It was the one argument that could stop Kirk, even
momentarily. And in that moment Jason was past him.
The four on the bridge heard Nyere double-time down
the steps, heard a rush of air and clanking of
bolts that meant he had sealed the bridge off from the
rest of the ship. They were trapped.
Jim Kirk rushed down the steps, pounded on the
sealed bulkhead, too late.
"Jason!" he yelled. "Jason, listen to me!
"Damn!" he whispered tightly, returning to the
bridge, collapsing unawares in the captain's
chair. "I tried to stay within bounds, tried to do it
by the book, and I've failed! My fault!"
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Mitchell had no time for self-recrimination.
He and Spock were already stripping down for action,
removing their heavy outdoor clothing, though Spock
wisely retained the watchcap. Mitchell was soon
at the gunnery slit, casing the joint. He whistled
softly. "Oh, boy!"
Kirk was on his feet. "What is it?"
"Well, take your pick," Mitchell
said. "A major blizzard packing about
eighty-mile-an-hour winds, or three big old
choppers grounded and stuffed to the gills with media
types. Getting out of here isn't going to be
easy."
"Out is not the way we want to go," Kirk said
emphatically. "Spock, there has to be an
override to trigger that hatch." He sat the
Vulcan down in his seat at the console.
"Captain, I am still uninformed as to the reason for
Captain Nyere's actions or our need for
urgency."
"Later, Spock, later. If there is a
later," Jim Kirk said. "Gentlemen, let's go
to work."
Melody had been only too pleased to find the
lady shrink floating the corridors against orders;
sending her to the bridge had eliminated one major
stumbling block. Jason's laser pistol, concealed
in the pocket of her tennis sweater, would eliminate
the rest.
"Over there!" she ordered T'Lera without
preamble, locking the infirmary door behind her,
bracing her back against it for cover, the laser pistol
aimed right between those quizzical eyebrows.
"Junior, you too. Yoshi, Tatya, stay where you
are. Don't even breathe!"
Tatya gave a little involuntary cry.
"Melody!"
"I said don't breathe!" Melody rasped, not
taking her eyes off the Vulcans. "Sit still! This
time tomorrow you'll be on your way home and it will all be
a bad dream! They'll be 'wiped," their
memories erased," she explained offhandedly
to T'Lera, wonder
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
ing why she bothered; she owed the Vulcan nothing.
"We all wills"
"Indeed?" The Vulcan had risen to her feet
at once, unfaltering. Not an overly imposing
figure, but one to whom attention was due nevertheless.
"And this permits you to take our lives?"
"Better me than Jason," Melody said, her
jaw set.
"I quite understand," T'Lera said. "But would it not be
preferable that I accept the responsibility?"
Melody's gun hand faltered. "You'd do that?
Take your own life, kill your own son?"
"I had thought to spare my son,"
T'Lera said, a color to her voice that none of them
had heard before, except perhaps Sorahl, in a time
before memory. "On the tennis court you suggested my
weakness would move you. This is my weakness: I would
plead for my son, for his life: and his freedom in
exchange for mine. Would you have granted me this?"
"I wouldn't have had the authority," Melody
began, but it was Sorahl's voice T'Lera
heard.
"My commander has instructed me to inform her should I
detect a flaw in her logic." As he had
aboard their scoutcraft, he sought to dissuade her from
sacrificing another's life for his.
"Be silent!" T'Lera cautioned him, knowing
what he was attempting. Her eyes never le*
Melody's "I see, Commander, that his
"Mother," Sorahl said now as he had then.
"Kroykah!" T'Lera hissed now as she had
then, violating her father's dictate and her own in
regard to languages unknown to all who could hear her
voice. If her son above all did not understand what
she did and why Her control was all but shattered;
gathering the shards she had left, she focused all
her will on Melody. "I see now I was in error.
You cannot give my son freedom, only
death. But it must be by my hands. I will ask for this.
Then you may do with me what you will."
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Melody shook her head. "You could really do that?"
She looked at Sorahl, as if expecting common
sense from him at least. "And you'd permit it?"
The young Vulcan had stood with head bowed beneath his
mother's reprimand. Now his
velvet-dark eyes met Melody's.
"It was our intention from the beginning," he said with some
fledgling mastery that might someday have flourished
to equal his mother's.
"Aboard your ship, in a crisis I can see
that!" Melody's hand was frankly shaking now; she
two- handed the pistol, lowered it more toward
T'Lera's heart, or where it was supposed to be.
"But in cold blood? I don't his
"Our blood is no colder than yours,
Commander," T'Lera said, deliberately
misunderstanding. "The weapon is not needed. Only
give us a place where we may be alone."
