thickly.

Lois asked a question.

“I should have checked up before,” he answered her. “Maybe I can find out—oh, nothing, Lois. Nothing at all.”

Then he went after Austin. Austin gave him the blond man’s name and, an hour later, Foster found himself sitting by a white hospital bed, looking down at a man’s ravaged face under faded blond hair. Brashness, judicious tipping, and a statement that he was a relative had got him this far. Now he sat there and watched and felt questions die as they formed on his lips.

When he finally mentioned the juke-box, it was easier. He simply sat and listened.

“They carried me out of the bar on a stretcher,” the blond man said. “Then a car skidded and came right at me. I didn’t feel any pain. I still don’t feel anything. The driver—she said she’d heard somebody shouting her name. Chloe. That startled her so much she lost control, and hit me. You know who yelled ‘Chloe,’ don’t you?”

Foster thought back. There was a memory somewhere.

The juke-box had begun to play “Chloe,” and the amplification had gone haywire, so the song had bellowed out thunderously for a short time.

“I’m paralyzed,” the blond man said. “I’m dying, too. I might as well. I think I’ll be safer. She’s vindictive and plenty smart.”

“She?”

“A spy. Maybe there’s all sorts of gadgets masquerading as—as things we take for granted. I don’t know. They substituted that juke-box for the original one. It’s alive. No, not it! She! It’s a she, all right!”

And—“Who put her there?” The blond man said, in answer to Foster’s question. “Who are—they? People from another world or another time? Martians? They want information about us, I’ll bet, but they don’t dare appear personally. They plant gadgets that we’ll take for granted, like that juke-box, to act as spies. Only this one got out of control a little. She’s smarter than the others.”

He pushed himself up on the pillow, his eyes glaring at the little radio beside him.

“Even that!” he whispered. “Is that an ordinary, regular radio? Or is it one of their masquerading gadgets, spying on us?”

He fell back.

“I began to 

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