Star Trek - TOS 38 Idic Epidemic

by Jean Lorrah

  “Alternatives?”

  “Set down—but where?”

  Where, indeed? Below them the river was already spring-swollen, filling the canyon from one side to the other. The hoverer was not watertight, and if it had been it was never built to be a raft. The river would simply carry them into the rapids and smash them on the rocks.

  While they held their hasty conversation, both fought the bucking controls. “Visibility deteriorating,” Kevin noted.

  It was not news to his father. “Let’s go, then.” He let the craft slew left, then right, feeling for rising wind. When he found it, he rode it toward the right-hand canyon wall. “Friend or enemy?”

  “If the enemy provides an advantage,” Kevin replied, “take it and use it against him. There. Up that rockslide! It’ll take that angle, Father.”

  They rose rapidly until they reached the limit of the thrusters against the canyon floor. Now they had only angular momentum, tilting the small craft crazily to thrust against rocks, ice, canyon wall. Korsal applied more power until the engines wailed in protest. The snow closed in around them.

  “Visibility zero,” Kevin reported.

  The hoverer’s instruments were not meant for this kind of flying, but they were all Korsal had to go by as he flew “by the seat of his pants” as his Human instructor had once called it.

  Tossed by the wind, they couldn’t tell whether they were rising at all. “Altimeter on barometric!” he told Kevin. It had been reading their distance from the nearest surface below them. Now it registered a slow but definite climb. “Good,” said Korsal, peering through the flying snow.

  “Antigrav warning,” Kevin said suddenly. “Overheating!”

  Korsal saw the red light flashing, but he had no choice now—it was either up and out, or crash into the river.

  They were still climbing, but yawing and heaving until he did not know which direction to steer. If he leveled off too soon, they would crash into the canyon wall; if he did not level off soon—

  Its warning light ignored, the antigrav malfunction siren began to sound. “Altimeter relative to surface!” Korsal ordered, eyed it as he urged the craft toward the horizontal—they were safe, some two meters above solid ground!

  He leveled off, blind, intending to settle on the canyon lip and wait out the storm.

  But he had not reckoned with the overheated antigravs.

  He heard the warning sizzle as they settled on layers of snow and ice. “The thrusters!” he exclaimed. “They’ve melted through their insulation! Kevin —jump! Run!”

  Cold air swept into the tiny cabin as Kevin opened the left-hand door and vaulted into the snow.

  Korsal thrust open the door on his side—just as the explosion came.

  He was lifted, tossed through the air like just another snow pellet, and slammed against something huge and hard. He heard ribs snap, then felt the pain, but for a moment he was still able to think as his body slid bonelessly to the ground.

  Kevin! He wanted to shout, but had no strength, no breath. Had the boy jumped far enough from the craft? Or had the explosion caught him too?

  Korsal tried to move, but could not. He tried to shout, but produced only a muffled gurgle. Then blackness and cold shut out all thought.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When Spock explained the new findings on the Nisus plague to Captain Kirk, he saw his friend’s face pale. But immediately the Human’s natural optimism reasserted itself. “It’s a clue, Spock. Medicine’s not my field, but it’s McCoy’s, and all these other experts’. They’ll build on this information to find a vaccination or a cure.”

  “What security classification do you want placed on the information?” asked Spock.

  “Need to know,” Kirk replied, “and continue to code all reports to Starfleet. Bones will brief everyone on the medical mission, but there’s no point giving this information to the rest of the crew … or any of the other passengers.”

  “My parents—” Spock suggested, but Kirk cut him off.

  “There is no reason to worry them, Spock. You are not setting foot on that planet.”

  Spock nodded wearily. Vulcans were realists, basing their lives on facts and logic. Nevertheless, he found it troublesome that his hybrid nature was now a physical liability. Many times in his life he had blamed illogic or emotion on his Human blood—but those things were still his choice, under his control. This mutating plague was not.

  A puzzle like this plague was irresistible. Until the new information had come in last night, he had been determined to find a “logical” way to beam down to Nisus with McCoy.

