Kirk shook his head.
“She’s on special assignment from Cultural Survey to evaluate the effectiveness of the cephalic implants as a survey tool,” McCoy began. “One of her jobs has been selecting likely native matches for survey team linkages. It looks as if she didn’t do such a good job on her own. Come to think of it, she was giving Spock the eye when they were getting ready to beam down the day before yesterday.”
“Oh, no,” groaned Kirk. “Not another one! Why does nearly every woman assigned to the Enterprise set her cap for that walking computer? Doesn’t she understand Vulcans?”
“I imagine so. She must be aware that Vulcans only have the mating urge—the pon farr—every seven years.” McCoy shrugged. “But be that as it may, we’re going to have to tune Sara’s implant to a new dop. She doesn’t seem to be able to handle the one she’s linked to now. With all the profiles she had to choose from, I’m surprised she didn’t pick one whose personality was more like her own.”
“How many Kyrosian profiles do we have?” Kirk asked.
“Over two hundred. Sara did the collecting herself. We picked up enough information by tight-beam scan to be able to outfit her in native dress. She was transported down just outside the city gates at night with a personality scanner hidden in a pouch. When the gates opened in the morning, she pretended to be a mute. Through sign language, she found an inn at the center of town, rented the rooms we’re using as a transporter terminal, locked the door, set up the scanner, and began recording natives.”
McCoy paused a moment and sipped from his glass. “She beamed up with quite a collection—town people, hill people, even a couple of Beshwa.”
“Beshwa?”
“Kyrosian gypsies. Anyway,” McCoy continued, “the native neural patterns she recorded on magcards give detailed personality profiles as distinctive as fingerprints.
“The next step was to select the profile that would be most useful to a particular survey party member in his particular mission, tune a telescan implant to it, and insert it surgically behind his right ear. Once it was turned on, a telepathic link was established with the selected native that gives the investigator an immediate command of idiomatic Kyrosian and the ability to react behaviorally in any situation exactly as his dop would.”
Kirk gave a wry grin. “And that, as George and Peters found out, can create problems.”
“But don’t worry, Jim, we’ll get the bugs worked out. Even with the minor problems we’ve encountered so far, the implant is the best survey device the bureau has come up with yet. We picked up more information, so Dobshansky tells me, on how Kyrosian society works in the last few days, than we could have in a month using the old system. Of course we’re lucky that the natives are humanoid enough that, except for colored contact lenses that duplicate their unusual eye pigmentation, little is needed in the way of disguise. The links make it possible for our people to go almost anyplace with complete acceptance. Within limits,” McCoy added, waving his glass for emphasis. “If you’re linked to a street beggar, you’re going to behave and talk like one. And that means you won’t be able to pass yourself off as a Kyrosian aristocrat. But as I said, we’ve been rather successful in matching profile to mission, though I should have checked on Ensign George more closely. I’ll get her on the operating table tonight and tune her implant to one which isn’t so… so friendly. I’ll see if I can dig up a man-hater so she’ll stop pestering Spock.”
“I’ve a better idea,” Kirk said. “Why don’t we pull her off the survey detail and put her to work with you on the whole problem? And by the way: I’d like to see the circuit diagrams for the implant. I think I’d better find out what makes that thing tick.”
“I’ve programmed them into the computer already, so I can show you right now,” McCoy said, sliding from his perch on the desk. He turned around and pulled a vision screen erect from the surface of the desk and pressed the intraship communicator button.
“Computer…”
“Recording,” replied the flat, feminine voice of the starship’s main computer.
“Display the circuitry of the telescan implant on the captain’s visual monitor.”
“Working,” the computer replied, and a moment later a glowing hologram appeared on the vision screen. The diagram was color-coded. Kirk saw what appeared to be thousands of dots strung on layered spiders’ webs. The three-level display turned as McCoy made an adjustment.
