Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Short Stories
Page 10
“Oh, I suppose so. Tell me about the elves. I like stories about elves and princesses.”
“Pandora, twelve turnings is more than two standard weeks! I can’t—”
“Yes, you can, Captain Kirk. Now stop complaining and tell me a story!”
Kirk rose to his full height and looked down on the child. “I’ve never threatened a child in my life, but I have responsibilities to my ship. You will take me out of here at once and we will go back to the Enterprise and this whole silly thing will be over!”
The little girl smiled up at him. “Oh, it’s just like Mommy said some men get! It’s really good, Captain Kirk, really.” She hugged herself with glee. “Go on, tell me how you will clap me in irons or make me walk the plank! I love it when people do that!”
“Pandora!” Kirk roared and shook his fists in frustration. There was a clink and tinkle of breaking ice somewhere off out of sight in the maze of frozen water.
The child clapped her hands in glee. “Oh, marvelous! Oh, great! More! More!”
Then Kirk made the mistake of grabbing her again.
• • •
It was as if he had grabbed a meteor. Color and light streaked around him, sound roared in his ears. His muscles, tensed and hard, seemed about to pull his body apart.
He soared in a volcano of sensation, as though his nervous system had been wired to a carnival. Kirk thought he screamed, but he wasn’t certain.
Then it was over.
He lay limply, sprawled on the chilly, rough surface of the ice cave. The girl bent over him. “Are you all right? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Please, Captain, speak to me!”
Kirk stirred and started to sit up, then shrank back as she reached for him. “Oh, no, don’t worry,” she said. “But when you grabbed me … well, I just can’t help it. Mommy said some people scream or jump, and I, well, I react.”
“You certainly do,” Kirk said. Everything seemed to hurt, and he moved stiffly.
“Let me help,” she said and put her hands on each side of his neck before he could react.
It was as though honey flowed over his body. The pain, the fatigue, even the hunger just dissolved away. He heaved a great sigh of relief and sat up. “I feel marvelous,” he said with a smile. “Never better. How do you do that?”
“I’m not sure,” she said solemnly. “It has something to do with activating and helping your natural immune system. I mean, when you walk you don’t really tell your feet to move individually, do you? You just walk; same with this.”
“McCoy will be fascinated,” Kirk said, standing up. “Now, let’s just get out of here and everything will be—”
“Captain, haven’t you been listening? I don’t want to go. Being with people is … well, all of you move in clouds of bacteria, in auras of electrochemical energy. It is very hard for me to cope with that.”
“But—”
“Captain, it’s like … like someone is playing really loud music right next to you, do you understand? You can’t think, do anything. I just want to be left here. But you can entertain me. One or two people I can take. If I get too many around me, I…” She looked sad, and suddenly she was crying.
Kirk hesitated to put his arms around her, but he did. There was no reaction, and for a long time she just sobbed against him. Alone since she was three, he thought. Four years old on a hostile, alien planet. And she lived, she coped, she survived. She talks like an adult, but she has the body and the development of a child.
“Is that what happened to … to the research staff?” he asked, and she nodded against him, sniffing at her tears.
After a moment she pulled back and turned away. “I couldn’t help it. I was just a baby. I barely remember. They … they were always after me. Taking blood—I hate that—and testing, testing. I got sick and … I had a fever … I kind of remember that. I … I struck back.”
She looked up at Kirk. “I couldn’t help it, Captain. You know when they hit your knee and your foot goes up? It was like that. I sort of sent out … I don’t know, spores, I guess. I called them wizards then. Little wizards no one could see.”
She fell silent, her eyes staring into the past. Kirk stroked her shoulders, his heart going out to the child’s pain. “They … they made me that way, you know. My immune system is very good. My metabolism can provide the energy. I … I’ve read about it since. Their notes, and the books.” Pandora moved off a few feet and spoke thoughtfully.
“A baby cries, throws a tantrum … and that’s what I did, Captain Kirk. Only what I did killed them all. I didn’t know they weren’t like me, that they couldn’t stand against my wizards. That’s why I must never go to where people are. Not ever. I couldn’t trust myself not to … not to…” She started crying again and trotted to him to hold her.
• • •
“Enterprise, this is Kirk.”
“Captain!” Montgomery Scott said in surprise and delight. He thumbed a transmitter control on the captain’s control chair. “Where are you, sir? We’ve been—”
“Later, Scotty. Beam in on these coordinates and bring the two of us aboard.”
“Aye, sir!” Scott gave orders to the transporter room crew and then signaled to Spock. “Mister Spock, forgive me for waking you up, I know you’ve only had an hour’s sleep after three days awake, sir, but—”
“What is it, Mister Scott?” Spock said evenly from his cabin.
“The captain, sir, he’s alive!”
“Good, Mister Scott. I shall come to the bridge at once.”
