Hellflower (1957)

by George O. Smith

In all of this he had to admire Carolyn’s ability to dissemble even while she was playing a losing battle. She was determined to carry on high until the bitter end, and she added to the slander with a fine regard for the well-turned phrase and amplified all the truckmen said. They were working on his chances for a painful Hereafter when the radio music faded again: “And here is the latest news on Charles Farradyne. Within the past half hour the area of search has been narrowed to a ten-mile circle by the interception of a moving van laden with hellflowers. The arrest was made by a state highway patrol with the aid of a woman who gave her name as Norma Hannon.

  “Miss Hannon was in a state of hysterical collapse after days of imprisonment at the hands of the lotus ring, a brutal physical assault, and threats of being forced into love lotus addiction. The driver of the truck was carrying a license made out to Walter Morgan, but information from the Bureau of Identification indicates that Morgan is also known as Lewis Hughes, a prominent teacher of Ancient History in a Des Moines school. During the struggle Miss Hannon succeeded in Tendering the alleged criminal unconscious by hitting him on the jaw with her slipper, after which she taped—”

  Farradyne chuckled. “You see?” he glowed Morgan grunted, “My license!”

  Roberts cried, “Our truck!”

  Carolyn said, “And what’s it got you, Charles?”

  “—the first aid kit,” went on the announcer. “Morgan or Hughes is being held on a John Doe warrant pending the true identification of the man, charged with hellflower possession, abduction, illegal restraint, assault and battery, rape and driving an interstate truck with an improper license.

  “Miss Hannon collapsed after driving the truck to within sight of the dragnet set out for Farradyne. Her statement will be taken by the Sand Office as soon as she is recovered. The point of hospitalization has been kept secret by the Sandmen, who are now confident of an early arrest. Indications are that Hughes or Morgan has turned state‘s evidence and is willing to inform on his racket-boss.”

  “Hah!” glowed Carolyn.

  “Did you a lot of good, didn’t it, Farradyne?” snarled Morgan.

  Farradyne ignored Morgan and spoke to Carolyn. “Unless Norma is being tended by some one of your gang, this is the end, baby.”

  She eyed him superciliously. “How long will they believe her after they discover she’s an addict herself?”

  “Maybe she isn’t.”

  Carolyn laughed. “Everybody knows there is no cure.”

  “And how about our pal, Brenner-Hughes-Morgan?”

  “You leave me out of this!” snapped Morgan.

  “Sorry.” said Farradyne with a smile. “I didn’t mean to include you, Walter.”

  Carolyn said, in a self-confident voice, “Brenner is one of us. He is just as willing to die for our cause as—” She suddenly remembered the truckmen present, who were probably as puzzled as men can be over the trend of conversation. But she didn’t have to finish. Farradyne realized with a start that the enemy culture and training must include a high degree of blind patriotism which demanded that the agent in danger of discovery must be ready to eliminate his discoverer even though it cause the death of both of them. The Semiramide—

  A searchlight swept across the lake and its light, refracted downward from the waves, caught Farradyne’s eye. He left them in the salon and raced up the stairs to the control room. Through the astrodome, distorted by the water, Farradyne could see the headlamps of a big truck. The searchbeam crossed the water again and flashed ever so briefly on the slender rod of the antenna. The truck paused in its course, the beam swept the woody shore and stopped; the truck turned toward something in the woods and rumbled off through the trees.

  The radio music died again. “Ladies and gentlemen, we arc about to bring you a very startling program. John Bundy, our special events newscaster, has joined the forces scouring the Lake Superior region for Charles Farradyne. Inasmuch as an early arrest is expected, and possibly a running gun battle, John Bundy will take the air with an on-the-spot account Come in, John Bundy!”

