Strangers From the Sky (20 page)

The lift had stopped. Kirk had given it no instructions, and Dr. Dehner apparently intended to follow him wherever he was going. Kirk decided to take advantage of that.

“Rec Room 3,” he instructed the lift. “Besides, doctor, he’s a Vulcan. Officially they have no feelings.”

Dehner had been watching the numbers on the lift panel, might have gone to the rec room with him if it weren’t for that last remark. She turned on him, her silken blond hair flailing about her face in her anger.

“Every intelligent being has feelings, Captain. The greater the intelligence the more highly developed the feelings. Mr. Spock is just better at hiding his than you are. Why do you dislike him so much?”

“I don’t dislike him,” Kirk defended himself. The lift had opened at the rec room. He stepped out but Dehner didn’t. “I don’t especially like him either. All I ask is that he do his job.”

“Maybe if you were a little clearer on what your job was, Captain,” Elizabeth Dehner challenged him through the closing doors, “you might be less paranoid about the way Spock does his.”

Mixed reviews, Kirk thought grimly, striding down the corridors as if he were in a great hurry. The Vulcan won’t mess with me anytime soon, but the lady shrink thinks I’m a bully. Nobody ever said this job was easy.

He was just stepping out of the shower the next morning when Gary strolled in without knocking. He and Kirk had always had the run of each other’s quarters; Kirk’s recent change in rank wasn’t about to alter that.

“Feeling better?” Mitchell asked with exaggerated solicitude, lolling in the doorway with his arms folded.

Kirk grunted by way of reply. He seemed to remember Gary had been on his side yesterday.

“You’d better tread softly on that bridge this morning, kid. Spock’s found his missing planet.”

Kirk began to dress, looked at Gary’s reflection in the mirror.

“Is it for real, or are you part of the gag this time?”

Mitchell shrugged off Kirk’s paranoia; they’d both pulled a few in their midshipman days.

“Scanners say it’s real. Oh, and FYI, they first picked it up on an infrawhite wavelength. Something Vulcans can see but we can’t. That’s why no one else spotted it.”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” Kirk said quietly, humbly. Gary always seemed to know little out-of-the-way facts that he didn’t.

“Spock’s taken some pretty impressive pictures this time,” Mitchell went on. “Verified and confirmed by everyone on each watch to avoid any further—misunderstandings.”

“Why wasn’t I informed?” Kirk snapped, on the defensive again.

Mitchell detached himself from the doorway, made himself comfortable in Kirk’s best chair, propped his feet on the bunk.

“I guess in view of yesterday’s tantrum he didn’t want to risk waking you,” he said casually. “His pictures range from 2300 last night to about five minutes ago, at half-hour intervals.”

Kirk stood with his shirt in his hand, stunned. “He’s been monitoring this thing
all night?
”

“From what I understand, Jim, he never left the bridge after you called him into question in front of half the crew. Hasn’t eaten or slept since he came on this time yesterday. I hear tell Vulcans get points for stamina, but…”

He let his voice trail off, let his silence do the rest. No one could put the guilts on Jim Kirk the way Mitchell could. He watched Kirk pull on his shirt, glance in the mirror one last time, then spin the entire vanity back into the bulkhead as if he didn’t much like the face he saw in that mirror.

“I was rather—abrupt with him, wasn’t I?” the captain of the
Enterprise
said humbly.

Gary grinned up at him. “Two things you never question about a Vulcan, James, are his competence and his veracity. You managed to do both simultaneously. Always said you were talented.”

“I’ll have to apologize to Spock,” Kirk said, steeling himself.

He motioned Mitchell to his feet.

“Let’s go have a look at the cause of the controversy.”

Spock straightened from his viewer, sensing Kirk’s arrival by the watchful quality of the silence on the bridge.

“Captain,” he reported at once, “the planet is no longer there.”

The silence deepened, grew profound, became so entire that the machine noise from the dozen bleeping, whirring, chirping, humming consoles seemed to heighten in an attempt to fill the vacuum, deafening.