“Good? That’s all you can say, Mister Spock? Good? He’s been missing for two weeks, Mister Spock!”
“I’m well aware of that, Mister Scott. The very fact that I kept the Enterprise in orbit here while we broadened the search is proof of that.”
“Aye, Mister Spock,” Scott said moodily. He broke the transmission, and to no one at all in the control room he said, “Sometimes I don’t understand Vulcans at all.”
There was more than one silent nod around the room.
• • •
McCoy looked up from his scope and grinned at Pandora. “You’re as healthy as a horse,” he said.
“Healthier.” She smiled back.
McCoy turned to Captain Kirk. “Now you, Jim.”
Kirk smiled. “I’m as healthy as a horse, too.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” the doctor grumbled. Kirk shrugged, winked at Pandora, and subjected himself to McCoy’s inspection.
The medical officer ended by shaking his head. “You’re right. There is nothing wrong with you. Nothing wrong. And that alone is kind of scary. Even some of your old scar tissue has disappeared.”
Kirk put his arm around Pandora. “I made her a deal, Bones. You don’t take blood, you keep the probes and sensors to a minimum—and she decides what the minimum is—”
“But, Jim, she’s—”
“Not anymore she isn’t. She is no longer a specimen. She is a seven-year-old girl. A special seven-year-old, but just a seven-year-old girl.”
“Jim, this is an opportunity—”
“Bones.”
“The notes were lost, the tapes blanked. We won’t know what her parents and the others were doing unless—”
“Bones, calm down. She’ll cooperate. She just doesn’t want to be a subject anymore, you understand?”
McCoy looked at Pandora’s big dark eyes and sighed. “A week at Memory Alpha? At Luna Lab? Johns Hopkins?” Pandora shook her head firmly. “You mean, all I get is … is what I’ve got?”
Kirk nodded. “One blood sample, one brief examination. And then I put my career on the line and lie.”
“Lie?” McCoy looked startled.
“Well, let’s say I just don’t tell of everything that happened on Osler. Pandora was the only survivor of a mysterious accident and illness. I was lost for two weeks and have little memory of it. And Pandora saved my life by keeping me awake.”
McCoy sighed. “And my research?”
&n
bsp; “Based on what you put together from what scraps you could find—which is true—and Pandora can live a normal life.”
“No, Jim,” McCoy said softly, looking at the little girl. “She will never live a normal life. But it will be a very long life. A very long life. Her cells don’t age, they don’t build up the toxins which destroy us all in the end. She, she could live … forever.”
Pandora blinked. Her chin quivered just twice. “You mean, I … I would get to be as old as you are, Doctor?”
Kirk burst out laughing, and after a moment of indignation, so did McCoy. “Yes, my dear, this old. And maybe a wee bit older.”
Spock entered the medical facility and looked at the three laughing, for Pandora had joined in with her tinkling laugh.
“May I ask the reason for this hilarity?” the Vulcan said.
“Top secret, Spock,” McCoy said with a smile.
Spock’s eyebrows went up. “You mean you are classifying Pandora’s fascinating immune system as secret, Doctor?” McCoy stopped laughing. “It was the only logical conclusion, Doctor McCoy. A biological research team of the highest quality on a remote and hostile planet. They are mysteriously killed and a three-year-old child survives alone for four years.”
Spock looked directly at the girl. “Fascinating,” he said. “I realized you must have hidden Captain Kirk away in such a way as to fool our sensors. There was no indication of excavations into bedrock, so therefore you had reduced his—and your—vital signs to a minimum. That only could be done by an astonishing control of your metabolic system. It was therefore only a matter of time before you revived the captain and he had an opportunity to talk to you.”
Kirk and McCoy stared at the Vulcan, but Pandora went to him and took his hand. Spock looked faintly surprised. “Oh, you feel funny,” she said, and giggled. “You feel kind of … bubbly.”
McCoy’s eyebrows went up. “Bubbly?”
“C’mon, Mister Vulcan,” Pandora said. “I bet you could tell me some marvelous stories.”
Spock did not say a word as the little girl led him away.
McCoy looked at Kirk. “‘Bubbly’? ‘Stories’? ‘Mister Vulcan’? Jim, what—”
“Don’t ask, Bones,” Kirk said. “And remember: no blood samples.”
• • •
In his cabin, Spock was speaking softly, and Pandora’s large eyes were upon him intently. “Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who lived in a castle on a planet far, far away.”
“What was her name?” the girl asked.
“Princess Pandora was her name,” Spock replied.
“Oh, good,” Pandora said. “Go on, please.”
“Princess Pandora lived in a castle that had seven towers and…”
• • •
“Mister Sulu, Warp One for Memory Alpha, the information planetoid.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The stars began to sail majestically past, then blur and streak as they went into hyperdrive.
• • •
“And the handsome prince tugged at the huge dilithium crystal until the magic sword came out with a roar…”