The Final Nexus

by Gene DeWeese

  "According to my instruments, they are."

  "And there was no indication when the field passed through them?"

  "None that I could see, Mr. Spock."

  "Contact with warp-drive nacelles now, Captain, Commander Scott."

  "No' a thing showing on the instruments, Captain," Scott's voice came over the intercom. "Matter-antimatter engines still functioning normally. Power output—"

  Scott's voice cut off abruptly, then came back. "Power output up ten percent, Captain!"

  "Cut back, Scotty!" Kirk snapped.

  "Already doin' it, sir."

  "It may be significant, Captain," Spock interjected, "that the field passed through the matter-antimatter core within seconds of the power increase."

  "Output stabilized, Captain," Scott announced. "Some o' the readings are a wee bit off, but nothing that can't be adjusted."

  "What is this thing?" Kirk snapped in frustration. "Spock, do the sensors show anything?"

  "Negative, Captain. Beyond the field, it is as if nothing exists. Most of the nacelles do not now register on any sensor. And from the rate of inward progress—" Spock paused, one eyebrow arching minutely.

  "All sensors dead, Captain," he announced. "The sensor array itself is now presumably outside the field."

  Chapter Twenty-one

  KIRK GLANCED AT the viewscreens. Those connected to the sensors were blank. Those operating on any portion of the standard electromagnetic spectrum remained operational, but the images were blurred. A camera in the Enterprise hangar deck showed the shuttlecraft, Kremastor's ship, and the engineering crew around them seemingly unaffected except for the blurring.

  For an instant, then, the bridge seemed to waver, as if a distorting lens had been passed before Kirk's eyes, and at the same moment a wave of disorientation swept over him, ending in a pulse of dizziness and nausea.

  But almost before he could react, the dizziness was gone. The bridge was once again rock solid.

  Except—

  Kirk blinked, shaking his head as if to clear it.

  Everything was precisely as it had been before, except for color. Every color—the people, the clothes, the consoles and their lights, everything—was changed.

  Spock's blue science tunic was a deeper blue.

  The red of Uhura's uniform was lighter, shading toward orange.

  His own tunic was lighter, too, much closer to yellow than before.

  And the flesh—

  Like the uniforms, everyone's face and hands—including his own—were slightly "off." Spock's faint coppery tinge had edged from green toward blue. Uhura and one of the security officers still flanking the turbolift door were a shade darker brown than before. Kirk himself, along with McCoy, Woida, Sulu, and the other security officer, had taken on a slightly jaundiced look, as if their blood had been diluted with orange juice.

  "Jim!" McCoy was looking around disbelievingly. "What the blazes is going on now?"

  "I have no idea, Bones. Mr. Scott, how are things in engineering? Is anything working? The sensors—"

  "I know, Captain," Scott replied, static half obscuring his words. "They're dead. And the readings on half the other systems have gone daft. I'm tryin' ta get them settled down, but it's like workin' wi' your eyes shut!"

  "Are the deflectors still operational?"

  "I wish I knew, Captain! They're still drawing power—more than they should—but I canna say what they're doin' wi' the power."

  "Understood, Mr. Scott. Do your best. Mr. Sulu, test-fire the phasers, minimum power."

  "Minimum power, sir," Sulu acknowledged, activating the phasers.

  An instant later, the bridge lights dimmed slightly. "Phaser banks drawing inordinate power, sir," Sulu said, "but no phaser beams are evident."

  "Phasers off," Kirk snapped, and a moment later the bridge lighting returned to normal. "Mr. Scott, what happened?"

  "I canna tell ye more than Mr. Sulu already has, Captain. The phasers were pullin' more power than they do on maximum, but no' a thing was comin' out!"

  "Lieutenant Bailey," Kirk said, turning sharply toward the security team that was still on the bridge. "Try your phaser, carefully. Lowest stun setting."

  Aiming at the deck by his feet, Bailey complied. A faint, purplish glow ringed the muzzle, but that was all.