“Here it is,” the doctor said. “The first section, once tuned to a profile of a native, establishes the telepathic link. This second section acts as a feedback shunt to keep the dop from being aware that his brain has been tapped.” McCoy traced a path with his finger. “Next is an input filter stage which passes behavioral information but cuts out thoughts of the moment. Having the constant mental chatter that goes on inside everyone’s head coming across would be too distracting.”
“I know,” said Kirk, nodding sober agreement “That’s one of the reasons Spock, like others with telepathic ability, rarely uses his talent. He finds mind-melding an extremely distasteful process.”
“Hah!” McCoy snorted. “The real reason is that he doesn’t want his pristine computer banks contaminated with a lot of emotionally tainted and questionable data.”
“I think you may be right.” Kirk laughed. “But, Bones, you know how infernally curious Spock is. I couldn’t keep him from this survey with tractor beams!”
McCoy snorted again and turned back to the diagram. “As I was saying, the implant is a honey of a job of psychoelectronic engineering, especially when you consider that all of its circuitry is encapsulated in a half-centimeter sphere.”
“This is where the problems must be,” McCoy continued, stabbing a forefinger at the input filter stage. “It looks as if this section isn’t working as well as the lab tests predicted. Too much of their dops’ personalities are leaking into Sara’s and Ensign Peters’ brains.
“I think I have an idea.” McCoy peered at the diagram with pursed lips. “If you do take Ensign George off the detail, she can help me get to work on it at once. Microminiaturized circuitry is tricky to work on, but with a little technical assistance from the engineering department, we shouldn’t really have too much trouble ironing out the problem.”
“Good,” Kirk said approvingly. He held out his empty glass for another refill, then thought better of it. “Guess I’d better hold off,” he murmured regretfully. “They’ll be beaming up the rest of the survey team soon and I’ll have to be at the debriefing. I’m curious as to what Spock has been up to for the last couple of days.”
“Me, too,” McCoy agreed and looked into his glass. “Maybe I’d better cut off also, if I’m going to be doing surgery tonight.”
Kirk pushed the visual monitor back into his desk as McCoy rinsed the glasses in the cubicle provided in the bathroom. He replaced them in the wainscot cabinet and turned to Kirk.
“Come to think of it, if you’ve got no objection, I’d like to remove Spock’s implant as soon as he gets back. He’s not essential down there, and I didn’t like the idea of implanting him in the first place. Kyrosian emotional makeup is pretty much like ours, and even if Spock was linked to a cold fish, he has enough trouble keeping his human side under control without having things complicated by leakage from his dop.”
“Sounds good,” Kirk said. “I’d want him to get to work on the source of that radiation front, anyway. The only reason I let him go down was that he insisted so strongly. Sometimes I think his only purpose in life is to keep feeding a new supply of esoteric data into that logical brain. But he did behave oddly…”
“I’ve always thought Spock was odd,” McCoy muttered.
‘… after he was transported up last night,” Kirk went on, not hearing McCoy’s remark. “He had nothing to say at the debriefing and took off by himself when it was over. I’ve had reports that he spent most of the night wandering around the ship by himself.”
Kirk faced the doctor. “Bones, could anything
have gone wrong during his operation?”
McCoy considered for a moment. “I doubt it,” he replied. “It was a routine insertion; he was the last one done, anyway. When he was linked, I ran a language test. Without having to think about it, he replied in flawless, idiomatic Kyrosian. There was the expected period of disorientation because of such intimate contact with an alien personality, but Spock seemed in control of the situation. If I’d thought the linkage would have caused him harm, I’d never have let him beam down.
“But,” McCoy went on, “I must admit to feeling a little uneasy about the whole thing, in spite of all the information we’ve acquired. The bright boys at Starfleet are always cooking up gadgets that violate a person’s physical integrity. Having my atoms scrambled every tune I go through that damn transporter is bad enough, but hooking one man’s nervous system to another’s with electronic widgets…” He grimaced his distaste. “Be only a matter of time before we’re all literally worshipping a transistor, or some bloody thing…”
Kirk slapped his medical officer on the shoulder. “Bones, transistors were old stuff two hundred years ago.”
“You know what I mean,” McCoy grumbled.
