Beyond missing Edith, McCoy also felt proud of her, and disappointed for her. From the moment he’d met her, when she’d taken him in, hidden him away, and nursed him back to health, she’d demonstrated her strong humanitarian nature. To see now that Edith’s influence had reached all the way to the halls of the federal government served only to increase his admiration for her. At the same time, McCoy saw that she now labored partially in vain. Though her tireless efforts to improve the lives of the downtrodden would continue to reap benefits for so many people, he knew that her attempts to steer the United States and the world away from war would not succeed. Like so many historic dates—the signing of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the first moon landing on 20 July 1969, first contact with Vulcans on 5 April 2063—the day of the United States entry into World War II had been taught in school, and McCoy remembered it: 8 December 1941, a day after Japan had launched a surprise attack on the country. He applauded her efforts, but her vision of peace would not take hold on Earth for another two hundred years.
With a sigh, McCoy opened his newspaper again. Behind him, Danny had stopped playing his trumpet and now chatted with Jordy King, a teenager who’d just started working with his dad, Steve, on the carding machines down at the mill. McCoy read through a couple of articles, but couldn’t concentrate. His thoughts kept returning to Edith.
Thirty-One
2276
Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott alternately peered at the monitor and through the viewing port in the front bulkhead of the shuttlecraft. Below, dimly illuminated by starlight, a vast metallic expanse extended in all directions, punctuated here and there by structures and machinery neither he nor any of his engineering team had yet been able to identify. Periodically swinging back and forth in his chair, Scotty moved his feet around the helmet of his environmental suit, which sat on the deck below him. He felt constrained by the suit itself, and a bit warm, but he still looked forward to putting down beside some of the alien equipment, donning his helmet, and heading outside to examine the unfamiliar artifacts.
Earlier today, more than two and a half years into their voyage to the Aquarius Formation, the Enterprise crew had encountered what appeared to be an unusual solar system: seven planets orbiting a black hole. As they’d entered the system and approached the outermost world, though, they’d discovered not a planet, but an artificially constructed metallic sphere, four and a half times the size of Earth. Though various structures had been erected on its mostly empty surface, none had been recognizable. The crew had seen nothing resembling propulsion systems nor any obvious means of access or egress. Sensors had failed to penetrate the outside of the sphere, making it impossible to determine the nature of the interior. All attempts at communication had gone unanswered.
The captain had ordered the ship to the sixth world, which had revealed itself to be a synthetic sphere similar to the seventh, though not identical to it. Only sixty percent as large, its surface held some of the same structures, but different ones as well. The fifth sphere measured sixty percent as large as the sixth, and again duplicated some machinery while also introducing new equipment. The fourth sphere, approximately thirteen thousand kilometers in diameter and generating a pull of zero-point-nine-seven gee, continued the pattern.
Given the nearness of the dimensions and gravity of the fourth artificial globe to that of Earth, Captain Kirk had selected it for closer study. In order to observe its surface at close range and to evaluate sites for further investigation, the captain had opted to send down a shuttlecraft. With none of the objects supporting an external atmosphere, the captain, Dr. McCoy, and Scotty had all donned environmental suits and boarded the shuttlecraft Newton.
“See anything interesting down there, Scotty?” the captain asked. He sat beside the engineer at the front console, piloting the shuttle.
“Aye, that I do,” Scotty said. The structures rising above the great metal plain came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. None gave any indication of being under power, but most suggested a complexity and configuration beyond that of manual equipment. By all appearances, the sphere—all the spheres they’d observed—seemed abandoned.
“Have you seen anything that might be a way in?” Kirk asked.
“Nothing obvious,” Scotty said, “but many of the structures are large enough that they could easily conceal a hatch, either for beings or for small spacecraft.”
“I’m still reading no indications of life,” Dr. McCoy said from his seat behind the captain. Scotty glanced over and saw the doctor examining a readout on a screen in the port bulkhead.
“Well, Mister Scott, should we find a place to set down?” the captain asked.
“Aye,” Scotty said, his attention captured at the moment by a pair of towers up ahead. According to sensors, the two edifices, otherwise alone on this stretch of the sphere, rose from pentagonal bases, one to a height of seven-hundred fifty meters, the other to a thousand. “Do you see the towers up ahead, Captain?”
“Yes,” Kirk said.
“Those are the tallest structures we’ve seen in the system so far,” Scotty said. “If the beings who built the spheres left behind a record of their history, or if they left any information at all, perhaps that’s where they might have put it.”
“A good choice, Mister Scott,” the captain said, then pressed a toggle on the console between them. “Kirk to Enterpr—”
The shuttle jolted hard, as though struck by something. Scotty flew from his chair into the starboard bulkhead, his feet kicking the helmet of his environmental suit and sending it flying. The cabin shook dramatically as he struggled back into his seat. Next to him, the captain climbed back into his own chair and worked his controls.
“We’re yawing to starboard,” Kirk called over the suddenly loud, high-pitched whine of the straining engines. “Trying to reestablish attitude control.”
