Case and the Dreamer (5 page)

“You were the executive officer on the X
ⁿ
ship
Outbound
,” said the Doctor, “an Explorer class discovery vessel launched from Terra Central on a mission to penetrate the galactic arm and make certain experiments in intragalactic space, among them being to test a new version of the flicker-field mode of faster-than-light travel. A design error caused the vessel to accelerate out of control to velocities exceeding anything regarded at the time as theoretically possible. Compounding the
Outbound
disaster was the ship’s ability to gather
intergalactic hydrogen molecules for fuel, which, at the unexpected velocities, caused an increment exceeding expenditure of fuel. The only possible result must have been an explosion or other disruption of the vessel. What actually happened is not known, because by the time it happened the ship was far outside any possibility of detection.”

Case felt a flash of irritation. “If you’ve picked all this out of my head already, why go over it?”

Gently the Doctor said, “We took nothing from you, Case. We respect personal integrity above all other things, and the privacy of a man’s choices are his own. No: what I have just said came from the archives.”

Archives. Not files or retrieval banks—archives. “How long were we—was the
Outbound
, lost?”

“By Terra Central reckoning—some twelve hundred years.”

“I couldn’t have been suspended for twelve hundred years!”

“You weren’t. You died.”

After a time the Doctor said, “Would you like to be by yourself?”

“If you don’t mind,” Case whispered.

The blue man faded and disappeared: Case saw this, but could only stare dully.

Jan. Oh, Jan …

His mind then for a while was a wordless throb. Deep in his mind, where lives the observer all of us carry—the merciless one who stands off watching—was name-calling:
Idiot! Sentimental slob! Why is it a greater grief to you to know she is a thousand years dead than a mere two hundred? And angry, are you? Angry! What are you going to do with your anger?

“Something,” he whispered. “Something …”

He flicked a slitted glance around. There was nothing in this bland place to strike out against, so with one blow he fisted his palm so hard he numbed it; and while waiting for it to begin to ache, he saw in memory a flash of ugly laughter. It was laughter all but standing alone, mouthless, deep, cheerful—the cheerfulness of a man with a better mousetrap; and Case (and Jan, and Jan) the mice. Why couldn’t
he remember the mouth, the face, the situation? For he
saw
this laugh in memory, he did not hear it.

Occlusion—the profound will not to remember. Occlusion is an act of survival, an unwillingness to replay some terrible shock. Yet occluded matter always leaves a trigger in plain sight (here, a visible laugh) and that is also a survival trait; for the deep mind wants always to know where the danger is, and what to fear. To be as close to his deep mind as Case was (his training had made him so) was to tread always the edge of internal terrors, to be placed always at the point of decision: shall I recall the trauma? or bury the trigger again?—for only at this edge did he have the ability to react with the fabled swiftness of the X
ⁿ
Corps.

He let the trigger, the laugh, fade and closed his eyes, commanding some alternative to come to mind. Anything. Anything else, anything instead. Something, perhaps, before the laughter.

Something like: before the laughter was the chase, and before that the landing, and before that the lifeboat, and before that … before that no one would ever know, because they had abandoned ship in the flickering grayness of translight velocity, under or over, who knew? There was no instrumentation for that, and no instruments told the truth anyway; electrons flowed in strange ways, coils and fields were distorted and wild. No one had ever been there before, no probe had ever reported back. Scuttlebutt, off-duty talk: What would happen to you if you bailed out of a ship at faster-than-light velocities? They said, as you reach it time approaches zero and mass approaches infinity. Achilles and the tortoise; as logic approaches perfection, truth approaches zero. Someone said C (the terminal velocity) was a gateway into another universe, or another phase in phased space. Some said, death and dissolution, for all the electrical phenomena of biochemistry would, with all the rules of physics, be so changed that organization of matter and of life would be disrupted. And some said no: transformation phenomena (mass into energy into space into time, each proportionately interchangeable) might retain
pattern
, and some inconceivably different form of life might be possible. Over it all was the certainty that to bail out, away from the guarding life-support, artificial gravity, and all the other
tissues of the man-made womb that was a spaceship, would be expulsion into something utterly strange and hostile. Bailing out in the stratosphere, with 95 percent of the atmosphere underneath one, and a temperature drop of perhaps two hundred degrees … the name of that is Lethal. Multiply it by what, then, in space, in that strange country where time itself might turn on its tail?

