Case and the Dreamer (3 page)

Once, weeks ago, he had asked Parks why he was there. Parks was very pleasant about it. He smiled, tapped Les on the shoulder, and said, “You’ll find out in time, old man. I really can’t tell you. I would if I could.”

Les could have gone to Mr. Bryce and asked him, but he didn’t dare, because of what he might find out. He racked his brains for some reason for which he might be fired—some little oversight in eleven years of steady work for the firm—and could find none. But bosses didn’t need a reason. The axe could fall at any time, on anyone. On any little man in the firm. And now, when he had come home, relieved at last of the pressure of the long hours with Parks, Angela was pushing it all back on him with her “How’s Parks?”

He glared at her, a lightning glance, a bullet of a glance. He said, “He’s fine.” That should stop it. And later, after the child was in bed, Angela would get a very careful exposition of the uses of diplomacy.

Angela said, “Still haven’t found out why he’s been sent to your office?”

Les put down his fork with great care. He lifted his napkin, dabbed at his lips, put the napkin down. He looked at his hands, front and back, and put them on the table, one at a time, one on each side of his plate. He opened his mouth to speak. Angela closed her eyes.

Rosalind cut piecrust with the side of her fork, lifted the piece she had cut without changing her grip. The sight had, on Les, the effect of a relay, switching in a new circuit. Almost joyfully, he barked, “Rosalind!”

The child jumped, blinked, and her face began to pucker up. “Be good enough to hold your fork like a civilized human being. It is not a shovel.”

Angela’s face became carefully bland. She reached out and touched the child’s shoulder. “Do hold it properly, darling,” she said, her voice like her hand, gentle. Her voice was different, though no louder, when she said, “I knew you’d manage to find something.…”

“No trouble at all,” said Les nastily.

“All gone,” said Rosalind, still using, at seven, the first phrase she had ever spoken. “MayIbescuzed?”

“Yes, honey. Hop into the bath, now, and come down for your good-nights when you’re all clean and shiny.”

Rosalind slipped from her chair and ran around the table—the opposite side of the table from her father’s chair. It was a longer way to the door. Good heavens, thought Les, does the child think I’ll reach out and clout her if she comes close? “Just a minute, young lady.”

Rosalind slid to a stop, paling, and put a frightened gaze up to him. In her eyes Les could all but see a catalogue of undiscovered crimes whisking past, as if they were printed on a revolving drum. Certainly there must be one that he could.… Broken flowers? Good clothes torn? Nothing spilled tonight.… Ah. Those scratches … the roller skates. “Rosalind, I am at my wits’ end. I simply do not know what to do with you. You are without doubt the most destruc—”

Angela clapped her hands. “Hop along, Bubbles! It’s late. Go on now—scoot. Quick!”

Rosalind waited for no second invitation. She escaped.

Les sat absolutely thunderstruck. “Angela!” he breathed. “I was speaking to the child.”

She rose, scraping and piling plates. “You were,” she said. “I saw you, Les. I saw you looking for something—anything—to punish her for. You’ve been looking ever since you got home. You went straight out to hunt for something the instant you got in the door. Just because you have trouble at the office.”

“You’re mad,” he said. “You’re out of your head. What’s got into you? You’ve never come out with such a thing before!” He forced a calm, felt for something solid in the shifting conversational ground, found it. “By what fantastic intuitive process do you connect my discipline of the child with any events at the office?”

“Oh—!” she said. “I get so terribly angry.” She rose abruptly and went to the sink. She tried to busy her hands and failed.

“Do tell me,” he said icily, “about how angry you get.”

“I get angry because I can’t talk. Because every time I have a thing to say, I cry. Oh, how I envy you your words! You always had words. I fell in love with you and your words. Only a big man, a good man, could think so—so clean, and have all those words.” She stopped, put up her apron and into its folds released one high, broken sob. She tore off a paper towel, blew her nose, threw the towel away and came back to sit opposite him. Her face was blotched and her eyes so bright they looked sick. “I never can say anything,” she half-whispered. “I always have to go and cry. So I don’t talk. It isn’t worth it.”

“It is in this case,” he said. “You’ve gone too far to stop.”

