Strangers From the Sky (28 page)

It was a last-ditch effort, primitive and unsanitary, polluting the water with ashy sediment, the air with greasy, roiling smoke that could be seen from the deck of the big ship all along the northern perimeter of the agrostation. Yoshi returned at dusk, bone-weary and covered with soot.

“You
could
help!” he accused Tatya on the third such night, falling across the bunk they shared in utter exhaustion.

Tatya soothed him absently, trying not to show her revulsion at the filth on his clothes, the grimy, smoky smell of him. Sorahl, when he permitted her to get that close to him, smelled like new-mown grass, or leaves in autumn, or something she’d left behind on the mainland and had a sudden nostalgia for.

“Jason would never let us both out at the same time,” she reasoned, though in truth she’d never bothered to ask him. “And I don’t dare leave the Vulcans. I trust Jason, but not Command. Someone has to keep watch. And I’ve been helping Sorahl in the lab.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you have!”

Tatya was genuinely startled by his vehemence, if not a little guilty. She and Yoshi had never formalized their relationship, had never needed to. They’d simply stayed together. Neither had ever been jealous; there’d never been any reason. Before.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Tatya yelled, her anger edged with guilt and consequently exaggerated. “
Bozhe moi
, you don’t think—?”

But Yoshi lay like a dead man, one long arm flung across his eyes, instantly asleep. Tatya left him alone and went to be with Sorahl.

“He is angry?” the young Vulcan asked, his velvet-dark eyes meeting Tatya’s blue ones so steadily she felt herself melting all over. “I do not understand.”

“He’s jealous!” Tatya said bluntly, taking the used slides from him and popping them into the sterilizer, hoping their hands would touch. “He thinks I’m in love with you.”

The young Vulcan knew the word, knew theoretically what it meant in human terms, but did not understand its coexistence with jealousy.

“Are you?” he asked with such absolute naiveté that Tatya dropped several slides.

“Of course not!” she lied, retrieving them from the floor and tossing her heavy braids back over her shoulders. The fact that I fantasize about you constantly, she thought—waking, sleeping, alone or with you, even when I’m making love with Yoshi—has nothing to do with anything!

“That is good,” Sorahl said, without being able to tell her any of the myriad Vulcan reasons why this was so. “I owe Yoshi my life. I should not wish him to be angry.”

Yoshi soon had more than enough to make him angry.

“Who’s going to look after my farm?” he demanded when Jason told him they’d be under way for Antarctica within the hour. He’d come straight in from the burning—dirtier than usual, his hands blistered, his mood precarious. What Jason was telling him made the past six days meaningless. “I couldn’t leave this close to harvest at the best of times. Now, with the wilt—gods, Jace, I could come back and find the whole crop gone!”

“Can’t be helped, son,” Jason said. “I thought we agreed the disposition of the Vulcans was of primary importance? And I have my orders.”

“Screw your orders!” Yoshi shouted, completely out of character. He never shouted, never found anything to make him that angry. He seemed to be angry all the time now, and it frightened him.

Worse, after his argument with Tatya, what he’d really wanted to say was “screw the Vulcans.” He, of all people, who a scant few days ago was ready to do anything to protect them—what was happening to him? Yoshi found a place of calm.

“At least let me call my contractors,” he asked. “They can get someone in to replace us, at least continue the burning.”

“I can’t break radio silence; you know that,” Jason said gently. Tatya, Sawyer, and now Yoshi would be furious with him. It seemed only the Vulcans understood what he was trying to do. “We can’t wait that long. I’m sorry!”

“You’re sorry?” There were tears of rage in Yoshi’s eyes. “My crops, my farm, my whole life—and you say you’re
sorry?
Who knows how long they’ll keep us down there, or what they’ll do to us? Who knows what’s going to happen to any of us, even you? Sorry doesn’t do it anymore, Jason!”

“I’ve been contacted, Captain!” Elizabeth Dehner sounded almost excited. “Two faceless, sexless characters buzzed their way into my flat at four in the morning, with sealed orders from the United Earth Council ‘requesting’ I pack enough heavy clothing for a week to ten days and report to the wingboat basin in Lima. And to make sure I tell no one, they’ve bugged my phone and there’s a spook in an unmarked car at the end of the street.”

“You know what to do?” Kirk instinctively lowered his voice, as if they could be overheard even with communicators.

