***
"I've got 'em pinned, Captain. No mistake, they've set down. And according to sensors Mudd's staying in place for a few minutes, anyway. His engines are off." Kyle was too busy to notice the slight fragrant aroma that had drifted into the room, and his voice covered the hiss from an overhead ventilation grid.
"Ready to transport down."
"Ready," both Kirk and Spock acknowledged. A high, musical whine filled the transporter chamber. Two chromatic columns of light appropriated the figures of the two officers as Kyle moved levers upward.
One of the figures seemed to sniff uncertainly at the air just before he was effectively dematerialized. Kyle brought the levers down sharply, and the electronic cadence vanished.
A different kind of music had taken over the bridge. Part of it could be traced to Arex, whose present navigational concerns were restricted to plucking and strumming the proper notes on an odd, double-stringed guitar. It wasn't an easy instrument to play, even for him, but without three hands it would have been all but impossible.
He was managing, however, singing a sweet wordless chant in time to the music. In the center of the floor, several of the younger officers were dancing lightly to the unusual rhythm, taking no notice of its alienness. And someone had broken out an adequate supply of intoxicants. It was developing into quite a party - even better, some insisted, than their recent private reveries on the Omicron pleasure world.
M'ress was leaning over the communications console while Scott, humming his own highland tune, massaged her shoulders. Her steady purring broke only once, when the chief accidentally rubbed her fur the wrong way. Otherwise, she was the picture of contentment.
Arex's wordless chant spiraled to a coda. It drew a smattering of applause from some of the listeners, who proceeded on to other activities.
Somewhere, in the back of the navigator's mind, a nonmusical note of insistence was howling for attention. Irritated, he glanced around the bridge, hoping something would key his memory. Oh yes, that was it.
"By the way," he murmured, speaking to the room in general, "is anybody keeping a check on the captain and Mr. Spock?"
"Surre, Arrex, Surre," purred M'ress. "See?" She flicked a hand at a screen control indifferently, once, twice, hitting the activating switch on the third try. Scott took no notice of this highly arbitrary activity, continued to rub her shoulders and back. How soft the communications officer was! Scott did not seem concerned in the slightest that this was not an appropriate thought for a ship's chief engineer to have in regard to his back-up communications officer.
The small communications viewscreen lit up, but M'ress did not notice that. She was not bothering to look at it, seemingly having already forgotten why she turned it on. Arex didn't remind her. He'd good-naturedly responded to a request for another song. No one bothered to comment that the interference pattern which was all that showed on the screen, was not even in focus.
Neither was Arex's melody, but for some reason no one seemed to care about that, either. Mostly because the majority of the music was in their minds.
***
The solidifying transporter effect was more brilliant than usual under the cross-light of the twin suns as the two starship officers materialized within walking distance of the armored landing craft.
Extraordinarily, the usually exacting Chief Kyle had relaxed his control, because both men set down at a slant. Kirk adjusted quickly, righting himself. But Spock, in a gesture wholly out of character, did not. The first officer nearly fell over, and Kirk had to reach out to steady him. Spock looked back at the Captain and smiled warmly.
"Thanks, Jim. I've never done that before. It's good to have a friend like you." Kirk's expression started to twist up, but melted into an odd, warm smile.
"Strange, that's the way I feel about you, too. In fact..." his smile grew broader, and he put a friendly arm around the first officer's shoulders "...my dear friend, Spock. Come on, let's go get Mudd and Christine." They started off down the slight slope in the direction of the lander. Neither man paid any attention to the slight shift in the surface of the ebony cliff behind them as the glistening medallion of the colossal eye opened again.
Mudd, preparing to unload some basic survival equipment for Chapel, had just stepped out of the lander onto the descending ramp. He did not even have a chance to notice the approaching officers before the ground began to shake.
Sand rattled around the base of the heavy vessel. The startled trader whirled. As he did so, Chapel shot past him before he could even think to get the phaser out or yell, or do anything else. She had spotted Kirk and Spock. But now she saw something else, and she screamed.
