“Your instruments—” said the Doctor.
“My instruments were wrong,” interrupted Case, “or I used them wrong, or a lot of things happened I can’t explain. All I can do is to tell you what happened.”
Detecting Case’s irritation, the Doctor raised small, shimmering hands. “Please.”
“Or what I remember,” mumbled Case. “Maybe they’re not the same thing.…”
He took another pull on the sucker and swallowed and said: “I set up the spectros for analysis and that’s one thing I won’t ever forget—the readout for Earth Normal. It said 0.9, and then it waited and threw in another nine, and after a bit three more: 0.99999. That’s mean temperature and pressure as well as composition, and I doubt Terra itself would give you a reading like that. And there’s something about the way those nines came up that’s important, that I can’t quite get my hand on … I don’t know.” He shifted, picked up the sucker, put it down again. “I got some sleep then, six hours, leaving Jan on watch with orders to wake me and take her six. We didn’t know what we were in for and we wanted to be rested.
“When she woke me we had light. The planet, planetoid, whatever, it had light. It looked like those old photographs of Venus, when she was first observed, before the cloud-cover was dispersed. The radar pix were the same as before, nearer now, but the opticals showed unbroken clouds. The velocities were so nearly matched that I could trust the iron mike to hang an orbit. I left a running check on the nature of that light. It was white, more or less—a mix; it came from the clouds.
“We slid into orbit nice as you please, and dropped in close enough so the spin was an embarrassment. I set the boat into a tail-in attitude with the big fin leading, and a steady one-G deceleration, which made it comfortable for us and easier on the sensors.
“You can’t expect full and sophisticated instrumentation and controls on a lifeboat, but what we had was good and I used it to the limit. We had all the time we needed and the velocities were so well matched that the transition from orbital to controlled flight situations was made as gently and pleasantly as any textbook tour-boat ever did. I lost the red-alert feeling, canceled the six-on, six-off watches, and spent most of my waking time on the scans. Jan said she would make a report about the way I handled it.”
(Jan watched everything he did—well, of course, it was such a change from those other weeks; and she jumped to do anything he asked her for; and one day she said suddenly, “Case, you’re wonderful, you know that? And nobody knows but me. I’ve got to tell them, somehow I’ve got to tell them.” This disturbed him far more than any unbelievable planetoid, and he had nodded to her and turned back to his console, glad he had something else to fix on. After that she spent a lot of her off-watch time murmuring into a voicewriter.)
“I set a spiral so gradual and so matched to the atmosphere densities that frictional heating was not a problem, only useful. We braked with it, we used the heat for hydrogen treatment; actually, I do believe we landed with full tanks because of that, not that it did us any good.… We reoriented, nose parallel and hung on the horizon, fin up and the living quarters gimballed over so that for us and the boat there was up and down again. We circled the planetoid in the high stratosphere—or what would be a stratosphere on Terra—and mapped.
“Once into the cloud cover we found that it was just that—a cover. The air underneath was clear, with occasional … drifting cumulus; the weirdest thing of all, though, was that, from the underside, the cover was illuminated only on one half. I mean, imagine a hollow sphere, half black and half white, and call the white the illuminated part. The planetoid is inside this sphere, and the sphere rotates around it, so that even without a primary, the surface has day-and-night phases.
“I picked a number of likely spots and finally selected one. It was a long, narrow, sandy plain, like a beach, at the edge of a large lake, with forest—oh yes, there was vegetation—on the other side. It seemed fairly level and we could land on it with a clear run to get off again. I ran a full check on the manuals and then took over. I made fourteen, fifteen trial approaches before I lowered the gear and went in.
“You have to understand, the lifeboat was no kind of airfoil. She came in on what we called stilts—supporting jets—and maintained attitude with gyros. I was practically sitting on the stilts at ten meters altitude, and I had forward velocity down to about fifteen meters per second. A crawl. And then there was this terrible noise and we fell over sideways.”
(A tearing scream, edged, stabbing, and Jan’s screaming with it, and—and his too, he screamed: to be falling, to know in that split second that the boat was gone, that hope, born again, was gone again; and as they toppled, that other sound, that other terrible sound that made them scream again when terror overrode despair.…)
“It was a small lifeboat, but small is …” He spread his hands. “There were tons of it all the same, and it fell over and I could hear the hull plates crumpling and turning back. I think the two left-side stilts, fore and aft, cut out, and the two right ones added to the topple and she lay over on her side and slid and ruined herself. And when the fin levered over and hit the sand we were thrown so hard we hit the bulkhead, restraints and all—they pulled right out, they were never built for such a lurch from the side as that.
“It was night, that crazy kind of night, when I came out of it. I was lying on the sand with my head on Jan’s lap and she was wiping my face with something cold.”
(And breathing used-up little hics, dry catches at the long, far end of weeping. She’d been thrown clear, right out through a rapture in the fin, and in time had found him dangling against the outside of the boat by his restraints, with his blood painting down the bent plates. She had got him down somehow and then had gone off to the beach with a bit of foam insulation which she dipped in the water and brought back. When he got his wits about him he gave her hell for maybe inoculating him with God-knows-what from alien water. Her response, astonishingly, was to fall instantly asleep.)
“I hurt all down my life side, especially, the skull and my hip, both scraped badly and bruised. Jan was shaken up and for a while, two days or so, I was afraid of internal injuries because she vomited a lot and moaned in her sleep. Then I guess we both got sick for a while, a fever and blurred vision; it is asking a lot of the biosystem to be thrust unprotected into an alien environment, even a kindly one.”
(Kindly. Cool at night, warm in the daytime, clean air, on the high side of oxygenation. Potable water. It could have been worse—if that had been all there was to it. When there was more to it, it was worse.)
“It was at the end of the third day, as nearly as I can recall, that we shook off the sickness and were able to take at good look at the situation. We were bruised and hungry, but we were out of shock. Jan told me she had been having dreams—a dream, I should say, vivid and recurrent: a device like hands, sorting and shuffling cards, laying them out, gathering them up, shuffling and laying them out again, and she was the pack of cards. I would not mention that or even remember it if she hadn’t described it so forcefully and so often. I had my own, too; but then, fever, you know—” He made a wiping-away gesture.
“What were the dreams, Case?” asked the Doctor, and quickly added, “if you don’t mind—” because Case dropped the sucker, clamped his hands together, frowned down into them.
“I don’t mind … although it’s not very clear any more; I tried too hard for too long not to remember, I guess.” He paused, then: “Hard to grasp, and any words I use are like approximations, but … I seemed to be suspended from some kind of filament. One end was inside me, somehow, and the other was high up, in, shadows. Circling around me were eyes. Not pairs of eyes or one pair, but I forget the arrangement. And I realized that the eyes weren’t circling me, but whatever held the filament up there was twirling it while the eyes watched, and then there was—”
“Yes?” The prompting was very gentle.
“Laughing,” said Case, and he whispered, “Laughing.” H
e looked up at the Doctor. “Did I tell you about that noise just before we crashed?”
“You mentioned a noise.”
“Partly it was the gyro bearings,” said Case. “I found that out later, after the hull broke up and I had a chance to look at the drive sector. You had to see that to believe it. The only way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine all the bearing assemblies—every one of them, mind you—while turning at max, instantaneously turned solid, welded into one piece. The shafts had wrung big ragged holes in the mounts, and it was these spinning down, tearing everything apart down there, that made most of the screaming. The rest was Jan, well, and me too, and—”
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.”
Case and the Dreamer Page 5