Kirk felt his blood pressure rising. Was there no end to this nonsense? He envisioned his ship trapped in endless orbit around this glaring, unfriendly sun like some interstellar
Flying Dutchman
, eternally in pursuit of a figment, a rumor of a planet, while he and his science officer remained locked in mortal combat, his hands forever gripping the Vulcan’s throat….

He took a deep breath, waited for the red haze to clear from his vision, and saw that Elizabeth Dehner was also on the bridge, tucking her blond hair casually behind one ear, watching him.

Paranoid, am I, Doctor? he thought.

“Mr. Spock?” he asked in the calmest of tones. “What do you mean it’s ‘no longer there’?”

Spock made note of the change of tone, as well as of its probable cause.

“Captain, as illogical as it may sound, this planet apparently has the capability to appear and disappear at random intervals, which I have plotted in this series of holo-images. It was literally here a moment ago, and gone the next.”

The holos were genuine, verified by all three watches, incontrovertible. But what did they mean?

Garth of Izar had given an electrifying guest lecture at the Academy once. Jim Kirk had been there, crammed into the back of the SRO auditorium with about a hundred other cadets.

“Consider the minuscule portion of space we have managed to explore in our time,” Garth had addressed them, his slender hands gripping the edges of the podium, his magnificent voice rolling out over them without need of augmentation. “As well surmise the nature of an entire ocean from a single surf-washed stone. Gentles, assume that space will always be more unknown than known, and nothing you encounter in its reaches will surprise you.”

As a cadet, Kirk had taken those words to heart; they had saved his life more than once and his face more often than that. As commanding officer, Kirk seemed to have forgotten them. Maybe there was some phenomenon, operative in this area of space and as yet unknown to human science, that could account for an entire planet’s whimsical appearance and disappearance. Maybe he should have thought about that before he shot off his mouth yesterday.

“Explanation?” he asked Spock now.

“Insufficient data, Captain,” Spock replied evenly, as if yesterday’s humiliation had vanished along with the planet. “I shall need to study this phenomenon further.”

“No,” Kirk said softly. “Not you, Mr. Spock. Have someone else from your department relieve you. Boma’s Astrophysics, isn’t he? Or Jaeger. Have one of them come to the bridge. You’re long overdue for some rest. And—an apology.”

“Sir?”

“I had—insufficient data—for coming down on you so hard yesterday. I’m sorry.”

Spock hesitated. He had never understood this human concept of apology—so casual, so commonplace, so different from the formalized Vulcan asking of forgiveness. Among equals, he had learned, apologies were frequently dismissed with some offhand response like “that’s okay” or “forget it,” neither of which was logical. To state that the offense being apologized for was “okay” implied that it did not require apology in the first place, and to suggest that the offender “forget” the offense was not only unlikely, but apt to encourage a repetition of that offense.

Further, one could hardly tell one’s superior officer to “forget it.” What other responses were possible?

“‘The first is to understand,’” Sarek his father, diplomat to all species, would say, quoting Surak. “‘Thence to accept the one, not as you would wish to be, but as the one would wish to be, for this is the essence of Diversity.’”

Estranged though he was from his father, Spock could respect his wisdom. First to understand. Spock had attempted to understand humans all his life, had come to understand only his lack of understanding. How was he to accept an apology he did not understand?

“Take it in the spirit it was intended and don’t analyze it to death!” Amanda, his ever-human mother, would say, quoting no one’s wisdom but her own. “And don’t be such an infernal perfectionist!”

There had never been estrangement from his mother; could not be, for Amanda would accept him whatever he became. Spock took her wisdom as it was intended.

“I accept your apology, Captain,” he said at last. “But I request permission to remain on the bridge. The study of this phenomenon would be a rare opportunity.”

Kirk’s first instinct was to deny him, but on second thought he realized Spock needed the vindication as much as he.

“Very well, Mr. Spock,” he said, settling himself into the command chair for the first time that day; he felt he’d earned it. “Between us maybe we’ll solve this thing. Who knows, we might even name the planet after you.”

That will not be necessary, Captain, Spock started to say, but again his mother’s wisdom intervened and he restrained himself.

“Main screen,” Kirk said.

“Aye, sir,” Kelso replied.

