"I'm serious."
"Stop beating that dead horse," she told him flatly. "It's the same chorus you used to sing about the three men in your control room, remember?"
"Brenner made a sound like that, too," he said.
"A pig-like sound," she said scornfully. "Forget it, Farradyne. You've convinced nobody but yourself, and your evidence consists of one man surprised at the sight of a good-looking woman and one man whose throat was coming apart in death. Forget it." She shut the door to her room in his face abruptly.
Farradyne looked down at Cahill's body with regret. Not that Cahill's death touched him in any way but mild shock and distress at the loss of his link to the hellblossom gang. A gunman and a love lotus operator was not likely to have his absence noticed among the kind of people who could afford to start asking a lot of questions of the officials, and there might be a fair chance that Cahill's disappearance would cause the same people to ask a question or two of Farradyne.
He would have liked to keep the body. But hauling a slain corpse—he did not consider it murder—into a doctor's office and asking for an autopsy on the throat could not be done. Nor could Farradyne do it himself. He could perform a fair job of setting a broken bone and he could treat a burn or a cut, but he would not recognize a larynx if he saw it. And although he knew better intellectually, he instinctively considered a vocal cord as a stretched string of some sort that vibrated in the air-stream.
Distastefully Farradyne hauled the body to the scuttle-port and consigned it to space with a terse, "See you in hell, Cahill."
6
The Lancaster came down at Denver. Before Farradyne had the landing ramp out, a spaceport buggy came careening across the field to stop almost at the base of the ship.