by Gene DeWeese
In the instant full contact was made, a torrent of impressions and emotions descended on him, overwhelming even his capacity to observe and analyze, his ability even to remain aloof and unentangled.
But there was still more.
What Spock had intended to be a mind touch was, suddenly, through the power of what he had contacted, verging on a full-fledged mind fusion, not with a single mind but with hundreds.
And not only with the Aragos, still unconsciously linked as they were through the organic computer, but also with the crew of the Enterprise, each and every one. The thing that Spock had initiated had taken on a life of its own. Like the process that can instantly freeze an entire container of supercooled water when a grain of sand is dropped in to act as a "seed," it reached out and absorbed every mind, every memory within reach.
From the captain and McCoy, it took the shared agony that had wrenched at them as, to safeguard their entire world, they had been forced to stand helplessly by and watch Edith Keeler's brutal death under the wheels of a speeding car back in the Depression-era United States. And from their days on Yonada, it drew more shared suffering, this time mixed with the bittersweet joy that came when McCoy himself, though miraculously reprieved from his own self-diagnosed terminal illness, was forced to part from Natira, the woman for whom he had been prepared to forsake his last days on the Enterprise.
From the captain himself radiated the unsharable elation he had felt when he first realized he was about to achieve his life's ambition of commanding a starship, but mixed with that elation was the later pain not only of Edith Keeler's death but that of his brother on Deneva and the deaths of dozens of friends and crewmen under his command over the years.
And from Spock's own depths emerged the personal hell he had experienced at his first sight of the paralyzed remains of his one-time commander and lifelong friend, Fleet Captain Christopher Pike, a hell that had forced him, logically and inevitably, into mutiny against Starfleet itself.
These and thousands—millions—of other images and memories and emotions flooded over Spock, threatening to absorb him, threatening to take his mind and, in the fusion, dilute it and weaken it like a drop of blood being dissolved in an ocean of water.
Desperately, yet with an icy methodicalness, Spock tried to pull away. The first link in the chain was that between himself and the woman with him in the alien transporter room. If the fusion was to be overcome, that was the link that had to be broken. Even in the midst of this mind-wrenching turmoil, Spock realized that it was the combination of his own Vulcan telepathic ability and the ability of the organic computer to monitor its charges that enabled this all-encompassing fusion to exist. If the link to either was broken, the fusion would dissolve. The other links would decay to their normal strength or go out of existence altogether.
Mustering all the mental strength he could summon, Spock pulled back, struggling against the vortex that held him. In his mind's eye, he once again visualized his hands gripping the woman's head, realizing with fascination that his fingers seemed to have acutally penetrated her skull. Slowly, finger by finger, he loosened his grip, withdrawing the immaterial but painfully real-seeming fingers from her skull, pulling them backward, seeing her flesh and hair reform in their wake. Then the hands were no longer touching even that, but were cupped in the air about her head, but still the vortex swirled about him, sucked at his imagined hands like the vacuum of space sucked air from a punctured ship.
But then, suddenly, the link was broken. His imagined hands did not withdraw but simply vanished, as if all resistance to his efforts to pull back had been instantaneously removed. At the same moment, the raging tide of other minds receded. The hundreds of Aragos and their thousands of years of dreams and nightmares, the crew of the Enterprise and their countless joys and terrors, all were gone in the instant the one single link snapped, allowing Spock's mind to recoil with all the tremendous force he had been using to break that link.
All were gone.
Except—
In the sudden silence and isolation, there was a scream, and as that part of his mind that had been trapped in the maelstrom of the fusion emerged and reunited with that small portion that, through it all, had somehow continued to observe his true physical surroundings, Spock realized that the scream had been going on for several seconds, that it was, in all probability, the reason for the sudden breaking of the link.
It was Crandall.
But even as that information imprinted itself in his once again fully integrated mind, he saw the Aragos moving.
The woman dropped the tricorderlike device and lurched backwards, away from the transporter platform, a look of terror on her face.
The man, Spock now realized, had himself been rigidly immobilized by the effect of the fusion, but now he had a similar look on his face and was bringing his hands back to the transporter controls, preparing to banish Spock and Crandall back to their cavernous prison.
And in that instant of observation, a new plan sprang into being in Spock's mind. It was a plan that had little chance of success. And even if it did succeed, there was even less chance that either he or Dr. Crandall would survive to share in its success.
It was, however, the only plan that, so far as Spock was aware, had any chance at all. He would spare Crandall if he were able, but he saw no way in which it could be done. With further analysis, it might be possible, but there was barely time to act, certainly no time for additional observations and deductions. In any event, neither his own life nor Crandall's could be considered significant when weighed against the possible salvation of the Enterprise and its four-hundredodd officers and crew.
Without hesitation, he reached out with his mind. In the aftermath of the chaotic and momentary fusion, the barriers were still low, the resistance almost nonexistent. It was as if he were actually in physical contact with the man at the transporter controls, so quickly was the mental contact established.
