Strangers From the Sky (35 page)

“An interesting game, this tennis,” T’Lera went on. “Pleasing to the observer as well as to the participant, in that it combines physical skill—speed, grace, agility, and strength—with intellectual acuity—the insight into the opponent’s thinking, the striving to improve one’s skills to the limits of one’s ability.”

“Sounds like you’ve done your homework!” Melody sneered. “Did you study up on all that in your cabin just so you could impress me?” She jerked her head in Kirk’s direction. “You two in cahoots or what?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t suppose they play games on your planet!” T’Lera’s impervious cool was making Melody blush again. “All locked in their ivory towers being cerebral all the time.”

“On the contrary,” T’Lera was saying. “We are not so very different from you in that respect.”

Jim Kirk, silent for once and watchful, was reminded of the only time he had chanced to observe a Vulcan in some solitary physical routine.

He knew the stories of Vulcan superiority in strength and agility, had always thought them exaggerated, until he came upon Spock, alone on a practice mat in a deserted corner of the rec room late into ship’s night, engaged in something that was neither dance nor calisthenic, neither aerobic nor isometric exercise, yet somehow a harmonious blending of all of these with something purely Vulcan and, Kirk was to find out the hard way, virtually impossible for a human to master. He had merely stood and stared, until Spock became aware of him.

The Vulcan came to a complete standstill, hands locked behind his back. “Captain?”

“Don’t you ever sweat?” Kirk had joked lamely, embarrassed for them both.

“Not with such minimal exertion, Captain,” Spock had replied stiffly, and Kirk had choked back a laugh. Minimal exertion? That last routine would have put a human’s neck in a sling for a week. Maybe the stories were true.

“It’s an interesting routine.” Kirk was still trying to warm up to his first officer; this was some weeks prior to the M-155 incident. “Could you teach it to me?”

Spock had hesitated. “It is not often taught to humans.”

“But there’s no—taboo forbidding it, is there?” Kirk had persisted. It would be a long time before he would learn to hear the silent alarm behind Spock’s reluctances. “I’m in pretty good shape; I’m sure I could handle it.”

“Undoubtedly, Captain. However, I do not think you would find it—desirable.”

“Why not?” Kirk had found himself growing annoyed. Every time he tried to understand this Vulcan he found doors slammed in his face. “I’d welcome the challenge. I may be only human—”

“Captain,” Spock seemed to have difficulty finding the correct words. “The routine you observed was a basic warm-up. It is mastered by most Vulcan children before the age of infant school. If you will excuse me…”

Dehner’s right—I never learn! Kirk thought, snapping himself back to the present and what he suddenly perceived as T’Lera’s interest in quite a different pastime than tennis.

“That the term ‘love’ is used when referring to a null score,” the Vulcan was saying. “Perhaps you could enlighten me as to its origin?”

Melody was being engaged in dialogue with the enemy in spite of herself. The effort made her diffident. She shrugged.

“I don’t know. No one does. It’s one of those obscure things that’s lost in the antiquity of the game.”

“Nevertheless,” T’Lera pursued her thought relentlessly, “one might perceive an interesting irony in the use of the term in a sport not noted for its ‘love’ of anything, except perhaps aggressiveness. Might one consider the use of the term an instance of ‘adding insult to injury’?”

Kirk stifled a laugh and Melody glowered at him. She’d gone back to hitting the ball off the back wall. “I never thought about it.”

“One wonders if the game would retain its essence were the aggression factor eliminated,” T’Lera mused.

She made to leave the gym then. Melody turned on her.

“Listen, you’re such an expert, why don’t we go a few games?”

Jim Kirk’s head came up at the same time T’Lera’s did, and he caught the gleam of something in those laser eyes, something it would take him years to learn meant “I accept the challenge.”

“I would be honored,” T’Lera replied, extinguishing that gleam aborning. “However, I suggest such a contest might prove inequitable.”

“Why?” Melody was suddenly intrigued by the idea. “Because I’m a pro and you’ve never played? We’ll treat it like a lesson, then. Just for the exercise, no points. You look like you’re in good shape, and you can’t be more than a few years up on me. I’ll handicap if you like.”

T’Lera continued to demur. “I doubt you could handicap sufficiently for the differences between us. Forgive me, Commander, but I would prefer not.”

