by Lee Correy
A squad of black-helmeted, armored, and armed men, their very tall and lean bodies covered with bulletproof plates and each with a sigil of authority on his shoulder, materialized in strategic locations around the glade.
"Proctors!" Orun warned, started to run, and then stopped in his tracks as one of the black-garbed forms fired a handgun twice over his head, obviously with deliberate intent to miss and warn that the next shot might find its target.
And the landing party from the Enterprise suddenly found themselves completely surrounded by tall armed men, each with a handgun pointed at them.
Chapter Three
It would have been difficult for anyone to tell which group was the most surprised—the four from the Federation landing party or the ten armed and armored Proctors of Mercan. Both stood there and stared at one another for a split second.
It was Kirk who broke the momentary silence by snapping the order to his people, "Put away your phasers." This remark was immediately rendered in the Mercan language by his Translator, except for the word "phaser," for which there was no Mercan equivalent. Kirk was counting on that, because the landing party slipped their phasers back under their tunics.
At the Academy many years ago, Kirk had been exposed to ancient gunpowder firearms, had worked with them, and knew what kind of physical havoc their projectiles could wreak. Unlike the clean disruptive energy bolt of a phaser at partial power, a firearm's bullet did extensive localized damage as it tore through tissue, with its shock wave literally blasting living flesh apart. He didn't want McCoy to have to cope with such injuries to the landing party at this time and under these conditions.
"Stand. Don't move," came the order from a large Proctor who was armored and medallioned to a greater degree than the others, indicative of the fact that he was probably the leader. But he was obviously as mystified as Delin, Orun, and Othol had been a few minutes earlier when these strangers had materialized in their midst.
"Great Abode!" the Proctor leader muttered in awed tones that he could not disguise. "These Technic people are becoming stranger by the day … and obtaining more advanced equipment all the time."
"We're not Technic people." Kirk directed his remark at the Proctor squad leader. "In fact, we're not Mercans. We're visitors."
There was dead silence as the Proctor leader tried to evaluate the situation. It was obvious that he was confused. He'd come expecting only the three young Mercans, not this group of four strangely dressed, short, and highly varied people carrying strange equipment and speaking strange sounds that became words through a small device they carried. Furthermore, they carried no handguns, only strange pouches of equipment that buzzed and hummed and sang as they were pointed at the Proctor squad.
"Who are you?" the Proctor leader asked imperiously. "What part of the Abode are you from?"
Kirk had nothing in his hands. He spread them palms up before him to show that he carried no weapon. "I'm James Kirk, the leader of this group. We're visitors to Mercan." The word "visitors" was rendered by the Translator as "guests/travellers/wanderers/searchers" before it ran out of synonyms searching its newly created self-program of the structure of the Mercan language.
The Proctor leader turned to Orun. "We've come to escort you, Orun, along with your companions Othol and Delin, under the orders of Guardian One Pallar. You three are charged with conduct contrary to the Code because of your open advocacy of the Technic of which you're members. The Guardians can no longer tolerate this disruption of the Code of the Abode. Now, who are these Technic people? Why do they look this way, and why are they dressed in this fashion? Why do they speak a strange tongue?"
"They're not Technic; they're visitors, as they claim," the young Mercan replied. "I'll readily admit that I'm of the Technic, but I also truthfully state to you that these people are not Technic. They materialized here only a short time before you and your squad arrived, Proctor Lenos. . . . And I certainly feel honored to think that we're so important that the Prime Proctor himself would lead the squad to apprehend us."
"Your disrespectful attitude will change with retraining," Proctor Lenos remarked. "Otherwise, I'd demand that you defend yourself here and now. . . . And I'm ordered to bring the three of you to Celerbitan alive, not with bullets in your hearts." He looked around at the four from the Enterprise, unsure of exactly what to do. "We'll take the four of you back with us as well. The Guardians will certainly want to see what the Technic has managed to accomplish in total secrecy."
"Translator, stop," Kirk ordered his device quietly, causing it to cease translating his words into the Mercan language. To the three other members of the crew of the Enterprise he said, "No resistance. No violence. We'll go with them. Obviously, the Proctors are the police, and we happen to be in the hands of the police chief of these parts."
"Maybe the chief of police can get us to the chief of government, whatever that may be," McCoy suggested.
"That's exactly what I had in mind," Kirk said. "We keep it calm. Scotty, please keep that temper of yours under control; your job is technology assessment."
Proctor Lenos was beginning to fidget, not being able to understand what Kirk was saying. Kirk sensed this and ordered his Translator back into action. "Please excuse me, Proctor Lenos," Kirk said with the most punctilious manners and a slight diplomatic bow. The highly stilted and overly polite language of Mercan made it easier for Kirk to phrase his sentences so the Translator would reply in stilted terms. He didn't like their language with its overly formal structure. But there it was; what could he do but work with it? "I had to give instructions to my people not to offer any objection to accompanying you. We'll be most happy to go with you and meet your Guardians."
This willing cooperation was apparently commonplace to Proctor Lenos. He turned his armored head and looked around. "Orun, where are your companions?"
