passengers all nervous and upset. If they do that again, business will be bad; maybe even now it will be bad. Play something!"

He hops out in front with his baton and gives us a quick one-two, and we all swing into "Space On My Hands," real loud so as to get people's minds off things which Frankie wants to get people's minds off of.

Stella Starlight gets up to sing, but she looks more like she would rather do something else. She stares at Hotlips and at the trumpet on his lips and begins to quiver like she is about to do a dance.

I remember she says she does not like high notes, and this song has some pretty well up in the stratosphere, especially for the trumpet section, which is Hotlips.

She is frowning like maybe she is thinking real hard about something and is surprised her thoughts do no good. Her face becomes waxy and there is a frightened look on it.

She quivers some more, as the notes go up and up and up. Then she lets out a shriek, like maybe she is going to pieces.

And then she does. Actually.

Right before our popping eyeballs she goes to pieces.

As each one in the band sees what is going on, he stops playing, until finally Hotlips is the only one. But the trumpet is in Hotlips' hand, and the music is coming from the recording machine we place under his chair. The notes are clear and smooth, and you can almost feel the air shaking with them.

But nobody notices the music or where it comes from. They are too busy watching the thrush, Stella Starlight.

She stands there, her face as white as clay, shaking like a carrot going through a mixmaster. And then tiny cracks appear on her face, on her arms, even in her dress, and then a large one appears in her forehead and goes down through her body. She splits in the middle like a cracked walnut, and there in the center, floating three feet from the floor is a small flying cuspidor.

Nobody in the room says anything. They just stand there, bug-eyed and frightened like anything. Somewhere, across the room, a woman faints. I do not feel too well myself, and I am afraid to look to see how Hotlips takes this.

There is no sound, but I hear a voice in my mind and know that the others hear it too. The voice sounds like it is filled with wire and metal and is not exactly human. It says:

"You win, Hotlips Grogan. I, as advance agent in disguise, tell you this. We will go away and leave you and your people alone. We place a mental block in your mind, but you outsmart us, and now you know our weakness. We cannot stand high sounds which you can play so easy on your trumpet. We find ourselves a home someplace else."

With that, the cuspidor shoots across the room and plows right through the wall.

"That's the engine room!" Frankie wails.

There is a sudden explosion from the other side of the wall, and everybody decides all at once they would like to be someplace else, and they all pick the same spot. The space ferry is pretty crowded, but we jam aboard it and drift away from the Saturn—musicians, waiters and paying customers all sitting in each other's laps.

The Saturn is wobbling around, with flames shooting out at all angles, and Frankie is holding his head and moaning. In the distance, you can just about make out little specks of cuspidors heading for the wild black yonder.

So all is well that ends well, and this is it.

Frankie uses his insurance money to open a rest home on Mars for ailing musicians.

Hotlips is all broken up, in a manner of speaking, over Stella Starlight's turning out to be not human, but he consoles himself with a good job playing trumpet in a burlesque house where the girls wear costumes made of glass and other brittle stuff.

As for me, Mamie gets me a job playing piano at the place where she works, and everything is okay except for one thing. When Mamie is around I cannot seem to concentrate on my playing. I feel a funny feeling in my stomach, like maybe it is full of supersuds or