Case and the Dreamer (7 page)

The Doctor waited.

“—laughing,” Case said at length, and, “I don’t think it was a real sound. Jan said she heard it too, but it wasn’t a real sound.… Words are no good, sometimes. Whatever we heard; it wasn’t with our ears.” He closed his eyes and shook briefly. The laughter. That laughter.

Not Case’s laughter; Case was not a laughing man.

“We were hungry. I boosted her back into the cabin—the rupture was too high off the ground for me to get in by myself, and she rummaged around looking for something to eat. She drew a blank. Lifeboats are designed for survival in space, not for planetfall. Suckers and their contents are—were—constituted from raw elements which were useless to us without processing, and we had no power to process. There was a lot of shouting back and forth while I tried to find a way for her to override the fail-safes that had shut down the power when the boat careened, but nothing worked. She threw down whatever she thought would be useful—seat cushions and a big soft sheet of head-lining and some rod stock and other junk, and the first-aid case, which we didn’t appreciate much until later, but as I said, we were
hungry
. I don’t think either one of us had ever known that feeling before and we just didn’t like it.

“Jan had read that fruits could be eaten without preparation and told me about it, so we left the ship and went across the sand to the vegetated zone. The sand felt strange to my feet, not unpleasant, but painful as we moved into the soil and rock and undergrowth. The little branches lashed at our bodies; some of them had sharp points on them that scratched. We found one great bank of plants heavy with little round red fruits that Jan said were berries. She ate some and we waited for a time, but there were no ill effects so she got some for me. We also found what seemed to be large fruits, but on breaking them open, discovered that they were full of small crescent-shaped constructs with casings so hard we couldn’t break them. We
brought a few of these back with us and cracked them against the hull plates with a stone. They were very good, very nourishing. We slept.”

(They slept on the sand and were cold, until Jan got the piece of soft head-lining and covered them. The heat of their bodies was trapped by it and kept them warm. It was a new experience for both, both having lived their lives virtually without clothes, in controlled environments, and sleeping weightless with a gentle restraint or supported by pressor fields.)

“The next day we went the other way to find food, to the lake. Jan went out into the water and washed her whole body in it, and called me. Since we no longer had the tingler I joined her. It was not the same, but not completely unpleasant either, and we did feel a lot better afterward. Up the beach a little way were rocks thrusting out of the water, and on them grew great clusters of bony things that Jan called bivalves. They weren’t easy to get off the rocks, and once touched they closed up tight; but we developed a skill with a bit of stone and a quiet approach, and managed to harvest a number of them. To swallow one at first was nauseating, but it was what you might call an acquired taste, and soon we were eating enthusiastically. It was while we were up there that the boat began to break up.”

Case looked up at the Doctor, standing patiently before him, but as usual his glance told him nothing. “It made a terrible noise, the plates shearing like that, and as we ran down the beach we could see it settling. It was just as if it lay in soft mud, but it didn’t; the sand under it was as solid as what we ran on, and dry. All the same, it was sinking, and breaking up. I’m telling you what I saw, what I remember,” he said defensively. The Doctor inclined his head and made a wordless motion for Case to continue. “I can’t help it,” Case grumbled. “It’s what happened.” When the blue man still did not respond, he went on:

“The nose and tail were crushed and sunk into the sand, and there were three new breaks in the hull. That’s when I saw the gyro bearings I told you about. The boat looked as if a giant had taken it by the two ends and bent it over his knee. The fin was flat on the ground now, and I looked in through the broken plates, and then
while Jan screamed at me not to, I scrambled inside. It was a mess, the way she’d said it was, and worse. Nothing answered on the console except the Abandon matrix and indicator lights showing that four, of the six lifeboats were ready for launch and the other two inoperative. I touched one of them and a ’belt launched from the wreck, shot across the beach and crashed at the edge of the forest where it exploded and set fire to the trees and drove Jan half into hysteria. I tried to shut down the matrix but the controls failed to respond, so I backed out—into Jan, who was afraid something had happened to me. I ordered her out. I suppose I was fairly forceful, it stopped the hysteria … and got out myself and ran around the hull. All of the launch ports had opened—two were all but underground. I crawled into the third one, where the coffin had just launched, and it was still hot, and Jan began screaming at me again, and I didn’t care, I went for the leads from the control center and ripped them off, and then crawled back to the launch booster and began to pull and pry at the release toggles. They came up and the coffin slid out on its rails and fell to the sand. I got into the space where it had been and was able to reach the control leads of Number Three. I had no trouble with the releases on that one but it would not slide all the way out; it just nosed into the sand. Because of that I couldn’t get to Four. Five and Six were the ones the board had said were inoperative, and it didn’t make any difference anyhow; they were underground.

