by James Gunn
He turned his body slowly, letting the rope unwind from his waist. When he had come nearly 360 degrees, the line slackened. Kirk straightened, clinging to the rope that trailed over the edge, feeling numb from his feet to his head. His arms felt like lead weights, and his legs were not much lighter. At that moment he didn’t know how he was going to get down from the glacier, and he couldn’t muster the energy to care. It would be easier to lie down here and die.
But then he remembered Johannsen and Linda, Frank and Paco, and all the people below in their quixotic struggle against overwhelming forces, [161] McCoy and Spock and Uhura and the crew of the Enterprise, the Joy Machine and the threat it posed to the rest of the galaxy unless it was stopped. He breathed in the frigid air off the glacier, now tainted with the odor of fire and smoke blowing from near the mountains. He remembered that Timshel was less massive than Earth and that the air had a percent or two more oxygen; what would have been impossible on Earth was only next-to-impossible here.
He shook himself, jumped up and down, beating his arms against his sides, and, taking a turn of the rope around his waist, now free of Paco’s weight, he jumped backward off the glacier and began rappelling himself down the icy face: jump, land with his feet against the ice, release a length of rope, jump, land with his feet against the ice, feeling the ice and snow broken from the rim by the rope falling around him, release a length of rope, jump, land ...
There was no end to it.
And then there was an end to it as he jumped, let out a length of line, and landed on pebbly ground, covered with mounds of ice, and he collapsed.
He sat up to mass confusion. Even from here, beside the glacier and its continual, animal-like roars and screams, he could hear shouting and see people running by the huts like lemmings ready to cast themselves into the sea. Shards of ice fell nearby, and Kirk scrambled to his feet and away from the face of the glacier before it came down upon him and negated all his effort. He still felt as if the strength had been drained from his body, but it was different now that he was down. A new flush of determination not to let the Joy Machine win this round surged through his body.
The glacier lurched forward a meter, and then began moving steadily, perceptibly, a few centimeters at a time, toward the water’s edge. It had already [162] crumpled and engulfed the shed at the base of the winch, and the fallen winch as well. It was only a few meters now from the nearest hut.
Kirk ran toward the water’s edge, making his legs respond even though they told him that they weren’t there at all. Men and women were running back and forth, frantically, purposelessly, useless possessions clutched in their arms. When some dropped what they were carrying, they turned to pick up other objects that had been lost by someone else.
Kirk grabbed one man by the arm and shook him. “Where’s Linda?” he asked. “Where’s Johannsen?”
The man waved vaguely in the direction of the Nautilus and turned to run in the opposite direction, toward one of the huts, as if to save something from the impending destruction, even though he didn’t know what. Behind him Kirk heard the glacier grinding and screaming, and the sound of something, like a person or an animal, being torn apart. He turned to see the first of the huts swallowed by the glacier, the back of it crumpling under the advancing behemoth, the roof falling, its supports standing like the ribs of some extinct beast exposed to the air, and then slowly being ground into the slab that had been its foundation.
Kirk turned and ran toward the dock where the Nautilus was moored. Here a more orderly procession of men and women were taking provisions from the commons to stack on the shore, while others were carrying some of the provisions into the Nautilus itself. Kirk looked around for a face he knew, but finding none he stopped a woman with a box of freeze-dried food in her arms and shouted, “Where’s Linda?”
She nodded toward the far side of the dock. There, when he rounded the bow of the Nautilus, Kirk found Linda tending Paco’s head, wiping away the blood and putting a bandage over an ugly wound. Linda [163] looked up as she finished. “Jim,” she said with welcome concern. “You made it!”
He nodded. “Where’s Johannsen? Somebody’s got to take charge here.”
She waved her hand at the electronics hut. “He went over there for something.”
“Is Paco all right?”
“I think so,” Linda said. “We’ve got to get him aboard the Nautilus.”
“And as many more people as it will hold,” Kirk said.
