Hellflower (1957)

by George O. Smith

  IT LOOKED AS INNOCENT AS A GARDENIA…

  But the Hellflower’s perfume turned any woman into any man’s woman. The haunting, pungent scent aroused desires too fierce to be slaked by ordinary passions —and left its victims burnt-out husks!

  Charles Farradyne knew that no woman could resist the Hellflower. Yet Carolyn, the girl he wanted above all to possess, smiled when he gave her the deadly bloom —smiled and inhaled the perfumed poison…

  HELLFLOWER is the fantastic story of a lovely woman who was not quite human—and of a man who went through heaven and hell to win her.

  HELLFLOWER

  GEORGE O. SMITH

  For Dona

  HELLFLOWER

  A PYRAMID BOOK

  Published by arrangement with Abelard-Schuman, Inc.

  Abelard-Schuman edition published 1953

  Pyramid edition published November, 1957

  Second printing February, 1969

  Copyright 1953, by George O. Smith

  All Rights Reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  PYRAMID BOOKS are published by Pyramid Publications. Inc., 444 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A.

  1

  The book had been thrown at Charles Farradyne. Then they had added the composing room, the printing press and the final grand black smear of printer’s ink. So when Howard Clevis located Farradyne working in the fungus fields of Venus four years later, he found a beaten man who no longer burned with resentment because he was all burned out. Farradyne looked up dully when Clevis came into the squalid rooming house.

  “I am Howard Clevis,” said the visitor.

  “Fine,” mumbled Farradyne. “So?” He looked at one of the few white shirts in a thousand miles and grunted disapprovingly.

  “I’ve a job for you, Farradyne.”

  “Who do you want killed?”

  “Take it easy. You’re the Charles Farradyne who—”

  “Who dumped the Semiramide into The Bog, and you’re Santa Claus, here to undo it?”

  “This is on the level, Farradyne.”

  Farradyne laughed shortly, but the sound was all scorn and no humor. While his raw bark was still echoing in the room, Farradyne added, “Drop it, Clevis. With a thousand licensed spacemen handy everywhere, willing to latch onto an honest buck, any man that comes half way across Venus to offer Farradyne a job can’t be on the level.”

  Clevis eyed Farradyne calculatingly. “I should think you might enjoy the chance.”

  “I’m a bum, but I’m no murderer.”

  “I told you—”

  “You’ve said a lot of nothing. So you came here to offer me a legit?”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t look good.”

  Clevis smiled calmly. He had the air of a man who knew what he was doing. He was medium tall, a sprinkle of gray in his hair and determined lines near the eyes and across the forehead. There was character in his face, but nothing to show whether this character was high or low. Just strong and no doubt about it. “I’m here, Farradyne, just because of the way it looks. The fact is that I need you. I know you’re bitter, but—”

  “Bitter!” roared Farradyne, getting to his feet and stalking across the wretched little room toward Clevis. “Bitter? My God! They haul me home on a shutter so they can give me a fair trial before they kick me out. You don’t think I like it in this rat hole, do you?”

  “No, I don’t. But listen, will you?”

  “Nobody listened to me, why should I listen to you?”

  “Because I have something to say,” said Clevis pointedly. “Do you want to hear it?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m Howard Clevis of the Solar Anti-Narcotics Department.”

  “Well, I haven’t any. I don’t use any. And I don’t have much truck with them that do.”

  “No one is on trial here and nothing that you say can be used in any way. That’s why I came alone. You’re on the wrong trolley. But I’ll tell you this, Farradyne, if I were in your shoes I’d do anything at all to get out of this muck field.”

  “Some things even a bum won’t do. And I don’t owe you anything.”

  “Wrong. When you dumped the Semiramide into The Bog four years ago, you killed one of our best operatives. We need you, Farradyne, and you owe us one. Now?”

  “When I dumped the Semiramide no one would listen to me. Do you want to listen to me now?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I got a raw deal.”

