made the promise, that he would
actually do just that, but the odds were in favor of it. It was now one
o'clock in the morning in Moscow, and Lenny's brother, Raphael, was a man
of regular habits.

Lenny reached out. When he made contact, all he got was a jumble of hash.
It was as though someone had made a movie by cutting bits and snippets
from a hundred different films, no bit more than six or seven frames long,
with a sound track that might or might not match, and projected the result
through a drifting fog, using an ever-changing lens that rippled like the
surface of a wind-ruffled pool. Sometimes one figure would come into sharp
focus for a fraction of a second, sometimes in color, sometimes not.

Sometimes Lenny was merely observing the show, sometimes he was in it.

_Rafe! Hey, Rafe! Wake up!_

The jumble of hash began to stabilize, becoming more coherent--

* * * * *

Lenny sat behind the far desk, watching his brother come up the primrose
path in a unicycle. He pulled it to a halt in front of the desk, opened
the pilot's canopy, threw out a rope ladder, and climbed down. His gait
was a little awkward, in spite of the sponge-rubber floor, because of the
huge flowered carpetbag he was carrying. A battered top hat sat
precariously on his blond, curly hair.

"Lenny! Boy, am I glad to see you! I've got it! The whole trouble is in
the wonkler, where the spadulator comes across the trellis grid!" He
lifted the carpetbag and sat it down on the lab table. "Connect up the
groffle meter! We'll show those pentagon pickles who has the push-and-go
here!"

"Rafe," Lenny said gently, "wake up. You're dreaming. You're asleep. I
want to talk to you."

"I know." He grinned widely. "And you don't want any back talk from me!
Yok-yok-yok! Just wait'll I show you!"

In his hands, he held an object which Lenny did not at first understand.
Then Rafe's mind brought it into focus.

"This"--Rafe held it up--"is a rocket motor!"

"Rafe, wake up!" Lenny said.

The surroundings stabilized a little more.

"I will in just a minute, Lenny." Rafe was apologetic. "But let me show
you this." It did bear some resemblance to a rocket motor. It was about as
long as a man's forearm and consisted of a bulbous chamber at one end,
which narrowed down into a throat and then widened into a hornlike exhaust
nozzle. The chamber was black; the rest was shiny chrome.

Rafe grasped it by the throat with one hand.