspection hatch and peered out. It was dark as the grave, too.

Boldly he opened the hatch and stepped out. Under the light of his headlamp, Farradyne inspected four rectangular metal boxes, painted a nondescript gray. Cables led from one to another, terminating in white metal connectors. The boxes were bolted to the deck by the self-tapping bolts that had come through his ceiling.

From one of the boxes ran a cable that led to a wall-connector.

Like all other Solarian spacecraft, the Lancaster was well supplied with a network of cables running up and down the length of the ship to serve as test connections and spares for this or that equipment. This made it possible to install some bit of gear for pleasure, comfort or added maneuvering without having to tear half the ship apart to run the necessary wiring.

The enemy had re-connected their multi-line cable to one of the standard Terran connectors and plugged the cable into the Lancaster's cable-plate.

Farradyne could see nothing about the metal boxes that would tell him anything, so he left them and went aloft, cautiously. He doffed the space-suit at the next level and hung it in a suit locker, and continued to walk up the stairway that would lead him to the spacelock and the salon.

Out of one porthole he could see the spaceport. It was broad and dark except for a bouquet of searchlights that drilled into the sky around the rim, a wash of floodlamps that surrounded one of the vast starships many miles distant, and the far-off blur of bright, red light that probably read "Spaceman's Bar" in whatever the natives used for a printed language.

He left the viewport and went higher in his ship until he came to the salon. He peered into it from floor level, but it was dark and untenanted. The spacelock was open and Farradyne looked out of the large round opening across the field to another starship standing a few hundred yards from the Lancaster. The other ship was just as dark as his, except for one small porthole that gleamed like a headlight in the darkness.

The problem of where he was called him to the control room.

He looked into the sky, hunting for familiar constellations. The Pleiades were there, but warped quite a bit and Farradyne found that, while he knew they were distorted as an aggregation of stellar positions, he could not remember their proper relationship. Orion was visible, but the hero had hiked his belt up after a swing of his sword at the mythical enemy. The Great Bear was sitting on his haunches instead of prowling and the smaller Bear had lost his front feet. Cassiopeia had gained some weight, enough to squash her throne and Sirius no longer blazed in Canis Major. Procyon had taken off for parts unknown, while several other bright stars dotted the skies in places where no stars had been on Terra. It was likely that some of these were merely displaced stars, but no one could tell Sirius from anything else without a set of astronomical instruments and a few years of study unless he knew which way Sirius was from this position.

Coldly and calmly Farradyne scanned the skies. Providing they had not travelled more than forty or fifty light years, the constellations before and behind the direct line of flight should be reasonably undistorted, except for those stars that would have been bypassed en route. This would only add a star or two to a constellation behind and subtract the same from a constellation dead ahead. The ones to the side of the line of flight would be misshapen and warped.

It would have been easier if he could have viewed the entire sky, but he had to be content with one hemisphere. If he could find an undistorted constellation with a few stars missing he had come in that direction and, conversely, if there were stars added, he had gone away from it past some of the stars between Sol and this enemy system.

He tried to recall visits to the big stellartarium in New York where the lecturer displayed the skies as seen from various well known stars that were within half a hundred light years of Sol. Certain sky-marks and their displacement would be very helpful, if he could remember them. But he found that he had not been as visually attentive as he might have been, or that he had seen and been entertained and then discarded the data as interesting but useless in a scientific culture that firmly believed in the limiting velocity of light.

Finally he gave up hoping to establish his whereabouts by visual inspection. He found a small pad of paper and began to make layouts of the familiar constellations as he saw them. Someone among the planets of Sol would be able to measure the angles and changes and come up with the right answer within a few light years, and stars were sufficiently separated so that the chances were good for a reasonable identification.

He put a dozen small pages in his pocket and then took his first look at the control room. He could see nothing changed at first, but then he found a small auxiliary panel beside the pilot's seat which contained a bar-topped toggle switch and three pilot lamps that were different in appearance from the rest of the Lancaster's standard equipment.

