"I think, Captain, that that may be a key. Probability would suggest some form of manual backup system to operate any airlock."
"I agree, Spock." Kirk studied the panel, made an experimental jump. "There's only one problem—artificial gravity seems to be in full operation here. For the moment, our key is out of reach. Someone can beam back aboard and bring back a . . ."
"I do not believe that will be necessary, Captain." Spock moved to the curving wall and braced himself against the metal. "If you will climb onto my shoulders, you should be able to reach the panel."
"Isn't science wonderful?" murmured McCoy.
It took Kirk, a trained gymnast and tumbler, only a second or two. Then he was securely braced on the Vulcan's shoulders. Even so, the recessed panel was still over his head. But by straining his arm he could manage to reach all three hexagonal plates.
"I always said you were a supportive influence, Spock," ventured McCoy.
"And I've always felt your humor was in execrable taste, Doctor." Spock's voice barely hinted at the strain of keeping Kirk's weight on his shoulders. "However I feel that in all honesty I must revise my opinion of your puns."
"Well, it's about time! I always knew you'd come around, Spock."
"They are," the science officer continued, "not merely bad. They are atrocious." McCoy's expression fell.
Kirk pressed firmly on the nearest plastic hexagon. It sank inward under his fingers, but nothing else happened. Trying the one to its left produced a similar lack of results. When he hit the third panel, however, the plastic suddenly pulsed with a soft green glow.
The brilliant reaction from something three hundred million years "dead" was startling—so much so that Kirk nearly fell.
"Careful, Captain," Spock admonished, tightening his grip on Kirk's legs. "I can support you like this for a long time, but if you insist on shifting your weight, well, I'm not an acrobat."
"Don't worry, Mr. Spock. I'm the one who'll end up falling. I don't plan to, not even in this light gravity." He kept his hand on the depressed disk and was rewarded with a faint but massive grinding sound.
"It's movin', Captain!" shouted Scott.
Sure enough, there'd been a slight hint of motion from the massive lock door. And the space near its top admitting light from somewhere within had grown a little wider. But the grinding stopped immediately and the green light faded from the disk.
"Try again, Captain," Spock suggested. Kirk pressed the disk once more. The glow returned. So did the grinding noise. He kept the disk forced down, trying to watch the lock door at the same time.
He heard a deep and echoing ripping sound, as of ancient joints and bolts giving way. The massive door shuddered, started to swing wide on unseen hinges . . . then stopped. This time not all Kirk's jabs on the disk could move it.
But there was a gap between door and tunnel wall now wide enough for a man to slip through.
"That's good enough, Spock! Coming down." He jumped carefully clear of his second's shoulders and moved to the new opening.
They had seen nothing so far to indicate that any excessive caution was required. Nonetheless, Kirk stepped softly as he edged through the gap. Spock followed, with Scott and McCoy bringing up the rear. The captain's last real fear was eliminated when they were all inside and the gigantic lock door failed to slam shut behind them.
The interior of the chamber in which they now found themselves was built on an enormous, inhuman scale. The walls were the color of pale chalcedony, dull and waxlike whites and blues. They curved upward and outward, forming a room vaguely hexagonal in pattern. Apparently the six-sided format was repeated throughout the interior of the vessel as well as in the construction of the superstructure.
The walls and sections of floor were lined with shattered, smashed machines of unknown, indefinable purpose. It was unlikely their purposes would ever be divined. Even the smallest device partook of the same feathery, lacelike design as the great ship itself. It was almost as though the builders had selected the internal structure of a leaf as their pattern for interstellar craft.
Some shapes—more solid, less ethereal of form—were still intact. And still operating . . . or at least dormant. They pulsed with different shades and blends of the visible spectrum. Violet and umber, emerald green and deep maroon and a light, pastel pink—each seemingly too beautiful to be functional.
