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.