He felt an urge to try the toggle, but fought it down. It was too much like playing with toy building blocks made of sub-critical masses of plutonium, and Farradyne wanted to stay alive long enough to watch the downfall of the enemy, not participate in the explosion. Curbing his human curiosity to fiddle with strange gadgets, Farradyne turned away from the board and went to the cupboard where he took out his binoculars.

He was astonished to find out how far away the starship really was, and how big it was when it leaped into closer view in the glasses. It was still as dark as an untenanted building except for that one lighted porthole, but the angle into the cabin beyond was too steep. Farradyne could see nothing more than the corner between the opposite wall and the ceiling. He toyed with the idea of trying to lift himself to the top of the dome, but gave it up because he realized, once he removed the binoculars from his eyes, that the additional few feet of height would not change the distant angle enough to make it worth his while.

The question of what to do next perplexed him. Obviously there was no answer. There could be no plan. He would have to play it by ear again, with the other guy calling the moves. He grunted unhappily; he could not even smoke because he feared to show even the smallest light. But—

Farradyne went down to his galley and opened a can of mixed space rations which he shovelled in cold. It filled him adequately but not tastily and he realized that the best of fine food would have been stowed away in a frenzy of nervous listening for the inevitable sounds of the enemy's return. With haste, Farradyne cleaned up the evidence of his presence, thinking how ridiculous it was to be stealing from his own spacecraft.

He was finishing up this job when the faint glint of a distant flash of light caught his eye. He hurried to the porthole from which the glint had come, and peered out. A large caravan of heavy trucks was snaking around the corner of a distant building and turning onto the spacefield. Their headlamps cut forward like scythes of light, cutting a brilliant path toward the Lancaster.

Farradyne did not deem it wise to sit this out. They might have been heading for the other side of the field, but if they weren't he was trapped. He went aloft to the salon and scuttered down the landing ramp, around the back side of the poised spacer and away from the direction of the trucks, running in the shadow cast by the Lancaster. Five or six hundred yards away was another spacer, and it was completely dark. Farradyne scurried around the widespread tail fins of the monster and stood there, peering at the caravan from between the angle made by the tail fin and the in-curving body of the spacecraft.

The trucks came around the Lancaster, surrounded it in a circle, and then a blaze of lights came, lighting the Terran ship from dome to reaction funnel. Ladders were sent aloft and a huge crane lifted. The calls of workers and the directions of their superintendent came to Farradyne clearly. He wondered what they were doing and saying; except for the three-toned voices that added an audible complement of women and children to the gang, it sounded like any work party on earth yammering in a strange tongue.

He watched for an hour, and then he saw that the distant sky was beginning to show a very faint glow of gray. Sunrise—or perhaps a false sunrise, he could not tell.

He scuttled like a human spider away from the direction of the work party until its flood lights were a distant miniature stage setting. He wound in and among silent, dark spacecraft, avoiding those with lights even though he had to detour wide for the sake of this safety. Eventually he came to the far side of the spaceport.

He cased the place warily from behind the fin of a spacer, looking at the dark, silent buildings and wondering if this gang of aliens had ever heard of night watchmen. He did not trust the quiet darkness of the apparently uninhabited spaceport because he was suspicious and he knew that other people were as suspicious as he was. He was glad that he did not barge in brashly, for along about the first glimmers of real graying sky, a man came out from between two of the buildings waving a searchlight. He sauntered along in front of the nearest building and disappeared between it and the next.

Farradyne skipped across the space and went into the gangway the watchman had just come out of. He walked warily through and came to a high wire fence. Keeping to the building side of the clearance-way between fence and building, Farradyne skulked along in the direction opposite to that taken by the watchman.

He needed a minimum of two items: A set of Planet X clothing and a way out of this rattrap.

He found the way out a few minutes later.

A dim striking of a bell alarmed him until he realized that it was tolling, rather than clamoring an alarm. He followed the tolling for seventeen bongs and came upon a small sentry house perched beside an open gate. As the tolling stopped, the man in the house stretched, yawned and got up, picking up a searchlight. He stepped outside and looked around in a bored manner.