“The hull plates overhead somewhere made a tremendous crackle; I can’t tell you what it was like inside there; it was as if the noise was inside my head. The whole structure settled, and I can’t tell you how I got out—I found myself on the sand outside Number Three just in time to see Jan trying to crawl into Number One, screaming again. I grabbed her around the hips and snatched her out (she screamed louder than ever until she realized what had grabbed her; she thought I was still inside and was going in to pull me out. That Jan, she was—she—)

“Well …

“Number Two coffin was free and clear; Three was still half in and half out, and I realized that if the boat settled much more it
would carry the coffin with it. I got hold of it, lifting and pulling. Jan immediately saw what was needed and helped me, and we got the coffin free. We fell back on the sand gasping and sobbing for breath, just used up—or so we thought until the lifeboat seemed to … well, bulge is the word, spread, as if a big hand spread out on top and pushed downward. The whole thing started to crack and crackle and something came loose and whistled through the air between us, and if you think we were terminally bushed—we did—we got terminally panicked. We must’ve scampered a hundred meters away with that noise behind us, pressure tanks banging and hissing and roaring, twisting metal crackling and screeching, and—and—”

The blue man waited. “And laughing,” Case whispered. He drew a deep breath and continued.

“When it was over … we thought it would never be over, we lay in a swag in the sand and watched our boat chewing itself up and the ground swallowing, it seemed to go on for hours … when it was over there was nothing but some tumbled sand, a great cloud of dust, and the two coffins and the junk we had thrown out earlier, lying there, some of it half-buried in sand and dust. We looked at each other and we were in almost as bad shape as the boat, only we weren’t buried yet. My hands were burned and one fingernail was torn half off, and the scrapes I got in the crash were all open and bleeding, and Jan was bruised and had a cut on her head and we were both covered with mudsweat and blood.

“We helped each other down to the lake and washed. We were too hurt and tired to think; maybe that’s what shock really is, because if we could have thought it all out then I think we would’ve just lain down and died. We didn’t know where we were, we didn’t know what had happened or what was happening or what would (except that whatever it might be, it didn’t have much hope in it for us.)”

Case sighed and placed his hands on the broad arms of his chair. Before he could rise, the blue man swiftly and considerately touched (in that untouching way of his) something on his panel, and decking appeared in the chamber. Either it was made or it was there all the time and only now became opaque. Case didn’t know, but it was something to stand on and “Uh!” His knees sagged and he caught
at the chair arm. “It’s all right,” he told the watchful Doctor. He pressed himself upright; stood, walked a pace, turned and stood by the chair, feeling the newness of movement, its old, somatically forgotten familiarity. “This is one G?”

“Not quite,” said the Doctor.

“Try it.”

The blue man ran a hand partway around the edge of a disk, which increased its glow. The transition from one gravitic state to another is a strange thing indeed, for everything responds. The brain pressures the skull as the feet press the floor; skin high on the chest stretches, low on the belly becomes less taut; the cheeks, the hair, the masses of liver and gut proclaim themselves. When Case began to tremble he sat down again. “I guess it’ll be a while.” he said shakily.

“It will.”

“But I’ll make it.”

“I’d say so. You seem to have a special talent for that.”

Case said thoughtfully, “Maybe I do. But then, I had Jan.”