Ahead, black rock erupted from the earth, heaving skyward on six stumplike legs. Each was as big around as a starship warp-engine. Sand continued to drift down from little clefts and protuberances. Overall, the leviathan was faintly reptilian in appearance. However, this was just a human attempt to categorize, to make something utterly alien familiar. Actually, the beast resembled nothing that could be related to the fauna of Earth.
Its eye was wide open now, staring down at them with massive, blank malevolence.
Kirk and Spock heard Chapel scream, noticed her frantic gestures and turned. At the same time there was a loud sucking noise, and they saw the creature lift itself out of the sand. They ran to the lander.
There was no time for greetings, and they immediately ran from the craft as the monstrosity behind them swung around on pillarlike forelegs. Mudd, completely stunned by the approaching apparition, was stumbling around on the landing ramp.
A shadow crept over the lander as a three-taloned cloud-paw blotted out the suns. The change in illumination was enough to shock Mudd into action. He ran down the ramp and hurried to catch up with Chapel and the others. Darkness fell just behind him as the paw began to lower. It seemed to descend in slow motion. He heard a flat, ugly crunching sound as hundreds of tons of living mountain ground the landing craft into the sand. The paw, still moving with seemingly contrived slowness, slid under the pulverized metal.
The monster lifted the flattened lander up, up. It looked like a broken toy in the shuttlecraft-sized paw. One eye examined it cursorily, then the paw shook, and the remnant of the lander flew free. It smashed down near the terrified humans, and that action seemed to galvanize the mountain-thing into motion once more.
Like a starship coming about, the monster turned, revealing as it did not one but three eyes, spaced evenly around the irregular, massive head. It had no recognizable neck - just the titan body and its six herculean legs. A mouth opened, circular and irislike, to show a bottomless pit lined with stalactites and stalagmites of writhing, twisting cilia.
A shrill whistling sound echoed from that awesome maw, like wind from a deep cave.
Spock, Kirk, and Chapel had slowed slightly, and Mudd caught up to them. Hand shaking wildly, the trader now raised his phaser toward the more threatening arrival. He tried to steady it by grabbing the wrist with his free hand, but that only made the phaser shake twice as hard.
Ignoring the ineffectual Mudd, Kirk and Spock moved slightly apart, taking out their own weapons.
"Aim for the head!" Kirk instructed, more for Mudd's benefit than for the calm Spock. Two beams of red light shot upward, converged on the massive, eye-studded bluff looming overhead. To Chapel they looked impossibly tiny, threadlike, to have much effect on that mountainous form. But if nothing else, the results proved conclusively that the creature was made of flesh and not unfeeling stone.
There was a tremendous whistling sound, a hurricanelike scream, and the beast exploded even further out of the sand. A long tentacular shape, something like a branching taproot, ripped out of the soil with an audible sucking noise. The creature snapped at itself where the beams had made contact, triple eyes blinking in dull pain.
Two of the gigantic legs collapsed, and the thing half fell to the ground, making the earth quake. The four humans were tossed about like corn in a popper.
Suddenly the triorbed skull swung back in the opposite direction. A volcanic upheaval of sand was in progress behind it. Another black head appeared from the earth, followed by an equally gargantuan form, as a second monster lifted toward the blue-white sun. Once clear, it immediately started for the other.
The four spectators were alternately fascinated and fearful. Spock was the first to break free of the hypnotic thrall the incipient conflict had created. He grabbed the hypnotized Christine. That action shocked her as much as the dual appearance of the mountain-sized aliens. But still greater surprises were to come.
"Darling!" Spock gasped, "are you all right?"
"I'm fine, Mr. Spo -" She suddenly felt faint. "D ... darling?
Mudd's expression was more easily interpreted. "Kirk, get us out of this!"