Linda looked at him as if weighing his judgment.
Before he could say anything more, Johannsen and Frank were nearby, carrying between them a large, well-crafted wooden box. Kirk knew what was in it. “Why are you wasting time on that thing?” he asked in disgust.
“We know what we’re doing,” Johannsen said grimly.
“Kirk, you got down okay!” Frank said happily. “Sorry I couldn’t stay to help, but I had to get someone to take care of Paco, and then Johannsen needed me.” He turned to Linda. “How is Paco?”
“I think he’s going to be all right,” she said.
“Let’s get this aboard and stowed away,” Johannsen said to Frank. They struggled the box toward the hatch.
Kirk turned to Linda. “Doesn’t he know there are people waiting to be saved? People who need his leadership? People who are depending on him?”
“You don’t understand,” Linda said.
Behind them the glacier increased its clamor and the huts, their protests at being torn apart.
“Let’s get Paco aboard,” she said.
Together they raised Paco’s body and maneuvered it through the hatch and down a narrow passageway to the tiny cabin where Linda had slept during the passage north. They lowered him on the narrow bunk [164] and checked his condition. As they left, they encountered Johannsen and Frank, free of their burden, in the control room.
“Where is it?” Kirk asked.
“None of your business,” Johannsen said.
“You can’t think that destroying Timshel City is worth the lives of your people here!” Kirk said.
“Our lives are nothing!” Johannsen said. “Our mission is everything.”
“Fanatics!” Kirk muttered.
“In times like these, only fanatics will keep up the struggle,” Linda said.
“If they sacrifice their humanity,” Kirk said, “there will be nothing left to struggle for.”
Linda led him outside to where the boxes of provisions had been stacked, and they joined the crew members of the Nautilus, whom Kirk now recognized, loading them aboard while destruction screamed behind them.
When they paused for a moment in their labors, Linda nodded toward the north. “What’s going on up there? Frank was too busy to talk.”
“Just as I suspected,” Kirk said, leaning wearily against the raised hatch. “The Joy Machine used my abduction to lead it to your headquarters. Since Marouk set the process in motion, he had to be involved, either working directly with the Joy Machine or as an unwitting tool. Since he’s no fool, it probably was his idea.”
“The Joy Machine is behind all this?”
“Apparently it couldn’t attack the base directly,” Kirk said. “You’d know better than I the restrictions implanted in its program.”
Linda nodded.
“So it started a process that might produce the same effect indirectly but that would take no lives if people behaved rationally. It destabilized the glacier with heat bombs, self-propelled lasers, and rocket exhausts.”
[165] Linda looked at the approaching glacier, shattering and screaming and inexorably approaching the ocean’s edge, where the Nautilus rested and the base’s personnel were being forced to retreat. “The Joy Machine is forcing our hand,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”
She started off toward one of the huts, running. Several of the huts had crumpled under the advancing edge of the glacier, and the one toward which Linda was heading seemed threatened by imminent destruction. “Wait!” Kirk shouted after her. “Lin
da, wait!”
But it was too late. She was gone beyond the reach of anyone’s voice.
Once Johannsen’s major purpose had been accomplished, he seemed not to care what happened. Kirk began issuing orders to the portion of the base personnel who had succumbed to panic. Panic, Kirk thought—the sudden onset of irrational fear. The Joy Machine was Timshel’s Pan, tootling enthralling music on its pipes but instilling unreasoned terror in those not yet under its spell. But then everything on the planet had been appropriated by the Joy Machine, even the glacier that had stood unmoving for centuries, powerful but silent, like the philosophers’ weighty discussions about the purpose of life and the ends of existence, now solidified into possibility and descending irresistibly upon the galaxy.
Kirk’s orders, rising above the clamor of destruction, whipped the mob back into rationality. He forced them to triage the personal items they were trying to salvage, dumping most of it into piles on the shore, and to form a line passing boxes of food and drink across the rocky beach. Soon Johannsen awoke from his daze and directed the supplies to the end of the dock to which the Nautilus was moored.
