Free Case and the Dreamer by Theodore Sturgeon

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 forus 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