Out of the corner of his eye, the captain of the
Enterprise
could see his ship’s psychiatrist leaning over the comm con chatting with Uhura. When she glanced in his direction, she was smiling.

Planet M-155 popped back into being within the hour.

Considering the uproar it had caused, it was an unprepossessing little planet, essentially a drab greenish-gray rock with a tenuous atmosphere, little free water, and scant primitive vegetation. There was no evidence of animal life and nothing of mineralogical value.

And no indication, from this distance, of what was making it disappear.

Enterprise
hovered at 40,000 perigee, as far away as scanners could work effectively. Kirk was not about to get his ship in too close.

“No evidence of structures or dwellings of any kind,” Spock reported. “No evidence of any civilization past or present, or of any advanced life form. Dubious such a thin atmosphere could support sentient life.”

“Then what’s playing tricks on us?” Kirk wondered aloud. “Could there be some power source from offworld? A transfer beam or displacement wave from another solar system? Even a ship powerful enough to pull a planet off course?”

“Nearest inhabited solar system is forty-six parsecs distant,” Mitchell reported from his station. “No vessel of any description within a radius of ten degrees.”

“And no disturbance of surrounding space, Captain,” Spock interjected. “Whatever the phenomenon is, it is affecting only this planet.”

Kirk digested this. “Could it be a natural phenomenon? A time warp or—or something?”

“Exploring that possibility at present, Captain,” Spock replied.

Kirk crossed to the science station, leaned on the rail. “Are we in any danger?”

“Inconclusive,” the Vulcan said. “However, at this distance, I do not believe so.”

Kirk didn’t like the smell of it. “Shell game!” he muttered evilly. “Cosmic three-card monte with us as the rubes.”

Kelso looked at Mitchell who looked at Kelso. They’d lived through enough of Kirk’s metaphors to know what was going on in the captain’s head. A more cautious commander would record the planet as an unexplained phenomenon, set out warning buoys, and move on.

James Kirk had not become the youngest captain in Starfleet history by being cautious.

“Spock, what’s the longest it’s been ‘present’ since it first appeared?”

“Four-point-one-three hours, Captain.”

“And the shortest?”

“One hour six minutes, sir. However, that is no guarantee—”

One hour and six minutes, Kirk thought. More than enough time to beam down, have a look around, and, with Mr. Scott on the button, zip back up again.

He glared at the greenish-gray blob on the screen; it seemed to be taunting him.

“Mr. Mitchell, organize a preliminary landing party and have them on standby,” Kirk said. “We’ll give this beast one more prestidigitation. The next time it pops back in, we’re going down there.”

“I
REITERATE
, C
APTAIN:
the fact that the planet remained ‘with us’ for one hour and six minutes at minimum once before does not guarantee that it will not remain for a far shorter period this time.”

“Mr. Spock, if you’d like to excuse yourself from the landing party, feel free to do so,” Kirk said shortly, itching to start.

“Negative, sir. Mathematically, the odds are in our favor. I merely point out—”

“Good,” Kirk cut him off, stepping up on the transporter platform with Spock, Mitchell, and Kelso. “Then let’s get going!”

“Still waiting for Dr. Dehner, sir,” Mr. Scott reported from the transporter control.

Kirk threw up his hands in despair, stepped down from the platform. It was his fault for insisting she tag along.

“I’d like a Med staffer along,” he’d told Mitchell, who presented him with a preliminary landing party roster consisting of himself, Spock and Lee Kelso, when M-155 popped off the screen again and they waited for it to reappear. “In case one of your falls and skins your knees.”

“Dr. Dehner’s next up on the med list,” Mitchell grimaced. “Jim, she’s a shrink, for crying out loud. I’ll lay odds she can’t remove a splinter.”

“Spock assures me the flora are pre-xylemic,” Kirk said, deadpan.

Mitchell gave him a blank look.

“No trees yet,” Kirk explained, having trouble with the corners of his mouth. “No wood, no splinters.”

“Hilarious,” Mitchell remarked, adding Dehner’s name to the roster. “One lady shrink, per captain’s orders.”

