All four figures solidified. The envelope of energy surrounding them vanished, and the whine from the transporter dropped to nothing. The four collapsed into various, sprawling positions on the alcove disks.
McCoy and the rest of the medical team were at their sides instantly, Scott and Dastagir a few seconds after. Scott leaned over the kneeling form of McCoy. The doctor had rolled Kirk onto his back and was passing a medical tricorder over the motionless form of the captain. Scott saw no visible damage, but he knew that any serious injury the officers might have suffered would probably not be easily noticeable.
McCoy started at the top of Kirk's head, grunted in what sounded like a gratified manner when he had reached Kirk's neck, and continued passing the compact device down the unconscious captain's body until it passed over his feet. A few readjustments to the instrument and McCoy repeated the pass, moving from feet to head this time. Then he relaxed visibly.
"He's all right," he told the expectant Scott, glancing back up and smiling in relief at the engineer. "Heartbeat, brain functions, involuntary muscular activity, everything, all his vital signs read normal—adjusting for his unconscous state, of course."
"Same here, Doctor," reported Nurse Chapel. She was bending over the lanky shape of Spock.
The reports were identical from the technicians examining Sulu and Uhura. "They're okay, then?" asked Scott.
"Looks like." McCoy rose.
Kirk's eyelids were beginning to twitch and his head to move from side to side. A low, tired moan escaped his lips. McCoy knelt again on one side and Scott on the other. Together they helped the groggy captain to his feet. Scott looked briefly at his wrist chronometer.
"If you can certify them all right, Doctor, we'll take them down to the bulk transporter."
"But the Klingons—" McCoy began.
Scott shook him off. "I told you, Doctor, the Klingons had nothing to do with this. Either it was unexpected but plausible equipment failure, or else we suffered some concealed damage from that pulsar outburst we rode out. And the captain has to be down on the surface within the hour, to attend that conference. Remember the Starbase lectures. The Briamosites make a religion of punctuality."
"But surely they'll accept a reasonable explanation for a delay, Scotty?"
"I wouldn't count on it. These people strike me as bein' basically good folk, but they've got their peculiarities. And I canna blame them for bein' nervous about this conference. If the captain and Mr. Spock and the lieutenants can be there on time, they've got to try and make it."
McCoy's reply was hesitant but positive as they supported the swaying Kirk. "I don't see why they can't go . . . so far, Scotty." Looking over a shoulder, he saw that the other three officers had also been helped to stand.
Under the doctor's direction, the four stunned officers were helped stumblingly out of the transporter alcove. Kirk walked like a man drunk, as if he couldn't find his balance. But by the time they had walked-carried him as far as the console, he shrugged off their support. Putting out both hands, he braced himself on the console, then turned, leaned against it, and raised his left hand to his forehead, wincing. His eyes opened, and he seemed to see them for the first time.
"Mr. Scott, Doctor McCoy . . . What happened?" There was an odd lilt to Kirk's otherwise normal voice, as if the captain hadn't yet regained full control of all his faculties. Neither the chief nor McCoy paid much attention to it. After the disturbing experience of being frozen in a transporter field for an abnormal length of time, a few mild side effects were only to be expected.
Scott explained. "There was a malfunction in the transporter, Captain. Maybe due to damage received from that pulsar we encountered. We had put you all in limbo for a while until I could get it fixed. You gave us all a bad scare."
"Oh . . . I guess that explains it." Kirk paused, then frowned and stared at Scott. " 'Captain' . . . you called me 'Captain.' "
Scott and McCoy exchanged glances. "Naturally, sir," said Scott, as gently as possible.
"Are you feeling all right, Jim?" McCoy was watching Kirk closely.
"Jim?" Kirk's voice sounded a touch higher, more tenor, than usual. Part of that could be attributed to shock at his recent experience, but not all of it. "Why are you calling me that?" Now the captain sounded—and looked—a little scared.
"What else should I call you, Jim? What's wrong?" Privately McCoy was thinking: temporary amnesia. But no . . . Kick recognized his name and title, merely wasn't identifying with them. Something else was wrong, then.
