Strangers From the Sky (21 page)

“S
HOOT ME IF
I’m wrong, Ji—Captain,” Lee Kelso’s voice echoed up the steps to Kirk and Mitchell. “This is going to sound nuts, but I think we’re in Egypt.”

There was no response at first from the dark at the top of the stairs, only the sound of both men scuffling and straining against the great stone slab that abruptly cut off the stairway, effectively imprisoning the four of them.

“You need any help up there?” Kelso asked.

“No,” Kirk panted, and the sounds of scuffling were replaced by footsteps, echoing, growing nearer. “It can’t be moved. We’ve tried.”

First Kirk, then Mitchell, emerged from the darkness, down the ancient crumbling stone steps to the huge, echoing chamber where Kelso and Elizabeth Dehner waited.

“You did say Egypt?” Kirk said, dusting his hands, looking around.

“Either that or the best reproduction I’ve ever seen,” Kelso maintained.

“Egypt,” Kirk said again, incredulous. “First disappearing planets, then disappearing Vulcans, now you want me to believe we’ve been yanked off a planet a thousand light-years away and ended up back on Earth. Well, why not?” He sat heavily on the stairs, forgetting the bruises he’d earned on arrival here—wherever ‘here’ was—and tried not to wince. He gave Kelso the floor. “Convince me.”

“For starters, I guess we all agree we’re not on M-155 anymore,” Kelso began, waiting for someone to contradict him. “Spock did say no structures, no evidence of civilization.”

“Spock…” Kirk said with a sick feeling. The Vulcan was missing, had not turned up with the others. His responsibility.

“Well, here we are inside a structure, all right,” Kelso went on. “And it’s got all the earmarks of dynastic architecture: heroic proportions, mortarless construction; it’s at least three thousand years old—I can tell you that even without a tricorder—and probably underground because there are no windows and the only way out is up—”

“Why don’t you call it a dungeon, Lee?” Gary Mitchell chimed in. He’d ensconced himself halfway up the stairs where the light from some sort of antique electric fixtures was strongest, and was dismantling one of the communicators. “Because that’s what it is. That stone upstairs won’t budge. That means we’re stuck here.”

“Thanks, Mitch.” Kelso grimaced, deflated. “Nothing like looking on the bright side.”

“That’s Mr. Mitchell’s job,” Elizabeth Dehner spoke for the first time from her chosen spot against one wall, deliberately distanced from the others, keeping her own thoughts on dungeons at bay. “Playing the cynic makes him feel superior to the rest of us!”

“Always expect the worst, doc.” Mitchell grinned down at her. “You’ll never be disappointed.”

“Egypt,” Kirk said for the third time, jumping down from his step and beginning to pace. There didn’t seem to be anything else for him to do, and he couldn’t just sit. “Earth. It seems impossible. Megalithic architecture is common on humanoid worlds throughout the galaxy, Lee. What makes you so sure?”

“I’ve been studying the walls,” Kelso explained. It was true. From the moment the foursome had picked themselves up from the sand-strewn stone floor, Kelso had been groping around the perimeter of the huge empty room, poking his fingers into crevices, measuring, calculating, at times crawling on all fours and muttering to himself until Kirk had demanded to know what he thought he was doing. “They’re sandstone, originally dressed to fit so snug they didn’t need mortar, particularly in a desert climate, although they’ve shifted in places, probably because of earthquakes. That’s why there’s sand on the floor. There were major quakes in Egypt in the twentieth century and the twenty-first—when they built the dam at Aswan, and again when they opened the old Gibraltar Locks. Too much water pressure in places where there’d never been water before.”

“I see,” Kirk said, but Kelso was just getting warmed up.

“If you look closely—” He began moving from place to place, pointing, scuttling around like a slightly crazed spider, his voice bouncing back and forth against the emptiness so that he seemed to be everywhere. “The blocks alternate headers and stretchers—short ones with long ones—in a pattern the Egyptians called
talatat
or ‘threes’—no one seems to remember why—which was the pattern for interior masonry from the Golden Age, around 1400
B.C
. Except for the women’s temples, which were done in headers or short blocks only, like the temple of Nefertiti, which was dismantled after the worship of Aten was discredited, literally chopped apart stone by stone…”

He trailed off, as if realizing for the first time that he had said more in five minutes than he usually said in a day. Quiet, diffident Lee Kelso, known among his peers as Old Reliable—the man who could find anything, fix anything (and, as those who knew him from the Academy could verify, “organize” anything that wasn’t nailed down) had suddenly revealed himself as a closet Egyptologist.

