Free Case and the Dreamer by Theodore Sturgeon Page A

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 Iclosed 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