Chapter II

It was a huge, semi-illumined room, with tier on tier of circling ramps rising up from an open space at the bottom. There ought to have been a stage there at the bottom, but there wasn't. Instead there was an open space, a mat, and a head rest. Up at the top of the circling ramps the room was in darkness, a fit hiding place for ghosts or Venusian werewolves. Pillows and a thick rug covered the circling ramps.

The soul-quickening Perfume of the Dreamer was stronger here. The throbbing of the lutes was louder. It was Venusian music the lutes were playing. Human ears found it inharmonious at first, but as they became accustomed to it, they began to detect rhythms and melodies that human minds had not known existed. The room was pleasantly cool but it had the feel of dampness. A world that was rarely without pelting rain would have the feel of dampness in its dreaming rooms.

The music playing strange harmonies in his ears, the perfume sending tingling feelings through his nose, Johnson entered the Room of the Dreamer. He suspected that other forces, unknown to him, were catching hold of his senses. He had been in dreaming rooms many times before but he had not grown accustomed to them. He wondered if any human ever did. A touch of chill always came over him as he crossed the threshold. In entering these places, it was as if some unknown nerve center inside the human organism was touched by something, some force, some radiation, some subtlety, that quite escaped radiation. He felt the coldness now.

Vee Vee's fingers left off patting his arm.

"Do you feel it, darling?"

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"How would I know?"

"Please!" Her voice grew sharp. "I think Johnny Johnson ought to know."

"Johnny! How do you know my name?"

"Shouldn't I recognize one of Earth's foremost scientists, even if he is incognito on Venus?" Her voice had a teasing quality in it.

"But--"

"And who besides Johnny Johnson would recognize the Karmer nerve grip and be able to break it instantly?"

"Hell--"

"John Michael Johnson, known as Johnny to his friends, Earth's foremost expert in the field of electro-magnetic radiations within the human body!" Her words were needles of icy fact, each one jabbing deeper and deeper into him.

"And how would I make certain you were Johnny Johnson, except by seeing if you could break the Karmer nerve grip? If you could break it, then there was no doubt who you were!" Her words went on and on.

"Who are you?" His words were blasts of sound.

"Please, darling, you are making a scene. I am sure this is the last thing you really want to do."

He looked quickly around them. The Venusians and humans moving into this room seemed to be paying no attention to him. His gaze came back to her.

Again she patted his arm. "Relax, darling. Your secrets are safe with me."

A gray color came up inside his soul. "But--but--" His voice was suddenly weak.

The fingers on his arm were very gentle. "No harm will come to you. Am I not with you?"

"That's what I'm afraid of!" he snapped at her. If he had had a choice, he might have drawn back. But with circumstances as they were--his life, Caldwell's life, possibly Vee Vee's life hung in the balance. Didn't she know that this was true? And as for Martin--But Caldwell had said that she had been asking about Martin. What connection did she have with that frantic human genius he sought here?

Johnson felt his skin crawl. He moved toward a nest of cushions on a ramp, found a Venusian was beating him to them, deftly changed to another nest, found it. Vee Vee flowed to the floor on his right, moved cushions to make him more comfortable. She moved in an easy sort of way that was all flowing movement. He sat down. Someone bumped him on the left.

"Sorry, bud. Didn't mean to bump into you." Caldwell's voice was still thick and heavy. He sprawled to the floor on Johnson's left. Under the man's coat, Johnson caught a glimpse of a slight bulge, the zit gun hidden there. His left arm pressed against his own coat, feeling his own zit gun. Operating under gas pressure, throwing a charge of gas-driven corvel, the zit guns were not only almost noiseless in operation but they knocked out a human or a Venusian in a matter of seconds.

True, the person they knocked unconscious would be all right the next day. For this reason, many people did not regard the zit guns as effective weapons, but Johnson had a fondness for them. The feel of the little weapon inside his coat sent a surge of comfort through him.

The music picked up a beat, perfume seemed to flow even more freely through the air, the lights dimmed almost to darkness, a single bright spotlight appeared in the ceiling, casting a circle of brilliant illumination on the mat and the headrest at the bottom of the room. The curtain rose.

* * * * *

Unger stood in the middle of the spot of light.

Johnson felt his chest muscles contract, then relax. Vee Vee's fingers sought his arm, not to harm him but running to him for protection. He caught the flutter of her breathing. On his left, Caldwell stiffened and became a rock.

Johnson had not seen Unger appear. One second the circle of light had been empty, the next second the Venusian, smiling with all the impassivity of a bland Buddha, was in the light. He weighed three hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce, he was clad in a long robe that would impede movement. He had appeared in the bright beam of the spotlight as if by magic.

Vee Vee's fingers dug deeper into Johnson's arm. "How--"

"Shhh. Nobody knows."

No human knew the answer to that trick. Unless perhaps Martin--

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!