There was a definite smile on Orun's face. "Why, Proctor Lenos, I suspect they managed to stroll away in the confusion caused by your confrontation with these strange people."
There was obvious frustration in Lenos' voice. "We'll get them. If necessary, we'll monitor all transporter activity until we get them."
"That's a large order, Proctor," Orun reminded him. "What's the current use rate? More than a thousand million individual transports from one place to another daily?"
"We have means," Lenos said darkly. Then to Kirk he said, "I have no warrant to return you to Celerbitan, James Kirk. However, I exercise my authority as Prime Proctor, to require your presence at Celerbitan before Guardian One because of your unusual appearance and equipment."
Kirk said nothing. He couldn't. He didn't even know what the rules were. But he knew that he'd find out quickly at Celerbitan, if that was the planetary seat of the political power base … and he was now quite aware of the existence of an exceptional power base: the Guardians, who must be the rulers, because there was a police organization, the Proctors, whose job must obviously entail enforcing the dictates of the political leaders.
But he also knew that he might be wrong. On more than a thousand worlds of the Federation, there were many more than a thousand different ways that intelligent beings organized themselves. He couldn't expect to find a situation here, developed in isolation, that would have any similarity to anything he knew.
But these Mercanians were humanoid, and all humanoid species shared a number of things in common, including political power bases sustained by threat of physical force for noncompliance with political and social rules. He didn't think he could be totally wrong on that one.
Strangely, the Proctors didn't search the landing-party members, nor did they attempt to take the tricorders that both Janice Rand and Bones McCoy kept running, sensing, and recording. Kirk guessed this was probably because none of the landing party carried anything that appeared to the Proctors to be weapons.
"Stand by to travel," Proctor Lenos ordered, removing a control unit from his equipment-laden baldric. Scotty's attention was riveted on the control unit as he a
ttempted to fathom its use and construction. Kirk also looked closely at it, while Janice Rand focused the attention of her tricorder on it.
The Prime Proctor rubbed his finger across various portions of the small, palm-sized unit … and they were somewhere else.
The first words spoken were McCoy's: "I knew these people weren't civilized. Anybody who'd use a transporter to get around the surface of a planet can't possibly be civilized."
"Quiet, Bones," Kirk snapped. "You're in no position to object."
"I dinna believe it," Scotty breathed. "They must have developed transporter technology at a very high level indeed. The Proctor required no communication with a main transporter crew, and the system delivered us here where there's no transporter. We must have gone through one or more relays en route. . . ."
Scotty was right. They weren't in a transporter room or unit but had materialized in the foyer of a grand edifice. It was a huge hall open on three sides, its roof supported by massive pillars and columns of a completely unique design fabricated of metals with beautiful sheens and textures. The building was perched atop a high hill on an island, because all around was an ocean.
It reminded Kirk of the view from the Acropolis at Athens on Earth.
But this edifice was not the Temple of Diana on the Acropolis, nor did it resemble it in any way. These Mercans were not at the same technical level of ancient Greece, because from the building alone Kirk knew they'd mastered advanced technology in several areas—although without closer inspection he couldn't determine the exact degree. Their architecture was an indication of their technology, even though it was totally alien, as could be expected in a civilization that had developed in complete isolation.
Almost as soon as the entire party materialized, Proctor Lenos announced, "I'll notify Guardian One of your presence here. Please make yourselves comfortable, and please don't hesitate to ask my Proctors to bring you anything you may require. I also request that you don't attempt to run away … because this squad of Proctors is my personal squad … and they don't miss."
And he strode down one of the hallways of the huge building.
Kirk looked at his landing party. They appeared to be as mystified as he at the polite and mannered way they'd been treated by what obviously were the police. It had never happened to him this way before. He switched off his Translator.
"Well, we've certainly discovered ourselves a dandy little planet." Scotty was the first to speak up. "With the sort of transporter technology they've got, plus what I can see from their buildings, their clothes, and their weapons, they may be our equals in engineering in some areas."
"Do you think it's advanced enough that they could help repair the warp drive, Scotty?" Kirk wanted to know.
"I haven't seen their energy sources. I dinna ken if they have matter-antimatter technology or not. But with transporter technology like theirs, they obviously have the industrial base that'd be useful in helping me rebuild that warp drive … even if they don't know what a warp drive is. . . ."
"Captain," Janice Rand put in, "Commander Scott mentioned a lack of technology in communications and transportation systems. If the Mercans have a planet-wide transporter system, why would they need communications or a transportation system? They already have both in their transporter system. If they want to talk to somebody, they just transport to where that person is. If they need to ship freight or cargo anywhere on the planet, they put it through a transporter. . . ."
"Which means they've got very powerful energy systems," Scott pointed out.
"That may mean that they've already got matter-antimatter," Kirk observed.
"No, Captain, they could do it with ordinary hydrogen fusion," Scotty pointed out. "That's why I dinna ken if they've got the energy sources. But they've got energy, all right. No question about that."
"Bones," Kirk said, turning to his ship's doctor, "any data? Are these people really as closely related to humans as they appear to be? If so, how did they get out here in the middle of the Galactic interarm void?"
