Chapter XXIV

Farradyne again ignored the oddness of the sky to examine the small auxiliary panel fastened to one edge of the main control panel. It contained a small meter calibrated in arbitrary units of three colors. The needle stood high, about three-quarter scale, in the middle of the blue region. Below the meter was the toggle switch, and on either side of the switch were flat buttons, blue to the right and red to the left. Behind the panel was a metal box; emerging from the box a cable no longer than a lead pencil snaked away into the maze of wiring behind the main equipment.

He considered the thing carefully. Booby traps were unlikely, but there were destruction-charges used to prevent the capture of secret equipment.

The destruction triggers usually were protected switches, placed in such a position and built in such a manner that when the crew wished to destroy their secret devices, they had to do it deliberately.

So Farradyne eyed the small panel critically and decided that while there must be some destruction-device included in such a highly secret piece of gear, it was not on the front panel where it might be pressed accidentally or in the heat of excitement. He was even certain that not very much could happen if he tinkered with the switches, so long as he was in space and a few light years from anything large and hard. It was also extremely unlikely that any gear of this sort would be easy to foul-up. The destruction of the gadget in space would leave the ship and crew marooned in the void between the stars.

He took the cross-bar toggle in his hand and pulled. It resisted his efforts, and so he tried pushing. It moved down in a wide arc and as he moved the switch down, the pressure of the drive suddenly caught up with the seat of his pants and Farradyne was sitting in his pilot's chair instead of floating above it by a fraction of an inch. He thrust the toggle all the way down and a full one-gravity of force came on.

Above his head the stars resumed their familiar appearance.

The needle on the meter stayed where it was, at three-quarter scale.

Farradyne chuckled aloud. _He had it now._ One button to start the equipment for warm-up period; the toggle to control its functioning; and the other button to cut the gear off when the flight was concluded. It was as simple as that, and although Farradyne had sat in many a spaceman's bar and heard arguments as to the possibilities of exotic operation of alien equipment, he knew that mechanical and electrical principles are universal and that their exploitation would most likely lead toward universal simplification.

Then, being practical, Farradyne dropped the subject and began to think about where he was, where he had come from, and where he was going. He put his eye to the point-of-drive telescope and caught a small star on the cross-hairs. This was undoubtedly Sol, considerably tinier than its appearance from Pluto, but of the right color. A true stellar point, it was, which meant that he must be light years from it.

He squinted through the point-of-departure periscope and cut the drive so that the flare would not blind him. Behind was the constellation of Lyra and on the cross-hairs was another tiny star of no particular consequence.

He got out his Spaceman's Star Catalog and opened it to Lyra. Among the listings were several semi-dwarfs of the F, G and K classifications and one of them, about twenty-seven light years from Sol, was located in the right position, so far as Farradyne could determine--

The sound of a whimper cut into his thoughts, and he remembered the possibilities of the scene down in the salon. He snapped on the intercom and listened, wondering whether he could actually sit there and let Norma go to work on Carolyn. Man's inhumanity to man was a pale and insignificant affair compared to the animal ferocity of a woman about to settle up a long-standing account with another woman.

His curiosity got the better of him. He sauntered down the stairs. Norma stood before the bound Carolyn, her eyes glassy and her face impersonal. In one hand she held a small bottle of acid from Farradyne's workshop and in the other hand she held a little pointed glass-bristle brush. As Farradyne came down the stairs, Norma dipped the brush in the acid and approached Carolyn, holding the brush as she would a pencil.

Farradyne said, "Wait."

* * * * *

Norma looked at him. "Don't stop me," she said. "I'm going to write 'Hellflower' across that alabaster forehead."

Farradyne shuddered. His imagination had stopped working at the point of removing fingernails and applying cigarettes to the skin. Now it leaped forward. A formerly flawless skin covered with scar-tissue lettering of accusals, viciousness, and probably lewdness.

"Are you ready to talk?" Farradyne asked Carolyn.

"I'll talk. I'll talk because you'll never get a chance to use the information."

"You talk, and I'll take my chances on that."

Norma frowned. "Please, Farradyne?"

"Maybe later," he said soothingly. "Go sit down and wait."

Norma turned and headed for the divan.

"Spill it," he said to Carolyn. "What the hell's going on, and why?"

"This is war," she said.

"Like hell it's war. This is backstabbing. But it'll be war as soon as we can fight back."

"It is war," she repeated. "The process should not be unfamiliar to you; you've done it yourselves time and again. First you weaken the enemy by undermining his resources, by lowering his resistance, by turning his efforts towards advancement against some stumbling block. Then--"

"I presume that doping the women of a race with hellflowers is an honorable practise?" sneered Farradyne.

"It is better than dropping a mercurite bomb. We got to interstellar space first and met another people as racially jealous as we are: your people. We could have made a landing openly, but if we had, the warfare you're threatening would have happened long ago. And there would be nothing left of either of our people but smouldering planets to mark the meeting-place of two stellar peoples."

"You can say this, knowing that no Solan has the barest inkling of how this doodad in the hold can permit us to travel faster than light?"

