Hellflower (1957)

by George O. Smith

  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 star-ship. 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 be was going to try the thing as soon as be 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 fullscale 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!”

  Norma shook her head coolly. “That’s emotion, Charles. I don’t know exactly what their purpose is, but I do understand that this is a conflict of eventual survival, and rule of an economic empire.”

  “But—”

  Norma shook her head. “Try the shoe on the other foot, Charles. Suppose you had come upon these people with the rest of your kind—how would you see them?”

  “As possible allies and friends.”

  “Balderdash! You’d have seen them as possible customers and people to be exploited and maybe enemies after you’d seen their history. Their attitude is as arrogant as ours and their personal justification as high. By some obscure luck of science they got to interstellar travel before we did and they automatically place us in an inferior position, but they also know that this inferiority is not so great as to make us a pushover. We are scientifically capable of discovering their interstellar drive at any moment, and why we have not is probably just a matter of our not combining the right sciences. Our knowledge of medicine is far vaster than theirs, for instance.”

  “How can you know this?” he asked.

  Norma opened a few buttons at her throat and slipped her dress down over one shoulder. There was a small circular bandage stuck to one spot “They took a sample of me,” she said. “Because I seem to be immune to several diseases that should give me trouble. When I asked about this, they told me that they hoped to discover just what cell change took place when we take our anti-cancer immunization. This thing they have yet to discover. Oh they use our immunization,” she said, slipping the dress up but forgetting to rebutton it, “but they use it as an African witch doctor might use a typhoid serum.”

  She nodded as she went on thinking, “This thing you have to remember, Charles, that if Terrans had arrived there first there would have been the same conflict, but conducted from the other side.”

  Farradyne shook his head angrily. “We’re not inclined to ruin—”

  “Stop sounding like one of King Arthur’s Knights. Men of sense and good judgment don’t request their enemies to meet them on a field of honor. Instead, a state of war is assumed and from that instant on, A is looking for a chance to stab B in the back because he knows that B will cut him off at the hips if he turns his back for a moment. Honor on the battlefield is accorded only to a defeated enemy; up to the time he is defeated, anything goes. And if both sides know that open warfare means total destruction, the process on either side is one of boring from within, or gnawing at the foundation. But this is a bad place to get involved in a discussion of ethics. Where do we go from here?”

  “If I knew how to run that ka-dodie in the Lancaster we’d head for Sol—if I knew where Sol was from here.”

  “And how about Howard?”

  “I don’t know about Clevis,” he told her. “The thing to do would be to hike home as fast as we could and spill our tale to the people who would know what to do about it. Let’s face it, Norma. They can mingle with Terrans because they can speak our language. But I couldn’t mingle with them to locate Howard. I’d be picked up in a minute.”

  “So how do we get back?”

  “Why do you think they brought the Lancaster?”

  “Probably to fit her out as a bona fide hellflower runner.”

  “Okay. We’ll hide out in my cubby until they run her back.”

  “You go hide out,” said Norma. “If they find me missing, they’ll know something smells bad.”

  Farradyne chuckled. “From what I know of them, they’re as arrogantly secure as the Gods of Olympus. Some part of their gang is still expecting me to turn up near Terra on an escape course, and the only smart thing I have done is to be where they didn’t plan me to be. So we’ll be
where they don’t expect us to be and maybe we’ll get away with it. Come on, let’s hide out.”

  The hitch in their plans came when Farradyne led Norma down the stairs to the last deck below and stopped, holding up a warning hand.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered.

  He pointed. The hatch he had used was lying to one side and a beam of diffuse light was coming up from below. There came also the triple-tongued voices of two men.

  Farradyne led Norma one deck above where he could speak without attracting the attention of the men below. “They’ve installed the space drive in the inspection cubby,” he said. “That’s probably what all the work was about. It’s been taken from the bottom deck and permanently installed down in the cubby where it wouldn’t attract attention on a casual tour. Maybe a different unit I wouldn’t know; the temporary job might have been only a harness-job to be used until they could haul the Lanc’ to base for a real tear-down and rebuild.”

  “I didn’t see any work-wagon,” said Norma.

  “Maybe not, but the workman is here, and tuning up the drive. We can’t get below now.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I’ve half a hunch that they won’t leave this ship standing idle long. Let’s hide in the cargo hold until they stop tinkering.”

  Norma nodded thoughtfully. “Let’s wait it out,” she said. “Then if we have trouble, I can slope and run out of here like a startled rabbit and draw the chase away from you.”

  “You make the escape,” he suggested, “I’ll do the hare and the hounds.”

  Norma shook her head. “Let’s use logic, and not emotion,” she said calmly. “I’m known to be here, you’re not. So if I cut and run and they catch me, that’s it. But if you’re caught running loose on this joint, they’ll also start looking for me. If I carry my point, you’ll still be unexpected. Follow? And someone may get back—the other way, no?”

  “I suppose you are right.”