"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! III An invisible force seemed to twitch at Johnson's skin, nipping it here and there with a multitude of tiny pinches, like invisible fleas biting him. "This is it!" a voice whispered in his mind. "This is what you came to Venus to see. This ... this...." The first voice went into silence. Another voice took its place. "This is another damned vision!" the second voice said. "This ... this is something that is not real, that is not possible! No Venusian Dreamer, and no one else, can levitate, can defy the laws of gravity, can float upward toward the ceiling. Your damned eyes are tricking you!" "We are not tricking you!" the eyes hotly insisted. "It is happening. We are seeing it. We are reporting accurately to you. That Venusian Buddha is levitating. We, your eyes, do not lie to you!" "You lied about the space ship!" the second voice said. "We did not lie about the space ship!" the eyes insisted. "When our master saw that ship we were out of focus, we were not reporting. Some other sense, some other organ, may have lied, but we did not." "I--" Johnson whispered. "I am your skin," another voice whispered. "I am covered with sweat." "We are your adrenals. We are pouring forth adrenalin." "I am your pancreas. I am gearing you for action." "I am your thyroid. I...."