“All right, Ensign, I get the message. I suppose you’d like me to tell you how you’re supposed to get hold of a Beshwa caravan?”
“No, sir,” Chekov replied, still maintaining his rigid posture and a straight face. “A potential captain must be resourceful, sir. It is the milk and eggs that has me puzzled. My dop doesn’t seem to have heard of either; there are no chickens or cows on Kyros.”
There were several guffaws around the table, and Chekov relaxed.
“Then belay the groceries,” Kirk said. “How do you propose to get the other item?”
“By buying it, sir,” Chekov said smugly. “The Beshwa are traders, and a proper trader will sell his own mother if the price is right. I’ll stop by Engineering and pick up a sack of Mr. Scott’s counterfeit gold coins.” Chekov began to leave.
“Wait,” Kirk called. “Bones, what shape is Kaseme in?”
“Doped to the gills, Jim. He was given a shot before he recovered from his fainting spell last night, and he’s been out ever since. Why?”
“He’s got to be returned eventually. We’ll let Mr. Chekov lug him down to the transporter.” Kirk turned back to Chekov. “Tell Rogers to shift the coordinates, Ensign, and drop Kaseme in his own bedroom. If he remembers anything, he’ll put it down to an alcoholic nightmare. Will you take care of that, Ensign?”
Chekov nodded and left.
“I’ve got a feeling that someplace along the line my navigator gave one of my legs a slight pull,” Kirk said with a grin. ” Their’s not to reason why,’ indeed. Well, let’s get on to the next item on the agenda. Spock’s location. Thanks to Lieutenant Uhura, we have a pretty good idea where he might be.” Kirk turned to Uhura. “Lieutenant, if you please.”
The black woman snapped an order to the computer, and on the briefing room’s larger vision screen, a strange picture appeared. It was dark and punctuated by blobs and squiggles of light.
“The Captain and I were discussing Mr. Spock’s whereabouts earlier, trying to figure a way to trace his movements. Once he got to the hills, there was no way of telling what direction he and his party might have taken. It occurred to me that our orbital scanners might have picked up some information.”
She gestured to the large picture. “That is a nighttime infra-red scan of the Andros area,” she explained.
“The white blotch at the bottom is Andros. Cities throw off a lot of heat, even at night. The wavy line along here is the coast; there’s a marked temperature differential between land and sea.”
She gave another order to the computer and a bright line crawled from Andros, moved halfway up the screen, and then arced left. “A time sequence of Spock and his riders,” she said. “I thought a group that big, riding together, might generate enough heat to be picked up. I had no luck with the 1.3 and 2.2 micron windows, but hit paydirt on the 3.4. With a little computer enhancement, the slight trace I spotted was brought to what you see. Once the sun came up, the background thermal level rose to such a point that we lost him, but at least we know where he was at 06:00 this morning.”
“Spock may have more brain power than any one of us,” Kirk said as Uhura sat down. “But as a team we can’t be beat.”
He called an order to the computer, and the infra-red blow-up was replaced by a normal light photograph of the same area.
He stepped closer to the large screen. “If the clans respond to Spock’s call for a holy war—and after his Afterbliss demonstration there’s no doubt in my mind that they will—he’s going to need a fairly large assembly ground. Just beyond where the infra-red track ends,” Kirk pointed to the photo’, “there’s a large valley which opens onto the plains. That strikes me as a natural jump-off point for a strike on Andros. If Chekov gets us that Beshwa caravan, we’ll beam down here—” he indicated a spot about thirty kilometers northeast of the city, “—and circle back through the hills so we can appear to have come in from the northeast.”
“That’s rough looking country,” McCoy remarked. Kirk nodded.
The photo showed the sharp, jagged peaks of the mountain lairs of the hill clans; the lower foothills, slashed with gullies cut by the torrential spring rains, where they grazed their flocks from early summer through late fall; and finally the wide coastal plains that undulated down to the sea. The dominant feature of the aerial photo was a deep gorge that angled down from the northeast, cutting a twisting furrow through the foothills until it widened and discharged the river flowing on its bottom onto the plains. There the waters slowed, finally spreading out into a broad delta and joining the sea near Andros. The plain was criss-crossed with lines marking secondary roads connecting the agricultural villages, and broader ones showing main market roads leading to the city.
