GHOST WALKER

Chapter One

It was in the Moon of the Blue Berries, in the

third year of the twelfth cycle of the Treecat

star in the thousand and forty-second turning of the

Wheel of the Universe, when the Hungries first

began to appear and disappear in the Bindigo

Hills. At first they seemed to be like children or like

the giant running-apes, not knowing anything but doing

no harm; then they began to catch animals and

make them disappear, and tried to catch people as well,

but the people ran away and hid in the warrens. Later

the Hungries began to kill people, and roasted and

ate their flesh. Then the hunters of the Bindigo

Warren and the other warrens near where the Hungries

appeared began to slay them, as they hunted the

Flaygrubs and Hootings.

Only in the fifth year of the twelfth cycle

did Kailin Arxoras, patriarch [n.b.

designation unclear] of the Bindigo Warren and

memmietieffos [concept unclear--

untranslatable from Midgwin language *]

draw close enough to the Hungries to walk in their

dreams as they slept, and to realize that they were,

after their own fashion, people too.

* See Enchar T'Krau Shorak,

"Telepathy Among the Midgwins,"

Journal of Intercultural Contacts

very. 93-3, and Neary, R. Jr.,

"Communications Problems with Non-Verbal

Alien Languages," JIC very. 30-

9.

From Songs of the Midgwins, translated and

introduced by Dr. H. H. Gordon, Oxford

University Press.

"Cute little critters, aren't they?" Dr.

Leonard McCoy, hands on hips, surveyed

the silent crowd of rotund, shovel-headed

Midgwins gradually forming in the pale twilight

at the end of the box canyon where the landing party had

materialized. Now and then a Midgwin would

raise its head on an extensible neck, adding

another foot and a half to its insignificant

height, to look with luminous gray eyes over the

heads of its fellows. But mostly they just gazed.

Every pair of bony, three-fingered hands held a

flower; wreaths of flowers circled many

pairs of narrow little shoulders or rested on the

long, webby manes of their hair, and against the

gathering twilight the pale blossoms seemed

to float disembodied, the fragile honey scent of

them unbearably poignant against the faintly musty

odor of the Midgwins themselves.

"Don't let them hear you say that, Bones,"

Captain James Kirk reproved his ship's

surgeon softly. "They killed a dozen of our

scouts and contact personnel before we convinced them

that there was a difference between us and the Klingons."

McCoy looked indignant at the

possibility of being mistaken for a Klingon. Behind

him, Dr. Helen Gordon laughed softly and

said, "I expect we all look alike to them."

"We do." A man's quiet voice spoke

from the shadows of the fat-trunked, almost leafless

barrel plants that huddled thick among the

canyon's stones. "But not in the way you think."

Kirk turned quickly, startled, and annoyed with

himself. Though the planetary contact team had

reassured him repeatedly that the landing party would be

in no danger and must be kept to the absolute

minimum, he was slightly on edge without the

safety margin of Security personnel. He

should, he knew, have heard these newcomers arriving

at the landing site.

They stepped from the encircling blue gloom into the

open two Vulcans and an Argellian in

hard-worn khaki coveralls, led by half a

dozen Midgwins, the foremost of whom was so old that

his smooth, purple-brown skin had faded to a

dusty gray under the whitish ridges of the whorled

scar tattoos. His eyes had faded too. They

were glacier-gray, wise and sad, and the skin around

them, and over his hard little beak, was white, as were the

silky strands of mane that hung down over his

knobby shoulders. Alone among the Midgwins,

he carried nothing in his hands, though he walked with

their rolling two-legged stride instead of--as the

others occasionally did--assisting himself now and then with

one long arm touching the ground.

The male Vulcan, a small, neat little man

whom Kirk knew to be the anthropsychologist

Dr. Shorak, stepped out ahead of the white-faced

Midgwin and presented Kirk, McCoy,

Gordon, and the other two members of the Federation

contact team with two flowers each. "Hold one in

either hand," he advised softly. "It is said that you

cannot lift a hand in anger if it holds a

flower."

"If I stick one behind the wrong ear, will someone

proposition me?" McCoy inquired, sniffing

at the tiny, intoxicatingly sweet blossom.

Dr. Gordon smiled teasingly. "If they

don't, I will," she promised, and Kirk hid

a grin. Unlike Dr. Mei Chu and Dr.

Nomias Gzin, the other two representatives

of the Federation Xenological Institute, Helen

had not kept to herself in the two weeks they'd been

on the Enterprise. She had instead fallen

easily in!comradeship, not only with Kirk, but with

many of the crew. It was becoming difficult for

Kirk to remember what it had been like without her

big-boned, awkward presence among them in the

rec rooms or the labs--without the sound of that soft

husky alto, and the knowledge that she'd be somewhere around when

he came off-shift.

Shorak said, "This is Kailin Arxoras,

patriarch of the Bindigo Warren and ..." He

hesitated fractionally, then decided against giving

whatever other title he would have given. Instead he

took Kirk's hand lightly but firmly in his,

deftly tucking one of his own flowers out of the way

between skeletal fingers, as Kirk saw the

Midgwins do, and reached out to Arxoras with the other.

"Would you permit him to--to see into you? It is not

like the mind meld--it is a surface affair

only, to reassure him of your good intentions. If

you permit it, would you close your eyes, think of

nothing, and count backward from twenty?"

Kirk hesitated as the instinctive caution of

years of dealing with unknown factors balked within

him. "And how will he reassure me of his good

intentions?"

Shorak gave the matter momentary consideration.

After an eighteen-month stint in the bush, he was

heavily bearded, his long black hair braided

back into a short queue. His face, darkened

slightly by exposure to the honey-colored rays

of the star Elcidar Beta, was grotesquely thin,

and under the worn khaki his joints had the

disquietingly knobby look of borderline starvation,

though he seemed healthy and alert. Other than that

he was perfectly neat, sleeves rolled down,

trouser legs tucked into boot tops, every tab

affixed, which was more than could be said of his wife,

Dr. L'jian--a xenoanthropologist of

awesome credentials and comprehensively rumpled

appearance--and Thetas the Argellian, under

whose rolled-up sleeves Kirk could glimpse the

whorled marks of Midgwin tattoos. Both

L'jian and Thetas had Shorak's look of

unnatural thinness, and with it his incongruous air of

health. Kirk noticed, too, that unlike his

Vulcan Science officer and every other Vulcan

Kirk had ever met, Shorak showed no hesitation

about physical contact with relative strangers.

He logged the anomaly in his mind and saw the

half-suspicious puzzlement that narrowed Bones

McCoy's eyes.

"I am not sure you would comprehend it if he

did," the Vulcan answered him after a moment.

"Due to the nature of the local predators, the

Midgwins have evolved communications which are

largely telepathic, and few humans have the

capacity to interpret or even receive them. It is

not imperative that you permit this."

For a moment Kirk balanced his natural

suspicion of unknown--and formerly hostile--

aliens with mind-probing powers against his natural

inclination to demonstrate goodwill, and his innate

faith that if goodwill were shown, in a

significant--if not overwhelming--majority of

cases, it would be returned. But what actually

won out was his curiosity.

"All right," he said, and closed his eyes.

The Vulcan's dry, twiglike fingers

closed on his.

Twenty, nineteen, eighteen ...

To say that he felt nothing would not be entirely

accurate, but at the time he had absolutely no

way to describe what it was he did feel. The

closest was perhaps the psychic equivalent of standing

with shut eyes while a horse sniffed at his

cheek.

... three, two, one.

He opened his eyes, and blinked. Arxoras

looked up at him with that sad gray gaze and said

haltingly, "T'ank 'o, Kep-i-tan," the

two soft tongues shaping words as best they could

around the hardness of the beak. It was difficult

to understand, but with careful listening, Kirk could make

out the words. "They have made a bright warrior their

patriarch, this warren floating in darkness like a

flendag nest in a stream." And releasing

Shorak's fingers, the old Midgwin reached out

to gently stroke the back of Kirk's hand. "I

share to others what I learn of you?" With a

graceful gesture he indicated the other

Midgwins grouped behind him, squatting on their

haunches, watching with those enormous eyes.

Curiously, now that he was a little used to them,

Kirk had begun to distinguish their various

expressions. The crowds of them still squatting around

McCoy, Helen, and Doctors Chu and

Nomias in the scuffed circle of crowding stones

at the end of the canyon were watching their alien

visitors with a look of childlike absorption in

their deeply folded, curiously juvenile

faces, but these grouped around the three researchers

were evidently not so uncritical. Several of them

were old, if the fading of color from skin and hair

was an indication of age; the folds of loose skin

around the protruding beaks were deep and baggy.

All were tattooed to one extent or another. But

in the eyes of some he could see skepticism,

wariness, hostility, at variance with the odd, old

manstchild physiognomy.

"You may share," Kirk said, and turning his

head, caught a worried glint in Shorak's

eye.

In turn, Shorak presented the others of the

new contact team and Bones McCoy to the

patriarch's psychic scrutiny. "A speaker who

will teach us the speech of the Hungries," Arxoras

said of Helen, touching her hand where Shorak, still

acting as link, held it. "A flower that has

felt sun for the first time." And, studying McCoy

for a long time, he said softly, "A healer living

in pain." McCoy turned his face away.

"I shall be glad of the presence of a relief

team," Shorak of Vulcan said later. Full

dark had fallen. They were sitting outside the

door of what Thetas the Argellian solemnly

referred to as the Elcidar Beta III

Xenological Research Institute, a mud and

wattle hut less than three meters in

diameter a quarter of a mile from the outskirts

of the village. A small campfire burned in

the center of a ring of flat river stones and

desiccated chunks of the soapy, soft-textured

local wood; and the low, flickering orange light

highlighted more strongly than ever the thinness of the

researchers' faces, the boniness of the Vulcan's

gesturing hands. He went on, "The civilization

here, though almost completely lacking in

instrumentality, is enormously complex."

"This?" McCoy's eyebrow went up

and he struggled unsuccessfully to keep an

incredulous chuckle out of his voice. Up the

straggling path through the hard, wiry bush jungle of

thorn thickets, rocks, and barrel trees the

first of the Midgwin houses could just be made out in the

gathering gloom, lumpish excrescences of mud that

stuck to the towering rocks, the squat trees, and

to each other, straggling in all directions up and

down the canyon and along the stream. Oddly enough,

even downstream from the village, the water was

clear, though there wasn't a great deal of it. Through

the soft, dust-smelling haze of evening the piping

voices of the Midgwins sounded no louder than the

chirping of cicadas in the night.

Thetas the Argellian nodded--Dr. Thetas

Farnakos Sredji Akunas, whose work on

societal structures was standard reading in every

anthro class from here to the Barrier, Kirk

reminded himself. The photographs Kirk had

seen of him had showed a plump little man with very bright

black eyes in the smooth Argellian face;

only by the eyes had he been recognizable.

Kirk had seen McCoy taking surreptitious

tricorder readings of all three of the researchers

--and had seen him double- and triple-check them.

As if oblivious to all of this, the Argellian

went on, "The rules of social interchanges--

the hierarchies of respect--the philosophical

education--to say nothing of their songs and legends--

all of them are among the most refined I've ever

encountered." He craned his head a little to see through

the tangled jungles toward the center of the

village. "It's truly a delight to work with

..."

Kirk got to his feet and followed the little

man's gaze back toward the lumpish shapes of the

mud huts among the thorn trees. Rose-amber

moonlight drenched the scene, dyeing the towering

rocks golden and outlining every thorn, every twig of the

jungle in numberless shades of orange,

cinnabar, and peach. Dimly he saw shadows

moving in the moonlight, more and more of them, and became

aware that the Midgwins were gathering in force. The

intermittent chirps of the verbal part of their

language had blended now into a soft, thrumming

murmur, like a cat's purr; he thought he could

see long lines of the Midgwins forming, setting

into thick, ridgy, concentric rings, like the rocks

themselves, shoulder to shoulder, hands linked, eyes

shut.

"What are they doing?" he asked softly,

turning back to the little anthropologist.

"It is the Consciousness Web," Thetas

replied. "They do it, not every night, but at least

three nights out of five. Each opens his or her

or its mind to the others, to feel their troubles,

to reassure one another of caring and love, to heal

sickness and hurts."

"So they believe," Shorak put in austerely

--if he hadn't been a Vulcan, he would have

squirmed. The shift of L'jian's eyes was

equally uncomfortable.

"Have you ever done it?" Helen inquired, folding

her long arms around her drawn-up knees. As

Kirk sat down again at her side, his elbow

brushed her shoulder, and he was acutely conscious

of her touch.

"It can be quite dangerous." There was a distinct

frost in the Vulcan's voice. "Any

psychoemotional melding ..."

"I've tried." The Argellian's dark

glance slipped teasingly sidelong at his

disapproving colleague. "My cold did go

away." He looked back at Helen. "It's

an unnerving sensation to have that much of your consciousness

scrutinized and not be able to do anything about it."

"Aren't there mental techniques to protect

certain areas of the mind from that kind of invasion?"

Kirk asked, recalling, uncomfortably, the

twenty-four hours of displaced consciousness he had

experienced not too long ago with the strange,

godlike alien entity Sargon, the few moments

of shared awareness. "As a Vulcan, surely you

would have some kind of shielding."

Thetas's next remark about wearing a cha/y

belt on one's wedding night was cut off

by Shorak saying "Indeed, both my wife and I

have had frequent occasion to utilize such

technique." He was, Kirk noticed, as

brusque and evasive about the topic of mind-sharing

and mental disciplines as Spock was, as guarded

about the dark shadow-side of Vulcan culture,

and Kirk was aware of L'jian's tilted

eyebrow as she exchanged a glance of speculation

with her husband about where an Out-worlder would have

acquired such knowledge in the first place.

Shorak nodded to Doctors Chu and Nomias

and said "We can instruct you in those techniques,

if you have not been so prepared at the Institute--

they are quite similar to certain Vulcan

mind exercises. In a civilization where they are

accustomed to reading one another's dreams, you might

find the disciplines of mental closure useful."

Shrill and sudden, a Midgwin voice cut

sharply through the milky stillness of the night.

Kirk's glance snapped back toward the

village, recognizing the sound of trouble, his every

instinct on the alert.

One of the Midgwin patriarchs had sprung up

on a stone--or maybe it was somebody's hut,

they weren't much bigger--in the center of the dreaming

rings of the Consciousness Web. There must have been

thirty or forty circles of them by this time, thousands

strong, podlike leathery bodies jammed together.

Their eyes were open, Kirk could see, a spiral

galaxy of dimly glowing stars.

The elder gestured, the sweep of his bony arms

filled with tension and fury; even at this distance

Kirk could see that his head was flat to his

shoulders, his beak tightened to the semblance of an

angry bird as he cawed and piped. The huge,

three-fingered hand jabbed out again and again toward the

shabby hut of the Research Institute, a cutting

gesture eloquent of rage.

"What's he saying?"

Shorak, who had risen also and stood, arms

folded, head down, listening, did not reply.

Helen, who had studied the Midgwin speech in

preparation for this mission, got to her feet and said

softly, "He's angry. He says the

Hungries will spread death upon everything they

touch."

"In a pig's eye," McCoy muttered, his

mouth twisting. "By the look of them, these people are

starving themselves to death--their population's outrunning

their food supply, if they're gatherers like you

say, Helen. I haven't seen anything

resembling organized crops ..."

"There aren't any," Thetas replied softly.

"But I do not think that is what the Ghost Walker

means."

"The Ghost Walker?" Kirk nodded back

toward the speaker, swaying furiously on his

rock. He was big for a Midgwin, his shiny,

reddish-dark skin just beginning to lose its color

around the eyes, his coarse black mane hanging

down over the ridgy folds of his back.

Tattoos covered his arms and shoulders like a

macrame cloak.

"Yarblis Geshkerroth the Ghost

Walker," Shorak said quietly, coming over

to Kirk's side. "Do not underestimate him. He

is said to be responsible for most of the disappearances

of the Klingon scout parties during the fighting here

five years ago."

Kirk raised an eyebrow and turned his gaze

back toward the fire, impressed that any of the

pudgy, harmless little race would be able to take on

Klingon armed scouts. "I thought you said they

understood the difference between us and the Klingons."

"What makes you think we understand the difference

between us and the Klingons?" Thetas inquired, bending

forward to rearrange the fire. "Yarblis's

contention is that there isn't any."

"Well, I'll tell you a great big one,"

McCoy retorted tartly. "If we were

Klingons sitting here, we'd be taking target

practice at our flat-headed little friend there instead

of discussing the matter in its philosophical

light."

"Watch out," Dr. Nomias said, and his short

antennae swiveled sharply in the direction of the

path. By this time they were all standing, looking back

up the twisting path through the brush toward the

village. With apelike nimbleness, Yarblis

Geshkerroth had swung himself down from his

makeshift stone rostrum and was waddling with

surprising speed toward the Research Institute.

Others had broken away from the circles of the

Consciousness Web and were following, Midgwins of

all sizes, most swinging themselves along on their

hands as well as their short, stumpy legs. They

moved easily through the thorn brush, their platy

hides making nothing of the barbed spears of the

plants; their eyes were a bobbing and luminous sea

in the dark.

Almost instinctively, Thetas and Shorak

closed their distance to Kirk and Helen; and equally

instinctively, Kirk gestured the others back and

walked out to meet the delegation alone.

"You ..." Squatting before Kirk, Yarblis

looked far more dangerous than a tubby little alien

with wide, glowing eyes should have. D rawn in on

himself, the thick wrinkles of his hide clenched to form

a protective armor, he was far from comical.

One big, three-fingered hand unfurled itself on the

end of the bone-thin arm. "Let me walk in," he

said, his voice shriller, his English and

pronunciation much inferior to Arxoras's. "Let

me see in your mind what you mean for

humankind." And by humankind, Kirk knew he

meant himself and his race.

Kirk hesitated. Sargon, savant of a

nameless and long-extinct race, had in their brief

time of shared consciousness taught him a certain

number of mental shielding techniques;

recently, Spock had been teaching him others.

Too frequently, starfarers who tangled with

telepathic alien races had found themselves enmeshed

in cases of possession that would have had any

exorcist in Earth's history reaching for his

crucifix.

"Let me see!" Yarblis insisted

furiously. "You hide from us why you have come!"

Behind him Kirk heard the scrunch of boots

on gravel, and from the tail of his eye he saw

Shorak coming toward them. Yarblis backed away

a little, hissing. "No! Not through this cold one with a

soul like a stone egg, who has never let us drink

of his dreams. By yourself and for yourself, unveiled

by lies."

From the direction of the village there was a stirring

among the Midgwins crowding the path. In the

gloom, Kirk caught a glimpse of a white

mane like a silken flag. Beside him, Shorak said

softly, "You don't have to ..."

Arxoras waddled from the darkness. Flowers were

braided into his snowy hair. "Please understand

my brother," he said to Kirk, reaching out one hard

hand to stroke Yarblis's bony back. At

Arxoras's touch, Yarblis relaxed visibly,

the taut ridges of his skin loosening, his head

rising a little on its neck. By the light of the

Institute fire Kirk could see the Ghost

Walker's arms were, among the tattoos,

blotched with the crinkly scar tissue left

by Klingon disruptors.

"He has said that you may be self-deceived--that

your belief is that, meaning us well, you can still harm

us. He asks to see deeper into your thoughts, to see

what you intend for us in this Federation your people speak of.

But if this troubles you or causes you fear, do not

regard what he says. I trust your people ..."

Yarblis twisted his head like an owl's on his

neck and hissed something at the old Midgwin.

Arxoras blinked calmly at him for a moment,

then turned back to Kirk. "I trust you," he

repeated.

"You don't have to--" Shorak began softly.

"No." Kirk held out his hands

to Yarblis and mentally concentrated his thoughts in the

best approximation he could find of the disciplines that

Spock and Sargon had taught him. "No, he

has a right to know. And we mean only benefits

to this world." He slowed and steadied his breathing, wishing

briefly he'd made more time to practice

meditation than he had ... An increase in the

production of food, he thought. Better ways of

living, but only if they chose them freely.

Only if they asked for Federation help.

Defense against the Klingons, on whose frontiers

this undefended, undeveloped world lay. That above

all.

The Ghost Walker took his hands.

The shock was horrible. Shared consciousness was

always an unnerving thing, more so the further the alien

consciousness was from human. Sargon had been

civilized, sensitive, intelligent, and,

Kirk now realized trying very hard not to hurt him.

There was an animal quality to Yarblis's

thoughts, a wild dark blur of

pseudomemories, emotions, and snippets of

things Kirk knew he was not meant to see the

pungent fragrance of bizarre lust and the

horrified shock in a dying Klingon's eyes.

He forced his reeling consciousness to hold to the

images of other worlds that had entered into the Federation,

of world councils asking for new food-production

techniques, new learning, new skills. Of the

Halkans refusing to sell their dilithium and the

Enterprise flying silently away.

Yarblis's mind rooted at his, greedy and

rough and very angry. Kirk was shaking when the mind

link broke.

For a moment he and the Midgwin stood, looking

at one another--the man in his gold shirt, his

fair hair damp with sweat in spite of the night

breeze moving softly in off the veldt. The

Midgwin gazed up at him with huge yellow

eyes glowing softly in the dark.

"Are you satisfied?" Kirk felt the probe

had gone far deeper than he'd wanted it to,

far deeper than Arxoras's had, seeing more things

about the Enterprise, about he himself, than he'd

wanted to reveal. But it was a contention he had no

way of proving, not even of expressing--certainly

not to Shorak, Vulcan reticence being what it

was. He wished Spock were there. But evidently

no harm had been done ... "Do you believe now

that we are not like the Klingons? That we

intend you no harm?"

"Yes," the Midgwin said, his flute voice

soft and deadly. "Yes, I believe that you intend

us no harm, Jam-es Tiberius Kirk." And

turning, he waddled away into the darkness.

"I think you should take Shorak up on his offer

of instruction," Kirk said quietly.

The glow of the dying fire, visible away to their

right among the thorn trees that surrounded the camp,

turned Helen's hazel eyes a greenish

amber, like a cat's would be if a cat were ever

to think seriously about giving up hunting.

He hesitated a long moment, wanting to bring

up the subject and not wanting to, not willing

to face what he had known from the first would have to be

faced ...

Oh, what the hell, he thought, and blurted

out, "If you're going to stay here."

And the next instant he felt thoroughly ashamed

of himself for that kind of blatant fishing. Helen

has her own career, he thought, as he had thought

since that evening when they'd first lain together talking and

he'd thought, This is different ... First-contact

team is an advance for her ...

I can't ask her to forego that kind of

advancement ...

His hands tightened around hers.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have

..."

She glanced across at him, a rueful smile

pulling at the corner of her mouth. "Shouldn't have

said the Big If?" She moved a little closer

to him as they walked, their booted feet as if

by instinct finding the narrow, scuffed trail that led

along the edge of the thorn forest. She spoke half

jokingly, the easiness between them as relaxed, as

trusting, as if they'd been lovers for years instead

of two weeks. "You don't think it's been

itching and eating at me already?"

Behind them, among the stumpy thorns and towering

rocks of the plateau rim, the swollen,

cantaloupe-colored moon hung like an

enormous fruit, outlining the crowding domes of the

warren's close-packed mud shelters in amber

light. Before them the grasses of the veldt stretched

away inffdistance, the sigh of the tepid breeze a

silken music, shifting melodies of flowers and

dust. Somewhere a night lizard cried, a

heartbreaking alto sweetness. Mr.

Spock had noted, back on the ship, that the

gravitational pull of the moon here was

relatively strong, and Kirk wondered if that

had anything to do with the strange sense he had felt

ever since his arrival the sense of bones and blood

being more deeply tuned to matters beyond his waking ken.

An unbelievably beautiful world, he thought.

A world that seemed to breathe life. As captain of a

starship--that strange combination of explorer,

strategist, and diplomat--he was well-aware

of the implications of that untouched beauty, conscious

that those virgin grasses that made such music

meant that no agriculture was being practiced here

and that the population was balanced on the precarious

knife edge of starvation; that the constellations of

jeweled stars overhead were maps of Klingon

territory.

If Helen stayed here ...

"I don't want to make things harder for you

than they are."

"Sure you do." She grinned, and stopping,

turned to kiss him with a gentle passion on the

lips. Then she sighed and shook her head, her

big, bony hands curiously light in his grip.

"Dammit, Jim ... the universe is so big.

It's so easy to lose things. All those roads

leading away, and there isn't one of them that

doesn't have a one-way sign on it."

"The Enterprise will be back in six

months." He put his arm around Helen's waist,

solid with muscle like the bole of a young tree. The

Big If.

"In six months ..."

She shook her head, the coarse dark abundance

of her hair hissing softly against his shoulder.

"It wouldn't be fair." Her husky voice

barely broke the deep-breathing sigh of the wind in

the grass, the half-heard multivoiced humming

of the Midgwin Consciousness Web that seemed

to fill the night. "Not fair to the others, to Chu and

Nomias, who would hardly be settled into the

research and teaching by then; not fair to my

replacement, coming in late and having to learn

everything in twice the hurry. No." Her voice

was nearly inaudible, as if she spoke to herself.

"We really have to decide now."

Kirk said nothing. Helen's arm slipped around

his waist and they walked a little farther, both

automatically keeping a bearing on the tiny glow

of the Research Institute's fire--the

only fire in the village. Though Shorak had

assured them that the major predators--the

Hootings and the Flaygrubs--did not approach the

warrens at night, Kirk instinctively kept

an ear cocked for any sound of danger in the long

grass. Glancing back, he could see McCoy

and Thetas still sitting by the fire. The two

Vulcans, Chu, and Nomias had retreated to the

Institute's hut to prepare the few small

artifacts to be taken up to the Enterprise when

the landing party returned for the night. The village

Consciousness Web, now over ten thousand strong, still

swayed in the darkness, humming, whispering, singing

shared dreams and healing songs.