The watchman took one look at the open gate some ten feet from his position and shrugged. He turned his back on it and disappeared between a couple of buildings not far from Farradyne's place.

Farradyne grinned. Obviously it had been so long ago since any trouble had been this way that the guard-system had become lax. Farradyne praised laziness and complacency highly as he sped across the open space on silent feet and passed the gate on his way to the outside.

Dawn was breaking and the chill of the morning nipped at him. He had broken free, but it was just as dangerous for him to remain in front of the open gate as it might have been for him to be roaming around the spaceport in the full light of day. He turned to the right and started to walk along the road toward a group of small buildings a few hundred yards from the spaceport.

The second item Farradyne needed came later. He had sauntered along several deserted streets in the gray of dawn and down a couple of alleys and through a vacant lot or two until he was quite some distance from the spaceport. Here, in a dimly lighted district Farradyne met his Planet X clothing.

The stranger did not have a chance. He had been drinking or sniffing whatever the enemy used for celebration and he had used too much. Farradyne's hard fist came out of somewhere and the stranger went down like a log, silently. Farradyne dragged him into an alley and stripped him to the skin.

His own clothing Farradyne stuffed in a trash barrel, pushing the bundle down below the rest of the rubbish in the hope that the barrel would be collected by a couple of hard-working and uncurious men who would never note the alien cut to the cloth.

He left the fellow naked to suffer both a hangover and a lot of embarrassment.

Then in the pleasantly bright dawn, Farradyne walked boldly down the city street jingling a bunch of native coins in the side pocket of his costume and feeling just a trifle silly, like an introvert at a fancy-dress ball. The trousers were striped gaudily and the loose jacket hugged his waist a bit on the too-tight side. There was a widish hat and a pair of shoes that could have been put on either foot. He looked like a character out of an old-time musical comedy and he hoped that his costume was not the kind worn by Planet X-ians as formal evening wear because then he would look silly to them wandering around in the morning light like a man caught far from home at six ack-emma in a tuxedo.

Eventually he passed a shop window and saw other garb like the junk he was wearing and he felt better.

He had every faith in the belief that people are disciplined against striking up an acquaintance with a total stranger, and so he turned into what was obviously a main thoroughfare and strolled along it until the streets began to fill with people.

17

There was no doubt about the alien quality of the city. But in its functional qualities, it was very familiar. These, he realized, were developments that had been found to be effective over a long time of sheer operation; functions that would have been mechanically similar on any planet no matter how alien, so long as its inhabitants breathed air, ate food and perambulated. Buildings were mostly squarish blocks cut with windows and doors; shops had broad windows for displaying their wares and even the wares were not too exotic. Clothing stores and gewgaw stores and food shops and now and then one that sold stuff that was not to be identified by a stranger.

The streets and alleys and gutters and sidewalks were normal. Traffic ran to the left, however, which gave Farradyne some trouble because he had been used to stepping from the curb and glancing to the right. Drivers squawked at him with their horns and swore at him in their multi-tongued voices. Farradyne forced himself to learn this left-handed traffic problem; he did not want to be handed a traffic ticket, nor did he want to be asked by some policeman for an explanation of his stupidity.

By now the sun was well above the horizon and the streets began to teem. The air began to sing with the noise of people chattering, greeting one another, and generally making a racket resembling a Chinese laundry in an air-raid. He heard the clash of metal on metal and turned to watch a couple of drivers arguing over their dented fenders. As he walked with his head turned, Farradyne bumped into someone and the man chittered something at him angrily. Farradyne nodded humbly and grunted under his breath and hurried on. So did the other man, who merely replied to Farradyne's grunt with a single three-toned discord before veering off and away.

He had to be careful, he told himself; he had found this city so closely resembling a city of his own system that he had become careless. He knew by now that if he conducted himself without attracting attention and if he walked without cringing, no one would think to stop him for questioning.