  Frowning, Bailey released the firing button, waited a moment, then pressed it again. Suddenly, he gasped and dropped the phaser.

  "It's hot!" he said, shaking his hand and adding a belated "Sir."

  "So," Kirk said, "our phasers obviously don't work any better than our sensors or transporters. I wonder what does work. Mr. Sulu, try the impulse engines, minimum power. Take us back toward the gate while you're at it. Now that this field has done whatever it's done, it might be worth trying to get through again, to see if there's been any change in the welcome it gives us."

  "Aye-aye, sir," Sulu acknowledged as he tapped the commands into the helm.

  Obediently, the Enterprise turned, pointing its bow in the direction of the invisible gate. "So far, so good, sir," Sulu said as the ship halted its rotation.

  After a moment, the deck seemed to tilt very slightly, but the fuzzy image of the other ships on the viewscreen remained steady.

  "Are we moving?" Kirk asked.

  "Impulse power is being applied, sir, but without operational sensors, it's impossible to measure our speed, if any."

  Kirk grimaced. "Scotty, how do the impulse engines look from down in engineering? They're not overloading, like the phasers?"

  "There's nothing ta indicate it, Captain," Scott's voice came over the intercom. "They seem ta be operating normally—as normally as anything is operating, that is."

  Kirk watched the seemingly motionless ships on the screen for another few seconds.

  "All right," he said finally. "Mr. Sulu, bring the impulse engines up to quarter power."

  "Quarter impulse power, sir."

  A moment later, everything tilted.

  Uhura almost slid off her chair into the communications station before she caught herself. The security team lurched backward, hitting the bulkhead on either side of the turbolift before they could regain their balance.

  "Cut power!" Kirk snapped, but Sulu's fingers were reaching for the controls before the words were out.

  The deck leveled itself, sending everyone lurching in the other direction.

  "May I take it, Mr. Scott," Kirk said when stability had returned, "that the artificial gravity system was a partial casualty of the field? It can no longer fully compensate for impulse-power acceleration?"

  "Aye, Captain, it seems that way," Scotty replied. "But at least the impulse engines seem ta be working."

  "Is there anything you can do about the gravity? Or about anything else?"

  "I canna say. If the readings can be stabilized, ta give me some idea o' what's really happening, then there's a chance. But, Captain, if ye're thinkin' o' testing the warp drive, I'd not be too hasty."

  "Don't worry, Scotty, I'm not suicidal. Yet. Besides, even if the warp drive worked perfectly," he added, glancing at the viewscreen, "it would take us several thousand years to reach the nearest star. Either we find a way back through the gate, or—" Kirk pressed another button on the command chair. "Kremastor, now that our dead space is gone, what's the state of your nullifier? I don't suppose it's started working again."

  "It has not."

  "And after seeing this happen—how many times did you say? a hundred?—you still don't have any idea what this dead space is?"

  "None."

  "Is it always the same?"

  "I have never before observed it from the inside, but it is always similar."

  "Similar? But not the same? Tell us about the differences. Scotty, Spock, Ansfield, are you listening?"

  "Of course I'm listening, Kirk!" Ansfield's voice erupted through the communication link. "The only reason I haven't been asking a mountain of questions myself is that I figured you had enough to cope with withou
t me getting in your hair."

  Kirk smiled. "Go ahead, Kremastor, tell us about the differences."

  "Very few of the dead spaces have been precisely the same. My sensors function more efficiently in some than others. In some, they would not function at all."

  "Have they all been the same size?"

  "None has been as large as yours, nor has any lasted nearly as long."

  "Is there any correlation between the size of the dead space and the size of the ship? Or the amount of time it takes it to close in?"

  "I have never tried to analyze such things. I know only that none before has lasted more than a few minutes. And none of the beings in the ships has survived much longer. All, except you, have destroyed themselves within hours."

  Kirk shook his head. "The more I hear, the more it sounds as if this dead space is something the ships themselves generate. But what about the color change? Does that always happen?"