It would be easier, Kirk thought, for Helen

to make her decis ion on the ship, surrounded by the

environment, the people, she had come to enjoy ...

easier for her to make the decision to stay there. But

much as he wanted her to stay--to become a part of his

crew, a part of his life--he wanted her to make

her decision clearly, fairly, without doubts.

She had to see this planet, these people, this place that

was the alternative road--this beautiful world and its

curious, secretive, fascinating people, this

civilization without artifacts, the work of a lifetime

spread out before her like a field of flowers.

Arxoras's words came back to Kirk A

flower that has felt the sun ... Was he himself the

sun? he wondered. Or was it this place?

"Will the Enterprise be back in six

months?"

There was a long silence. Then Kirk shook his

head. "If everything goes as it should."

"Mmm." Helen nodded wisely, her eyes

shadow and silver-glint in the moonlight. "You

know, I did notice how much everything always goes

as it should on exploration-patrol missions."

Jim had to laugh at the mock gravity of her

voice, but he knew she was speaking the truth. In

six months, God knew what could happen.

"On a starship, I'd never be more than a

cataloger of other people's finds, you know," she went

on. "Sending back superficial evaluations for

others to follow up. It's not what I want."

She turned and put her hands upon his shoulders.

They were almost of a height. Her voice was thick,

hesitant, the voice of one with little experience in

saying how she felt or what she wanted. "But

I don't want to lose you."

Slowly, he said, "I won't always be

on exploration patrols."

It was the first time he had spoken of what he would

do two years from now, when the Enterprise's

current mission was done. The first time he had thought

of applying for anything other than another five-

year stint of the same. Even as he said it, the thought

gave him a curious pang, a wrenching hurt, as

if he stood at the starting line of a race,

electing to remain where he was while everyone else

vanished into the distance.

But on starbase duty he would at least be able

to see her. To have some kind of life with the woman,

to put in the time it took to build a future with

someone, to build something that would last beyond a few

years.

Helen laughed softly. "Oh, Jim! Even

if you were base commander, you'd drive yourself into a

nervous breakdown in a year watching starship

captains screw up things you'd think you could do

better!"

"Oh, thanks a lot!" he groused, laughing

too as he gave her a mock shove, because he

knew she was right. She shoved back, and they

tussled in the dappled moonlight beneath a stand of

stumpy, thick-boled trees, giggling like

teenagers until their mouths met.

Chapter Two

Coming back through the tepid darkness, Kirk

heard Thetas's voice and McCoy's, a

quiet murmuring beneath the sighing purr of the

Consciousness Web in the warren beyond. The

Enterprise's doctor and the little Argellian

anthropologist sat side by side on a chunk

of river rock, the jittering firelight before them

glinting on the gold line of service braid on

McCoy's sleeves and the streamlined arrowhead of the

Starfleet emblem on his breast, seaming Thetas's

emaciated face with shadow. Seeing the

Argellian reminded Kirk again of the plumpness

of the man in his earlier pictures, and he shivered

at the thought of Helen growing that thin, that wasted-

looking ...

But no, he thought. It was part of her mission

to teach agriculture, to help these people stave off the

starvation overtaking the planet.

"What do you mean, resistant to learning

farming?" McCoy was saying as Kirk and Helen

emerged from the tiny game trail along which

they had walked. "They're gatherers, it's the most

inefficient way of making a living no matter

what planet you're talking about! The food

resources of the countryside are just this side of

exhaustion! Can't they see they're one good drought

away from planetwide catastrophe? You say

they cherish life--"

"They cherish life upon their own terms," the

Argellian replied, folding his skeletal

hands. "Their standards, their intentions, are based upon

other things. To them, all things are deeply bound

together. They cherish life as a quality ..."

McCoy sniffed. "Nobody's quality of

life has ever been improved by malnutrition.

Didn't any of you ever explain Malthus to these

people?"

Thetas smiled sadly. "It is difficult

to explain any of this to someone who hasn't lived

among these people--it's difficult enough for me to try

to get some of it across to Shorak and L'jian, who

won't participate fully in the Consciousness

Web. There isn't an insult scatological

enough, poisonous enough, to be the equivalent of

calling someone here mi'ik--greedy, grabby. The

thought of deliberately cultivating food, rather

than living day to day upon what Rhea--the

Planet Mother Spirit--chooses to send, is

absolutely repugnant to the Midgwins on a

number of levels."

The deep humming of the crowd, subtle and

pervasive as the slow throb of surf, filled the

darkness around them. Turning his head, Kirk could just

glimpse the backs of the nearest of those concentric

circles, up the path in the warren, swaying in the

velvety moonlight. Even the children, little pale

grublike creatures who hid throughout the daylight

hours, curled, dreaming in the circles, bathed in

the unvoiced songs, the warm closeness, the

profound comfort and content.

Behind them Dr. Chu's voice said something about the

new subspace radio they had brought,

to replace the old and almost worn-out one the

Institute had been using for years. "Do you think

we should lay in a supply of emergency rations?"

"They're not stupid," Thetas went on

quietly, turning, like Kirk, from the

Institute's low-voiced activity toward the

serene stillness of the warren. "They know food is

scarce. They know there are far too many warrens, that

the warrens are far too large. In the

distant past they simply used to let the sick

die, the weak succumb to predators. They won't

do that now, haven't done that for hundreds of years.

Many of them are now saying some kind of compromise

should be sought, but the conservatives say that they will not,

as they say, make the land their slave, force it--

her--to yield beyond what is her will, her free and

loving gift. The idea is repulsive to them, the

start--according to what Arxoras has told me--of

fighting over possessions, of living for things instead

offor one another. In a way, it's hard to fault

them for this."

"Do they have an alternative solution?"

McCoy demanded irritably, poking at the

fire with a stick. The yellow spurt of the light

showed the cynical anger in his face, the anger of a

doctor who sees a man drinking himself to death in

spite of every warning.

Thetas shrugged, and smiled again, his wrinkled

face and bald head dyed honey-gold in the

fire's glow against the squatty screen of barrel

trees behind him. "For the most part they say things are

not so bad yet, and may not grow any worse."

And, when McCoy made a gesture of impotent

disgust, added, "How many years did the people of your

planet, and of my own, even the well-meaning ones,

say the same in the face of the Malthusian

alternative?"

"And unfortunately," Kirk put in,

folding his arms and leaning one broad, gold-clad

shoulder against the nearest tree stem, "the concept of

ownership and the practice of agriculture are

important points of definition in the index of

civilization as set out in the Settlement

Accords with the Klingons."

"But that's absurd," Helen protested.

"What about the Suriaps? And the Organians

themselves? Those definitions of civilization were

obsolete before the Settlement was signed! What

about the Drommian Belters?"

Kirk shrugged. "Revisions to the index have been

proposed for years, but the Settlement is still in

force. And as long as Midgwis lies in the path

of Klingon expansion, you know they're going to push

to have the Midgwins declared subsentient and the planet

opened for "development" ... Going by their

track record, the kind of development they

tried with the Organians."

"The poor things," Helen said impulsively,

and Thetas chuckled with genuine amusement.

"Scarcely that. One of the main Klingon

arguments that the Midgwins are animals and not

human is the number of their "researchers"--

read "scouts"--who attempted to investigate

this planet who never returned."

"I don't know," McCoy returned with a

wry grin. "I'd call that a pretty good

argument to the contrary, considering the differences in

size and firepower. If what you said about our little

friend the Ghost Walker is true--"

"But how could he?" Helen asked, her dark

brows pulling down over the bridge of her nose.

"They don't seem to have much technology. I

don't think I've seen a weapon--or a tool

of any kind--or even fire, for that matter ..."

A muted commotion from the Research Institute's

doorway cut off her voice. The makeshift

curtain--a silvery survival blanket hung

in the low door arch--was lifted aside and the

others emerged, Shorak and L'jian carrying a

few small sample cases, Doctors Chu and

Nomias bearing the empty sections of crate in

which the new subspace transmitter had been

delivered. "Those will make good seats, when we

get an annex built for you," said L'jian,

shaking back the end of her sloppily braided

queue from one thin shoulder. "And you'll find the

survival blankets you have brought will have their

uses, in spite of the relatively high ambient

temperature ..."

"It will take getting used to," panted

Nomias, whose pale blue skin was drenched in

sweat despite the brevity of his thin shorts and

singlet. Kirk smiled a little as L'jian nodded

her agreement, knowing that this area's slow baking

warmth would be as uncomfortab ly hot to the Andorian

as it was chilly to the two Vulcans.

"And you say there is nothing else at all that

resembles an artifact?" Chu inquired of

Shorak, looking up from her tiny height at the

skeletal Vulcan beside her. "No pottery,

no food bowls ..."

"They sometimes pile seeds and fruit upon pads

of flap lichen they strip from the rocks," Shorak

explained. "Invariably they eat the lichen,

however--they do not keep anything."

The little Earthwoman sighed. "I suppose

we'll be able to make a case for the braided flower

chains, but it will be awkward. The Klingons are

sure to say that anyone can braid flowers

--but then, anyone can chip an arrow point. And the

predators they hunt ...?"

"In the single hunt we saw," L'jian

said, "they drove the Flaygrub over the edge of a

cliff--the spindars of M-428 do that to the

galfirdach, and no one would argue that the spindars

are sentient."

"Except Horace Frill of Oxford

Institute, in that dreadful article he wrote for

Interstellar Studies, no," Chu agreed

thoughtfully, and then turned back to Kirk. "We

are satisfied as to the conditions here on this

planet, Captain, both in terms of our

physical safety and the safety of the next

phase of this mission. Has what you have seen

satisfied you?" She spoke formally, as she had

always maintained a formal distance from him, but in her

tiny crone face her dark eyes were shining, as

Kirk had seen Helen's shine as she looked

around her at this strange and beautiful world.

He smiled. "Yes," he said. "I have a

few concerns, but nothing that Dr. Shorak has not

also expressed. I'll report to Starfleet that

I find no exceptional or immediate dangers here;

that contact phase can proceed. Tomorrow--"

"If you please," Chu said, again with a formal

inclination of her head, "my colleague and I have

accepted Dr. Shorak's invitation to spend the

night here--our first night upon the planet. We can

return briefly to the ship tomorrow before it leaves

orbit." The joy of it, the eagerness, was palpable

in her voice. "Helen ...?"

Kirk turned, to look at the woman who had

suddenly fallen so silent at his side.

He thought, I may never see her again after

tomorrow ... His past had taught him to be

philosophical about good-byes, and that people always

did turn up again.

But he knew, too, that when they turned up

again, it was seldom the same.

Helen said slowly, "I ... I think I'll

spend the night on the ship." She did not look

at Chu--didn't look at Kirk either. Her

hazel eyes were lowered, her angular face very still.

Nomias's prim mouth flexed a little,

repressing whatever his thoughts were, but Chu came

over to the tall woman and took the powerful hand in

her own tiny one. In her neat little khaki

coveralls and heavy boots, she looked like some

strange little wrinkled doll, oddly

similar to the Midgwins themselves. Her voice was

neutral as she said, "Then you can bring our things with

you when you beam down in the morning." Her black

eyes, looking up into the downcast hazel ones, were

understanding behind their scholarly detachment. Or not,

she seemed to add, unspoken.

"It will save us a trip back up," she went

on chattily, while her wise, dark glance

flicked over Kirk, as if evaluating the

decision she knew Helen would have to make, while

saying nothing that would influence it. And indeed, since

the decision was, as Mr. Spock would say,

completely irrational, there was nothing much that she could

say that Helen hadn't already considered. Instead she

continued, "I agree with the good Dr. McCoy on

the subject of transporter beams ... I

never did like the thought of having the component atoms

of my being disassembled and reassembled like a bagful

of puzzle bits."

Helen chuckled softly in spite of herself, and

squeezed Dr. Chu's hand. "Thank you."

The old woman smiled, and patted her arm.

"Good night. My things are in the corner of my

room by the door ... If you'd check the backs

of the drawers for me I'd appreciate it.

Nomias's things are all boxed up beside his

bunk. We shall see you in the morning."

Or not, Kirk's thoughts echoed again. He

put the words from his mind.

Helen said nothing, only turned and walked up

the path toward the warren, passing close to the ropy

lines of dreaming Midgwins, toward where the rocks

of the box canyon sheltered the transporter

coordinates. McCoy was already on his way there,

the sample cases he'd taken from L'Jian

tucked under one arm--the pitifully slim evidence

that this "rich and complex" culture, as Thetas had

termed it, was in fact culture at all, and not

an anthropologist's dream that politicians

could exploit. The world, untouched

by agriculture, was ideal for colonization. A

braided wreath of flowers--a few mud-smeared

sticks ... to be carefully cryostored by the

small Anthro department, and eventually passed

on, as Helen had said, for others to analyze more

fully.

Watching her walk away into the darkness, Kirk

felt a pang, knowing in his heart what she would be

leaving behind here. Behind him he heard Nomias say

to Chu with a slight, superior twist to his

high voice, "If you think you're seeing that

woman in the morning, you're deceiving yourself."

Chu sniffed as the two of them turned back to the

hut, her long white pigtail gleaming like frost-

killed grass in the moonlight. "Oh, don't

be a fool."

"I'm pleased you feel yourself able to make a

favorable report on conditions here," Shorak

said quietly, as he and Kirk stood for a moment

beside the dying fire. "I will admit to an occasional

mistrust of Starfleet's view of certain

matters. The Midgwins are not easy

to explain."

Up the thorny slope behind them, the warren had

sunk into near silence, though, peering through the

moonlit blueness of the night, Kirk could see the

Midgwins still sitting in their crowded, hand-linked

lines. They were no longer swaying, but the peace, the

joy of their communion, seemed to lie on the night

like the scent of summer grass, healing, caring,

enfolding. Cherishing even this prim Vulcan

researcher, Kirk thought, with some amusement, whether

he admitted it or not, as it would cherish the new

research team ... cherishing everyone, every living soul

in the village, in the world, who stood within its

spell.

He smiled. "I'm not sure I understand the

explanation I've been given. But nowhere in the

Federation Charter does it say that we have to understand

each other ... only that we be willing to try."

He extended his hand, and Dr. Shorak took it

without even the slight hesitation that Spock showed--

and Spock's instinctive avoidance of physical

contact was far less than most Vulcans'.

Evidently, living among the Midgwins had had

at least some effect.

The moon was setting as Kirk climbed the

thread of path and passed through the silent warren.

Everywhere, Midgwins sat in their close-furled

spirals of caring peace, their triangular,

flat-topped heads gleaming like a pavement of

cobblestones in all directions, a sea of life

washing up against the low domes of their houses, the

high sides of the rocks. So many of them--thousands

--in this one small area, he thought, trying to eke

a living from wild fruits and grains.

And yet Shorak--and Chu--had refused

supplemental food supplies, which, Helen had

explained, would have alienated them irreparably from

the community. It was grabby, greedy ...

and lacking in faith in Rhea, in the Earth Spirit

Mother, who gave her children what they needed when they

needed it.

He shook his head. No, he thought. He did

not understand.

Ahead of him in the dim starlight that filtered

down into the canyon's darkness he made out the

shapes of Helen and McCoy. They weren't

talking, though Helen had taken one of the sample

cases and was holding it folded in her arms. Her

head was down, her rumpled coveralls bleached

colorless by the filtered light; McCoy, a little

apart from her, was looking quietly around him, thinking

his own thoughts of this strange and beautiful world.

Bones would know, Kirk guessed, as well as

any of them did, what it meant that Helen was

returning to the Enterprise tonight. Bones would

realize what the decision to remain with the ship would

mean to her.

If that's the decision she comes to.

She raised her head at the crunch of the stream

gravel underfoot as he stepped clear of the shadows

of trees and rocks, and she greeted him with a

half-apologetic smile; by it, he knew that the

jury on that one was still out.

He wanted her to stay. And, he reflected,

half amused at his own reactions, he wanted

to know now what her decision was to be--wanted

to feel safe. He knew already he was in for a long

night of wondering whether he'd have this woman at his

side for the next two years--with luck, the next

sixty--or not.

But like Chu, he knew there was nothing he could

say.

Still, there was a feeling of relief in his chest as

he flipped open his communicator and said,

"Three to beam up, Scotty."

The final setting of the moon had softened its

shadows. A diffuse fill of starlight touched

what had been pockets of velvet blackness and

glimmered on the strange, low-growing plants that

clogged the canyon walls, the spicy sweetness

of their blossoms drenching the dusty air. And in the

shadows of the rocks, Kirk saw, suddenly, the

shape of a solitary Midgwin, its stumpy,

podlike body barely distinguishable from a plant

or a stone itself. In the same moment that he

wondered what any Midgwin was doing absenting itself

voluntarily from the comfort and healing of the Consciousness

Web, he recognized by the dim starshine

the ropy network of tattooing and the ugly blotch of

disruptor scars, and read the malevolent hatred

in Yarblis Geshkerroth's fishlike yellow

eyes.

Then the cold glitter of the transporter beam

enveloped him, breakin g his atoms

into electricity, his mind into a flashing stream of

neurons leaping across the dark.

Chapter Three

Something was wrong.

Mr. Spock's hand shot to the Emergency

Quarantine button almost without his conscious thought.

The band of amber lights sprang inffbeing like a

coronet around the transporter room's ceiling,

and blast doors slipped down into place with an

oiled pneumatic hiss almost before the three gold

figures in the light of the beams solidified

into human shape. Assistant Transport

Chief Oba looked over at him in surprise;

Captain Kirk stepping swiftly down from the

transport disk after one quick glance at the

flashing lights, asked, "What is it, Mr.

Spock?"

But after that first second--and indeed, even during

the flare of the impulse itself--the Vulcan himself could

not have said. "I'm not sure, Captain." There was

no apology, no uncertainty, in his deep,

slightly rough voice, and even as he spoke he

looked around the brightly lit chamber, searching,

analyzing ... McCoy had stepped off his

transport disk with his usual celerity, as if

he feared--which he half did, in spite of

Transport Chief Kyle's repeated

reassurances--that the beams would come on again and

snatch him back into electrostatic limbo.

Dr. Helen Gordon remained for a moment where

she had appeared, holding a duraplast sample

box cradled in her arms and regarding the captain

worriedly.

"My impression was that something else

materialized with the transporter beams."

Kirk's eyes narrowed and he scanned the

room again. "But you didn't see anything?"

"Negative, Captain," Spock replied

formally. "A subliminal impression only."

"Mr. Oba?"

The communicator in the console crackled on;

the voice of the night officer on the

bridge came on. "Mr. Spock? We've

got a reading of Emergency Quarantine down there

..."

Kirk touched the switch on the console's

front and turned to the small black eye of the

in-ship visual receptor high in the wall.

"We have a possible alert situation here, but nothing

serious at the moment." He turned back to the

transport assistant.

Oba shook his head. "Looked kosher to me

until Mr. Spock hit the panic button."

His long, slender, ebony fingers were already keying in

a playback sequence. All of them, including

Helen now, were grouped around the console as a

readout single-framed through.

"I always said you can't trust those things,"

McCoy growled with a glance back at the

transport disks, cold silver circles on

the red floor of the chamber itself.

"I sympathize with your objections,

Doctor," Spock replied, mechanically

punching in a visual replay of the transport

sequence, "but the Enterprise does not carry

rope ladders long enough to reach from the planet's

surface up to our current orbit."

"Oh, come on, Mr. Spock," Dr.

Gordon teased with a shaky grin, "you couldn't bring

the ship in a little closer to the planet?"

"Not even to oblige Dr. McCoy."

Spock studied the slow-motion sequence as it

replayed on the console's small screen the

preliminary glitter of the matter beams, the

gradual taking-shape of those shimmering, cutout

forms, swiftly solidifying as the atoms

reassembled. Then he played it through again, studying

the spaces behind and around the materializing forms,

while Captain Kirk, who had been watching the

screen over his shoulder, prowled cautiously to every

corner of the small room and up onto the

transport platform itself, hazel eyes half

shut, turning his head this way and that as if listening,

scenting for some anomaly.

"I see nothing abnormal on the visuals."

The captain came back to the little group around the

console, touched the communications switch.

"Lieutenant Dawe? Can we have an intensive

life-readings scan of the transporter room at

a submicron level? Feed it through to us here."

The transporter rooms, the designers of the

starships had known, were the ship's weak

point on missions of exploration. They, and the

shuttlecraft hangar were equipped not only with the

capability for almost instantaneous quarantine, but

with the finest and most accurate of the ship's internal

scanners. In the early days of warp-drive

exploration, there had been far too many cases of

hideous stowaways in the form of viruses,

larvae, and unknown parasites that, multiplying,

growing, or cloning in the ventilator ducts or

electrical conduits, could easily wipe out a

ship's crew before they could be destroyed, sometimes

before they were even detected.

But, studying the readouts fed to them by the ship's

computer, with McCoy looking over his shoulder,

Spock could detect no anomaly within the room

itself, no evidence of any life-form whatsoever

unaccounted for. And indeed, even that first, fleeting

impression that there was something else in the room was

fading. He could not recall exactly what it was

that he had sensed, only that he had sensed something

wrong and had reacted instantaneously to prevent

its possible spread.

"Most curious," he said after a half hour's

examination and reexamination of the readouts revealed

nothing. He looked across the little room at the

captain, who was still pacing slowly along its

metallic walls, touching them every now and then and

looking up at the lighting and ventilator ducts,

as if searching for some means of possible egress.

"Captain ..."

He paused, for the captain had shut his eyes,

his eyebrows pulled slightly together, listening--

scenting, Spock would almost have said--for something, some

clue, as to what might have been heard or seen.

But at the sound of Spock's voice, those eyes

opened quickly. "Yes, Mr. Spock?"

"Have you a hypothesis from information learned on the

planet?"

The captain hesitated for a long moment; then his

glance shifted. "I don't ... I'm not sure.

No." He shook his head, and said more strongly,

"No."

"Dr. Gordon? You have studied the native

life-forms of Elcidar Beta Three."

Dr. Gordon, who had remained quietly

to one side during most of the examination, shook her

head. Mr. Spock had not been unaware of

Dr. Gordon's increasing intimacy with the

captain; he had, indeed, not been surprised in

the slightest when the captain had gone over

to the researcher's table in the mess room the first

night out of the Institute.

Three years of interested observation had made

Spock familiar with James Kirk's

reactions to the female of the human or humanoid

species, and though he himself felt no physical

attraction to any of these women, these days he could

usually pinpoint which female of a group would appeal

to the captain's gallantry. Dr. Gordon had

few of the physical characteristics typical of the

captain's choices--she was six or seven

centimeters taller than the tallest

representative of the romantic sampling so far

that Spock knew about, nearly the captain's own

height, her eyebrows darker and thicker and her chin

squarer. At first glance Spock had been

deeply curious about the nonphysical factors

at work, though of course he was not about to pursue

such information verbally among other males of the human

species, like Dr. McCoy or Mr.

Scott.

Within a very few days he had come to understand how he

himself could find this woman appealing, had he

permitted his human side to overcome the

Vulcan training inculcated into him by his father's

people--not to mention his own unspoken determination to be

completely Vulcan in his soul, even if he could

not be so in his chromosomes. Dr. Gordon had

a fine intelligence and a clear-thinking logic, a

high degree of abstract aesthetics, and a quick-

witted, if sometimes regrettably frivolous,

verbal facility. But Spock surmised on the

strength of previous observations that these were only

secondary factors in the captain's initial

interest. Nevertheless, he had, in three years,

only once seen the captain so seriously

involved with a woman. It had taken the captain a

long time to recover from the loss of Edith Keeler

--in some ways, Spock suspected that he never

would recover. His Vulcan logic deplored an

involvement which was, to say the least, an invitation

to inefficiency--but some rebellious human corner

of his soul applauded Kirk's judgment.

Not, he reminded himself austerely, that it was any

of his business.

Dr. Gordon said now, "There are some very

small, very quick predators listed in the Midgwis

initial reports, and something called a sheefla,

which is supposedly very hard to see. But according

to Shorak, sheefla avoid the

villages, especially when the Consciousness Web

is in operation."

"And either of the smaller predators would have left

a physical residue on the walls if it had

gotten into the vents," Dr. McCoy added,

walking over to where the captain still stood, his clear-

cut, boyish features stained honey-gold by the

amber warning lights as he looked up at the

steel-blocked vent shafts nearest the

transport chamber itself. "And there's no trace

of that in the microscans."

"And in any case," Dr. Gordon added,

"they couldn't have moved swiftly enough to beat the blast

doors down. And there's no sign of them on the

playbacks."

"No," the captain said slowly, and looked

back at McCoy and Spock as if seeing them

for the first time. "No, I suspect it was some kind

of electromagnetic surge effect from the

transporter itself, like a static backfire ...

Isn't that possible, Mr. Oba?"

Oba nodded. "Now and then I've heard about the

beams throwing off a "ghost" ... I've never

seen it, though. I'll ask Mr. Scott."

"Do," the captain said. "I recall reading

something about it in the 23.5 issue of Starship."

He crossed between them to the console and touched a

switch. "All systems check out here, Mr.

Dawe. False alarm. Deactivate

quarantine." His fingers flicked through the four-

digit security code. A moment later the

blast doors hissed open and the amber lights went

out.

As always, Spock felt the slightest flinch of

uneasiness as they did so, wondering if he had

truly investigated all possible contingencies.

Preoccupied with this, he was for a moment barely

conscious of Dr. Gordon stepping a pace

toward the captain as Kirk strode with his usual

briskness through the opened doors. But his ears were

quick, and he heard, as probably few others in the

room did, the soft breath of her uncertain

voice whisper, "Jim ..."

