Case and the Dreamer Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 any 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, fallagain, 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