Chapter IX

Shocked out of his sleep, he lay stunned and blinking for a moment, then leaped out of bed and raced to the corridor. The light blinded him at first, but not enough to stop him from seeing Cahill.

Cahill came along the tiny corridor listlessly, blood dribbling from under his left arm, running down his fingers and splashing to the floor. On Cahill's face was a stunned expression, full of incomprehension, semi-blank. Blood ran down his leg, across his ankle, and left red footprints on the floor.

Through whatever haze clouded Cahill's eyes, he saw Farradyne. He stumbled forward and reached for Farradyne, but collapsed in midstep like a limp towel, to stretch out at Farradyne's feet like a tired baby. His voice sighed out in a dying croon that sounded like a rundown phonograph.

Behind him came Norma Hannon. Her eyes were blazing with an unholy satisfied light and her body was alive and sinuous. A tiny automatic dangled from her right hand. Her lips curled as she came up to Cahill and poked at the man's hand with her bare foot.

"He--" she started to cry in a strident tone. Then the semi-hysteria faded and she looked down at Cahill again, relishing the situation.

Farradyne shuddered. What had happened was obvious. Cahill had tried to force himself upon Norma; she had killed him. Apparently Cahill had not been able to do more than clutch at the deep neckline of Norma's nightgown, which was slightly torn.

He leaned back against the wall and saw things in a sort of horrid slow motion. Under any normal circumstance, no jury in the solar system would have listened to an attempt to prosecute her. Under any normal circumstance, Farradyne could bury Cahill at space and report the incident at the first landing. But Farradyne couldn't stand too much investigation. And Norma Hannon was a love-lotus addict--a 'blank,' in Cahill's words.

"Now what?" asked Farradyne bitterly.

"He--" Her eyes opened wide again as she relived the scene and relished the violence.

"Have your fun," Farradyne growled. "What did you do? Let him get all the way in before you plugged him? No warning at all?"

"I hoped it was you," she said. "I wouldn't have killed you." Her voice was calm; she might have been saying 'kiss' instead of 'kill'. "Him I did not like."

"And you like me?"

"You I save to hate tomorrow," she said matter-of-factly.

"Why didn't you save him?"

"What was he to you?"

"He was my source."

"Source?" Norma looked blank. Then understanding crossed her face. "Hellblossoms," she said with a sneer that twisted her face. She stepped past Cahill's body and handed the tiny automatic to Farradyne, who took it dumbly just because it was proffered. She went on into the salon and sat down.

Farradyne wanted to hurt her, to reach through that wall of emotional scar and make her feel something besides anger. Remorse, perhaps.

"Source," he nodded, following her. "Love lotus. I'd have given you one, Norma."

She made a sound like a bitter laugh. "No good, Farradyne. What good is one love lotus?"

"I don't know," he said simply. "I've never had one."

Her laugh was shrill. Then she bawled at him like a fishwife, "What an operator you are, Farradyne! You big fumbling boob with your stolen spacer and your forged license, making like a big wind and blowing like a breeze! Fah!"

She got up as suddenly as she had sat down. She paused on her way down the corridor to kick Cahill's head with her bare foot. The man's head moved aside limply.

* * * * *

Farradyne stayed where he was until he heard her door slam shut. Then he got up and went toward his own room, pausing at the door to look at Cahill. He should be moved, thought Farradyne.

He found himself looking down on the dead man with a strangely detached feeling, as if he were watching a rather poorly plotted play. He relived the scene although he tried to shut it out of his mind. Shutting out would not work, and so he went through it detail by detail, minutely, from the sound of the pistol shot to the last dying groan from Cahill's tortured throat. The memory of that dying sound jarred on Farradyne's nerves. There had been something strange about it--

It had been a discordant cry.

Farradyne found himself making a completely useless analysis, itemizing things that surely could not matter. The cry had been a discord.

His mind wandered a bit as he considered the word. A series of atonal notes do not make a discord. A discord comes when atonal notes are sounded at the same time. The former can be pleasant to the ear, the latter not.

And then a chill hit him. He felt like a man who has just been told that he had one more question to answer before winning the prize on a quiz show.

Cahill's moan had been a full discord.

With a sudden leap of the mind, Farradyne was back in the Semiramide, hearing three voices behind him. They had found one skeleton afterwards. Then his mind leaped to Brenner, who had emitted an approving grunt when he saw Norma come around the tail structure of the Lancaster with the sun shining through her skirt. He had no proof, no proof. Brenner's grunt had no discord but none the less a mingling of tones. Three voices? Maybe more?

Maybe he was not sure of the first. Brenner's sound had been very brief--maybe he was convincing himself. But Cahill's death-cry had been most certainly polytonal. And they both were love-lotus operators.

It might mean something or it might not. Farradyne put his head back and tried to make a series of sounds. He moaned. He gargled, and he tried to hum and say something at the same time. Maybe the stunt could be cultivated after much practise, and maybe it was used as a password.

More than anything Farradyne needed corroboration.

It was a weak hope, but he stepped over Cahill's body and rapped on Norma's door.

She opened the door after a moment and said, "Now what?"

* * * * *

He looked down into her glazed eyes, hoping to see some flicker of expression that showed some interest in anything. "Norma, you've a good logical mind--tell me, did you notice anything about Cahill's last cry?"

"No."

"Nothing odd?"

"I've not seen men die very often. What was strange about it?" The eyes unglazed a bit, but Farradyne could not tell whether this was awakened interest or merely the recapture of the feeling she had enjoyed before.

"It sounded to me like a discordant moan."

"It was discordant."

"Not the way you mean. It sounded to me like there were three or four distinct tones all going at once."

"Stop beating that dead horse," she told him flatly. "It's the same chorus you used to sing about the three people in your control room, remember?"

"Brenner made a sound like that, too," he said.

"A piglike sound," she said scornfully. "Forget it, Farradyne. Your evidence consists of one man surprised at the sight of a good-looking woman and one man whose throat was coming apart in death. Forget it." She shut the door to her room in his face abruptly.

Farradyne looked down at Cahill's body with regret. A gunman and a love-lotus operator was not likely to have his absence noticed among the kind of people who could afford to start asking questions of the officials, and there might be a chance that Cahill's absence would cause the same people to ask a question or two of Farradyne.

Farradyne would have liked to keep the body. But hauling a slain corpse--he did not consider it murder--into a doctor's office and asking for an autopsy on the throat could not be done. Nor could Farradyne do it himself. He could perform a fair job of setting a broken bone and he could treat a burn or a cut, but he would not recognize a larynx if he saw it.

Grunting distastefully, Farradyne hauled the body to the scuttle port and consigned it to space with a terse, "See you in Hell, Cahill!"

Sleep did not come to Farradyne for a long time.