"Calm down, Harry," Kirk answered with an assurance he didn't feel. He freed his communicator, shook some clinging sand free, and flipped it open. As long as the monsters were occupied with one another, the humans were in no danger despite their proximity to them. A few seconds and they would be back on the ship.
"Transporter room - Captain speaking. Beam us up, Kyle, and show some speed."
On board the Enterprise, his voice sounded clearly over the open transporter room pickup. But it was lost in the music pouring gaily through the intership intercom.
Transporter Chief Kyle and an attractive young yeoman named Marion were dancing to the music. Kyle heard, or thought he heard, Kirk's voice, punctuated by the insistent clamor of the intercom alarm buzzer. But the strident sound blended easily, naturally, into the music.
Kyle held Yeoman Marion a little closer, smiling down at her. There was country fiddling and a Bruch concerto mixed somehow into the music - and something more. She returned his smile lovingly.
"No response," Kirk muttered, a little worriedly. The communicators were tough little instruments, well-sealed. It was virtually impossible for anything like sand to get inside. Kirk shook it, an age-old gesture of semimagic, and tried again.
"Chief Kyle, this is an emergency! Beam up!"
Not a hum of recognition in answer, nothing to show that the Enterprise still existed in this universe.
"What's going on up there!" Then he noticed that no one down here was paying him much attention, either.
Chapel appeared to have regained control of herself - and lost it in the process. The contradiction was implied, but not real. She was clinging to Spock and gazing up at him with a thoroughly unprofessional expression.
Mudd was pointing in the direction of the ruined landing craft and making indecipherable gobbling sounds. He was communicating, nonetheless.
After eyeing each other uncertainly for several long moments, the two moving mountains had turned slowly until both were once again facing the tiny aliens.
"Don't be upset with Chief Kyle, Jim," said Spock airily. "It takes a moment or two to lock in coordinates. It doesn't matter." He looked down at Chapel reassuringly. "Nothing matters, now that you're safe, Christine."
"Yes - oh yes. How wonderful."
"They're coming for us again!" Mudd stammered, backing up and making shoving gestures in the direction of the black monsters - gestures that were instinctive more than anything else.
The two giants were indeed moving toward them again, one ponderous step at a time. Kirk searched the landscape around them desperately. A thick cluster of towering yellow-brown knife-blades - the still standing core of some long-dead, long-eroded volcano - thrust out of the sand not too far behind them.
The weathered rock - if indeed it was rock, and not another monster - had been shattered in the past by some powerful convulsion that slivered it with deep cracks and crevices. There seemed to be a number of places to hide in. Anything was better than standing on the flat sand, waiting for a mountainous paw to flatten them.
"Over there!" Kirk yelled, starting toward the volcanic plug. Spock helped Chapel along while Mudd brought up the rear.
They made rapid progress over the sand, which fortunately grew firmer the nearer they came. And their approach provoked no display of eyes, legs, mouth, or any other organic appurtenances. Kirk continued to rail at the silent communicator.
"Emergency beam up - Enterprise, come in!" He looked back over a shoulder. The first thing he saw was that Spock and Chapel were running while tightly locked together. Absurdity combined with apprehension to spark bitter comment.
"Can't you take your hands off her, even now?"
"This is my affair, Captain," Spock panted, maintaining his dignity.
Chapel listened to this interplay without really understanding what was happening, or why. "Please, I think we should get a few things straight..."
But she found it hard to talk while running. They hurried into a deep crevice filled with sand, stumbling back down arrow-straight depths that showed no signs of narrowing. They had been lucky - their first choice of a refuge was good and deep.
"Jim," Spock began, and then a switch was thrown in his mind and he paused in confusion. "No ... no ... Captain." He pronounced the title carefully, - emphasizing it - but then half-smiled again.
"We're both reacting abnormally. Look at me. It's the potion. The love drug ... insidious. It -" From behind them a loud voice interrupted incredulously.
