by Jerry Oltion
He wasn't going to give up, was he? Well, then, Mudd would throw him a bone and see what he did with it. In fact, maybe he could get Spock to lead him straight to his own quarry. It might be worth a try, since Mudd had no interest in returning to either planet to continue the search on his own, especially if another war was brewing. "Hmm," he said, pretending to come up with it on the spot. "Well, when you put it that way, maybe I could point out a thing or two. For instance, their interplanetary transporter. I realize Prastor and Distrel are relatively close as far as distance goes, but they're still farther apart than our technology would allow us to beam. And rumor says they once had interstellar capability. The design for that would be worth a bit if we could come up with it."
"Aye, that it would," Scotty said from halfway down the conference table.
"Or take this resurrection business," Mudd went on. "If there does turn out to be a mundane explanation for it after all, then we could certainly find a market for it elsewhere. The Klingons, I imagine, would pay handsomely for a device that would allow them to die gloriously over and over again."
"Such a device would upset the balance of power throughout the galaxy," Spock said.
"Not if I sold it to everyone else as well," Mudd pointed out.
McCoy could sit still no longer. "Dammit, this speculation is pointless. We've got to do something to get Jim back, not just sit here and scheme up plans to rob the locals of their technology."
Spock said, "The bridge crew is searching for the captain at this very moment. The Prastorians and the Distrellians are also conducting their own search. We are doing all that can be done directly, which leaves us with indirect methods, such as determining what else Mr. Mudd knows about this society. And you, Doctor. What have you discovered in your examinations?"
"Well," McCoy said, mollified somewhat to be asked for his expertise, "I can pretty confidently state that these people didn't actually die. I found none of the toxins or enzymes normally released during death in their tissues."
"But we know we did," Scotty said. "Maybe whatever brought us back to life cleaned out those enzymes."
"And repaired all the damage done by the disruptors? I don't think so. Sulu's still got the scar he's had since childhood; why didn't it repair that while it was at it?"
"Maybe it's a time machine," said Sulu. "It backspaces just a few seconds until the subject is alive again."
"But it would have to have a subject to send back," McCoy protested. "Scotty was a cloud of elemental particles after that phaser overloaded, yet here he is. I can't imagine a time machine that could reassemble him from that."
"It wouldn't matter," Sulu said. "If it went back a few seconds and beamed him away before he—oh. Paradox."
"Indeed," said Spock. "If a time machine were employed, bystanders would not remember seeing a person die. Victims would simply disappear moments before death seemed imminent, which is not the case."
"So we're looking for something that can actually resurrect a corpse and edit out the trauma of death," said McCoy. "Sounds to me like we're looking for divine intervention after all."
"We are looking for anything that might shed light on this phenomenon," Spock said.
Scotty leaned forward. "Then I'd suggest studying it in action. We've got the perfect opportunity to do that on Distrel. From what you've told me, that Stella android keeps reappearing every few minutes We should go see if we can figure out where it's coming from."
"We must finish scanning Prastor for the captain first," Spock said. "As soon as we have established to my satisfaction that he is not here, we will return to Distrel and examine the android."
Mudd suddenly realized he had an opportunity to improve his odds of escape tremendously. "You forget the android's own ship," he said. "It should still be orbiting Prastor, shouldn't it?"
"It should," said Spock.
"Then we can go back to Distrel in that while the Enterprise continues to search here." Yes, indeed they could. And the moment the landing party beamed down, Mudd would blast off at warp ten for some other part of the galaxy.
Spock raised an eyebrow appreciatively. "That is an excellent suggestion."
Mudd couldn't resist. "Well of course it is, laddiebuck. I made it."
The problem with Mudd's idea, Sulu realized when he got back to the bridge and scanned Prastorian space for the android's ship, was that it required that ship to be in one piece. But whatever agency was responsible for the resurrection of individual warriors, it apparently didn't resurrect spacecraft, for Sulu found only a tumbling collection of debris where it should have been.
"That's what they were shooting at," Uhura said when he brought it up on the screen.
"What who was shooting at?" Sulu asked.
"The fighters that attacked us after you went down to the surface. When we backed off, I saw them fire at something else before they returned to base. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but that's what it had to be."
"Friendly lot," Chekov muttered. He turned to Spock, who looked uncomfortable in the command chair. "So what do we do now, sir?"
Spock considered that for a moment, then said, "We will leave a shuttle here to continue scanning for the captain, and take the Enterprise back to Distrel and examine the android. Mr. Chekov, you will remain here in the shuttle. Contact us immediately if you discover anything."
"Aye, sir." Chekov got up from his workstation and strode for the turbolift. He didn't look happy about being left alone in hostile territory, even if there was a cease-fire in effect. Everyone knew how long the previous one had lasted, and the Padishah was already threatening to end this one. But he didn't question his orders.
"Mr. Sulu, take us back to Prastor as soon as he leaves the shuttlebay," said Spock.
Sulu laid in the coordinates, then watched his monitors until he saw the shuttlecraft dwindle against the starfield. "Shuttle away," he said. "Engaging engines."