What had Carolyn said? Something about their springing from the same basic stock some fifty thousand years ago? Well, anyway, these were of the same family of curious apes who were gregarious enough to band together and still individualistic enough to resent any intrusion upon privacy. There would most certainly be three-toned hell to pay if he opened his own trap, but so long as he kept it shut, they had no way of telling him from any of their own kind.

And so he walked among them for hours, until the crowd thinned and the traffic became less boisterous and frantic and the city settled down to the quieter routine.

Farradyne found it hard to place this cosmopolitan culture in the same niche with the society that appeared to be systematically undermining the Solarian civilization. It was quite similar to the paradox he had found in the Niles family. It was as though murder was an honorable enterprise and that the dope-sales were listed on the daily stock exchange under the commodities section.

Farradyne had expected to find some monstrous ugliness here. A police or slave state would not have surprised him; it was such a culture that usually fostered villainy. Instead he found a city much like his own and it was hard for Farradyne to shake off the feeling that the only misunderstanding between them was the age-old barrier of tongue.

Eventually he came upon an ornately carved building that stood with the doors open. People were sauntering in and out with no obvious barrier, and so Farradyne followed one group at a little distance and went into the building.

It could have been any museum on Terra, for the lifeforms displayed were as bizarre as any of the stranger bits of art work on the earth or other of Sol's planets. He came upon a quiet hallway that had a non-scale model of the solar system; it was a working orrery that told Farradyne nothing other than that this system had eleven planets and a batch of satellites. None of the planets had rings like Saturn. He looked for something that could identify the parent sun for him, but he found nothing familiar about any of the displays, except one.

There was a small model of Sol and its planets on a pedestal, and while the sight was familiar, the lettering below the display was not. If the legend said anything about distance and direction, it was not only in the alien's terms, but in the alien's written language.

To find out where in the sky he was, Farradyne needed a fast course in Planet X-ian language, and then a six months' concentrated course in uranography. He began to understand that the matter of being lost is only a dislocation of your own frame of reference. Cities do not have large signs around the streets saying "This is Chicago" because any man in his right senses knows that he is not in Detroit, and if he does not, there are better places for him than either city.

He shunned the opportunity of visiting the enemy planetarium. Having some lecturer explain the heavens as seen from Planet X in a trio-voice would get him nowhere.

He left the museum and began to trudge back toward the spaceport. He was hungry again, and the morning and early fore-afternoon had been frustrating, even though it had been enlightening to find that the aliens lived and breathed and enjoyed themselves like people instead of the cold inhuman monsters he had expected.

Again Farradyne watched his fellows carefully. It seemed that one medium slug would buy him a wad of paper that could be nothing other than the afternoon news, after which he would get two smaller slugs in change. He strode to the newsstand with a what-the-hell feeling and tossed down one of the medium slugs. He scooped up one of the papers and two of the smaller slugs and walked away without saying a word. The newsman watched the transaction without turning an eye. Then Farradyne folded the paper through the middle and tucked it under his arm and sauntered along like the absent-minded professor until he found a quick-grab joint that opened on the sidewalk.

He stood at the counter scanning the wall-menu as though he knew what it said until the waitress sounded off at him. He looked down at her with a frown of irritation, and then waved two fingers at a hot plate full of flat square things floating in an oily sea of juice. He unfolded his paper and immersed himself in a page while the waitress scooped two of the flat things from the plate and slid them between folds of something like a bun. She shoved them beneath the lower edge of Farradyne's paper on a flat plate and stood there mewing at him like a trio of alley cats.

Acting in an absent manner Farradyne took two of the larger slugs from his pocket and dropped them on the bar. The waitress took one, deposited it in a register with a shrug, as if she had seen oddly absorbed characters before, and returned with three of the smaller slugs which she piled on the bar beside Farradyne's remaining coin.

He munched his greasy God-knows-whats and while he mentally complained about the flavor and the greasiness, he was forced to admit that they were more satisfying than his earlier cold can of mixed space rations.

