distinctly out of place in the noisy, ill-mannered
mob packed to the walls in the dank, windowless
anteroom, the silent figure in the watchcap and
heavy dark
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
overcoat simply awaited his turn. Near
midnight, when even the most entrenched of the reporters
had given up and gone to supper, Spock alone
remained.
An exhausted secretary was locking the inner
offices when she found him.
"Everyone's gone," she told him. "You'll have
to come back tomorrow."
"You are here," Spock pointed out reasonably.
"Yeah, well, I'm going home. And even if
I weren't, I'm not authorised to review travel
applications."
"But the assistant director is. If I am
not mistaken, he is still in his office."
The secretary eyed him warily. "Says who?"
"Between seven A.m. and twelve noon today,"
Spock said, "seven persons including yourself entered
these offices. You are the sixth to leave. I believe
the person remaining is qualified to issue
travel permits."
"How do you know who his
"I was here," Spock said simply. "I watched
them."
"You've been here for over seventeen hours?"
"Seventeen hours and twenty-one minutes."
The girl nodded, amazed. "And I'll bet the
next thing you're going to say is that you're not leaving
until you speak to the assistant director."
"Correct."
"Okay!" She sighed, sat at the reception
desk, reached for a stylus and a computer form.
""Let me have your name, Mr. his
"Spock. his
"First name?"
He hesitated for only a moment. "Benjamin."
"And which media service do you represent, Mr.
Spock?"
Spock shook his head slightly. "I am not a
reporter. I have been sent by Professor Jeremy
Grayson of the Peace Fellowship."
He showed her the readout of the message from 333
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Stockholm. Her manner toward him became
suddenly deferential.
"We were told to expect Professor
Grayson himself."
"The professor was taken ill," Spock said,
wondering if that fact had altered radically during his
travels. "I have been sent in his place."
"I see," the secretary said. "Everything seems
to be in order. I'll just need some identification,
Mr. Spock."
It was the one thing he had hoped to avoid. If the
single item that had gotten him across borders and
oceans alike to bring him here should fail him now, he
could go no further. Reaching inside his collar and
skipping the fine silver chain over his head, Spock
cradled the symbol of peace in his hand.
It hardly compared with navigating a starship through
hyperspace, Gary Mitchell thought, checking his
coordinates in the jouncing
snowmobile, but it had its own excitement. With
luck he would reach Byrd within the hour.
Yoshi sat cross-legged on his bunk in total
darkness, contemplating the rest of his life.
He'd thought sleep would come easily after his long
soul-searching talk with the psychiatrist, but her words
had only replaced his old fears with new ones.
If his small life was so profoundly
affected by the presence of Vulcans, no wonder the
rest of the world was hysterical.
Suppose T'Lera was right, and Vulcans might
have come to Earth within his Lifetime? Suppose Dr.
BeRero was right, and there were things he could do to help?
The least he could do was to go find Tatya and
apologise for his caveman behavior, Yoshi
decided, groping for his jeans in the dark. He would
find her and Sorahl; he knew they'd be together,
possibly for the last time; the council might decide
as soon as tomorro tilde and tell her, tell
them he was sorry.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Something fell out of his jeans pocket and brushed
against his foot. Yoshi flicked on the reading lamp
and retrieved it.
"Stupid!" he chided himself aloud, unfolding the
computer printout. Anyone else would have put it in a
safe place before
Before it fell into the hands of people who would try try
to make him forget who had given it to him, Yoshi
thought. He'd told Dr. Bellero he was no kind
of hero, but maybe he could preserve something of
value. With sudden determination he found a
pencil, bracketed Sorahl's newly created
enzyme off from the rest of the formula, and gave it a
name. Then he refolded the printout and hid it in the
bottom of his duffel bag, and went for a walk in the
belly of the Whale.
T'Lera took the first game, forty-love,
She had come onto the court barefoot, her feet
too narrow for human tennis shoes, yet another
reminder of her difference.
"Never mind!" Melody waved off any
objection. "Some of the best of the Aussies play
barefoot."
Nevertheless, she kept staring at T'Lera's
feet.
"Quite within the norm of human acceptability,"
T'Lera assured her, extending each foot in
turn against the floor as if for inspection.
"Unlike the ears."
"Hey, I didn't mean ?"'
"Perhaps if Earth is to be our final home, your
surgeons might be called upon to remedy that
defect, that we might be more pleasing to the eye of the
beholder. was The T'Leran irony was
radiating full strength. From his place on the
sidelines, Jim Kirk could taste it; it
made his back teeth ache. He wondered how
Melody could
withstand the full intensity. "Unless of course you
prick us and we bleed . . ."