“Why, Lee, you amaze me!” Jim Kirk said softly when he’d done.

“It’s a hobby.” Kelso shrugged. “I’ve always been interested in architecture.”

“What about the treasures, Lee?” Gary tweaked him, shaking cobalt-blue sand out of the communicator. It sprinkled like fairy dust down the stairs to mingle with the reddish sand on the floor, a reminder that where they had been was not hallucination, but no guarantee that where they were was not. “Where’s King Tut’s gold? Where’s the ancient papyrus with the secret code? Where’s the hidden passageway to get us out of here?”

“There are some hieroglyphs over here,” Elizabeth Dehner said helpfully, interested in what Kelso had been saying and anxious to shut Mitchell up at any cost. “At least that’s what I think they are.”

Kelso had already investigated them.

“They’re not true pictographs. Coptic graffiti. Centuries younger, and inferior to the real thing.”

“Excuse us!” Mitchell murmured.

“At least the lights are a little more contemporary,” Kirk observed, studying the wall sconces near the high stone ceiling, listening to the echo of his own voice. “For a minute there you had me expecting torchlight processions. All right, let’s say Egypt, for the sake of argument. That puts us in a lot less difficulty than we would be anywhere else. All we have to do is find a way out of here, locate Spock—”

“Just like that,” Mitchell remarked dryly, refitting the casing on the communicator and testing it. “Nothing to it!”

“Have you got that thing working yet?” Kirk demanded impatiently. “If we can home on a Starfleet frequency—”

“Oh, it’s working, all right,” Mitchell assured him. “But I can’t broadcast. There’s no range. Something’s jamming it.”

Kirk turned to Dehner. “What about the tricorders?”

“Same problem, Captain,” she replied. “I can read anyone inside the chamber, but I can’t get beyond the walls.”

“There’s some kind of damping field all around us, Jim,” Mitchell reported, snapping the communicator shut with finality. “Something out there wants us incommunicado. And if it’s the same thing that was strong enough to bring us here, offhand I’d say we’re in pretty deep—”

“Very astute, Mr. Mitchell,” said a voice behind them, a voice that did not echo, but spoke in the same heavily accented Standard that Kirk thought he’d imagined before. “However, allow me to assure you that your fears are unfounded. I mean you no harm.”

He had not come down the steps, had not entered to the sound of stone walls sliding open to Gary Mitchell’s suggested hidden passageway, was simply there with them—curious apparition out of another age or reality, turbaned and white-robed, too thin for his height or too tall for his weight—wraithlike, insubstantial, grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat, and carrying (Kirk saw)—

—a bone-china tea service on a teakwood tray.

“You’re the one!” Kirk advanced on him, finger pointed accusingly. “The voice I heard. Are you responsible for bringing us here?”

“Quite responsible, Captain,” the wraith acquiesced with a small bow, setting the tea service down on the steps in lieu of furniture, spreading his long fingers in apology. “Guilty as charged, though I assure you that was not my original intention.”

Kirk opened his mouth and nothing came out. Nonplussed, he looked up at Mitchell for suggestions. Mitchell shrugged.

“What was?” Kirk asked carefully.

“I was attempting,” the stranger said, fussing with the tea things, “an experiment in the manipulation of time. It was not intended to involve anyone else. You and your crew simply got in the way.”

Behind him, Kirk could hear Dehner’s tricorder whirring busily. Cool and collected, she was taking readings on the stranger. Good! Kirk thought, clearing his throat.

“I am Captain James T. Kirk of the Federation starship
Enterprise
. We were on a peaceful mission—”

“Oh, I know all that, Captain,” the stranger said, waving it away with one long hand and nearly upsetting the teapot. “Though at present I do not know how I know. I know all manner of useless things. It is when I try to employ my knowledge in some way that might benefit me in my plight that I succeed only in making matters worse. Do you take honey in your tea, Captain?”

Before Kirk could refuse, assert himself, even shout something incoherent, Dehner’s voice came from behind him.

“He’s human, Captain,” Dehner whispered. “More or less.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kirk demanded.