Then he folded his paper (wondering whether he had been absorbed in a lonely hearts column, the local stock market, or a nice lurid sex-slaying) and sauntered off toward the spaceport. He made it in easy steps, angling this way and that and wandering like Haroun al Raschid, but feeling more like that other fabled Arabian who was forced to remain in the body of a stork because his bird's mouth could not pronounce the magic word in the proper language. No one paid him any attention.

The sum and substance of his adventure was the feeling that a hyena can walk through a monkey cage so long as the hyena has enough sense to wear monkey clothing and keep his big bazoo shut, and an opinion that it was a damned shame that such nice-appearing folks could be such lice.

By the time Farradyne returned to the vicinity of the spaceport it was getting along toward late afternoon. It was a long day on Planet X and if Farradyne's judgment of time were anything worth mention, the day had still some hours to go until the real darkness came. He had no watch. A watch would have come in handy for time estimating even though there stood an excellent probability that the length of the day did not match anything like the Terran standard of time. He had dumped his wrist watch along with his own clothing because it was obviously alien; the watch he wore was his victim's but it was calibrated in Planet X time and Farradyne had not had a chance to compare times, nor to sit quietly and observe the relative motions of the several hands around the dial.

He was too early, but he had no other place to go. He could see across the spaceport to the Lancaster, where the cranes still poised high and the work went on, but still he had no more urge to return to the city.

Farradyne observed the entry of others carefully, and discovered that there were a couple of smaller ships taking on passengers, and that a number of people were coming along to watch them off. It looked like the operations on the average civilian spaceport, where people were not herded around nor treated with suspicion. It caused Farradyne to think that obviously the people of Planet X were all in accord on the plans of their undercover attack on Sol. Farradyne smiled sourly, on the planets of Sol any such venture would have been greeted with every shade of reaction from eager applause to outright hostility.

Farradyne was more than willing to take advantage of their obvious self-confidence or lack of concern over the possibility of sabotage, espionage, or enemy action. He was fitting himself unobtrusively into a group of people who were entering the main gate of the spaceport when he heard the raucous toot of an automobile horn.

Like all the rest, Farradyne turned to look. An official looking limousine was slowly coming up that broad drive. In it were driver, three guards, and—

"Norma Hannon!" he said with astonishment.

Then Farradyne felt the cold chill of fear crawl down his spine because he knew that he had made a hideous mistake. He turned away slowly, hoping that the others were turning as slowly to go about their own business. He started toward the spaceport, only to find a uniformed guard barring his way.

The guard chimed at him tersely.

Farradyne took his guts firmly and eyed the guard with a contempt that he did not feel. "Talk Terran," he snapped.

The guard blinked and chimed some more, less tersely but no less demandingly.

"Talk Terran," snapped Farradyne firmly. "Or I don't hear you. I know too many who've let down too often and relaxed into their own tongue. They aren't alive."

"I don't speak Terran very well."

"Well, damn it, learn it!" roared Farradyne. "You'll be needing it soon enough. Now, what did you have to say to me?"

"You heard me, but I'd rather—"

Farradyne relaxed with a grin. "No, I didn't. You could impugn my wife's virtue and I wouldn't listen to you. So now let's start over again."

"I was going to ask—"

"No," said Farradyne shortly. "Not that way. I said 'start' and I meant that we'd start thinking in Terran, like I've learned to do. Now, you addressed me properly and I said, 'Talk Terran!'"

"Oh. Er, look, you're not going to make me repeat it?"

"Why not?"

"I'd feel like a fool. After all, a mistake is a mistake, isn't it? I could hardly know that you were one of the Terra group, could I? After all, you're not dressed in Terran clothing."

Farradyne saw a glimmer of doubt in the guard's face; Farradyne should have been in Terran clothing if his intention was to stay as Terran as possible until the bitter end. He merely smiled, thinking fast. He said, "Don't want to attract any more attention here than I do on Terra. Frankly, I'm masquerading here. See?"

"I guess you're right. You can speak to your own group, but others can see you. Tell me, sir, what is it like? On the planets of Sol?"