The end of the electronics hut crumpled under the glacier’s advance. There goes the radio, Kirk thought. Just then, however, Zworykin burst from the door [166] waving a sheet of paper in his bare hand. He began to run toward the Nautilus, his eyes darting from person to person until he spotted Kirk and stopped in front of him.
“This came through just minutes ago,” he said, trying to get his breath.
“You stayed too long,” Kirk said, taking the sheet of paper from Zworykin’s fingers. “Did you see Linda?”
“Nobody has been in the electronics hut since Johannsen left,” Zworykin said. “Where did she go?”
Kirk shrugged and looked down at the paper. On it Zworykin had printed in block letters: “COMPUTER FULLY OCCUPIED QUANTIFYING DATA ON HUMAN CONCEPTS OF GOOD. ANALYSIS MUST PRECEDE ACTION. IS HAPPINESS THE END OF HUMAN EXISTENCE? ACCESS DENIED. JOY.”
“Joy?” Kirk said.
“That’s what I thought the word was.”
Joy, Kirk thought. That was it, then. The ship’s computer had built a wall he could not breach, had developed a will of its own he could not break. Perhaps Spock, with his logical mind and technical skills, could bring it back under control. But he was far from Spock, and Spock, if he was still all right, was far from any communications device.
The glacier ground closer. The electronics hut was gone now and the barracks where he had slept, and the women’s barracks beyond where Linda had recovered her pitiful treasure of coffee beans. The approaching ice seemed to suck all the warmth from the narrowing beachhead, like white death drawing life’s blood from everything that had survived its destruction until now.
Johannsen was beside him. “Where’s Linda?” he demanded. “You’ve got to get going!”
“She ran off to get something,” Kirk said. “I don’t know what or where.”
“You let her go?” Johannsen demanded.
“You people!” Kirk said. “I had no more control [167] over her than I had over you. Anyway, it’s your plan and your ship. I’ll take my chances here with the others who can’t get aboard.”
Johannsen shook his head decisively. “Impossible! You’re essential.”
Kirk shook the message in front of Johannsen’s face. “Not anymore. The Enterprise is out of the picture.”
“Not important,” Johannsen said. Someone tugged at his elbow, one of the crew of the Nautilus. Johannsen shook him off. “Find Linda!” he ordered and turned back to Kirk. “I’ve done all I can. Now it’s up to you and Linda.”
The glacier was so close it was almost impossible to hear each other. It took its first bite out of the commons. Kirk turned to look at it and saw Linda running toward them, holding something in her right hand.
“I found it,” she shouted as she neared the ship.
“What?” Kirk asked.
“The virus. I’d stored it in one of the freezers, and everything had been turned upside down in the evacuation.” She held out a small box like a case that might hold a jeweled watch.
Kirk shook his head.
“Get aboard and get going,” Johannsen shouted.
“What about you?” Linda asked.
“I’m staying here with the others,” Johannsen replied, at the top of his voice. “With the crew and Paco, there’s no more room.”
“What will you do?” Linda shouted. “No reason to think the glacier will stop at the water.”
“No reason at all.”
“You’ll all be killed!” Linda shouted.
Johannsen smiled. “We’ve got the wampuses.”
Linda stopped and then nodded. “Good luck,” she shouted and turned to Kirk. “Into the Nautilus!”
“We’re counting on you,” Johannsen shouted.
He was, Kirk realized, talking not to Linda but to [168] him. He shook his head and followed Linda through the hatchway while Johannsen cast off the lines that held the Nautilus to the dock.
In the control room Linda counted the crew. “One missing,” she said. “Lintzman.”
As she spoke a man came through the hatchway, breathless. “Here. I was looking for you.”
“Let’s get under way,” Linda said. “Before we’re swamped.”
