by Barbara Paul
Uhura looked startled. "How?"
"You just think 'Stop!' It works as a chemohypnotic. The drug and your brain chemistry cooperate to give you a limited control over your unconscious thought processes, and that includes dreams. That way you aren't totally at the mercy of whatever your unconscious chooses to throw at you. Something scares you, you think 'Stop'—and it will stop. You may have to run through the beginnings of half a dozen dreams before you find one that looks safe, but you will be able to decide which one you'll finally dream. And best of all, you won't end up a dream-deficient basket case in need of extensive therapy before you can function again."
Uhura smiled, the first time in days. "It really will work?"
McCoy smiled back. "It really will work. This is only a temporary measure, you understand. It won't cure what's causing the dreams, but it will let you get some sleep. Come see me tomorrow."
Uhura thanked him and went into the examination room, where Christine Chapel was waiting with the Tridocane. After she'd administered the hypo, Nurse Chapel said, "Some patients find this works faster if they keep repeating the word 'Stop' to themselves just as they're falling asleep. Why don't you try that, since this is your first time."
"All right, Christine. Are there any side effects I should know about?"
"No, none—no groggy feeling the next day or anything. The only problem with Tridocane is that it tends to lose its effectiveness after the third or fourth use."
Uhura was dismayed. "So this will help me only four nights at the most? That's all?"
Nurse Chapel put a hand on her friend's arm. "It's only a temporary measure, Uhura. Didn't Dr. McCoy tell you?"
"Oh. Yes, he did say that," Uhura admitted. "Well, I suppose it's better than nothing. Thanks, Christine."
Uhura went back to her quarters and quickly prepared for bed. She lay down and closed her eyes and did what Christine Chapel had told her to do. Stop, she thought, a bit desperately.
Stop. Stop.
Captain James T. Kirk forced himself to stand still and not pace. The bridge temperature was the highest he'd ever felt it, and unnecessary movement could only increase his personal discomfort. Thirty hours had lapsed since he'd first announced that the galaxy was on fire, and now the Enterprise itself felt ready to burst into flames. The ship's coolant system was overtaxed, small electrical fires had broken out in four or five places, and Scotty was calling every two minutes to say the ship couldn't take much more. Everyone on the bridge was sweating—except the Vulcan first officer. Kirk could feel the heat through the soles of his boots.
"How much farther, Mr. Spock?" he demanded.
"We're almost within sensor range now, Captain. Just a little closer."
Kirk strode over to the communications station. "No answer from Holox yet?"
"No, sir," Uhura said. "I've repeated the message on every comnet frequency open to this sector. They must have received it by now." The colonized planet had remained stubbornly silent. Another mystery.
Chekov called out, "Tventy-two minutes to heat front!"
Twenty-two minutes, Kirk thought. He sat in the command chair. "Mr. Spock?"
"Readings coming in now, Captain." The Vulcan studied the symbols scrolling through his viewer. "Temperature beyond our capability to measure, but gas analysis is in. Twenty-five percent ionized helium and seventy-five percent ionized hydrogen, plus trace elements." Spock straightened up from his viewer. "Fascinating." His voice had a seldom-heard edge to it.
"Captain Kirk!" Scott's voice erupted from the speaker system. "We canna take any more! The—"
Kirk slapped a button on his armrest control panel. "Not now, Mr. Scott! Why 'fascinating', Spock?"
"The three-to-one hydrogen-helium ratio—that's exactly what our universe consisted of when it was approximately three minutes old. Even the trace elements had begun to appear by three minutes after the colorfully named Big Bang had taken place. And now we find those conditions precisely duplicated right here."
Kirk thought that over … and his eyes widened as he realized what it meant. "Helmsman, full reverse! Get us out of here, Mr. Sulu, and fast! Now!"
"Full reverse." Sulu moved quickly, responding to the urgency in the captain's voice without understanding the reason for it.
"Course, Captain?" Chekhov sounded puzzled.
