“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 no one ever saw her face too plainly, although everyone imagined, of course, that it was beautiful.
“The network made no bones about her being an alien being. She was represented as a member of a mystery race that Juston Lloyd had found in the Asteroids. You remember Lloyd, the New York press agent.”
Nevin was leaning across the table. “And the people, the government, it does not suspect?”
West shook his head. “Why should it? Your Stella is a wonder. Everyone is batty over her. The newspapers went wild. The movie people—”
“And the cults?”
“The cults,” said West, “are doing fine.”
“And you?” asked Cartwright, and in the man’s rumbling voice West felt the challenge.
“I found out,” he said. “I came here to get cut in.”
“You know exactly what you are asking?”
“I do,” said West, wishing that he did.
“A new philosophy,” said Cartwright. “A new concept of life. New paths for progress. Secrets the human race never has suspected. Remaking the human civilization almost overnight.”
“And you,” said West, “right at the center, pulling all the strings.”
“So,” said Cartwright.
“I want a few to pull myself.”
Nevin held up his hand. “Just a minute, Mr. West. We would like to know just how—”
Cartwright laughed at him. “Forget it, Louis. He knew about your painting. He had Annabelle. Where do you suppose he found out?”
“But—but—” said Nevin.
“Maybe he didn’t use a painting,” Cartwright declared. “Maybe he used other methods. After all, there are others, you know. Thousands of years ago men knew of the place we found. Mu, probably. Atlantis. Some other forgotten civilization. Just the fact that West had Annabelle is enough for me. He must have been there.”
West smiled, relieved. “I used other methods,” he told them.
CHAPTER THREE
The Painting
A robot came in, wheeling a tray with steaming dishes.
“Let’s sit down,” suggested Nevin.
“Just one thing,” asked West. “How did you get Stella back to Earth? None of you could have taken her. You’d have been recognized.”
Cartwright chuckled. “Robertson,” he said. “We had one ship and he slipped out. As to the recognition, Belden is our physician. He also, if you remember, is a plastic surgeon of no mean ability.”
“He did the job,” said Nevin, “for both Robertson and Stella.”
“Nearly skinned us alive,” grumbled Cartwright, “to get enough to do the work. I’ll always think that he took more than he really needed, just for spite. He’s a moody beggar.”
Nevin changed the subject. “Shall we have Rosie sit with us?”
“Rosie?” asked West.
“Rosie is Stella’s sister. We don’t know the exact relationship, but we call her that for convenience.”
“There are times,” explained Cartwright, “when we forget her face and let her sit at the table’s head, as if she were one of us. As if she were our hostess. She looks remarkably like a woman, you know. Those wings of hers are like an ermine cape, and that platinum hair. She lends something to the table … a sort of—”
“An illusion of gentility,” said Nevin.
“Perhaps we’d better not tonight,” decided Cartwright. “Mr. West is not used to her. After he’s been here awhile—”
He stopped and looked aghast.
“We’ve forgotten something,” he announced.
He rose and strode around the table to the imitation fireplace and took down a bottle that stood on the mantelpiece—a bottle with a black silk bow tied around its neck. Ceremoniously, he set it in the center of the table, beside the bowl of fruit.
“It’s a little joke we have,” said Nevin.
“Scarcely a joke,” contradicted Cartwright.
West looked puzzled. “A bottle of whisky?”
“But a special bottle,” Cartwright said. “A very special bottle. Back in the old days we formed a last man’s club, jokingly. This bottle was to be the one the last man would drink. It made us feel so adventuresome and brave and we laughed about it while we labored to find hormones. For, you see, none of us thought it would ever come to pass.”
“But now,” said Nevin, “there are only three of us.”
“You are wrong,” Cartwright reminded him. “There are four.”
Both of them looked at West.