“Give her a chance to get dirt under her nails like us ordinary mortals,” Kirk said. “Opportunity to study interpersonal relations outside of lab conditions, that kind of thing. Be nice to me, Gary, or I’ll see that you personally get to take her in hand.”

Now Dehner was holding up the landing party and the joke had gone flat.

“By the time she gets here we’ll lose our window on that planet!” Kirk lamented for the benefit of one and all. “Scotty, page her. If she’s not here in one minute we’ll—”

“Reporting for duty, Captain,” a cool voice reported from the doorway. “I had to double-check my equipment.” Dehner joined them on the transporter pods.

“Energize,” Kirk barked to Scotty, the only way he could think of to have the last word.

“Fan out,” he instructed his party. “Spock to six o’clock, Lee to nine. Gary to three, and I’ll take twelve. We’ll rendezvous back here on my signal.” His eyes went from Dehner to Gary and he was tempted, but only briefly. “Doctor, you’d better stay with me.”

The others moved off to reconnoiter.

“Making sure I get dirt under my nails, Captain?” the psychiatrist inquired archly. “Or do you think you’re apt to be the first to skin your knees?”

“Belay that,” Kirk said, wondering how she’d gotten wind of what he’d said to Gary on the bridge. Gossip, like everything else aboard a starship, traveled at warp speed. “We’re here to get some work done, not to play personalities.”

He was not about to tell her his stomach was in knots, watching the people under his command moving off into the unknown. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to it.

“Oh, I see!” Dehner said, seeing through the tough-guy act but playing to it. “Snide comments are your exclusive bailiwick. Rank hath its privileges, and all that.”

“Did you bring that tricorder down for show or do you plan to take some readings?”

They traveled in silence after that.

Scotty had set them down on the night side; there was too much radiation from Kapeshet’s corona, Spock had warned, for them to remain long on the day side unprotected. As it was, the raging sun spat enough of its radiance out over the horizon to lighten the night sky abnormally, obscuring all but the brightest stars, creating weird skittish aurorae at the poles, and giving the landing party an adequate if fickle fairylight to walk by.

The atmosphere was thinner than was strictly comfortable for humans, and Kirk cursed himself for not ordering airpacks. Well, he’d set himself a time limit of fifteen minutes; they could hold out that long.

Underfoot the soil was sandy and an unnatural cobalt-blue in color, though it could have been some trick of the light. It was fine and dusty and clung to boots and uniforms, irritated eyes and skin. Kirk heard Dehner cough more than once, but unobtrusively. He was probably the last person she’d let know she was uncomfortable. His own eyes were stinging, and he had a sneaking feeling this stuff was gumming up the tricorders despite their shielding.

“Anything?” he asked Dehner when she came to a halt, shutting off her tricorder with a shake of her head.

“Between the dust and the ionization from that infernal sun,” she answered, disguising another cough, “I couldn’t tell you.”

Kirk wouldn’t have expected her to find anything under ideal conditions; it wasn’t part of her training. But he nodded to let her know it didn’t matter, cleared his throat, and pulled out his communicator, motioning to Dehner to keep absolutely still so the dust would settle. He homed on Kelso’s frequency.

“Landing party, report.”

He heard static and the sound of coughing.

“Kelso here, Ji—Captain.” Old habits die hard. “I’m about a thousand meters from where we split up. Can’t find anything unusual, except that there are pockets where there’s no air. Makes you a little light-headed if you’re not careful. That and the dust—” He broke off, coughing again.

“Take it easy, Lee,” Kirk advised. “Try to keep the dust out of your equipment. And your lungs. Rendezvous back at starting point in five minutes. Kirk out.”

Mitchell’s report was much the same, with more vociferous complaints about the dust. Kirk gave him the same instructions he’d given Kelso.

“Can this stuff harm us?” he asked Dehner, wiping his eyes on his sleeve, which only made them burn more.

“No worse than an attack of hay fever,” she said, allowing herself to cough in earnest this time. “But cumulatively—”

“Understood,” Kirk said. They weren’t going to learn anything this way, he realized. “Let’s go.”

Against his own advice about gumming up the machinery, he tried to contact Spock as they hurried back the way they’d come, stirring up dust as they went.