  As happened only too disconcertingly often, Kirk had followed his train of thought. “I’m frustrated too, Spock,” the captain said. “No, not over as serious a matter, but I can’t beam down to Nisus, either—and that means I have to deliver by viewscreen a message I’d dearly love to deliver in person.”

  “And what is that?” Spock responded.

  “Seems there is a young man on Nisus who has just pushed me out of the record books for youngest admission to Starfleet Academy.” Kirk did not appear at all unhappy to have his record broken.

  “A Vulcan?” Spock suggested.

  Kirk grinned. “Not unless Vulcans have changed their pattern of naming. This young man’s name is Kevin Katasai.”

  Katasai! Spock felt his eyebrows rise involuntarily.

  Kirk saw, and frowned. “What—you know him, Spock?”

  “No. However … the engineer who uncovered the spread pattern of the plague is one Korsal Katasai, presumably a relative of this successful candidate.”

  Kirk’s frown grew even deeper. “Korsal? That sounds like—” He broke off with a laugh. “Come on, Spock; it’s just a coincidence! Starfleet’s certainly not going to admit Klingons to the Academy!”

  “You are probably right, Captain,” Spock replied. It did seem a most unlikely thing for Starfleet to do.

  They left the briefing room, but Kirk was in no hurry to return to the bridge. He accompanied Spock to the large mess hall, where most of their passengerswere having breakfast. There they joined Sarek and Amanda, who were eating breakfast with Daniel Corrigan and his wife, T’Mir.

  Spock sat down with his tray just in time to hear his mother say to T’Mir, “I have always found that there is a far greater difference in ways of thinking between male and female than between Vulcan and Human.”

  Daniel gave his wife a grin that spoke volumes, but T’Mir looked demurely down at her plate, then back to Spock’s mother. “I am beginning to understand that,” she said softly.

  Sarek arched an eyebrow and said to Daniel, “Mulier est hominis confusio.”

  The Human doctor’s grin turned to helpless laughter. T’Mir stared from her husband to Sarek and back. “What did he say?” she demanded.

  “Woman is man’s joy and all his bliss,” Daniel choked out.

  Amanda gave Sarek a look compounded of amusement and annoyance.

  T’Mir caught it, saw that her own husband could not meet her eyes, and said, “Daniel, that is not what it means!”

  “It is,” he replied, “according to an ancient authority from Earth, one Chauntecleer.”

  With that Spock, whose Latin was good enough that he had recognized the true meaning of the saying, remembered where it came from. Chaucer. Trust Sarek to cast his jokes in literary obscurity! Glancing at Kirk, he saw his captain smothering a grin, and remembered Kirk’s passion for ancient books.

  T’Mir cocked an eyebrow at Sarek and said, “I shall have to look up that reference.”

  “Precisely what you should do,” Spock’s father replied, exactly as if he were speaking to one of his students.

  It had occasionally occurred to Spock, since he had reached maturity, that possibly his adolescent decision to apply to Starfleet Academy rather than the Vulcan Academy of Sciences might have been influenced by a desire not to have either of his parents as a teacher, especially his father. Sarek professed not to understand the concept of
humor, but was reputed frequently to produce the same reaction in his non-Vulcan students that he had just created in Dr. Corrigan.

  When the thought occurred, though, Spock quickly suppressed it, as he did today.

  As the small commotion at their table faded, Spock became aware of something at the food console. A young Vulcan woman was waiting for her choice to appear in the cubicle when Sendet came up to her. Spock could not hear their words, but he saw the woman give a negative movement of her head.

  The cubicle door slid open and the woman removed her tray and started away. Sendet followed.

  As they approached the table where Spock sat, he could hear Sendet saying, “You must listen to me, T’Pina. You have the strength, the intelligence to be one of us. Let me show you what comes of practicing this grand ideal of IDIC.”

  “Sendet,” T’Pina said flatly, “I do not wish to speak to you further. Please go away.”

