tip-off; then the fact that she had become animated at the chance to start a scene of violence. Dope is dope and all of it works the same way. The first sniff is far from dangerous, but the second must be larger and the third larger still until the body craves a massive dose. With some dope the effect is physical, with others it is mental. With love lotus it was emotional. The woman had been on the emotional toboggan; her capacity for emotion had been dulled to such an extent that only a scene of real violence could cut through the scars to give her a reaction. Someone had slipped the girl a really top-notch dose of hellflower!

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Norma Hannon," she snapped. "And I don't suppose you remember Frank Hannon at all."

"Never met him."

"You killed him."

Farradyne felt a kind of hysteria; he wanted to laugh and he knew that once he started he could not stop easily. Then the feeling went away and he looked around the room.

Every eye in the place was on him, but as he met their eyes they looked down or aside or back to their own personal affairs. He knew the breed--spacemen, a strange mixture of high intelligence and hard roughness. Farradyne knew that to a man they understood that the most damaging thing they could do was to deny him the physical satisfaction of a fight. He could rant and roar and in the end he would be forced to leave the joint. It would be a lame retreat. A defeat.

He looked back at her; she stood there in front of him with her hands on her hips, swaying back and forth and relishing the emotional stimulus of hatred. She wanted more, he could see. Farradyne wanted out of here; the girl had done her part for him and could do no more. To take her along as a possible link to the hellblossom operators was less than a half-baked idea. She would only make trouble, because trouble was what she relished.

"I've got it now," she blurted. Her voice rose to a fever-pitch, her face cleared and took on the look of someone who is anticipating a real thrill. Norma Hannon was at that stage in the addiction where bloody murderous butchery would thrill her about to the same degree as a normal woman being kissed good-night at her front door. "I've got it now," she said and her voice rang out through the 

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