Star Trek 10

by James Blish

  "But if the Klingons give the villagers more power, what then, Jim?"

  "We give this side exactly that much more. The trickiest, most difficult, dirtiest game of them all—but the only one that preserves both sides. In whatever this planet is to become, each side has its evolutionary value."

  McCoy's face had grown deeply thoughtful. "Jim, all this time . . . with Tyree blindly trusting you—and you beginning to understand what you'd have to do . . ."

  Kirk nodded. "Agony, Doctor. I've never had a more difficult decision."

  McCoy looked at him, himself experiencing Kirk's torment. "There's another morsel of agony for you. As Tyree won't fight, he'll be one of the first to die."

  "He'd be a wise leader," Kirk said. He stopped his pacing. "His wife's the only way to reach him. If I tell her we'll supply guns, she may persuade him. I must have a talk with her."

  She was bathing in a forest pool. Cooled and refreshed, she finally "stepped out of it, her wet inner garment clinging to her body. There was a flat rock near the pool and she sank down on it, zestfully savoring the sun's warmth as it began to dry her streaming black hair. After a moment she reached for her small leather pouch. Selecting a small herb from it, she crushed it between her hands, applying its scent to her neck, face and shoulders. She wore the concentrated look of a woman preparing herself for a man.

  When she heard Kirk's voice call her name, she smiled to herself, unsurprised. Discarding the herb, she gave her attention to arranging her slim body advantageously.

  At the sight of her in her thin wet clothing, Kirk hesitated. She beckoned to him. "Stay," she said. "You are here because I wished you here."

  He smiled, correcting her. "I'm afraid this was my idea."

  "Yes, they always believe they come of free will. Tyree thought the same when I cast my first spell on him." She touched the stone beside her invitingly. "Be comfortable, Kirk. Sit down. I will not hurt you."

  After another moment of hesitation, he obeyed. She leaned toward him. "Can you smell the fragrance on me? Some find it pleasing."

  He took a fast sniff at her shoulder. "Yes, very nice," he said. "But what I want . . . want to talk of . . ." The polite smile on his lips faded. His head was spinning.

  Nona edged closer to him. He tried to draw back but his befuddled senses were stronger than his will.

  "Smell the scent again," she said. "You will find it soothing."

  "Yes, but I came to . . . to talk about . . . about . . ."

  From where he had been following Kirk, Tyree heard the voices. He carried the flintlock whose mechanism still puzzled him. Now he forgot the question he had planned to ask. Face set, he checked the amount of powder in the pan. Then he moved on in the direction of the voices.

  Nona had drawn Kirk close to the herb perfume on her neck. Kirk pulled away. Fighting vertigo, he got shakily to his feet, inhaling deep gulps of fresh air. "Forgive me . . . I . . . seem . . . unable to think . . ."

  She sat very still, smiling and waiting. Kirk's eyes locked with hers. And suddenly he was smiling back, aware only of a lovely woman who seemed to desire him.

  "How beautiful!" he said. "How lovely you are, Nona!"

  Tyree raised the gun. For a moment he focused its sights on Nona. Then he swung them slowly to Kirk. Nona, in Kirk's embrace, caught the gleam of sun on the barrel. She made no move though Kirk's back was Tyree's clear target. There came the sound of the weapon's crash on a rock. Relief mixed with contempt in her face. Tyree could never be important. A man of faint heart. She lifted her arms to Kirk's neck.

  "Yes, lovely . . . incredibly lovely," Kirk was saying foggily.

  Tyree was running from the scene of his betrayal. As he skirted a rock, a monstrous shadow rose from behind it. The dead gumato's female mate, it had begun its swift and noiseless stalk of the Hillman when it was distracted by the sound of Kirk's maunderings. It swerved. Nona saw it over Kirk's shoulder. She tried to pull free but he held her tight. Fists clenched, she struck at him savagely, jerked clear of his arms and sped into a run. Then the sudden thought of Kirk's dazed helplessness halted her. Her quick stop brought a snarl from the beast. She screamed, racing for the pool. But the apelike thing cut her off at the water's edge. She shrieked again; and Kirk, slowly emerging from his confusion, fumbled for his phaser. Realization hit him. Rushing to the pool, he saw Nona prone, the great animal towering over her. He fired his phaser. The gumato vanished. Extending a hand, he helped Nona to her feet.