Have they all read Shakespeare? Kirk
wondered. And was there anything more than a difference in
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
degree between Sawyer's attitude toward
Vulcan intel1ect and his own?
"Your serve!" Melody barked from her side of the
net.
The human's sneakers made a great thumping,
squeaking Earthbound protest against the surface of the
indoor court, where the Vulcan seemed to float
against a gravity lighter than that of her world.
Melody's savage two-handed volleys were met with
effortless agility, answered with lofting
nonaggressive returns that gave no hint to the
human opponent as to where they would vector off and
descend. Jim Kirk's call of "Game!" in
T'Lera's favor was merely salt in the wound,
insult to injury.
"A hundred and thirteen, huh?" Melody
huffed, wiping her brow with the backs of her
wrists.
"Point-four-six," T'Lera replied.
Jim Kirk found himself hoping she'd beat the
pants off her.
Yoshi's footsteps on the metal stairs to the
bridge roused Jason Nyere from uneasy sleep.
"Wha?" The ca
ptain pulled himself upright in his
chair, instinctively going for the laser pistol he'd
returned to the weapons locker eight days ago; his
dreams had been that troubled.
"Easy, Jason," Yoshi told him. "Just
me. Not used to wearing shoes. Decks get cold
at night."
"Have to fix that," Nyere muttered, orienting himself,
eyeing the void of the comm screen wi/lly. "The
Vulcans his
was are becoming acclimated to the cold,
Captain," one of them assured him. More awake
now, Jason noticed Sorahl and Tatya as
well. "Please do not trouble yourself about that."
was time is it?" Jason wondered, squinting at the
chrono.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Time for you to get some shut-eye."
Yoshi tried to help the big man out of the chair.
"You can keep the screen on in your quarters, can't
you? Nothing's going to happen up here; they've
probably sealed off the whole continent by now."
"Ought to be on the bridge when it comes," Nyere
said halfheartedly, easing himself up. He was getting
too ol less-than like to sleep upright in a command
chair. "Captain's duty to keep the watch . .
."
He staggered. Yoshi supported him on one
side, Sorahl on the other.
"Want us to call Melody to the bridge?"
Yoshi asked. He got no answer; Jason was
asleep on his feet. Together Yoshi and Sorahl
half carried him into the radio room where there was a
daybed. Tatya removed Jason's boots and found
a blanket.
"Poor old man!" Yoshi mused as the three of
them tiptoed out.
Except for the stray monitor light, the bridge
was in total darkness. Beyond its wraparound window lay
a jumbled expanse of snow-covered pack ice,
trampled and dirty around the buildings at Byrd,
stretching as far as the rise of the glacial ridge that
marked the beginnings of the mainland. Above the
ice sprawled a breathlessness of stars.
"I guess we can't see Vulcan from here,"
Yoshi whispered as the threesome stood together on the
tower. Whatever else he was made to forget, he must
somehow condition himself to seek out the small red point of
Epsilon Eridani for all his nights.
"Only from your Northern Hemisphere,"
Sorahl replied solemnly, "my friend."
Had he sensed what emotions brought Yoshi here
or, being a Vulcan and without such
emotions as jealousy, did he simply disregard
them in others? No one spoke, no one dared look
anywhere but at the stars. Yoshi wrapped one long arm
around Tatya.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
She rested her head on his shoulder, recognising
as if from long ago the familiar smell of him of
sea breeze and sandalwood and something
uniquely Yoshi, Earth things, human things and
sighed, content.
Yoshi's other hand went instinctively to push his
lank hair out of his eyes, but stopped. Instead he
tossed his head back and reached out to clasp the
Vulcan's shoulder, gesture of
fraternity in spite of difference.
Sorahl accepted the gesture, and with it the un-
shielded turmoil of a human mind. This would be the
legacy of any Vulcan who dared call human
friend. Perhaps it was not yet time. But he would devote
whatever remained of his life to making it time.
A metal-cold figure with infrared eyes
picked out the three figures standing as one at the
window of the conning tower, targets so easy even he
was tempted. His weapon shifted and rose in his hands
as if of its own volition; he sighted off the
central figure and pondered whether it would be better
to take him first, then sweep side to side to pick
off the other two, or to start at either side and sweep
straight across. Either way it was a matter of
seconds. All three would be his.
"Racher?" A voice behind him. "There's
someone there. On the bridge."