  By this time Kirk had noticed, but even as he shoved his coffee aside and started to rise, another voice spoke loudly. “Sendet! Let the woman hear, along with everyone else. Then she will have facts with which to make her choice.”

  Satat stood just inside the door, flanked by other Followers of T’Vet. Now he strode forward, toward Kirk.

  The captain rose, and so did Spock, automatically assuming a position behind him and to one side, where he could defend his back if necessary. From the other side of the room, Lieutenant Uhura, the only other line officer there, got up and moved to a similar position on Kirk’s other side.

  Satat looked over the group at the table with a sneer. “I take it you have not told them, Captain Kirk. Surely these practitioners of IDIC”—he spoke the words as if they tasted bad—”would not sit calmly eating breakfast if they knew the secret data supplied to your medical unit during the night.”

  “What do you know about such data?” Kirk countered.

  “You are a fool, Captain. Do you think because we practice the ancient philosophies that we are technological savages? There are computer experts among us. We have been monitoring all data relayed to the Enterprise.”

  Their monitoring had never been noticed because no one had ever considered that the Followers of T’Vet might do such a thing. Kirk looked to Spock for an explanation. “Any computer technologist could program one of our standard monitors to interface with the sickbay computer,” he said. “Why did you do it, Satat? You gave your word not to interfere with the operation of the Enterprise.”

  “Our monitoring did not interfere—but it gave us the justification for all that we stand for. This unnamed plague is irrefutable evidence of what happens when Vulcans forget their true heritage, turn from warriors into philosophers, and pollute their bloodlines with alien genes! Infinite diversity exists—no one can dispute that. But infinite combination is against nature. You see the results on Nisus!”

  “Captain Kirk,” said Sarek, “do you know what this man is talking about?”

  “Yes, I know,” Kirk said grimly. “The latest discovery concerning the Nisus plague. We knew it kept mutating, becoming more severe with each new strain. What we have just learned is that the deadlier strains develop… when it attacks people of mixed heritage.”

  Sarek and Amanda looked at one another and then at Spock. Sarek raised his hand, and Amanda touched her first two fingers to his. Daniel Corrigan also reached for his wife’s hand, but gripped it in the Human fashion.

  And Satat continued triumphantly, “This disease is only the latest symptom of the corruption spread from Earth and Vulcan to every world which has allowed high-sounding ideals to overpower fact. Give the plague its proper name now, for its true source. Call it the IDIC Epidemic!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Korsal awoke to bitter cold and pain. He did not know where he was. Everything was a white and gray blur. When his eyes focused, he recognized that the white was snow, falling all around him so thickly that he could make out nothing more than a few meters away. The gray shapes were rocks and trees.

  Memory returned. Kevin!

  He tried to sit up, and pain stabbed through his right side. He tried to take a deep breath, to call his son’s name, but again the sharp pain stopped him.

  “Father?”

  The voice was faint, blown away by the wind. But Kevin was alive!

  Despite the pain, he drew breath and tried to shout. It came out a croak. “Kevin!”

  “Father? Are you all right?”

  Again he tried to answer, managing only a gasping wheeze.

  But there was a faint shape out there in the whiteness now. Was it just a tree branch blown by the wind? No! Something moving toward him—

  “Father!” Kevin knelt beside him. “You’re hurt!”

  “Just… broken ribs,” Korsal got out.

  “Lie still, then,” said Kevin, and delved into Korsal’s pockets for his gloves, which he had taken off inside the hoverer. Kevin helped his father put them on over shaking hands. “The antigrav engines exploded.”

  “I know. Are you hurt?”

  “No. I was thrown clear. Lost my glasses, though. Don’t try to talk. I know what to do; we just have to survive till the storm’s over. They’ll send a search party. The fire in the hoverer is almost out. In this snow it’ll cool off quickly, and then I’ll see what I can salvage.”

  “Not…in the blizzard,” Korsal gasped. “Lucky you found me.”

  “We make our own luck,” Kevin said. It was a Human saying, but it could as easily have been Klingon. “You can’t move around to keep warm, so I’m going to build a shelter and start a fire.” He took off his jacket and laid it over Korsal. “Exercise will keep me warm till I get the fire going.”

