Unless they were stopped on the
shores and the legal ramifications of that were
mind-boggling they could be on the ice within hours, and those
perceptive enough to guess at Byrd could be
here within a day or two.
It was why Jason and the Vulcans had been so
unceremoniously pulled out of the inquiry; it was why
everyone still inside Byrd was running around like chickens
wondering what to do next. It was why Melody
Sawyer finally broke down and told Jason about
Tatya's aunt in Kiev.
"You did what?" Jason repeated, looking down
at Tatya, who had collapsed all in a heap on
the carpet in his quarters, crying again. It seemed
all she'd done for the past two days had been cry for
one reason or another.
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"I thought if people knew it would help," Tatya
blubbered. She looked up at Jason tearfully.
"When Melody cut in, I did what she told
me. I told Tante Mariya not to break the
story. She wouldn't have, without my telling her.
Someone else must have overheard. I only wanted
to help!"
"Oh, you helped, all right!" Sawyer spat at
her from where she stood guard at the door, ready
to cave in the skull of the first Ground Forces flunky
who so much as set big toe across the
threshold. This was a family problem, and she would
see it stayed i. the family. The whole family was
here, too she and Jason, Yoshi and Tatya, and
and the other two. Whatever happened, it would happen
inside this room. "You fixed it so the brass have
to make the media out as liars no matter what. And
if they have to kill your friends here in order to kill the
stories his
"Goddammit to hell, Sawyer!" Jason
roared, knocking his chair over and advancing on her;
Melody had never seen him so angry. "You!
You've been sitting on this for how long? Why the
hell didn't you tell me?"
Melody pulled herself up so straight she was
trembling.
"Assumed the situation was contained and no need
to trouble you, sub!" she barked. "I heard her
retract her story and assumed the aunt bought it, and
was She broke, came as close as she could
to apologising. "Hell, Jason, I thought his
"That's always been your trouble, Sawyer!" Jason
spluttered. "How many times do I have to tell you
don't think!"
T'Lera passed a look to her son, a look that
said simply: Do you still question that it is not yet
time? Sorahl hung his head, wished only
to return to his makeshift laboratory and his
research, away from this human turmoil that gave him
cause to question everything he believed.
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"It's done now," Jason Nyere said
helplessly, his anger gone, replaced by a great
weariness.
"What's going to happen to us?" Yoshi seemed
perpetually bewildered, got up from where he'd had his
arm around Tatya, left her to dry her own tears.
"Jason?"
"Ground Forces will probably evacuate their people
and whoever else is willing to be "wiped" and
returned home," the captain said. "I think we can
be sure it's their intention not to be here if any
reporters get through the security cordon. As for the
rest of us . . ."
All nonmilitary personnel in the dining hall
were escorted back to their quarters until such time as
Ground Forces decided who was to go and who would be
allowed to stay. Rumors about the media leaks grew
more ominous with
repetition. What had started out as a
few individuals' concern over a stray flying
saucer was beginning to sound like an Earth-wide panic.
From the white-on-white perspective at Byrd,
there was no telling what was truth anymore.
Jim Kirk had been among the first to return
to his room voluntarily. Now he sat on his
bunk and slapped his communicator shut with a
grimace, hiding it in a secret compartment in his
luggage. Broadcasting for too long was dangerous
even on the high frequencies, and he hadn't been
able to reach Mitchell or Kelso. Lee had warned
him there might be too much interference this close to the
Pole. Not only that, he couldn't even get through
to Definer, who was caught up in the chaos with the rest
of the medical personnel. Deaf, blind, and on his own,
Jim Kirk decided it was time to act.
He retrieved his communicator, slipped it
into a pocket, and replaced the intell-agent ID
in his wallet with one of Kelso's backups, which
he'd had the presence of mind to activate before he
left Tierra del Fuego.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Taking advantage of the confusion still reigning in the
corridors among those who balked at
leaving, Jim Kirk blended in with the pacifist
contingent, blessing Lee Kelso for his ingenuity and
offering a silent prayer of thanksgiving to John
Gill for his lecture on the Dove Society.
"An anomaly," the noted historian had
called it in his lectures on pre-Federation
history at the Academy. "Possibly the first time
in human history that the intelligence community
stopped looking upon pacifists as the enemy and joined
with them in preserving the unity of Earth. The society
endured for over a century, until the Romulan
Wars focused intelligence attention outward against a
new enemy . . ."