  The assistance exhausted his strength. His drugged state had left him so weakened that he slumped to the ground, eyes closed, breathing hard. Nona looked down at him. Then she picked up a rock. She clubbed him over the head with it. The phaser dropped from his hand. She lifted it, examining it in wonder. Then she turned and made for the forest.

  Stumbling, broken, Tyree was making his way to his lean-to when McCoy and Yutan intercepted him.

  "Where's Captain Kirk?" McCoy demanded.

  Tyree waved blindly behind him and Yutan cried, "Tyree! The firestick! Where is it?"

  "I left it . . . back there."

  "A fine thing to leave lying around! Show us!" McCoy shook Tyree's arm.

  It roused him. "I show you," he said.

  Pieces of the broken rifle lay on the ground. Yutan picked up the barrel. Tyree covered his face with his hands. "No! I don't want to see it!"

  McCoy was about to speak when Kirk staggered toward them. Still groggy from the blow, he swayed. Then he crumpled back to the ground. McCoy, taking a quick check of his pulse, broke out the hypo from his medikit.

  Meanwhile, Nona had arrived at a decision. At first sight of an armed village patrol, she had hidden herself behind a thick-leaved bush. As it approached, she made up her mind. She stepped from her concealment, confronting the leader of the four-man group. She lifted Kirk's phaser full into his view.

  "I bring victory to Apella!" she said. "He will have the courage to use this new weapon! Take me to him!"

  The man grinned. "Tyree's woman! A Kahn-ut-tu female also. Do we entrust this division to Apella?"

  The patrolmen guffawed. The leader grabbed her, the others pressing around them. She yanked free. Then she aimed the phaser at the leader. "Touch me again—and this small box will kill you!"

  The man hesitated. But the villager behind her gave her a slight push. She wheeled to level the weapon at him. He was not impressed. All of them were grinning broadly now. They closed in about her, clutching at her, at her clothing. Ignorant of how to use the phaser, she tried to shove them away. "Fools!" she cried. "I bring you a weapon far greater than your firesticks!" Laughing, one of the men pushed her at another one. She struck out, screaming. They began to toy with her. Their laughter had acquired a dangerous edge. One of them tried to kiss her. She shrieked again.

  Kirk heard her. He reached for his phaser. "Nona! She's taken my phaser! She's in trouble! Come on . . ."

  There was another scream. Her thin garment was ripped now. Passed roughly from jeering man to jeering man, she beat at their faces with the phaser, screaming wildly.

  Kirk, McCoy and the two Hillmen raced down a hill toward her. The patrol leader, looking up, saw them. "Men," he yelled, "it's a trap! The woman tricked us!" His sharp knife gleamed. He struck.

  "Nona!" Tyree shouted.

  The leader lifted his flintlock, aimed and fired. McCoy fell.

  Kirk, Tyree and Yutan charged the patrol. The fight was hand to hand, bloody and brief. The two surviving villagers fled. McCoy, holding his wounded arm, stumbled down to the scene of the melee. Tyree was stooped over the dead body of his wife. In the dirt, trampled but undamaged, lay the phaser. Kirk picked it up.

  "She gave it to them," McCoy said. "But they didn't recognize it."

  Kirk looked at the wounded arm. "You, too," he said.

  "Yes, me too! You and your blasted Paradise planet!"

  Tyree had straightened. He reached for an abandoned flintlock. Then he removed the powder and bullet pouch from a patrolman's dead bod
y. He turned to Kirk, his grim face working with grief and fury. He extended the gun toward Kirk.

  "I want more of these! Many more!"

  "You'll have them," Kirk said.

  Tyree spoke to Yutan. "Two of those who killed my wife escaped. We shall track them down and kill them. Come! I must speak to our people."

  They set off at a run. There was a moment's silence before McCoy said, "Well, you've got what you wanted."

  "Not what I wanted, Bones. What had to be."

  Amazingly, his communicator, so long silent, beeped. He flipped it open. "Kirk here."

  "Spock, Captain. I trust all has gone well."

  "Spock!" McCoy shouted. "Are you alive?"

  "A ridiculous question, Doctor. Clearly you are hearing my voice."

  McCoy shook his head. "I don't know why I was worried. You can't kill a computer."

  Kirk motioned him to silence. "Spock, ask Scotty how long it will take to reproduce a hundred flintlocks."