"Away from … that!" Kirk gestured toward the main viewscreen, which now was showing streaks of exploding gas in the far distance. "Spock, any chance your figures could be wrong?"
"No, Captain, I've checked them twice. We are now retreating from the effects of a primal explosion identical to the one that gave rise to the universe we ourselves are living in."
Kirk didn't like it; he didn't like it at all. "So what we're seeing is a new universe in the process of getting itself born," he said heavily. "It's more than the galaxy that's on fire!"
"What's that?" Uhura exclaimed, startled. "A new universe?"
"Inside our uniwerse?" Chekov protested. "But ve vere here first!"
Without looking away from his viewer, Spock remarked, "You'll find the laws of nature have little respect for squatters' rights, Ensign, if I understand that term correctly. But it's unlikely the new universe had its origins within our own. Ours is only one of countless numbers of universes, all residing in a larger superspace that has been swelling outward for an unimaginably long period of time, a superspace that is ferociously hot and immeasurably dense. To use an analogy, we're but one bubble in a sea of foam—a sea with no surface, and no bottom. And bubbles in that sea of foam occasionally touch."
The bridge personnel all fell silent, depending on their instruments to tell them whether they were about to be burned alive or not. There was nothing in their universe to shield them from the heat generated by a neighboring universe's Big Bang; their only hope was to outrun it.
Spock's image of touching foam bubbles persisted in Kirk's mind. Could one of the bubbles burst the other? Could the bubbles just bounce off each other? Or would the abrasive action of two universes grating against each other wear a hole in both of them, to create an interspatial portal allowing matter and energy to flow from one universe to the other? And if they had to bump into another universe, why couldn't it be a mature one? Why did the collision have to come only three minutes after the other universe's primal explosion, an explosion that spewed out heat intense enough to vaporize every star system, every galaxy, every supercluster …
"Temperature is dropping!" Chekov cried out jubilantly. "Half a degree, one—"
He was interrupted by an outbreak of cheering. "Let's hold off on the celebrating," Kirk said. "All we've done is buy some time." He rose and stepped between the navigator's station and the helmsman's. "Sulu, I want you to match the rate of our retreat as closely as you can to that of the heat front's advance. Chekov, keep feeding him temperature readings. Don't let the front get too close."
"Understood, sir," Sulu said.
The speaker crackled to life. "Ah, Captain," sighed Chief Engineer Scott, sounding much relieved. "Thank ye."
Kirk smiled wryly. "Just for you, Scotty," he murmured and moved over to his first officer's station. He hesitated, looking for the best way to frame his question. "Spock, is there any possibility this is an unnatural phenomenon we're witnessing? That is, could it have been manipulated from this side of the front?"
The Vulcan's right eyebrow rose. "Triggering a primal explosion? Not by any technology known to us, Captain. Do you have some reason to suspect such an unlikelihood?"
Kirk shook his head. "Just a hunch. Never mind the technology—somebody's always developing new technology we don't know about yet. But is it possible in theory?"
In the years they'd served together, Spock had developed a healthy respect for his captain's hunches. And he'd done so in spite of the fact that even the idea of hunches went against the grain of Vulcan thought processes. Inspired guesswork grated against all of Spock's training as well as against his own natural proclivity to reason things out and igno
re the insights that sprang from the exercise of instinct and imagination.
But he'd learned the captain didn't depend upon either instinct or logic exclusively, and Spock himself had frequently benefited from Kirk's more oblique approach. So now he put his mind to the problem his commanding officer had posed. "If it's true that every universe is a vacuum fluctuation—then yes, theoretically at least, such a triggering event might be possible. But one would have to develop some sort of gravity manipulator of far greater potency than the antigrav units we use on the Enterprise."
"Why gravity?"
"Gravity is unique, Captain. It is the very warping of space-time that we have encountered in the past. There are moments in time that cease flowing smoothly into the next moment, and there are points in space that fail to connect logically with adjacent points. During these off-moments and at these non-points, space-time itself literally does not exist. But if one of those non-moment-points could be captured gravitationally …"
"Big Bang?"
