Case and the Dreamer

by Theodore Sturgeon

  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.

  There appeared on the walkway that now surrounded the coffin a blue man, hooded and gloved, whose body dazzled without being excessively bright, who seemed to be not quite transparent yet not solid, who seemed in some way out of focus. At no time did he touch anything with his small hands, and he moved without a stride—he seemed to glide or slide from place to place.

  He stood for a time with his hands behind him and his hooded head bent, regarding the coffin, and then turned to the control bank. Deftly he activated a half-dozen systems by passing his hand between the face of the console and one after another, of the floating disks, each of which lit up. A gate at the front of the room opened and two metal arms, bearing a semicircle of glowing busbar, moved the length of the coffin, down and back. The field of the curved busbar rendered the top half of the coffin transparent. The arms retracted, the gate closed. The blue man made his swift, touchless passes at the console and the various glowing, floating disks faded to dark.

  The blue man placed his hands behind his back and stood for a long time regarding the body inside the coffin—the (compared with his own) overlong arms and legs, the hint of bony ridges over the corpse’s eyes, the heavy pectoral muscles and the flat stomach. After a time he glided around to the other side of the coffin and inspected that view, the hollow needles still embedded in the antecubitals, the bronze-colored, tonsure-shaped helmet clamped to the head, at the thick hair which tumbled around its edges, and for a long astonished while at that phenomenon, once Case’s shame and embarrassment, later his flag of defiance—his beard, which in the last days of his life he had allowed to grow far past the limits imposed by Xn.

  The blue man returned to the controls and set up a complex sequence. Again the gate at the front of the room opened, and a new device trundled out and approached the coffin. It looked like a fair segment of a planetarium, a multiple projector studded with gimballed lenses and the housings of small and highly diverse field generators, together with a positioning frame and sets of folded, tool-bearing arms. The telescopic legs arched and straddled the coffin, and positioned the projector over it. Urged by the sure, fleet hands of the blue man, the projector came alive with thread-like beams, some visible and brilliant, blue, gold, scarlet; some invisible but faintly shrill in the thin atmosphere which the room had assumed to match that inside the coffin. These beams were probes and stimulators, pressors and tractors, gauges and analyzers, samplers and matchers and testers.

  Without pause, now, they reached their summations and took further action. Mechanical hands searched and solved the seals. Gases were mixed and injected while the atmosphere in the chamber was matched in quality and kind and pressure (a process which had no effect whatever on the blue man) and then the seals were cracked, the coffin opened. While the body remained where it was, the opened coffin sank away to and through the deck. Case’s corpse seemed to be floating in midair, which it was not, for although gravity had not yet been applied, it was held from drifting or shifting by the tractor beams, while the crouching machine tapped the tubes from the needles in Case’s arms, severing them as the coffin dropped away, replacing their contents with something new. The same process was used on the small bronze helmet, all its leads analyzed, duplicated, tapped, and the original severed and discarded. A diathermic field adjusted the body’s temperature, through and through, and all at once, tubed needles snaked out to the groin, the abdominal cavity, the sides of the neck. Warm fluids began coursing through them while pressor beams gently manipulated the joints, the muscles, the chest.

  … and suddenly Case sat up, but you can’t sit up afloat in midair supported by intangible columns of force and entangled by needle-pointed tubes, electrodes, probes. Even so, his movement was so sudden and so violent that the swift reflexes of the blue man, the built-in fail-safes of the systems, could not prevent his wild angry flailing and his tortured shout, “Jan!” But that was as far as he got before the massive tranquilizer hit his brain and he relaxed, sleeping.

  Two tubes were gently replaced.

  A broken hollow needle was extracted and another put in.

  And a sleeping man is not a dead man. Let him sleep, said the master computer, and the blue man dissolved away and the lights dimmed, and Case slept.

  “Jan!”