  Scott's voice spoke. "I didna get that precisely, sir. A hundred what?"

  "A hundred . . . serpents, Scotty. Serpents for the Garden of Eden." He paused. "We're very tired, Mr. Spock. Beam us up back home."

  THE OMEGA GLORY

  (Gene Roddenberry)

  * * *

  The disease which had killed every crew member aboard the USS Exeter was a mystery. Everything about the other starship was mysterious. Why was it still patrolling an orbit around the planet Omega IV when it was scheduled to end its mission six months ago? The patrol was the current assignment of the USS Enterprise. That was the enigma which had caused Kirk to decide to transport his landing party aboard the Exeter.

  And what he had been expecting was an undamaged starship full of dead men. If that had been an accurate description of the situation he'd walked into, Kirk would have been grateful. Dead men were a tragic but natural phenomenon. But there was nothing natural about the Exeter. That was the horror. The ship wasn't full of dead men. It was full of empty uniforms.

  Phaser still in hand, he watched McCoy stooping over a collapsed uniform in the Exeter's engineering section. A scattering of white crystals extended from its neck and sleeves. McCoy, waving him and Spock away, bent closer over the uniform, taking care not to touch it.

  Lieutenant Raintree rushed up to him, his face sick. "Just the uniforms . . . all over the ship, Captain! And that . . . white stuff spilling out of them!"

  Spock said, "As if they'd been in them when . . ." His words trailed off into silence.

  "Exactly," Kirk said. "When what?" He spoke to McCoy. "Bones, let's get to the bridge. Mr. Spock can replay the Captain's last log entry. They may have had time to record whatever was happening to them."

  A blue crew uniform was crumpled on the deck beside the computer station. Spock stepped over it to turn on the mechanism. McCoy, his tricorder unslung, was examining the tiny white granules at the end of its sleeves. He lifted his head. "Jim, analysis says these crystals are thirty-five percent potassium, carbon eighteen percent, phosphorus 1.0 and calcium 1.5."

  "I have the surgeon's report, Captain," Spock said. "It seems to be the log's last—"

  McCoy interrupted. "Jim! The crew hasn't left! They're still here!" At the look on Kirk's face, he went on. "This white powder . . . it's what's left of the human body when you remove the water from it. We're all ninety-eight percent water. Take it away, and we're just three or four pounds of chemicals. Something crystallized the chemicals in these people. It reduced them to this."

  "So that's it," Kirk said slowly. "At least we can hope it was painless."

  The computer beeped. Activating a switch, Spock pointed to the main viewing screen. "The name of the Exeter's surgeon, sir, was Carter," he said.

  The face of a man appeared on the screen—the face of a man in torture. So much for the hope that the deaths had been painless, Kirk thought. That agonized face had possessed a body. He visualized the body dragging itself to the recorder to speak its last words into the Captain's log.

  They began in midsentence. ". . . if you've come aboard this ship, you are dead men." The voice broke in a spasm of pain. "Don't return to your own ship. A mutated di-bacto-viro complex of some sort . . . deadly . . . don't know what it is. If you're aboard you're infected—you're already dying."

  Young Lieutenant Raintree whispered, "My God—let me out of here!"

  "Pull yourself together, Lieutenant!" Kirk snapped. "This is heroism you're listening to!"

  "Repeat, repeat," said the face on the screen. "Our landing party brought . . . contamination up from the planet." The face convulsed with agony. "You have one chance . . . some kind of immunity for those living on the planet's surface. Your sole chance, get down there. Get down there fast. The Captain is . . ."

  A scream broke from the viewer. It went dark.

  After a moment Kirk walked over to the vacant command chair. Carter had sat in it to use the Captain's log recorder. Now all it held was the bodiless clothing that had been his medical officer's uniform. As to the heap of white dust dropped from the clothing—that was Carter.

  "Bones," he said quietly, "warn the Enterprise. Mr. Spock, the Exeter's Transporter Room. Prepare to beam us all down to the planet."

  They were in an alley of what might have been an old-time American frontier settlement, set on the edge of a desertlike terrain. But the buildings that formed the alley's walls were Asian, their roofs concave, flaring at the eaves. They moved cautiously to the alley's entrance. In the street people had gathered about some object of intense interest. They looked Asian, too. Dark-haired, yellow-skinned, their eyes were slanted by the epicanthic fold characteristic of Oriental races. One of the villagers saw them as they emerged from the alley. He gave a terrified shout. The others turned—and the crowd broke up into a frightened flight.

