Case and the Dreamer by Theodore Sturgeon

occasional … drifting cumulus; the weirdest thing of all, though, was that, from the underside, the cover was illuminated only on one half. I mean, imagine a hollow sphere, half black and half white, and call the white the illuminated part. The planetoid is inside this sphere, and the sphere rotates around it, so that even without a primary, the surface has day-and-night phases.
    “I picked a number of likely spots and finally selected one. It was a long, narrow, sandy plain, like a beach, at the edge of a large lake, with forest—oh yes, there was vegetation—on the other side. It seemed fairly level and we could land on it with a clear run to get off again. I ran a full check on the manuals and then took over. I made fourteen, fifteen trial approaches before I lowered the gear and went in.
    “You have to understand, the lifeboat was no kind of airfoil. She came in on what we called stilts—supporting jets—and maintainedattitude with gyros. I was practically sitting on the stilts at ten meters altitude, and I had forward velocity down to about fifteen meters per second. A crawl. And then there was this terrible noise and we fell over sideways.”
    (A tearing scream, edged, stabbing, and Jan’s screaming with it, and—and his too, he screamed: to be falling, to know in that split second that the boat was gone, that hope, born again, was gone again; and as they toppled, that other sound, that other terrible sound that made them scream again when terror overrode despair.…)
    “It was a small lifeboat, but small is …” He spread his hands. “There were tons of it all the same, and it fell over and I could hear the hull plates crumpling and turning back. I think the two left-side stilts, fore and aft, cut out, and the two right ones added to the topple and she lay over on her side and slid and ruined herself. And when the fin levered over and hit the sand we were thrown so hard we hit the bulkhead, restraints and all—they pulled right out, they were never built for such a lurch from the side as that.
    “It was night, that crazy kind of night, when I came out of it. I was lying on the sand with my head on Jan’s lap and she was wiping my face with something cold.”
    (And breathing used-up little
hics
, dry catches at the long, far end of weeping. She’d been thrown clear, right out through a rapture in the fin, and in time had found him dangling against the outside of the boat by his restraints, with his blood painting down the bent plates. She had got him down somehow and then had gone off to the beach with a bit of foam insulation which she dipped in the water and brought back. When he got his wits about him he gave her hell for maybe inoculating him with God-knows-what from alien water. Her response, astonishingly, was to fall instantly asleep.)
    “I hurt all down my life side, especially, the skull and my hip, both scraped badly and bruised. Jan was shaken up and for a while, two days or so, I was afraid of internal injuries because she vomited a lot and moaned in her sleep. Then I guess we both got sick for a while, a fever and blurred vision; it is asking a lot of the biosystem to be thrust unprotected into an alien environment, even a kindly one.”
    (Kindly. Cool at night, warm in the daytime, clean air, on the high side of oxygenation. Potable water. It could have been worse—if that had been all there was to it. When there was more to it, it was worse.)
    “It was at the end of the third day, as nearly as I can recall, that we shook off the sickness and were able to take at good look at the situation. We were bruised and hungry, but we were out of shock. Jan told me she had been having dreams—a dream, I should say, vivid and recurrent: a device like hands, sorting and shuffling cards, laying them out, gathering them up, shuffling and laying them out again, and she was the pack of cards. I would not mention that or even remember it if she hadn’t described it so forcefully and so often. I had