In the same instant, however, Spock felt the other, the organic core of the computer and the hundreds of minds it still touched. It, too, was reaching out, blindly trying to reestablish its links to those hundreds of new minds that had been snatched from it.
But this time Spock was prepared, and he concentrated solely on the man, excluding all else. Unlike the first time, when his own curiosity had helped open the doors that had allowed the fusion, he resisted all other influences, all other probings. Instead of an image of hands grasping the other's face and head, there formed almost automatically in Spock's mind the image of a wall shutting the two of them in, the rest of the universe out.
And his task this time was immeasurably easier than what he had set for himself before. Instead of a series of actions, all of which would have gone directly against both the woman's logic and her instincts, he needed this time only to divert the man's attention, to cause one move out of a half-dozen he would make, all in panic-driven haste, to be in error.
If, that is, he could trust the accuracy of the memories supplied by that portion of his mind that had observed the man's actions as he had transported item after item to and from the third transport unit. And if Spock's own hurried analysis of those actions, of the functions of the switches and dials, were correct.
But there was no time for doubts, no time for further observation or analysis. Already the man's fingers were darting across the controls, and within a second—
Concentrating so intensely he could almost see the controls as if through the eyes of the operator, Spock willed the man's fingers to an even more rapid pace, all the while centering his thoughts on the one, critical switch.
For an instant, just an instant, the man's fingers hesitated, as if he, like the woman before him, had become aware of Spock's intrusion, and the man's eyes blinked. But in the wake of the massive intrusion of only moments before, the man could be sure of nothing, and the new suspicion only increased his haste as he resumed his movements.
And the switch was thrown.
The switch that,
Spock believed, controlled the destination to which he would be transported, was thrown.
Not daring to withdraw for fear that the man would, even under these conditions, notice his mistake, Spock could only wait and try to maintain the wall that separated him from the distressing chaos of another uncontrolled fusion. He could only wait and watch as Crandall's transport unit energized seconds before his own and the man dissolved into swirling smoke.
Finally, after a half-dozen seconds that seemed to Spock's tension-heightened awareness like twice that number of minutes, he felt the tingling chill of the transporter grip him.
Filling his lungs with a last intake of breath, narrowing his eyes to slits to give them as much protection as possible, he blocked his mind against the pain he knew was coming and watched the transporter room fade from around him.
An instant later—though he knew that in reality the transport process took several seconds—his body felt as if it were about to explode as the vacuum took him in its grip.
Beyond the barrier, apparently only inches away, dozens of faces turned toward him, their eyes widening in shock, their mouths opening in soundless shouts. Ignoring the sharp prickling in his ears, the only portion of the pain his mind had yet allowed to reach his consciousness, Spock turned from the barrier.
He had, as he had hoped, materialized outside the barrier, but he was a good fifty feet from the array of Enterprise equipment, fifty feet from the translator he needed to snare from its invisible support and throw through the barrier to the captain. Both humans and Vulcans had survived for brief periods of total exposure to a vacuum, but whether either could function usefully for more than fractions of a second was unknown. Would the blood vessels in his eyes rupture, blinding him? How long could he withstand the sudden unbearable pressure of the air of that last deep breath before he was forced to release it, letting the vacuum in to tear directly at his lungs? How long could he block out the violently cramping pains imposed on every joint by the sudden reduction of external pressure? Even for a Vulcan with a full complement of mental and physical disciplines, to function under such conditions for more than a few seconds would not be easy.
And as he completed the turn away from the barrier, he saw that the task would be even more difficult than he had imagined.
Standing virtually in the midst of the Enterprise's equipment, blood trickling from his ears, a set of survival gear already on his face, was Dr. Crandall.
Chapter Twenty
LITTLE MORE THAN two hours ago, Dr. Jason Crandall's world had once more been turned upside down.
One moment he had been lying in despair in an Enterprise detention cell, reliving again and again his bungled attempt to keep the deflectors from being raised, knowing that it had undoubtedly been his final chance to achieve any kind of victory over Kirk and his hateful disciples. The next moment, he found himself snatched from the cell and dumped in the midst of what appeared at first to be nothing more than a vastly larger cell.
But this one, he realized in an almost instantaneous burst of elation, looked as if it contained not just himself but every single person who had been on board the Enterprise.
No longer was he the only prisoner, the only one helpless to do anything but bemoan his fate! Now, suddenly, his enemies were prisoners as well! They were all prisoners, he no more helpless than any of the others, even that insufferable captain! Even if he was never able to gain the victory he had hoped for by destroying the Enterprise, he could at least no longer be defeated. He could still be killed—probably would be killed—but he could not be defeated, not by death! He could now die gladly, secure in the knowledge that Kirk and his four hundred sycophants were no better off than he himself. Their precious starship, their exclusive spacegoing fraternity, their vaunted loyalty to each other—in the position they were now in, none of it meant a thing!