The three officers stared at each other as if paralyzed, until a new voice broke in: "Scotty, Bones! What in the name of the seven black holes has happened?"
Both men turned together. Sulu was eyeing them in a most authoritative fashion. The helmsman released himself, started toward Scott and McCoy—and almost fell. Startled, he looked down at his feet, registered surprise and astonishment, and then came toward them again . . . walking carefully as if treading on eggshells.
"Jim? Sulu?" McCoy's dazed gaze switched back and forth between captain and helmsman.
Sulu's eyes traveled over his lower body. He extended both arms out in front of him, rotated them over and back. His hands went to his face, felt the features as would a blind man touching a friend. His eyes widened.
"Oh my god! What's happened to us? What's happened to me?" He gestured shakily toward the body of the captain. "If I'm Kirk, in Sulu's body, then who are you?"
"I'm Lieutenant Uhura, of course," replied Kirk's body, in that peculiarly modulated tone that was so like Kirk's normal voice yet wasn't. Then Uhura-kirk looked down at herself. She said nothing for long moments.
"I'm here, Scotty, Bones. In Sulu's body." Kirk-sulu eyed them both, amazed and stunned.
"It would appear," put in the voice in Lieutenant Uhura's body very calmly and rationally, "that while we were in the malfunctioning transporter field a part of each of us was switched."
"A most important part," Kirk-sulu agreed, staring over at the now-alien shape of his science chief. "That is you, Mr. Spock?"
The first officer spoke to them, from Uhura's body, with Uhura's voice. While the tones were unquestionably those of Lieutenant Uhura, the choice of words and flatness of speech were those of Spock. "It is, Captain." He started toward them, stumbled for one of the few times in his adult life, and moved on much more cautiously.
"It would appear, Captain," Spock-uhura said, addressing himself to Sulu's body, "that I am not quite myself." McCoy did a double-take—he was beginning to wonder who he really was—but Spock was serious as ever. The joke was unintentional. "That is you in Lieutenant Sulu's body."
"It's beginning to look so." Kirk-sulu still sounded overwhelmed by it all. Turning, he stared across at the stolid form of Mr. Spock, who was carefully inspecting himself, running hands over his body, head, and, most particularly, a pair of unfamiliar ears.
"Since everyone else has been accounted for . . ." There was no need to finish the comment. But the voice in Spock's body finished for him, and confirmed the inevitable. "Yes, it's me, sir," admitted Sulu-spock. "I feel so strange, sir. This body . . . so many subtle differences. I feel different, altered. Not ill, exactly. Just queasy."
"I would sympathize with you, Lieutenant," said Spock-uhura, "but at least you have ended up in a body of the proper gender. If you wish to compare unnatural feelings," and at that Spock-uhura glanced down meaningfully at its curvilinear form, "I believe mine far exceed yours. Nothing could feel more awkward than this. I find myself in a body of different sex and different race. I believe I can cope sufficiently with the mind, but the rest will take careful work."
"Don't count on being unique, Mr. Spock." Uhura-kirk was experimentally walking in a small circle, testing out a different arrangement of mass and new, more powerful musculature. "I didn't exactly end up in an easy-to-compensate-for container either, you know." She almost stumbled again, caught herself, then grinned.
"No wonder I nearly fell down the first time I t
ried to take a step, McCoy. The captain uses a longer stride than I'm used to."
"The question remains, what can be done to put us back where we all belong?" Kirk-sulu's attention was focused on the wide-eyed face of the ship's chief engineer.
Instantly, every other eye in the transporter room turned the same way.
Scott collected himself, thought a moment, and started to reply . . . to Uhura-kirk. Correcting himself, he shifted to address the body of Lieutenant Sulu.
"Nothing right away, I'm afraid . . . Captain," he told Kirk-sulu apologetically. Turning, he bent over and reached into the still-open console panel near the floor. He withdrew a small rectangle, about twenty centimeters long, which was filled with microcircuitry. It looked like a piece of metallic turf.
As he spoke, his fingers wove an intangible web over the battered, damp panel. "Everything that's been damaged on this I've either bypassed or replaced. The key to the personality-mind switch you've all experienced is locked in place on this panel.