Racher lowered his weapon reluctantly.
"Not yet." His breath made no vapor on the
deadly cold air. "Not yet."
"Game!" Jim Kirk called a second time,
raising his hands at Melody and shrugging as if
to say, What did you expect?
"Three out of five!" Melody barked,
though her sides were heaving and the sweat stung her eyes
even under the sweatband.
T'Lera seemed to weigh the dangers, if not the
gratuitous violence, of trampling so fragile a
human ego for the third time. Yet there was no question of
holding
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
back. She had accepted the challenge; she would do
what she must.
"I said three out of five, goddammit!"
Melody yelled across her hesitation, swinging wooden
arms to keep them limber, bouncing on an ankle that
hadn't hurt like this since Goddard.
T'Lera gathered herself, her bare toes gripping
the service line. "As you wish, Commander."
"It's all over for you come morning!" Melody
taunted her across the net as they played. "I hope
you realise that!"
"Indeed," was all T'Lera said.
"I don't understand you people," Melody huffed,
playing for her pride if not her planet. "Do not
understand you at all! You could have grabbed Yoshi and
Taty tilde and held us off. You could grab me
and the cream puff
here right now single-handed you're that strong. Take
over the ship tilde old off the whole goddamn
planet! What I don't understand is why you
don't!"
Jim Kirk had not cut across her monologue
to tally T'Lera's points; it was about to be over and
all he had done was witness. T'Lera's final
return was a butterfly, a dove, whose wings
lightly brushed the high ceiling of the gymnasium before
floating slow-motion down with a precision beyond any
human's saving. Jim Kirk would wonder forever after
if T'Lera had intended it to be so flamboyantly
poetic. As for him, he was speechless.
"Must might always make right, Commander?" T'Lera
wondered, becoming very still as the ball rolled
unmolested across the floor. "Are there not sometimes
greater considerations?"
was 'Greater considerations"!" Melody snorted,
at the net. There was no attempt to concede the match,
no consideration of the traditional handshake. Shake
hands with a Vulcan?
Impossible! "Loeic and lofty ideals! You're
all so noble, aren't you? You know, I think you could
almost change my mind if you'd just 339
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
once admit to being a little less than perfect.
if you'd show a little weakness, a little selfishness a little
concern for your son if nothing else.
"I have a daughter and a son not more than a year or
two either side of your son's age," Melody
finished. She was still out of breath, though no
t from tennis.
"If I were in your place, I'd be on my knees
begging for them!"
It would require years under the tutelage of
another Vulcan to teach Jim Kirk the constant
tension in the Vulcan soul between the pull of diversity
and the preservation of what it means to be a Vulcan.
All he could think of now was that T'Lera had met
her Vulcanian Expedition, and depending upon whether
her response was seen as logic or compromise .
. .
"Would such a display gratify you,
Commander?" There was Vulcan logic and a
thousand years of peace in her voice, Vulcan
pride and forty thousand prior years of ferocity in
her eyes. "Is it my humility you require, or
my humiliation?"
Before Melody Sawyer could find words, before Jim
Kirk could move, T'Lera of Vulcan, still somehow
unridiculous in her borrowed tennis
clothes, was on her knees at Melody's feet.
What she might have said no one would ever know; the
ship's loudspeaker shattered the silence before she could
speak.
"Red Alert! Red Alert!" it boomed throughout the
huge empty ship in Jason Nyere's command
voice. "Red Alert! First officer to the bridge!"
Sawyer took a split second to throw down her
racquet and grab a sweater. Jim Kirk was already
running.
Sorahl had heard the snowmobile first.
Bundled in a heavy parka gift of the departed
pacifist contingent, who had provided clothing for him
and his mother, neglecting only tennis whites he'd
opened the hatch to breathe the night air, marveling at
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
a cold so different from that of his world's desert
nights. If he had been listening then, he might have
sensed the shifting intensity of Racher's shadow
troops, who, seeing him clearly
silhouetted against the stars, could barely contain
themselves. But Tatya had been on her way up to join
him, and the sound of her footsteps
distracted him until
"What is it?" she asked, seeing his faraway
look.
"I hear something. An engine, perhaps."
Tatya listened, shook her head in amazement.
"Those ears! I don't hear anything!"
But they remained very still, and after a moment she heard
it too. So did Racher.
"Shoot before my order," he whispered fiercely,
to make certain everyone heard him, "and you are dead
before the one you shoot at."
He still somehow expected Easter's band to turn up
Strangers from the Sky Page 38