The captain was already turning back in the

doorway, silhouetted against the crisp white

lighting of the corridor outside. For a moment

Spock thought he was going to speak--either to himself or

to Dr. Gordon, who stood at his side.

But shaking his head, the captain thought better of

it. He only said, "Good night,

gentlemen ... Helen." And was gone.

"Are you all right?"

The small guest stateroom was dim--it was

possible to cut even the very low safety lights for

sleeping, but few people did--and the lights of Deck

5's corridors that streamed in from behind

Lieutenant Uhura as she stood in the

doorway weren't much brighter at this hour of the

night. But by then the Communications officer could see

that Helen had packed to leave, small bundles

of personal possessions lying in a neat row

along the wall opposite the bed.

A backpack. A small duffel. A pair

of good rock-climbing boots. A carrier of

books on wafer--Uhura knew from earlier

visits to Helen's cabin that they were mostly

classics of interstellar field anthropology

and all preliminary reports on Midgwis and

its inhabitants.

Helen herself, clothed in pajamas of thin white

lawn with her shaggy, coffee-colored tail of

hair spread out over her shoulders, sat cross-

legged on the rust-colored coverlet of the narrow

bed, a look somewhere between relief, pleasure, and

disappointment in her eyes.

She had, Uhura realized, been half

expecting the captain.

And half dreading the interview.

"I'll be fine."

"We'll all .be "fine" in twenty

years," Uhura said with a smile. "How are

you?"

And Helen laughed with a soft, ironic

amusement as Uhura perched herself on the other end

of the bed. She gestured toward the packed bundles

along the wall. "The others said they'd spend the

night on the planet. I said I'd be down in the

morning."

Uhura said nothing, understanding from her own

experiences that last, desperate push against a

decision that has to be made. The tall

anthropologist sighed, a deep hurtful gust that

seemed to come from the core of her bones, and folded

her long arms around herself. "God, this stinks,"

Helen said without rancor, as if she knew that

Uhura would know exactly what she meant.

"You want some coffee?" Uhura asked--for

Helen looked chilled with the inner cold that had

nothing to do with the Enterprise's

excellently controlled climate.

Helen nodded. The VIP guest cabins were

all equipped with food slots; as Uhura

crossed the room to punch in the order, she

remarked, "Well, that's too bad, because all

you're going to get is what comes out of this."

It surprised Helen into laughing, as Uhura

had hoped it would. "Oh, come on! Yeoman

Brunowski would commit seppuku if he heard you

imply he couldn't get a decent adjustment for

coffee out of his remixers."

Uhura took the blue-gray velfoam cup

from the slot and turned back toward the bed. "They

can warp spacetime and unravel molecular

structure, but even with the kind of fine tuning you can

get with a starship's computer, they still can't really

get coffee right except with real beans. Will you?"

she added quietly. "Be down in the morning?"

Helen looked up at her with a lopsided twist

to her mouth and eyes that shined suddenly with moisture

in the dim glow of the reading lamp beside the bunk.

"I don't know," she said helplessly. And when

Uhura sat down beside her again, folding up her

long legs under the red-and-black caftan she

wore when off duty, Helen added, "I don't

think so."

Uhura sighed, and there was a moment's silence.

Then she said, "I checked for you. You're way

overqualified, but once we get to Starbase

Nine, you can enlist as ensign and work as

Anthro/geo assistant to Lieutenant

Bergdahl ..." She paused as Helen winced.

"That's the only position open? With

Bergdahl?"

"I'm afraid so. And that's only because

Emiko's willing to transfer to Input. It's a

tight area."

"And I expect Emiko's only looking for a

way to get out of working with Bergdahl," Helen

added glumly. It was a conclusion Uhura had come

to already.

"He's a damn good researcher," Helen went

on, "but he's never going to forget that I've got

my doctorate, and he doesn't ... and he's

never going to forget that I came on as the

"captain's woman."" There was sudden

bitterness in her voice. Uhura made a

noise of protest, fractionally too late--she

knew Helen was right, about the sour and prissy

Anthro/geo chief at least, and

possibly about others onboard besides; Helen's

eyes were defensive as she said, "You know that's

what they'll say."

"Only for a little while. And only the people who

always say things like that. And everybody," Uhura

added wisely, "knows who those are. Technically

you'll both be working under Spock. You won't have

to see old Birddog half the time ..."

"But the other half I will." She set the

coffee aside--it was just as flavorless as always,

despite the cutting edge of remixer technology

--and shook back the loose tangle of her dark

hair. "Dammit, Uhura, I can't avoid the

man I'm going to be assistant to, no matter

how many holes he picks in my work. And I'm

coming on this ship to work, to do a job ... to salvage

what I can of my career after I ..." She

visibly bit back the words blow it to be with the

man I love ...

Uhura said nothing. There was not much, she

reflected, that one could say under the

circumstances.

"Dammit ..." Helen whispered again.

"You do have six months," Uhura began

hesitantly.

The younger woman looked back at her with weary

irony in her eyes. "Do you really think the

Enterprise is coming back to Midgwis in six

months? That there won't be some emergency, some

unexpected mission, that gets it transferred

forty sectors away? That's what starships do,

Uhura. They're the knights of the fleet, not the

pawns. How many times has the Enterprise been

able to return on a regular basis to a planet

it visited? Jim isn't his own master, any more

than ..."

She bit off her words again, and Uhura finished

for her "Any more than I am?"

Helen's cheeks reddened in the ocher glow of the

lamp.

Uhura's lips framed a wry smile.

"Why do you think we get to be such close friends in

Starfleet? We're all we've got ... if

anyone's got anything, that is. And you don't.

You never do."

"No," Helen sighed. "No, you never do."

She pushed back her hair again, stared out into the

shadows of the tiny room. It seemed to remind her

of something, for she glanced over at Uhura again and

asked, "Did you check on who I'd be

rooming with if I signed on?"

"I tried," Uhura said guardedly. "But

that's something you can't really know in advance. The

computer's usually pretty good about match-ups, but

with a mid-voyage transfer it's catch-as-catch-

can. I know Zink's roommate just

transferred--"

"Zink's roommates always transfer, according

to what Giacomo from Computers told me. Zink

never shuts up."

She was silent for a time, rubbing her big hands

together as if with cold, her knees drawn up under

her chin. The VIP guest quarters were better

soundproofed than most of the ship; here there was not even

the faint murmur of voices passing in the

corridor. Only the soft, subliminal throb

of the ventilators, and the distant hum, more felt

than heard, within the walls themselves, the resonances

of engines and pumps, the heartbeat of the ship itself.

At length Helen said softly, "But the thing

is, I don't want to lose him. To lose ...

I don't know. These six months, this year, or

two years ..." She got to her feet, an

impulsive move like a big lioness's, and paced

the confines of the room, her bare feet making no

sound upon the floor. "Time can be so precious, and

it disappears so fast. I don't want to look

back when I'm fifty and say, "I found a

man I loved like I've loved no one else, but

we both had other commitments.""

Uhura's lips tightened suddenly, and she

looked aside.

"All my life I've studied, and learned,

and trained myself to add to the knowledge of the universe,

to learn how to work with other species ... but never with

people of my own species. And my work is mostly

done alone. And I want ..." Helen shook

her head, her voice faltering like a cracked beam

under sudden weight.

"And the captain?" Uhura asked.

"This isn't easy for him either." Helen

paused, and drew a deep breath. "I won't

always be a third-class assistant to Uriah

Heep, you know. Some kind of compromise is

possible if we're together. If we're not ..."

She shook her head. "We have nothing. There!"

She grinned shakily, though her eyes glinted with

tears again. "Now I've talked myself into it."

Uhura got to her feet with one smooth motion,

strode over to Helen and hugged her

firmly. "I want to say, "Don't do

anything you'll be sorry for later,"" she said

gently. "But what I'm really thinking is, I'm

glad you'll be with us for a while longer. Welcome

aboard."

Helen squeezed her hand, a powerful grip like

a man's. "Thank you," she whispered, and

Uhura could sense the tears perilously near the

surface. "Thank you for coming."

She would cry, Uhura thought, when she was

alone.

So she bade her good night, and walked away

down the corridor in the dim lighting of the late-

night shift, for everyone in this sector worked the day

watch, and everyone--or nearly everyone--would be

asleep. She had said, "Don't do anything

you'll be sorry for later," but either way she knew

Helen would be sorry. It was the nature of

choice. But she knew from her own experience that

nothing was so hurtful as a decision unmade. When

Helen cried, they would be tears of regret for the

road not taken but the pain would be less

desperate, less awful, than indecision would

be.

Uhura wrapped her caftan more closely

around her, hugging herself as if with cold, though the

mild coolness of the Enterprise's corridors

never varied. She remembered her own decisions,

the roads untaken that would have led her anywhere but

here.

It was something one couldn't afford to think about too

much. Infinite diversity, infinite combinations,

Mr. Spock would say ... But unless you picked

one of those infinite roads at the crossing of the

ways, you would never walk on any. And in space

the distances were so great, and the times so long. She could

only hope that Helen would be happy in the choice

she had made.

And Captain Kirk ...

She turned down the corridor that led to the

turbolift up to the junior officers' quarters

on Deck 4, and stopped.

In three years she had walked these

corridors in the muted lights of the late-night

watch hundreds of times, even when, as now, they

lay before her completely empty, silent but for the

almost soundless throb of the engines far below. Even

returning from rec-room showings of the gruesome

horror films to which Mr. Sulu was addicted,

she had never felt nervous or uneasy

with the empty dimness ... For all her lively

imagination, Uhura's practical mind did not

work that way.

But now she felt it, the creeping chill of

irrational dread.

She fell back a pace, telling herself not

to be silly, but her hands were cold. Her eyes

searched the shadows, quartering the corridor ahead

of her with quick efficiency, searching for anomalous

shadow, for movement, for a break in the familiar

pattern that would have caused her senses to shrink like

this, would have caused the alarm bells to go off in the

back of her brain.

There was nothing. Only a darkness not

noticeably darker than it had ever been before, a

stillness that seemed to wait for her, to watch her with

dreadful intentness from some point along the right-hand

wall between where she stood now and the turbolift's

shut doors.

Uhura stood for several moments looking down

that empty corridor, feeling the slow growing of a

creeping cold over her, fighting desperately

against the terrible sense that something was coming toward her,

something moving slowly, gropingly, uncertainly

along the wall ... Something that reached out toward

her, and tried to form the syllables of her name.

There is nothing there. She fell back

another pace and told herself this two or three

times more ...

Then suddenly she turned and walked quickly

back the way she had come. There was only one

turbolift from Deck 5 to the smaller decks

of the primary hull above this point, but she followed

the corridor around to one of the lifts going down to the

ship's central lounge on the deck below. As she

emerged from the turbolift and threaded her way between

the tables and couches of the brightly lighted room,

waving a greeting to her various acquaintances of the

small late-night shift taking their breaks at

its white plastic tables over remixer coffee and

various other delicacies fabricated from the

recycled raw elements in the lowest holds, she

cursed herself inwardly, calling herself a fool ...

At the far end of the lounge, which sprawled

enormously across the center of Deck 6, she

got back into the main turbolift that led up,

eventually, to the bridge and tried to sound casual

as she said, "Deck Four." She felt

obscurely embarrassed, as if the turbolift

computer would recognize her voice and

ask her why she'd made such a pointless detour.

As she hurried down the long, dimly lit

corridor from the turbolift to her room, she

kept glancing back over her shoulder, though she

knew there was nothing there to see.

Chapter Four

"Helen!" At the sound of the transporter-

room door opening, Chief Engineer

Montgomery Scott slid out from under the main

console's access hatch and stood up with a smile.

On the few occasions on which he'd visited the

rec rooms--mostly at mealtimes--in the past

few weeks he'd had a couple of long

conversations with Dr. Gordon, and she was one of the

few people onboard who shared his taste for bagpipe

music. Then, too, as one of the older members

of the crew his instincts as a matchmaker were strong.

His pleased expression wavered a moment as he

saw that she carried packs and duffels, but she

smiled at him and shook her head.

"Chu and Nomias," she explained.

Scotty beamed. "Then you're staying?"

She nodded. But looking at her again, the

Engineering chief saw the marks of sleeplessness on

her face the smudgy look under the eyes, the

lines around the mouth. It had been a hard choice

for her, he realized, though privately he

couldn't understand how anyone would deliberate for even

a moment between joining the crew of the Enterprise and

spending who knew how many years on a godforsaken

backwater planet whose inhabitants not only

had not invented the wheel but had no intention of doing

so. But still, it was the job she'd prepared for.

She smiled, and forced cheer into her voice.

"I'm putting in for provisionary fleet status

today; my papers should be waiting for me by the time we

reach Starbase Nine. I'll be in

Anthro/geo with Bergdahl."

"Garh," muttered Scotty in alarmed

distaste. "Never let that whey-faced laddie catch

you takin' a glass of wine, then, if you don't

want to hear about it for the next three months." As

he spoke he took the two heaviest duffels from

her and carried them to the transporter disks,

Helen following behind with the rest of the assorted

packs. "What did the captain say when you

told him?"

She hesitated awkwardly on the

steps of the transport chamber itself. "I haven't

told him yet," she admitted. "I didn't

decide myself until late last night."

Scotty's eyes twinkled. "Then he should be

down here himself any minute"--he smiled--

"thinkin' he's going to see you off."

Her self-conscious blush belied the quick shake

of her head, but he'd seen the way she'd looked

around the room when she first came in, half

expecting to see him there. "Is there some problem

here?" she asked quickly, gesturing toward the console

where Transport Chief Kyle's red-

coveralled legs still protruded through the open

access panel.

Scotty shook his head, all considerations and

speculations of his captain and his captain's

romances dropping from his thoughts in the face of the

larger consideration at hand. "Nothing that we've been

able to find," he said.

"You mean something that caused the feedback ghost

we got last night?"

"Aye. And feedback's likely all it

was." Scott shrugged. "It happens now and

then, if there's some bit of dust or foreign

matter in the transporter room that picks up a

sympathetic resonation. You'll get an energy

jump, but it's nowhere near strong enough to be of

danger to anyone. Just a bit of a sparkle. Mr.

Spock's not the first man who's pulled down a

quarantine on the strength of it."

He walked back over to the console and hunkered

down to check the readings on the micro-fine ion

scanner. It registered zero. There was not so much as

an atom of foreign material inside the

console's sealed circuits, not even the occasional

film of water vapor that would sometimes leak through the

vent filters ... nothing. Pleasing to know, of

course, but it did leave an unanswered question.

He straightened up again, and shook his head.

"It used to happen more often, before they began using

filex shields on the wiring. I remember a

shipwide intruder alert that kept us orbiting

Lyra Omicron Six for twenty-four hours

while we went over this ship with flea combs, and

nary a thing did we find except the head

librarian's cache of chocolate bonbons. But

you have to be careful."

Helen smiled, ducking her head a little. There

was a small silence.

"We've a few minutes till beam-

down time," said Scott after a moment. "We can

open a channel to the planet, if you'd like to tell

them you won't be joining them after all."

"I'll speak to them from the bridge, when Jim

... when the captain makes contact. I

suppose," she added with a half-smile, "that

I'll have to learn to call him Captain if I

become part of the crew. Thank you." She glanced

at the chronometer on the wall. "It's 0700

hours ... he'll be on the bridge now, won't

he?"

"Aye ..." Scott nodded and saw her shake

her head a little, as if putting aside some thought

or disappointment, or telling herself not to be

silly.

She smiled. "I'll speak to him there, then."

And she was gone, leaving Scotty to return to the

puzzle of the ghost that shouldn't have been there.

On the bridge the usual quietly efficient

commotion was under way as the Enterprise prepared

to leave orbit. Helen caught a sidelong

glance from Uhura as she walked over to the

captain's chair, where Kirk was listening to Mr.

Spock's summation of conditions between the star

Elcidar Beta and Starbase Nine. Helen

waited until he was done, then took a step

closer and said, "Captain?"

He turned his head, and Helen flinched a little

with startled shock. She had guessed that James

Kirk would get little sleep last night, but never

that it would have done this ... His face looked strained

and oddly gray and it flashed through her mind that if

concern about what her decision was to be--about what it

would mean to him in terms of their commitments to one

another--could do this to him ...

But of course it couldn't, she thought. It was

laughable vanity on her part to even consider that it

might.

Something else was bothering him, something serious.

It was in his voice as he said, "Yes ...

Helen?"

She kept it short. "I'm here to request

transfer to the Enterprise ... admission on a

provisionary basis into Starfleet."

Something changed in his eyes. Her peripheral

vision picked up the quick motion of Mr.

Spock's eyebrow, the slight tension of

Sulu's shoulders, and Chekov's, as they stopped

themselves from looking around from the Navigation console and

grinning congratulations at her ... But the

captain only nodded, and began, "Do you have a--"

and cut himself off quickly. But just for an instant he

looked as if he were groping for a response,

trying to sort out what his next step was to be.

He's surprised, Helen thought with the same

sense of shock she would have experienced if he had

suddenly dashed a pitcher of cold water into her

face. He didn't really think I'd do it.

How could he not have? After all we said on the

planet ...

Everything in her seemed to turn cold; as if

life support and gravity had suddenly

glitched.

He recovered quickly from his surprise, and

manufactured a smile. "Lieutenant

Uhura, transmit a subspace request for

processing to Starbase Nine. It can be ready by the

time we reach there."

"Aye, Captain." Helen could hear the

pleasure in the Communications chief's warm

contralto voice. But looking back at Kirk,

baffled, hurt, and shaken to her bones, she could

see the veiled uncertainty in his eyes.

She stared into the polite, slightly wary

blankness of his eyes, and thought, I've said

I'll be in the fleet, I can't turn around

immediately and say no I won't ...

Before she could speak, Uhura broke in on them

again, saying, "Communication coming in from the research

party, Captain. Shall I put it on the

visuals?"

He turned away a little too gratefully.

"Pipe it in, Lieutenant."

And there, on the main screen, was the place that

would have been her home, the people who would have been her

family, for the next three years at least, years

that would now be spent on this ship ... with Jim ...

Jim who had reacted with that blank-faced

surprise to what they had spoken of last night

...

Long morning shadows splashed a hot blue

on the dusty ground around the Research

Institute's insignificant, lumpy bulk.

In the sulfurous light of the planet's

surface, everything seemed strange, burning. The

short trunks of the barrel trees loomed in a

golden screen behind the hut, and beyond that, the dark

tangle of thorns, the gentle, amber meadow

stretching away down the hillside ... the meadow

along whose edge she and Kirk had walked

last night--Stop thinking about that! Around the

extinguished firepit before the door were heaped the

packs she'd taken down to the transporter room

half an hour previously, and standing beside them were the

people who would have been her colleagues Thetas, like a

small and quick-moving gnome, with his great, dark

Argellian eyes and the whorls of scar tattoos

spread like a jungle over his arms and back;

Shorak, prim and scholarly with his carefully

trimmed beard, and L'jian impatiently pushing

a metal comb into her wild hair; Nomias, with

his supercilious smile, and Chu, wrinkled and

tiny and kind.

At the corner of the screen, at a respectful

distance, a small group of Midgwins stood,

great fishlike eyes watching and blinking

inscrutably. Among them Helen recognized the

old patriarch Arxoras, his long white hair a

thin cloak over his skinny shoulders, a white

flower in either hand.

"Dr. Shorak, Dr. Chu," James

Kirk said, and Helen felt her chest get cold

and heavy with dread, wondering what he really

felt, and wishing she were sure of herself, one way

or the other.

It had all seemed so clear at two o'clock that

morning ...

"Dr. Gordon has decided to turn down the

mission on Midgwis, and has opted instead

to return with the Enterprise to Starbase Nine."

Any of the researchers could have done that, if for

whatever reason--from prevailing climate

to personal health to an inauspicious

astrological conjunction--he or she decided not

to participate in the mission that they had all trained

for. But Helen read the downturned flick of

Nomias's mobile blue lips, and the slight

slump of Chu's shoulders as she realized her

younger colleague had made the choice, taken the

road that ran in the direction she herself had long

ago chosen not to travel.

Kirk went on, "We will make arrangements

from Starbase Nine for a replacement to be

selected and sent from your list of alternates; one

should be out here by the earliest possible transport."

"Leaving us one short--" Nomias began, and

Shorak cut him off.

"Thank you, Captain. Dr. Gordon ..."

Helen stepped forward, into the narrow range of the

small visual pickup unit, part of the

new transmitter that the Enterprise had brought

out to them with the additional research team.

"We respect you for your choice," the

Vulcan said, "and for the courage it took to follow

an alternate course at this late date." With a

nod he stepped back; Vulcans, once away

from the elaborate formalities required by their own

hierarchical culture, tended to speak baldly

to the point.

But Chu said, "I wish you every happiness--and you,

Captain. Thank you for a most pleasant

voyage."

Kirk inclined his head, and the screen went dark.

Standing beside him, Helen watched his profile from the

corner of her eye. His face was unreadable. Then

she saw his glance slide to her, studying her

sidelong, inscrutably considering, and she thought,

It was a sham. Jesus, it was a sham ...

She felt sick to the core of her being. With a

formal, "Captain," she inclined her head to him,

and quietly left the bridge.

Behind her she heard him telling Mr. Sulu

to set a course for Starbase 9 at warp

factor 4.

Captain Kirk remained on the bridge when

the shift ended, deep in the study of the reports

on yesterday's transporter ghost. Lieutenant

Uhura, after checking the guest VIP

staterooms, ran Dr. Gordon to earth in

sickbay, in a small lab where Nurse

Christine Chapel had stayed on after hours to run

an analysis of herbs brought up from the

planet's surface.

Uhura heard Helen's voice as she came

down the corridor, and stepped through the door. It

slipped shut after her, just as Chapel turned on

her high lab stool to regard Helen with deep

compassion in her blue eyes. Helen had spent a

lot of rec-room time with Uhura and Chapel,

working jigsaw puzzles and talking--

inconsequential talk, most of it, but it

overlay a growing core of friendship. Upon the

workbench before the thin-featured blond nurse a row

of a half-dozen graduated cylinders was

arranged, each filled with a clear liquid; a

pile of flimsiplast hardcopy lay before her,

annotated in Dr. McCoy's nearly

illegible script.

"You can still go back, you know," Chapel pointed

out gently.

Helen, who had been pacing the room, only

shook her head. She still wore her many-pocketed

khaki researcher's coverall, her dark hair

bound up in a leather thong and a bronze pin. She

looked over at Uhura, her hazel-green

eyes puzzled, and said, "You were there. Was it just my

imagination? I didn't expect him to fall

into my arms weeping with delight, but ... he

looked surprised. Not even floored, not

knocked for a loop--certainly not relieved. Just

a little surprised. You know him ..."

"I'm not sure any woman really does,"

said Uhura, bringing up a second lab stool and

perching one flank on it as Chapel turned back

to her procedure, adjusting the temperature

control on one of the cylinders.

In practice, neither Chapel nor Dr.

McCoy was ever off shift. Though they had more

unstructured time than anyone else on the

Enterprise, in fact they were like the senior

officers, always on call. Uhura had known

she'd be able to find Christine here--if she hadn't

been working on one of Dr. McCoy's ongoing

procedures she'd have been working on the paper she

was writing for the Journal of Alien

Pathologies--and had known that Helen would

probably be with her. She had passed Dr.

McCoy's office and had seen him, too, still

hard at work. On a mission of exploration, no

medical officer could afford to simply rely on

existing information or practices. In dealing with a

constant bombardment of alien microbes, unknown

conditions, and shifting biosystems, awareness of

new possibilities could literally be the difference

between life and death for every person in the crew.

Uhura leaned an elbow on the workbench and added

quietly, "I would have said, "except you.""

"That's odd ..." Chapel paused in the act

of jotting a note of the numbers which had flickered

to life on the small screen at the rear of the

bench.

"What?" Helen came over and Uhura

turned, both distracted for the moment from the puzzle

of Captain Kirk's behavior by the uncertainty

in Chapel's voice.

"Well ..." Christine consulted Dr.

McCoy's notes again. "The odd thing is that

there's nothing odd. I mean, these are just ordinary

homeopathic herbs. There's nothing in them to account

for some of the medical effects Dr.

McCoy--and Dr. L'jian--observed down on

Midgwis."

"He mentioned he was puzzled by the tricorder

readings he got," Helen said thoughtfully. "I

know he kept taking them."

Chapel punched up a reading on the second

of the series of vials, and the third, jotting notes

on her stylopad as she spoke. "He said they were

all badly deficient in ten or twelve

essential vitamins ..."

"They looked like they were just this side of starvation,"

Helen said frankly. "It ... it scared me, a

little."

"At that level of starvation, they should have

virtually nothing left of their immune systems--

and according to the readings, they don't! Like the

Midgwins themselves. In L'jian's analysis of

ancient bones, she says the Midgwins are

se verely malnourished in comparison to what they were

even fifty years ago."

Uhura frowned; even she sensed the anomaly,

and Helen said, "That was mentioned in the preliminary

reports. But everyone down there seemed fine."

"Exactly." Chapel looked up from her

note making. "It's got Dr. McCoy

stonewalled. According to Thetas, there have been a series

of plagues, the sort you start having once a

planet's food resources are bottoming out.

But each of those plagues stopped, cut itself short

after a dozen casualties. Dr. Shorak

attributes this to some kind of herbal medicine, but

I can't find anything in any of the herbs we've

tested to justify that contention. In your reading, in your

prep work on the planet, did you find anything that

might account for it?"

Helen thought back for a moment, then shook her

head. "There's been almost nothing written about

Midgwis, you see," she said. "The early

reports described the Midgwins as

nonsentient--certainly not the dominant life-form

of the planet, which is the Bargumps. The

Midgwins just colonize whatever land the

Bargumps aren't breeding in and stay out of their

way. It wasn't until five years ago that

anyone guessed they had a culture at all, and

not until the Organian Peace Treaty two

years ago that the Federation was willing to fund

research to keep the Klingons from going in and

stripmining the place like they did Marcipor

Two. They still don't know whether the

Marcipex were a sentient race or not--no one

ever will, now. But they've found artifacts ...