"To put you all back to your original bodies, I've first got to figure out exactly what went wrong. Then I have to trace the one minuscule portion of the damage that produced the personality switch and change current flows, matching energy levels and duration precisely all the way, mind you, so that when you go back into the transporter the personality changes will reswitch themselves without doing further damage to some other portion of your bodies or minds."
He let the panel dangle carefully from one palm. "It's not," he added meaningfully, "a five-minute job for a maintenance tech to perform with a hammer and chisel."
"Wait a minute," said an excited Sulu-spock. "The transporter computer bank holds memories of all our transporter patterns. Why can't we just go to another transporter, desolidify ourselves, and then have the right patterns punched into the transporter so that when we're recombined it will be in the correct pattern . . . and proper bodies?"
"I dinna think it's that easy, Lieutenant," Scott began to explain. "If you'd been completely dematerialized in the transporter and then fully rematerialized elsewhere, I might be willin' to try it. But that didn't happen. Only part of your patterns were switched, and it was before full dematerialization had taken place." He shook his head. "No, I dinna think it's a good idea. It might even make things worse than they are now."
"I don't believe any of us could stand that, Mr. Scott," said Spock-uhura.
"That's for certain," agreed Kirk-sulu. "Things are going to be hard enough to cope with as they stand." He faced Scott again. "I don't expect miracles, Scotty. How long before you can localize and repair the troubled sections?"
Scott glanced down at the tiny panel, which had suddenly assumed enormous significance. "I kinna say for certain, sir. At least a couple of days. I dinna want to take a chance with you all in the transporter until I'm sure as I can be that I've fixed it."
"A couple of days?" Uhura-kirk glanced down at her massive—to her—linear shape. "I don't know if I can handle a couple of days in this body, Mr. Scott."
"I'm afraid you'll have to, Lieutenant," said Kirk-sulu meaningfully. "We'll all have to."
"But what about the conference, sir?" she wondered.
McCoy nodded. "That's right, Jim." He checked his own chronometer. "You're supposed to be down on Briamos for the conference's opening session in two-thirds of an hour."
"They're expecting Mr. Spock and myself," noted Kirk-sulu. He pointed at first Uhura's body, then Sulu's. "That means that the four of us are still going to have to attend. It's too late to change designated envoys, and I don't think the Briamosites would accept anyone below captain's rank as a designated ambassador."
"But how are we going to manage, sir?" wondered Sulu-spock. "It doesn't seem possible."
"It has to be possible, Mr. Sulu. We can't ask for a postponement of the conference time without offending the Briamosites, and even if we could there's no guarantee that Scotty will be able to fix the transporter and put us back in our own bodies," and he added hastily, unable to leave so grim a thought without hope, "in a reasonable amount of time."
"What precisely do you propose, Captain?" Spock-uhura looked on with interest.
"Mr. Spock, the captain and first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise will be present at this conference." His gaze wandered to his own body (how strange to be staring at a self that was not a mirror image), now inhabited by the personality of Lieutenant Uhura, and to that of Mr. Spock, in which Lieutenant Sulu was currently residing. "So will Lieutenant Sulu—that's me. And Lieutenant Uhura—that's you, Mr. Spock." Uhura's head nodded once. "What you and I do is not particularly important. We're lower-ranking officers, attending our superiors. We won't be closely watched.
"Mr. Sulu, you and Lieutenant Uhura will be acting as principals in this little play. So your imitations will have to be much more convincing. Mr. Sulu, at least you're in a body of proper gender, one not unlike your own in build and musculature." He turned his attention to his own ghost shape. "The success of this pantomime, Lieutenant Uhura, and of the entire conference, rests on your shoulders—even if they happen to also be mine." His own eyes were staring back at him expectantly. To his surprise, he found he had to repress a slight shiver.