“Oh, I’ll go on,” she said miserably. “Yes, I will.…” Something within him twisted, and for a moment he wished he had not forced her, wished he could make her stop.

She said, “I don’t think you’re big any more. If you were, you’d know it. It wouldn’t need proving. What you were doing this evening, what you do every Tuesday now, was to prove that you were bigger and stronger than—than Bubbles.”

“That,” he roared, “will be just about enough of …” But she went right on talking. He realized, in the midst of his fury, that she had started and would not stop until she was finished. It did not matter how angry he got. It did not matter, even, whether he listened or not. She crouched on the edge of her chair, her head tipped oddly sidewise. Her eyes seemed not to be seeing, and tears crept down her patchy, flushed cheeks. And she went right on talking, crooning, almost.

“Fear means everything to you. I never knew it because I never had to be afraid of you. I worked too hard, did too much. You couldn’t be angry at me. Now you are afraid for your job, because of Parks. You are being treated like a little man at work, and it makes you try to be a big man at home. You are afraid.

“You are afraid and you don’t have to be, because there are other jobs in town besides the one you have, and because you have done
nothing to get fired for. Fear means more to you than good sense. You are ruled by fear and you try to rule by fear. Bubbles is the only one in the world you think you can make afraid, and you’re not sure of that so you have to prove it all the time. You were fine and wonderful and big, and now you are small and afraid.”

“Stop saying that,” he said ominously.

“You are afraid,” she droned, “You are afraid.”

He rose and clenched his fist.

“Mummy?”

Rosalind entered the kitchen, glowing from her bath. She wore flannel pyjamas and a dressing gown with a crazy zigzag pattern. She went to her mother. “I’m clean,” she confided. “Is Daddy sick?”

Over the child’s head, Angela said, “Yes, honey.”

“Bubbles,” said Les hoarsely, “come here.”

Angela held the child’s shoulders while she searched his face. Apparently she found what she was looking for. “Go on, cookie,” she murmured.

Les picked up his daughter, who was stiff and puzzled. He set her in his lap and put his arms around her. “Bubbles, tell me something. Tell me the truth. I promise I won’t—I won’t spank you.” He cleared his throat. “When you do something wrong, I punish you. Right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes. Now, do I always punish you the same? I mean, if you do something bad, like break flowers or spill Mummy’s perfume, do I always punish you just as hard?”

“I guess so.”

He licked his lips. “Bubbles, this is awfully important. Tell me the truth. Is there any time when I punish you harder?”

“Yes,” she said gravely. “It’s worse on Tuesdays.”

He made a sound that was not a word, and held her tight. He held her so tight that she screwed up her eyes. When he released her she looked at him. “Gee!” she said. She reached over and pulled his nose. She pulled it twice before he could make the noise like the auto horn. How long had it been since they had played that?

He kissed her. “Come on, honey,” said Angela. They went away and left him alone.

The phone rang after a time. Angela was still upstairs. He took the call.

When Angela came back, he was washing the dishes. Angela said nothing. She got a towel and began drying.

“That call,” he said, in an awestruck voice. “It was Bryce.”

“Bryce,” she said, without anything but acknowledgment in her tone.

“He was very polite. The big boss himself.… He asked me what I thought of Parks. I said I thought he was a good accountant. What else could I say? Bryce … thanked me for my opinion. He apologized for disturbing me at home. Then he told me …”

“Told you what?” asked Angela, when she could stand the choked silence no longer.

“We’re opening a new branch in Calgary,” he said. “Until tonight only three men knew about it—a top business secret. Parks is slated to manage the new branch, and he’s been around learning all the ropes from … from.…” He shook his head wonderingly, “from ‘the best men in the company.’ ”

He looked at Angela. Her face was still, not smiling, not frowning. “He … asked me if I wanted to manage the new branch and I told him.…” His eyes rested on the cottage curtains, which were not Venetian blinds. “I told him no, I like it just the way it is. He was very … relieved. He hoped I’d say that. He needs me here. He said he had to ask me because I deserved it.” He looked down at her tear-stung, waiting eyes, and said again, “Deserved it.” He wagged his head and whispered, “Me.”