"Pleasant enough."

"Is that so? I've heard they were rich. But the people? Are they as bad as I've heard?"

"Worse," said Farradyne, thinking that propaganda was as universal as anything could be. He began to itch. How could he break this off before he really did give himself away? The cold sweat that had been running down his spine at the time of the guard's first hail, which had dried in the exultation of knowing that he had succeeded in turning the guard's suspicion away, now started to itch again as another sweat came out to wet the dried salt.

Farradyne was saved the trouble. The car tooted for attention again and Farradyne turned to see it coming back from the spaceport.

"There goes the other one," said the guard, nodding at the car. It passed them and Farradyne saw, with less astonishment this time, that the new one was Howard Clevis.

"Sure does," chuckled Farradyne. "And now so do I."

"You've plenty of time before they hop off for the colony. But go on, and good luck! I'll remember what you said about thinking in Terran."

Farradyne waved and went into the spaceport. He was walking on wobbly legs, because he did not know whether the guard would suddenly begin to suspect him and let fly. But as he passed beyond range around the fantail of a big spacer he relaxed once more.

Farradyne walked slowly out across the field, feeling let down. He had learned nothing from the day's wandering, but while he dawdled all over town, Norma Hannon and Howard Clevis had been within a shout of his Lancaster. Not that he could have done anything, but just being able to talk it over might have brought something out of meeting up with them.

Night was slow in coming, but Farradyne loafed along on his mile and a half walk through the tails of the parked spacecraft until darkness was well on its way.

Two things he noted:

The work-crew around the Lancaster were polishing off the last bits and some of the trucks were folding down their ladders and preparing to take off for home. The other item was the position of the lonely lighted porthole in the big starship. It had changed. To Farradyne this meant only one thing. Clevis had been in one stateroom from early that morning or late last night, but Norma had been missing. Now Norma was back to her own stateroom and Clevis was off, possibly being questioned.

Could he—should he—? Questions raced through his mind. And if he did, would Norma be able to tell him anything? He had his own plans; to hide back in his Lancaster and wait out developments. At least long enough to throw a hard hammerlock on whatever pilot came to drive the Lanc' and twist information out of him.

Norma, he thought then, might know one thing: Their location. It would be a help to know. For if push came to shove, Farradyne was going to enter the Lancaster and take her up and then he was going to experiment with that auxiliary drive. He might die, but he was going to try the thing as soon as he knew that he could never find out without taking the long gamble.

One of the work trucks made up his mind for him. It turned from the Lancaster and its headlamps cut a swath across the field, swinging toward Farradyne. It took Farradyne less than the proverbial half a jiffy to come to the conclusion that bamboozling a guard at the gate was one thing, but to be found slinking around either near the Lancaster or the big starship was something else again.

He avoided the lights of the truck by scooting up the landing ramp of the starship and into the spacelock. It occurred to Farradyne as he went that the lack of people, including guards, out in this region of the spacefield was in a way its own protection. Any distant watcher seeing a figure out here would know automatically that the person was an intruder; perhaps the only reason Farradyne had not been hailed down was due to the known presence of workmen.

Farradyne lay with his chin on the sill of the spacelock and peered out as the truck went by. It would be some time before they were all finished, he concluded, and so he decided to kill the time in action.

Feeling his way along the dark corridors, Farradyne made his way aloft, up the stairways and around the circular floors until he came upon the one door with a streak of light coming underneath it. The light helped him see; the door was secured with a single bolt of the sliding variety, easy to open from the outside but impossible to move from within.

Farradyne slid the bolt and pushed open the door.

Norma was standing inside, poised defiantly with her hands on her hips, waiting. For a moment she did not recognize him, then her face twisted and said, "Well! If it isn't our interstellar man-about-space, Charles Farradyne!"

18

"Now see here," he said shortly, "Clevis must have told you about me."

"I knew that you and Clevis had something cooked up together the first time I saw him come into the Lancaster without a blazing gun in each hand," she said sourly.

