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.