That's why the mission on Elcidar Beta is so

important, why the finds there will be so ..."

She broke off suddenly, and Uhura, seeing

the flinch of pain of those dark brows, remembered the

strange, gold-lit landscape she'd seen in the

viewscreen, the alien beauty of the place.

Chapel must have seen it, too, for she asked

quietly, "Have you talked to him?"

Helen did not reply.

"He hasn't left the bridge all day,"

Uhura said.

"I know," said Helen softly. "I thought

he'd come to the rec room, like he used to when he

took a lunch break, even a brief one ..."

She shook her head again.

"I'm not very good at this, you know. It sounds

stupid," she added. "At the age of twenty-four

you'd have thought I'd have had at least some kind of

experience, but ... I worked damn hard for my

scholarships and studied hard once I got them.

Oh, yeah, I had boyfriends, but they never seemed

anywhere near as important to me as studying."

She shrugged, and looked away from Chapel's

worried compassionate gaze. "So I don't

really know if he's reacting strangely or not.

If he's avoiding me, or if this is just something

men do."

"It's something some men do," Uhura said

quietly. "But I would have sworn, not the

captain. He's never been deliberately

insensitive ..." She frowned, remembering

back to the captain's preoccupation all day on the

bridge, to his repeated checking and rechecking of the

ship's internal systems reports. "To tell you

the truth, my impression is that he's had something

on his mind since he came back up from

Midgwis."

"That could be," Chapel said thoughtfully.

"And as a relatively minor member of the

crew," Helen finished, with a lopsided smile,

"it's none of my affair what it is." There was

relief in her face, but Uhura guessed it was

an uneasy relief, a hope against hope that she

hadn't seen what she knew perfectly well she

had.

"Minor member hell," Uhura said

firmly. "At the moment you're the only one

onboard who's done extensive research

about Midgwis. If it was something on the planet

that worried the captain ..."

"Nurse Chapel ..." The lab door slid

abruptly open again, framing the spare, blue-

smocked figure of Dr. McCoy. He nodded

a greeting to Uhura and Helen--people were always coming in

and out of sickbay and none of it ever seemed to throw

Chapel's work off-stride--and turned back

to his assistant. "Did you by any chance leave the

door of the small med lab unsecured?"

Chapel shook her head. "No ... those

samples need to settle out in a controlled

environment if we're going to get any kind of

an accurate reading on them."

"And you didn't mention the changed door code

to anyone?"

"No. You only changed it the day before

yesterday, and it isn't as if anyone but you and me

ever goes in there."

"No," agreed McCoy quietly. "Come in

here for a moment." When Helen and Uhura glanced

at each other and made to go he added, "You

ladies might as well see this, too. The

experiment's shot to hell anyway."

The small med lab was situated almost 180

degrees around the curved central corridor of

sickbay, in a position corresponding to that of

McCoy's private lab on the other side of the

central ring. It lacked the elaborate

facilities of the main med lab or the biochem

lab, and was generally used for long-term experiments

that needed to be left in a sterile environment out of

everyone's way. "This was just a routine

precipitation analysis of blood and fluid

samples we picked up at Persis Nova,"

McCoy explained as he stood aside to let the

three women precede him into the bare-walled little

room. "Aside from the fact that the information's necessary

to a preliminary report on another planet in

the disputed border zone with the Klingons, there was

certainly nothing unusual about them."

"Good heavens!" Uhura exclaimed, drawing

back and looking around the small room in dismay.

"Why on earth ...?"

Every vessel, every beaker, every test tube on the

long table and the shelf behind it had been overset;

even the petri dishes full of soft, ashy,

dried precipitates and powders were surrounded

by scattered dunes of their contents, as if an

impatient hand had knocked them sharply

back and forth. Distilled water pooled on the

floor, and the more viscous solutions lay in

colored puddles on the table, or clung in

half-congealed blobs around the vessels that had

contained them. The dim, sweetish pungency of

organic decay filled the air, making Uhura

wrinkle her nose with disgust.

"Look over here." McCoy gestured to the end

of the table where the blood precipitates had been.

Chapel frowned, puzzled and a little alarmed.

"What ...?"

"It's as if someone tried to write in it,"

Uhura said slowly. "To write with their finger,

look." Her own slender hand traced the drawn-out

smears pulled from the sides of every sticky,

purplish puddle, jagged, childish tracks that

wavered and went nowhere.

"Why would anyone have done something like that?"

Chapel asked, baffled.

"And how would they have gotten in?" Uhura

demanded, looking up at the join of ceiling and

walls where the narrow vent shafts opened. "The

ventilator grille's only ten centimeters

square ..."

Helen, too, was looking at the small metal

square above the door, gauging the distance between it and the

table with a calculating eye. She turned her head

to meet McCoy's speculative gaze.

"A projection out of the vent, maybe?"

"A tentacle or a pseudopod?" he added

thoughtfully. Behind them Uhura and Chapel traded

a nervous glance, for picking up an intruder, an

alien stowaway, was the nightmare of every man or

woman who had ever traveled the spaceways, and the

source of a thousand tales, authentic and

apocryphal, with which the junior crew regaled

one another in the rec rooms after hours.

"It would account for a certain amount of clumsiness

across that distance ... but I could swear those marks were

made by a finger." Cautiously, he brought the

lab's single tall-legged stool up under the vent

and, taking a small magnifier and a tiny

flashlight from one of the table drawers, stood on the

seat. He shined the light down the vent shaft as

far as he could--which was only as far as the filter

twenty centimeters or so in--and sniffed the soft

flow of cool air coming out, then examined the neat

mesh of the grille, first visually and then with a

tricorder Chapel handed silently up to him.

"Nothing," he said after a time. "No

deposits or smudges of any kind, not even

of the precipitate solutions. No scratches,

no marks, no sign that the vent cover was

removed." Bracing one hand carefully on the

wall beside him, he climbed down and looked around

him again at the disrupted lab. Then he walked to the

communications panel beside the door, punched in the

number of the captain's personal page and said,

"This is McCoy, Jim. We've had a

problem in sickbay. I think you'd better get

down here."

Chapter Five

"And an internal scan of the ship shows nothing?"

The captain glanced beside him at Mr. Spock as

they emerged, last of the group of Science and

Security personnel that had for the past hour been

going over the small lab with every analytical

tool on the ship.

Spock paused, looking back over his shoulder

at the bright, small, evenly lit room, with its

tumbled beakers and its liquids pooled

untidily on the floor. It had not been

hermetically sealed, true, but something about the

situation disquieted him.

"Negative, Captain. Both the scan run

immediately after the quarantine alert, and the scan just

completed, account for every life-form aboard the ship,

including the plants in Botanic, the rec

room, and Mr. Sulu's quarters."

"I wouldn't put it past one of Sulu's

babies to have gotten loose and stuck a tentacle

out that vent," McCoy muttered, folding his arms

and regarding the disordered lab dourly. More

security officers came around the curve of the

corridor in which they stood--the main offices of the

Security section were just a few corridors

away. "That thing with the gold flowers he picked up

on Iolos Six ..."

"The aetavis spengleris would have very little

interest in anything with the protein chains characteristic of the

Persis Nova life-forms connected with your

experiments," Spock remarked quellingly.

"Its affection f or you, Doctor, was based

solely upon body temperature ... most

plants being entirely lacking in aesthetic

judgment."

"I could tell that by the way it went after you,"

McCoy retorted. Spock merely

raised a dismissive eyebrow and turned back

to Kirk as Dr. Gordon came around the curve

of the corridors and into view from the direction of

Nurse Chapel's duty station.

Spock, though well aware that it was no more his

business than had been any of the captain's other

numerous affairs, was interested to note the

diffidence with which Dr. Gordon approached the

captain--the way she stopped for an instant when

she first saw him and then approached with an

uncertainty that amounted almost to hesitation, as if

she feared a rebuff. That morning on the bridge

he had seen her disappointment when Kirk had

made no acknowledgment of her decision to remain

on board the Enterprise--a decision that had

lowered Spock's opinion of her powers of

logic. He personally regarded it as irrational

of her to expect congratulation on the forsaking--or

at best the postponement--of her career, even from the

man for whose sake the decision had been made.

But why Dr. Gordon would have felt--or

feared--rebuff was, to Spock, a mystery.

"I've been over all the preliminary

research reports on the life-forms of

Midgwis," she said in her gruff, rather abrupt

way. "There's nothing that would have been able to get

into the locked lab, nothing that would even have been able

to get onto the ship undetected ..."

"That you know about," Kirk said softly.

Helen hesitated. A short ways down the

corridor, Security Chief DeSalle had

opened another outlet of the vent shafting and was

checking the square metal duct with infrascope and

magnifier for marks or smears in the fine film

of moisture that collected on the filters.

Back in the lab itself, Nurse Chapel was

holding a reflector for the ship's photographer

to get shots of the puddles of liquid from every

conceivable angle and in every conceivable lighting and

perspective, for analysis both by computer and

by DeSalle himself.

The captain went on, "You said yourself the

reports are preliminary. Your--" He stopped

whatever his next remark would have been,

reconsidered, then said, "The research teams

made only a cursory survey of the planet.

Even Shorak and his party saw only a small

portion of the world, never truly appreciated ..."

He paused, a frown appearing suddenly between his

fair brows, as if he were picking his words

carefully, sorting through a tangle of ideas for

what he wanted to express. "My impression was

that even their observations were ... frequently at

fault."

McCoy looked around sharply, as if startled;

Spock raised one eyebrow for amplification, but

Kirk shook his head, not able or not willing to say

more.

"We have not, of course, eliminated the

possibility that the intruder entered the lab in a

perfectly normal fashion through the door,"

Spock pointed out after a moment. "Nor the

possibility that the intruder was a member of the

crew ..."

"Why would anyone have wanted to disrupt that

experiment?" McCoy demanded, and Spock

regarded him with mild surprise.

"I am not an expert on the vagaries of

human motivation, Doctor. I am merely

saying that in our quest for the apparently impossible,

we should not overlook the obvious. It is a

fairly easy matter to disrupt a simple

security latch on a door of that kind."

"No," Kirk said quietly. His gaze

moved, not restlessly, but with a kind of narrowed

deliberation from the door of the violated lab along

the curving, light blue walls, taking in the vent

grilles, the doors, the small access hatches

and conduits that led into the mazes of the ship's walls

and tunnels. DeSalle and his assistant were

packing up their findings, shaking their heads

uneasily; everything having been photographed,

McCoy and Chapel were beginning to pick up the

fallen beakers and vacuum the spills. "No,

there's something. I knew it in the transporter

room. I felt it."

"Computer analysis reveals nothing

amiss--" Spock began.

"I would say that merely reveals the limitations

of the computer."

Back in his quarters Mr. Spock, with his

customary deliberation, activated his computer

screen and scanned again through the results of the

security investigation of the small med lab, the

results of the shipwide life-form scan that had

accompanied that investigation, and the results of the

earlier scan during the quarantine emergency.

He punched through a request for the latest results

from the analysis lab, where he knew

DeSalle would still be working, despite the late

hour, on what little he'd found. But as he had

himself earlier informed Captain Kirk, there were no

anomalies.

Still, he was uneasy. He knew the captain

had an acutely developed awareness of

subliminal cues, a hair-trigger sensitivity

to almost-indetectable breaks in patterns that

humans tended to refer to as a "sixth sense,"

though it was in fact merely a more efficient usage

of the existing five.

And he trusted the captain's judgment

implicitly. In dozens of tricky and

dangerous planetary missions, and in hundreds of

chess games, he had seen James Kirk's

wits and instincts in action, and knew that the

captain had something that he himself lacked the

conviction that hard data had limitations, and the

ability to spot those limitations.

Something was troubling the captain. He'd known it

that morning on the bridge, seen it in the stress

lines of his face, the marks of sleeplessness and

strain. He suspected now that Kirk had lain

awake most of the night, quite possibly going over

these same scan results on his own

viewscreen, trying to find some flaw, some

telltale clue to tell him that his own instincts were

correct--that against all evidence to the contrary, they

did have an intruder on board.

And, like Spock, he must have found nothing, for there

was nothing to find.

For a long time Spock sat gazing at the

computer screen in the warm dimness of his room--the

Enterprise was a vessel designed principally

for an Earth-human crew, though at maximum

setting the temperature controls for his private

quarters could approximate Vulcan's

pleasant heat. After some moments he reached forward

and keyed in another sequence, and played through,

frame by frame, the video of all the events in

the transporter room the previous night. He

saw himself hit the quarantine button, but oddly

enough, there was not even the characteristic glittery

flicker of a feedback ghost that everyone assumed

he must have seen.

There was nothing at all.

Nothing except his memory of that momentary,

fleeting conviction that there was something in the

transporter room that should not have been there.

Then behind him, very faintly, he heard a

footstep on the floor.

Spock's reflexes were quick. Even as he

turned, his mind groped at the anomaly, the

sense that there couldn't have been anyone in his

quarters when he came in, dim though the lighting

was, for his acute hearing would have picked up

breathing, the creak of boot leather, the thousand soft,

subsensory rustlings that the clothed human body

makes ...

And there was, in fact, no one behind him at

all.

For some moments Mr. Spock sat, half

turned around in his chair, looking back into the

small, somewhat featureless room behind him. Even

officers' staterooms on a starship were not large,

and offered very little in the way of either architectural

interest or places of concealment. Despite his

subsequent return to speaking terms with his father,

Spock's departure from his family on Vulcan

had, for all its exquisite politeness, been

stormy enough that he cherished few souvenirs to remind

him of the world that had always considered him a half-

caste and an outsider. A shelf held a few

geological curiosities he had picked up

on various worlds; three terminals on his desk

permitted him access to as many programs or

scientific journals as he wished to peruse at

any one time. One could have bounced a coin off the

Spartan bunk, had one wished to utilize so

illogical a method of testing the taut neatness

of its coverlet.

There was nowhere in the room that anyone or anything

could hide, and no corner of it not immediately visible

from the chair before the desk.

Nevertheless Mr. Spock got to his feet and,

in a manner reminiscent of Captain Kirk's

recent behavior, walked slowly around the little

room, looking, listening, almost scenting, for further

anomalies, further clues to account for what he

had heard or thought he had heard.

There was, of course, nothing. Dismissing the

matter as some chance refraction of sound, but filing

the incident for possible later reference in his mind,

Mr. Spock stripped, showered, meditated, and

retired to bed.

"Jim?" As the door slipped closed behind

Helen, the light from the hall--dimmed, as they were

in this part of the officers' quarters, for the

Enterprise's artificial night--

caught on the eyes of the man sitting at the little

desk, and just for a moment she paused. He'd

turned quickly to look at her as she came in,

and for that instant his eyes had had a wariness, an

almost animal quality that turned them into the eyes

of a stranger.

But then the shadows hid him, and his voice was

Jim Kirk's voice. "Helen." He got

to his feet, came to her and took her in his arms.

"Jim, wait a minute!" With her hands against

his broad shoulders she held him off; for an

instant his grip tightened greedily around her

waist, dragging at her, and she felt,

fleetingly, a strength that would not listen, that would not

let go.

But the next moment his hold slacked a little and

he drew back, regarding her, his face with its

strange new lines of worry and stress

inscrutable in the dimness.

"Jim, what's the matter?" Her voice

shook a little, for even in his arms, where she had

wanted to seek what comfort she could all day, she

felt a kind of strangeness, as if he were holding

off from her, holding something back. His head tilted

a little, the single night lamp in the sleeping

cubicle beyond catching a gleaming edge on his fair

hair. He said nothing.

"We said ... the truth," she went on,

stumbling over her words, cursing herself for not knowing

how to say what she wanted to say without

inadvertently destroying what lay between them.

"Please tell me the truth."

"The truth about what?" His voice was stiff,

mechanical, unfamiliar. She had thought at one

time she'd been able to read its every variation, its every

gradation ...

She had thought she'd known him. What should she do

now? Pretend there was nothing wrong and hope it

sorts itself out?

"The truth about me," she stammered slowly.

"The truth about ... about us. This morning on the

bridge, when I said I was staying with the ship, you just

... you just said, "All right, fine--"'" She

cut herself off, fumbling for what to say, trying not

to sound like a clinging vine petulantly reminding him

of fancied promises, and whining because he hadn't

paid her sufficient attention. But there was something

wrong. She couldn't say what, couldn't say how

she knew it. She felt burningly conscious of his

hands, resting on her sides.

Still he said nothing, and she went on quickly, "But

you were--surprised, or you looked surprised

... Does it bother you that I decided to stay?

I can still go back ..." Her whole soul cringed from

the thought of what she knew Nomias would say.

His silence--the silence that felt to her so

calculating--unnerved her. "Jim, talk to me!

Tell me what's going on with you! I know you

love your ship, I know you need your career, I'm

not asking you ..." Her voice tailed off

despairingly. Looking across at his face, she

could see little of it, for his back was to the dim desk

light, but she could almost hear the wheels of his thoughts

spinning, calculating, piecing together this explanation

or that. Under her hands she could feel the tension in his

pectorals, the uncertainty as he hesitated

over what would be best to say.

At length he said, "Helen, I ... You're

saying that I didn't react as you expected this

morning. But how did you expect me to react?"

"I'm not saying that!" she pleaded, exasperated

and tired and desperately confused. "I'm just

asking how you did react!"

Another long pause. Then, slowly, still

picking his way carefully, as if piecing together

bits of sentences from previous conversations, "This

is something that's never happened to me before. I am

... new to this ..."

He hesitated again, then went on quickly,

"Helen, can we speak of this another time?"

"I'm sorry!" Remorse stabbed her. "I

shouldn't have sprung this on you now. You did see--

or sense--something in the transporter room,

didn't you? The same thing Mr. Spock

sensed?"

"Yes." He almost pounced on the words.

"Yes, there is--something aboard the ship. I know

it. I feel it. Give me a few days,

Helen. We will ... we will talk of this. We will

sort this out. But not now."

"All right." It was better than nothing, she

thought--it probably didn't have anything to do with her

at all ...

She turned to go, but his arms tightened suddenly

around her, dragging her to him. More surprised than

anything, she yielded.

She had wanted him all day, wanted the day

to end just as it was ending ...

But what she had wanted was not his body, but

reassurance, and in spite of his words,

she felt only deeper and deeper confusion, not

knowing if it was appropriate to go or to remain,

to protest her own needs or to yield to his.

Never had she felt so much that, as a man, he was

a species utterly alien to herself, and more than

anything else, as he dragged her to the bed, she

wanted to ask Uhura what she ought to do ...

The crashing noise jarred Spock awake

to darkness, disorienting and profound. For a moment he

lay listening, the silence around him thick and

waiting, wondering what it was that he had heard.

Logically, he should not have heard anything, he

thought. Though the soundproofing of crew quarters was

an expensive luxury, at least some measure of

it was necessary on a five-year mission, and all

crew members--even the real convivials like Mr.

Scott and Bray in Maintenance--observed the

noise regulations fairly strictly. Most of the

time even Mr. Spock's hypersensitive hearing

could not distinguish words, though he could usually hear

voices through the doors of any room he passed

and occasionally through the walls of his own quarters.

But as he lay listening, he heard nothing, for it

was the deep of the Enterprise's artificial

night.

Engine noise? he wondered. But the

subsonic, throbbing hum of machines and systems,

the veins and nerves of the ship's metallic flesh

that made a background tapestry to all his other

perceptions of the ship, sounded normal. Still, he

thought that what he had heard had been a ship

noise, not human ...

Then he heard it again. Somewhere close ... For

some reason, he did not think it was in the room with

him, though logically he could not have heard it so

clearly had it not been.

Someone hammering on a bulkhead?

The noise was impossible to identify beyond that it

was a pounding dull, heavy, furious. There was

something in its rhythm that made him think it was

sentient, not mechanical; a scream of frus-

tration, of hopelessness, by that which cannot make a sound.

The room felt cold. A timer was set

to reduce the high temperature at night, in

mimicry of Vulcan's desert climate which still

ruled his physiology, but for some reason there was a

bitterness to this chill, a malevolent clamminess.

Spock drew the coverlet over him more

closely, but it did not help--after a

moment he threw it back, switched on the

bedside light and walked to the door.

In the corridor outside he could not hear the

pounding at all.

It was possible, he thought, considering the dimly

illuminated line of the shut doors of other

officers' quarters stretching out before him around the

curve of Deck 5, that certain sounds could carry

within the walls themselves, if the harmonics were

correct--and indeed, that might account for whatever

soft, almost stealthy noise it was that had disturbed his

thoughts earlier in the evening. But that could very well have

been some sound in the corridor itself--his

Vulcan hearing frequently picked up

footfalls and voices of the people in the passageway

that ran by his door.

When Spock entered his room again, the pounding had

ceased. It was warmer than he had thought it had been

when he'd first awakened; cold as the Vulcan

nights, but without that icy frigidness. He turned

on the main lights and by their prosaic white glare

walked around the small room again, examining the

ventilators with the half-formed notion that the sound

might have carried along an access tunnel or

vent shaft.

Finding nothing amiss, he shut off the lights

and returned to bed.

But he was still awake an hour later when he

heard stumbling steps go by his door, and the muffled

sound of a woman crying as she returned to her

rooms.

Chapter Six

Even before the alert came, it was a queer and

curiously disquieting voyage toward Starbase

9.

Very little of the talk filtered up to the senior

officers at first, but there was a subcurrent of

rumor, especially among those who worked at the

farther corners of the ship. Ensigns Brunowski

and Miller spoke of hearing a kind of knocking

or pounding while working in the main computer room on

Deck 8. At least Miller was working;

Brunowski, being off-shift from Laundry and

Recycling--or Lose and Ruin, as the ship's

cleaning and molecular breakdownstreassembly

facilities were fondly known by those who liked

to wear something other than uniforms while off duty

--was keeping his friend company. The sound

seemed to be coming from somewhere close by, possibly

carried in a vent shaft or in the walls themselves,

but ceasing before they could get any kind of fix on

it. Miller, a prot@eg`e of Mr. Scott's

seconded to Computers because of a temporary

shortage in that area, said that the sound didn't

strike him as being mechanically produced; more like

someone or something pounding on a wall.

Ensign Gilden in Historical reputedly

heard something similar, while working alone in his

cubicle on the Deck 11 dorsal; a tapping

noise coming, he thought, from somewhere among the maze of

metal shelves filled with historical

documentation gathered from various planets which he was

inputting, though he admitted that he did not go

seeking the source of the sounds until after they had

ceased. He was one of the several who complained of

objects being moved--coffee cups, note

tablets, bundles of hardcopy and styluses that were

no longer in the places where he was sure he had

set them, though a glance at the assistant

historian's tiny cubicle was, on the

surface, sufficient explanation for the phenomenon

of disappearing objects. Nevertheless, as

Lieutenant Uhura pointed out one evening in the

rec room, Gilden could hardly have survived this

long in the fashion that he did without developing a

fairly strong sense of where he'd placed things.

But hers was a minority opinion, at least at

first.

Those were the things that got talked about. There were

things that didn't.

Mr. Scott, whose cubbyhole down in the

Engineering hull was another place that suddenly

seemed to suffer from disappearing or oddly

transported objects--the most inexplicable of

which was the coffee cup that was missing from his desk,

subsequently found on top of a two-meter

storage cabinet--mentioned to no one the strange

sensation that had overwhelmed him while working alo ne in

the shuttlecraft hangar deck, the certainty that

had overcome him that someone was standing nearby. The

hangar deck itself was nearly thirty meters long,

unlit--being out of immediate use--save for a single

line of half-strength lumenpanels across the center

of the ceiling and the localized white glow of

Scotty's worklights near the open access hatch

he was testing. The shuttlecrafts Herschel and

Copernicus were looming masses of shadows at

one end, but the area around the hatch itself was

clear in all directions for thirty feet or

so, and sitting up, startled--for he had not heard the

inner doors open--Scott had drawn in breath

to speak, assuming whoever was there was one of his

assistants.

But there was no one there.

And a prickle went down his spine, a

coldness, an irrational dread that brought sweat

to his palms. In that first second he fumbled

to hold his worklight up, illuminating the space

all around him more brightly. "Who's there?" he

called out, his heart beating fast.

But no one answered. The only sounds were the

distant throb of the engines, the faint humming of the

worklight itself, and the occasional muted chirp of test

gear cycling through.

Annoyed with himself, Scotty went back to work.

But after a few moments the dread, the uneasiness,

at being alone in that great echoing space grew so

strong that he got up and, taking his worklight with him

--an unnecessary precaution that he would never have

considered under other circumstances, since the vague

illumination provided by the lumenpanels far

overhead was sufficient for him to see, and he knew

the hangar as well as he knew his own cabin--he

crossed to the main switches and lit the entire

giant chamber.

He shook his head at himself as he went back

to work, all his pragmatic Glaswegian

sensibilities offended. But the fact remained--

he felt better with the lights on.

At about this time Mr. Spock was called down

to the central computer chamber.

"We've heard it three or four times,

sir," Miller reported, rubbing a big hand through

the stiff brush of his hair. "Kind of a tapping

noise sometimes. I've heard it, Giacomo's

heard it ..." He shook his head. Spock was

familiar with his work, both as Mr. Scott's

assistant in Engineering and as a fill-in for one

of the higher-level computer techs, and knew his

judgment could be trusted.

"Common sense tells me it's got to be

mechanical--you just don't have mice on a

starship--but the timing is just enough off that I don't

know."

