“You don’t say. Where did you get her?”
“Found her,” West told him.
Laughter gurgled in the man’s throat. “So you found her, eh? Can you imagine that?”
He reached out and took West by the arm.
“Maybe we’ll have a lot to talk about,” he said. “We’ll have to compare our notes.”
Together they moved up the hillside, the man’s gloved hand clutching West by the arm.
“You’re Langdon,” West hazarded, as casually as he could speak.
The man chuckled. “Not Langdon. Langdon got lost.”
“That’s tough,” commented West. “Bad place to get lost on … Pluto.”
“Not Pluto,” said the man. “Somewhere else.”
“Maybe Darling, then …” and he held his breath to hear the answer.
“Darling left us,” said the man. “I’m Cartwright. Burton Cartwright.”
On the top of the tiny plateau in front of the laboratory, they stopped to catch their breath. The dim starlight painted the valley below with silver tracery.
West pointed. “That ship!”
Cartwright chuckled. “You recognize it, eh? The Alpha Centauri.”
“They’re still working on the drive, back on Earth,” said West. “Someday they’ll get it.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said Cartwright.
He swung back toward the laboratory. “Let’s go in. Dinner will be ready soon.”
The table was set with white cloth and shining silver that gleamed in the light of the flickering dinner tapers. Sparkling wine glasses stood in their proper places. The centerpiece was a bowl of fruit—but fruit such as West had never seen before.
Cartwright tilted a chair and dumped a thing that had been sleeping there onto the floor.
“Your place, Mr. West,” he said.
The thing uncoiled itself and glared at West with an eye of fishy hatred, purred with lusty venom and slithered out of sight.
Across the table Louis Nevin apologized. “The damn things keep sneaking through all the time. I suppose, Mr. West, you have trouble with them, too.”
“We tried rat traps,” said Cartwright, “but they were too smart for that. So we get along with them the best we can.”
West laughed to cover momentary confusion, but he found Nevin’s eyes upon him.
“Annabelle,” he said, “is the only one that ever bothered me.”
“You’re lucky,” Nevin told him. “They get to be pests. There is one of them that insists on sleeping with me.”
“Where’s Belden?” Cartwright asked.
“He ate early,” explained Nevin. “Said there were a few things he wanted to get done. Asked to be excused.”
He said to West, “James Belden. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”
West nodded.
He pulled back his chair, started to sit down, then jerked erect.
A woman had appeared in the doorway, a woman with violet eyes and platinum hair and wrapped in an ermine opera cloak. She moved forward and the light from the flaring tapers fell across her face. West stiffened at the sight, felt the blood run cold as ice within his veins.
For the face was not a woman’s face. It was like a furry skull, like a moth’s face that had attempted to turn human and had stuck halfway.
Down at the end of the table, Cartwright was chuckling.
“You recognize her, Mr. West?”
West clutched the back of his chair so hard that his knuckles suddenly were white.
“Of course I do,” he said. “The White Singer. But how did you bring her here?”
“So that’s what they call her back on Earth,” said Nevin.
“But her face,” insisted West. “What’s happened to her face?”
“There were two of them,” said Nevin. “One of them we sent to Earth. We had to fix her up a bit. Plastic surgery, you know.”
“She sings,” said Cartwright.
“Yes, I know,” said West. “I’ve heard her sing. Or, at least the other one … the one you sent to Earth with the made-over face. She’s driven practically everything else off the air. All the networks carry her.”
Cartwright sighed. “I should like to hear her back on Earth,” he said. “She would sing differently there, you know, than she sang here.”
“They sing,” interrupted Nevin, “only as they feel.”
“Firelight on the wall,” said Cartwright, “and she’d sing like firelight on the wall. Or the smell of lilacs in an April rain and her music would be like the perfume of lilacs and the mist of rain along the garden path.”
“We don’t have rain or lilacs here,” said Nevin and he looked, for a moment, as if he were going to weep.
Crazy, thought West. Crazy as a pair of bedbugs. Crazy as the man who’d drunk himself to death out on Pluto’s moon.
And yet, perhaps not so crazy.
“They have no mind,” said Cartwright. “That is, no mind to speak of. Just a bundle of nervous reactions, probably without the type of sensory perceptions that we have, but more than likely with other totally different sensory perceptions to make up for it. Sensitive things. Music to them is an expression of sensory impressions. They can’t help the way they sing any more than a moth can help killing himself against a candle-flame. And they’re naturally telepathic. They pick up thoughts and pass them along. Retain none of the thought, you understand, just pass it along. Like old fashioned telephone wires. Thoughts that listeners, under the spell of music, would pick up and accept.”
“And the beauty of it is,” said Nevin, “is that if a listener ever became conscious of those thoughts afterward and wondered about them, he would be convinced that they were his own, that he had had them all the time.”
“Clever, eh?” asked Cartwright.
West let out his breath. “Clever, yes. I didn’t think you fellows had it in you.”
West wanted to shiver and found he couldn’t and the shiver built up and up until it seemed his tautened nerves would snap.
Cartwright was speaking. “So our Stella is doing all right.”
“What’s that?” asked West.
“Stella. The other one of them. The one with the face.”
“Oh, I see,” said West. “I didn’t know her name was Stella. No one, in fact, knows anything about her. She suddenly appeared one night as a surprise feature on one of the networks. She was announced as a mystery singer, and then people began calling her the White Singer. She always sang in dim, blue light, you see, and