“I think so.” Dehner’s voice was as cool as ever, but did he only imagine a slight tremor at the ends of her words? “I’m to go along. Mingle freely with the other medical personnel, do exactly what’s expected of me, and try to report in to you at four-hour intervals.”

“I’ll follow you,” Kirk promised. “As soon as Mitchell lets me know where.” As if on cue, his incoming beeped. “Good luck, doctor. Kirk out.” He switched frequencies. “Gary?”

“
Delphinus
is moving out, Jim. Heading south-southeast, making twelve to fifteen knots in the general direction of the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica. Last I heard from Kelso he was going to have a tap on them by his next call-in.”

“How long since you’ve talked to him?” Kirk wanted to know.

“Little over four hours,” Mitchell said. “He said he might have to do some moving around. Some people wondering why he was logging so much overtime.”

It didn’t sound good. Kelso was resourceful, but not invincible. Not for the first time, Kirk regretted the communicator in his hand.

“Gary,” he said ruefully. “When you talk to him, tell him to be careful. Dehner and I have to be moving too. I want you to sit tight until I give the word. If you get in a jam, like I told Lee, get back to Parneb and wait for us. Don’t do anything—reckless.”

“Who, me? Listen, kid, I’m not the one who’s heading for Antarctica. If you need me, just holler, and I’ll saddle up the sled dogs.”

Kirk laughed in spite of the almost perpetual knot in his stomach. “Are you ever serious?”

“Not if I can avoid it,” Mitchell admitted. “But I am now. Take care of yourself, James. I’d never forgive myself if you didn’t.”

In a furnished “sleeptel” cubicle, the twenty-first century’s solution to the problem of cheap residency hotels, overlooking the flat, cookie-cutter scenery of the vast industrial suburb that had once been a state called Ohio, Howard “Studs” Carter a.k.a. Lee Kelso, formerly of MediaMagix/Hollywood, unpacked his very own personal computer, purchased in Canton that afternoon with one of Parneb’s credit cards.

There’d been too many questions, too much heat at MediaMagix, and Kelso had quietly skipped town, setting up shop closer to the acres of microwave receptors meandering across Middle America. With a few minor upgrading adjustments, the little beauty at his elbow could be persuaded to eavesdrop on the world.

Kelso tuned the screen to a news program while he tinkered, with the volume so low it reached him only subliminally, until one item in particular almost made him drop his teeth.

“…responding to an anonymous tip that what was removed from the agrostation was actually the fusilage of a space vessel which may have originated outside the solar system, and which may or may not have contained alien survivors. Spokespersons for AeroNav deny this categorically, and the PentaKrem insists that any connection between the incident and the mission to Alpha Centauri…”

Omigod, omigod! Kelso thought, as close to panic as he could come. It would take some more tinkering to get this baby to contact Jim Kirk, but Parneb could be reached by conventional telephone link. Kelso was on the horn to Parneb as fast as his fingers could fly.

“The reports are worse here!” the Egyptian confirmed morosely. “They are going so far as to speculate that the aliens are being held at a secret government installation, that they have at least three heads and are reproducing by cloning even as we speak. Ah, Lee, I am afraid even your century’s magicians cannot remedy my mistakes now!”

“Don’t let it get you down,” Kelso consoled him, though he was feeling less than optimistic himself. “The more hysterical the rumors, the easier they’ll be to laugh at later.”

“Unless someone is harmed by them!” Parneb lamented. “In my experience, Lee, hysteria does not sit at home and brood. It takes to the streets in search of a scapegoat.”

“There are ways we can plug the leaks.” Kelso was thinking aloud, eyeing his little computer. “If we could find out who the hell started them in the first place…”

“ ’Tis cold,” Easter observed in his lugubrious way. “Antarctica.”

“
Ja
, so?” the other inquired in his clipped, metallic tones. “You are afraid of a little cold?”

Gray was Racher’s color—gray skin stretched taut across a gray skull face, gray close-cropped hair, gray gunmetal eyes that glinted and clicked in their sockets rather than blinking like normal eyes, gray metal-on-metal voice. Legend had it Racher was more bionic than flesh, that his throat had been shot out or burned out or even ripped out and replaced with a robotic voice box, that other body parts had met similar metal-and-plastic fates. Easter, watching those eyes roll and click at him on the commscreen, could well believe it.