  Kevin and Korsal both wore heavy utility knives inside their boots—badge of manhood, earned at Survival, but also an all-purpose instrument that served as well in a fight as it did now. Kevin cut a low-hanging limb from a pine tree and used it first as a broom to clear the snow away from where Korsal lay.

  He made a bed of pine boughs to insulate them from the frozen ground, and with great care helped his father onto it. Korsal felt odd, being supported and cared for by his son—as if they had suddenly changed places. He was deeply proud of the boy. In a genuine emergency, Kevin was reacting calmly and competently. Because of that, they would probably survive.

  Kevin constructed a lean-to, Korsal unable to contribute more than the effort of putting points on the limbs before Kevin drove them into the packed snow.

  Fortunately, the boy did not have to search far forwood, as the snow was falling ever more thickly, the wind howling. Korsal watched him strip wet bark back, shred the dry inside of a limb into tinder. “Now,” he said, “how do we light it? I have a magnifying glass but no sun, steel but no flint—there will be firestarters in the hoverer’s emergency kit, if it wasn’t blown up.”

  “There’ve been no secondary explosions,” said Korsal. “I think you dare go to the hoverer to get the kit.”

  But the snow was now falling so thick and fast that I although it was noonday, darkness had settled over f them. Korsal peered out of the shelter and decided, “No sign of stopping. In that you could get lost and freeze to death not ten meters away. It’s getting colder. We’ll have to start the fire by friction.”

  It was not an easy task in the cold, damp air, but Kevin worked diligently, spinning a stick amid the tinder he had created. “At least my hands are getting warm,” he joked. “I can’t feel my feet anymore.”

  Nor could Korsal feel his. In fact, his whole body was getting numb. Perhaps the best thing would be just to go to sleep, let his body heal—

  “Father! Father, wake up!”

  He was hauled to a sitting position, gasping at the pain in his broken ribs.

  “Wake up!” Kevin demanded. “I won’t let you freeze to death!”

  “Snowing… not cold enough—” Korsal muttered.

  “The wind chill is!” said Kevin. “Stay awake, Father. Talk to me!”

  “What?” He cracke
d open one eye, to find his son peering myopically at him.

  “Talk to me!” Kevin demanded again. “Tell me … tell me about the empire. What if I go there someday? What will I have to do to be accepted?”

  “Fight,” Korsal said groggily.

  “In the military. Yes—but what else? I want to be a scientist, like you, not a soldier.”

  “They want… weapons.”

  Kevin picked up his tinder and spinning stick again. “Tell me about families. What was it like growing up in the Klingon Empire?”

  “Like here. Passed Survival … went to school. Always good in school, better than my brothers, but they were bigger, stronger. Krel—he was the oldest. I remember… he taught me klin zha. By the time I was eight I always won. And he always challenged again… .”

  “Father?” sharply from Kevin.

  “I couldn’t win at wrestling, shooting, running. None of the others would game with me. But Krel—he always … always gave me the chance to do what I was good at.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said Kevin. “Karl’s much better at klin zha than I am. I should play with him anyway.”

  “No need,” Korsal said softly. “He’s better than I am too—and I taught him.” He opened his eyes as a smell of smoke teased his nostrils, saw Kevin leaning over, gently blowing on a tiny wisp of flame.

  “Stel says that’s the sign of a good teacher—when the student outperforms him.”

  Korsal’s foggy mind had to grope for the name. His eyes drifted shut again. Stel. Kevin’s mathematics teacher. Starfleet. Kevin’s score on the Academy entrance exam must have been higher than his teacher’s.

  “Stel is wise,” said Korsal.

  “Lots of Vulcans are—or seem to be,” said Kevin. “Sometimes I think it’s because they never say very much, so what they do say sounds profound.”

  Korsal smiled at his son’s astuteness. Warmth was beginning to coax him back to life, and he opened his eyes to see Kevin feeding a cozy little fire.