7
Cinnabar was inside the sunlight zone by a thousand miles and its sun was always in the same spot of the sky. It was a well-contrived city, built so that the streets were lighted either directly or by reflections. Cinnabar was also one of the show-cities of the system, but Farradyne found that it did not show him the right things. He could have learned as much about hellflowers on Terra merely because New York had a larger public library.
He tried everything he could think of but made no progress. His trail had turned to ice after Cahill's death. He loafed and he poked his nose in here and there and drank a bit and varied his routine from man-about-town to the spaceman concerned about his future. There was only one bright spot—his listing had been tentatively taken up by a group of schoolteachers on a sabbatical, who had seen Mercury and now wanted a cheap trip to Pluto.
Farradyne had accepted this job for about three weeks later. It gave him a payload to Pluto, and when he got there it would be time to do the subcontracting job Clevis had set up as a combined source of revenue and a means of contact. Once each month Farradyne was to haul a shipment of refined thorium ore from Pluto to Terra, a private job that paid well. In the meantime Farradyne could nose around Mercury to see what he could see. Then he could haul his schoolteachers to Pluto and pick up his thorium, which definitely made his actions look reasonably normal to the official eye.
On the end of the drums of semi-refined thorium there would be a spot of fluorescent paint, normally invisible. He was to wash off this spot so long as he had nothing to report. If it remained, then something was wrong with Farradyne; he had not turned up or he had something to report. Clevis would know what to do next.
And so Farradyne watched the date grow closer and closer and his hopes of having something to report grow less and less likely. He felt as though he had been given up, in fact he got to the point where he wondered how a man could get a love lotus if he wanted one. The prevalence of the dope seemed high enough, but as far as Farradyne was concerned it was harder than buying a real gold brick. There did not seem to be any for sale. He thought that perhaps his method of attack was wrong, and yet he did not know how to correct it.
He cursed under his breath at the futility of it, and realized that his curse must have been audible because he felt a touch on his elbow and a voice asking, "Is it that bad?"
He turned slowly, his mind working fast to think of something to say that would not be leading in the wrong direction. "I was—" he started, and then he saw that the voice which had been low-pitched enough to have been the voice of a man had come from the throat of a tall, dark-haired woman who sat beside him at the bar. "Just wondering what strangers do for excitement on Mercury," he finished lamely.
"Spaceman?"