“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 your 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 k
now 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 place 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.
Hellflower (1957) Page 12