The men moved toward the center of the room, where a monstrous amorphous shape squatted like a jeweled toad. From its top, graceful appendages radiated roofward in all directions—wands of flexible crystal. The four men moved closer.
As they advanced, the crystalline strands began to move. Slowly, gently, swaying to the ebb of some unseen tide. As the strands moved they were accompanied by a strangely melodic, somehow nocturnal music.
McCoy murmured, "I heard something like that, once. Not exactly the same, but close. Ever hear electric cello, Jim?"
"Close, close," Kirk agreed. "I wouldn't swear to any similarity, though. You know me, Bones, I'm more partial to classical stuff."
They stopped next to the enigmatic structure. When they halted, the floating fronds also stilled, the haunting music fading out in a last, trilling pianissimo.
"What do you make of it, Spock?" Kirk asked. As he spoke, the translucent limbs fluttered slightly and invisible fingers ran ever so lightly over a faraway harp.
"Look here, Captain," interrupted Scott before Spock could answer. He was pointing to the upper surface of the stocky construction.
A thin, sparkling band of pink light had suddenly appeared around the upper trunk of the main body. Spock made a quick reading with his tricorder.
"Captain, it's registering energy output. Quite weak, but definite."
"Still functioning, then," mused Kirk softly, "after all these millennia. The lock door I can understand—it would operate off any oddball, emergency power source. But this thing?"
Spock was circling the object, constantly consulting his tricorder. He was shaking his head as he rejoined them.
"I am still getting tricorder readings, Captain." When he spoke there was music and movement in the room again. "I would hazard an opinion that those strange appendages are accumulators, receptors that pick up any faint form of kinetic energy—motion, movement in the air from sound waves . . . our voices . . . anything."
"It absorbs this energy and metamorphoses it, returning it or 'playing it back' in at least two readily observable ways. As motion in its 'arms' and as music . . . if those sounds are indeed an alien conception of music."
"Yes, but what is its function?" Kirk pressed, staring at the wands. They threw his words back at him and added a lithe tune.
"As to that, Captain, your guess is as good as mine. This could be anything," and he gestured at the shape, "from an energy-acceptance station for the starship's engines to a recreation area for her crew. We do not have enough information to deduce."
"It gives me the creeps," announced McCoy firmly. It wasn't a flip evaluation, either. "I feel like something that ought to be dead is watching us." Scott looked equally uneasy all of a sudden. Machines were his province. He knew them better than most people, but this thing—
"Aye, Captain, I feel it, too."
"A standard physiological symptom of latent primal superstition." Spock said. "The fear of primitive peoples confronting something utterly incomprehensible to them."
Kirk was studying the rest of the silent chamber. He spoke idly.
"Compared to the beings that built this craft, we are primitive peoples. You too, Mr. Spock."
"I did not mean to imply otherwise, Captain. Merely to attempt an evaluation of—"
"All right, all right, never mind, Spock. Let's keep moving."
He pointed to the far side of the chamber where another door waited.
III
Whereas the inner airlock door had been a single massive plate of unadorned metal, this portal was both more elaborately designed and more formal-looking. It was decorative as wel
l as practical. The flat surface was seamed by triple lines, forming three triangles, each engraved deeply with alien words and cryptography. To the men of the Enterprise they were so many scratches.
Spock located another recess with its three inserted hexagonal disks.
But when he depressed them, nothing happened. All four stared at the seemingly impenetrable barrier for a while.
"Of course!" blurted Scott suddenly, as the others turned. "The other door was bent, damaged, so only one disk was enough to operate it. Or maybe the circuitry was jammed together. But three triangles—three disks. Press them all at the same time, Mr. Spock."
"Quite so, Mr. Scott," concurred Spock, sharing in the chief engineer's revelation.
His hand was not quite wide enough to cover all three disks, but both hands managed the trick neatly. This feat gave them some idea of the size of the starship's crew members, or of their manipulative digits, anyway. Spock pressed in.