“Afraid there’s something you can’t one-up a human at?” Melody held her racket like a weapon. “Mr. Kirk here says I should try interacting with you instead of ‘objectifying’ you. I’m not a diplomat like Jason; I believe actions speak louder than words. I’ve listened to all the heroic words about how you scuttled your craft and how you were willing to die rather than let us discover you. Just words. I want to see what you’re really made of.”

The challenged and accepting look had returned to T’Lera’s eyes. Jim Kirk found himself intervening.

“Melody,” he interjected. “I don’t think you want to do this…”

“Shut up, cream puff! You’re out of this!” Melody barked, still focused on T’Lera. “Well?”

“As you wish, Commander,” T’Lera said, and Jim Kirk wanted to scream.

“C
APTAIN’S
P
ERSONAL
L
OG:

“This has to be a joke, a single great cosmic joke, probably at my expense. Here I stand, on a tennis court buried deep within an Earth ship, awaiting what may literally turn out to be the match of the century, played out before an audience of one whose role is nothing more than unofficial referee.

“I consider myself fairly well read. I am familiar with the Faust legends, the tales of mortals dicing with the devil. I seem to remember an old 2-D film whose outcome had something to do with a knight playing chess with Death for possession of his soul. But the fate of the Federation hanging on the outcome of a tennis match? It is simply too much.

“Maybe history derailed cannot be set back on course, and my crew and I have been exerting ourselves for nothing. Maybe I, captain without a ship, leader with no one to lead, deserve to be caught between two of the most impervious females, two of the most immovable objects, in the galaxy.

“The urge to scream has passed. I am now possessed of an almost uncontrollable desire to laugh. Only the thought of all the bad things that may yet happen makes it possible for me to contain myself. At the very least, I may be able to prevent these two from killing each other.”

Kirk and Melody stood around waiting for T’Lera to change into borrowed tennis clothes. Melody had insisted on it, and Kirk felt he deserved points for not strangling her on the spot. She stood glaring at him.

“What are you grinning about, cream puff?”

Kirk just shook his head; he didn’t trust himself to speak.

“You don’t have to hang around!” Melody growled, pacing the service line like a tigress, perhaps having second thoughts. “Why don’t you go make yourself a cup of hot milk and—”

“Sawyer, if you think I’d miss this match for anything…”

“Kirk, let me ask you something.” Melody stopped pacing and came over to him, confidential. “Do you really think she’s as old as she says?”

Kirk shrugged, bemused. “Who knows? I understand from the medical findings that their lifespan is more than twice ours. You should have asked me. Getting cold feet?”

“In a pig’s eye!”

Kirk smiled outright;
that
response had a familiar ring. “Melody, out of curiosity—what if you lose?”

Her laugh was more a bark, a forewarning of her bite. “I haven’t lost since Goddard, and I played on a busted ankle that day! Besides, Kirk, she claims she’s a hundred years old. Give me a break!”

Melody had blundered into the age factor all by herself.

“I suppose your space service has some pretty tough fitness requirements,” she’d sounded T’Lera out in the locker room. She really was trying; Kirk’s remark about good soldiers had stung her more than she cared to admit. “You look to be in fair shape for your age, if I guess right.”

“One-hundred-thirteen point-four-six,” T’Lera supplied deliberately.

The information rocked Melody, as every new and different datum about these people did. She shook her head and went to wait on the court.

“Good night, Yoshi, and thank you!”

Elizabeth Dehner shut her cabin door, listened as Yoshi’s sneaker soles faded down the corridor, took a deep breath, and counted to a hundred. Willing herself to remain calm, she rummaged in her luggage for a small hypersonic lock pick, the very one Lee Kelso had jury-rigged to get into the computers at Alexandria. Stepping back out into the corridor, Dehner returned the way she and Yoshi had come, heading for the pharmaceuticals locker three decks below where she’d made note of it during their walk.

Tatya flipped open the hatch on the conning tower, reached out, and scooped up a handful of snow. Cupping it in her two hands, she tiptoed down the metal steps, past Jason Nyere, snoring in the captain’s chair beside the defiantly blank comm screen, and presented her offering to Sorahl. The young Vulcan took the uncanny melting stuff from her, marveled at a cold that burned the hands.

“My teacher Selik once calculated that a moderate storm of one minute’s duration, over an area of one square mile, would contain a number of these hexahedral crystals equivalent to—”

“Shut up and stop breathing on it!” Tatya hissed, exasperated. “Look, it’s melting already. Your hands must be incredibly warm.”