"The love potion ... insidious?" Mudd gaped at them. Kirk and Spock ignored the trader.
Spock was fighting with himself. "Once ... once you recognize its effects for what they are, you're able to resist it somewhat, as I am doing now."
"It worked," Mudd mumbled inanely, his facial expression one of dazed comprehension. "Oh my Great Aunt Anabella, bless her departed black-hearted soul, it worked!" He slumped dejectedly to the sand.
"And I was going to sell the few crystals I had left to those lump-headed miners for a miserable three hundred credits apiece." Both hands beat at the sides of his head.
"You mean you thought all along they were phony?" a puzzled Kirk asked, his attention momentarily drawn away from the communicator.
Mudd looked across at him, his voice a pitying moan. "Did you think I'd believe a crazy old Sirius medicine man? Of course I thought they were phony. Especially after all they did on Ilyria was make people sick." He was wallowing in self-misery.
"Old and crazy - wouldn't even say where the benighted things came from. I knew they could produce a temporary pleasant effect, and a little dizziness - but love?" He beseeched the heavens. "It's not fair, I tell you, it's not fair!"
The con-man conned - Kirk had to grin. He peered down the cleft. Neither of the creatures was in view. They had not seemed particularly intelligent, and their reaction time was slow, very slow. If only they didn't accidentally pass this way. Perhaps it would seem to them that the fast-moving tiny animals - themselves - had simply disappeared. If their memories were commensurate with their reactions, the two living mountains might go back to being pieces of scenery again.
"Cheer up, Harry. You wouldn't have known what to do with any honest money anyway." Mudd was too depressed to offer a rejoinder. He felt sick.
***
Perhaps the scene in the Enterprise's Sick Bay might have cheered him up. Light music played over the intercom. Some of the medical personnel present were dancing close together. Others were playing idly with the medical computers.
A couple of the more adventurous were doing nonregulation things with the body-function machinery that slid over the hospital tables.
The nominal head of this sybaritic setting was Dr. McCoy. At the moment he had one arm companionably around Nurse Mayer.
"Now Lyra, did I ever tell you about the time I saved Captain Kirk's life? And Commander Spock's?" N
urse Mayer shook her head, looking up at him with a mixture of awed admiration and affection. Her normal reaction to such a statement of McCoy's would have been a hard-boiled snort of derision.
"And my dear friend Scotty, too," McCoy continued blithely. "And that pretty little Lieutenant Uhura. Why, I guess I've saved just about everybody on this ship, one time or another." He looked around the room, saw nothing unusual in the highly unmedical activity.
"If the Enterprise had a heart, I'd save her, too." He found himself sniffing away a tear, smiled down at his companion. "Let's talk about your heart, my dear Lyra -"
***
Kirk walked over to Mudd, backed the trader up against one wall. "How long does the effect of the potion last, Harry?"
"I ... I don't know." Kirk reflected that he was still probably in shock. Not from the sudden appearance of the monsters, but from the revelation that he had probably been involved in an honest deal. "I didn't know it was going to have any lasting effects at all, so I didn't ask."
"Well how long," pressed an exasperated Kirk, "did the 'crazy old medicine man' say it was supposed to last?"
"Not long."
"What do you mean, 'not long'? He must have told you something about its effects - whether you thought they were foolish or not."
"Actually - you're hurting my arm, Captain - he was starting to, but I wanted to complete the transaction as smoothly as possible before he discovered the credit slips I paid him with were counterfeit."
"Then how -" but Kirk was interrupted by a startled shout from Chapel. He turned from Mudd, saw her pointing toward the entrance of the cleft.
Both monsters lumbered into view, blocking out much of the light as they moved between the setting suns and the crevice. Their heads, black icebergs, swayed slowly from side to side in searching motions. Then they stopped. The head of the nearest one stared into the cleft, three great glassy eyes pinning the humans under an overpowering, unthinking gaze.
Star Trek Log Three Page 13
