Annabelle turned a somersault inside West’s zippered pocket. The man’s eyes caught the movement.
“What you got in there?” he demanded, suspiciously.
“Annabelle,” said West. “She’s—well, she’s something like a skinned rat, partly, with a face that’s almost human, except it’s practically all mouth.”
“You don’t say. Where did you get her?”
“Found her,” West told him.
Laughter gurgled in the man’s throat. “So you found her, eh? Can you imagine that?”
He reached out and took West by the arm.
“Maybe we’ll have a lot to talk about,” he said. “We’ll have to compare our notes.”
Together they moved up the hillside, the man’s gloved hand clutching West by the arm.
“You’re Langdon,” West hazarded, as casually as he could speak.
The man chuckled. “Not Langdon. Langdon got lost.”
“That’s tough,” commented West. “Bad place to get lost on … Pluto.”
“Not Pluto,” said the man. “Somewhere else.”
“Maybe Darling, then …” and he held his breath to hear the answer.
“Darling left us,” said the man. “I’m Cartwright. Burton Cartwright.”
On the top of the tiny plateau in front of the laboratory, they stopped to catch their breath. The dim starlight painted the valley below with silver tracery.
West pointed. “That ship!”
Cartwright chuckled. “You recognize it, eh? The Alpha Centauri.”
“They’re still working on the drive, back on Earth,” said West. “Someday they’ll get it.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said Cartwright.
He swung back toward the laboratory. “Let’s go in. Dinner will be ready soon.”
The table was set with white cloth and shining silver that gleamed in the light of the flickering dinner tapers. Sparkling wine glasses stood in their proper places. The centerpiece was a bowl of fruit—but fruit such as West had never seen before.
Cartwright tilted a chair and dumped a thing that had been sleeping there onto the floor.
“Your place, Mr. West,” he said.
The thing uncoiled itself and glared at West with an eye of fishy hatred, purred with lusty venom and slithered out of sight.
Across the table Louis Nevin apologized. “The damn things keep sneaking through all the time. I suppose, Mr. West, you have trouble with them, too.”
“We tried rat traps,” said Cartwright, “but they were too smart for that. So we get along with them the best we can.”
West laughed to cover momentary confusion, but he found Nevin’s eyes upon him.
“Annabelle,” he said, “is the only one that ever bothered me.”
“You’re lucky,” Nevin told him. “They get to be pests. There is one of them that insists on sleeping with me.”
“Where’s Belden?” Cartwright asked.
“He ate early,” explained Nevin. “Said there were a few things he wanted to get done. Asked to be excused.”
He said to West, “James Belden. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”
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.
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 Car
twright. “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.
“Of course,” decided Nevin. “There are four of us.”
Cartwright spread the napkin in his lap. “Perhaps, Louis, we might as well let Mr. West see the painting.”
Nevin hesitated. “I’m not quite satisfied, Cartwright …”
Cartwright clucked his tongue. “You’re too suspicious, Louis. He had the creature, didn’t he? He knew about your painting. There was only one way that he could have learned.”
Nevin considered. “I suppose you’re right,” he said.
“And if Mr. West should, by any chance, turn out to be an impostor,” said Cartwright, cheerfully, “we can always take the proper steps.”
Nevin said to West: “I hope you understand.”
“Perfectly,” said West.
“We must be very careful,” Nevin pointed out. “So few would understand.”
“So very few,” said West.
Nevin stepped across the room and pulled a cord that hung along the wall. One of the tapestries rolled smoothly back, fold on heavy fold. West, watching, held his breath at what he saw.
A tree stood in the foreground, laden with golden fruit, fruit that looked exactly like some of that in the bowl upon the table. As if someone had just stepped into the painting and picked it fresh for dinner.
Under the tree ran a path, coming up to the very edge of the canvas in such detail that even the tiny pebbles strewn upon it were clear to the eye. And from the tree the path ran back against a sweep of background, climbing into wooded hills.
