"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.