“I ain’t afraid o’nothin’!” Easter retorted, having thought it through thoroughly. It was a lie. Death he did not fear, at least not his definition of it—death immediate in a flash of heat and fire with nothing to follow or, at worst, a hell of further fire. But death by cold—slow, creeping, numbing, Dantesque—that was fear. “I done my share. T’reporters is eating it out of our hands. And I said yez could have any of me people.”

“But not you?” Racher’s metallic sneer transmitted across a hemisphere from his base somewhere in Africa. “Easter keeps his rear covered while we freeze ours?
Nicht so
. You come with, coward, or there is nothing!”

“Who yer calling a coward?” Easter spluttered, then stopped.

Slowly it penetrated his brain that Racher intended exactly what he’d had in mind, the real reason behind this caper that made the capturing of spacemen secondary—a desolation of polar ice as the perfect arena for their true purpose, the elimination of the other for supremacy over the global terrorist ratpack. Only one King Rat would emerge from such a showdown. The white-on-white nihilism sparked some remnant of Irish heroic poetry buried deep in the detritus of Easter’s murderer’s soul.

“Listen, yer lousy scut.” He chose his words carefully, for all their seeming rage. “I’ll beat yer there!”

“Ever wonder about the others out there, Ben?” Jeremy Grayson asked his many-times-great-grandson.

Spock finished drying the dinner dishes, meticulously folded the dishtowel. “‘Others,’ Professor?”

“I’ve never known quite what to call them,” Grayson said, setting out his pawns. “‘Aliens’ sounds like a slur somehow, and ‘extra-terrestrials’ is so ethnocentric. The Others, then. The intelligent beings on all those other worlds out there.”

Spock sat carefully opposite his ancestor. Their nightly conversations had covered a variety of philosophical and speculative topics, but never this one. Was this some manner of test?

“Do you believe unequivocally that they exist, Professor?”

Grayson found that amusing. “You mean do I really think humans are all there is? A perfect God would hardly be so easily content. Oh, I believe in them, Ben. I only wonder if they believe in us.”

He palmed a pawn of each color for Spock to choose from; his eye quicker than any human hand, Spock chose the black.

“I am not certain I understand.”

“It occurred to me”—Grayson opened with a standard knight gambit—“that they’ve probably been out there watching us for years, and if they aren’t weeping, they’re probably killing themselves laughing.”

Spock considered the actual history of “alien” observation of Earth as he contemplated an unusual bishop defense. “I must confess, Professor, that I have never considered the question in quite that way.”

“Captain’s Personal Log, Day Six; Location: AeroNav Wingboat hangar, Staten Island, Tierra del Fuego:

“I wait with the other intelligence personnel in what passes for the VIP lounge of this desolate great barn in this more desolate corner of the world. Our destination: a place that gives new meaning to the word ‘desolation’: Byrd Research Complex, on the inland edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica.

“My intelligence credentials have passed all inspections thus far, making it possible for me to infiltrate the system with remarkable ease. Special Commendation, Lee Kelso, appended. My fellow intell-agents are predictably featureless; even those obviously traveling in pairs do not speak to each other. At the opposite end of the lounge, a select group of civilians seems to be enjoying themselves a lot more.

“Dr. Dehner or, should I say, Dr. Bellero, has gone on ahead with the first boatload of military and medical personnel. She, at least, left knowing what she had to do. I only wish my mission were as clear.

“I have the virtually impossible task of seeking out two Vulcans, stranded on an ambivalent Earth twenty years before their appointed time, and somehow persuading them to trust me to extricate them from their velvet-lined captivity, lest they fall prey to human fear or permit themselves to be ‘lost’ in a bureaucratic gulag from which there may be no return.

“The only Vulcan I knew to speak to invariably rubbed me the wrong way without trying, and I am forced now to admit that most of the fault was mine, my insistence on trying to make him over in a human image, which simply cannot, and should not, be done. If only I had been able to understand that, we might never have been caught in Parneb’s machinery at all, and if Spock is lost, as Parneb believes he is, it is my responsibility, and mine alone. A Vulcan is not a human with pointed ears; he is a Vulcan, with all of the difference and similarity this implies. I have learned this too late. How much more difficult will it be for humans of this century to understand; how ironic that it falls to me to make them see it!