  "Color change?" Ansfield broke in. "What color change?"

  "When the dead space vanished and everything stopped working, everything changed color. Didn't it happen to you in Kremastor's ship?"

  "I didn't think—The colors looked different to me when he first kidnapped me, but I thought it was just the strange light in here. And there at the end, I was too busy listening to what was happening to you people to pay any attention to anything else. Besides, I was already so sickly looking—I'm looking at my uniform now, and at my hands—the uniform is a much deeper blue, and my hands are sort of jaundiced-looking, even more than when Kremastor first snatched me. Is it the same with you?"

  "It seems to be," Kirk said. "All the blues are deeper, almost violet in some cases. The greens are shading toward blue, reds are closer to orange, browns are—"

  "Kirk! I've got it!" Ansfield's voice exploded from the intership link.

  "Got it? Got what?"

  "I see what's happened! Why nothing works the way it should, why everything's changed color! And I think I know how I can get out of here without having to perform major surgery on Kremastor!"

  Suddenly, she laughed. "Spock, can you get down to the physics lab?"

  "I assume, Commander," Kirk interrupted, "that you have a logical reason for this request."

  "Darned right I do! If Spock can run a few simple experiments for me, then I can tell Commander Scott how to get the transporters working again. I think."

  "And how might that be, lassie?" Scott broke in from the engineering deck, an unusual mix of annoyance and sarcasm in his tone.

  "It should be just a matter of making a few basic adjustments, Mr. Scott, that's all."

  "I've been makin' basic adjustments until I canna see straight!" Scott said. "And a few adjustments not so basic! Unless ye know something that turns some o' the universal laws of physics upside down—"

  Ansfield laughed again but cut it off sharply. "Actually, Mr. Scott," she said, "I think I do. I'm betting that the universal laws you mentioned don't apply here! That's what Spock has to do in the physics lab, find out what—"

  "Don't be daft! They apply everywhere! That's why they call them universal laws."

  "Everywhere in our own universe, Mr. Scott, our own universe. That's the catch. About a minute ago, when Kirk was telling me about the color changes, I suddenly realized something. We're not in our universe anymore!"

  Chapter Twenty-two

  THE GRIN WAS obvious in Commander Ansfield's voice as she acknowledged Spock's first finding in the lab: the speed of light, in this universe, was just under three hundred fifteen thousand kilometers per second, an increase of roughly five percent.

  "This means," she said, "that we're involved with at least three separate universes here! In Kremastor's, c is approximately three hundred eight thousand kilometers per second. Which explains why his sensors and transporters worked a little bit. The difference between his universe and this one is only half the difference between this one and our own, at least as far as the speed of light is concerned."

  Scotty spoke ruefully over the intercom from engineering. "I should ha' seen it m'selft Captain. The ten-percent increase in engine output had ta come from somewhere."

  "We all should have seen more than we did," Kirk acknowledged from the bridge. "The evidence is really pretty plain—in hindsight."

  Ansfield laughed aloud then, although her seeming high spirits were as much the result of anticipatory nervousness as genuine elation. After all, she was still locked away inside Kremastor's doorless ship, and until she stepped off the transporter platform on the Enterprise, she couldn't be positive that the necessarily jury-rigged modifications Commander Scott and his crew were making would do the trick.

  "None of you had my advantages, that's all," she said with another laugh. "In that musty collection in my cabin, there's a lot of nineteenth- and twentieth-century science fiction along with the romances and the rest, and those old-time writers, even if they weren't much good at 'predictions,' had wild ideas for practically all situations, including a few not all that different from the one we're in right now.