"Fascinating." Spock walked thoughtfully

around the central computer core--a shoulder-high

monolith two meters long by nearly a meter

thick, surrounded by concentric rings of

data banks, terminals, program-logic

cubes, worktables, wafer scanners, and

monitors, and painted a neutral shade of

Starfleet blue. His boots thumped hollowly

on the raised subfloor which masked the tangle of

cables and wires connecting this immense nerve center

with every monitor screen, visicom, and reader

port on the ship. "Where does the noise appear

to be centered? In this room?"

"Not really. The first thing I thought of was that it

might be something under the floor--there's about forty

centimeters of crawl space down there. But

to tell you the truth, sir, it's damn difficult

to tell."

Spock nodded. It seemed almost impossible

to him that a human's hearing, particularly in terms

of direction-finding, could be that poor, but it was also

difficult for him to understand how humans stood the

overpowering, sickly gaminess of the animal

proteins on which they routinely glutted themselves.

At least Miller was reporting accurately, and

perhaps the odd, adirectional quality of the sound was

significant in itself.

"Thank you, Ensign," he said, returning to the

worktable where he'd left his small troubleshooting

kit to extract a handlight. "I shall be here some

time. Dismissed."

He had been at work 1.3 hours, finding

nothing, when he heard the noises himself.

The first he knew of anything amiss was the sudden

blare of gritty and outlandish music from the room

above him--for he was lying in the narrow confines of the

space between floor and subfloor, meticulously

checking every centimeter of cable and wire with the

handlight and an ion beam. The noise made him

flinch, and he barely caught himself from banging his

head on the underside of the floor above. He

recognized one of the more outr`e forms of what

passed on Earth for popular music, and realized

that someone--probably Miller--had hooked up a

dot player somewhere in the room, though how anyone

could work with such racket going on was a source of

mystification to him.

A moment later he realized that he had not

heard the hollow thump of footfalls crossing the

floor above him to switch on the device.

He emerged from the hatch and located the player,

a smooth black box the size of his hand tucked

into a shelf with the spare backup batteries. He

keyed it off and stood looking around him

at the vacant room.

He would assuredly have heard, had anyone

crossed to that shelf from the door.

With the abrupt cessation of the noise, the silence

in the room seemed even more profound. The central

computer chamber lay in the core of Deck 8, a

nerve center carefully protected in the event of

attack or disaster, and though it was surrounded on

one side by the recreation and entertainment areas, and

on the other by the galley and LandRather, such was its

shielding that no sound penetrated to it from the

corridors and rooms outside. Spock stood,

the player cradled lightly in his bony hands,

listening, and it seemed that a queer, creeping

uneasiness prickled at his skin and, just for an

instant, quickened his breath.

It was absurd, of course. He slowed his

breath and concentrated on finding the source of that

... dread? His hearing was acute enough to detect a

subsonic note, and there was no such thing in operation

--a scent, perhaps? There were gases that instilled

anxiety, and the Enterprise's ventilation system

was sufficiently selective that one area could have

been flooded while adjacent rooms were left

clean. But stepping quickly to a reader, he keyed in

the code for an air-quality report and found

nothing amiss in the screenful of numbers that

flashed, a moment later, before his eyes. And there was

nothing to account for the sudden sensation of icy cold.

Then, quite near him, he heard the knocking.

Miller was right. There was absolutely nothing

mechanical about the sound.

It was, in fact, virtually identical to the

tapping he had already heard in his own cabin,

seventeen hours after departure from Midgwis. It

was less violent, less enraged--why, he

wondered, did he persist in anthropomorphizing

it with an emotional context? Another subliminal

cue to be investigated ...

And as Miller had said, it was virtually

impossible to detect from which direction it came.

Belatedly, Spock realized he was still holding

the dot player in his hands. Miller would

undoubtedly object to the loss of his entertainment

software, but Spock switched the little machine

to recording mode, multi-directional; then

turned to key into the nearest monitor for readings of

every life-form, every energy source, atmosphere,

gravity, anything at all, concerning the room in which

he stood.

There was absolutely nothing amiss. No

anomalies, nothing unaccounted for.

The knocking ceased before the computer had finished

giving him its information.

Playing back the dot recording later,

Spock found that though the machine had erased

Radovic Ja'an's Shaken to the Bones

album, it had picked up no sound at all.

It was Ensign Reilly who first said the word,

"Ghost."

"Gah," Chekov said, sorting out his cards.

"Trust an Irishman to go looking for spooks

..."

"Trust an Irishman to beat you hollow round

the cribbage board, you mean--and who's to say

there's no such a thing? It was you Russians who

set up the Vorodny Institute ..."

"Of course. We went about it in the correct

way, scientifically."

Reilly snorted. At the other end of the long

rec-room table, Uhura and Chapel were engaged

in sorting out the pieces of the latest of the

Communications officer's collection of jigsaw

puzzles. Across the room Yeoman

Brunowski, square and dark and sloppy in a red

LandRather coverall, was playing ragtime piano with a

touch surprisingly light and sure; and Ensign

Tracy Giacomo was singing one of the more

scurrilous of the spaceways ballads, to the great

amusement of a handful of the junior crew.

"And precious little you found at it, didn't

you?" Reilly retorted, moving his cribbage

counter several more places ahead of Chekov's.

"Because there was nothing to find," the Russian

replied, glancing up from his disappointing

collection of fives and sixes. "Why don't you

say we've got a werewolf on the ship and have

done with it?"

Sulu, kibbitzing over Uhura's shoulder,

laughed. "Can't you picture a werewolf on a

planet with four moons that all come full at

different times? He'd have a nervous breakdown

..."

"Or a vampire on a world like Trigonis that

has three suns and the biggest silver deposits

in the galaxy?" Uhura added, looking up from her

puzzle bits with a grin.

"Scoff all you may, you heathens," Reilly

said serenely. "It'd be a clever

werewolf, or a vampire either, to get into the

labs and spill whatever's to be spilled, wouldn't

it, Christine?"

"That was just an accident," Uhura said quickly.

But when she looked across at her friend for confirmation,

the nurse had her eyes fixed on the bright-

colored blobs of plastic she was moving about on

the tabletop, and her thin cheeks were flushed.

"Once is happenstance, as the Great Man

said," Reilly went on goadingly, shaking back

the loose lock of brown hair that fell over his

forehead, "and t wice is coincidence. How many

times has it been, Chris?"

Chapel raised her eyes to Uhura's.

"Last night," she said quietly, "made

four."

"Four!"

In the shocked silence Yeoman Zink's rather

strident tones could be heard relating the details

of an ex-roommate's love life to several

interested third parties; a gust of laughter

swirled around the piano, and over by the food

slots Lieutenant Bray from Maintenance was

griping about the remixer program's idea of

chocolate.

"The labs have been locked every time," Chapel

went on in a muffled, uneasy voice. "It's

never the same lab--just wherever there are liquids.

Covering the flasks doesn't help; the covers

are pulled off, if the flasks themselves aren't

broken." She sorted a straight-edged piece from

the tangle before her as if it were of some critical

importance, and moved it over to where the other edged

pieces were, never raising her eyes to her

audience.

"Have you tried staying in the lab and watching?"

Reilly asked, leaning forward on his elbows,

fascinated by the prospect of a ghost story.

The blond head nodded. "That was the time all the

bottles in the doctor's liquor cabinet were

opened and spilled." She extracted another edge

piece, long fingers working as deftly as they did

when they were manipulating bits of experimental

paraphernalia, or the implements of life and

death. Even in her off-duty clothes--exercise

tights and a baggy Starfleet sweatshirt--there was

something formal about her, some of that quiet aloofness that

frequently made her seem older than her

years.

"Last night we set up a

recorder in each lab. Three of them worked fine.

In the fourth--the lab where the beakers were spilled--

it hadn't recorded. It must have jammed, though it

worked perfectly well in the morning. It just ...

didn't switch on."

Reilly and Chekov had abandoned their game and

come close to listen, though it was to be noted that

Reilly kept hold of his cards. Though her

chair was close by, half concealed from the table by a

grotesque potted plant known to all as the

Man-Eating Monster, Helen Gordon did not

look up from the small reader screen in the arm of the

chair before her, though Uhura was aware that Helen

hadn't touched the next-screen key for nearly ten

minutes.

Chapel fingered another piece free, and after a

judicious moment, fitted it into one to which it was

obviously the mate. "The thing is," she went

on, "about half those puddles of liquids had

been ... touched. Like someone pulled a finger through the

edge of them, trying to drag out liquid and make

streaks with it ... Sometimes the powders that get

spilled have been traced in too. And I mean

liquids that have blistered ceramic countertops and

would take a man's fingertip down to bone in

seconds. So in spite of what Mr. Spock

says about how easy it is to disrupt a security

lock--and it might have been the first time, though

we've had all of them upgraded to tens since then

--it really doesn't look like it's some member

of the crew playing pranks."

Giacomo had finished her song, and amid the

chatter and talk near the piano Brunowski could

still be heard playing, shifting from ragtime

to Vivaldi with a delicacy of touch utterly at

odds with his unprepossessing appearance. Miller

had joined him on the bench, and a moment later the

sweet mournfulness of a harmonica threaded into the

melody.

"That still doesn't mean it was a ghost," Chekov

said stubbornly. "For one thing, nobody has died

..."

"Don't be ridiculous, boyo," Reilly

retorted. "Since the start of the mission we've

lost dozens!"

"What's likelier," Sulu said quietly,

"is that it's the intruder." He'd come in from the

gym next door, still clothed in his close-fitting

black bodysuit; his bare arms and face gleamed

with sweat like oiled oak in the gentle

light.

"Now who's being ridiculous?" Chekov shot

back. "They've run life scans on this ship

backward, forward, and upside down, and no

trace of an intruder has shown up. And

anyway, why would an intruder spend his time

breaking into Dr. McCoy's laboratories

to spill things?"

Under cover of the general noise, Uhura rose

with her usual dancer's grace and circled past the

Man-Eating Monster to where Helen still sat

silent in her chair. Uhura rested one slender

hand on the younger woman's shoulder. Helen looked

up with a start.

"What is it?" Uhura asked softly.

Helen did not look well. Her hazel

eyes were surrounded by dark rings of fatigue, and the

lines of strain from nostril to mouth, around her eyes

and back from their corners, were deepening to gullies.

She had been quiet, too quiet, and looking

down at her now, Uhura could see the puffy

flesh that spoke of tears--not tears shed once and

forgotten, but of hopeless weeping, again and again,

alone in the guest VIP cabin that she would occupy

until she officially entered Starfleet at

Starbase 9.

"Look, if we had an intruder somewhere on the

ship," Chekov was arguing to Chapel, oblivious

to the fact that Reilly was surreptitiously

changing the position of the markers on the cribbage

board, "it has to have shown up somewhere on the

readings. Even electrostasis life-forms will

read on an ion scan ..."

"The ones that we know about," Sulu returned.

"And anyway, there are no electrostasis

life-forms on Midgwis ..."

"That we know about," Sulu said again. "I know the

captain has sent a subspace message back

to the research party there to ask about it ..."

"It's nothing," Helen replied to Uhura's

question, her voice almost inaudible under the general good-

natured clamor around them. Her hand played

nervously along the edges of the reader screen, and

Uhura saw how bitten the cuticles of the

nails were, how fidgety their touch. It troubled

her to see how Helen had changed from the strong,

sure woman who had come onboard with the research

party--even from the woman, uncertain of her

future but confident that all would be well, who had

come onto the bridge and quietly

looked up into Kirk's face and said she was

requesting a transfer to the Enterprise. ...

Something had happened since then. Something

drastic.

Slowly, without looking up at her friend, Helen

went on. "I--It's just that I've ... I've

decided not to apply for Starfleet status after

all. Once we get to Starbase Nine I'm

going to subspace back to Midgwis, and ask if

they'll still have me."

Uhura said nothing for a moment. The rec-room

doors slipped open and Mr. Spock came

in, crossing the room with that curious, graceful

aloofness to the chessboard, where he began to set up

the pieces for a game. The way Christine

Chapel's head turned wasn't lost on

Uhura, the hopeful look in her eyes that

changed so swiftly to carefully concealed hurt.

Mr. Spock frequently neglected to greet

anyone when he came into the rec room like that, there

being no logical reason to do so, but Uhura

knew that Chapel--though Chapel herself was the first

person to admit the illogic of it--was wounded

by being thus ignored.

Dammit, Uhura thought unhappily,

doesn't she realize she's asking for water from

a dry well?

Then her eyes returned to Helen. "Would you like

me to send a message back to them now?" she

asked softly.

Helen shook her head. "And anyway we've

had no messages from them even in reply to the ones

the captain sent." Protocol aside, there was

something deliberately distant in her use of

Kirk's title, as if, Uhura thought, Helen

sought by it to put him from her.

She frowned a little. The messages had troubled

her. "No, we haven't," she said slowly. "And

that's beginning to worry me. I checked out that new

subspace transmitter we left them myself.

Nothing should have gone wrong with it."

"They might be busy ..."

"Too busy to answer a question about a possible

intruder on a Starfleet vessel? That's one

of the top priorities on any--"

The rec room door slipped open again and

Captain Kirk came in. He paused in the

doorway and looked around him, as was his habit, and

it struck Uhura, looking at that trim,

broad-shouldered form in the gold command

shirt, that he, too, had the appearance of a man

who'd been spending his nights wrestling demons in

the dark of his room. Like Helen's, his face was

taut and weary, though he hid it better; the

smile he manufactured as he crossed the

room toward Spock and the chessboard was a strained

facsimile of his usual grin. Not that Spock

would consider it any of his business to ask about it,

Uhura thought dourly. She knew for a fact from

Christine that the captain was avoiding McCoy and

sickbay as he would a pest house.

She saw him catch sight of Helen and

pause. But Helen got swiftly to her feet,

and before either Uhura or Kirk could speak to her,

crossed the room to the doors. They swished open

sharply before her. Kirk said, "Helen ..." but

she was gone.

For a long time he stood there, looking at the

shut doors, and there was something that disturbed and

frightened Uhura greatly in the speculative

expression of his narrowed hazel eyes.

Chapter Seven

"Are you sure we're not going to get in trouble

for this?" Ensign Gilden shifted the weight of the

box he carried in his arms, and the bulky squares

of the fat paper books rustled inside it--a

complete set of the Margolian novels, with the

original Brodnax covers. At this point in the

second watch, the medical labs flanking the

long corridor from the dorsal elevator to the

emergency bridge in the center of the saucer were

usually deserted, and in the low lighting, the shadowy

forms of the assistant historian and the

Anthro/geo clerk had a furtive air not

materially lessened by the sturdy plastic boxes

they carried or by the mechanical cargo runner that

hissed along like an overloaded donkey in their

wake.

"What we're doing is not illegal,"

Ye oman Emiko Adams said softly.

"Bribing Ensign Miller to clear out and

pressurize a hull section is not illegal?"

"I didn't bribe him," Lieutenant

Bergdahl's clerk pointed out reasonably. "And

if Brunowski can talk Danny

into pressurizing one of the hull sections down on

Deck Twenty-three to set up that secret lab

of theirs, for God's sake, the least you're

entitled to is to do the same to store objects of

antiquarian value."

Gilden ducked his head a little--a thin,

depressed-looking young man of medium height,

slightly stoop-shouldered in his red Ship

Systems shirt. "Well," he said modestly,

"I don't know about antiquarian value ..."

"Of course the original faxes of the

bulletins from the Castorian wars have

antiquarian value," Adams retorted

bracingly, her delicate oval face--with the

flat cheekbones and bright black eyes that were,

with her diminutive height, her private

despair--peeking around one side of the enormous

box of Mongese romances, the complete

illustrated collection of all the various

cycles. "And I don't care what the computer

jockeys say, copying the stories from the novels

--or copying the "best" of a series, and who's

to say that the really trashy ones aren't just as much

fun?--or copying "relevant" articles from

the Earthlog journals isn't the same as having

them to look through, to hold them in your hands."

"Well ..." said Gilden, who was a little

embarrassed by the way his pack-rat instincts had

gotten out of hand. "The thing is, it's not like they

give us all kinds of room, even for

"temporary storage." "Only until

input," they say ... Do the people who write the

regs have any idea how long it takes to feed a

book into the computer? Even with automatic input

scan? And to check the translation? And you always have

to go through and check the analysis. And what do they

give us? Two rooms partitioned out of the Deck

Eleven dorsal observation lounge, and we had

to fight for those! They've got a goddamn bowling

alley down on Deck Twenty-one, and they

say, "Dump the hardcopy after the relevant

stuff is input" ..."

"That bowling alley is full every shift,"

Adams pointed out. "It's one of the most popular

rec rooms on the ship."

"Well, it shouldn't be. People should have better

things to do with their time. And anyway," he added, his

sparse eyebrows pulling together. "Even after I'd

input the information, I couldn't just let them get

rid of this stuff. I know there're

copies in the Institute Special

Collection, and on Memory Alpha, and in

other places. But I just ... I couldn't."

"Nor should you," Adams said. There was a soft,

nostalgic look in her shoe-button eyes, for

she was a pack rat too.

Their voices dropped as they passed a

bulkhead beyond which other voices could be heard, the

voices of Security Chief DeSalle and the

ship's photographer, examining the computer

analyses of the latest lab-breakage incidents,

and Gilden and Adams hurried their steps a little.

"And furthermore, it's ridiculous that there's no

corridor from the Deck Eight dorsal lift

across to the central lift," breathed Gilden as they

ducked into the alcove near the biochem lab where the

turbolift doors were. "We have to go right past

DeSalle's office ..."

"We could have taken the turbolift straight

across from the dorsal."

"Nobody does it at this time of the late

shift," Gilden pointed out. "Somebody'd be

bound to ask who's running fifteen trips back

and forth from the pylon at this time of night. It's

all worked through the central computer, and it logs it

for Fleet Statistics ... What do they think

we're going to do, raid the food remixers?"

The turbolift doors slipped open--

Adams and Gilden had a certain amount of

maneuvering to get themselves, their respective

burdens, and the high-piled bulk of the cargo runner

in at the same time. Adams had to do considerable

backing and filling with the little hand toggle that controlled

the thing in order to get its burden of ephemeral

hardcopy clear of the closing doors. "I mean,

what're they gonna do in an emergency? Deck

Nine," he added, speaking to the ceiling.

"There's the food conveyor," she pointed out as

the turbolift whirred into life. "It goes from the

pylon into Deck Eight."

Gilden sniffed disdainfully.

There was no sound in the materials reclamation

section on Deck 9, but they heard the soft

throbbing of the molecular breakdown units, and beneath

that, the subsonic whisper of the engines, like the

half-heard beat of the ship's heart. Decks 9

and 10 of the saucer, like the lower decks of the

Engineering hull, were the automated stomach upon which

the Enterprise and its crew traveled, the nameless

mechanical processes without which the

strategies of the bridge, the genius of the labs,

and the wisdom of the computers were pointless ephemera,

helpless before the cold black vacuum of entropy

and space. There was no night shift here, barely

any day shift, save for an occasional patrol

to make sure things were functioning as they should; the

huge, echoing rooms with their crowding, angular

machines, their tangles of cable and pipes, were

almost dark. Gilden and Adams moved uneasily

along the curved wall of that shadowy corridor,

the click of their boot heels and the soft humming

of the cargo runner echoing in an oddly comforting

manner.

"Here." Adams set down her box in the

gloomy, odd-smelling cavern of the organic

fabrication room and set to work with a small

ganymede driver to extract the bolts of a

bulkhead. "Miller pressurized three

sections for you, the one below this and the big one above.

That should give you plenty of room ..."

"What a guy," Gilden said admiringly,

putting his head through the resultant opening and peering

around. It was utterly black--Adams produced

a small handlight from her belt and shined it around.

The chamber beyond the bulkhead was some three meters

wide by five deep, and still held the faint,

slightly nasty pungency of the raw carbon-

hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen compounds it had contained

--the basic raw elements from which all food and

water on the ship were fabricated. It was icily

cold there, and the clerk's breath puffed whitely in

the dim yellow beam of her light.

"Danny said along with the pressure, he'd

run in some heat bled off the power conduits from the

molecule shakers. He says it'll warm up a

little more."

"That's fine. Cold never hurt paper."

Gilden ducked through and set his box of books

down, then began to unload the cargo runner.

"I'll have to do something to thank him."

Adams shook her head and smiled. "He owes

me one," she said. "I helped him and

Brunowski move the computer terminal in."

"For what?" Gilden asked, puzzled.

Her grin widened--she lost her look of

geisha fragility when she grinned that way, and

became all street urchin. "It's not

illegal," she reassured him.

Gilden thought about what he knew of Dan

Miller and John Brunowski, and said

hastily, "I don't think I want to know."

Adams ducked back through the hole in the

bulkhead and screwed it shut again after her friend.

"Here, you'll need this." She handed him the

ganymede. "I mean, they're not stealing anything

or smuggling anything or running a still or a

gambling game or selling fleet secrets to the

Klingons ... nothing like that."

"Then why do they need a lab-quality computer

terminal? Or a food remixer? Or a--"

"Well, it's just that John--" She broke

off suddenly and looked sharply around. The huge,

silent chamber, curved in the shape of the saucer's

hull, all at once seemed deathly cold.

"Do you feel ...?" she whispered, and Gilden

held up his hand for silence. Above his short-

clipped beard his face was chalky.

There was something else in the fabrication room with

them. They both knew it, could feel it; the cold

had nothing to do with the icy vacuum of space

outside. It was somehow personal, aware ...

centered somewhere near them, among the crouching shapes

of the molecule shakers, hidden in the gloomy

shadows. From where they stood, pressed against the

wall, most of the vast room was hidden from them, lost

in darkness and in the curve of the walls that took in

ninety degrees of the saucer's arc. But for some

reason, Adams felt that whatever it was, was

near them ... and moving.

Beside her, Gilden whispered an archaic curse

word; her hand automatically sought his. Across

seven or eight meters of floor the dark

rectangle of the door loomed ... If we

ran, Adams thought, if we ran across the

floor ... what if it didn't open?

Somewhere among the looming monoliths of the

machines a knocking started, a faint tapping

sound, ringing hollow, metallic. Adams fumbled

with her handlight and flashed it in the direction of the

sound, but nothing moved there, no shadow, no

stirring. Only that hollow knocking, like something

seeking its way ...

With sudden strength Gilden thrust her forward

onto the low platform of the cargo runner, pulled

the control from her hand and thumbed the toggle for full

speed. In a whining whoosh the little cart bolted

toward the door, which slashed open before them, whined

shut in the dark behind them as they swooped along the

corridor's arc, clinging against the yaw of

centrifugal force and heading for the

turbolift as fast as the cart's engine could carry

them. They didn't get off the runner until

they'd reached the lift, springing in and manhandling the

runner in after them rather than taking the time to maneuver

it with the toggle.

They ran the lift straight across Deck 7 and

down to the Deck 11 dorsal lounge--deserted

at this time of night--and to hell with who was logging

trips. Neither wanted to get out and walk that

dimly lit, echoing corridor that ran between the

central and dorsal lifts.

They didn't speak until they were back in

Gilden's office again, a cramped c ubicle

partitioned, as he had said, off the dorsal lounge

on that deck, and crammed--floor to ceiling around

the walls, and shoulder high in most other places

--with old books, old sets of magazines,

box after box of scrolls, files of letters,

cases of notes ... the original hardcopy of

historical records, gathered up from every planet

the Enterprise visited, from every culture and

civilization it discovered or explored, information

waiting to be logged, digitalized, input for

retrieval and transmission to the central knowledge

banks of the Federation on Memory Alpha. Some

of it had not been looked at for years--or

centuries--even on the planets from which it had

been gleaned. In the dim light of the small desk

lamp the place had the claustrophobic air of a

cavern; Adams huddled nervously on a chair

between two mammoth stacks of old books and

videotaped adventure serials while Gilden

ran hot water out of the food slot that was a

legacy from the days before the room had been partitioned

off the Deck 11 lounge.

"This is real licorice tea I bought on

Starbase Twelve," he said, handing her an

unwashed ornamental cup. "The remixers only

have camomile and mint and they both taste like lawn

clippings."

She gave a whisper of a chuckle, but her hand

was trembling as she took it. "Thank you."

Gilden still looked very pale in the upside-down

reflections of the tiny lamp, and he almost spilled

his own teacup when he picked it up.

Their eyes met.

"Do we report it?"

She remembered that dreadful cold, the sense of

overwhelming fear--the knowledge that something she could not see,

could not detect, had been in that room with

them ... "You want to explain what you were doing

down in organic fab at this time of night?"

He hesitated, visibly torn between his sense

of duty and what he knew the ship's historian

would say about the sequestering of useless hardcopy that

had already been input. He thought about all the rest

of his precious caches of odd weapons, ritual

implements, sets and series of arcane books--

scrolls and notebooks and letters from and to people a

century dead whom he'd encountered in the

historical byways of a hundred worlds--that

stacked his tiny personal quarters to the ceiling and

crammed every cranny and corner of Historical's

meager storage area and the minuscule closets of

every friend he could talk into providing them room.

Gently, Adams said, "It won't be there if

we send someone to look, you know. Not now."

"No," Gilden said shakily, sipping at his

tea. "No, I suppose not." He shivered

again, thinking about the knocking he had heard in this

office. Thinking about the way things had begun

to appear and disappear when he wasn't looking, about

the sense he had had, once or twice, that there was

something in the room with him ... about the night he'd

come down to this office and had heard, beyond its locked

door, movement within. "And if it is when we

take the next load down ... I guess

we'll deal with it then. You think you could get

Danny to borrow a bigger light for us?"

"Helen ..." It was Uhura's voice,

worried and frightened, a moment after the quick, light

flurry of taps on the door. "Helen, it's

Uhura."

