"Isn't much," admitted Cahill. "But enough. The—"
His voice trailed away as Norma's high heels came clicking up the circular stairway back toward the salon. "I thought I'd have a cigarette and a drink with company before I go to bed," she announced in a tone of voice that Farradyne had not heard her use before. With gracious deftness, she made three highballs of White Star Trail and water and handed two of them to the men. She let her fingers linger over Farradyne's very briefly, and over Cahill's longer. She lounged in a chair across the room from them, all curves and softness, with only that strange disinterested look in her eyes to give her away.
The evening had been a series of paradoxes; Norma's change from the 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 mechanical and therefore inclined to be frightfully chilled logic. Norma had claimed that she knew the emotions by name and definition; that once she had felt them but 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.
Yet it was only the blankness in her eyes that gave her away this evening. Otherwise she might have been a very charming companion.
She did not even force herself upon them; when her cigarette and her drink were gone, Norma excused herself quietly and 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 good-night and Farradyne went to his own stateroom to think.
He hadn't done bad, he thought; he had been on the trail for less than a hundred hours and already had a lead. Obviously the Semiramide disaster was the tip-off; no Sandman would go that far to establish a shady reputation.
Farradyne was prepared to go on 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, 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 steamroller 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 and then he could look his fellow man in the eye and ask him to forget one bad mistake.