* * * * *

Carolyn looked at him contemptuously. "You're an idealist, Charles," she said. "I'll tell you what would happen. You'd greet us with cheers and invite us in--long enough to steal our warp-generator. You'd trade us your medical science for our chemistry and your electronics for our gravities, and then you'd meet us face to face to prove to yourselves that even though you got a second-place start, you could move faster and hit harder than we could. You'd carry your war to us, and we'd carry our war to you, and there would be cause and effect, and attack and retaliation, with each blow a bit more vicious until your people would be planting mercurite at the same time we were. And then, as I say, the next interstellar race to visit this region of the sky would find the radioactive remains of two ex-cultures. I know, because both our people come of the same stock."

"All right," he snapped. "So you've justified your actions to yourself."

"_Of course._ Everybody is self-justified."

"And you justify the doping of our race by calling it better than meeting us face to face."

"Remember your own history. Even before the First Atomic War everybody realized that warfare was a bankrupt measure, to be undertaken only after all else failed. You conducted your conflicts under cover, by boring from within, by undermining the national structure. Similarly, when your people have been lowered in resistance, we shall move in quietly and make of you an asset to our economy, instead of a ruined structure that must be helped."

"Wonderful. However, I don't cotton to the idea of being an abject supplicant to your superior kind."

There was a yelp from behind him and he whirled to see Norma Hannon about to letter something on Brenner's forehead.

He raced across the floor and caught her hand just before the acid-laden brush touched Brenner's skin. "Norma," he said quietly. "Don't."

She looked up at him reproachfully. "You promised me--"

"Later."

"That's what you're always saying," she complained. "Then all you do is talk a lot of guff with that female over there."

"Okay. I forgot." He turned to Brenner. "Next question: how do we navigate that ka-dodie of yours?"

Brenner laughed harshly. "You know so much, why don't you go ahead and try it?"

"Now, Farradyne?" pleaded Norma.

"Not yet. I'm going to try his suggestion." Farradyne inspected the tapings and satisfied himself. Then he turned toward the stairway.

"Wait," said Brenner testily. "Take her with you, dammit. I don't want my face lettered with words found in washrooms."

"Somehow it seems appropriate."

"All right. The toggle fades the generator on and off. The red button stops the equipment. The green button is for start. Wait until the meter reads in the upper block before using the toggle. The speed for this particular equipment is approximately two light years per hour in Solarian measurement. We're about six hours from Sol now. Go ahead and run us close to Sol so we can finish this gambit."

* * * * *

Farradyne took Norma by the hand and led her up the stairs. She protested and hung back--but once in the control room, she crossed briskly and turned the intercom so that sound from the salon would come through clear and strong, but sound from the control room would not go out. Then she turned from the panel and faced Farradyne with the beginning of a soft smile on her face.

"That was the hardest job I've ever had," she breathed.

Visibly, she relaxed. An aliveness came around her eyes and her mouth spread into a brief smile. She snapped her bottle of acid into one of the many spring-holds in the control room. Then she walked over to the co-pilot's seat and dropped into it. She rested, with her head tilted back.

Farradyne watched with puzzlement. "Norma," he asked, "how long after a sniff of love lotus does the effect last?"

"Seldom more than an hour. I have been free of it for quite some time."

"But you had a hell of a dose."

She took a deep breath. "I could feel it leaving," she said. "The effects faded after you took the flower out of my hair, but instead of fading away with a dulling of the senses, the urges I felt diminished without leaving me emotionless. I think I'm cured of it."

Farradyne recoiled a bit.

"No, Charles, this is no trick. This is not an attempt to lead you on. I'm cured, I think, honestly."

"But how?"

"One thing no one has tried is to place the addict in a veritable bath of the things. Perhaps that did it--an overdose--Anyway, it's wonderful to feel normal again." She sat up in the chair and leaned toward him. She reached for his hand and drew him forward and kissed him on the lips. For a moment they clung together, then she moved away from him slowly. "It's all back again," she said quietly. "The quickened pulse and the pleasant tingle. I'm a woman again, Charles. Let's go home so I can enjoy it."

It was almost too good to be true--but it had to be.

Farradyne gave her hand a squeeze. "Done!" he said. His other hand lifted the cross-bar toggle, and the pressure of the springed seats threw them up against their hold-down straps.

Two light years an hour. Farradyne ran the Lancaster for exactly six hours and then cut the superdrive. Together, they inspected the heavens and found a brilliant yellow star on their quarter. Farradyne turned the Lancaster to face it and raised the toggle slowly; Sol changed color, racing toward the blue and the violet first, then turning a dull red and raising through the spectrum again until it became violet once more. It went through another spectrum-change and grew in size like a toy balloon hitched to a high-pressure air line, until its flare frightened the pilot. He shoved the toggle down and Sol winked back into the familiar disc of blinding white, about the size as seen from Mars.

Farradyne oriented himself, consulted the spaceman's ephemeris and pointed at a large unwinking point. "Home," he said.

Two light years an hour. Farradyne went to the computer and made some calculations. He returned, pointed the Lancaster at Terra and flicked the toggle up and down, counting off a few seconds for drive. Sol whiffled past, changing in color as its position changed in the astrodome; and when Farradyne drove the toggle down, Terra was a distinct disc in the sky above them.