"Big Bang. But Captain, who would wish to trigger an uncontrollable destructive force of such magnitude?"
"Klingons," Sulu muttered from the helm.
Kirk was thinking. "This heat explosion—it'll go on until it consumes our universe?"
"Unknown, Captain. Since we have no instruments capable of measuring the intensity of the heat or the size of the gaseous mass, it's impossible to say how far out in a concentric circle the original explosion will travel before it begins to cool down. There is this, though—the explosion would travel outward in all directions from a central point. It would not travel in just one direction, toward us."
"So we're getting only a piece of it?"
"I assume so, Captain. We would not be able to outrun it if we were receiving the full blast … we would have been consumed immediately otherwise. That does not mean it is any less dangerous. However, there is always a possibility that this new universe will prove to be smaller than our own, in which case the survival of at least part of our universe would be assured."
"Looking on the bright side, Spock?" Kirk asked sourly. "What if it's larger than ours?"
"Then we are indeed in trouble."
Abruptly Kirk swung around and started pacing. After a moment he stopped as suddenly as he'd started and said, "It all began near the Beta Castelli system. What if someone were determined to wipe out the Zirgosian race? Wouldn't this be a sure-fire way of doing it? No pun intended. This big an explosion got not only Zirgos itself but two of its colony planets as well."
Spock raised an eyebrow. "Earth humans have an expression that covers such an eventuality," the first officer said archly. "I think it is something about shooting off a cannon to kill a gnat."
"Yes, yes, it would be overkill—it would be suicidal, in fact. But maybe something went wrong. Maybe the energy released is greater than what was anticipated. Maybe a lot of things. We need some answers. One thing in our favor—if someone did set out to kill off the Zirgosians, they could have missed a few. Let's see if the Zirgosian colonists can tell us what happened here." Kirk returned to the command chair. "Mr. Chekov! Lay in a course to Holox. Mr. Spock, how much longer before we've learned everything we can learn here?"
The Vulcan peered into his viewer. "The data are repeating now, Captain. We can leave any time."
A few moments later Chekov announced, "Course to Holox laid in. Two point five parsecs."
"Ahead warp five, Mr. Sulu," Kirk said. "Lieutenant Uhura, notify Starfleet where we're going and why. And feed through the data from Mr. Spock's computer—we want them to know all about our three-minute universe. Starfleet has some decisions to make."
"Yes, sir," she said. "Do you think they'll try evacuating this sector?"
"Where would they evacuate to, Lieutenant?" Kirk muttered.
The question hung ominously in the air. The Enterprise hurtled onward toward a small planet called Holox, where questions bigger than that might find their answers.
Chapter Two
CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK woke to find he'd been sleeping on his stomach, something he hadn't done since he was a boy. Was he that afraid of what was coming—to revert to childhood in his sleep?
What woke him was an audible signal that he was wanted. He rolled off the bed and hit the intercom control. "Kirk here."
It was Sulu. "We're approaching orbit, Captain. But someone got here ahead of us. There's another ship circling Holox and I can't identify it."
"Is Mr. Spock on the bridge?"
"No, sir."
"Get him. I'm on my way."
In the turbolift Kirk rubbed his eyes; he wasn't fully awake yet. From the lift's speaker came the sound of Sulu's voice summoning Spock to the bridge. An unidentified ship? Must be some mistake. He stepped off the lift—and woke up completely. On the bridge's main viewscreen was displayed a piece of flying hardware the likes of which he'd never seen before.
Long and lean, what was almost a perfect rectangle lay stretched out to form a thick gray bar across the deep black of space. No deflector dish, no nacelles. No identification markings.
"Increase magnification," Kirk ordered. The closer picture showed him weapons hatches, closed ports, exterior ship structures hidden behind unrevealing casings. Whatever that ship had, its occupants weren't displaying it for casual passersby to examine at their leisure.
Uhura was standing by her station, hypnotized by the sight of the ship on the screen. "What is it, Captain? They don't acknowledge our signal."
"Don't know, Lieutenant. Keep sending. Mr. Chekov?"