(“I had Jan.” Strong Jan, wise Jan, tender Jan.) Jan kept herself to herself, mostly, and took orders—not because she was a woman, because the Space Services in general and X
ⁿ
in particular made no distinctions; actually there were more female officers than men; Jan took orders because she was a rating and he was an officer … to begin with … and after that her reasons were her own. Perhaps she was one of those who would always defer to a decision-maker, which Case was, through and through. And perhaps she had other reasons. She knew her specialty and all its peripherals. A good biologist (and she was good or she wouldn’t have been with X
ⁿ
) is a physicist and a chemist, a physiologist and a cytologist, a geneticist and a zoologist. Her way was to remain alert to whatever Case was doing; to make herself available in every possible way, and to keep her id, ego, self, whatever that inner “who-I-really-am” thing is—to herself. It was Jan who reasoned that some of the food they gathered might serve them better, and cause less diarrhea and stomachache, if it were processed, and that an application of heat might suffice in lieu of something more sophisticated. It was she who took fire from the burning forest and preserved it, and experimented with the bivalves
and fruits and later the fish they were able to catch (it was she who reinvented the gorge: the fish-hook concept escaped her). Case and Jan came from generations of people who lived in a world without primitives, in which the art and practice of living off the land were academicians’ mysteries.

It took them forty-three days to discover a solid-seeming outcropping with the right slant, to get the coffins—lifebelts—up to it and bedded there, ready for use. They got them across the sand and into the water, lever and haul, roll, lift and tug, and floated them up to the closest possible point to the rocks, where they did the hardest work—manhandling them upslope to their appointed cradles and setting them in. They lay close to one another, almost exactly parallel and angled to the sky, and it was after exhaustive checks and rechecks of everything that Case bound the launching systems of both to the controls of one. Their drill took into account a number of possibilities: if there were one survivor, he or she would take Number Three, which contained the master firing key. If one were incapacitated, the other would load him or her into the “slave” and board the “master.” If both were ambulant, Case would take the “master,” Three. Case gave the two tiny craft meticulous checks on a regular schedule, and (sometimes by a huge effort of will) they touched not one crumb, not one drop, from the stores aboard the tiny craft.

They permitted themselves no fixed idea as to why they prepared this rather hopeless escape. The coupled launching, of course, would give them a fair chance of staying together in the gulfs of space. What would make them launch would be to get away from something or to get to something; and it was always possible that they would never launch at all: but “Better to have ’em and not need ’em,” Case said; “than to need ’em and not have ’em.”

They made memories … which, after all, is the only meaningful thing any conscious entity can do. Many were not to be shared.

Under the blanket she had improvised from some headlining: “Case, what are you doing?”

“Self-relief. Acceptable alternative to the tingler, according to the manual.”

“Oh. ‘Furtherance of psycho-physiological equilibrium’ under Health, individual, under conditions, emergency.”

“Right. Section—”

“I recall the reference,” she said: one of the few times she had ever interrupted him. “This isn’t an emergency, Case.”

He put his nose out into the chill night air and looked up at the black starless sky. “It isn’t?”

“Not that kind of an emergency.”

“We’ve lost our tingler.”

“So we have.”

“Oh, I see. You are prepared to take care of this for me.” She said, “Well prepared.”

“I had thought of that,” Case said seriously. “However, it has been a principle with me not to extend my authority into the personal area. That is a presumption.”

“It isn’t a presumption,” she said flatly. “Women, too, need means for the furtherance of psycho-physiological equilibrium.”

“They do?” It wasn’t a denial; he had simply never thought about it. Now that he did, he realized with a flash that it must be so. “How very efficient.”

“Isn’t it.” Then she enveloped him wildly. He was shaken. He knew why she cried out (he was not completely ignorant) but not why she cried. It was as good as any tingler, and he could see that in time it might even be better.

And they built a shelter. The first time it rained at night was, in its way, the worst thing that had happened to them. The crash, their injuries, cut feet, thorn-gouged bodies, even hunger—none of these contained the special misery of being wet and cold in the dark with nowhere to go until the sun came up. They clung together under the permeable head-liner wet as worms, and the moment it grew light they began to build. They found a rock out-crop near the edge of the beach, with two large, many-branched trees near it, and by laying poles from the top of the rock to the tree-crotches, they had roof-beams. The poles were a special treasure; they found them in the burned part of the forest where trees had fallen.