The three disks glowed green. Seconds later the three sections of door slid back silently, disappearing into walls, roof, and floor. Another huge chamber opened beyond.
The interior of the pod was circular in design, with huge rooms spaced around a common core, and they were walking around it. This particular chamber was lined with a long row of the dark, hexagonal ports they'd seen from outside. Whether it was from starlight they admitted or the presence of more of the ubiquitous plastic strips, the light here was much brighter.
"No, Captain," mused Spock as they discussed the continuing puzzle of the strange illumination. "I think the light has been on in here all the time."
"Why couldn't we see in through the ports, then, from out—Oh, of course." Kirk answered his own question. "One-way ports, to protect the observer from external light and other radiation sources."
They moved deeper into the long, curving chamber. One interior wall was dominated by a huge reflective shape. It resembled a giant convex mirror and was also six-sided in form, though greatly stretched-out. Objects with even stranger patterns—weird instrumentation and peculiar machinery—lined all the visible walls and dominated rank on rank of high, slanted consoles.
There was something else unusual, more unusual than any individual piece of apparatus.
The destruction that had blasted the rest of the starship, including the room they'd just left, was not in evidence. Whatever catastrophe had torn the great vessel asunder had passed over this room.
As they moved further into the chamber and close to specific instruments, lights began to appear, glowing, emanating from scattered dials and panels and hidden strips of plastic.
"Proximity activation," noted Scott absently. "Huh-oh . . . look there." They stopped, turned.
The gigantic mirror, which was doubtless anything but so simple a device, began to exhibit a milky opalescence. Colors commenced to flow and drift and blend across its surface. A moment later there was more music. But this was quite different from the sounds produced by the octopoidal machine in the other chamber. They were more rhythmic, insistent and yet soothing.
They moved toward it, curious. Spock began to adjust his tricorder, preparatory to taking some preliminary readings.
"A most intriguing phenome . . ."
The gentle light on the clustered console to Kirk's right abruptly exploded in brilliant green. A lurid, blinding emerald flare bathed them all. Formerly stolid, calm music changed suddenly to an enraged percussive clamoring. An enormous outpouring of emotion that even over three hundred million years and unfathomable differences in shape and physiology still sounded unmistakably like an alarm.
Behind them the three segments of the tripartite portal slammed silently shut. McCoy took a couple of steps toward it, slowed, stopped when he realized the futility of the gesture.
The light dimmed; the music ceased.
They were trapped in the cyclopean cave.
There were the three familiar disks set in a familiar recess to the left of the doorway. McCoy sauntered over slowly and depressed the three plastic plates. Lightly at first, then with all his strength. Then he tried them in various combinations. All attempts produced equal results—none at all. The door remained resolutely closed, as obstinate as the dead star circling below them. Not even the faint light appeared from within the disks.
Various imprecations and comments on the dubious parentage of the door's designers also failed to have a salutary effect.
"Somehow I didn't think it would work, Bones." Kirk smiled grimly. "Analysis, Mr. Spock?"
Spock consulted the all-purpose tricorder once more, wishing instead for the mythical terran supercomputer JWG. Wishing was not logical, but under the circumstances, he permitted himself the tiny private deviation. The tricorder singularly uninformative.
"Nothing available on whatever activated the door mechanism, Captain. But an atmosphere has been supplied now." He sounded surprised. "It approaches Earth-normal. Shall we deactivate life-support belts? We may be here for a while and this gives us an opportunity to conserve the power supply since we can't return to the Enterprise for recharging."
Kirk hesitated. Force-fields could be more of a problem than a benefit at the damndest times, but . . .
"No, Spock. This is just a bit too neat, too easy. That door could open again as fast as it closed. Whatever established an atmosphere in here might not have had the foresight to do the same in the other room. No, we'll keep our life-support systems on." He flipped open his communicator, eyed the now ominous walls uncertainly.