  “So did the man you killed.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody!” yelled Farradyne.

  Clevis eyed him calmly even though Farradyne was large enough to take the smaller, older man’s hide off. “I am not here to argue that point,” he said. “And I don’t intend to. Regardless of how you feel, I’m offering you a chance to get out of this mess. It’s a space job.”

  “What makes you think I’ll play stool pigeon?”

  “It’s no informer’s job. It’s space piloting.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You bet and I’ll cover it a thousand to one.”

  Farradyne sat down on the dingy bed. “Go ahead and talk, Clevis. I’ll listen.”

  Clevis dug into his briefcase and brought out a flower. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, handing the blossom to Farradyne.

  Farradyne looked at it briefly. “It might be a gardenia, but it isn’t.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Clevis eagerly.

  “Only because you wouldn’t be coming half way across Venus to bring me a gardenia. So that is a love lotus.”

  Clevis looked a bit disappointed. “I thought that maybe you might have some way—”

  “What makes you think I’d know more than a botanist?”

  Clevis smiled. “Spacemen tend to come up with some oddly interesting specks of knowledge now and then. No, I didn’t really hope that you’d know more than a botanist. But—”

  “So far as I know, there’s only one way of telling. That’s to try it out. Thanks, I’ll not have my fun that way. That’s one thing you can’t pin on me.”

  “I wouldn’t try. But listen, Farradyne. In the past twelve years we have carefully besmirched the names and reputations of six men hoping that they could get on the inside. For our pains we have lost all six of them one way and another. The enemy seems to have a good espionage system. Our men roam up and down the system making like big-time operators and get nowhere. The love lotus operators seem to be able to tell a phony louse when they see one.”

  “And I am a real louse?”

  “You’ve a convincing record.”

  Farradyne shook his head angrily. “Not that kind,” he snapped. “Your pals sloughed off my license and tossed me out on my duff to scratch, but no one ever pinned the crooked label on me and made it stick.”

  “Then why did they take away your license?”

  “Because someone needed a goat”

  “And you are innocent?”

  Farradyne growled hopelessly. “All right,” he said, returning to his former lethargy. “So just remember that all the evidence was still my unsupported word against their assumptions. I was acquitted, remember? Lack of evidence stands on the books. But they took my license and tossed me out of space and that’s as bad as a full conviction. So where am I? So I’ll stop beating my gums about it, Clevis.”

  Clevis smiled quietly. “You were a good pilot, Farradyne. Maybe a bit too good. Your trouble was being too sure of yourself. You collected a few too many pink tickets for cutting didoes and collecting women to show off in front of. They’d have marked it off as an accident if it hadn’t been Farradyne. Your record accused you of being the hot-pants pilot, the fly-fly boy. Maybe that last job of yours wa
s another dido that caught you. But let’s leave the ghost alone. Maybe you’ve learned your lesson and are willing to make a stab at it again. We need you.”

  Farradyne grunted and his lips twisted a bit. He got up from the unmade bed and went to the scarred dresser to pour a stiff jolt from an open bottle into a dirty glass. He took a sip and then walked to the window and stood there, staring out into the dusk and talking, half to himself. Clevis listened.

  “I’ve had my prayer,” said Farradyne. “A prayer in a nightmare. A man fighting against a rigged job, like the girl in that old story who turned up in her mother’s hotel room to find that every trace of her mother’s existence had been erased. Bellhops, and cab driver, steamship captain and the hotel register, all rigged. Even the police deny her. Remember? Well, that’s Farradyne, too, Clevis. Do you know what happened? My first error was telling them that someone came into the control room during landing. They said that no one would do that because everybody knew the danger of diverting the pilot’s attention during a landing. No one, they said, would take the chance of killing himself, and the other passengers would stop anyone who tried to go up the stairs at that time because they knew the danger to themselves.