Kirk traced the road that went almost due north. When it reached the gorge, he paused.
“There’s evidently a bridge across here, though the scale is too small to show it,” he said. “You’ll note that the road picks up on the other side. A few kilometers farther north is a mining settlement which is the source of most of Andros’s iron. It is located by the mines, and up a ravine a few kilometers to the east, there’s a crude smelter.”
There was a groan from Scott. “I remember the place,” he said sourly, “or rather my dop does. He spent a year of compulsory city service there when he was younger.” Scott’s personality seemed to disappear and be replaced by an even more crotchety, cynical one. “What a hole! No girls, one lousy wine shop that watered the juice so much it took four liters to get a buzz on, and typical army chow. Ugh!”
“Army?” Uhura said curiously.
“That’s right, sweetie. It was a paramilitary operation, and still is. The clans always want to steal our spearstone, and every now and then they’ll pull a sneak raid to grab off a few ingots. Nothing large scale,” he added, “but enough of a nuisance so that only young men run the operation. What a pain! A week in the mines, a week at the smelter, a week on guard, and then you start the whole cycle over again. If I’d known, and had a choice, I would have picked the galleys!”
Scott stopped suddenly and looked sheepishly about
“I mean my dop would. It’s sair weird being able to tap into somebody else’s memories at will. While you’re doing it, you get to feeling you were there yourself.”
“That’s why the telescan implants seemed like such a great idea for survey use,” McCoy said. “Though I myself felt from the start—”
“We’re all aware of your feelings, Bones,” Kirk said, “but the postmortem can wait. At the moment, we have only three days and a few odd hours left to save Kyros from a brutal, theocratic dictatorship ruled by a mad genius… and save our own necks and the Enterprise in the process.” He turned back to the photograph displayed on the large vision screen and pointed again, continuing his briefing.
“Just north of the mining settlement is one of the main east-west migration trails of the hill people. Well swing left there and approach from a less suspicious direction. Our best plan would be to join with one of the clans which is riding to join Spock, and journey along with them. A gathering that size would be a natural place for Beshwa to set up shop.”
When the conference broke up a half hour later, the general structure of the plan to sever the link between Spock and Cbag Gara had been worked out. Its keystone would be Ensign Sara George.
Well guarded as he was, Kirk realized, there was no way strangers could get close enough to Spock for the implant nullifier to be effective; but the gross sexuality he had inherited from his doppelganger, Chag Gara, might be his undoing. If…
There were too many ifs in the scheme, as Kirk was the first to point out. But the alternatives were unacceptable.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It had been three hours since the meeting broke up. Captain Kirk was sprawled out on his bunk staring at the ceiling, his mind busily working on the details of the coming expedition, when the intraship communicator sounded. He rolled off the bunk.
“Kirk here.”
�
��Sorry to bother, Jim,” McCoy’s voice said, “but we have a neelot problem. Can you come down to the cargo transporter?”
When he got to the transporter room, crewmen were wheeling a gaudily painted Beshwa wagon off the stage and over to one side. Chekov, a miserable expression on his face, was braced against the control console, his Kyrosian shorts down around his ankles. McCoy finished applying an antiseptic spray to one bare buttock, then sprayed a layer of flesh-colored foam that hardened into a thin, flexible sheet.
“There,” he said. “In a couple of days the dermolastic will dry up and fall off, leaving a nice, pink gluteus.”
“What happened to you?” Kirk demanded with a grin.
Chekov pulled up his shorts and turned so that Kirk could see a jagged tear in their seat
“Damn neelot bit me, sir.”
“His not to reason why,” McCoy put in softly.
“So where is it… them?” the captain asked.
