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 the girl. 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 addiction where bloody, murderous butchery would thrill her only to the same degree as a normal woman being kissed goodnight at her front door. "I've got it now," she said, and her voice rang out through the barroom. "The only kind of a rascal that could dump a spacer and kill thirty-three people and then turn up with another spacer, is a big-time operator. You louse!" she screamed at him. Then she turned to the rest of the room.

"Fellows, meet Charles Farradyne, the big-time hellflower operator!"

Farradyne's nerves leaped. He knew his spacemen. A louse they could ignore but a dope-runner they hated viciously. Their faces changed from deliberate non-recognition of him to cold and calculated hatred, not of Farradyne, but of what he represented. Farradyne knew that he had better get out of here quickly or he would leave most of his skin on the floor.

Something touched him on the shoulder, hard. He snapped his head around. The bartender had rapped him with the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun.

"Get the hell out of here, Farradyne," said the barkeep between narrowed lips. "And take your rotten money with you!"

He scooped up the change he had dropped beside Farradyne's glass and hurled the original ten-dollar bill at him. It went over the bar and landed in a spittoon between the brass rail and the bar.

"Pick it up," growled the barkeep coldly. He waved the shotgun and forced Farradyne to retrieve the soggy bill. "Now get out—quick!" Then his voice rose above the growing murmur of angry men. "Sit down, God dammit! Every bloody one of you sit the hell down! We ain't going to have no trouble in here!" He covered the room with the shotgun.

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