Unger bowed. A little ripple of something that was not quite sound
passed through the audience. Unger bowed again. He stretched himself
flat on the mat, adjusted the rest to support his head, and apparently
went to sleep. Johnson saw the Dreamer's eyes close, watched the chest
take on the even, regular rhythm of sleep.
The music changed, a slow dreamy tempo crept into it. Vee Vee's fingers
dug at Johnson's arm as if they were trying to dig under his hide for
protection. She was shivering. He reached for her hand, patted it. She
drew closer to him.
A few minutes earlier, she had been a very certain young woman, able
to take care of herself, and handle anyone around her. Now she was
suddenly uncertain, suddenly scared. In the Room of the Dreaming, she
had suddenly become a frightened child looking for protection.
"Haven't you ever seen this before?" he whispered.
"N--o." She shivered again. "Oh, Johnny...."
Under the circle of light pouring down from the ceiling, the Dreamer
lay motionless. Johnson found himself with the tendency to hold his
breath. He was waiting, waiting, waiting--for what? The whole situation
was senseless, silly, but under its apparent lack of coherence, he
sensed a pattern. Perhaps the path to the far-off stars passed this
way, through such scented and musical and impossible places as these
Rooms of the Dreamers. Certainly Martin thought so. And Johnson himself
was not prepared to disagree.
Around him, he saw that the Venusians were already going ... going ...
going.... Some of them were already gone. This was an old experience
to them. They went rapidly. Humans went more slowly.
The Venusian watchers had relaxed. They looked as if they were asleep,
perhaps in a hypnotic trance, lulled into this state by the music
and the perfume, and by something else. It was this something else
that sent Johnson's thoughts pounding. The Venusians were like opium
smokers. But he was not smoking opium. He was not in a hypnotic trance.
He was wide awake and very much alert. He was ...
_watching a space ship float in an endless void_.
As Unger had come into the spotlight, so the space ship had come into
his vision, out of nowhere, out of nothingness. The room, the Dreamer,
the sound of the music, the sweetness of the perfume, Vee Vee and
Caldwell were gone. They were no longer in his reality. They were not
in the range of his vision. It was as if they did not exist. Yet he
knew they did exist, the memory of them, and of other things, was out
on the periphery of his universe, perhaps of _the_ universe.
All he saw was the space ship.
It was a wonderful thing, perhaps the most beautiful sight he had seen
in his life. At the sight of it, a deep glow sprang inside of him.
Back when he had been a kid he had dreamed of flight to the far-off
stars. He had made models of space ships. In a way, they had shaped his
destiny, had made him what he was. They had brought him where he was
this night, to the Dream Room of a Venusian tavern.
The vision of the space ship floating in the void entranced and
thrilled him. Something told him that this was real; that here and now
he was making contact with a vision that belonged to time.
He started to his feet. Fingers gripped his arm.
"Please, darling. You startled me. Don't move." Vee Vee's voice. Who
was Vee Vee?
The fingers dug into his arm. Pain came up in him. The space ship
vanished. He looked with startled eyes at Vee Vee, at the Dream Room,
at Unger, dreaming on the mat under the spot.
"You ... you startled me," Vee Vee whispered. She released the grip on
his arm.
"But, didn't you see it?"
"See what?"
"The space ship!"
"No. No." She seemed startled and a little terrified and half asleep.
"I ... I was watching something else. When you moved I broke contact
with my dream."
"Your dream?"
He asked a question but she did not answer it. "Sit down, darling,
and look at your damned space ship." Her voice was a taut whisper of
sound in the darkened room. Johnson settled down. A glance to his left
told him that Caldwell was still sitting like a chunk of stone.... The
Venusians were quiet. The music had shifted. A slow languorous beat
of hidden drums filled the room. There was another sound present, a
high-speed whirring. It was, somehow, a familiar sound, but Johnson had
not heard it before in this place.
He thought about the space ship he had seen.
The vision would not come.
He shook his head and tried again.
Beside him, Vee Vee was silent, her face ecstatic, like the face of a
woman in love.
He tried again for the space ship.
It would not come.
Anger came up instead.
Somehow he had the impression that the whirring sound which kept
intruding into his consciousness was stopping the vision.
So far as he could tell, he was the only one present who was not
dreaming, who was not in a state of trance.
His gaze went to Unger, the Dreamer....
Cold flowed over him.
Unger was slowly rising from the mat.
The bland face and the body in the robe were slowly floating upward!