come out of it. You love me. You know you do. This is crazy!”

The bottle had mysteriously vanished. He went behind the bar to find another. Then, with a conviction that made him freeze motionless, he knew that there was someone else in the room.

He was hidden in the shadows where he stood. Only his eyes moved as he looked toward the newcomers. There were two of them, and they were not human.

They—moved—toward the juke-box, in a rather indescribable fashion. One of them pulled out a small, shining cylinder from the juke-box’s interior.

Foster, sweat drying on his cheeks, could hear them thinking.

“Current report for the last twenty-four hours, Earth time. Put in a fresh recording cylinder. Change the records, too.”

Foster watched them change the records. Austin had said that the disks were replaced daily. And the blond man, dying in the hospital, had said other things. It couldn’t be real. The creatures he stared at could not exist. They blurred before his eyes.

“A human is here,” one of them thought. “He has seen us. We had better eliminate him.”

The blurry, inhuman figures came toward him. Foster, trying to scream, dodged around the end of the bar and ran toward the juke-box. He threw his arms around its unresponsive sides and gasped:

“Stop them! Don’t let them kill me!”

He couldn’t see the creatures now but he knew that they were immediately behind him. The clarity of panic sharpened his vision. One title on the juke-box’s list of records stood out vividly. He thrust his forefinger against the black button beside the title “Love Me Forever.”

Something touched his shoulder and tightened, drawing him back.

Lights flickered within the juke-box. A record swung out. The needle lowered into its black groove.

The juke-box started to play “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.”

 Prev. P 15/15