Gripping the edge of the console in order to steady his gaze, Scotty called up a sensor display. He expected to read the residual energy of weapons fire or the graviton signature of a tractor beam, but he saw neither. As the captain’s hands moved across his own station, Scotty operated the sensors, attempting to determine what had disrupted their flight. He saw no chemical trails of ballistic missiles, no motion of other craft, no ionization—
Then he saw it.
“Captain,” he yelled, “we’re in some type of warp field. It’s causing havoc with the engines.”
“I’m bringing the shuttle down,” Kirk cried. At once, the Newton canted downward, the line of its hull still askew with respect to its forward motion. “Kirk to Enterprise,” he called. When he received no response, he tried again. “Kirk to—”
The noise in the cabin abruptly quieted, and the shuttle accelerated downward.
“Enterprise,” the captain finished, the word loud in the suddenly silent compartment. Kirk and Scotty both labored at their stations, their hands speeding from control to control.
“The engines have shut down,” Scotty reported. He looked up and saw nothing but the wide plane of the sphere in the forward viewport as the shuttle plummeted. He checked the readouts, then said, “From the looks of this, I doubt the crew will be able to beam us through the warp field or secure the shuttle with a tractor beam.”
The captain continued to punch at his controls. “We’ve still got thrusters,” he said. “And antigravs.” He peered over at Scotty and then back over his shoulder into the cabin. “Scotty, Bones, into your helmets,” he ordered. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep the hull intact.”
Scotty reached for his helmet, then remembered that he’d accidentally kicked it across the compartment. He started up out of his chair to retrieve it, but then Dr. McCoy handed it to him. Scotty sat back down and quickly pulled it on over his head, then secured it to the rigid neck of his environmental suit. He raised his left wrist into view before the visor and pressed the activation control mounted there. Immediately, he felt the
coolness of air moving across his face as the suit’s cycling system engaged.
“Hold on,” the captain said, his voice emerging tinnily from a speaker in Scotty’s helmet. “Impact in thirty seconds. You two, get to the aft section.”
Scotty stood from his chair and stumbled toward the rear of the shuttle along the slanting deck. He saw the captain remain at the forward console and wanted to protest, but knew that to give them the best chance of survival, somebody would have to stay and operate the thrusters and antigravs. He followed McCoy into the aft compartment, watched as the doctor dropped into crash position, then did so himself, leaning against the rear bulkhead and putting his helmeted head between his knees.
Fifteen seconds later, the shuttlecraft Newton pounded onto the unforgiving metal surface of the sphere.
McCoy woke with a start, opening his eyes in dim light and unfamiliar surroundings. The bulk of his helmet surrounded his field of vision, and he could feel the constricting fabric of his environmental suit against his body. He saw a curved overhead a couple of meters above him. In order to look around, he moved to push himself up from the surface upon which he lay.
He felt nothing below him.
McCoy jerked his head around to peer below him…except that he could distinguish no “below.” When he’d opened his eyes and seen a surface a distance from him, he’d assumed that direction to be “up,” but his vestibular system could confirm no orientation with respect to gravity, because he sensed no gravity. Over his shoulder, visible just past an opaque section of his helmet, he saw a figure in midair and discerned it as Scotty. Beyond him floated another person, presumably Jim.
McCoy pondered the circumstances. He remembered leaving the Enterprise in a shuttlecraft with the two men for the purpose of surveying and possibly exploring the sphere. They’d approached—
It all came back to him, right up until the Newton had slammed into the surface of the synthetic world. He and Scotty had hunkered in the aft compartment, ordered there by the captain as the shuttle had plunged from the sky. McCoy recalled Jim’s voice, no doubt at the moment before impact, warning of the crash to come. Then he’d awoken here, floating at the midpoint of this long cylindrical space, about four or five meters in diameter.
“Scotty?” he heard Jim say, his voice emerging from the speaker in McCoy’s helmet. “Bones?”
McCoy waited for a moment to see if Scotty would respond. He didn’t. “Jim, it’s McCoy. I’m here.”
“Bones, are you all right?” the captain asked.
McCoy flexed his muscles, moved his arms and legs, trying to evaluate his physical condition. “Achy,” he concluded, “and a little nauseous, but otherwise I seem to be all right. What about you?”
“About the same,” Jim reported. “Can you get to a bulkhead?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” McCoy said. He flapped his arms, attempting to “swim” through the air, without result. “I seem to be floating in the center of this place.”
“So am I,” Jim said. “Listen, I’m going to try to wake Scotty up. You might want to lower the volume on your speaker.”
“Thanks for the warning,” McCoy said, and he raised his hand to work the controls mounted on the wrist of his environmental suit. As Jim repeated Scotty’s name a dozen times—at different volumes, sometimes including his rank, sometimes his position—McCoy examined the sensor readouts attached to his other wrist. They could breathe the atmosphere here, he saw, though it read somewhat thin. According to his chronometer, they’d been unconscious for almost three hours, though, so they had at least another ninety minutes of their own air remaining.