It no longer mattered, Crandall told himself with something that bordered on glee, that the Enterprise had somehow saved itself from the Hoshan and Zeator lasers for which he had attempted to lower the deflectors. It no longer mattered that he was helpless. The others were equally as helpless as he, and for two hours he had reveled in that knowledge, enjoying the anger and frustration and fear he saw in the faces around him. Even the attack on him, so quickly stopped by Kirk for whatever his perverted reasons, had only added to Crandall's manic enthusiasm, proving as it did that they credited him with at least some of the responsibility for their downfall.
But then, snatched away to that dimly lit transporter room, as he had elatedly watched the total helplessness of even the supposedly superhuman Vulcan, something happened that made all the previous upheavals in his life fade into nothingness by comparison.
In less than a minute, his mind, his entire life, was literally turned inside out.
In one eternity-long minute, everything changed.
He had often undergone changes before, not only in his evaluation of the world around him but in his evaluation of himself, but never had he experienced anything like this. His mind suddenly lost all its barriers, all its privacy, and the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of others came pouring in, filling his mind as if it were their own, overwhelming and absorbing and blending with his own memories and emotions.
And, to his utter amazement, he found himself experiencing not revulsion or hatred or even fear, but understanding.
And then, an instant later, an overwhelming shame.
Through a hundred different pairs of eyes, he saw what others saw.
Through a hundred different minds, he felt what others felt.
He saw Captain Kirk's early efforts to befriend him, to make him feel welcome in spite of his own hostility and overbearing demands.
He saw the remnants of Ensign Davis's admiration for what she thought he had been, her sorrow at what she saw as his irrationality, his betrayals.
He saw the hundreds of honest smiles that officers and crew alike had, despite his lack of response, bestowed on him, smiles he had interpreted as a sarcastic surface, concealing only contempt.
But most of all, from hundreds of different viewpoints, he saw—himself.
And he cringed.
He had been wrong.
Virtually every thought and every motive he had attributed to the officers and crew of the Enterprise had been wrong, painfully and shamefully wrong.
Under impossible circumstances, they had tried their best to understand and help him, and he had, at every turn, done his best to destroy them.
Had his whole life been lived the same way?
Had his brother, all those long years ago, truly meant to help him, not, as he had assumed, trick him into making a fool of himself in front of the class?
Had that negotiator on Tajarhi—Crandall couldn't even remember his name now—been sincere in that out-of-channels, late-night warning? Had the resultant disaster, the loss of life and all the rest, actually been Crandall's fault? Had his distrust of the man, his assumption that the call was part of a desperate, lastminute scheme to win a better settlement, been the true cause?
Had his whole life been, as these weeks on the Enterprise had been, a series of disastrous misunderstandings, all growing out of his own egocentric—and horribly wrong!—imaginings? Had he, in assigning to others the motives he himself was driven by, ruined not only his own life but the lives of countless others?
The only possible answer, the answer he saw in the suffocating torrent of revelations that had descended upon him, was a soul-rending YES!
But now—
Now, in the final moments of his life, he had one last chance to redeem himself.
Even as his transport unit had begun to operate, he realized that he knew what the Vulcan hoped to do. The Vulcan's thoughts, not in words but in images, had leaped into his suddenly receptive mind, and he knew what was going to happen.
As, too late, he tried to suck in a final breath, he felt the transporter take hold, and, suddenly, he was in the vacuum virtually in the middle of the array of Enterpris
e equipment.
For an instant it was as if every nerve in his body had gone dead, and in that instant, before he felt his lungs begin to burst, his joints to cramp, he saw and grasped the survival gear that hung only inches in front of him.
But a translator—a translator was what he needed!
As he lifted the survival gear to his face, as his entire body erupted in an explosion of pain, he saw Spock. The Vulcan had appeared next to the barrier, and already he was moving toward Crandall.
But he wouldn't make it.
Even a Vulcan could not do miracles.
For an instant, the old Jason Crandall surged up inside him, and pleasure flared through him at Spock's helplessness.
But it was gone as quickly as it had come, buried not only by the volcanic pain in every part of his body but, more completely, by a renewed wave of shame.
Abruptly, not giving himself a chance to think, he forced his violently cramping muscles to obey one last command and rip the survival gear from his face and, with a gut-wrenching effort he wouldn't have thought possible only seconds before, throw it through the deadly vacuum to the Vulcan.
As Spock, himself moving in a series almost of twitches, caught it, Crandall, all control gone, felt the air that remained being ripped from his lungs, felt his joints freeze in agony, his body begin to topple.
His last, pain-shrouded sight was Spock slipping on the survival gear and lurching toward him.
Somehow, Spock caught the survival gear and instantly fastened it over his face. Instinct cried out for him to simply suck in the life-giving air, but he knew he did not have the time. The gear was not intended for use in a vacuum, only in hostile atmospheres on planetary surfaces, and, while it would give him air to breathe, it would do nothing for the violent, cramping pains that would, he knew, render him helpless the moment the barriers his mind had set up crumbled. And, of equally immediate concern, the operator of the transporter might discover his mistake any second, and that would be the end of Spock's chance to reach a translator.