“Can’t fight progress. If man hadn’t kept trying to find ways to do things better, we’d never have climbed down from the trees. We’d still be in them, scratching for fleas and swinging from limb to limb.”
“So, now we’re swinging from star to star,” McCoy said sardonically. “And still scratching. We’re as much the slaves of our glands as our ancestors were, and most of our behavior makes as much sense. I hope poor Spock hasn’t caught the itch. In spite of his dop’s low EQ, I’m concerned about permanent effects on that finely tuned Vulcan brain of his.”
“Stop fretting,” Kirk said. “Spock’s used to that sort of thing. It’s been a struggle at times, but he’s always managed to keep what he considers his illogical side under tight control. Being exposed to a little added irrationality may make him uncomfortable, but Spock’s too smart to let it run riot.”
The captain grinned slyly at his medical officer.
“You are fond of our Vulcan iceberg, aren’t you, Bones?”
McCoy stared at Kirk, harrumphed crustily, and got to his feet.
“I’d better get down to surgery and set up for the removal of Ensign George’s implant,” he said, unwilling to continue a conversation which might force him to reveal his true feelings for the half-alien first officer. “I’ll try to be at the debriefing.”
“Hey, Bones,” Kirk called.
“Yes?”
“You forgot your bottle.”
“Tell you what,” McCoy replied. “Keep it. Tomorrow night, put Spock on second watch and we’ll lock the door, cut off the communicator, and kill the rest of. the bottle. Call it doctor’s orders.”
Kirk grinned and McCoy stepped toward the cabin’s door. He turned suddenly, raising an admonitory finger. “But don’t go nipping. That jug punched a nice hole in my budget.” McCoy lowered his finger, grinned, and stepped into the corridor.
As the door hissed shut, Kirk lay back down and picked up his Xenophon. With luck, he could get in a. couple of chapters before the survey party came aboard. He had just found his place when the communicator bleeped again.
Kirk dropped the book onto the bunk and went to his desk.
“Kirk here. What is it?” he said, trying to keep annoyance out of his voice.
“Lieutenant Commander Helman, sir,” came a worried voice. “We are in condition yellow…”
“Specify!” Kirk snapped.
“The radiation front is building. The science computer has projected a geometrical progression on the intensity scale. There’s a point 72 probability that the front will pass intensity twenty in the next few days.”
Kirk swore silently to himself. That would mean putting up the deflector screens, which would make it impossible to operate the transporters. “Do you have a duration estimate?”
“It’s still too early for an accurate prediction, sir,” Helman went on. “The computer says that it could die down in a week or two, or go on more than a month. Its configuration is unlike anything in the data banks.”
Kirk sighed. “Very good, Commander, thank you. I’ll be right up.”
He glanced at his book. Scooping both it and his dirty uniform up, he put the book away and tossed the uniform into the autowash chute.
He strode to the door of his quarters wondering when he would finish Xenophon. Then he exited and walked quickly down the corridor to the turbo-lift.
CHAPTER TWO
As the turbo-lift doors hissed open, Kirk stepped onto the bridge. Sulu, vacating the command chair, reseated himself at his helmsman’s position.
“Report,” Kirk ordered as he sat.
Helman, a tall, thin officer with close-cropped blond hair and a protuberant Adam’s apple, straightened from the science console and turned toward the starship’s captain.
“The radiation front has jumped to intensity 2.4 in the last hour, sir. At first the increase looked like a random fluctuation; but when the computer had enough data to run a curve, it reported a possible condition red, which is when I recommended a yellow alert to Mr. Sulu.” Helman gestured at the science console upon which glowed several red lights. “The front has all the characteristics of a nova, but the local sun is still perfectly normal.”
Captain Kirk frowned. “You can’t have a radiation front without a source. Have you backtracked along its course?”
“Aye, sir,” Helman replied. “The only star the coordinates fit is Epsilon lonis, the black-hole binary we checked out last month. But how a nova shell could increase in intensity so rapidly… It’s got me stumped, Captain, and there isn’t enough applicable data in the computer to come up with a working hypothesis.”
