She let her fingers linger over Farradyne's very briefly, and over Cahill's longer. She lounged in a chair across from them, all curves and softness, with only that strange, disinterested look in her eyes to give her away.

Farradyne found this a bit difficult to explain to himself. The evening had been a series of paradoxes; Norma's change from vixen to the lady of languid grace did not ring true. He had been aware of her ability to reason coldly, brought about by her burned-out emotional balance which was so dulled that her thinking was mechanically unemotional and therefore inclined to be frightfully chilled logic. But Farradyne's grasp of the problem was incomplete. Norma had claimed that she knew the emotions by name and definition, that once she had felt them, but that now she only knew how they worked. Farradyne found it hard to believe that she was so well-schooled in her knowledge that she could put on the act of having them when she obviously did not.

She did not even force herself upon them; when her cigarette and her drink were gone, Norma got up, excused herself and quietly went below.

"Me too," said Cahill.

Farradyne led him down to a stateroom and waved him in. "See you in the morning," he said. Cahill nodded his goodnight and Farradyne went on to his own room to think.

He hadn't done bad. Of course he did not really know how far some of Clevis' other operators had gone, but Farradyne had been on the trail for less than a hundred hours and already had a lead. Obviously the fact of the Semiramide was the tip-off; no Sandman would go that far to establish a shady reputation.

Farradyne was prepared to go as far as he had to. The idea of actually running love lotus was not appealing, but the SAND office had been fighting the things for a half century, watching helplessly while the moral fibre of the race was being undermined by the nasty things and somehow it was far better to let a few more lives be wrecked by hellflowers than to save a few and let the whole thing steamroll into monumental destruction. Farradyne still had to duck a few people who might like to nail his hide to a barn door, but sooner or later he would come out on top of this mess and then he could look his fellow man in the eye and ask him to forget one bad mistake—that wasn't even Farradyne's so far as he himself knew.

Being on his first step eased his mind somewhat. He would be rid of Norma in the morning sometime and on his way with Cahill, 

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