The interplanetary flight took just a few minutes. Sulu brought the ship into orbit around Distrel, a bit less elegantly than he might have if Chekov had been feeding him navigation data, but he got the job done. He brought them to a halt over the city where the android kept reappearing, and said to Spock, "We're in position, sir."
"Very well." Spock punched the intercom button. "Spock to engineering. Mr. Scott, meet me in the transporter room." He let up on the button and said, "You have the conn, Mr. Sulu. Set up a planetwide scan for the captain while we are away."
"Yes, sir." Sulu felt a surge of relief that he wasn't being ordered down to the surface again. What a change from when they had first arrived here. He remembered being disappointed that he hadn't been selected for the first landing party, but after what he'd gone through when he had beamed down, he was glad to stay on board this time.
What had happened to his sense of adventure? He was usually first in line for planetside missions, the more dangerous the better. Was he scared? He didn't think so; if he had been asked to beam down, he would have gone without protest and done whatever was required of him without hesitation. But despite what Dr. McCoy had said, he felt as if he had been given a second chance on life, and he didn't intend to squander it.
That must have been how Chekov had felt when he realized he would be left behind; he was reluctant to risk losing what he had so recently regained.
Sulu wondered if the Nevisians felt this way after they died, too.
The bathhouse was uncomfortably hot, even for a Vulcan. The temperature was actually about the same as home—it wasn't the heat, but the humidity that made it unbearable. Spock considered disrobing for comfort, but practicality won out; he needed his belt to hang his recording instruments from. And with luck they wouldn't be here long anyway.
Harry Mudd seemed even less comfortable than Spock, though whether that was because of the heat or the proximity of over a dozen armed Distrellians, Spock couldn't say. He wasn't even sure why he had brought Mudd along; he would probably be useless in an investigation like this, but there wa
s a chance that his time with the androids had given him some useful knowledge about them.
Scotty approached the whole venture with characteristic determination, ignoring both heat and guards as he headed straight for the pool in which the android kept reappearing.
"She should show up any time now," said one of the guards, a woman who wore a practical, if scant, blue uniform. "She appears every ten minutes or so."
Spock and Scotty set up their tricorders and waited. "I'm getting something," Scotty announced a minute later. He was monitoring for Chi band phased matter emissions; Spock switched over to that mode himself and scanned around from side to side to see where they were coming from. It was hard to trace; he found over a dozen separate sources in the walls, ceiling, and floor.
Then the android flickered into being, and the emissions stopped. A second after that a bright blue flash lit up the inside of the bathhouse, and the sizzle of a high-voltage short circuit echoed from the walls. Spock's inner eyelids slid closed, preventing him from seeing the android itself. The flash lasted only a moment, but by the time he could open his eyes again the android was gone.
Spock replayed his tricorder readings: there had been more phased matter beams just after the flash.
"It appears to be a variant of a standard transporter," Spock said.
"Aye," Scotty replied. "Except we're under an energy shield at the moment. No transporter I've ever heard of can penetrate a shield."
"Unless the phase transition coils are within the shield as well," Spock said. He walked around the pool to the wall where the nearest of the emission sources had been and examined the area with his tricorder. Energy readings were high in several high-frequency ranges. "There is a scanning device here," he reported. "In fact, there are several of them."
"Gods' eyes," the woman guard said. "We put them in all our buildings."
Yes, that would be an appropriate name for them. Spock remembered finding an elaborate worldwide sensor network during his first survey of the planet; these were undoubtedly part of that network. And whoever they reported to would certainly know all and see all, if they could process the volume of data they received.
"Where do they send their information?" he asked the guard.
She looked puzzled. "To the Gods, of course."
Spock suspected they were dealing with a semantic problem rather than a theological one. "Where is the gods' physical location?" he asked.
"They're everywhere," the guard said. "Watching over us and protecting us from harm."
Then again, maybe it was a theological problem. He tried a different tack. "Where do these gods' eyes come from?"
"From the Gods?"
Scotty said, "I think what Spock means is, when you put up a new building, where do you get the new gods' eyes to put in the walls?"
"Oh," she said. "I'm not sure. From the palace, I think."
"See if you can find out," Spock told her. She turned away to go ask someone, but he stopped her before she could leave. "What have you done with the bodies of the two attendants who were electrocuted?"
"The Gods took them away," she replied.
"I see. Thank you." When she was gone, he said to Scotty, "Apparently the sensors and dematerialization subroutine continue to function, but the rematerialization process has been interrupted somehow."
"Except here," said Mudd, nodding toward the pool. He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve.
Indeed. This locus seemed to be the single anomaly.
Scotty looked at the water, then back at Spock. "I wonder what would happen if we drained the tub so the android didn't short out."
"That should be easy enough to test," Spock said. He looked down into the water. Yes, there was a drain at the bottom of the pool, stopped with a simple plug. He looked around for a rod to dislodge it with, but saw nothing. The attendants probably did the job manually.
Well, so could he. He set his tricorder down and pulled off his shirt.
"You're not going in there, are you?" Scotty asked him.
"That seems to be the simplest way to remove the plug," Spock replied. "If we wait until after the android appears again, I should have more than adequate time."
