Hellflower (1957)

by George O. Smith

  “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, sometime 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 softheaded 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 soundsequence 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 tieup.”

  “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?”

  “Segre
gate ‘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 her 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 h
apless 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 aspace 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.”