  “Then they practically scoffed me into jail when I told them that there were three people in the room. A pilot might just as well be blindfolded and manacled to his chair during landing. He hasn’t time to play games around tables and chairs. So I heard three people behind me and couldn’t look. All I could do was to snarl for them to get the hell out. So then we rapped the cliff and dumped into The Bog, and I got tossed out through the busted observation dome. They salvaged the Semiramkide a few months later and found only one skeleton in the room. That made me a liar. Besides the skeleton was of a woman, and they all nodded sagely and said, “Woman? Well, we know Farradyne!” and I got the works. So,” said Farradyne, bitter-sounding once more, “they suspended me and took away my license. No jobs for a man trained for space and nothing else. They wouldn’t even let me near a spacer—maybe they thought I might steal one, forgetting that there is no place to hide. Maybe they thought I’d steal Mars, too. So if I want a drink they ask me if it’s true that jungle juice gives a man hallucinations. If I light a cigarette I’m asked if it is real laughing grass. If I ask for a job they want to know how hard I’ll work for my liquor, and so I end up in this godforsaken marsh, playing nursemaid to a bunch of stinking toadstools.” Farradyne’s voice rose to an angry pitch. “The mold grows on your hide and under your nails and in your hair, and you forget what it’s like to be clean and you lose hope and ambition because you’re kicked off the bottom of the ladder, but you still dream of someday being able to show the whole damned solar system that you are not the louse they made you. Then, instead of getting a chance, a man comes to you and offers you a job because he needs a professional bastard with a bad record. It’s damned small consolation, Clevis.”

  Farradyne sniffed at the glass and then threw it out the window with a derisive gesture. “I’ll ask for a lot of things,” he said quietly, now. “And the first thing is for enough money to buy White Star Trail instead of this rotgut.”

  “That can be done, but can you take it?”

  “It’ll be hard,” admitted Farradyne. “I’ve been on this diet of soap and vitriol too long. But I’ll do it. Give me a month.”

  “I can’t offer you much,” said Clevis. “But maybe this can be hope for you. Help us clean up the hellblossom gang and you’ll do a lot toward erasing that black mark on your record.”

  “Just what is the pitch?”

  Clevis took a small leather folder from his briefcase and handed it over. Farradyne recognized it as a space pilot’s license before he opened it. He read it with a cynical smile before he asked, “Where did you get it?”

  “It’s probably the only official forgery in existence. The Solar Anti-Narcotics Department—SAND—has a lot of angles to play. First, that ticket is made of the right paper and printed with the right type and the right ink because,” and Clevis smiled, “it came from the right office. The big rubber stamp, ‘Reinstated,’ is the right stamp and the initials are put on properly, but not by the right man. The license will get you into and out of spaceports and all the rest of the privileges. But it has no listing on the master log at the Bureau of Space Personnel. It’s an excellent forgery, it will not be questioned so long as you stay out of trouble. The only people who will check on the validity will be the ones we hope to catch. When they discover that your ticket is invalid, you may get an offer to join ‘em.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime you’ll be running a spacer in the usual way. We’ve a couple of sub-contracts you can handle to stay in business. You’ll pick up other business, no doubt. But there are two things to remember, always.”

  “Two?”

  “Two. The first is that you’ve got to play it flat, no nonsense. Just remember who and what you are. And just to make sure of it, I’ll remind you again that you are a crumb with a bad reputation. You’ll be running a spacer worth a hell of a lot of dough and there will be a lot of people asking a lot of other people how you managed the deal. Probably none of them will ever get around to asking you, but your attitude is the same as the known gangster whose only visible means of support for his million-dollar estate and his yacht and his high living is the small string of hot-dog stands or the dry-goods store. That he owns all these things is only an indication of thrift and good management”

  “I get it,” grinned Farradyne.