"Well, then you ought to know that I'm—"

"You're a damned idiot, Farradyne! You bumbling fool!"

"But look, I'm here—"

"Where?"

"I was hiding in the inspection hatch. I couldn't see out. Don't you know where we are?"

"They didn't think I'd find it necessary to know," she replied bitingly. "You fancy pants!"

Farradyne swore in his throat. "Now I'll ask you whose side you're on," he snapped. "I came here to—"

"Whose side I'm on?" she laughed harshly. "Whose side are you on, Farradyne? I hope you're on their side; you're bound to louse them up sooner or later."

"Look, Norma—"

"So you come bubbling home with the bait in your mouth, unable to feel the hook, and hand it to Howard to get caught on. Go back where you got that monkey costume and die."

"Norma, answer me one thing. Who was Frank Hannon?"

"Frank? Frank was Howard's right hand undercover man, Farradyne. He had the goods on a man whose name no one knows; he didn't say because he didn't have the chance. He had it all with him when you dumped the Semiramide."

Farradyne eyed her coldly. "There's one thing you've got to admit," he said. "That tale of my three-tongued people was no lotus-dream."

Her silence was as good as a grudging affirmation.

"So part of the pattern is clearing up," he went on. "But if Clevis found me because I'd had four rotten years mucking toadstools on Venus, I'm not above wondering if this was not part of some master plan. Could someone have wrecked the Semiramide and saved me to act someday as bait for Clevis?"

"Isn't that just a bit far-fetched?"

"Maybe and maybe not. Just think. We're not merely fighting an apparently well-integrated mob of dope-runners. We're fighting a blind battle against a whole culture that is calmly and maliciously undermining the moral fiber of the whole race so they can move in and take over with little or no opposition. Doesn't that make sense? Such a program has plans that extend for years; I may be only one small angle, although mine happens to be the angle that worked. Don't tell me you expect warfare to be run like a football game, complete with referees and penalties for kneeing a fallen contestant in the kidneys."

Norma considered it a moment. "I suppose it does make sense. Any formal declaration of war is an openly expressed intention of committing suicide. But you explain yourself if you can."

Farradyne shrugged. "Maybe for the first time I out-guessed them," he said hopefully. He went on to explain how he had done it in a few quick sentences. "Then," he finished, "the big ship didn't even try to find me—the little man that didn't escape. I also doubt that they knew where I was, or they'd not have let me run free all over town." He went on and finished the tale of his peregrinations.

"We saw them catch the Lancaster," she said. "We wondered just why you suddenly went dead at the stick after giving them such a chase. Well, I guess that's it. I'll go on the assumption that you aren't a hellflower devil."

"Thanks," he said bitterly. "And, why the sudden change?"

"I've heard this three-toned language that everybody was so scornful about. I've heard a lot of it. I know that a full-scale organization such as this bunch can and will pull some rather complicated capers, so I am no longer sure that it was your inept handling of a spacecraft that caused the death of my brother. He was on someone's trail and I've assumed it was you. Maybe it wasn't. And if it wasn't then the Semiramide affair was not even an accident on your part. So, damn you, I can't hate you any more."

"You can't hate me?"

"Not unless you turn out to be one of this outfit. And for the life of me I can't see just what you hope to learn from me that I didn't spill during their questionings."

"Did they—" he let the rest of the sentence hang because he didn't know just how to express it.

"They know everything I know," she said. "I've been filled to the gills with something they shot out of a needle that made me as happily loquacious as a babbling marmoset."

"Did they explain why they brought you back here? It seems to me they'd imprison you."

"That's for later. They're now comparing my tale with Howard's and after they get done comparing notes they'll bring Howard back and we'll take a little jaunt to what they call their 'Detention Planet' where I'll meet a certain number of other Solarians who have gotten a bit too sharp for their liking. It's in another stellar system, I believe, completely safe and far from home and as a last lever in this war they'll hold the lives of a few hundred thousand men and women over the heads of Terra."

Farradyne swore. "The stinking bastards!"