"Aye, but if you don't…" Scotty left the rest unsaid, but Spock knew what he meant. If he was wrong, then he would join Kirk and the others who hadn't rematerialized—wherever they might be. Spock tried not to think about where that most likely was: nowhere at all.
He stripped down and waited for the android's next reappearance, averting his eyes this time to avoid the flash. When he looked up again the android was gone, so he stepped into the pool, wincing at the sudden increase in temperature, and held his breath while he reached down for the plug and pulled it free. Water gurgled down the drain and Spock climbed back out of the pool, glad to be out of the heat. He had forgotten that the electrical discharge would warm the water even more than normal.
He dried off and dressed again while they waited. The pool was still half full when the android appeared the next time, so it disappeared with the same blue flash. The next time, however, the last of the water was just swirling around the drain when the android materialized in midair, then landed with a thud on the wet tile bottom. It was a mess. Phaser burns all along the front and right side and a disruptor burn on the left shoulder had exposed its inner workings, and its left arm was missing below the elbow. Much of the exposed circuitry was charred and crackling with sparks even without water to help short it out. Amazingly, the android struggled to raise its head, spotted the three men watching it, and croaked out, "Harcourt Fento—" before slumping back down, inert.
A second later it vanished again.
Mudd sniffed. Spock looked over at him, and was startled to see a tear run down his cheek. For an android? Perhaps it was the similarity to his wife that brought on the emotional response. Whatever the cause, Mudd noticed Spock's attention and immediately turned away, and when he turned back he had composed himself again.
"So, what do you think?" he asked gruffly.
Spock said, "I think we should look for the source of the transmissions. The Grand General's palace would be a logical place to start. What do you know of its secret byways?"
"Me?" Mudd protested. "Why do you think I'd—" He looked from Spock to Scotty, then blushed. "Never mind. All right, so I had a look around. And yes, there's an almighty big network of catacombs underneath it."
"That sounds like just the sort of thing we're looking for," Spock said. "Come on."
Chapter Twenty-one
SCOTTY COULD TELL that the Grand General was not happy to see them again. He was busy preparing for a major battle, and he made it clear that he only allowed them into the palace again because he needed their help in preventing it. Even then he insisted on accompanying the humans on their investigation.
"But you're wasting your time," he told them as they walked along the corridor from his temporary throne room toward the stairway. Blast scars pocked the surface at random all along its length, evidence of the fighting that had raged here only hours ago. "You won't find the Gods skulking around in the cellars. And they're most certainly not the mechanical mockery you suggest." He seemed personally offended at the very idea. Scotty wondered how much of that was righteous indignation, and how much was embarrassment over being fooled by the Stella android.
"Perhaps not," said Spock. "But there is the matter of the 'gods' eyes' that are installed in buildings throughout the planet. Those are mechanical, are they not?"
"Yes, but they're provided directly by the Gods. We certainly couldn't build something like that ourselves."
"No?" Scotty asked. "Then how do you get them? They don't just magically appear in the walls, do they?"
"No," the Grand General admitted. "They magically appear here in the palace, in the Gods' Eye Shrine."
That sounded promising. "Let's have a look at that first," Scotty said.
The Grand General sighed. "Very well." He turned left at the next cross-corridor
and led them through a maze of hallways and rooms to a small but lavishly decorated shrine. It looked at first glance like an insignificant religious altar, but upon closer examination Scotty recognized the pedestal in the center of the room as a raised transporter pad. The Grand General stepped around it to a glowing panel on the wall and waved his hand in front of the light. "Arbiters of fate," he said, "watch over us and guide us."
There was a soft whir and rush of displaced air; then a cylinder about six inches thick and a foot long, rounded on one end, appeared on the pad. Scotty scanned it with his tricorder. It was a sensing device, all right, already activated and beaming a steady stream of data—where? Nowhere in particular, it seemed. It just sent it out in all directions. Apparently these things worked like a decentralized computer network, sending out information through whatever route was open until it reached its intended target. It was a good design for multiple redundancy, but it made tracing things difficult.
Spock had taken a different approach; he had monitored the pad at the moment of beam-in. "The matter stream came from beneath us," he said. "I believe Harry's guess was correct: the machinery—or whatever—we seek is in the catacombs." He nodded to the Grand General, removed the sensor from the pedestal, and backed away out the door and down the hallway a few yards, saying, "If you could activate it again, I will attempt to triangulate."
The Grand General scowled at the notion of "activating" the gods, but he turned back to the control panel and waved his hands in front of it and beseeched the arbiters of fate again, and another "gods' eye" appeared on the pedestal.
Spock consulted his tricorder. "The source lies five hundred feet below us, and twelve hundred fifty feet to the northwest."
Scotty had been monitoring it this time as well, and his reading backed up Spock's. "All right," he said. "Now we're getting somewhere. Let's go have a look."
It was a long descent. They could probably have used one of the palace transporters, but Scotty didn't trust the alien machinery through so much rock, especially now that some of that machinery was malfunctioning. If the transporter web was tied together like the sensor web, there was no telling what might go wrong.