  “Hello, this is John Bundy! Our convoy of trucks, men, guns, radar and radio control resembles a war convoy. We have everything from trench knives to one-fifty-five rifles aboard as we scour the northwoods for the criminal who has been so successful up to this time. We arrived at a point along Lake Superior which must be close to Farradyne’s operations, according to the description given to us by the arrested truck driver. Sand and mud from Miss Hannon’s shoes correspond to that district “Flying above us now are eight squadron bombers carrying heavy depth charges because Farradyne is believed to be hiding his spacecraft in the waters of the Lake. A submarine from the Great Lakes Geodetic Survey has been hastily equipped with some ranging sonar from the War Museum at Chicago and is seeking the submerged spacecraft. It—”

  There came a distant crash in the radio and seconds afterward the Lancaster resounded with the thunder of an underwater explosion.

  “One of the depth charge patterns has been dropped,” explained Bundy excitedly. “Perhaps this is—no, it’s not. Sorry. Just a hope, but the submarine has just covered the explosion area and reported only an underwater mountain peak instead of a hidden spacecraft. No place will be left unsearched—”

  A thin, pure ping of a pitch so high it was on the upper limit of Farradyne’s ability to hear came and lasted for less than a tenth of a second. It came again in about twenty seconds, repeating at like intervals again and again. The interval dropped; the volume of the ping increased noticeably until the singing tinkle, something like tapping a silver table knife on Haviland china, was coming fast.

  Ping! Ping! Ping!

  Farradyne looked above. Circling there were skytrails of jet bombers making loops in the sky. There came another flash of the searchbeam against the antenna.

  Ping! Abruptly the pinging changed in tone. It became frequency modulated so that it rose in a chirp, and Farradyne knew that the submarine was coming closer.

  Normal Get through, wherever you are!

  Along the shoreline something blossomed with an orange flash. Seconds later there was an eruption fifty yards from the Lancaster that shook the ship hard enough to make the plates groan. A trickle of lake water oozed through the ceiling of the astrodome.

  The pinging came louder.

  Underwater bursts ricocheted and flashed and hurled their gusts of force against the spacer, buffeting the Lancaster.

  Farradyne’s hands hung above his controls. He could escape this holocaust; all he had to do was to blast free to the water, make a brief run for it, and then come down hard on the enemy ultradrive toggle-bar and his Lancaster would virtually disappear right under the guns of the squadrons that sought him. He could hide in space for a day or a week and return after Norma explained.

  But this was wrong. To be sure he had the enemy equipment in his hold and enemy agents in his salon who could explain the science behind the device. Eventually it could be reproduced—but only if there were time.

  For Farradyne realized that his act had been the first overt move that could start the First Interstellar War—but the enemy would not permit Sol to take the second move. Once their secret was out the star ships would hover over Sol’s planets with their loads of mercurite and it would be slavery or death. He would land to find a ruined Sol and a few remnants of humankind reduced to savagery. The only result would be the locating of a mercurite stockpile and a blow of retaliation.

  And then someday, another sentience would come to visit the stars and find only the smouldering ruins of two systems that could neither live with each other nor permit each other to have supremacy.

  Another bouncing crash shook the Lancaster.

  The radio was rambling on and on as John Bundy gave the world a blow by blow description of the first action made toward its ultimate death.

  “—and to those people who have stood out against the expenditure of monies for arms and training, I say they should witness this attack upon an enemy of society. Ye
s, warfare is dead, but the conflict goes on against evil and ruthlessness, and only by preparedness of strength and preparedness of mind—to be as ruthless as the fiends that bore from within—can mankind combat his own weaknesses.

  “They are evacuating the area now. Farradyne is trapped and unless he surrenders within the next half hour, atomic weapons will be used. We may never learn the thoughts of the mind that has directed the decay of the moral fiber of our people. We may never know why a man, given the opportunities that many finer men have been denied, chose as his life’s work—”

  Carolyn laughed hysterically and Farradyne went below for a look.

  Morgan and Roberts fell upon him and hauled him down the stairs. They pinned him to the deck and held him there. Carolyn stood above him.

  “We don’t mind dying,” she said, “in order to take you with us! You and your money and your paid agents and your bribed officials! Permit you to surrender? To stand mock trial and be acquitted? Never!”

  The Lancaster shook with the trob of depth charges.

  Farradyne struggled against his captors. He’d been as blind a fool as he had ever been, to let them sit there without taping them separately.

  “Let me up!” he stormed. “Let me up so we can escape this bombing—”

  “Shut the hell up!”

