The Hellflower by George O. Smith — Read

Cinnabar was inside of 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 from reflections. Cinnabar was also one of the show-cities of the solar system; but Farradyne found that it did not show him the right things. He could have learned more about hellflowers on Terra because New York had a larger Public Library than Cinnabar.

Farradyne 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 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.