And always the other argument: that velocity itself is not a commanding factor; that early in the days of railroading wise men said that the ears would bleed, the sight would fail, the blood be unable to circulate at twenty miles an hour; and that all the talk of C was the same logical untruth; speed has no absolute, velocity is always relative, and that the only danger in bailing out is the matter of being a hell of a way from anywhere.

Well, Case had found out (with Jan, with Jan) by doing it, and it hadn’t taught him a thing, except maybe that one can live through it. Not how, not what happened to them. The shrill alarm, the echoing-everywhere voice saying
abandon
, the clutch of fear on the way to his assigned lifeboat station when the mail hull started to buckle and the airtight barrier slammed down between him and his boat (and a good thing too; that whole section of the ship cracked away and exploded outward, boats and all) and the lights gone, the gravity gone, the wild scramble through familiar-unfamiliar gates and corridors to his alternate station, where he tumbled through the hatch (on top of someone else, he didn’t know who) and kicked out and squirmed around, treading the other as he craned back to the corridor to see if anyone else was coming; but then, you couldn’t
see
. If there was or was not, his conscience was clear (though his regret could never be) for the automatic override canceled his manual launch controls, and he fell back into the lifeboat as it clanged shut and banged away from the ship. The boat’s inertia-field took over at launch and saved them the terrible agony of acceleration, but its vibratory effect, chiming down the scale, was an agony of its own. His shipmate was as preoccupied with this as he, and the only thing he could clearly recall was a spinning glimpse of the ship with a ragged cavity in its midsection—the first part to blow off, the part that had contained his lifeboat station—limned in flickering
arcs as the ruptured power cables lashed and vomited.

Probably they were both unconscious for a time. Case remembered a hazy inspection of the instruments, which had no useful information for him at all, except that the craft was sound and that its converter was picking up a reasonable amount of usable atomic hydrogen, so that fuel and life-support would not be a problem. Almost detachedly he watched his hands on the controls, running through the implanted checklist, setting the computer to hunt for a ship and/or a terrestrial planet, the drive to maximum (the computer would not use maximum, but in that setting, max. was available), and the life-support complex: on, with alarms. A touch on one control took inventory of all stores and reported them complete. Another applied spin. The lifeboat had the contours of a shark with an exaggerated dorsal fin. The body contained stores, converters, fuel; the fin was instrumentation and living quarters for six. Spin was on the long axis; subjective “down” was therefore in the tip of the fin.

All snug, all safe.

No hope.

Plenty of room, plenty of food and air for six. With two, it was palatial.

He looked at last at the other one—not that he hadn’t cared before, but because his ingrained priorities were condition first, personnel second.

His first reaction had to do with all the people it wasn’t. It wasn’t Old Growl, the captain, or that funny little Henny from the black gang, or Bowker, who had always puzzled him and whom he’d always wanted to know better when he could get around to it, or Mary Dee, who had never found out that he had liked her better walking away, such was her hair, such was her face. This was one of the background faces, one of the others, you know, the people that make up the bulk of the roster in your memory of one or another school you went to once. Gander, Dancer, something like that. Janssen. XBC, xenobiochemist, usually found in a corner with two or three others from Science Section, talking shop. Correction. Listening to other people talking shop.

“Janifer?”

“Janocek.” She sat with an elbow hooked around a soft stanchion, where she had anchored herself before spin. She had apparently been watching the checkout intently, following it step by step. Case outranked her; the conditioning would defer to him but make her miss nothing of the routine. Clearly, at this moment they both felt the weight of the programming leave them. Optimum conditioning takes care of essentials—down to the finest detail, true—but then it stops. They were on their own.