"For one thing," he went on, "you'll be operating under the constant scrutiny of the Briamosites. Now, Captain Kumara knows me, but not intimately. I don't know how much he remembers in the way of personality traits and habits from our time together at the defunct Interspecies Academy. Probably not a great deal. But you'll have hormonal and other physical responses, the normal reactions of a male human body, to cope with. Some of them may surprise you at unexpected moments. Somehow you're going to have to act natural, nonetheless."
"I don't see that I'm going to have it that much easier, sir," objected a concerned Sulu-spock. "At least Uhura's in a human body. Talking about unexpected hormonal reactions, I'm in a Vulcan body. Already I'm feeling, well, itchy."
"It should not be overly difficult, Lieutenant," Spock-uhura insisted quietly. "All you have to do is act sensibly."
"That's easy for you to say, Mr. Spock," countered Sulu-spock testily.
"And you'll have to learn to control your facial expressions," Spock-uhura warned the lieutenant. "Those grotesque distortions of lips and mouth, the unnecessary head gestures must be eliminated if you halfway expect to . . . to . . ."
Spock-uhura halted in midsentence, staring at nothing in particular. "Most peculiar," the first officer finally murmured in Uhura's bell-like voice. He looked up at Dr. McCoy. "I presume, that my near outburst just then is what might be called an emotional response."
"Possibly, Spock. If so, it was very mild." McCoy considered carefully. "You raised your voice, but that's not necessarily an indication of emotional coloring."
Spock-uhura placed both hands against his forehead, winced at something that was not pain. "I feel most unusual, Doctor. My self appears reluctant to follow directions." Abruptly, the hands dropped and Spock-uhura looked at Kirk-sulu primly. "This is going to be more difficult than I first assumed, Captain."
"It's not going to be easy for any of us, Mr. Spock." Kirk-sulu sounded firm. "But it has to be tried. Otherwise Briamos will ally itself with Klingon. I'm willing to chance anything to prevent that from happening.
"We have a couple of things going for us, however. Briamosites know very little of human behavior. Our ambassador," he added drily, "didn't strike me as your average human being anyway. So much of our seemingly aberrant behavior can probably be explained away, if we do anything awkward. It will be more difficult to fool the Klingons, but they think all humans are a little crazy in their behavior anyhow."
"That is not entirely a Klingon assessment," noted Spock-uhura pointedly. "The present situation would only tend to reinforce that belief."
"We might stall the Briamosites for an hour or so now, Mr. Spock." Kirk-sulu looked thoughtful. "We have to. We're going to need that hour to give ourselves a crash course in each other. But for several days? No, never." He
walked over to confront his own body.
"Lieutenant Uhura?"
"Yes, sir," his own voice, but an oddly higher tenor, responded promptly.
"You are going to have to become me. At least, you're going to have to well enough to fool the Briamosites and the Klingons. At least our voices weren't switched. You're speaking with my vocal cords and my lungs. You've served as acting captain several times. This is another of those times, only you're going to have to be more than just acting captain. You're going to have to be Acting Captain James T. Kirk."
"I'll do my best . . . Lieutenant," she replied. Both of them smiled.
It was good to see himself looking so confident, Kirk thought a little crazily. He still felt as if he were talking in a dream. Any minute now they would all wake up, back in their own bodies, ready for the conference—everything all right again.
Then he realized his exuberance might be due in part to the fact that he was in a more youthful, responsive body. They would have to watch for subtle as well as blatant differences like that during the conference.
"We're all going to have to exercise some to get used to our new bodies," he went on. "Our strides, as Lieutenant Uhura has pointed out, are different now. So are our reaches. I can't have myself, meaning you, Lieutenant Uhura, reach for a stylus only to miss it and clutch empty air. Enough errors of that sort and sooner or later the Klingons would catch on that something's definitely wrong with us. Once that happened, they would find ways to take advantage of us, to our detriment regarding the Briamosites."
He turned to Spock's watching form. "As for you, Lieutenant Sulu, you're going to have to talk like a Vulcan, think like a Vulcan, act like a Vulcan."
"I'll manage somehow, sir," Sulu-spock replied calmly. "I mean," and he seemed to stand a little straighter, "I will endeavor to execute my assignment to the best of my abilities, Captain."
Star Trek - Log 10 Page 20