Abruptly he threw his arms around her, with his wet soapy hands, and buried his face in her hair and the side of her neck. She stood acquiescent, not helping, not hindering. He held on to her and was full of words, bursting with words, and could find hardly a one that was any good. He said at last, “You get afraid too.”

She nodded against his cheek without speaking.

“You’re pretty small yourself.”

“Yes.”

“No you’re not,” he whispered. “No, you’re—” But then the words deserted him altogether.

If, at the very moment Case died, someone had aimed a laser (a tight one, one of the highest intensity ever) at the spot from Earth, and if you could have hidden the beam-front for a thousand years (you couldn’t, of course, and anyway, nobody aimed, nobody knew), you might have seen his coffin.

It wasn’t meant to be a coffin. Ships have lifeboats when they fail, and the boats have life belts in case they fail, and the coffin had once answered that purpose; but now and for all those centuries, it was and had been Case’s coffin.

It lay in lightlessness, its wide-spectrum shrieks of distress forever stilled. It tumbled ever so slowly, pressed long ago by light long gone, because it had never been told to stop.

Case, aged a thousand and some hundred and perhaps a couple of dozen and a fraction (but then, do the dead grow older?), lay in the sealed cylinder, dressed in inboard fatigues (which long ago—even in Case’s long ago—had evolved into practically nothing) consisting of barely enough material to carry his brassard: Senior Grade Lieutenant, and the convoluted symbol of his service branch. X
ⁿ
, it read, once you got past the art: Ex—on many levels: exploration, extrasolar, extragalactic, extratemporal, and more; plus the possibility matrix; expatriate, ex-serviceman, ex-officio, exit … for on entering X
ⁿ
, no man made plans for himself—not if they involved any “here,” any “now.” Or anyone.…

An invisible, intangible something brushed the coffin, just once (for once was enough), and there then appeared something utterly outside Case’s experience in all the exploration, all the discovery, all the adventure in his conscious life. It was a stroboscopic flicker which, more swiftly than the eye could comprehend or the brain register, became with each pulse a structure twice as large as it had been
before, until it reached a point hardly ten meters away from the tumbling coffin, and stopped, glowing. There was no deceleration in this approach, for there was no motion as motion is understood. With each pulsation the craft for it was indeed a ship—ceased to exist
here
and reappeared
there
. The distance between
here
and
there
was controllable and could vary widely; it must be so, for the approach (if it can be called an approach, in a vessel which in and of itself never moved) doubled its apparent size except for the last three pulses, during which its “approach” was meters, a meter, some centimeters.

A brief pause, then a disk no larger than a saucer spun out from the seamless hull of the vessel, hovered for a moment near the slowly tumbling coffin, then fell back and around to match its rotation. It placed itself near one end of the coffin and emitted a squirt of flame, and another. The tumbling slowed and, with a third impulse, stopped.

Another pause, while emanations from the ship probed, bathed, searched, touched, tested, checked, and rechecked. Then on the flawless hull appeared a pair of lines and another, transverse, making a rectangle. Inside, the rectangle the hull appeared to dissolve. The tiny saucer moved behind the coffin and made its meticulous squirt, and the coffin moved precisely through the intersection of imaginary diagonals athwart the doorway.

Inside, four columns of pale orange light sprang upward from the deck, supporting and guiding the coffin until it was fully inside, whereupon the rectangular opening hazed over, darkened, became solid, seamless hull again. With a brief, shrill hiss, atmospheric pressure appeared, equalizing the outside of the coffin’s shell with whatever was inside. Then the orange beams turned the coffin and moved it toward a spot on the forward bulkhead that irised open to a corridor, a tall oval in cross-section, glowing with sourceless, shadowless, pale blue-white light. Again a doorway shut behind the coffin, and it was moved smoothly and silently up the corridor, past a row of closed oval doors and shuttered ports, to an open door near the far forward end of the corridor. Here the beams checked the coffin; turned it, and slid it into a room. It came to rest in a space between two banks of equipment. On the left was apparently a control panel
of some complex kind, though it carried no switches or knobs, but had instead arrays of small disks floating two handsbreaths away from the panels, each, when activated, glowing with its own hue and with intensity according to the degree of function. On the right was a great bank of indicators. Case (if he had been alive) would have found the calibrations and indicators incomprehensible.