  Clevis snapped, “This is no laughing matter. What goes along with this is important. You’ll play this game as we outline it to you and in no other way. The first time we find you playing hanky-panky, we’ll have you by the ears in the morning. And if you cut a dido and get pinned for it, there you’ll be with a forged license and a spacer that will have some very odd-looking registration papers so far as the Master Log runs. And no one is going to admit that he knows you. Certainly the SAND office won’t. And furthermore, If you do claim any connection at any time for any reason whatsoever, well haul you in for attempting to impersonate one of us. You’re a decoy, a sitting duck with both feet in the mud, Farradyne, and no damned good to anybody until you get mired deeper in the same stinking mud. There’ll be more later. Now for the second item.”

  “Second? Weren’t there ten or twelve in that last delivery?” grunted Farradyne.

  “That was only the beginning. The second is this. Do not, under any circumstances, make any attempt to investigate that accident of yours.”

  “Now look,” snapped Farradyne hotly, “I’ve spent four years—”

  “In the first place, nothing that you could possibly do would convince anybody that you were the innocent bystander. So—”

  “But I’m telling you—”

  “The game you are going to play will not permit you to make any attempt to clear up that mess. As a character of questionable background, your attitude must be that of a man caught in a bad show and forced to undergo visible suffering long enough for the public to forget, before you can resume your role of professional louse. Got this straight?”

  Farradyne looked at Clevis, gaunt has-been looking at success. The window was dark now, but there were no stars visible from the surface of Venus, only Terra and Jupiter and Sirius and Vega and a couple of others that haloed through the haze. The call of the free blackness of space pulled at Farradyne. He turned back from the window and looked at the unmade bed, the insect-specked wall, the scarred dresser, the warped floor. His nose wrinkled tentatively and he cursed inwardly because he knew that the joint reeked of rancid sweat and mildewed cloth and unwashed human body, and his nose was so accustomed to this stink that he could not smell it.

  Farradyne came to understand in those few moments while Clevis watched him quietly, waiting for his decision, that his oft-repeated statement that there were some things that even a bum wouldn’t do was so much malarkey. Farradyne would have joined the hellblossom oper
ators for an opportunity to get out of this Venusian mire. He turned to Clevis.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Clevis cast a pointed look at the dresser.

  “There’s nothing in the place but bad memories,” said Farradyne. “I’ll leave ‘em here. Good, bad or indifferent, Clevis, I’m your man no matter how you want it played. For the first time in years I seem to want a bath and a clean shirt.”

  As Clevis headed toward the door Farradyne aimed a solid kick at the dresser, putting one more scar on its marred flank. “I’m behind you,” he said.

  2

  He was rustier than he had realized. For it was not only four years away from the levers of the control room and the split-second decision of high speed, it was four years of rotting in skid-row. His muscles were stringy, his skin was slatey, his eyes were slow and he had lost tone. He was flab and ache and off his feed. He was slow and overcompensating in his motions. He missed his aim by yards and miscalculated his position and his speed and his direction so badly that Donaldson, who rode in the co-pilot’s seat, sat there with his hands poised over the levers and clutched convulsively or pressed against the floor with his feet, chewing his lips with concern as Farradyne flopped the sky cruiser roughly here and there. They practiced on Mercury where the traffic was very light, in a Lancaster Eighty-One which was a fine piece of space-cruiser by any man’s opinion, and Farradyne punished the ship like a recruit.

  It took him a month to get the hang of it again. A solid month of severe discipline, living in the ship and taking exercise and routine practice to refine his control. He found that making the change from the rotgut jungle juice to White Star Trail was not too hard because his mind was busy all the time and he did not need the high-powered stuff to anesthetize. White Star Trail was a godsend to the man who liked the flavor of fine Scotch whiskey but could not afford to befog his coordination by so much as a single ounce of the pure quill. It was a synthetic drink that tasted like Scotch but lacked the alcoholic kick, and Farradyne learned soon enough that he could forego the jolt of high-test liquor in favor of the pleasant flavor because he had discovered ambition again.