Case and the Dreamer Read Online Free Page B

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 panelof 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 X n .
    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 fairsegment 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