Collector of esoterica even then, a certain
eager young plebe had absorbed every shred of
information he could find on the Dove Society,
used its techniques and code words in a covert
operation, with several fellow victims, in a brief
abortive foray against a common enemy of peace in the
person of an upperclassman named
Finnegan. Their victory had been short-lived
and Finnegan's vengeance swift and murderous, but
Jim Kirk's memory for useful trivia
endured.
To his surprise, the pacifists
immediately accepted him as one of their own.
"I had a premonition," their leader confided when
she'd secreted him in her cabin with the others, out of
Ground Forces' earshot, "when you asked that rather
pragmatic question of our unfortunate visitors this
afternoon. Pity T'Lera never had a chance to answer it.
I presume the "Colonel" is cover?"
"Naturally." Jim Kirk grinned at her.
She was a plump, grandmotherly type, but not
impervious to his charm. "It lends me more
credibility with the brassheads. Do you think they'll
send us home?"
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"They've already told us as much." The pacifists'
leader sighed. "We're to be airlifted out, then
detained somewhere while they "wipe" our
memories, then dropped on our respective
doorsteps as if we'd been away on a skiing
<
br /> weekend. We agreed to those terms from the beginning or
they would never have allowed us in. But we'd hoped for a
better outcome than this."
"Outcome?" one of her companions demanded. "This
is no outcome at all! The military intended
all along to "disappear" these people. The
news leak is just a ploy to keep us from speaking to the
Vulcans directly!"
"We should have called Grayson in," another
said. "They'd have listened to him."
They all began talking at once.
"dis . . hear he's been ill. . . Iost his
wife last year . . . wouldn't matter. You don't
know Grayson. You're too young to remember, but his
"We asked for Grayson from the beginning!" their
leader finally silenced them in exasperation. "They
refused to let us contact him. Obviously he
carries too much clout."
"Excuse me," Jim Kirk said, sticking his
neck out. "Who is this Grayson?"
They all looked at him, owl-eyed.
"You are rather young," their leader said, eyeing him
suspiciously. "And I suppose it has been that
long. Jeremy Grayson is professor
emeritus of the University of Pacifist Studies
at Vancouver, one of the founding members of the United
Earth Movement, and a hero of the Third War. Less
flamboyant than some of the others, certainly, and
he's been in retirement for years, but I would have
thought his
"Of course!" Jim Kirk lied,
thinking fast. "He was one of my-heroes as a boy.
I wasn't sure he was still alive. It seems a
little awesome that he'd be the same one...."
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
They seemed to accept that. Kirk promised himself
if he ever Scot out of this, he'd learn to be a little
less glib.
"If you could get in touch with Professor
Grayson . . ." he suggested.
"Impossible!" somebody said. "We won't be
allowed to communicate with the outside until after
we've been "wiped." By then we won't
remember why we came here, or even that we came
here."
"But if someone else could?"
"Jeremy would be able to find a sane solution to this;
I'm certain of it," the leader said sadly. "And he
commands sufficient respect from world leaders to make it
stick. But it's too late for that now."
"Maybe not," Jim Kirk said, and reached a
decision.
Starfieet's Prime Directive, he
reminded himself, precluded interference with any
normal culture progressing at its own
pace. There were no regulations on the books
pertinent to time travel. Ergo the only directive
that applied to time travel was the moral obligation not
to do anything that would alter the future. He didn't
know if his mere presence here had already irrevocably
changed history, but now that he was here, he had to do
what he could to bring about a peaceful resolution to this
crisis.
He whipped his communicator out of his back
pocket.
"I have a device here," he began as the
assembled pacifists gathered around to get a closer
look. "It's highly classified, and I can't
tell you how it works, but it's quite possible I can get
a message to your Professor Grayson with it.
If you can trust me to remain here as your
spokesperson . . ."
Before the media had broken the space-aliens
story, and before Ground Forces and the
PentaKrem sought some legal way to cordon off
the entire continent of Antarctica, two small
pleasure copters skimmed in low
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
over the floe ice and settled on their
pontoons on the seaward edge of the Ross Ice
Shelf some five hundred kilometers from Byrd.
The individuals who emerged from them, ruffling the
feathers of the penguin population with the crash and dank of
several snowmobiles sliding down the
unloading ramps, were anything but tourists.
"We split up," Racher decreed at once,
leaping onto the ice in his arctic fatigues, his
face grey against their blinding white, his metal
voice whirring and clicking in the frigid air. "You
that way, we this. A pincer, with them in the center, so!"