"Enterprise, do you read me? Mr. Sulu?" He paused, tried again. "Lieutenant Uhura, acknowledge. This is the captain speaking."
A faint, rhythmic humming was the only sound the speaker in the compact unit produced—a normal blank receptor wave. That proved the communicator was operating.
"No use, Captain," said Spock, still working with the tricorder. "Some sort of blanket interference has been set up. Its efficiency approaches totality." He looked up from the 'corder.
"I do not like this at all, Captain."
McCoy had ambled back to rejoin them.
"You always did have this marvelous ability for understatement, Spock. A gigantic alien zombie could come crashing through the near wall, spewing fire and dripping venom from poisonous fangs, and you'd sum the situation up by declaring that its intentions were other than benign!"
Kirk noticed that Scott had his phaser out. "What are you going to do with that, Scotty? We can't cut our way out any more than we could cut our way in."
"No, sir," the engineer admitted. "Not exactly."
"You've got an idea, Scotty. Don't keep us guessing."
"Well, sir, these walls are tough, I'll give you that." He gestured towards the trisected door with the phaser. "But those control disks don't look like they're made of anythin' near as strong a material. If I can burn through the covering plates and short the controls—assumin' they're shortable—there's no reason why the door shouldn't release."
"It's a good thought, Scotty," Kirk confessed. "I don't like being destructive, but . . . Give it a try."
Scott walked over and eyed the recessed disks briefly. He lined up the phaser on the lowest one, carefully set the power level, and pressed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, turning up the power all the way. This time he produced a very faint red glow which quickly faded and disappeared.
At a sudden thought Kirk pulled out his communicator again. This time he didn't try to activate it. Instead, he turned it over and checked the power telltale set in the base.
"No energy rating. Something's drained them. Blanket interference my eye! Something's at work in here that drinks energy like a sponge." His eyes darted around the innocent-seeming chamber, saw—as expected—nothing.
"And whatever it is, it's selective. These panels and dials are still glowing, still activated. I'm surprised this even picked up a carrier wave, before."
McCoy had his own comm unit out, checked it and then repeated the check with his
phaser.
"Mine too, Jim."
"And mine," Spock added. "But not the tricorder." He made his own survey of the silent room. "Odd."
"So we're stuck," said McCoy unsubtly. "No communications and no weapons . . . no way of telling Kyle to pull us out of this." He jammed the useless instruments back in his belt.
"Only for the moment, Bones. Things are happening awfully fast here. They might happen in our favor any moment. We'd better be ready to take advantage of them if we get a chance. You miss a lot mooning over current disappointments. For example, notice anything new?"
They all searched the chamber. Creamy opalescence still washed across the face of the convex mirror. Lights still flickered and stuttered from different instruments.
"I see. Everything's returned to normal." McCoy studied the mirror. "Or at least, what was passing for normal when we came in." He paused a moment, listening. "Even the music's back—if that's what it is."
Kirk noticed the large, hexagonal dais in the center of the room. They had just been passing it when everything had gone crazy. Now, staring at it intently for the first time, he kicked himself mentally for not noticing the similarity before. Despite its size and shape it bore an unmistakable, if faint, resemblance to another smaller, more familiar object . . . his own command chair.
Recessed knobs, oddly curled levers, and triple-disk controls lined the slanted face of consoles inside the "chair," along with a vast array of multicolored, winking dials and band indicators. There were markings over the transparent dials and plates that might have been instructions, directions. Whatever secrets they held were locked up in a long-extinct alphabet and mathematical system.
"Control and navigation instrumentation, maybe," he mused. He turned to scan the room, suddenly seeing it in a new light.
"I'll bet this was the ship's bridge." He touched the peculiarly formed seat. "The captain must have sat here, in this same chair—eons ago." He stood on tiptoes and let himself down gently into the seat. Whatever the nature of his long-dead alien counterpart, one thing was certain, their backsides had differing configurations.
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