  The object of their interest was an execution. A heads-man's block had been set up in the middle of the street. Kneeling at it, his hands thonged behind his back, was a savage-looking white man, his strongly-muscled body clad in skins. Near him stood a young white woman, also wearing savage skins. Horrified, Kirk realized she was awaiting her turn at the block. Instinctively, he and his men rushed forward. The villagers who were holding the white male savage were surprised into loosening him. He rolled aside as the ax flashed down. He tried to sink his teeth into the nearest villager. The ax was lifting again when it was halted by a sharp command.

  "Put your ax away, Liyang!"

  The voice was familiar. Kirk whirled.

  Incredibly, Captain Ronald Tracy of the USS Exeter was striding toward him in the well-known uniform of a starship Captain. His pistol-phaser hung at his belt. Nor had he lost the commanding charisma of the personality Kirk remembered. He was followed by a military guard of young village men armed with javelins and swords.

  "Ron!" Kirk shouted.

  "Jim Kirk, by all that's holy!" Tracy said.

  There was an odd little pause in which Kirk was conscious that Tracy was taking stock of the unexpected situation. Then he seemed to have straightened out the inventory. "I knew someone would come looking for us," Tracy said. "I'm sorry it had to be you, Jim." He shook hands grimly. "But I'm glad your arrival stopped this. I didn't know they had an execution going on."

  Kirk said, "Captain Tracy. My First Officer, Mr. Spock; ship's surgeon Leonard McCoy; Lieutenant Phil Raintree."

  McCoy said, "Captain Tracy, the last log records aboard your vessel warned of a mutated disease."

  "You're all safe," Tracy said. "Some form of immunity exists on the surface here." He turned to a robust guard behind him. "No more of this, Wu. Lock up the savage."

  Wu pointed to Kirk's phaser. "They carry fireboxes—"

  "Lock up the savage!" Tracy said.

  It took more than Tracy's military guard group to subdue the still-bound white man. Before he was led away, several villagers had to be told to assist them. It was a rough assistance. Tracy noted Spock's cocked eyebrow. "The white beasts are called Yangs," he said casuall
y. "Impossible to even communicate with them. Hordes of them out there; they'll attack anything that moves."

  "Interesting," Spock said. "The villagers know what phasers are."

  Tracy glanced at him sharply. "You're a Vulcan?"

  Spock nodded. "By one-half, Captain."

  Was Tracy disturbed by the information? Kirk broke the moment of curious tension. "How were you left alone down here? What happened?"

  Tracy's answer came with obvious effort. "Our medi-scanners showed the planet as perfectly safe. The villagers, the Kohms here, were friendly. That is, they were after they got over the shock of our white skins. We resemble the Yangs—the savages. When my landing party transported back to the ship, I stayed behind to arrange our planet survey with the village elders." He paused, struggling back to control. "The next thing I knew, the ship was calling me. Our landing party had carried an unknown disease back."

  He stopped to avoid an open break in his voice.

  "My crew, Jim. My whole crew . . . people I knew, people who . . ."

  He straightened his shoulders but couldn't go on. Kirk, sharing his torture, said, "We saw it, Ron."

  "I . . . am as infected as they were . . . as you are. I stayed alive only because I stayed down here. There's some natural immunization that protects anyone here on the planet's surface. I don't know what it is yet."

  McCoy spoke to Kirk. "Lucky we found that log report. If we had returned to the Enterprise . . ."

  Tracy completed the sentence. ". . . you'd be dying by now along with the whole Enterprise crew. You'll stay alive only so long as you stay here. None of us can ever leave this planet."

  They had half-suspected it—but hearing it finally put into words chilled them. Being marooned on Omega IV for the rest of their lives could well be a fate as empty as death. Kirk, aware of his men's somber faces, said, "Then we'll have to make the best we can of this planet. Can this place provide us with any quarters?"

  "They're being prepared," Tracy said. "Wu will show Doctor McCoy and the Lieutenant to theirs. Doctor, yours can accommodate any equipment you want beamed down to you. I apologize, Jim. Your quarters and Mr. Spock's aren't ready. So if you two will follow me . . ."