  Tortured and hoarse, yes, but it had not been like the syllable that tore his throat and half his mind, mingled with the continuing crash of his chemical jets, abetted by the crush of acceleration, a multiple of anguish and loss and terror and love and fatigue (he hadn’t known about the love before) on that terrible launch, the last before he died. There were the lifebelts, the coffins, side by side on the escarpment where he and Jan had dragged them, where they had tumbled in barely ahead of capture by the—by the—(a thought missing here: occluded, forgotten …?) and—and—

  And his craft was launched, and hers had not.

  No-one, not ever anywhere, no one has been so helpless, so furious. Programming in the escape belts was so simple it was implacable; he himself had set up the sequences, he himself had taken the irrevocable precaution of locking them in, of tying his command controls to hers, of canceling an
y possible override. And—

  And his craft had launched, and hers had not, had not, had not.

  Jan!

  Case slept on in the dimness, apparently free-floating, actually caged by gentle, unbreakable beams. After enough hours (the master computer knew exactly the meaning of “enough”), the sourceless light increased, and with it, the figure of the blue man appeared and gained its almost-density. Moving to the console, the blue man activated certain of the telltales on the opposite bulkhead and studied them. Apparently satisfied, he turned back, made a number of careful adjustments, and then passed his hand behind a master-switch disk.

  Immediately a deep hum began; grew in intensity until checked by the blue man’s intangible hand, and then began to rise in pitch, fall again, rise and steady. It began to pulsate: eleven, fourteen, sixteen cycles … eighteen … and there it held. Then began a series of matching tones, high harmonics, multiples, tones set apart by fractions to set up beat frequencies; these in turn orchestrated to the heavy subsonics, the entire structure of sound constantly self-adjusting to itself and to the readouts connected through Case’s bronze helmet, until at last the whole living sonority was tailored exactly to him, to the emanations of his brain, the doorways of his mind, the subtle temporal cells, the neurons and synapses of his brain.

  Case was no longer asleep. This was something far deeper.

  Something began to press against the integument of his mind, gently, irresistibly, until it dissolved the wall and entered. It sought out those storage cells as yet unoccupied, meticulously respecting treasures and privacies, looking into nothing, asking only space to lay down new learning. Once this was found, it withdrew, leaving (remember: all is figure) a line into each compartment.

  Now there swiftly flowed through these lines new knowledge and new ideation. Language. Idiom. The ideological, analogical, mythological underbracing of idiom. Case was given everything a colleague and contemporary of the blue man might be expected to have, except knowledge of himself and his current situation. That he would get in his own way, in his own time: the ultimate courtesy.

  The hypnotic sound faded. The lights changed slightly. The blue man put his hands behind his back and waited.

  Case awoke.

  There is no end to the wonders of the universe, and no acrobatics of the imagination through time and space are needed to find them. A twentieth-century man could, if he would, spend half a lifetime in learning all there is to be learned about a square foot of topsoil, six inches deep. He would find animals and insects with marvelous abilities, able to speak languages of scent as well as sound; whole generations of aggression and defense; funguses capable of weaving nooses quick and strong enough to snap around a salamander, ingenious enough then to wrap and digest it. On the microphysical level are the endlessly subtle phenomena of solution and suspension, of freeze and thaw, while the living things encapsulate and encyst and metamorphose … no end of wonders.

  Consider then the cattle tick. Hatching in the ground, she sheds and grows and sheds and grows some more, and sheds and mates. At last, carrying within her the encapsulated sperm, she climbs. Eyeless, she is yet guided to climb upward until she finds a limb-tip where she clings until her reflexes are fired by a single, special spark: the odor of butyric acid, which is found in the sweat of warm-blooded mammals. At that, she leaps and, if she misses, will climb patiently again and find another tip, and hang there waiting. She has been known to hang there for eighteen years—and yet will react instantly and fully in the presence of the one thing she is equipped to take and designed to need. She will feed for a day, whereupon she releases the sperm she has hoarded to the eggs she carries. She falls then and dies, and the fertilized eggs are ready to take up the cycle.

  Her life, then, is composed of instants and episodes (as is yours) and could you communicate with her, she might recall episodes: the second shedding, the mating, the climb, the leap, the wait, through drought, freeze, drench, windstorm—why, that was another instant, another moment, for during that time she could be called alive only by nearly misusing the word; it was another instant, and less memorable than that first plunge into warm blood.