"One question at a time," McCoy replied. He looked down at his medical tricorder. "I don't know the details of internal structure and physiology yet. And it would be of great help to have blood and tissue samples for analysis back in Sick Bay. I could give you a solid answer under those conditions. But they look like kissin' cousins to us. They appear to have muscular structure, articulation, and sensors similar to ours. They're probably tall and skinny because the gravity here is eight-tenths standard and the climate is generally warm and semitropical over most of the planet."
"How about my second question?" Kirk wanted to know.
"I'm glad you asked that question," McCoy replied slowly. "Are there any other questions? Seriously, I don't know, and I wish I did."
"Maybe we should just ask them where they came from," Janice Rand suggested.
"That's a good idea, Yeoman," Kirk said. He turned on his Translator and walked slowly over to the edge of the building, where he could look out over what was obviously a city spread out below and around the hill. He turned to Orun and asked, "Is this Celerbitan?"
Orun nodded. "It's the headquarters of the Guardians and the Proctors. . . . You're really from some other place, aren't you?"
"What I've told you is true," Kirk replied. "We don't come from Mercan."
"But where do you come from, then?"
"Probably the same place your ancestors did. Where did Mercan begin? How did it start? Where did the Mercan people come from?"
"You don't know the story of the Creation of the Abode?" Orun asked incredulously. Then he nodded. "Of course, if you come from somewhere else, you couldn't know."
"Where did you come from?"
"From the Spiral of Life that's duplicated by the spiral of the basic chemistry of life itself," Orun explained, then paused. "Some call it the Ribbon of Night because that's the only time it can be seen in the sky. We, the Technic, believe that the ancient legend may be true because there's some evidence now that the Ribbon of Night or Spiral of Life is made up of a very large number of suns like our own, except that we don't understand why we can't see them as suns like ours. Some of the Technic believe that it's like a light that's seen from many steps away and gets smaller as you take more steps away from it."
It suddenly occurred to Kirk that he was dealing with a completely new phenomenon here. "Steps" and lesser dimensions were all that the Mercans now possessed. They didn't need distance dimensions when a transporter could take them around their planet in a fraction of a second.
A world without distance!
And a universe without astronomy, insofar as the Mercans were concerned.
What other fascinating mysteries did this unusual civilization of humanlike beings hold?
It would be a bonanza for Federation xeno-sociologists.
And if the Sagittarius Arm was the direction of the future expansion of the Federation in its efforts to colonize and populate those parts of the Galaxy, Mercan would become an important way station on the trade routes between the Arms.
And it could destroy Mercan.
Kirk couldn't help thinking of other cases on ancient Earth where unique cultures developed in isolation had been totally and completely destroyed by newcomers.
He didn't want Mercan to go the route of the Aztecs or the Incas.
He knew that his first task, therefore, was in conflict with his responsibilities as the commanding officer of the Enterprise. As the Captain, it was his obligation to arrange for the repairs to his ship. But as the ranking representative of the United Federation of Planets and operating under the dictum of the Prime Directive, he had to put aside for the moment his starship-command responsibilities.
He had to unravel the social aspects of this Mercan culture first. Was Mercan ready for the Federation and the changes that relations with the Federation would bring? Or would he have to manage to get the Enterprise repaired and somehow leave without disrupting this civilization, leaving the inevitable decision on interact
ion up to the Federation?
Kirk strolled casually back to his companions and turned off his Translator. "I don't know exactly what we've gotten into here," he told his party. "But we will not—repeat, not—violate General Order Number One until we find out more about Mercan."
"I agree with you, Jim," McCoy put in. "I've been watching and listening, too. This place, this culture, these people, are unique. We should disturb them as little as possible until we have more data."
"But I've got a warp drive engine up there that has to be repaired," Scotty complained, "or we're going to stay here for a very long time indeed. And sooner or later these Mercans are going to discover the Enterprise orbiting over their heads. How can we help but disturb them then, eh?"
"Scotty, for all we know, the Mercans may have the transporter technology to reach up there to the Enterprise and simply transmute it into a signal that won't materialize anywhere … ever," Kirk warned.
"Aye, there's that," the engineer admitted.
"Yeoman, how about your input here from the woman's point of view?" Kirk wanted to know.
"Captain, we've probably already disrupted this culture by simply beaming down a landing party," Yeoman Rand replied thoughtfully. "But unless we're very careful, I think it could turn into a situation like a woman trying to raise a feral child …"
"Go on," Kirk prompted her when she paused.
"A feral child doesn't have cultural programming," Janice Rand explained. "No matter what we do, we've changed things already. And this feral culture could react to us in a way we can't anticipate. In other words, Captain, my woman's intuition tells me that we're in great danger. . . ."
Yeoman Janice Rand was correct.
Chapter Four
Kirk wasn't surprised to see Proctor Lenos return with another tall but older man who stepped up to the landing party and said in a cordial tone, "Welcome to Celerbitan and to the Guardian Villa. I'm Pallar, Guardian One of the Abode."