“In its present state it is most untidy,” Sorahl observed, watching the melt drip between his fingers and onto the floor. “Is there someplace where I can dispose of it properly?”

“It’s only water!” Tatya dismissed it, wiping her own hands on her trousers, suddenly disappointed with the venture. It wasn’t that Sorahl’s childlike wonderment wasn’t what she’d expected; it was the sense that everything was melting—everything. “When my cousins and I were small, my Tante Mariya used to pour hot syrup over the new snow on a really cold day; it would freeze hard in seconds and we’d eat it like candy. It tasted like—oh, I don’t know—like something you knew you had to enjoy for that moment because you could never have it again…”

She stopped babbling, turned away from him to hide her tears. What an idiot she was to offer him something as cold and ephemeral as a handful of snow! What she wanted to offer him was freedom. She wanted to grab his hand and run with him across the pack ice to the mainland, to roll in the powder until it was in their hair and their eyelashes and down inside their boots and parkas, though she imagined he’d hate that. She wanted to flee with him to the nearest settlement—no matter that it was a thousand kilometers away—to go to ground where no one could find them. She would travel with him for years until everyone had forgotten, until it was safe. They’d send for Yoshi, and the three of them could build a life together, somewhere, somehow.

She realized Sorahl felt nothing for her, perhaps believed his people knew nothing of emotion as he claimed. His response would always be polite interest, nothing more. Somehow it no longer mattered. What she felt for him was pure and cherishable in and of itself, and if only she could set him free…

“I wish I’d never met you!” she whispered through her tears.

“Truly?” The young Vulcan stood with the snowmelt still dripping from his fingers. “If I have given offense, or committed some error—”

“No!” Tatya whispered sadly, and she touched him then, put her hand against his cheek as she might have with a favored brother, or a child. “No, you’re close to perfect! It’s we who’ve got it wrong!”

The border towns were in chaos.

While it continued to deny the presence of extra-terrestrials anywhere on Earth, much less within the boundaries of Antarctica, the PentaKrem was being an awful nuisance about letting anyone travel inland without proper authorization. The backlog of media types and UFO groupies in the raggedy little settlements dotting the coastlines made the natives irritable, and they shut their doors in stolid silence, letting the rabble of outlanders cool their heels quite literally in the sub-subzero cold as they scrambled for hot meals, hotel rooms, and rarer-than-hen’s-teeth travel permits.

Tensions mounted. Daylong blizzards, the occasional earthquake, and a mysterious delay in arrival of supply ships only added to the turmoil. Some of the groupies grumbled and went home, but the media reps held their ground, disregarding the fact that it wasn’t theirs to hold. Drunken brawls were common, the jails filled up almost as fast as the hotels, and sanitation robots could not possibly keep up with the excess.

In the midst of chaos a solitary figure stood out by virtue of his refusal to succumb to it. Finding no order, Spock set about creating his own.

He waited all day and half the night in the anteroom of the PentaKrem’s temporary headquarters in the tiny prefab town of Sunshine, where a squadron of aides processed media personnel through their offices in an attempt to convince them that there really was no story, so would they all kindly go back home? Looking distinctly out of place in the noisy, ill-mannered mob packed to the walls in the dank, windowless anteroom, the silent figure in the watchcap and heavy dark overcoat simply awaited his turn. Near midnight, when even the most entrenched of the reporters had given up and gone to supper, Spock alone remained.

An exhausted secretary was locking the inner offices when she found him.

“Everyone’s gone,” she told him. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“You are here,” Spock pointed out reasonably.

“Yeah, well, I’m going home. And even if I weren’t, I’m not authorized to review travel applications.”

“But the assistant director is. If I am not mistaken, he is still in his office.”

The secretary eyed him warily. “Says who?”

“Between seven
A.M
. and twelve noon today,” Spock said, “seven persons including yourself entered these offices. You are the sixth to leave. I believe the person remaining is qualified to issue travel permits.”

“How do you know who—”

“I was here,” Spock said simply. “I watched them.”

“You’ve been here for over seventeen hours?”

“Seventeen hours and twenty-one minutes.”

The girl nodded, amazed. “And I’ll bet the next thing you’re going to say is that you’re not leaving until you speak to the assistant director.”

“Correct.”