Spock answered the communicator signal reluctantly. Neither the thin atmosphere nor the dust affected him; there were portions of his planet where such conditions were a constant. And the absolute normalcy of his tricorder readings for this kind of planet puzzled him. There must be an answer to its disappearances, and he must find it.

“Spock here.”

“Time we were getting out of here, Mr. Spock. Get back to the beamdown point at once.”

Spock had positioned himself on a small rise above the worst of the dust; with his acute vision he could distinguish the distant figures of the others gathering like ants around their point of origin. He did not require their dubious security in numbers, would be perfectly content to remain where he was, alone on the planet if necessary, in order to pursue his research.

“Captain, request permission to remain and continue my tricorder readings. There are still several possible explanations for the phenomenon which I have not yet had opportunity to explore.”

The captain seemed to be having some difficulty getting his breath. Spock heard sounds of acute upper-respiratory distress.

“Negative, Spock…dust getting to all of us…back here on the double.”

“Captain, I am unaffected by the dust. Respectfully request—”

“Dammit”—cough—“Spock, don’t”—choke; splutter; cough—“argue!”

“Very well, sir,” the Vulcan said reluctantly, and started back to where the others awaited him.

“Och, what d’ye make o’that, Kyle?”

“I dunno, Mr. Scott. Never seen anything like it.”

Scott signaled to Kirk on the surface.

“Captain, is your landing party all together down there?”

“All but Spock,” Kirk reported through a surge of interference from the corona, tapping the dust out of his communicator. “He’s on his way in. Why?”

“I was afraid of that!” Scott said. “I had a fix on the lot of you like you ordered, in case we had to beam you up quicklike, and all of a sudden one of you popped off my screen, just like that blooming planet!”

“Stand by!” Kirk ordered, switching frequencies just as Elizabeth Dehner shouted.

“Captain! Mr. Spock—he’s gone!”

She’d been standing a little apart from the others, facing in the direction Spock had gone, had caught a glimpse of the spare, angular figure moving purposefully toward them, as she’d watched first Mitchell then Kelso appear out of the swirling grit moments before. Suddenly, she saw nothing.

It might have
been
nothing—a larger swirl of dust obscuring the Vulcan, a sudden depression in the landscape momentarily hiding him from view; he might even have fallen and skinned his knees, Kirk thought bitterly, choking on the thought as violently as on the dust—were it not for what Scotty had just told him.

Kirk’s mind raced. They’d been down here scarcely twelve minutes by his chrono. The planet had not disappeared that soon for as long as they’d been monitoring it. Was it about to vanish now, and take them with it?

“Spock!” Kirk called into the communicator, knowing it was useless.

The entire expedition was useless. Worse than useless because it had endangered his crew. It was all his fault. He was running toward where Dehner had seen Spock vanish, shouting into the communicator at the same time.

“Scotty! Beam the others aboard now! I’ve got to find—”

But the communicator failed, jammed by the interference and the dust he’d kicked up in his impatience. Kirk flung it aside, whirled as if to take one from someone else when he heard Kelso yell “Mitch!” and watched in horror as Mitchell, too, simply popped out of being.

The shout had not died on Kelso’s lips before he too disappeared. Kirk spun around in time to see Elizabeth Dehner’s eyes go wide as she—

Helpless to get a fix on anything, Scott and Kyle stood at the transporter control and watched as the landing party vanished one by one. Then the planet itself popped out from under them.
Enterprise
, suddenly robbed of its orbit, lurched violently before gravitational control compensated and the automatics locked in. Helping Kyle to his feet, Scotty looked at his screen in dismay.

“Bridge!” he called at once. “Who’s up there, then?”

“DeSalle here,” came the reassuring voice from the helm. “Uhura at Navigation. Somebody’s rocking the boat.”

“Aye, Mr. DeSalle,” Scott breathed. “Take us out a remove from that blasted sun. There’s namore between us and it. The whole kit’s disappeared again and taken the landing party with it!”

Kirk hit the sand too hard to break his fall, landing on his backside in an undignified sprawl. He could see nothing. The first thing he heard was a voice, speaking heavily accented Standard.

“Oh, dear! I
have
done it this time, haven’t I?”