“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 Xn 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 Xn) 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.
Nowhere else on the planet did they see fallen trees.
They found vines to lace between and over the poles and down the sides, where the ends could be staked into the ground, and another kind of vine, thick and tough, to weave through these horizontally, to carry the thatch of the roof and sidewalls. Thatch (which, like the gorge, was Jan’s invention) was practical because of the sheltered location, and because there were no insects. The now-ragged piece of headliner served for end wall and door, and—
—and they were happy there.
No literature has truly defined “happy”; its special quality is that its nature is seldom grasped at the time it happens, but only afterward.
Case had a long, long afterward.
“We quarreled once,” Case said after a time. “I think that’s where it began, the—the nightmare.
“Her voicewriter. I’d been up the beach at the fish-trap. There was an inlet there and we’d set stones in the form of a V with the point shoreward and just a little opening at the point. Fish would swim in through the opening and once inside they couldn’t find the hole. After a time it was full of fish. The big ones ate the little ones and that kept them going without any help from us. Most of the time you could stand on dry ground and spear one, first time out. I came back with a fine one, a meaty fish with a triangular head and no scales, and you know, when you expect someone to be glad and they …”
(She flew at him; he had to drop the fish and take her upper arms and hold her and even shake her a little before he could understand what she was screaming at him.)
“It was the voicewriter. It was one of the few things she had been able to save from the cabin of the lifeboat, and she used it every day. It was a private thing with her, and I sensed this and never questioned it and never played it back. I assumed she was keeping a log, and let it go at that. And it was gone, and never before or afterward did I see her so angry.
“It took hours for me to convince her that I had not taken it, that she must have mislaid it somewhere. She was faced with an impossibility; I would not lie to her, or at least, I never had; and she was sure she had not lost the writer. She receded finally into a mood of doubt which lasted until … until … for the rest of the time.
“And a while later I had a chance to understand a little better how she felt. I had an array of stone tools—spearpoints and cutting blades and fish-scrapers—that had cost me I don’t know how many hours of effort and care, and we had come to depend on them. There was a shelf in the rock which formed the back wall of our house, and I had them neatly laid out by size and function; I worked on them every minute I wasn’t do
ing something else. Perhaps you can imagine my feelings when I returned to the house to get a cutting tool and found them gone—all of them. Jan was gathering fruits in the forest and when she came back I was waiting for her—furious. I suppose what happened between us would have been amusing to an outsider, how I yelled, how she denied, how I doubted someone who had never lied before … what stopped us from the angry accusations was … was that someone—something—did think it was funny. We heard laughter.
“That stopped the fight—right then. For a moment we held on to each other, not breathing, listening. I thought at first it was coming from inside my head, so sourceless was it. But then I knew Jan heard it too—not loud, pervading everything.
“That same night we awoke to something else—a smell. Doctor, no chemical laboratory in history has ever produced a more powerful, disgusting smell than that. It was the essence of rot and filth and sickness; it brought us up standing, gasping for breath. We ran outside, and then across the beach and into the water. The smell was everywhere. Jan vomited.
“And then it was gone, in less than an hour—just gone, without a trace. Jan said she heard the laughter again.
“The next day we took some fruit—we had no way of carrying water—in a basket Jan had woven, and went inland, to climb a high point we could use to scan the territory. We had explored it before, and it gave a wide view. If there was anything or anyone new on the planetoid with us, we wanted to know what it was.
“It was a long, hard climb—it would have been impossible for us the year before, but our feet were tough and our skins well used to heat and wind and thorns; if it had not been for the growing fear, it would have been a pleasant adventure.
“All the effort got us, besides the exhaustion, was another session with the smell, and more laughter.
“It got cold. For two days and a night the lake and the little water we had was frozen solid. Our only covering was the headliner, and we rolled up in that and lay shivering. At the twentieth hour we had to get up to relieve our bladders—did you know you can be dying of thirst and still have to relieve your bladder?—and though we were gone for only a minute or so, and moved only a few meters from the shelter, when we got back the liner was gone.
“We almost died. We would have died, I think, but just before dark it got warm again. Melted frost was dripping all around us; we drank it and had something to eat. We slept like dead people.
“In the morning the lake was gone—a lake so big, that part of it, you couldn’t see the other side. I looked at Jan and I’ll never forget the way she stared at it, eyes wide open and kind of … dry, and she didn’t start and she didn’t cry out; she just said in a very low voice, ‘Case, I can’t stand any more.’ Jan could stand anything, that’s what I thought.
She told me some things. She said that the forest was impossible—no humus, no windfalls. She said that fruit trees just don’t bear all the time without blooming and growing the fruit in cycles, without some means of pollinating … a whole lot of technical staff. She said the same thing about the bivalves and the fish; there seemed to be no aquatic vegetation, no plankton or equivalent—no reason for the fish to have evolved. I remember the smell came up as she was talking, as she was saying, ‘Something here wanted us, made this place for us. Now it doesn’t want us any more.’
“I said, ‘Would we be better off in space, in the coffins?’ She said yes. I said, ‘We wouldn’t be together.’ She looked at me for a long time. She had eyes you couldn’t see into. I couldn’t see anything. She said, ‘We’ll leave together and we’ll be picked up together or we’ll die. At least this ends through our choice, and not at the command of some—some awful—’ and the smell peaked up and she vomited.
“I said all right, we’ll go.