“Still down there, sir. While I was trying to hitch one of them to the wagon, he let loose with a kick that could have taken off my head if I hadn’t jumped back out of range. When I did, another one just reached around and took a sample. Is it true that once they’ve tasted blood—”
“I’ll see that you’re mentioned in the log… sometime,” Kirk interrupted. “However, we’ve now got a Beshwa caravan and nothing to pull it with.”
“That’s what happens when you send a boy to do a man’s job,” McCoy drawled. “Especially a city boy.”
“I can’t help it if my dop isn’t a neelot tamer,” Chekov said defensively. “I’d like to see what you would have done if you were in my shoes… sir.”
McCoy made a modest gesture. “Once I’d shown them who was boss,” he said, “they’d be eating out of my hand. As an old Georgia farm boy raised around Missouri mules, I’ve yet to see a meaner, more ornery critter than a terrestrial jackass, in spite of all the planets I’ve been to.”
“Well,” said Kirk, folding his arms across his chest, “it looks like we have a volunteer, doesn’t it, Ensign?”
“Yes, sir!” came Chekov’s enthusiastic reply.
“Now, wait just one little old second, Jim,” McCoy protested.
Kirk looped his arm through one of McCoy’s and escorted him to the transporter stage. “Shouldn’t be any trouble at all for an ‘old Georgia farm boy.’ ” He turned to the officer behind the control console. “Lieutenant, energize, if you please.”
With a huge grin on her face, the woman officer did so.
“Yours not to reason why,” Kirk called gaily as McCoy faded from sight in the glitter of the carrier wave.
Ten minutes later, the chief medical officer reappeared with six docile neelots in tow. “I was waiting a full five minutes,” he said, as he led the animals to the wagon and rapidly hitched them up. Kirk noticed that his right knuckles were bruised and bleeding.
“Was that… eating out of your hand, or eating of it?” he asked.
“Couldn’t find an ax handle, so I had to use my fist,” McCoy explained. “They may have heads that look like alligators, but they’re soft. A proper Missouri mule would have reared back and hee-hawed.” Crooking his finger, and with a mock evil grin he said to Chekov, “Come along, Ensign. I wouldn’t want you to get hoof and mouth disease at a time like this. I have an old-fashioned needle…”
Sometime later, Kirk, programmed with a Beshwa dop, lay on his bunk again and began to sample the store of knowledge of his new identity. He had become accustomed to the Androsian mind he was previously linked to, but the Beshwa were products of a different culture. As he gingerly began to probe the memories and attitudes of his dop, the communicator sounded.
This time it was his chief engineer.
“What’s the problem, Scotty?”
“It’s this Beshwa caravan,” Scott explained. “I just canna make sense of some of its parts…”
Kirk grinned and realized he could get one up on his engineer because of his Beshwa dop.
“Hang on, Scotty, I’ll be right down.”
When he arrived in the cargo transporter room, which he had left only an hour before, he found his engineer standing by the odd-looking wagon, fists on hips, muttering softly.
“Can I be of any help?” Kirk asked innocently.
“Well, sir,” Scott said, “if you can tell me why the wagon tongue is hinged so it can stick straight up in the air, and why the van can be disconnected from the wagon in front and, above all, why the blazes there’s a telescoping boom twenty meters long and connecting the twa parts… I’ll… I’ll nae take a drink for a month!”
“You don’t mean that?” Kirk asked in mock surprise. Scott nodded.
“Well,” Kirk began, “even though I’m not an engineer, of course, it seems simple to me. I imagine the reason the two parts can be disconnected is so the Beshwa, if they have several short trading visits to make in one day, can unhook the van and park it somewhere convenient. As for the rest…”
Scott’s jaw dropped farther and farther as Kirk went into a detailed explanation of the use of the various special features.
When he finished, he added modestly, “I may be way off base, though, Mr. Scott.”
Scott turned wide eyes on his captain. “But you’re right, Captain. That’s the way it has to be. Now, why couldn’t I have seen that?”