“Okay!” She sighed, sat at the reception desk, reached for a stylus and a computer form. “Let me have your name, Mr.—”

“Spock.”

“First name?”

He hesitated for only a moment. “Benjamin.”

“And which media service do you represent, Mr. Spock?”

Spock shook his head slightly. “I am not a reporter. I have been sent by Professor Jeremy Grayson of the Peace Fellowship.”

He showed her the readout of the message from Stockholm. Her manner toward him became suddenly deferential.

“We were told to expect Professor Grayson himself.”

“The professor was taken ill,” Spock said, wondering if that fact had altered radically during his travels. “I have been sent in his place.”

“I see,” the secretary said. “Everything seems to be in order. I’ll just need some identification, Mr. Spock.”

It was the one thing he had hoped to avoid. If the single item that had gotten him across borders and oceans alike to bring him here should fail him now, he could go no further. Reaching inside his collar and slipping the fine silver chain over his head, Spock cradled the symbol of peace in his hand.

It hardly compared with navigating a starship through hyperspace, Gary Mitchell thought, checking his coordinates in his jouncing snowmobile, but it had its own excitement. With luck he would reach Byrd within the hour.

Yoshi sat cross-legged on his bunk in total darkness, contemplating the rest of his life.

“He’d thought sleep would come easily after his long soul-searching talk with the psychiatrist, but her words had only replaced his old fears with new ones. If his small life was so profoundly affected by the presence of Vulcans, no wonder the rest of the world was hysterical.

Suppose T’Lera was right, and Vulcans might have come to earth within his lifetime? Suppose Dr. Bellero was right, and there were things he could do to help?

The least he could do was to go find Tatya and apologize for his caveman behavior, Yoshi decided, groping for his jeans in the dark. He would find her—and Sorahl; he knew they’d be together, possibly for the last time; the council might decide as soon as tomorrow—and tell her, tell
them
he was sorry.

Something fell out of his jeans pocket and brushed against his foot. Yoshi flicked on the reading lamp and retrieved it.

“Stupid!” he chided himself aloud, unfolding the computer printout. Anyone else would have put it in a safe place before—

Before it fell into the hands of people who would try to make him forget who had given it to him, Yoshi thought. He’d told Dr. Bellero he was no kind of hero, but maybe he could preserve something of value. With sudden determination he found a pencil, bracketed Sorahl’s newly created enzyme off from the rest of the formula, and gave it a name. Then he refolded the printout and hid it in the bottom of his duffel bag, and went for a walk in the belly of the Whale.

T’Lera took the first game, forty-love.

She had come onto the court barefoot, her feet too narrow for human tennis shoes, yet another reminder of her difference.

“Never mind!” Melody waved off any objection. “Some of the best of the Aussies play barefoot.” Nevertheless, she kept staring at T’Lera’s feet.

“Quite within the norm of human acceptability,” T’Lera assured her, extending each foot in turn against the floor as if for inspection. “Unlike the ears.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean—”

“Perhaps if Earth is to be our final home, your surgeons might be called upon to remedy that defect, that we might be more pleasing to the eye of the beholder.” The T’Leran irony was radiating full strength. From his place on the sidelines, Jim Kirk could taste it; it made his back teeth ache. He wondered how Melody could withstand the full intensity. “Unless of course you prick us and we bleed…”

Have they all read Shakespeare? Kirk wondered. And was there anything more than a difference in degree between Sawyer’s attitude toward Vulcan intellect and his own?

“Your serve!” Melody barked from her side of the net.

The human’s sneakers made a great thumping, squeaking Earthbound protest against the surface of the indoor court, where the Vulcan seemed to float against a gravity lighter than that of her world. Melody’s savage two-handed volleys were met with effortless agility, answered with lofting nonaggressive returns that gave no hint to the human opponent as to where they would vector off and descend. Jim Kirk’s call of “Game!” in T’Lera’s favor was merely salt in the wound, insult to injury.

“A hundred and thirteen, huh?” Melody huffed, wiping her brow with the backs of her wrists.

“Point-four-six,” T’Lera replied.

Jim Kirk found himself hoping she’d beat the pants off her.

Yoshi’s footsteps on the metal stairs to the bridge roused Jason Nyere from uneasy sleep.

“Wha?” The captain pulled himself upright in his chair, instinctively going for the laser pistol he’d returned to the weapons locker eight days ago; his dreams had been that troubled.