  Farradyne struggled.

  There was a blasting roar that stunned them all; it shook the Lancaster viciously. The trickle of water through the astrodome was covered by the ear-splitting thunder, but less shockingly loud as the Lancaster hiked into the open air and braved the fire of the squadrons.

  Farradyne fought himself awake. “Let him escape and we—”

  Carolyn’s shrill laugh drowned out his weak voice. The radio went on as accursedly unanswerable as always. “Farradyne’s spacecraft has been trapped and fired upon and now the pilot himself has been flushed from cover. He is making the criminal’s last-stand. The rascal is hoping to flee through the most thorough skycover that has ever been assembled. He cannot hope to win through, ladies and gentlemen. I wish we had video here in the early morning light, so that you could see this vivid spectacle of the eternal battle between the forces of good and evil!

  “But we’ll all be there when Farradyne goes down to the death of flame he so richly deserves. Above him now are the jet bombers and above them lie the Interplanetary Space Guard to fire the final coup de grace—if Farradyne can run this gauntlet of righteous wrath that far.

  “His flare trail is dimmed by the pinpoints of flashing death that seek him out. On every side of me are ships vomiting torpedoes, guided missiles with target-seeking radar in their sleek noses that will end this reign of terror and dissolution once they find their mark.”

  Farradyne looked up at Carolyn and saw a glow of excitement in her eyes. She looked down at him and said, “Charles, you almost succeeded—”

  The radio clicked audibly and a forceful voice came on: “Attention! Attention! All listeners hear this. This is the office of the Secretary of Solar Defense, Under Secretary Marshall White speaking. All persons, whether official or unofficial, whether citizen or military, are hereby charged with the safety of Charles Farradyne and the Lancaster model Eighty-One in his possession. This is a ‘Cease Fire’ order. All citizens and military personnel, officials and non-officials are hereby ordered to offer Charles Farradyne whatever he may request in the nature of manpower, machinery, supplies, protection, material and safe conduct so that he may deliver his spacecraft to the Terran Arsenal at Terre Haute, Indiana.”

  Morgan looked at Farradyne with a scowl.

  Carolyn cried, “Friends in high places!”

  Roberts spat on Farradyne’s face.

  The Under Secretary’s voice went on, “Within the hour, Miss Norma Hannon, one-time associate of Howard Clevis, undercover agent attached to this office on free duty, has presented irrevocable evidence to show that the hellflower operations have been a part and parcel of an unsuspected plot against humanity by denizens of an extra-solar culture. Since Farradyne’s spacecraft contains the only known device enabling matter to exceed the velocity of light, its delivery to the Arsenal is deemed top priority. All persons are charged—”

  Farradyne shrugged himself out of the grip of the truckmen. “Go the hell aloft and grab that bastard running the ship!” he snarled at them.

  The other enemy rushed forward and Roberts caught a hard fist on the jaw and reeled back. Farradyne wheeled with a wide swing and chopped the edge of his hand hard against the side of the alien face. The blow hurled the other back against the little bar, against which he crumpled and slipped to the floor in a flaccid heap.

  “Watch her!” Farradyne yelled to Roberts, who was recovering from his blow. Morgan dashed up the stairs and Farradyne was at his heels.

  The truckman raced across the control room and caught, the enemy pilot by his right wrist, whipped it out, around, down, back and up in a hammerlock. He jerked once and then lifted the screaming pilot out of the chair; hammerlock in one hand, his other arm clenched around the pilot’s throat.

  Farradyne slipped into the pilot’s chair and reversed the controls. He oriented himself, and then boldly turned the Lancaster on its side and sent the ship screaming through the upper air towards Indiana.

  In the control room there were some flashes high in the sky. Terran forces had made contact with the enemy.

  He turned in his pilot’s chair as he heard them struggling up the stairs. Carolyn was fighting her way up with tooth and nail and crying, “I’ve got to see him!” Roberts was still stunned from the blow, a bit groggy and also a bit reluctant to lash out and crush a few bones.

  Farradyne jeered, “So I couldn’t get through?”

