No mysterious little robot ships with tentacles that whip out and capture a man.
No strange trio in surgeons' gowns.
And no Alice—
A sudden spear of thought pierced his mind. Maybe all that was illusion, too. Maybe he could go home right now and find her waiting for him. Maybe—
No. That was real enough. The accident. Dr. Winters. The scene in the icy room next to Surgery at the hospital. Dr. Martin didn't know about that. He would have called that a fantasy, too, if Mel had tried to tell him.
No. It was all real.
The unbelievable, alien organs of Alice.
The great, black ship.
The mindless robot searchers.
His nightmare had stemmed from all this that had happened out in space, which had somehow been wiped from his conscious memory. The nightmare had not existed in his boyhood, as he had thought. It was oriented in time now.