"I do not understand you people at all!" Melody
shouted, very near hysteria. Even two-handed she could not
keep the pistol still. "I don't want your
nobility, your pity, your goddamn condescending
Vulcan 'understanding" his
"Looks like you're stuck with them anyway, John
Wayne," Jason rumbled from the side, stepping in
beside T'Lera.
Melody cursed herself for a punchy
sleep-deprived fool; she'd forgotten all about
the waiting-room entrance. How much had he heard'
"Captain sub," she said, chin up, control
regained, voice colder than the blizzard raging
outside. "You are in my line of fire!"
"And that," Kirk concluded, watching Spock
manipulating switches at the helm control while
Mitchell and Dehner worked over the weapons locker
with Kelso's lock pick, "is how we end up
gathered here today.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Except for Kelso. Only God knows where
Lee Kelso
is$'i
"Only God and Mr. Kelso," Spock
corrected him mildly, touching a final toggle and
sitting back as the hatch below clanked and slid open
like magic. "I should like to meet this Parneb.
A discussion of temporal dynamics with such a being
would be most ilium his
"Later," Kirk cut him off, grabbing a
weapon from Mitchell. He thought fast. Tlie
fewer people who got a look at Sp
ock "Mr.
Spock, you and Dr. Dehner will wait here.
Don't let anybody else aboard. Mr.
Mitchell, let's go!"
"Tatya, don't be an idiot!" Melody
said.
"I know what I'm doing!" the young woman said with a
quietude and dignity that surprised everyone. She
had used the distraction of Jason's arrival to move
across the room to where the Vulcans were, blocking their
bodies with her own. "I can't let you take them
away again! I can't live with never knowing what
happened! If you can kill two innocent people,
Melody Sawyer, the third can't be all that hard."
Exasperated, Melody almost lowered her
weapon. "Yoshi, do something! Talk some sense
into her, can't you?"
The young man stood alone on the far side of the
room, separated from everything he believed in by the
point of a laser. He'd told Dr. Bellero he
was no kind of hero. Was it heroism
to admit he couldn't stand by and watch these people
destroyed?
"I never could talk her into anything; you know that."
He swept his hair out of his eyes, moved to join the
others casually. "Give it your best shot, Mel.
No one'll blame you."
Did she only imagine she heard Jason
laughing at her again? He was out of her range of
vision, off to the side where she'd bullied him with the
pistol, not realising he
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
was that much closer to grabbing it from her if he'd
wanted to.
"Well, John Wayne?" he rumbled.
"Looks like you've got the whole shooting match.
What're you going to do with it?"
Melody lowered the pistol, let it fall to the
Hoor, flung herself at Jason and began to pound
him with her fists. He held up his hands and let her
until, exhausted, she fell sobbing against him, and
he wrapped her in a bear hug and stroked her
hair.
Her voice was muffled by his tunic. "Damn you
anyway, Jason Nyerer'
"Yeah, I know," he soothed. "Pity the
council won't be as easy to persuade! Come on,
tough guy. I'm going to put you to bed."
It was the moment Kirk and Mitchell chose
to kick in the infirmary door.
"Sorry," Kirk offered lamely. "We thought
there might be a problem."
Jason Nyere, still holding Melody, threw
back his head and roared.
Humans! T'Lera thought, more with incredulity than
with disgust. For them it was over one crisis averted, a
moment of levity before the next the fina tilde
crisis, and its final solution. Did they not understand
that in that moment of shared levity the responsibility for
that final solution had fallen out of human hands, and
into Vulcan, where it should have been from the beginning?
The responsibility was now T'Lera's alone.
The methodology would be at her discretion, in the
place of privacy that she had asked of Melody
Sawyer. She would do what she must soon, now, before
humans could intervene yet again.
"You will inform Captain Nyere that we are
returning to our quarters to await his superiors'
decision," she instructed her son in her best command
tone and, answering his unasked
question: "Nothing more."
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Understood, Commander," Sorahl replied, taking
her meaning, placing his life once more in her hands.
"1 am prepared."
His motherst-mander acknowledged his fealty with her
silence, and departed, that she might also be prepared.
Jason had ordered Kirk and his party to remain in
Kirk's quarters while he sorted things out.
Dehner, sitting on her bunk in the small cabin,
reluctantly made room for Mitchell. Her
sharing a cabin with Kirk had required some
explaining.
"Lovers, huh?" Mitchell teased her now,
scrunching in beside her. "Just for the sake of the mission?
