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 

 Prev. P 4/127 next