  Case’s first awakening, then, was but an instant after that terrible launch (for he could, but would not remember the long despair during which he gave himself to the belt’s life-support, life-suspension systems). He might have forgone these through grief and fury had not his own emergency programming been as implacable and unforgiving as that he had laid onto the belts, unconscious, automatic, indelible.

  (But hers didn’t launch, didn’t launch.)

  Therefore Case awoke (the first time) but an instant after that terrible wrench; therefore his hoarse cry; therefore he was the only human being in all the universe who could remember so distant an event as the escape from that hellish unknown planet; and to him it was not distant at all. For such is the nature of time, that a man’s clock and a man’s soul might give him true measurements, but the truth need not be the same. If you are to understand Case, you must understand this.

  So it was that he knew time had passed when he awoke the second time; he knew he had been asleep. He knew he felt well and rested, and that he was hungry and thirsty. He did not know where he was, and when he tried to sit up he could not.

  “Lie still,” said the blue man. “Don’t try to move while I get those needles out of you.”

  Case’s first disobedient reflex was to move, fast and hard. When he again found he couldn’t, he saw the sense of it and relaxed. The blue man made quick, sure passes at the console, and a piece of equipment glided out of the bulkhead somewhere beyond his head, came to him, extended glittering gentle arms and tools and drew the tubes, applied cool creams, released, untied, removed the various devices which had given him back his life (and all trace that they had ever been there) while he lay wondering what language the blue man had spoken—and how it was that he could understand it.

  The equipment slid away from him and traveled to its gate in the forward bulkhead, which swallowed it. Case lay still, looking up at the blue man, whose hooded, concealed face could tell him nothing, but whose relaxed, hands-behind-back pose was one of watchful waiting. Mysterious, yes. Menacing, no.

  Case moved tentatively, found no restraints, sat up. He sat on nothing visible and, looking down, found himself apparently afloat a meter above the deck. He had a second of vertigo, which passed as the blue man, with instant understanding, waved at a control. Case was immediately supported and surrounded by the soft, firm chair which faded in around him. He sat up straight, looked at the arms, around at the back, and then at the blue man, whose calming gesture was commanding enough, to cause him to lean back—watchful of course, but no longer alarmed.

  “Lieutenant Hardin …”

  Case blinked. It was so long, even as he knew time, since he had heard that name that he had all but forgotten it was his. It was a little like being called by one’s middle name, never having used it publicly before. “I’m usually called Case,” he said. “And who are you?”

  A pause, then the blue man (faceless, but with a smile in his voice) said, “There really is no simple answer to that question. For the time being; just call me the Doctor.”

  “Doctor.” The word meant the right thing as he said it, but felt unfamiliar to his tongue and throat. “Doctor,” he said again in his own (old) language. That felt better but he could sense it meant nothing to the blue man.

  “That’s right,” said the Doctor, “you’ve learned a new language—new to you, very ancient to me.”

  The idea of hypnogogia—sleep-learning—was not unfamiliar to Case, though he had never experienced anything as—well, finished as this. Learning and using information by hypnogogia had always been an instant translation (or rapid analog) process to him: think “cat” and come out with “gleep,” or whatever the appropriate word was in the learned system. In this case, he was thinking in the new language. Yet if he wished to use his old one, he could merely by decision, and without
special effort. All gain, no loss.

  Case closed his eyes. Did his new language have words for grief and anger and self-detestation? Yes, it had. Gratitude? Saved my life … There is this about dying anguished: that the anguish dies with you, and the pain. What then if you are revived, and with you, the anguish? This is what mattered at the moment, not a stupid “Where am I?” He was on a ship, which had picked him up. Whose ship, bound for where? That mattered too, but—not yet. Gratitude …?

  There were a million questions to ask, and nine hundred thousand of them conflicted with his conditioning: to give no information unless he must, and on certain matters, no information at all.

  “You were the executive officer on the Xn 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.”