  "Anyway, it was the 'field' that fooled everyone, including me," she went on. "But when Kirk was describing the color changes, I suddenly realized that every change was in the direction of a shorter wavelength, a higher frequency. And that's when the light finally came on. Once I realized we weren't just in a remote corner of our own universe but in another universe altogether, where the basic physical laws weren't quite the same, everything fit. First, there was the speed of light, which was obviously a little higher here. That's why all the colors were shifted toward the high-frequency end of the spectrum—red toward orange, green toward blue, and the like. And as you just now said, Mr. Scott, that's why the output of the anti-matter engines jumped ten percent, the old Mc2 bit. With a higher c, there's got to be a higher power output. And the fact that nothing associated with subspace worked should've been a tipoff, too. Like warp drive, access to subspace depends on Cochrane's equations, and the speed of light is at the heart of every last one. "

  She paused, realizing abruptly that she was starting to sound as if she were back in her former career in the university, lecturing a class. But after a moment, when no other voice filled the tense silence, she went on, though perhaps a shade more softly. "As I said, the basic problem was that we all insisted on thinking in terms of a 'field' surrounding the Enterprise, but it wasn't really afield at all. It was just a little 'bubble' of our own universe and its laws that we brought along with us. That's why everything seemed to work normally at first, at least inside the bubble—Kremastor's so-called dead space. And what we saw as the outer edge of the 'field' was just the surface of the bubble, the boundary layer between the two realities—a discontinuity, like the discontinuity at the boundary between air and water. And what Spock said about the 'field' around Kremastor's ship starting with Kremastor himself—his brain, actually, since that's all that's left of him-fit right in, too. And the way the bubble changed shape when it closed in on the Enterprise, developing two lobes, one centered on the main deck, where most of the crew—most of the minds—were, and a smaller one centered on the engineering deck where fewer members of the crew were. It's our minds that were maintaining that bubble—and Kremastor said ours lasted longer than any other he'd seen," she finished, "although I suppose that could be because there are so many of us instead of any inherent superiority."

  "I assume, Commander," Spock said, not looking up from his experiments in the physics lab, "that this is an example of the 'intuition' of which Dr. McCoy speaks so often and so highly."

  "You're darned right, Spock!" McCoy, in the lab with Spock, chimed in before Ansfield could reply. "And it's the main reason people are still in control of computers instead of the other way around."

  "In this case, Doctor," Spock said, "it would appear to involve a form of pattern recognition. Given more time and data, I would have recognized the emerging pattern—"

  "Don't kid yourself, Spock! You wouldn't have spotted it any quicker than you do
the 'patterns' that Jim uses to beat you in chess!"

  "But the patterns the captain employs in chess are often simply not logical, Doctor, whereas the logic here is plain." Pausing, Spock looked up from the lab instruments. "Except for the Universal Gravitational Constant, Mr. Scott, all other fundamental values appear to be close enough to their values in our own universe that the differences will not affect transporter operations," he said. "As soon as you complete the modifications necessitated by the increase in c, you should be able to transport Commander Ansfield out of Kremastor's ship."

  From the intership link came an audible sigh of relief.

  Once the modifications were completed, Ansfield was quickly transported out of Kremastor's ship and returned to the bridge. Meanwhile, Kremastor's maps of the entire nexus system had been transferred to the Enterprise computer for Spock to study. When the sensors came back on line, however, he abandoned the maps to run a complete recheck of Kremastor.

  "His life-form readings are still decidedly odd, Captain," he announced after a minute. "They are, in fact, virtually identical to the readings obtained during the brief, earlier scan. However, I can now envision a possible explanation."

  "I assume you plan to let us in on it, Spock," McCoy said when the Vulcan paused to consult the records of the earlier scan.

  "Of course, Doctor. The seeming anomalies have to do with the biochemical reactions by which the life-form sustains itself."

  "I don't suppose these anomalies could have anything to do with the fact that he's just a brain supported by a spaceship instead of a natural body," McCoy said when Spock paused again.

  "That is part of it, of course, Doctor, but the chemical reactions, the basic metabolic readings themselves, are slightly askew. These data lead me to speculate that Kremastor is maintaining yet another bubble in which certain of the natural laws of his native universe continue to operate. I would also speculate that we ourselves are doing the same. If we were not, even the minor differences that exist between the natural laws of this universe and those of our own would have already proven fatal to us."