Lying on her bed in the darkness, Helen made

no reply. She did not trust her voice

to remain steady, and in any case, what could she have

said? In time she heard her friend's soft sandals

retreat up the corridor, leaving her alone.

Alone with despair, and desperate confusion of

mind. Alone with the memory of both a dream and a

nightmare.

The dream ...

Helen dropped her head to the flat, tidy,

regulation Starfleet pillow.

The last evening on Midgwis returned to her,

with a clarity so intense that it hurt her chest with

physical pain. She could feel the warm strength

of his fingers enclosing hers, the firm gentleness of

his lips--smell the dry, sweetish

scents of the grass and feel the warmth that radiated

back upon them from the ground itself. In that

honeysuckle moonlight the expression of doubt

in his face had been clear as by daylight. If

he'd known he was lying, would he have felt doubt?

Or was the doubt merely something he'd faked

to convince her?

Or had she made it all up?

She rolled over and stared at the ceiling above

her, a flat and neutral blue-gray, like

everything else in Starfleet. It had that

impersonal sameness that she'd always despised about

the service, that regulation-issue simplicity of the

lowest common denominator that she'd been willing

to embrace for his sake.

She shook her head bitterly. How could she

have been that stupid? To fall in love with Jim

Kirk--to still love Jim Kirk, or still love

the man she thought she'd known ...

But she realized she hadn't known Jim Kirk

at all.

That, she knew, had to be the source of the

nightmare.

At the thought of it, she reached over quickly to the

bedside lamp, switching it on to surround the

narrow bunk in its comforting glow. She'd been

sleeping with it on for the past four nights.

Rationally, her waking mind knew what the

nightmares had to mean. They were, she told herself

in the voice of every psychology teacher she'd ever

had, just the reflection of her own horror at

finding out that Jim wasn't what she'd thought he'd

been. That was all.

That was absolutely all.

But waking in the night--or dreaming of waking

here, in her cabin on the Enterprise--or

worse still, dreaming of waking in Jim's cabin,

waking up and looking over at the thing in the bed beside

her, the thing she had been making love to, and

thinking it was Jim ...

As a xenoanthropologist, she had never been

repelled by the concept of sexual congress with

alien species, in spite of years of

hackneyed anthro-department jokes. But in the

nightmares, it had not been the alienness that

repelled her, but some deeper and undefinable

horror. And always there would be a moment when it would

turn to her with its slow grin, and look at her with

eyes that were hazel like Jim's--but not Jim's.

She shuddered, pushing the recollection

of the dreams away. A glance at the clock told

her it was 2200 hours, and she wondered if the

novel she'd picked to read that night would keep

her awake, as she'd hoped it would ... wondered

if the nightmares would cease when they got

to Starbase 9 and she got off this haunted ship.

Footfalls tapped in the corridor. She

heard McCoy's voice, the soft southern accent

rising and fading in conversation "... swear I

haven't felt like that since the time my Butler

cousins and I dared each other to spend the night in

what was left of the old Hawks plantation ..."

She wondered if McCoy could give her something

to keep her from dreaming, but shrank from the thought of

asking him.

Because then he would ask her about the dreams.

And he'd ask her when they'd started.

And she couldn't very well tell him that they had

started the night she had gone to Jim's quarters

after they'd left Midgwis, the night that, lying in

his arms she'd looked suddenly up into his face

and had thought, abruptly, blindingly, and for no

reason that she could fathom

This man isn't Jim Kirk.

Chapter Eight

He walked the corridors of the Enterprise

alone, as he had walked them he did not know how

many times.

There was something in the familiarity of the action itself

that helped him, grounded his mind and soul. Without the

Enterprise, he did not think he could have

survived.

In that first second in the transporter room,

when he had realized there was something wrong, when with the

tingle of rematerialization he had felt the

brute shock, the wrenching pressure of an alien

mind forcing him away from the reassembling atoms of

his body, it had only been the fact that he was on

the Enterprise, in the place that he knew as he

knew the nerve endings of his own body, that had let

him remember who and what he was.

He was James T. Kirk, and the

Enterprise was his ship.

He would not be forced out. He would not be displaced.

He would not die.

But in those first few seconds, staring in

panicked horror at his own body, seeing it

move and speak to the others ... seeing them

respond ... it had been a very near thing.

How well he remembered it, as he moved

silently now down these corridors--moved step

by step, forcing himself to supply with his mind the

recollection of his own footfalls, the slight

jar of now-vanished muscle and bone. He was

passing along the observation gallery that overlooked

the shuttlecraft hangar, an area known to be

deserted at this time of night--an area where he

knew he would not meet that other self, that alter

ego, that creature that walked the ship now in his

body. To his left the long transparent

aluminum windows looked out into the bluish darkness

of the chasm of the hangar, where the single

shuttlecraft always ready for swift emergency

egress--the Copernicus, he knew, from

walking this gallery a dozen times--sat docked,

a small, square, dark shape in the gloom.

First had come shock, hideous and disorienting as

he realized there was something amiss; then horror as

he'd seen himself stepping down from the transport

disk, speaking to Spock in a voice of command

...

And then rage, like a red explosion of heat.

Maybe it was the rage that had saved him, yanked

back the unraveling elements of his mind to a

fiercely personal center.

The rage burned him still.

Whatever it was, he thought, moving along those

shadowy hallways in the deeps of the night watch,

whatever alien mind had taken possession of his

rematerializing body--whatever it intended to do with

his ship--he would survive. He would win.

But how he would do it without a physical body,

without any means to communicate with his friends, without

even the ability to tell them that the man they spoke

to, the man whose or ders they took, the man who

commanded the Enterprise--HIS Enterprise--

was an impostor, he did not know.

And so he walked, alone.

In Engineering on Deck 16 Scotty was

lovingly dismantling and cleaning one of the power

exchangers at the base of the starboard Jeffries

Tube in the support pylon, going over every cable

and servo with cleaning solvent and the finest of

hairline lasers, and explaining to Miller--

crouching on the floor just outside the hatch in a

neatly arranged welter of tools, with his head

thrust in to listen--exactly where each of the power

lines ran from and to, and why.

"... now, on the destroyers, the Saladin-

class cruisers, you'll no' be gettin' this much

power to the slave relays off the main drive. The

housing's about half a meter wider, and the lines

run around it--see?"

Miller wedged himself into the base of the tube at

his mentor's side and shined a handlight up into the

narrow space. He'd already put in a full day

in the computer room to which he'd been seconded, but

like Montgomery Scott, he was a man who'd rather

tear down an engine than eat his dinner. "So if

you needed to shift the azimuth, and the servocams

quit on you ..."

Scotty beamed with delight at having a

pupil who thought the same way he did.

"Well, I'll tell you a little secret.

There's an access tube for the mechanical cable

stringers that goes up this side of the housing, but in a

pinch a man can get up there and change the angle

manually ..."

Miller turned his head suddenly, slithering his

upper body out from the tube and whipping around to scan

the wide, red-lit chamber behind him, and Kirk

saw fear in the young man's brown eyes. He

remained still, close to the great dark mass of the

starboard turbine; a few meters away from him,

Miller stood flattened to the wall, looking up

the corridor toward the shuttlecraft deck, then

swiftly back into the main turbine room again.

Scotty moved out of the tube to stand beside him, and

his face, too, broad and homey and dark-browed,

was troubled. "What is it, lad?"

"I don't ..." Miller hesitated.

"Nothing," he finished. "Did you feel it get

colder?"

Scotty thought about it for a long time before shaking his

head. Kirk moved silently away down the

corridor, past the dark maintenance shops, the

deserted repair bays and the auxiliary

infirmary, seeking silence and safety once again.

It was becoming more and more difficult for him

to remember what his arms and hands and feet had

felt like, what it had been like to walk, to speak,

to breathe. He had to concentrate harder to call them

back, to create moment by moment in his mind the

electron shadow of every eyelash and fingernail, and the

concentration tired him more. Sometime, he knew, he

must sleep--and without living tissue to contain that

shadow, everything he held together by his will, by his

mind, would vanish like smoke in the wind.

After his experience of consciousness shared with the alien

ruler Sargon, he had asked Spock about the

mechanics of this type of personality

autoprogramming. Spock, who had his own

unpleasant memories of the experience, had been

silent for a time, and then he had talked--for the first

time since he had known the Vulcan--about the

Vulcan concept of katra.

Katra, as far as Kirk understood it, was the

inner consciousness, the mental reality of a sentient

being--the soul, though being a Vulcan, Spock had

spoken in terms of the neuroelectronic

patterns of the brain and their interaction with the

physical form of the body. There were exercises

to consciously strengthen and ground the katra against

dissolution, he had said.

Later, seeking a means to deal with the stresses

of captaining a starship, Kirk had gotten his first

officer to teach him some of the Vulcan forms of

meditation, and though he did not pretend to comprehend

any of the spiritual lore of that ancient and

secretive race, after practicing the meditation's

outer forms, he began to get a dim inkling of what

it might be about.

That, too, he thought, had saved his life now,

by at least giving him a rough idea of what he must

do.

But he didn't know how much longer he could

keep it up.

As it was, he could only cling to what he

knew, the memory of his body, and the bone and nerve

and artery of the Enterprise itself.

Down on Deck 23 all was dimness and

silence, save for the deep throb of the molecular

reconverters in the main fabrication plants on

the deck above. Here among the cargo holds all

was silent and still. Along the dark corridor only

a streak of light marked the bulkhead panel behind

which Yeoman Brunowski tinkered with his arcane

schemes, whatever they were; above the faint,

slightly metallic smells of dust and grime

and machine lubricants in the big cargo holds,

the dreamy odor of bittersweet chocolate

drifted on the air.

In the clandestine lab itself, a five-by-four-

meter bulk-storage compartment in the outer hull which

Brunowski had talked his incurably good-

natured friend into rigging with "borrowed" pressure,

the LandRather yeoman himself sat at a makeshift

table, a lab-quality terminal before him,

with an assortment of archaic knobs and dials

breadboarded between it and what looked like one of the

molecular remixers from the galley. Jury-

rigged wiring snaked up the wall, connecting the

whole shebang with the main computer line and the power

lines that fed the fabrication facilities on the

deck above. Overhead, a roughly wired

lumenpanel shed a half-strength yellow glow on

the young man's unruly dark curls, always just--and

only just--this side of Starfleet's regulations

about "clean and neat." His dark eyes held a

look of almost maniac concentration as he moved the

dials hairline fractions of millimeters,

listening to the infinitesimal changes in the

remixer's soft hum.

Abruptly the lumenpanel made a faint

sput and went out.

Brunowski swung around in his chair and sat

frozen, staring at the narrow rectangle of the opening

in the bulkhead. Kirk stepped back a little,

though he knew that his own shape would not be

silhouetted in the dim corridor lights. He

was aware that he himself had, in some way, caused the

makeshift wiring to fault. It was something

associated with the energy of his presence, like the

strange cold that emanated from him, something that he

could not always control, as he could not always control the

knocking that seemed to arise near the places where

he stood. From a dozen minor disciplinary

brushes, he knew Brunowski was a difficult

man to frighten, but by the faint amber illumination of the

terminal screen, he saw fear now in that shapeless

unshaven pudding of a face.

After a long moment, never taking his eyes from the

hinged bulkhead, Brunowski groped for the handlight

on the table beside him and flicked it on. The

reflected glow sparkled on the sudden film of

sweat on his forehead, but the beam was steady as it

flashed across the opening where Kirk had stood.

Slowly, hesitantly, the laundryman got

to his feet and approached the place, and Kirk

fell back a few paces into the dark of the

corridor again.

Behind him the remixer gave a soft cough and the

smell of bittersweet chocolate was abruptly

replaced by that of sweet-and-sour pork--a

Starfleet standard. Brunowski cursed quite

surprisingly, and added to himself, "I swear to God

this place is haunted."

But like Gilden and Adams, Kirk

knew the laundryman would tell no one, no

matter how many times he might sense his presence

in these lower decks.

It was now late enough that he felt he could

venture higher, up the central pylon to the

saucer itself.

These nights of endless walking, of moving through the

familiar corridors and empty, darkened labs,

he had been aware that the other Kirk, the

impostor who had taken his place, walked too.

He wasn't sure why, for he kept strictly

away from any chance of meeting a creature whose

mental abilities might very well encompass his

destruction should they meet, but he knew that the

impostor did walk, prowling the decks and

corridors of the ship as he himself did. Perhaps,

he thought, seeking for some trace of him, some

sign. But the Enterprise was large, and offered

infinite refuge. Perhaps for some other reason.

But in the deep night watch--the third watch,

when only a skeleton crew was awake and the

humming of the Enterprise's machines was virtually

the only sound in all those darkened halls--even the

impostor slept. Then, for a time, the ship was his

again, and he dared emerge from the cargo holds, the

storage bays, the vast, humming, automated

recycling plants, to do what he could to get his

kingdom back.

Ensign Giacomo was working the Central

Computer room on Deck 8 when Kirk got

there. She was a thin, pretty, dark-haired girl

in the short blue tunic of the Science section,

running routine input designed more to keep an

operator mildly busy than for any real use.

The experience of thousands of spacegoing vessels,

both in the early days of the Federation and handed on to it

by the Vulcans and other starfaring allies, had

taught that the central computer core of any ship

must never be left physically unattended, no

matter how boring and routine this baby-sitting

function might be. It was not something which could be done

by another machine. There is human error, but there

is also human instinct and human judgment.

Kirk crossed the room to the computer itself. The

"ship's computer," he well knew, existed in

actuality in three separate banks, here on

Deck 8 and in two other places in the

Engineering hull, all its essential systems

backed and double-backed, all linked to one another

by superconductor nerve bundles and

thence to monitors, readers, and visicoms in

nearly every room in the ship. But here was the

computer's heart, its brain, its central

plexus ... here in these curving banks of

featureless, pale blue metal, protected at

the very heart of the saucer, at the ship's innermost

core.

And, after the incident with Redjac on Argelius

II, well and truly shielded.

It was impossible to guard against the completely

unexpected--and Kirk was a firm believer that

somewhere in the galaxy lurked sentient life-forms

of configurations and capabilities absolutely

unimaginable, and therefore impossible to guard against.

But part of the Enterprise's mission--the

essential part--was to see what needed to be

made up as they went along. Thus Mr.

Spock had taken the Xeno/anthro/bio

records and devised a projection

probabilities program, and from it had jury-

rigged a faint electron-bombardment field

over each unit in the interlocking concentric rings

of the banks, which, he believed, would prevent the

entry into the computer of a sentient mind intent upon

using the computer as an electronic brain. The

ship was far too dependent upon the proper

functioning of the computer--and the computer itself too

interconnected in its various program paths--

to permit that kind of thing to happen again.

The irony of it was, thought Kirk, with a shadow

of his old humor, that in ordering Spock to do so,

he had very probably sealed his own death warrant.

And since he had no idea what that alien

intruder wanted with his body, and his ship--who

knew how many other death warrants besides?

He looked around him at the curving banks of

memory, of files, of thought units filling that

vast and brightly lit round room, the brain of his

ship through which every oxygen level and cabin

temperature passed, which controlled everything from the

conversion rate of the anti-matter pods to the sizes

of uniforms to be fabricated by LandRather--

analysis, documents, translation, records,

automatic logs and times--enough and more than enough

memory to house the synapses of a human brain.

Spock had told him--Sargon had told him

--that without some kind of physical structure, the

electron shadow of his mind--the katra--would

eventually disperse, dissolve. If it hadn't been

for the initial stabilizing matrix of the

transporter beams, it probably would have done so

already. How long it would take, Kirk did not

know, and Spock, as he was whenever the discussion

touched the dark and secret ways of Vulcan

spirituality, had been uninformative on the

subject. But Kirk knew, could feel in his

bones--except, he reflected dryly, that

I don't have bones--that it would be soon.

Giacomo looked up from her work at the

central of the three main terminals, her quick-moving

fingers stumbling to a halt as she scanned the

silent room. She shivered, rubbing her thin arms;

Kirk knew, seeing the expression of her eyes,

that if there'd been more lights to turn on, she'd have

done so. Her hand moved a little toward the comm-link

button and then pulled back as she told herself not

to be silly; but he could see her fingers shake.

Unconsciously echoing her friend Brunowski down

in his illegal recycling lab, she muttered

to herself, "I don't care what they say, I

swear to God this place is haunted." Kirk

moved quietly to the wall at the far end of the

room.

And began to knock.

He wasn't entirely sure how he

produced the knocking. He only knew that he

could, by a kind of controlled flailing with his mind.

The first time he had produced the sound, it had been

unconscious, the reaction of sheer, blind rage, of

helpless horror, when the intruder, the alien,

whoever and whatever it was and whatever it wanted, had

taken Helen in its arms, had hurt her ... had

hurt her, Kirk understood, in a way that might

never be healed.

And there had been nothing he could do.

It was that rage that kept him going now, putting

all his strength, all his concentration, into the effort

to communicate. It was desperately difficult

even to produce sounds, and Morse or any other

code was out of the question--he simply hadn't enough

control.

Giacomo flinched, dark eyes huge with

terror, but she didn't get up and leave her

post. Kirk, with what little of his mind he could

spare from the agony of his task, admired her

guts and wished he didn't have to frighten her. But

he had to get Spock back here to investigate

once more. He had done so once, and could have taken

the Vulcan by the shoulders and knocked his head against

the wall when Spock had spent his time

patiently and calmly searching for a reasonable

explanation.

But there was nothing he could do. He had

to communicate somehow, with someone. He had to have

help, before it was too late--too late for him,

and perhaps too late for them all.

"I dunno, Spock." Dr. McCoy

poured two centimeters of bourbon into a water

glass and relocked the security medical-stores

cabinet in which he kept his liquor--the cabinet

in which, Spock recalled, every bottle had been

found broken the night they'd put all the

liquids in the medical labs into unbreakable

containers. He returned to perch on the corner of

his desk. "There are more things in heaven and earth than

are dreamt of in your philosophy, or contained in

your computer either, and if it's an alien, it's the

damnedest one I've ever heard of."

Spock, seated primly on a lab stool,

pointed out, "There is no evidence that the

destruction is not being caused by some member of the

Enterprise crew. All the readings indicate

that there is no life-form unaccounted for on this

vessel."

""Readings" my grandmother's left hind leg.

Maybe the first time someone could have broken that door

code, but after we put the security locks on

them ..."

"I doubt that with the scientific and technical

resources available on the Enterprise there is

a room on board that could not be entered by someone

truly determined, and I fail to see what your

grandmother's anatomy has to do with the accuracy of the

in-ship scans." The Vulcan folded his long,

bony hands around his drawn-up knees. At this

late hour sickbay was quiet. When Spock

had left the rec room after his chess game with the

captain, Nurse Chapel had still been there,

engaged in the mystifying ritual of picture

reassembly even after Uhura had departed.

The chess game had been unsatisfactory,

the captain's mind still clearly preoccupied with

Dr. Gordon's irrational behavior, though the

captain had made no mention of it, and Spock's

Vulcan training made even the notion of asking

unthinkable. Spock had been interested, though

disquieted, to note how deeply the affair with

Dr. Gordon had affected his commanding officer.

Whatever turn had been taken upon

Midgwis, and subsequent to the

anthropologist's decision to remain on board the

Enterprise, its effects seemed to be adverse

upon both parties concerned--the captain's chess

playing, though it had not precisely

deteriorated, had certainly changed

qualitatively, and after a single game the

captain had excused himself and departed for bed. He

had looked exhausted, as he had since the

problems with Dr. Gordon had started; Spock

was ashamed to admit, even to himself, the concern he

felt for the captain.

Still wakeful, he had made his way down

to sickbay and had found McCoy still puzzling over

the latest manifestations of the putative intruder

which might or might not be aboard.

"It is not the "how,"" Spock went on,

"that interests me so much as the "why." The choice

of the medical labs as the target has, of course,

been obvious from the first ..."

McCoy's eyebrows scaled up. "I'm

glad you think so."

Spock tilted an eyebrow in return.

"Surely it is clear even to a human,

Doctor, that the medical labs are--or were--the

only place where free-standing containers of

liquids were to be found unguarded at least one

third of the time. Since very little else has been

damaged or even disturbed, it is clear that

liquids somehow have something to do with the disturbances

..."

"But it doesn't make any sense!"

McCoy leaned his back against the edge of the desk

behind him, looked up at the Vulcan in

frustration. "Certainly not for a human; not even for

an alien, really, since half those liquids were

inorganic and would have killed anything that tried

to drink them. No, Spock," he sighed, and

shook his head. "What this is starting to sound like

..."

He hesitated, turning the water glass in his

hands for a moment and regarding it as if momentarily

absorbed in contemplation of the reflected glow of the

overhead light in the complex carbohydrate

bonds of its amber depths. Then he looked up

at Spock again with his sharp blue eyes. "How

much have you read of the literature of poltergeist

manifestations, Spock?"

"Less than point-five percent of what was

available in the Academy library,"

Spock replied with his customary accuracy.

"Of the tapes available in the library section of the

Enterprise's computer--"

"And you haven't noticed a similarity?"

Spock was silent, instinctively unwilling

to open a subject that Vulcans seldom

discussed with other Vulcans.

"The knocking, the objects moved around without people

seeing them, the--"

"I am familiar with the poltergeist effect,"

the Science officer replied slowly. "The

Vulcan word for it is eschak."

McCoy blinked. "I didn't think

Vulcans had anything so irrational as ghosts."

"Eschak--poltergeists--random and

destructive psychokinetic effects--are, as you

quite well know, Doctor, unconnected with the chain-

jangling headless horsemen you humans take such

delight in frightening yourselves with. They are, as you

point out, irrational, perhaps one reason that they are

so much more common in your world than in mine ..."

"Don't tell me," McCoy moaned, "that

even your ghosts are too logical to haunt

houses."

"I would not tell you anything for which I have so little

data," Spock responded politely.

"Nevertheles s ..." He frowned, dark eyes

focusing upon some middle distance of contemplation.

Contrary to what most humans believed,

Vulcans were not entirely creatures of

rationality--their notorious logic was, in

fact, a necessary defense against the other side of the

Vulcan nature. Due to more widespread use

of meditation and other spiritual techniques, cases

of eschak were indeed few--no more than one or

two per century, and even fewer now--but those that

had been substantiated made human

poltergeist manifestations appear laughably

ineffectual.

"Nevertheless," Spock went on, "in most such

cases, both in your world and mine, the manifestations

are associated with a human focus, usually a

young boy or girl, or someone in a deeply

disturbed frame of mind."

Their eyes met.

After a long moment McCoy said, "What's

going on with her, Spock? And with Jim? Seeing the

two of them in the rec room tonight ..."

"It is certainly not my place," Spock

replied, "to investigate--or to discuss

--the captain's romantic entanglements."

"Dammit, Spock, you know as well as I do

that this isn't just a romantic entanglement! Jim

is damn serious about the woman ..."

Dryly, the Vulcan said, "You would know more about

such matters than I, Doctor. But it appears

that Dr. Gordon is in some state of strong

emotional turmoil, which seems to date from her

trip to the surface of Midgwis; and no

manifestations of the poltergeist effect were

reported before that time--certainly not before Dr.

Gordon's appearance on the ship. One could

theorize--"

With a sharp whistle, the intercom on the desk

came to life. McCoy reached out and slapped the

switch. "McCoy here ..."

Uhura's voice came on, breathless and

shaken. "Doctor, I'm down in Helen's

room--visiting officers' quarters. Can you get

here right away?"

Chapter Nine

She was walking in the observation lounge on

Deck 12 with Jim. It was very late in the

second watch; they had already been to his room,

and in the warm aftermath of loving, he had spoken

to her of his ship, and she had said, "Will you show it

to me?" He'd chuckled, "What, now?" and,

deep asleep now, Helen still felt in her dream

the touch of his lips on her bare shoulder, still

smiled at the way the hanging forelock of his

rumpled blond hair dangled in his eyes. But

she saw the delight in his face.

The observation lounge, like all the dorsal

lounges in the pylon, was a single long, narrow

room with an emergency gangway at one end and the

turbolift shaft at the other, a double line of

chairs running down its center and a food slot

programmed for the more popular combinations of starch and

grease. At this time of the shift the long room was

empty, and only dimly illuminated. The stars

outside seemed very close.

If she stood near the heavy, structural-

weight plex of the windows, Helen could see the

underside of the primary hull spreading like

a weightless parachute of pale gray rhodium

overhead, the long, sturdy pod of the Engineering

hull stretching beneath. But below that pod dropped

infinity, literally infinity, pitch-black and deep

beyond conceptions of deep. In it the stars,

hideously distant, did not twinkle or

sparkle, but burned with a chill skeletal light

that made the shadowy structure of the great

nacelles and their slender pylons seem

strangely fragile.

And over all that silver surface shone

pinpricks of light, tiny reminders of the warmth of

life which temporarily baffles even the entropy

of infinity, the individuated joy of humanity

capable of briefly conquering that all-encompassing

dark.

It was only her second time on a spacegoing

craft at all. The passenger liner that had taken

her from Mars, in whose colonial domes she had

grown up, out to Delta Cygnus to the

university, had not boasted observation ports.

She was interested to note that in spite of the life-

support systems, the pylon's observation

decks and lounges--and the Historical Section that

had been commandeered from one of them--were

noticeably colder than the inner areas of the ship.

The wall that separated them from eternity was icy to the

touch.

She looked over at Jim's face and saw the

dreams there, reflected by starlight in his eyes.

"It's the freedom out there that you want, isn't

it?" she said softly. "Not the ship itself, but where the

ship is going."

He thought about it a long time before replying. There

was something in the dim intimacy of the empty lounge

that, for all its echoing length, was like the warm confines

of the cabin they had just left. In a way, it was as

if they still lay twined together like animals in an

underground den. Helen could think of no man to whom

it would even occur to her to speak like this--to ask the

why, to inquire about the heart spring that few people even

like to admit that they have ...

