find another ship," he said hurriedly.

Farradyne nodded curtly at Martin's back. He looked down at the girl. He felt again the powerful impulse to plead his case, to explain. But he knew that this was the wrong thing to do. Martin had refused the job once Farradyne had been identified. This might be the start of the game that Clevis wanted. Farradyne could louse it up for fair by saying the wrong thing here and now. So instead of making some appeal to the woman, Farradyne eyed her coldly.

There was something incongruous about her. She looked like the standard tomato of the spacelanes; she dressed the part and she acted it. The rough-hewn language and the cynical bitterness were normal enough but her acceptable grammar and near-perfect diction were strange. He had catalogued her as a drunken witch but she was neither drunk nor a witch. Nor was she a thrill-seeking female out slumming for the fun of it. She belonged in the "Spaceman's Bar" but not among the lushes.

He caught it then. He had been too far from it for too long. The glazed, bored eyes, the completely blasé attitude gave it away first; then the fact that she had become animated at the chance to start a scene. 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. In some dope it is physical, in others the effect is mental. With the love lotus it was emotional. The woman had been on an emotional toboggan; her capacity for emotion had been dulled to such an extent that only a scene of real violence could cut through the emotional scars to give her a reaction. Someone had slipped the girl a really topnotch 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 looked at them and met their eyes, they looked down or aside. He knew the breed, they were spacemen, a very strange mixture of high intelligence and hard roughness; Farradyne knew that to a man they understood that the most damaging thing they could do to him was to deny him the physical satisfaction of 

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