For the flicker of a passing second, West could have sworn that he heard the whisper of wind in the leaves of the fruit-laden tree, that he saw the leaves tremble in the wind, that he smelled the fragrance of little flowers that bloomed along the path.
“Well, Mr. West?” Nevin asked, triumphantly.
“Why,” said West, ears still cocked for the sound of wind in leaves again. “Why, it almost seems as if one could step over and walk straight down that path.”
Nevin sucked in his breath with a sound that was neither gasp nor sigh, but somewhere in between. Down at the end of the table, Cartwright was choking on his wine, chuckling laughter bubbling out between his lips despite all his efforts to keep it bottled up.
“Nevin,” asked West, “have you ever thought of making another painting?”
“Perhaps,” said Nevin. “Why do you ask?”
West smiled. Through his brain words were drumming, words that he remembered, words a man had whispered just before he died.
“I was just thinking,” said West, “of what might happen if you should paint the wrong place sometime.”
“By Lord,” yelled Cartwright, “he’s got you there, Nevin. The exact words I’ve been telling you.”
Nevin started to rise from the table, and even as he did the rustling whisper of music filled the room. Music that relaxed Nevin’s hands from their grip upon the table’s edge, music that swept the sudden chill from between West’s shoulderblades.
Music that told of keen-toothed space and the blaze of stars. Music that had the whisper of rockets and the quietness of the void and the somber arches of eternal night.
Rosie was singing.
West sat on the edge of his bed and knew that he had been lucky to break away before there could be more questions asked. So far, he was certain, he’d answered those they asked without arousing too much suspicion, but the longer a thing like that went on the more likely a man was to make some slight mistake.
Now he would have time to think, time to try to untangle and put together some of the facts as they now appeared.
One of the minor monstrosities that infested the place climbed the bedpost and perched upon it, wrapping its long tail about it many times. It chittered at West and West looked at it and shuddered, wondering if it were making a face at him or if it really looked that way.
These slithery, chittering things … he’d heard of them somewhere before. He knew that. He’d even seen pictures of them at some time. Some other time and place, very long ago. Things like Annabelle and the creature Cartwright had dumped off the chair and the little satanic being that perched upon the bedstead.
That was funny, the thing Nevin had said about them … they keep sneaking through … not sneaking in, but through.
Nothing added up. Not ev
en Nevin and Cartwright. For there was about them some subtle tinge of character not human in its texture.
They had been working with hormones when something had happened that occasioned the warning sent to Earth. Or had there been a warning? Had the warning been a fake? Was there something going on here the Solar government didn’t want anyone to know?
Why had they sent Stella to Earth? Why were they so pleased that she was so well received? What was it Nevin had asked … and the government, it does not suspect? Why should the government suspect? What was there for it to suspect? Just a mindless creature that sang like the bells of heaven.
That hormone business, now. Hormones did funny things to people.
I should know, said West, talking to himself.
A little faster and a little quicker. A mental shortcut here and there. And you scarcely know, yourself, that you are any different. That’s how the race develops. A mutation here and another there and in a thousand years or two a certain percentage of the race is not what the race had been a thousand years before.
Maybe it was a mutation back in the Old Stone Age who struck two flints together and made himself a fire. Maybe another mutant who dreamed up a wheel and took a stoneboat and changed it to a wagon.
Slowly, he said, it would have to be slowly. Just a little at a time. For if it were too much, if it were noticeable, the other humans would kill off each mutation as it became apparent. For the human race cannot tolerate divergence from the norm, even though mutation is the process by which the race develops.
The race doesn’t kill the mutants any more. It confines them to mental institutions or it forces them into such dead-ends of expression as art or music, or it finds nice friendly exiles for them, where they will be comfortable and have a job to do and where, the normal humans hope, they’ll never know what they are.
It’s harder to be different now, he thought, harder to be a mutant and escape detection, what with the medical boards and the psychiatrists and all the other scientific mumbo-jumbo the humans have set up to guard their peace of mind.
Five hundred years ago, thought West, they would not have found me out. Five hundred years ago I might not have realized the fact myself.
I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories Page 26