But somehow, with Jim, it was easy.

Slowly, as if it were a matter difficult

to put into words, he said, "I--I don't really

know. It isn't freedom, really. If it was

freedom, I think I'd have become one of the

free-traders, the planet-hoppers--God

knows, if it's freedom you want, you don't go

through Starfleet to get it. And I don't

think it's power, exactly. I may have

absolute power over 430 people, but when you think about

it, that's not very much. It's--it's as if the words for

it have been forgotten. Longing ..." He shook his

head, fair brows descending over the bridge of

his straight, well-shaped nose.

"I used to think I was crazy," he went on

softly, speaking as if to himself. Speaking, Helen

thought, as he had spoken to no one for years--perhaps

never. "Just to go to these places, to see them ...

to be where no one has imagined being before, at least

no one I've ever known, have ever heard of." His

arm around her waist had tightened a little, iron-

strong, and yet there was no desire now in his grip

--for desire had been sated--but only a kind of

gratitude that someone was there. It occurred to her

that, like the aloof Mr. Spock, for all his

womanizing, this man had been essentially alone

much of his life.

"It sounds so silly when you pick it apart,"

he said after a time. "But when it's inside you,

calling you on ..."

"Yours goes out," Helen said softly, speaking

of whatever it was--that longing that had no name.

"Mine goes deep. To see how things fit together,

and what's going on underneath. It does sound

silly, to say I've spent my life studying

how things work, but ... I had to. I couldn't not.

But for the life of me, I can't explain why."

"If we could explain why," he'd said with a

rueful half grin, "we'd talk ourselves out of it,

and be the poorer."

He'd drawn her closer to him then, and they had

kissed, not in passion, but taking pleasure in the

affection; and from thinking that the captain of the

Enterprise would be a good man with whom to have a

teeth-rattling affair, Helen found herself thinking

that Jim Kirk was a man she would want to know for a

long, long time ...

She turned in her sleep, troubled, trying

to surface from the gluey darkness of her dreams.

There was something wrong.

Her flailing hand brushed the switch of the

bedside lamp--it was on, as was the small reader

by the bed on which page 215 of a murder mystery

called The Shirt Off His Back still glowed

with amber letters on darkness.

But she couldn't wake up.

She sank back down, this time to nightmare.

It was the nightmare that had become

terrifyingly familiar, the nightmare of Jim's

arms around her, of Jim's lips crushing hers,

rough and brutal and impersonal--the nightmare of

her own confusion and indecision. She had never felt

this frightening sense of being taken by an utter

stranger. But this is Jim! she kept saying,

desperately, to herself.

But looking up into his eyes, she had known it

wasn't Jim.

She didn't know who it was.

Or what.

Then she was lying asleep in her bed--or

maybe it was Jim's bed, for in her dream she

couldn't tell. In her dream she could see by the

faint glow of the nightlight that someone was lying beside

her, an indistinct mound beneath the rumpled sheets,

a faint sheen of light--maybe--on the blond

hair ...

Terrified, she tried to wake up before he

turned toward her with the face that wasn't Jim's

face. That wasn't human at all. She was

trying to wake up, trying to get enough air into her

lungs to scream and wake herself up, but there

wasn't any air ...

Let me out of this! Let me out before he

turns to me ...

The covers stirred, moved.

She managed to open her eyes.

She still couldn't breathe.

Her head was throbbing. The room--her own

room, and not Jim's quarters, in which she'd been

dreaming she'd lain--was nearly dark, but for the

glow of the night lamp and the orange reflection of the

reader. She tried to inhale but couldn't, her

lungs sucking, her sinuses full of some

strange, metallic smell. Panic flooded

her, panic that she might still be dreaming ...

She looked at the bed beside her and saw it

empty of the thing in her dreams. But the buzzing

cloudiness filled her head, like sleep or something

close to it, disorienting and terrifying. She fought

her way clear of the coverlet and rolled numbly

to the floor, dragged herself to her feet, fumbling,

clouded, not really sure whether she was still asleep

or not. But whatever was happening, she thought

numbly, there was something wrong, something very wrong, and

she had to get out of the room.

Reeling like a drunkard, she made it to the

door. Her fingers groped at the opener switch.

Nothing happened.

Panic flooded her, panic beside which the panic

terror of the dream vanished like a leaf whirled

away by a stream. There was something in the air of the

room, something that weighed and burned her lungs,

filled her head with dull humming and wrapped her

limbs in l ead. The ship! she thought,

terrified. The life-support systems have

gone--there's an emergency--the intruder--there is

an intruder--it's shut down the life-

support systems! She remembered someone had

shown her the emergency manual switch to the door,

but couldn't recall where it was or how to use it.

Her vision was graying out as she stumbled to the tiny

desk, pounded desperately on the comm switch.

But of course if all the life-support

systems were gone, everyone else would be dead too

...

Dead--she was dying ...

"Uhura ..." she gasped, her throat on

fire and the words a harsh guttural croak, not

knowing whether the intercom was working or not.

"Uhura!"

"Methoamyline gas." Mr. Spock held

up the long, narrow cylinder for the captain and

McCoy to see. The thumb-sized gauge at the

top read almost empty. "It had been placed in

the ventilation duct in Dr. Gordon's

quarters; the outflow duct had been closed and the

door pad disconnected."

Kirk held out his hand, his eyes blank and

hard.

"I could have told you it was methoamyline,"

McCoy growled, glancing back at the high

diagnostic bed where Helen lay, her dark,

level brows black and startling against the gray

waxiness of her face. "She's lucky she woke

up long enough to call for help ... and luckier still the

person she called was awake to do something about it."

"I--I don't quite know what woke me."

Lieutenant Uhura frowned, wrapped the heavy

black folds of her robe more closely about her.

"I just--I'd been worried about her." Her dark

eyes slipped sidelong at Captain Kirk,

but he stared straight before him, unresponsive.

"Then I--I thought I heard something falling.

That's what waked me." She shrugged. "And when

I opened my eyes and looked around, the comm light

was flashing ..."

"The methoamyline was one of the spare

breathing tanks left over from when we

transported the Denovian consular party

to Giermos, of course," Kirk said quietly.

"It wasn't being kept under any particular guard

..." He hesitated, and passed his hand suddenly

across his eyes. Behind the hardness of furious anger

in them Spock could see exhaustion, the ragged

look of a man living on his last reserves. He

was keeping it concealed, as a commander must, Spock

thought, but the harsh lights of sickbay showed up

cruelly the new lines on Kirk's face, the

hollows under the cheekbones where he had visibly

lost weight.

Slowly, he walked back to the bed, and stood

looking down at the woman there. The slow rhythm

of her breathing was soundless, echoed in the faint

pulsing of the diagnostic screen above her. Even

in unconsciousness so deep it bordered on coma,

there was a slight pucker to her brows, as if she still

struggled with some haunting, abyssal dream.

"I thought she--" Kirk began uncertainly,

and stopped. Then, "I wonder why she didn't

try to call me?"

Spock caught the slight compression of

Uhura's bronze lips, and the look of both

puzzlement and irony in her eyes, and remembered

how Helen had fled the rec room earlier that

evening upon Kirk's entrance. It was, of

course, absolutely none of his business what was

going on, and indeed, from a Vulcan standpoint, in

appallingly bad taste even to notice so

blatant a display of emotions. But had a

biochemical or technical problem presented this

many fascinating anomalies, he would have been

tinkering day and night with the follow-up of those

contradictory clues.

He wondered if there were a way of consulting

privately with Uhura on the subject, once

the present problem of the intruder, with its new and

alarming ramifications, was solved.

Since Uhura said nothing, Nurse Chapel,

who stood on the other side of the bed, replied

tactfully, "She was in a panic, Captain.

She'd often call up Uhura to talk during the

off-shifts, as she couldn't call you."

"Oh," Kirk said, a little blankly, his

brows pinching together as if with thought or pain. "I--

I see ..."

"Do you?" McCoy growled as he led the way

from the intensive care ward down the

corridor to his office, leaving Chapel and

Uhura by Helen's bed. The door slid

soundlessly shut behind them. "Well, what I

see, Jim, is that you look as bad as she

does. What the hell is the matter with you?

You've been avoiding this place like the plague

..."

"And I'll continue to avoid it as long as

there's a threat to my ship." Kirk paced a few

strides, then turned back with a fidgety

restlessness, like a caged tiger, to face them.

"And there is a threat, gentlemen," he went

on in a taut, quiet voice. "I've known

it--I've felt it--since we left

Midgwis. I've sensed it, hiding somewhere in the

corridors, somewhere in the walls. And now it's

turned lethal."

"And has attacked the only person on board

who has done any kind of extensive research

on the fauna and inhabitants of Midgwis

itself," Spock concluded thoughtfully. "Which

indicates that it is intelligent and, to some

degree, informed. And yet the lack of any kind

of physical readings ..."

"The galaxy is a big place, Mr.

Spock," Kirk replied softly. "None of

you--none of us--has any idea of the true

capabilities of the Midgwins."

"Then you don't consider it an accident," the

Vulcan said, "that we have had no reply to our

efforts at subspace contact with the researchers on

Midgwis itself?"

"No." The captain shook his head. "It's

becoming more and more obvious that communications were

deliberately cut--and that someone is trying

to keep us in the dark about something on Midgwis

itself. We're turning back, gentlemen."

Spock raised one eyebrow--Kirk walked

to the comm link on the wall of McCoy's office,

keyed the bridge. "Ms. Fontana ..."

"Yes, Captain," came the night

navigator's voice.

"Lay in a course for Midgwis.

Lieutenant Mahase, notify Starbase

Nine that we have changed our course and are

returning to Midgwis due to a potential threat

to vessel's safety, and possibly to Federation

security. That is all."

"You're making it sound like a conspiracy,"

McCoy said doubtfully.

"I agree with the captain," Spock put in,

walking to the table where McCoy had laid down the

empty methoamyline cylinder and examining the

gauges once again. "Indeed, it may explain in

part our extreme difficulty in locating the

intruder by conventional scans. However, it does not

necessarily have to be a conspiracy of the

Midgwins. The Klingons have every reason to wish

to sabotage the mission there, and have been known to buy

or extort the services of fleet personnel

before. The manifestations--"

"No," Kirk said sharply. "No, it is--

something from the planet. And it must be destroyed, as

quickly as possible now, since it will almost certainly

try to prevent us from returning to Midgwis."

Spock's left eyebrow tilted still farther at

this sudden dogmatic certainty; McCoy perched

on one corner of his desk and said, "Fine--but just

how do you go about destroying something that doesn't

leave physical readings on an in-ship scan?

Something that can go through walls, apparently at will?"

"There was research done at Columbia

University in the late twentieth century on the

effects of proton waves upon electronic

kyrillian fields," Kirk responded,

resuming his pacing. "You're the expert on

katra, Spock--you should be able to put together some

kind of disruptor that should disperse our little friend."

Spock was shocked silent for a moment, as if

Kirk had casually mentioned in company some

confidence about his sex life, and for just an instant he

was startled to find that the pang of that casual

betrayal of trust went so deep.

But the man was the captain, and, he reminded

himself, under considerable stress. Stiffly, he

replied, "Indeed, a kind of proton-acceleration

field can be devised. But I would be much more

inclined to attempt to communicate with the intruder before

destroying it out of hand."

"No!" Kirk insisted again. "That would be

dangerous--perhaps fatal." And, when Spock

looked at him blankly, he went on in a

calmer voice, "It's a disembodied

intelligence, Spock; a bioelectrical

shadow. It could ... possess anyone who came

near enough to let it. If you, or you, Doctor"--

he swung around, his eyes suddenly, burningly

intent--"or anyone, in fact, hears, or

sees, or ... or senses ... any kind of

manifestation, any appearance of this--this

poltergeist effect--flee it immediately. The

risk is too great, especially for you,

Spock."

"Indeed." Spock remained standing beside the

workbench, long fingers resting idly on the gauges

on the cylinder, his straight, dark lashes veiling

his eyes. On the wall behind him the lighted

readouts of the observation monitor showed Dr.

Gordon's bio readings inching slowly back

toward normal as the poisons were cleared from her

blood. Dimly, his Vulcan hearing picked up

the voices of Nurse Chapel and Lieutenant

Uhura in the corridor, exchanging low-voiced

words--then the retreating click of Chapel's

boot heels as she went into the lab, and the soft

pat of Uhura's Morocco leather slippers

vanishing down the corridor. He turned back

to the captain, troubled by his growing sense of

wrongness, of something amiss.

"I find it curious, however," he went on,

"that when Mr. DeSalle fingerprinted this

cylinder, it was found to have been wiped clean. This

argues for a degree of sophistication in our

intruder--if, in fact, the attempted murderer

and the intruder are one and the same."

As she approached the door of her cabin,

Lieutenant Uhura slowed her steps. Two

or three times, coming or going from Helen's

quarters or the rec room late in the second

watch, when the corridors were nearly deserted,

she had felt again that strange fear that had come over

her the night after they'd left Midgwis, the

eerie sense of being watched by something that knew her

name. She had mentioned this to no one, a ware that

rumors were already buzzing around the ship, but some of the

things she'd overheard in the rec room troubled her

more than she liked to admit.

And now this.

It was turning lethal, the captain had said.

She wondered if what she had felt that first night

had been only her imagination, or whether she'd

had a closer call than she cared to think about.

She had dreamed about it, she thought, hurrying her

steps toward her door; dreamed about it just before she

woke up, dreamed about cold, about someone calling

her ...

But why would it call her, if waking her up would

save Helen?

She shook her head. Probably

too many of Reilly's rec room ghost

stories, she thought. The thumping sound that she had the

dim impression had waked her had undoubtedly

been due to that.

But it hadn't. The door slid open, and though

a week ago she would simply have walked over

to her bed and gotten in, the uneasiness of the last

several days caused her to switch on the light

while still standing on the threshold.

And she saw immediately that the small Martian

bronze that usually stood on her tiny, metal,

Starfleet regulation dresser lay on the floor

in a corner. It must have been its fall that had

waked her in time to see the flashing light of

Helen's call.

Behind her in the corridor, the small amber

lights of a Yellow Alert began to flash. The

alert light over the comm link in her room was

flashing also, and though she was virtually certain she

knew what she was going to hear, she reached out and

touched the open-announce button. Yellows you

had to key in to find out what the trouble was--it

wasn't a roll-you-out-of-bed emergency, but

definitely something for everyone who was awake to know.

As she'd expected, the voice of

Lieutenant Mahase, her night replacement,

was speaking. "... on board. Exercise all

precaution; avoid being alone." In spite of

herself, she smiled at the recollection of

Mahase's outrageous rec room parodies of the

standard announcements about exercising precautions and

avoiding being alone under any circumstances.

"Intruder Alert--it has been confirmed that an

alien intruder is on board. Exercise ..."

She removed her fingers from the switch, then

looked back at the little bronze, lying on the

floor. Dubious, almost afraid to touch the thing,

she walked over and picked it up, then looked from

it to the dresser where it had stood. Uhura was

meticulously neat--living in a three-by-

five-meter stateroom for three years, you had

to be--but there were only so many places to put things,

and the top of the dresser was one of them. A few

perfume bottles, the tiny amber gleam of the

Alert lights flicking on and off in the depths

of the glass; her jewelry box; the small,

cased disk of a favorite movie; a note

tablet and stylus ... The place the Martian

bronze had occupied was clearly delineated by the

things that had stood around it. It was nearly

ten inches from the nearest edge.

There was no way it could have fallen by itself.

Chapter Ten

Back in the chamber of the captain of the

Hungries, Yarblis Geshkerroth sank

slowly onto the bitter hardness of the bunk and

lowered his head to his hands. "His" head, he

thought ironically, "his" hands, and held the

hands out to look at them. Little and white and weak,

fragile enough to crush in his beak, had he still had a

beak.

Yet with finicking little stubs like these, the

Hungries had made machines, machines that

made machines, which in their turn had created this, this

monster thing, this half-living city, this iron

Bargump that carried them all in her sterile

belly through the screaming black void of nothingness

they called Space.

Loneliness ate him like a cancer. He wondered

how much longer he could last.

Longer than the captain of the Hungries, the

man Kirk, he thought, with sudden, vicious

desperation. At least longer than he.

Touching him in the village, he had felt the

alien captain's strength. But never had he

guessed the man would have such strength to hold his soul

together in this fashion. Not for so long. Only

barely could he remember how long it had been.

Dear Rhea, he thought desperately,

let me last ... let me last until it is

accomplished.

But Rhea--the sweet life that informed every

tree, every stream, every glade and covert in which he

had grown up, the breathing spirit whose name and nature

he knew deep within his heart--was far away.

Having all the brain of this James Kirk at his

disposal, being able to see the memories in his mind

as easily as he saw the memories of his

siblings in the Consciousness Web, he knew in a

sense how far away the world, the Mother Spirit that had

surrounded him, was, though he could barely grasp

it with his heart.

Farther than a Midgwin could walk, if he

had begun walking at the dawn of the world, through all

the years of ancestors, till now ... and he could

not even walk that, because there was no earth here, no

rock, no water. No Rhea, no family,

no Consciousness Web, no love.

Only nothingness, and the cold metal of the vessel,

and the hysterically precise measurements that the

Hungries occupied themselves with to the point that they

could not think without thinking centimeters,

microns, seconds, years ...

How easily they slipped in and took over,

first the language of the mind, then its perceptions,

then its inner heart.

No wonder they all became grabby, thinking that

because they knew how many of a thing existed, they could then

apportion it, so many to me, so many to my sibling

... only they did not think of others as their

siblings. Only as "them."

No wonder they became Hungries, hungry

with a hunger that could never be filled no matter how

much they had.

And all the evil, all the craziness, all the

tight greediness he had read in their dreams, in

their minds, in their memories--greediness that they

did not even recognize as wrong, which they seemed

to think the right and natural order of things--

greediness that would now spread among the Midgwins,

cause his people to seek it, because it masqueraded as good

--stemmed from that.

Counting Hunger-of-the-soul. Mine and yours.

If Arxoras could be deceived by them, Arxoras

who was wise and good with his many summers of

experience, how much more would others less experienced

be deceived?

Yarblis staggered to his feet, turned to the

mirror above the dressing table which held the things the

captain's memories marked as "his." He had

never occupied an alien body for this long. The

Hungries he had ousted from their bodies when they

materialized in a golden cloud of glitter--the

Hungries that Shorak and the others had called

Klingons, and claimed were not the same as themselves or

James Kirk and his party--he had taken when they

arrived in the world, and had kept only long enough

to kill the others of the party before returning to his own

body. He had never before realized the terrible

stresses of the alien flesh, and how those stresses

marked the body he occupied his inability

to sleep in this new body, his loathing distaste for the

slimy food that his mind told him he had to eat

to keep from being conspicuous ...

And like a darkness in which all things else must

grope, the hideous, devouring loneliness of

separation from the Consciousness Web.

That above all.

He stood now looking at the face of James

Kirk. It was more lined than it had been, grayer,

the discolored flesh around the eyes making them seem

pale and glittery. The physician had begun

to notice. The man Spock, the cold Counter of

Everything, had noticed more.

Like the woman Helen, he would have to be disposed

of before he, Yarblis, could accomplish his plan

with the ship, the plan that would save the world from the

Hungries forever.

He had not thought that--

Abruptly the door note sounded, its

mechanical quality unbearable for all its

softness. Yarblis swung around, fighting the

grate of irritation that these things caused, with all

their implications about the way these people lived; calling

back to his mind everything about James Kirk,

everything that was James Kirk. He was James

Kirk now ...

"Come," he said.

It was Spock.

"Captain ..." The Science officer--

Kirk's mind identified him as Science officer

and all that it meant--inclined his head. Spock was

like the researchers Shorak and L'jian, who would

never enter the Consciousness Web, whose souls were like

stone eggs and whose dreams he had never quite been able

to read. He would have liked to read Spock's

dreams, but the concentration required merely

to remain in Kirk's body precluded anything

else, and, robbed of the usual mental links, it was

difficult sometimes to read the verbal and physical

cues of a species alien to himself.

"What is it, Spock?"

Spock considered for a moment, an uncharacteristic

uncertainty in his hawk features. Then he said,

"Perhaps I should be asking that of you, Captain. I

did not wish to speak of it before Dr. McCoy, but

it is my impression that you know more about this intruder

than you have said. Certainly you seemed to be

expecting an intruder long before the manifestations

began to be reported by the crew."

He frowned, tilting his head a little and regarding

the captain with those dark, calm eyes. His

experiences with the Klingon-Hungries had given

Yarblis a little experience in reading these

elongated, oddly featureless faces, with their tiny

eyes and minimal folds--he had long since

grown used to having them around him.

"I did not speak of it, as I was not

entirely certain that it was that which was preying on your

mind." Spock spoke diffidently, as if

skirting another matter, and Yarblis

rememberedstknew from Kirk's memories that this

Vulcan, this stone-egg-soul, would have regarded

mention of the affair with Helen as bad tast e and none

of his business. Though Yarblis knew Kirk was

Spock's friend (though friendship could not truly exist

without the Consciousness Web), he himself disliked the

Vulcan and everything he stood for the cold

self-containment, the precision that negated all the

freedom of soul for which he, Yarblis, strove,

the obsession with counting things, with rules.

He shrugged--a gesture within Kirk's

repertoire--and said, "If I'd spoken of it,

would you--or anyone--have believed me? We went

over this ship top to bottom--your precious

readings didn't show us a thing. But I knew there

was something in that transporter room. And I think

you did too."

"Indeed, I had a momentary impression of there

being another life-form there," Spock said

doubtfully. Yarblis, his back to the dimness of the

room, his face to the lights in the hall, was aware

of how narrowly Spock was regarding him, aware

of the intonations of worry and uncertainty in the

deep, rough-textured voice.

But the Vulcan (another piece of knowledge from

Kirk, though Yarblis was not entirely certain

how to interpret all those things that went with that label

on these particular family of Hungry) merely

went on, "Did anything take place on the

planet that would have led you to your conclusions about the

intruder? I have been meaning to speak to Dr.

Gordon about it ..."

Yarblis realized he had put the metal

gourd of poisoned air in her room just in time.

And now he would have to make sure of her, before she

regained consciousness enough to speak.

"Only my impressions gained from encounters with the

Midgwins themselves." What Kirk knew, or

thought, of his people, Yarblis knew to be so

simplistic and distorted as to be almost

unrecognizable. What Helen knew, he could

only guess from memories of what she had told

her mate. The others would know nothing, but he

realized he had spoken from knowledge that there was no way

he could have had. There were so many things to know, so many

things to sort--it was not like the brief masquerades

before.

He went on, carefully, "Some of the things

Thetas and the others told me on the planet about the

abilities of these people ... Be careful, Spock.

I'm telling you again, this thing must be destroyed, and

as quickly as possible. Don't get near it.

Don't let it get near anyone."

"Indeed not, Captain," Spock replied

formally, though Yarblis could see he was not pleased

about that. There was an awkward silence, in which

Yarblis was aware that the Vulcan was watching him,

as if waiting for something. What it was, he could not

be sure, not knowing the physical cues of these people,

but whatever it was, he did not get it. In time,

walled behind his formal manner, Spock went on,

"I have double-checked the shielding on the computer, as

the poltergeist effect has been reported itself a

number of times in the Central Computer room or

its vicinity."

"Good," Yarblis agreed, though it was less

than completely clear to him why Spock seemed

to consider this important. This "central computer"

was vitally important in Kirk's mind--a

sort of giant machine that made the air go, the

lights shine, the ship itself move. But as with the

implications of Spock's Vulcanness, the

clusters of tiny facts surrounding the concept of

Central Computer were difficult for him

to interpret. He knew enough about the "computer" to use

it to implement his plan for the ship, his plan that would

save the world, that would keep the Hungries from

tempting his people into destroying the beauty and wholeness

of Rhea in which they lived, but there were other things which

he simply had not had the time nor energy to pick

apart.

"Good. See what you can get for me on a low-

wave proton accelerator. If we know that it

is manifesting itself near Central Computer, we

can start our hunt for it there."

"Very good, Captain."

Spock inclined his head again, a gesture of

respect. With the closing of the door, Yarblis

heard the slightly uneven tread of his boots

retreat down the hall; heard the boots pause,

as a man might pause when caught by some thought,

then start again and fade.

He had done something wrong.

Yarblis knew it, standing still in front of the

door. His heart--the alien heart--beat fast with the

rush of alien enzymes into his blood. He had

avoided them whenever he could--the man

Spock, the woman Helen, the physician

McCoy--the others whom Kirk's mind

identified as those who were most familiar with his

mannerisms, though since these people lacked anything

resembling a Consciousness Web, Yarblis could

not imagine how they could truly know one another at

all. He had hoped to be able to avoid them, or

at least put them off, until they returned

to his own world and he accomplished the plan that would

put his people beyond the temptation of dealing with the

Hungries forever.

O Rhea, Mother Spirit of streams and

grass, he whispered to himself, let me only

last that long ...

Yet whatever he had said in this conversation, or in

the one before, in the cold and sterile rooms that

passed among the Hungries for a Healing

Place, he had made some kind of mistake,

and the man Spock was more suspicious than ever.

He would have to act fast.

The crew of the Enterprise felt little

surprise when word came down that their course had

been reversed and that the starship was en route back

to Elcidar Beta III. In a number of

quarters there was even a certain amount of relief

that the ship remained on Standing Yellow Alert

confirmed reports of an intruder, precautions

to be taken. Those who worked Central Computer

late at night--Giacomo, Miller,

McDonough--had for several nights already been

doubling up on their shifts, those off duty, or

friends in other departments, like Gilden and

Brunowski, unobtrusively keeping those on

duty company. A few questioned the fact that scans

of the ship still revealed no evidence of an

intruder's physical presence, but most had been

in space long enough to realize the extreme narrowness

of human experience. There were only a few who

continued to claim that the intruder was, in fact, a

ghost.

