Read Ebook: The hellflower by Smith George O George Oliver Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 3753 lines and 115263 words, and 76 pages

Farradyne growled hopelessly. "All right," he said, returning to his former lethargy. "So just remember that I was acquitted, remember? Lack of evidence. But they took my license and tossed me out of space and that's as bad as a full conviction. So where am I? I'll stop beating my gums about it, Clevis."

Clevis smiled quietly. "You were a good pilot, Farradyne. Maybe a bit too good. 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 was another dido that caught you. But let's leave the ghost alone, Farradyne. We need you, Farradyne."

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 the old story who turned up in her mother's hotel room to find that every evidence of her mother's existence had been erased. Bellhops, and cab driver, and the steamship captain, and the hotel register all rigged. Even the police disbelieved her, remember? Well, that's Farradyne, too, Clevis. 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 anybody who tried to go up the stairs at that time because they knew the danger to themselves.

"They practically scoffed me into jail when I told them that there were three people in the room. I couldn't look around, you know. A pilot might just as well be blindfolded and manacled to his chair during landing. 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. Then we rapped the cliff and dumped the ship into The Bog, and I got tossed out through the busted observation dome. They salvaged the Semiramide 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 then they all nodded sagely and said, 'Woman? Well, we know our Farradyne!' and I got the works.

"So," Farradyne sounded bitter once more, "they suspended me and took away my license. They wouldn't even let me near a spacer; maybe they thought I might steal one, forgetting that there's 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. So I end up in this God-forsaken 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're 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--and its damned small consolation, but I'll take it just to show you and everybody else that I'm not the hot-rock that I've been called."

Farradyne sniffed at the glass and then threw it into the dirty sink with a derisive gesture. "I'll ask for a lot of things," he said, quietly now. "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 towards erasing that black mark on your record."

"Just what's 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 has a lot of angles to play, Farradyne. 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. 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 subcontracts you can handle to stay in business, and you'll pick up other business, no doubt. But there are two things to remember, always. The first is that you've got to play it flat, Farradyne. No nonsense. Just remember who and what you are. 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 his small string of hot-dog stands. That he owns 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 they know you. Certainly the SAND office won't. And furthermore if you do claim any connection at any time for any reason whatsoever, we'll 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. Now for the second item."

"Second? Weren't there ten or twelve in that last?" 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. 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 walls, 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 his nose was so accustomed to this stink that he could not smell it.

Inwardly Farradyne came to understand, in those few moments while Clevis watched him quietly, that his oft-repeated statement that there were some things that even a bum wouldn't do was so much malarkey. Farradyne would join the hellblossom operators if it gave him an opportunity to get out of this Venusian mire. He turned to Clevis, not realizing that only a few seconds had passed.

"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 them here. Good, bad or indifferent, Clevis, I'm your man no matter how you want it played. For the first time in years I want a bath and a clean shirt."

He was rustier than he had realized. It was not only the four years away from the levers of the control room and the split-second decision of high speed, it was the four years of rotting in skid row. His muscles were stringy, his skin was slaty, his eyes were slow. He was flab and ached 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 like a recruit.

It took him a month of practise on Mercury to get the hang of it again. A solid month of severe discipline, living in the ship and taking exercise and routine practise 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. 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.

Eventually they 'soloed' him; Donaldson sat in the easy chair in the salon below talking to Clevis, and he could hear them discussing problems unrelated to him. Their voices came over the squawk-box system clear enough to be understood. It gave Farradyne confidence. He took the Lancaster Eighty-One into the sky, circled Mercury and began landing procedure. For a moment, then, he relived that black day in his past:

He had called the spaceport, "Semiramide calling North Venus Tower."

"Aye-firm, Semiramide, from North Venus Tower."

"Semiramide requesting landing instructions; give with the dope, Tower."

"Tower to Semiramide. Beacon Nine at one hundred thousand feet, Landing Area Twelve. Traffic is one Middleton Seven-Six-Two at thirty thousand taking off from Beacon Two and one Lincoln Four-Four landing at Beacon Seven. Keep an eye peeled for a Burbank Eight-Experimental that's been scooting around at seventy thousand. That's all."

"Aye-firm, Tower."

Then had come the voice of a woman behind him. Just a murmur--perhaps a sigh of wonder from a woman who had just been shown for the first time in her life the intricacies of rack and panel of meter and gage and lever and shining device that surrounds the space pilot to demand every iota of his attention during take-off or landing. In Farradyne's recollection, there were two kinds of people: one kind stood in the center of such an array and held their hands together for fear of upsetting something; the other couldn't keep their damned hands off a button or a lever even if it meant their own electrocution.

There were thirty-three people aboard, thirteen of them women, and Farradyne wondered which of them it was. He didn't care. "Get the hell below," he snapped over his shoulder.

A young man made some sound. Farradyne was even sharper; a woman might wander up, interested, but a man should know that this was a deadly curiosity. "Take her below, you imbecile," he snarled.

An older man chimed in with something that sounded like an agreement to Farradyne's order; there was a very brief three-way argument that lasted until one of them fell for the lure of a dark pilot-lamp and an inviting push-button. The Semiramide bucked like a wasp-stung colt and the silver-dull sky over North Venus Spaceport whirled--

Farradyne was shocked out of his vivid daydream by the matter-of-fact voice of the Mercury Port's dispatcher: "Lancaster from Tower, you are a half degree off landing course. Correct."

Farradyne responded, "Instructions received, Tower. Will correct. Will correlate instruments after landing."

"Aye-firm, Lancaster Eighty-One."

Farradyne's solo landing was firm and easy; almost as good as he used to do in the days before--

He put it out of his mind and went below to Clevis and Donaldson. The latter asked him what had been the matter with the course.

"I hit a daydream of the Semiramide," admitted Farradyne.

"Better forget it."

"I came out of it," said Farradyne shortly.

"Okay?" Clevis looked at Donaldson. The pilot nodded. "Okay, Farradyne, you're ready. This is your ship; you're cleared to Ganymede on speculation. You'll play it from there. There's enough money in the strong-locker to keep you going for a long time on no pickups at all, and you'll get regular payment for the Pluto run. Just remember, no shenanigans."

"No games," promised Farradyne.

Clevis stood up. "I hope you mean that," he said earnestly. "If nothing else, remember that your--er--misfortune on Venus four years ago may have put you in a position to be a benefactor to the same mankind you hate. I hope you'll find that they are as quick to applaud a hero as to condemn a louse. Don't force me to admit that my hope of running down the hellblossom outfit was based on a bum hunch. Don't let me down, Farradyne."

Clevis left then, before Farradyne could find words. Donaldson left with him, but stopped at the spacelock to hurl at Farradyne: "Luck, fella."

An hour later Farradyne was a-space between Mercury and Ganymede. On his own in space for the first time in four long aching years. Not quite a free man, but at least no prisoner. He took a deep breath once he was out of control-range and could put the Lancaster on the autopilot. Gone were the smells and the rotting filth of the fungus fields; here were the bright clear stars in the velvety sky. Here was freedom--freedom of the body, at least. Maybe even freedom of the soul. But not freedom of the intellect, yet. He had a tough row to hoe and the tougher row of his innocence to turn up into the light of day.

But for the first time since he'd been thrown flat on his face, Farradyne felt that he had a chance.

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