"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 

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