“Case Hardin, Lieutenant S.G.,” he said.

“Yes, sir, I know.” There was a foolish pause. He should have known she knew. There were more ratings than officers on a ship. To the ratings, the officers were never a, well, sea of faces. And his “S.G.” hung pompously in the air between them. Her eyes were long almonds, so bright they were opaque (but, one realized, not from the inside), and her hair was drawn back almost painfully tight from a seamless brow. She was slender, tall (both just this side of “too”), and there was an odd, controlled quality in her voice, as if it were kept in the middle register by a conscious effort. She asked, “What happened?”

He shrugged and nodded at the telltales. No ship, no boats, no planet, no sun anywhere. Some debris, dwindling as their launch took them away; nothing large enough to have saved or sheltered anyone, else the computer would have it reported. As they spun, a paleness washed across the screens: the end of the arm of a distant galaxy. Case touched a control and fixed a view of it. “Nobody tells the ratings anything,” she observed.

“They don’t tell a lieutenant much either. We were testing a new drive. Theoretically it wouldn’t work in gravitic fields of a certain density, so we headed for deep space with a conventional drive. By the numbers, we were okay; the math section gave us a factor of safety of three or better; I mean, we were three times as far into intergalactic space as we needed to be safe. Well—they were wrong, or the design was wrong, or they did something wrong on the bridge. They cut in the new drive, and couldn’t turn it off. Nothing could turn it off. It was working outside our power supply, beyond control. We just accelerated until we broke up.”

“And there’s no one—”

“No one.”

They found themselves looking at one another. What was happening behind the shine of those long eyes?
Why you?
Or was she mourning someone? For a second he had a deep flash of regret; he did not gossip, he did not pry, he never watched other people’s affections and partnerings and personal peccadillos. Case had a searching and hungry mind, but it was pointed at the job, the responsibility, the mission; a deliberate repression of his own wants and an earnest subjugation to those of his superiors, and theirs. He was a good officer. Whether or not he was known as a good man had never concerned him. And … perhaps it need not concern him now. He was half the population, and the ranking half at that. There wasn’t anyone else for her to set standards and comparisons by, and from the looks of things, there wouldn’t be. He sighed (why?) and turned away from her. He had nothing to recollect about her. He would have to start knowing her from scratch, from this point forward, while she … well, she knew who he was. In his world, one was used to living in close quarters with other people—there were so many of them, everywhere. But because there were so many, there was always a choice. But now …

He turned to the console, latched out the saddle and sat down. He stared glumly at the faint stain of stardust that was a galaxy—who knew which one—and the blackness everywhere else—and hopelessly set up the computation for its distance. Eight hundred light-years, nine? Something like that, surely. The boat could accelerate to a fraction of C—a large fraction, to be sure, but still a fraction—and the suspension gear might keep them alive for a minimum of two, a maximum five hundred years.

Of course, the boat was equipped to care for six; but could the life-suspension systems be manifolded, so that they could revive and use new gear before the old ones were played out? Would the unused systems be effective after that length of time?

He glanced over his shoulder. His biochemist might have some answers. But first—some numbers.

Expertly he flicked the computer commands, demanding the range
and distance of the nearest planetary body. In scanning a galactic cloud, even at eight hundred light-years, the computer could only operate in an area of probability—to lay in a course to a point in the cloud where terrestrial planets were most likely to be, and terrestrial planets are not
likely
to be anywhere. He set the computer to seeking, and turned away from it. He had at last done everything he could, and he hated that, dreaded it. There was now nothing left but to face the whole matrix of things he had never concerned himself with nor trained himself for; for which no conditioning had ever been offered him and for which a single word—infrarational—had been a big enough discard bag for him. He was trained to confront problems, not people, not a person, not, for that matter, himself. He turned to confront it, her, himself, and she was crying, and she said, “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”