“We went down to the beach, only now it was a sandy shelf at the edge of huge rocky barrens where the lake had been. We heard the laughing again, loud. We struck up the beach toward the coffins. There was a terrible rumbling behind us and the beach fell away into a rocky pit fifty to a hundred meters deep, the sand blowing about like snow. We began to run, and another section of beach fell.
“That really terrified Jan and I had to sprint all out to catch up with her. I grabbed her and held her until she stopped struggling. More beach fell, some of it not a meter from our feet, but I wouldn’t budge. She finally quieted.
“I said, ‘I think you’re right. If whatever-it-is wants us to go, we’ll go. If it wants us to go, it will leave the lifeboats alone until we get there. If it wanted to kill us we’d be dead by now.’
“She said, ‘All right, then, but hurry!’ and I said, ‘No, Jan—I’ll go, but I won’t run.’
“She looked at me—really looked at me, not as some force holding her while she struggled to run, not glancing over my shoulder at the edges of that new hole in the ground—really at me, and she smiled. Smiled. She said, ‘All right, Case,’ and took my hand.
“Suddenly the air was sweet and the ground no longer shook, and we walked up the beach looking at each other and not at the place where the lake used to be, or back where our house was, or anything. When we got to the little launch-pad I had built, I started a careful preflight check. I checked everything, Doctor—everything. I took my time and Jan gave me readouts, one craft to the other, when I asked for them. All that while the whole planetoid was still, like waiting, like watching. And whatever it was, it was no longer laughing.
“Jan got in and lay down. She put out her arms and kissed me in a way—”
(—in a way she never had before, not even lying together. She … never had kissed him before, not really, only sometimes when in the midst of her own storm she seemed to forget some subtle resolution of her own.…)
“… in a way that was all the words anyone needed, and then I closed the plate, and saw the dogs turn tight from the inside. Then I got into my own craft and buttoned up and punched the Go button.”
Case meant to say, “And she didn’t launch,” but his voice wouldn’t work and he whispered, “And she didn’t launch. She didn’t launch.” He meant to look up at the Doctor but his eyes didn’t seem to work either. He dashed a hand angrily across them. “You see,” he said harshly, “I—”
“I see,” said the blue man gently. Something seemed to have rushed out of Case; he was slumped in his chair and his hands flattened out on the arms as if they had weight on them. The Doctor turned to see the telltales and said, “I think you need to sleep for a while, Case.”
Case moved his head slightly but did not answer otherwise. The blue man waved at a disk on his board and the chair became a couch, the lights dimmed, the Doctor faded away.
Case’s resuscitation had not ceased with the withdrawal of the tubes from his arms. Asleep and awake, he had been bathed in emanations and vibrations, tiny search beams and organic detectors. The bland mixture in the sucker was computer-formularized just for him, here, now, in this up-to-the-second condition; so that when he next awoke it was in his usual style, alertly and all together. He rose and stretched, taking pleasure in the knotting and flexing of his muscles. He tried a step, then another, then turned to face the bank of telltales. Clear and open and fully, he could read them all—even the many which did not exist even in theory when he was born. He smiled when he saw that the gravity was 1.2 Earth normal. In space, a third of that was usual, but Case smiled and left it where it was. He looked over the huge bank of controls, and found them completely understandable, while marveling at their completeness.
He walked back to the oval doorway through which his coffin had been transported, and went down the corridor. He could read the never-before-seen legends on the doors: ARMAMENT, DRIVE, ELEMENT BANK, BIOLOGY, CHEMISTRY (he knew without looking that these were interconnected), GENERAL REPAIR AND TOOLS … on and on to the end of the corridor and around two comers and forward again on the other side of the ship: ATMOSPHERE AND PRESSURE, COMMUNICATIONS, COMPUTER RECREATION AND EXERCISE, on and on again, until at last he faced the door marked MASTER CON
TROL. It dilated for him with a snap as he approached it, and he entered.
The control room was sizable, and again he found himself perfectly familiar with equipment he had never seen before. By the main control bank and its three chairs stood the blue man. There had been no one else anywhere on board, “And you’re a hologram,” said Case, completing his thought aloud.
The blue man inclined his head. “There has not been a man aboard this ship in over seven hundred years. It’s too far away, and anyway … nobody cares. Correction. A great many people care, are interested, even fascinated. But the urge to come out, to be personally involved—it seems to have left us. You know what Earth is like now.”
It was not a question. Case called upon the knowledge which had been fed into his brain in just the way you can call upon the likeness of your first teacher’s face, your first fist-fight, the time she … or he came to you and said … You see? These things are with you always, but are not evident until you call.
So Case looked on Earth as a contemporary, ten centuries past his death, and wagged his head slowly. “It shouldn’t have come to this.”
“It had to. It was that or die,” said the blue man; and Case thought a bit and saw that it was so.
“You can go back, Case. You can be suspended rather more efficiently than you were before, and for a good while longer. It would take—oh—another fifteen hundred years to get you there, and it is not possible to predict what Earth would be like when you got there. Still, it would be Earth—it would be … home.”
“ ‘You can’t go home again,’ ” Case quoted from somewhere, with not a little bitterness. “I suppose there’s an alternative.”
“There is, and it is a matter of your free choice. You see, Case, primitive as you may seem to some of us, you have a quality which we lack and admire—a willingness to go out, to do, to explore and discover and find, actually and physically, and not in theory or extrapolation or imagination. This ship was designed, yes, and used, by men like you, and when the last of them died on an exploration, there were no replacements, and besides, the ship was already so far away that only long-suspended men could reach it.
Case and the Dreamer Page 6