The young navigator was at the science officer's station, peering into the viewer. "Mass, three hundred forty-one point one million kilograms. Length … nine hundred meters exactly!"
"Nine hundred meters!" Sulu echoed disbelievingly. "How can they maneuver?"
"So they're three times as long as the Enterprise and twice as heavy," Kirk mused. "And they don't want to talk to us?" He glanced at Uhura.
"Still no response."
The turbolift door hissed open and Spock stepped out on to the bridge. The Vulcan's only visible reaction to the strange ship on the screen was an arched eyebrow. Wordlessly he moved over to his viewer, Chekov resumed his navigator's seat.
"Interior visuals, Mr. Spock?" Kirk asked.
"Unable to scan, Captain. The ship has some sort of shielding we can't penetrate. It's too large for a battle cruiser, yet it's obviously armed. Maneuverability must be limited."
"And slow," Sulu added. "Even a simple ninety-degree turn would take forever."
"Not quite forever, Mr. Sulu, but an inconveniently long period of time if the ship were under attack," Spock remarked. "They must depend heavily upon their shielding for defense."
Kirk strode over to Communications. "Ship-to-ship."
Uhura flipped two switches and pressed a button. "Ready."
"This is Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise. We represent the United Federation of Planets and our mission here is a peaceful one. Please identify yourself."
No one made a sound as they all waited for the strange ship's response. There was none.
"Are you sure they got the message, Lieutenant?" Kirk asked.
"Yes, sir," Uhura said. "The receptor echo was quite clear."
"Repeat," Kirk ordered. "We—"
"Kepten!" Chekov cried. "Look!"
They all looked. The ship appeared to be in the process of growing mechanical arms and legs, but what it was in fact doing was unfolding itself. The top aft portion lifted, extended itself, and divided into four sections, each connected by dorsals with every other section as well as with the main body of the ship. Elsewhere on the ship the same process was taking place. In a few minutes the ship had changed from a long, monolinear slab into an ovoid composed of intricate, connecting parts. Then it moved. Following the curvature of the world below, it swiftly and gracefully slipped out of sight.
"Well, that answers the question of maneuverability," Kirk remarked dryly. "Where is it, Spock?"
<
br /> "On the other side of Holox … and it is now matching its orbit to ours. They're keeping the planet between us, Captain."
"Must be shy," Sulu grimaced.
Spock looked at the helmsman curiously. "Shy, Mr. Sulu?"
When Sulu realized the Vulcan was taking him literally, he hastily withdrew his suggestion and asked a question instead. "Why do they bother with that long, thin form anyway? The ovoid can do whatever they need to do."
"Probably to conserve power," Kirk guessed. "That ovoid shape has got to put a bigger drain on their resources than the more compact form. Maybe the colonists on Holox can tell us who they are. Lieutenant—"
"Sir, they're still not answering," Uhura said. "I've been transmitting continuously."
"Here's something, Captain," Spock said quickly, examining the sensor array monitor. "A point of great heat on the planet's surface, and in an area the colonists have not yet settled. No volcanic activity or other known natural phenomenon responsible."
"A hot spot with no cause?"
"With no known cause, Captain."
"Let's see." Kirk stepped over to the monitor. He studied the surface imaging on the screen and then read the numbers displayed across the bottom. "Could it be a forest fire? Does wood burn that hot?"
"It is an unforested area, mostly desert. There's nothing there to burn."
"Then there shouldn't be any hot spot."
"Correct, Captain. But it is indisputably there."
Kirk growled. "I don't want any more mysteries! Come along, Mr. Spock—let's go see what's going on down there. Will we need suits?"
"No, sir. Holox has a nitrogen-oxygen mix we can breathe. And we can move faster—gravity is only point nine Earth normal."
"Mr. Sulu, you have the conn," Kirk said. "Lieutenant Uhura, notify the transporter room. And tell Mr. Scott to meet us there with a security detail. Make that a double security detail." He charged into the turbolift, followed closely by his first officer.