His mittened fist closed like a vise in
demonstration.
His people, an even dozen of them tilde ameless,
faceless, sexless, and armed to the teeth stood in
solid ranks behind him to face Easter's ragged
crew, Red and Aghan and the only others he could
gather on such short notice: Kaze the
self-styled ninja and Noir, who was either
Rastafarian, born-again Mau Mau, or Avenging
Angel of Allah, depending upon the day of the week.
The contrast was not lost on Easter, who was immediately on
the defensive.
"Says you!" he snarled, coming as close to the armed
Racher as he dared, glaring into those unblinking
metal eyes. "Think yer God, do yer?"
Aghan rolled his eyes at Red, who ignored
him. Their leader was hell-bent on prolonging their
stay in the cold with this show of bully-boy arrogance;
better to be snug inside the plush, well-heated
snowmobiles, gift of an arms dealer experiencing
some lean times since Colonel Green's demise
and looking for fresh territory.
"Yer don't give me orders!" Easter
growled, scuffing his feet against the ice when Racher
did not deign to respond. "Hear me?"
"Together we are too visible," Racher stated
flatly. "You wish to be captured? Perhaps you do not
trust me? Or perhaps you are afraid?"
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
This earned him a string of curses which he dismissed
with an indifferent shrug; even his shoulder joints had
a metallic sound. He fondled his small laser
rifle and glanced over his shoulder at his troops,
who smirked in unison at their leader's cool.
"You are finished?" Racher asked when it looked like
Easter had run out of spit. "We split up."
Easter cursed a final time, motioned his lot
into their two snowmobiles, though not before
Aghan decided to take some target practice at
a flock of penguins.
He aimed his automatic and let off a full
clip, laughing manically at the splatter of blood
and guts and feathers and the prodigality of noise
rolling flat out over the ice with nothing to rebound it.
"Lookit, Easter, look!" He danced in
delight. "I got me a whole bunch of
spacemen!"
Racher spat on the ice. "Verrdckter!"
His troops in their snowmobiles soon vanished
over the horizon, far from already gelid splash of
innocent blood, across a landscape of white on
white.
White lather foamed in pleasing soft billows
against the sides of the shaving mug as Spock stirred it
with the badger-hair brush. The brush had given him
pause the first time Jeremy Grayson asked
him
to assist an old man with shaking hands in the ritual
of shaving, but Spock considered finally that the badger
might not have minded overmuch the honor of offering its
small life in service to a fellow creature who
had done as much good as Grayson.
"Hate to put you through this rigamarole, Ben,"
Grayson said as Spock, expertly now,
stroked the lather onto his weathered face and began
to ply the razor. "I'm probably the last man
on Earth who cherishes an old-fashioned barbershop
shave. Consider it a point of vanity. I like
to look my best even if no one can see me.
Does that make sense?"
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Of course, Professor," Spock replied.
One of such age was permitted his own illogic.
"And the "rigamarole" does not inconvenience me."
Rather, it is something of an honor, Grandfather.
They were in the kitchen again Jeremy
Grayson seemed to live in the kitchen, except
when he had visitors and the vidscreen was just coming up
for the early morning news, Grayson's way of
"keeping a finger on the pulse of mayhem" as he
put it.
"I've decided it may be safe for me to pass
on soon," he remarked, watching the screen with the
volume down as Spock trimmed his sideburns.
"I do believe we've andally gotten over the need
to kill each other on a global scale. I'll
leave the minor skirmishes to the younger generation. Lord,
I do get tired sometimes! Though I may
stay around to learn if the Icarus mission finds
anyone on Alpha Centauri."
Spock wiped the remaining lather off the
professor's face in silence. Grayson was
scowling at the vidscreen.
"burn that up a bit, would you, Ben? Your ears
are obviously better than mine. This looks like
something that may need our attention."
Together they listened to several of the saner versions of the
space-aliens story.
"Well, what do you think of that7" Grayson
mused.
"Possibly a hoax?" Spock wondered
aloud, his mind awhirl with permutations and
calculations, none of which made much sense in the
abstract. If the stories were true, if there were in
fact aliens present on Earth, might their
presence be connected with his untimely arrival?
"Maybe, maybe not," Grayson said, pulling
himself to his feet and groping for his cane. "But if
it's anything like the truth, I have a fair idea the
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