Case and the Dreamer Read Online Free Page A

it.” He wagged his head and whispered, “Me.”
    Abruptly he threw his arms around her, with his wet soapy hands, and buried his face in her hair and the side of her neck. She stood acquiescent, not helping, not hindering. He held on to her and was full of words, bursting with words, and could find hardly a one that was any good. He said at last, “You get afraid too.”
    She nodded against his cheek without speaking.
    “You’re pretty small yourself.”
    “Yes.”
    “No you’re not,” he whispered. “No, you’re—” But then the words deserted him altogether.

Case and the Dreamer
    If, at the very moment Case died, someone had aimed a laser (a tight one, one of the highest intensity ever) at the spot from Earth, and if you could have hidden the beam-front for a thousand years (you couldn’t, of course, and anyway, nobody aimed, nobody knew), you might have seen his coffin.
    It wasn’t meant to be a coffin. Ships have lifeboats when they fail, and the boats have life belts in case they fail, and the coffin had once answered that purpose; but now and for all those centuries, it was and had been Case’s coffin.
    It lay in lightlessness, its wide-spectrum shrieks of distress forever stilled. It tumbled ever so slowly, pressed long ago by light long gone, because it had never been told to stop.
    Case, aged a thousand and some hundred and perhaps a couple of dozen and a fraction (but then, do the dead grow older?), lay in the sealed cylinder, dressed in inboard fatigues (which long ago—even in Case’s long ago—had evolved into practically nothing) consisting of barely enough material to carry his brassard: Senior Grade Lieutenant, and the convoluted symbol of his service branch. X n , it read, once you got past the art: Ex—on many levels: exploration, extrasolar, extragalactic, extratemporal, and more; plus the possibility matrix; expatriate, ex-serviceman, ex-officio, exit … for on entering X n , no man made plans for himself—not if they involved any “here,” any “now.” Or anyone.…
    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 beenbefore, 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,