“She means, Captain,” the stranger said, still holding the teacup (seeing that Kirk had no intention of taking it, he offered it to Dehner, who shut off her tricorder and accepted it with a shrug in Kirk’s direction), “that while some of my readings are within human norms, many are not. She will tell you that my neurological patterns are paranormal, for example, particularly what you would classify as esper ratings, and that she is unable to determine my age.”

“Exactly,” Dehner said coolly, as if his knowing all that didn’t surprise her in the least. She leaned against the steps sipping her tea as if it were the most normal thing to do under the circumstances. Kirk wondered if it was. “How did you know? Have you been tested before, Mr.—”

“Parneb,” the stranger said, pouring a second cup of tea. “Mahmoud Gamal al-Parneb Nezaj, if you please, though Parneb is the one name I shall carry with me through all my incarnations. Mr. Mitchell?”

“My mama told me never to take tea with strangers,” Mitchell quipped pleasantly from his perch near the top of the staircase. His arms were folded, he leaned casually against the wall, but a certain tightness about the mouth let Kirk know that he was coiled and ready to spring if he gave the word.

“Ah, but we are no longer strangers!” Parneb protested, offering the tea and some biscuits to Lee Kelso, who had never been known to refuse anything edible. “I know who you are, and I will tell you as much about myself as I can remember. And in due course I shall do all in my power to get you home safely. But you must first promise me you will not do anything—precipitous.”

“It’s mint!” Kelso said past a mouthful of biscuit, referring to the tea, to which he’d added a generous dollop of honey. “It’s very good.”

“From my own garden,” Parneb said with a trace of pride. “And the honey is from my own apiary. Two skills which will hold me in good stead down the ages.”

“One of my crewmen is still missing,” Kirk interrupted, shaking off a kind of
Through the Looking-Glass
malaise that seemed to have captured Kelso at least. All this pouring and sipping, nattering and chattering, were getting to him; he had a sudden desire to smash crockery. “He was with us on that planet—”

“Yes, I know, the Vulcan,” Parneb said calmly. “Pity, I don’t quite know how that happened; you were all supposed to arrive here.
Malesh
, a single Vulcan can’t be that difficult to find.”

“We are in Egypt, aren’t we?” Kelso wanted to know.

“Most definitely, Mr. Kelso. And I quite enjoyed your lecture on the subject.” Parneb poured himself a cup of tea at last, folding his ectomorphic personage onto the stone steps to sip at it delicately. “You and your associates have managed to surmise a great deal despite the restrictions I have placed on you by confining you to this—cellar; it was not intended to be a dungeon, Mr. Mitchell, truly. I must also accept responsibility for jamming your equipment, Captain. I was aware that your training and your talents would demand that you attempt to escape or to seek help from outside. But, like you, I also have a manner of Prime Directive. I cannot have you announcing your presence in a century that is not your own.”

Slowly Kirk began to comprehend what Parneb was really saying. He had by his own admission transported them across parsecs of distance. Why not time as well?

“Parneb,” Kirk said with the last ounce of patience he possessed. “What century is this?”

“Why, one of mine, of course,” Parneb seemed surprised that Kirk didn’t know. “But as to which of them—let me think…”

It was more than Kirk could stand.

“I want answers!” he gritted out through clenched teeth. “I don’t know who or what you are—sorcerer, con man, or just plain lunatic—but if you don’t release us, tell me what’s happened to my first officer and my ship, and get us back where we belong, I’ll—”

“You’ll what, Captain?” Parneb went on placidly sipping his tea.

Kirk lunged for him, found himself grabbing what felt sickeningly like cobwebs, until it melted out from under him. Kirk lurched forward, hit the steps hands first, broke his fall, and rolled onto the floor. Beside him Parneb’s teacup tumbled, splashed, and smashed to bits. Parneb was elsewhere.

“Please don’t do that again, Captain.” Kirk leaped to his feet to find the conjurer standing in the center of the room, smoothing his clothing fastidiously. “It wrinkles the
djellaba
and is undignified for both of us. I
told
you I would do what I could. But I need time. And your present behavior is hardly conducive to my letting you out of here at all.”

Kirk seethed, mentally adding his skinned hands to the bruises he already owed this disappearing dervish.

“Patience, Captain, for just a bit longer,” Parneb advised affably. He saw that Kelso was examining the walls again. “Mr. Kelso, I would be most interested in how you rate this structure comparative to others of the same period…”