You expect me to believe that? Why, old Jim
here's got a reputation second only to mine for his
"Gary, not now!" Kirk snapped. He turned
to Dehner, the beginnings of an idea forming in his head.
"Did you get what you needed?"
"Fortunately for us," Dehner reported. "One
of the station personnel on Agro Four has a form of
Parkinson's Disease, and he's under treatment with
Neodopamine. Delphinus delivers it
to him two or three times a year. I managed
to get hold of a six-month supply. Far more than
we'll need. And there was enough Demerol down there
to chill out the entire southern hemisphere. I took
as much as l could fit in my pockets."
"Then you're set?" Kirk wanted to know.
"On the supply side, yes. But I'll need
a clear head and a quiet place to work before I dare
try hypnosis under such primitive conditions."
"We'll see you get everything you need," Kirk
said with more assurance than he felt.
"Everything she needs for what, Kirk?" Jason
Nyere was beyond the amenities by now, hadn't bothered
to knock. "I came to ask you to give Melody a
shot of
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
something." He addressed Dehner. "Calm her
down, help her sleep, and, frankly, keep her
out of my hair for the next couple of hours."
"Of course, Captain," Dehner said.
"I've just come from topside," Nyere said to them
all. "The blizzard looks to be letting up some,
which means we'll have reporters spewing out of those
choppers and swarming up the sides in no
time. And it's been half an hour since the last
message from Command. That gives me less than that
much time to find a way around an order that in conscience
I can't obey."
He handed Definer a key. "I'll show you where
we keep the prescription stuff."
"I know where it is, Captain." Dehner took
the key from him, thinking wryly of all the skulking
around she'd had to do last night. "I won't be
long."
"Thank you!" Jason nodded. Nothing this bunch
did could surprise him anymore he thought. He
waited until Dehner had left. "Everything she
needs for what, Kirk?"
"About your orders, Captain," Kirk stalled,
though he already knew what he was going to do. "Are you
so sure what they'll be?"
"Kirk, I'm career Aeroationav," Nyere said
wearily. "That makes me an authority on
Murphy's Law. I've also lived long enough to know
that it's human nature to solve a small problem
by turning it into a bigger one. This Vulcan way of
logic begins to sound very appealing after a while."
He shook his head in disbelief. "Why am I
telling you this? I've been staring down the
barrel of a general court-martial since I first
met the lady with the ears. It doesn't matter
anymore who you are or if I can trust you; I'm
finished."
"What are you going to do?"
Jim Kirk asked him
quietly.
Jason sighed. "It may be a fate worse
than death, but 365
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
with the lady's permission I'm going to turn her and
her son over to those reporters as soon as the weather
clears. I don't know anyone else who could hold
up better under the three-ring circus, and once she
does not even the PentaKrem can pretend she
doesn't exist."
"Captain," Jim Kirk said tightly, "that's
the worst thing you can possibly do."
"Oh, is it?" Jason said mildly. "Says
who?"
"I guess we still have a lot of explaining to do,"
Kirk said.
"I'd say that was about right," the captain of the
Delphinus conceded dryly.
"Well!" Kirk said breezily, rubbing his hands
togeth en Once the decision was made, the
rest was easy. Sort of. "Captain, I think
you'd better sit down. What we have to tell you is
more than a little incredible."
"So if you tell T'Lera what you've just told
me . . ." Jason Nyere said after he'd
absorbed it all.
"I'm afraid we can't do that, Captain,"
Kirk said.
"Why not? It would solve everything. If she
understood she and her son were interfering with history his
"We cannot burden T'Lera with certain
knowledge of the future, Captain Nyere," Spock
explained. Nyere had not been able to take his eyes
off this new Vulcan, this confirmation that there really was
a planet full of them, and offshoots scattered
throughout the galaxy, and who knew what manner of other
strange, exotic beings out there to be encountered in a
future Jason Nyere would not live long enough
to share. The knowledge Kirk had given him was both a joy
and great bitterness; he would be glad to be free of
it. "Vulcans cannot be made to "forget" by means
of drugs and hypnosis as humans can; therefore
whatever information we gave T'Lera, she would have
to retain for life. Further, if we are to enable her
and Sorahl to return to Vulcan, as I
assume we are his
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"Gary may have come up with a solution to that," Kirk
interjected, giving Mitchell the floor.
"We may be able to "borrow" a
spacecraft," Mitchell said, ungluing himself from the
doorframe where he'd taken to lounging. "There's
an abandoned missile installation left over from the
Third War dug into the rock under the Western
Strangers from the Sky Page 41