“You will continue to try to pin down that source, but right now I’m more concerned about the possible danger to this ship. We’ve got to get a more precise reading on the projected radiation increase.
“Lieutenant Leslie,” Kirk said, swinging his chair around to face the stocky engineer.
“Sir?”
“You and Mr. Sulu will tie in your banks with the science console. I want exact data on the nature of that front.”
A chorus of “aye, ayes” sounded, and the officers turned to their consoles to feed in requests, collate incoming data, and to coordinate the operations of their stations.
“Ready, sir,” Helman said finally.
“Project,” Kirk ordered.
The image of Kyros disappeared from the great screen and was replaced by a grid on which each radiational component of the strange shell of energy was plotted on the ordinate against the abscissa of time.
Helman touched a button and, like glowing worms, the component projection lines began to creep across the screen, crawling forward through tune and upward in intensity.
“What a hash,” Sulu muttered. “It’s almost as if we’re running into a solar prominence.”
Kirk watched intently as the ship’s computers continued the projection.
“That readout is getting too complicated,” he said. “Blank everything but the hard radiation and high-energy particles, and give me a horizontal on hull shielding safety limits.”
The second science officer made a few adjustments and the confusion of the screen began to clear as, one by one, the lines representing the lower frequencies and slower moving particles began to disappear leaving only those charting lethal radiation, high energy protons, alpha particles, and heavy nuclei.
The narrow red line marking the maximum limits of the shields’ tolerance flashed on the screen. There was a dead silence on the bridge as the projection track of each component continued an unbroken climb toward the red line.
Suddenly, each of the lines bent sharply and shot upward vertically, slashing the red line in dozens of places and continuing almost to the very top of the grid before peaking and beginning an equally sharp decline.
The ship com
puter chimed softly and the emotionless voice began to speak to the silent crew. “Deflector shield activation necessary in eight days, thirteen hours, and twenty-four minutes or radiation penetration will exceed 100 rad.”
“And that’s enough to put half the crew down with radiation sickness,” Kirk muttered.
“At the rate those curves peak,” Helman said, nodding agreement with Kirk. “A few more hours’ exposure would kill us all, right?”
“Is a response required?” the computer asked.
“We aren’t going to be here long enough to make the answer more than academic,” Kirk said. “But as long as you have one, let’s hear it.”
“Data indicates that, unless corrective measures are taken, all crew members, with one exception, will receive a lethal dosage by twenty-three hundred hours, stardate 6728.5.”
“Who might be the exception?” Kirk asked. “As if I couldn’t guess.”
“Commander Spock,” said the computer. “Vulcans are twice as resistant to radiation as humans. If an exact prediction of Commander Spock’s resistance is desired, a tissue sample must be secured for molecular analyzation.”
“That figures,” said a familiar voice sardonically. “While the rest of us are heaving and watching our hair fall out, Spock and the computer will be playing three-dimensional chess.”
Kirk swung his chair about.
“Bones,” he asked, “what are you doing up here? I thought you had our sexpot in surgery.”
Dr. McCoy laughed. “I had her on the table, just ready to give her a local when the yellow alert came through. I thought I’d better report to the bridge to see if I was needed, so I told her to report back in the morning. I imagine she’s hanging around the transporter room on the odd chance she might get lucky when Spock is beamed up.”
He paused and gestured at the visual monitor dominating the front of the bridge.
“Looks like some nasty stuff is on the way in.”
“‘Nasty’ is an understatement,” the captain said. He gazed at the screen thoughtfully for a moment. “In order to weather what will be coming in a few days from now, we’d have to put the shields up, and at the rate that storm is peaking, we’d have to put them on maximum before too long. Twenty hours of that, and the power reserves would be exhausted. If we didn’t pull out before then, we’d fry. Buying a few more hours would be pointless anyway. The transporters won’t operate while the shields are up, and we’ve already gathered all the data on Kyros that can be obtained from orbit. There’s nothing urgent about the survey, it’s mainly a field test for the implants.”
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