After a half a minute or so of the captain’s exhortations, McCoy heard several low groans. “Scotty?” Jim asked, and McCoy returned the speaker in his helmet to its normal setting.
“Aye,” Scotty said. “I’m here, Captain.”
“Are you all right?” Jim asked.
Scotty grunted once or twice, obviously testing his body as McCoy had a few moments ago. “I think I hurt my shoulder, but otherwise I seem to be all right,” Scotty said. “Captain, where are we?”
“I’m assuming somewhere inside one of the structures we saw on the surface of the sphere, or within the sphere itself,” Jim said. McCoy heard the chirp of a communicator channel being opened. “Kirk to Enterprise,” the captain said. He waited a few seconds, then repeated himself. He got no response. “It’s no use; they’re not receiving us,” he said, then closed the channel. “Scotty, can you reach the bulkhead?”
“I don’t know,” Scotty said. “I don’t think so, but let me try.” McCoy looked over and saw the engineer moving his arms and legs about, but he remained suspended in place. “I can’t move, Captain,” he said.
“Bones,” Jim said, “take a look at the—”
All at once, lights came up in the cylindrical space. McCoy gazed around and saw a row of illuminated tubes recessed into one section of the rounded bulkhead. Now he could also see drawings on the side of the cylinder, simple linear representations of various shapes. A predominant theme seemed to be a pair of different-sized regular pentagons coupled with two narrow, tower-like figures, one about three-quarters the length of the other.
“Scotty,” Jim said, “is that a hatch near you?”
“It looks like it might be,” Scotty said.
McCoy strained his neck to inspect the bulkhead around the engineer and finally saw to what he thought Jim had referred, a circular metal rim in the side of the cylinder. As he looked at it, it receded half a meter, then rolled to the side. An alien stood there—although “stood” might be the wrong word, since it possessed no legs. More or less cylindrical in shape, its body spread slightly at its bottom and top. Colored a deep forest green, it measured perhaps two meters in length. McCoy saw nothing resembling a face or any sensory organs, but the alien did have two rings of tendrils extending from its body, one about a third of the way up, the other about twice as high. The diameter of each of the lower tendrils appeared about the same as that of human fingers, though they reached about twice the length; the upper tendrils appeared thicker and a good deal longer. Both sets of appendages stayed in constant, sinuous motion, like the fronds of sea plants wavering in a current.
“Jim, do you see that?” McCoy asked.
“I do,” the captain said. “Turn on your external speakers.” McCoy did so, in time to hear Jim address the alien. “I am Captain James T. Kirk of the Federation starship Enterprise,” he said. “We are on a mission of exploration and come in peace. We did not know that—”
A piercing screech filled the air, but contained enough variations in pitch, tone, and volume to cause McCoy to characterize it as speech. Peering at the alien, he saw that a maw had opened up in its midsection, between the rings of tendrils, and he postulated that the squealing “voice” emerged from there. The alien paused for a moment, and McCoy watched as another opening appeared in its flesh. It reached in with one of its upper tendrils and pulled out a round silver object, which it then placed in its maw. The second aperture closed, vanishing completely, as though it had never been. “I am Lukoze,” the alien said, its words now obviously modulated by a translation device. “We are the Otevrel. We have been in contact with your ship. We understand what has happened. You will now come with me as I remove you from this world.” At first, McCoy liked the sound of that, assuming that it meant they would be permitted to return to the Enterprise, but as he thought about it, he hoped it hadn’t been intended as a euphemism for something far more inimical.
The Otevrel, Lukoze, reached a lower tendril up to the side of the corridor, and McCoy felt gravity slowly reassert itself. He, Jim, and Scotty immediately drifted downward, until they alit on the curved surface of the cylinder. McCoy found the footing awkward, but manageable.
He looked over at Jim and saw him reach to his suit’s controls. McCoy understood and quickly shut down the output to his external speaker. He saw Scotty do the same. “What do we do?” the engineer asked, e
choing the question in McCoy’s own mind.
“We don’t appear to be in any danger,” the captain said. “It sounded as though they contacted the Enterprise, and Spock explained the situation and asked for our release.” Jim took a breath, then added, “But stay alert.”
As the captain walked toward Scotty, McCoy did too. When the three of them had come together, Jim worked his speaker control again. “We will follow you,” he told Lukoze.
At once, the alien’s maw and the device it carried disappeared into its body, swallowed up like an object dropped into a lake. Lukoze then moved away from the hatch, gliding quickly and smoothly along another curved deck. Jim followed, and then Scotty, with McCoy bringing up the rear. When he passed through the hatchway, McCoy saw that they’d entered another cylinder, almost identical to the first, but longer. He peered down and inspected the deck, expecting that he might spy evidence of a lubricant that the Otevrel had utilized in their locomotion, but he saw no such thing. Maybe they move about like snakes, he thought, picturing the alternate lifting and dropping of scales that the limbless reptiles employed in rectilinear motion, giving the impression of sliding along smoothly in a straight line.
Crucible: McCoy Page 44
