He entered the cafe and the music of the askarins swirled more loudly about his head and he looked through the smoke and colored light until he spotted Ciel sitting in a rear booth. The place was crowded. On the small dance floor before the orchestra nearly nude Venusian girls were going through the writhing motions of a serpentine dance. Their greenish skins shimmered iridescently. The sad-faced Venusian musicians on the band-stand waved their graceful, spatulated fingers over their curious, boxlike askarins, producing changing tones and overtones by the altered capacitance. A rocketman in the black and silver uniform of the Space Force was trying to stumble drunkenly out on to the floor with the dancers and his friends were holding him back. There was much laughter about the whole thing. The Venusian girls kept dancing and didn't change their flat, almost lifeless expressions. Ciel looked up without smiling when he got to the booth. She had a half-finished glass of meth before her. He tried a smile anyway. "Hello, baby." He sat down. She said, "I didn't really think you'd get here. I could have had dates with exactly eleven spacemen. I kept count." "You have been faithful to me, Cynara, in your fashion. I need a drink and don't want to wait for the waitress. Mind?" He took her half glass of meth and tossed it down. He felt the wonderful illusion of an explosion in his skull, and it seemed to him that his body was suddenly the strongest in the world and that he could whip everybody in the joint with one arm tied behind his back. He said, "Wow." Ciel tried a smile now. "It does that to you when you're not used to it." The first effect passed and he felt only the warmth of the drink. He signaled a waitress and ordered a couple more. "Don't forget to remind me to take a hangover pill before I go to work in the morning," he told Ciel. "You--you are going to work in the morning, then?" "Afraid I can't get out of it." "And the moon trip's off?" "Not off, just postponed. We'll get to it, don't worry." "Dick." "Yes?" "I can take it just so long, putting our vacation off and off and off." Her eyes were earnest, liquid and opaque. "I've been thinking about it. Trying to arrive at something. I'm beginning to wonder, Dick, if maybe we hadn't just better, well--call it quits, or something." He stared at her. "Baby, what are you saying?" * * * * * A sudden, fanfare-like blast from the orchestra interrupted. They looked at the dance floor. There was a flash of light, a swirling of mist, and within the space of a second the Venusian girls suddenly disappeared and their place was taken by a tall, hawk-nosed, dark-eyed man with a cloak slung dramatically over one shoulder. The audience applauded. "That's Marco, the new mentalist," said Pell.