  Carolyn faced him, “You poor simpleton,” she said, “you’ve just sealed your own doom.”

  Farradyne shrugged. “Sometimes it’s better to kill the dog than let the fleas multiply. It saves the rest of the dogs.”

  “Do you realize what you’re doing? You’re giving up! You’re admitting—”

  “Oh, shut up, Carolyn. What’s your alternative? To surrender quietly and let your rapacious gang walk in? Of course we can’t win. But you can’t win either because we’re going to deprive you of victory. When the next galactic race comes this way they’ll find a couple of glowing monuments to a culture that preferred death to slavery.”

  “But you couldn’t possibly—”

  “Oh yes, I can. That’s why we’re heading for the arsenal now. I’ll get my load of mercurite there, and deliver it to your system while you and your gang are ruining ours. I call it retribution.”

  “You don’t offer any alternative, either,” she whispered.

  “Complete surrender,” he suggested.

  “And you know what that would mean.”

  Farradyne looked at her. It was an impasse and he knew it as well as she did. The law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is only good when there is a higher authority to see that it goes no further. When there is no just authority to pass judgment, the loss of an eye is revenged with interest, and the anger and resentment and desire for counter-revenge grow and pyramid until nations and planets and solar systems are involved in punitive wars that leave both sides weak and broken. Primitive and ruinous it was. But then, so was all revenge.

  It need not be ruinous. There could be a better way to pride, to personal or national integrity. It had been done before in the middle of the Twentieth Century and it had been the start of a consolidated Terra. For there is personal pride in knowing that you have let your defeated enemy live; in letting your defeated enemy know that you feel strong and secure enough to hold his efforts in contempt.

  Farradyne looked at Carolyn. “Surrender,” he suggested to her. “Then we’ll move in quietly and count off your people. We’ve lost many of ours, so we’ll just tally off so many men to be murdered in cold blood. So many virgins to be ravished. So many wives to be left without husbands and so many husbands left without wives. Children le
ft homeless to such and such a number.” His voice rose. “So much hunger; so much pestilence; so much famine; so much death. What in the hell do you think we are, Carolyn, a race of God damned vultures?”

  “What do you want me to do?” she whimpered. “You’re in the driver’s seat.”

  “No, I’m not!” yelled Farradyne. “And I’m not going to be held responsible for anything that wasn’t my idea in the first place. Your outfit started this and now if your outfit does not care for the end-game, it’s for you to say. Now— do we drop mercurite?”

  She searched his face and saw nothing but hard determination. She shook her arm from Roberts’ clutch and walked to the radio. Into the microphone she began to singsong. She went on for some time; staccato, musical now and discordant then, her triple-tongued voice rising and falling as she spoke rapidly.

  Then she turned from the radio. “You win,” she said. “Somehow you always win. And maybe—maybe I’m glad it’s all over!”

  Tears welled in her eyes and she turned away from them to stumble down the stairway blindly.

  23

  Farradyne looked down at the white face, almost as pale as the hospital sheets. Norma looked up at him, her face wan and her smile weak but genuine. He reached down and pressed her hand gently. “Relax, Norma, it’s all over and done with.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Dr. Fawcett told me this morning that you were obviously on your way to a cure.”

  “I’m feeling fine,” she said. “I’m weak, but I do feel better. This is just from the strain. I held my nerves together too long and it’s left me sort of washed out. But I’ll be all right.”

  “You’ve got to be,” he said seriously. “This is all too good to miss.”

  “What’s happened? Charles, you talk. I’m—”

  “Sure. Well, you never saw so much gold braid and striped trousers a-space before in your life. After I set the Lancaster down at Terre Haute, they came aboard and sat on two of the guys for hostages against my return, and a bunch of us went to Lyra Three Fifty Seven with Carolyn as interpreter. We made ‘em cough up Clevis and about a hundred other bright guys who’d been too smart for ‘em. They—the gold-braid and striped-trouser set—moved in and they’ve been conferring ever since. Seems as how I guessed right; both sides seem to think that there’s been enough strife, and that more can be gained by pooling our efforts. Anyway, it’s out of my hands now and I’m just a spaceman again.”