“Because I have a Beshwa dop and you don’t, Scotty. Now, get down to sickbay and have Dr. McCoy link you into yours, and then you can check this caravan over thoroughly. We’re beaming down before dawn tomorrow, and I don’t want a wheel coming off the first hour on the road.”
Scott turned to go, then swung back. “Captain, aboot that pledge…”
“Scotty,” Kirk said, “Do you really think I would make you go on the wagon?” Kirk grinned. Relieved, Scott went to sickbay.
Early the following morning, the landing party lined up before the Beshwa caravan for a quick inspection. The experiment of hooking two men into one dop had worked out well; the only thing that betrayed the overlapping was when the officers went into character. In spite of their physical differences, in intonations and mannerisms Kirk and Chekov were almost like identical twins. The same was true for Scott and McCoy, who had been double linked to the other Beshwa profile in the medical department files. Only Sara, still a little pale from her ordeal but otherwise in good shape, remained linked to her original doppelganger, the amorous little Androsian belly dancer; but since Beshwa women were retiring sorts who took no part in the trading, it was hoped she would be able to pass virtually unnoticed. In her case, her nonverbal abilities were considered more important than her verbal, though she had been given a quick hypno-briefing on Beshwa patois the night before, and her dop, for business reasons, already had a fair command of the hill tongue.
The caravan had contained enough clothing to outfit them all—Chekov’s purse had been large enough to buy the vehicle just as it stood, complete with dirty crockery from the morning meal of the former owners.
The men wore gaudily decorated leather tunics that stretched to their knees. Over them they wore sleeveless leather jackets with V-shaped openings that plunged from neck to waist, and woven trousers. Their hair, now dyed a purplish black, had been shaved on each side so that only a five-centimeter-wide strip remained. They were unarmed, in accordance with Beshwa tradition. Their skins had been darkened to a deep mahogany color, and their contact lenses were slightly more pinkish than the Kyrosian norm.
Sara’s dress was similar to the men’s, except that instead of hanging loosely, her tunic fit her voluptuously curved body like a second skin; and her hair, also dyed, had been trimmed to a pert page-boy bob.
Kirk surveyed the small party closely, then nodded his head in approval. “All aboard,” he called. He and Chekov climbed into the driver’s seat on the wagon, as the others scrambled up to perch on the trade goods on the wagon’s bed. They seated themselves comfortably on the thick fur covering.
“Energize,” Kirk ordered.
The neelots hissed and reared nervously, as they suddenly felt earth under their hooves instead of the ridged plate of the cargo transporter. Kirk’s newly acquired driver’s skill was put to a severe test as he tried to keep them from bolting. After he had them quieted down, he looked around, attempting to determine their location.
Dim shapes that seemed like bushes humped around them, but all the moons had set, and starshine didn’t provide enough light for traveling safely. A hah’ hour passed before a faint grayness began to appear on the eastern horizon. When at last it was light enough, Kirk jumped down from the wagon and pushed through tangled vegetation, Sara at his heels, until he came to an outcropping of rock which jutted ten meters into the air. When he reached the rock, he clambered up it, and slowly surveyed the surrounding countryside.
“We seem to be right on target,” he said as he reached down to help Sara climb up beside him.
To the north he could make out an escarpment slashing across the middle distance. It rose to the far left rather abruptly and cut east, separating the foothills from the plains. Along its base ran a gorge, deeply cut into living rock by millennia of rushing waters. Directly ahead, a roaring sounded in the distance, and the first rays of Kyr gave rainbow tints to a cloud of dancing mist that rose above the canyon’s edge to signal a waterfall below.
He swung one hundred and eighty degrees and faced due south, studying the wind-scoured plains which sloped gently down toward Andros and the sea. There was no sign of life. He looked back in the direction they were to travel.
“Can you make out the bridge, Captain?” Sara asked.
He shook his head and glanced back in the direction of Andros.
The rolling country dotted with brush, barren as it was, seemed almost benign compared to the rugged foothills and the roaring chasm ahead.
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