The engine started quietly, and the ship moved back from the dock on its forward jets. When it was free, it slowly turned and headed out to sea.
Kirk went on deck to watch the final victory of the glacier. The entire little community was gone, now, and the cliff of ice had nearly reached the shore. The gray interminable back of a wampus was against the pier and the last of the personnel from the base was tossing supplies onto it and climbing on top. Now Kirk realized what Johannsen had meant about the wampuses, and why he had to be the one to stay.
Johannsen was the last to leave. Another wampus already was swimming steadily toward open ocean, its back loaded with people and supplies, the ice-strewn water lapping threateningly close to the passengers it transported.
The story of Pinocchio had been inverted. Now the great sea mammals were carrying humans to safety. On their backs.
The images that Kirk carried with him were the great glacier calving giant icebergs into the ocean as it rolled forward seemingly without end, and the wampuses, their backs like vast floating islands, moving steadily and smoothly south with their cargoes of people standing, watching the destruction of their temporary homes and then turning to face the future. It was an unlikely partnership, but, Kirk told himself, it deserved a chance to develop into something that might be the envy of the galaxy.
[subspace carrier wave transmission]
>humans = emotions<
>emotions = love anger sorrow regret friendship = humans<
Chapter Twelve
Journey into Pain
KIRK SLEPT FOR nearly twenty-four hours, scarcely stirring in the hammock strung between two bulkheads. He dreamed about a machine as big as a glacier that engulfed him and imprisoned him within a palace made of ice. He slept for centuries, like some fairy-tale prince, dreaming long, slow dreams that he was awake and seized by indescribable joy.
When he really awoke, sweating and cold, his bladder begging for relief, he had to roll himself out of the hammock’s embrace, his aching muscles protesting every movement. Timshel might be slightly less massive than Earth and slightly more oxygen-rich, but stretching the limits of physical endurance had the same result: pain.
He restored himself with a sponge bath in the tiny bathroom facilities, and a single-dish meal that he warmed in the oven. By then he had begun to feel a little better. When he made his way into the control room, he found the hatchway onto the deck open. He climbed out. Linda was standing by the railing, looking back the way they had come. The days had [171] become a little shorter as they traveled south. The sun was low on the horizon. Twilight would fall soon. Alread
y they had sailed out of the region of icebergs and floes, and the ocean was calm.
Linda looked at him with a pleased smile. “You’re up. Rested?”
Kirk nodded.
“You did good work back there,” Linda said. “Starfleet picks good captains.”
“So did you,” Kirk said. “Johannsen, too, for that matter. No easy matter to leave your base to be destroyed in order to save your crew.”
A shadow passed across Linda’s face. “And yet you were the one who insisted on saving Frank—and Paco. And you didn’t even know them.”
Kirk shrugged. “Johannsen had responsibilities for the others. I was free to indulge my sentimental side.”
“It wasn’t that alone,” Linda said. “Arne was ready to sacrifice them for the cause. He was ready to sacrifice all of us.”
“Including himself,” Kirk added.
“Yes. I give him that. But it made me realize that I didn’t really know him.”
“Times like those,” Kirk said, “bring out the best and the worst in people. Sometimes those who don’t perform well in routine circumstances come into their own during emergencies; sometimes the opposite is true. Neither has anything to do with character or worth.”
“You’re not only capable,” Linda said. “You’re kind as well. It’s just that I can’t help seeing Arne differently.”
“It’s good to see people as they are,” Kirk said, looking out over the ocean. “To think the best of them but have no illusions. What’s that?” He pointed to twin black spots in their wake.
“Wampuses,” Linda said. “We have an escort.” She waved her hand around both sides of the ship. Humps [172] and gray backs and ruffled water surrounded them at a distance of a few hundred meters. “I wish we could talk to them the way Arne does,” she said wistfully. “They might be able to tell us something important. Or something comforting, anyway.”