In other quarters, however, uneasiness

remained.

"You can't deny there's something weird about the

whole business, Spock," McCoy grumbled,

perching on a lab stool and watching while Spock

made adjustments on what appeared to be--and was in

fact housed in the gutted casing of--a small

laser cannon, hooked up to a modified

nuclear accelerator and a proton

converter. "If it's an alien--if it's something

we picked up on the planet--what the hell is

its aim? I still find cups and feinbergers moved

around in the labs, and if there's any free

liquids there, they get tipped over, but what's

the point of that? And what the hell is that thing

supposed to do, anyway?"

"This, Doctor," Spock replied, looking

around the workbench behind him--they were in the small ion-

study lab on Deck 2--"is a low-level

proton wave-induction generator."

"Oh," McCoy said. "Silly me; should have

seen it in a minute." He crossed his knees and

watched with a certain amount of interest as Spock

turned around in what, had he been human, would have

been irritation, and started a concerted hunt through the

tools on the bench. "Lose something?"

"There was," Spock said, "a pin welder on

this bench 2.7 minutes ago exactly--I put

it there just before you came in." He straightened up,

dark brows forming an even sharper vee than usual

above the high bridge of his nose beneath the

protective goggles he'd pushed up onto his

forehead. "This is the fourth tool which has

inexplicably vanished in the last eighteen

hours. Yesterday a sonic wrench, a crystal-

optic transmitter, and twenty-four

centimeters of selenite wire all disappeared from

this bench where I clearly remembered laying them

down."

McCoy groaned. "Don't tell me it's

starting here!"

Spock eyebrowed for amplification.

"Nurse Chapel tells me things have been

disappearing out of the labs, and turning up in the

damnedest places, like that note pad of mine that

showed up in the decontamination room where

nobody'd been for days ..."

"Or a tube of methoamyline disappearing from the

xenoecology stores and turning up in the

ventilation ducts of Dr. Gordon's

quarters?"

McCoy looked uncomfortable. "Well, there

is that."

"How is she, Doctor?"

"Still pretty groggy. She says she has no

idea how the gas cylinder got there, but she'd

been asleep for a couple of hours when it was set

off. The gas is odorless. It's only chance she

woke up, only chance Uhura was

awake when she signaled her room. Since

there's no one else in sickbay at the moment,

Chris and Lieutenant Uhura take turns

staying with her. Considering she's our only source

of information about Midgwis now, I think it's a

safe assumption that our intruder's going to try

again."

"I agree," Spock said, picking up a

spot welder and squinting as he delicately

collimated the beam down to approximate the

vanished tool he actually needed. "Yet there

is in fact very little evidence connecting the intruder

--or the various poltergeist effects that have been

reported on the ship--with the attempted murder of

Dr. Gordon."

"Oh, come on, Spock," McCoy said.

"You're not still claiming there's a Klingon spy on

board, are you?"

"I would not be so rash as to theorize ahead of my

data," Spock replied austerely. "But

apports--objects appearing and disappearing--are

fairly commonly reported in cases of

poltergeist phenomena, and there has yet to be a

reported case of a poltergeist wiping

fingerprints from such an object." He pulled the

goggles down over his eyes and bent over the

induction generator; there was a sharp hissing as he

pin-welded the delicate wires into place.

"It is for that reason," he said a few

minutes later, straightening up again from h is work, "that

I wished to attempt contact of some kind with the

intruder. At the least, we might gain some

information about what it is and perhaps increase our knowledge of the

fauna of Midgwis--if Midgwis is where it

came on board, as seems to be the case.

Certainly it seems to possess as high or

higher levels of intelligence as the Midgwins

themselves, and its skills at concealment would go far in

explaining why it has not been mentioned in Dr.

Shorak's reports. At best, we might gain

a witness as to the real perpetrator of the

attempt, provided, as I say, that the intruder

and the perpetrator are not one and the same."

"And if they are one and the same," McCoy

replied, "you lay yourself open for God knows what.

Some kind of alien possession, if Jim's

right."

"If," Spock agreed carefully, "as you

say, the captain is right."

There was a long and rather uncomfortable

silence.

"Have you talked to him?"

Spock pushed his goggles up again, frowning a

little, as if trying to fit together pieces of some

complex puzzle which would not fit. "I have

attempted to," he replied after a moment's

consideration. "And indeed, it is difficult to find

fault with his reasoning. The records of contact with

alien species bear ample witness to the existence

of life-forms with whom even the most careful

attempts at contact prove quite rapidly

fatal, not only to the single individual

attempting contact, but to everyone in the contact

party. And beyond this certainty--which could only be an

exaggerated caution--he seems to be perfectly

in possession of his senses."

"I dragged him in for a physical today,

dammit," McCoy muttered, picking up a

stylus from the bench and turning it restlessly in his

hands. "His weight's down about five pounds, but

other than that he's fine--physically. And if he

didn't say two words to me ... Well, he

is dealing with an intruder, and one that can't be

detected. And it did come damn close

to killing the woman he loves. It's enough to make

any man a little irrational."

"For which reason," Spock replied dryly,

"I have always been profoundly grateful that I am

a Vulcan." He returned to contemplate the

awkward tangle of spare parts and wire on the

bench before him.

"And this'll kill it?"

"Theoretically." Spock checked a connection,

plugged in a gauge, and consulted the ruby

numbers that blinked to life in the dark of the tiny

screen. "It is difficult to tell in advance,

as the life-form--if it is a life-form--is

completely unknown to our records and does not

register on scans. In theory, if the intruder

is an independent neural-electronic

infrastructure, the proton-induction field should

disrupt its pattern long enough to neutralize it

permanently."

He turned back to his workbench and moved his

hand as if to lay it on something he knew

precisely the location of, then paused,

irritated, and began to hunt again. McCoy

hopped down from his stool and walked around the

induction generator, hands behind his back so Spock

couldn't accuse him of poking things--he'd

visited Spock while Spock was working before--

examining it with interest. "So what was that katra

thing Jim asked you about?"

Spock's back was to him, and he saw the

shoulders stiffen. The Science officer's voice was

arctic. "A theoretical concept in Vulcan

metaphysics the captain and I had once

discussed."

The intonation was as definite as the banging shut

of a door, but McCoy persisted anyway. "He

talked about it as if it were a type of life-form

analogous to the thing we're dealing with."

"The analogy was in error." Spock removed

his goggles, hung them neatly on the

appropriate hook and donned a magnification

headset, a pair of needle-fine

manipulators in his right hand. "Now if you will

excuse me, Doctor, the captain is very

anxious that the generator be finished and tested this

evening. Three more need to be produced tomorrow, so that

the entire ship can be swept in sections, and I do

need quiet to work."

"Well, excuse me," McCoy muttered,

and took his leave. Spock was poking around in the

innards of the induction generator before McCoy was out

the door.

Back in sickbay, McCoy glanced through the

door of the intensive care ward where Helen lay,

dozing fitfully under the faint lights of the

diagnostic bed. Beside her Uhura sat, the

computer reader angled around toward her, and the muted

amber lights of something on the screen turning her

broad cheekbones to faintly gilded bronze.

She looked tired. She'd had a full shift

on the bridge already, McCoy knew, though he

also knew the Communications officer did not

grudge the time spent watching at the bedside of

her friend. It was one of the worst and most annoying

things of a Standing Intruder Alert, this doubling-up

of watches. He couldn't ever recall one that had

gone on this long.

On the other hand, he thought wryly, passing

along the corridor to his office, he couldn't

ever recall dealing with an alien who was nothing more

than a pattern of neural impulses, if that.

No wonder the researchers on Midgwis had

never reported such a thing.

Or had they? Curious, he tapped a key

to activate the reader on his desk, and after a

moment's thought to remember some of the

codes, punched into the reference computer. Would

Input have gotten around to indexing Shorak's

reports yet? Probably--they were usually

pretty fast about things like that.

Letters swam onto the screen, amber in

darkness.

SECURITY CODE REQUIRED FOR

ACCESS.

Damn, he thought, cutting out; Spock must

have put a bee in Jim's bonnet about the

Klingon conspiracy theory after all. He

debated buzzing Jim and asking about the access

code, but glanced at the chronometer and decided

against it. If Jim wasn't asleep now he ought

to be.

He frowned, reflecting on that. Jim looked

terrible. Was it the pressure of knowing the intruder

was on his ship, somewhere, waiting to kill again? Or

was it whatever the hell was going on between him and

Helen? It sure as hell wasn't like Jim

to take on that way over an affair that had turned

sour, but then, Jim was generally careful to keep his

affairs too casual to turn sour in that fashion

... And in any case he, Leonard McCoy,

Boy Divorc`e, had no business setting himself

up as a consultant to other people's love lives when

he'd made such hash of his own.

Having him in for a physical had gotten him

exactly nowhere. There was nothing wrong with him,

except the lines of strain in his face, and that

haunted look in his eyes. He'd tried keeping

his friend off the bridge during emergencies before, when

he was severely wounded, it hadn't worked. When

he'd tried to talk to him he'd been met with

monosyllables I can't talk about it now,

Bones. Ask me about it later.

"Maybe when we get back to that godforsaken

planet," he muttered to himself, keying open his

security safe and taking out a small,

unbreakable container of bourbon to pour himself a

glass, "we'll get this straightened out."

But the memory of Midgwis troubled him. The

touch of the old patriarch's mind on his came

back to him, like the balm of warmed oil on a

half-healed wound--the sense of the burden of

loneliness lifted. He remembered the molten

amber moonlight, the smells of dust and whispering

grasses--the sense of all things being at rest,

being as they should be, without hurry and without stress,

from the beginning of time. Remembered, too,

the reflection of the firelight in Thetas's dark

eyes, and the little Argellian's soft voice in the

dancing shadows as he spoke of the strange

beauties of the Midgwins' simple life, their

elaborate structure of legends and faith, their

spiritual philosophies and intricate,

nonvisual arts, the deep calm of their

civilization that came from the sense of lying utterly

in the hands of Fate.

A structure fragile as glass, Thetas

had said, which even change for the good might shatter

irreparably.

He knew that none of the three researchers had

mentioned any kind of Midgwin belief in spirits or

invisible beings--which didn't mean there wasn't any

of course. It might be something the Midgwins

hadn't mentioned to the researchers, or that the

researchers wouldn't have thought to mention to the landing party

if they considered them simply creatures of the

imagination. Beings which moved and manipulated

artifacts would have damn little scope in Midgwin

society, which hadn't been able to come up with any

greater claim than a few sticks and a wreath of

flowers to the instrumentality necessary to class them as

officially a sentient civilization.

And yet, according to what Helen had told him in the

last few weeks about how cultural researchers

operated, it was not something they would disregard.

He got to his feet and walked back down the

short, brightly lighted stretch of corridor to the

doorway of the ICU. "Lieutenant Uhura?"

She looked up swiftly. Absorbed in her

reading she might be--novel, romance, fashion

magazine, whatever it was, piped up from the deep

reserves of the library computer's endless files--

but she still knew herself to be on guard. "Yes,

Doctor?" She reached out to touch the hand of the

woman who lay in the bed, then to straighten aside

the dark cloud of hair that lay on the flat

pillow. "She's resting easier."

"Good." He came into the shadowy room. The

air was stuffy--because of the alert, the ventilators were

double-shielded. "Do you know if Dr. Gordon

had any separate set of notes about

Midgwis? A separate wafer of her

researches, for instance? All the planet

reports in the main computer are under seal, and

I'm not going to wake Jim up to get them ..."

"He sure looks like he needs the sleep,"

she commented. "Yes, Helen had a

wafer. It'll be by the reader on her desk in her

room. It's got an orange label. It's

all the early reports on Midgwi s--it's

pretty complete. She was looking for some kind of

reference too, you know, about a creature that was

invisible, untouchable."

"She find anything?"

Uhura shook her head. "I don't know. But

I don't think she'd mind if you went into her

room and got it."

But when McCoy went down to the visiting

officers' quarters--still feeling a little silly about

going to all this trouble for something he could probably

get Jim to give him the access code to tomorrow,

always provided he could track Jim down--there was

no wafer with an orange label next to the

reader. There was no such wafer anywhere in the room

--in fact, there were no wafers of any kind in the

room at all.

Restless, Helen moved in her sleep.

Uhura looked up quickly and pushed aside the

reader on its movable arm. The novel she was

reading, about love amid the fall of ancient

civilizations, was only to occupy her time--anything

(except a ghost story, she thought wryly)

would have done. She glanced in surprise at the

chronometer in the upper corner of the diagnostic

screen. Nearly midnight. Chris should be coming

on duty here soon, and she could go to bed ... not that

it would be much of an improvement on sitting next

to Helen. Because of the alert, even the officers, who

had private staterooms, had doubled up

quarters, standard procedure in the rare cases of

an alien loose. She was sharing with Chris, and with

Organa from Security, a woman with whom they

both got along well. But one could have only so

much of the cozy atmosphere of a slumber party.

Here, at least, it was quiet. And, she admitted

to herself, a little uneasily, remembering the strange

feeling she'd had in the corridor, here things were very

well-monitored indeed.

She bent over the bed, feeling Helen's

face. Neither fevered nor cold, though her friend was

turning a little in her sleep, muttering restlessly.

She took the big, square hand in hers and said

softly, "Helen, I'm here. It's Uhura

... I'm here," not loud enough to wake, but enough, she

hoped, to reassure.

Helen opened her eyes and stared at

her in the dim glow of the diagnostic lights. Her

voice, eroded by the harshness of the gas she'd

inhaled, was almost unrecognizable as she whispered,

"It isn't him!" Her eyes were blank, still

dreaming--possibly even still asleep. She

closed them again and a great sob tore her; the

powerful fingers closed around Uhura's with a

desperate grip. "It isn't him!" she sobbed

again, and broke into a storm of weeping, turning her

face away when Uhura tried to comfort her.

From weeping, she slid back into sleep.

Chapter Eleven

After Dr. McCoy left, Mr. Spock

sat for some time at his workbench, magnification

headset pushed up on his forehead, staring at the

induction generator without really seeing it. His first

flash of annoyance at McCoy he had

repressed with reflex swiftness, and reproached

himself now at the childishness of feeling it at all.

What he felt about Kirk, he knew to be

equally childish, and only to be expected, as his

father would certainly have told him--and he could hear the

Vulcan ambassador's deep voice and

judicious phrasing in his mind--if one spoke

to humans regarding Vulcan things.

In speaking to the captain at all regarding

matters of his Vulcan heritage, he had

behaved like a sentimental fool.

That katra stuff ...

So that was all Kirk had gotten out of that

conversation, one evening months ago in the deserted

rec room when they'd finished a second game of

chess and the captain had asked him about meditation,

about the Vulcan philosophy. After several

hours' more discussion about life, and why humans

strive, they had reached--with the tentativeness of friends

who are not quite sure whether they wish to abandon the

safety of superficialities--the concept of the

soul.

It had been that hour of the night when the last of the

off-watch crew members had trailed away

to bed, when the lights had dimmed down to a few

pools of brightness around the piano, the chessboard,

the bank of food slots on the wall. A little

to Spock's surprise, since the captain

generally presented a facade of action and

boldness, Kirk had spoken of his own soul, his

own doubts. Spock had reciprocated with what

he had himself been taught, and what he in fact

believed ...

It had been a side of the captain that he had

rarely seen, and one which he had believed to be

genuine. The anomaly was disquieting, but based upon

matters notoriously open to misperception.

He went back to work.

The silence around him seemed suddenly profound.

Straightening up, he looked about the ion lab,

trying to analyze the source of his deep sense of

unease. A lab, like any of the other

small ones in the Science section, the bright

lumenpanels prosaically illuminating neatly

arranged tools on the workbench, the coils of

wires and superconductor, the gauges on their

shelf and, on the other side of the room, the

brushed-steel cyclors and the gleaming computer

terminal. Some imbalance of his circadian

rhythms, he thought. It was only 2300 hours but

it felt later, felt like the deeps of night ...

He had a flash of irrational dread that if he

opened the door through which McCoy had passed, he

would find only darkness there. And the room certainly

felt cold.

The dread he felt, the sense of the uncanny,

was certainly as irrational as his earlier annoyance

had been. He reached for the spot welder he had

collimated to replace the vanished pin welder--

the tool he had placed on the bench behind him

literally 8.3 minutes ago during his conversation with

Dr. McCoy--and found it, too, gone.

"Curious," he said quietly. Getting

to his feet, he made a slow circuit of the

lab, checking--as they had all fallen into the

habit of repeatedly checking--the ventilators

behind their emergency baffles, the small, round

electrical hatches, the corners that seemed

somehow to contain strange feelings of congealed

uneasiness. He found nothing. "Most curious."

He returned to work in a thoughtful frame of

mind.

Dammit, Spock! Kirk screamed at

him, voiceless, helpless, from the corner of the room

where he stood; and he was standing, he told himself--

feet on the floor, elbow a few centimeters

from the wall--he did have the shadow of a corporeal

body still ... Don't bend that fine Vulcan

mind of yours to finding a reasonable explanation!

You're the only one who might be able to hear me--

who might be able to save me, to save Helen!

He's going to try to kill her again ... And his

own time, he knew, in this strange, bodiless

state, was growing short.

But the sleek, dark head, bent over the innards

of the induction generator cum proton cannon,

did not lift again. And somewhere Kirk sensed the

nearness of that other captain, that terrible alter ego

who had done this to him ... who was seeking to kill the

woman he loved and use the ship that was his very life

now for purposes unknown ...

Somewhere that other self was walking, prowling the

half-lit corridors on whatever errands had

taken it nightly here and there about the ship, from the

upper decks of the Science section down to the very

bottommost of the cargo holds. Knowing he could not

face him, he faded into the wall and fled down,

following the computer lines toward the deserted lower

reaches of the Engineering hull, where, if

relatively unnoticed by any save

Brunowski and Miller in the pursuit of their

mysterious projects, at least for the time being he

could be safe.

"Two generators," Mr. Spock said, "should

adequately establish a disruption field on

one deck of the ship, allowing for both the

curvature of the primary hull and the length of the

Engineering hull. According to what little research has

been done in the field, my estimate is that ten

minutes should be sufficient time to disperse an

electrostatic life-form, though I have no data

on the possibility of such a life-form

reassembling itself. Perhaps you have an opinion on the

subject?" And he regarded the captain, left

eyebrow slightly raised, curious as to what his

reply would be.

Kirk passed a hand over the lower portion of his

face, a nervous gesture he had picked up in

the last twenty-four hours or so, as if to vent

some of the feverish restlessness which seemed, these days,

to be consuming him. "Ten minutes ..." he said

softly, and for an illogical moment Spock had

the impression that he was trying to call to mind

precisely how long ten minutes actually was.

"It can--it might be able to--re-form itself ..."

The blinking amber lights of the Yellow Alert, still

flickering on and off above the door of the small

ion-study lab, increased the illusion of a

strange animal heat in his eyes, as well as the

way he held himself, with his head drawn down a

little to his shoulders, as if for protection. "The

nialigs of Rigel Five could re-form ...

Twenty minutes, the reports said." Then, with a

visible effort, he drew a deep breath and made

his shoulders relax. "What ... what is your

opinion, Mr. Spock?"

"I think that thirty minutes would be a

guarantee of safety," he replied, a little

surprised that the captain would have dug out that

obscure report from the library section

of the computer and consulted it, even as he himself had.

"Thirty, then," the captain said, with a sharp little

nod that made him look again like himself. "We can't

take chances, Mr. Spock. You were able

to assemble two proton generators, then?"

"I was able, by cannibalizing the spare ion-

frequency accelerators, to assemble three,"

Spock replied, worriedly observing how

Kirk's hand stretched out to caress the gray housing

of the laser cannon in which one of the generators had

been constructed, and which now rested on the lab table

before him. The other two generators stood near the

door, clothed in the round, br ushed-steel casings

of the accelerators from which they had been constructed,

barnacled with sprawling incrustations of the equipment

welded to them to complete the transformation, the fruit

of a long night's labors which had left the ion

lab--and the physics workshops next door--

strewn with gutted transformers and opened

modulator housings like clamshells around a

village midden. Even after he had completed work

on them at close to 0400 hours, Spock had

neither left the lab nor gone to sleep, half

fearing they would play the same vanishing tricks as

his tools had in the earlier part of the evening, or

suffer the same inexplicable malfunctions that

recording machines seemed to in the presence of the

intruder's halo of poltergeist effect. When

he had reported to the bridge at 0800 hours,

he had left a security officer on guard over

them--the woman was still waiting discreetly outside

the door.

"Three?" Kirk's eyebrows pulled together

slightly, questioning--then he nodded, though Spock

had the momentary impression his agreement was pro

forma, not because he understood the strategy. "Of

course ..."

He is tired indeed, Spock thought, his

own eyes narrowing as he considered the strained

harshness of the captain's face. "Had sufficient

parts been available, or had Inorganic

Fabrication had time to create them, I should, in

fact, have built four," he said. "Naturally,

we will need to stairstep our way down from deck

to deck, disassembling the units on one deck

while the deck below is being swept. Sufficient

parts not being available, I was able to assemble two

slave-relayed signal modulators which should

extend the field to cover an entire deck and

thus do the work of an independent

generator, but it has left the physics

laboratory completely depleted ..."

"It doesn't matter," Kirk whispered in that

low, tense voice. He did not even walk over

to the two modulators that Spock had indicated

--lumpy, bizarre bastardizations of assorted

pieces of research equipment wired to the faceted

shallow screens of pickup dishes. "The sweep

has to be made soon, Spock. Soon--before

we reach ... Midgwis." He had been about

to call the planet something else, Spock thought.

"Captain," Spock said hesitantly, "I

am still of the opinion that some attempt should be made

to communicate with the intruder ..."

"No!" Kirk swung fiercely around on

him. With an effort, he got a grip on himself

again, straightened up, and said more temperately,

"You don't ... We don't know what we're

dealing with, Spock. I can't take any chances."

Again, the sureness in his voice troubled

Spock, the impression that his captain did,

indeed, know only too well what they were dealing

with. Had he seen something, Spock wondered, in

the half-hour or so that McCoy had mentioned

Kirk had spent walking alone with Dr.

Gordon along the periphery of the thorn jungle

that concealed and protected the Bindigo Warren?

Seen, or sensed, or heard something that told him

now what it was that had attempted to murder the only

other witness to ... whatever it had been?

But in that case, why keep its nature a

secret? If it were a hitherto unknown form of

life, to destroy it without even an attempt at

observation would be monstrous, given the nature of

their mission.

"Would it not be possible to use the generators

to fence the intruder into a small area of the

bottommost cargo hold until we reach

Midgwis?" Spock asked reasonably.

"That way, advice could be obtained, either from the

researchers on the planet or from the patriarch

Arxoras."

"No!" Kirk insisted again. "It's--it's

too dangerous." He passed his hand over his mouth

again, fingers pulling twitchily at his lips as he

thought. "Given time, it might be able to slip past

the fields somehow, and we can't risk that."

"Perhaps," Spock said. "On the other hand, the

intruder itself might be a creature known--and indeed

revered--by the Midgwins, and there might be

repercussions of some kind if we--"

Kirk laughed harshly, an abrupt bark

abruptly cut off, then shook his head. "No,"

he said simply. "No, Mr. Spock. In

fact, we have no way of knowing that Arxoras and the

other memmietieffs aren't behind this. They could have

been deluded into thinking ... into thinking that the

Federation means harm to the world ... to Midgwis

..." He shook his head again, the gesture of a

tethered animal trying in vain to drive clouds of

canker flies from its ears. The pain line between his

brows stood out very clearly. "No. We are

dealing with an Intruder Alert, Mr. Spock,

and an alien which has proven itself capable of

murder. For the safety of the ship we must do it this

way, and must do it soon. How soon can the sweep

begin?"

"The generators can be charged to full power

by 1800 hours." Spock nodded toward the thick

stringers of cable leading from the wall to the two

chunky, brushed-steel globes, the savage

triangular shape of the laser cannon. "Once

charged, they will be able to operate on ship's power,

though Mr. Scott is charging backup emergency

batteries." Slowly, as he spoke, he began

to collect the tools from the edge of the bench where they

had ranged--the tools that had appeared and

disappeared in so disturbing a fashion last night,

always just after his back was turned ...

Another manifestation of the poltergeist effect?

But would a creature intelligent enough to know that the

construction of the generators must be slowed down--

intelligent enough to identify the sole member of the

crew who might have information concerning it and attempt

to dispose of her--have contented itself with merely stealing

tools? For most of the night, in disregard of one

of the standard Alert rules, Spock had been working

alone ... and the creature had allegedly

attempted to kill once already.

He went on slowly, "Allowing ten minutes

for setup and breakdown time, on either side of a

thirty-minute run, I have estimated that the

sweep should be accomplished in 15.666--"

"All right," Kirk said abruptly. "Set

up your teams--have them in the main briefing room

at 1800 hours." And turning sharply, he

took his leave.

Thoughtfully, Spock summoned in the security

officer to keep watch over the equipment once

again, and descended to his quarters

to complete his notes for the briefing and the assembly

of the sweep teams. Allowing for the exigencies of

sweeping the dorsal decks separately from the

lower decks of the primary hull, for setup and

takedown time--two more modulators, he

realized, would have to be assembled in order to keep

a continuous sweep going on Deck 7--the deck

level at which the primary hull connected with the

dorsal--the sweep which would undoubtedly not begin

until 1900 hours or later, would last through the

night and well into the following morning. That meant

a relief shift was needed of two teams, perhaps

three when they reached Deck 7 ...

He paused in his note making and sat for a

moment, his note pad on the small surface of the

desk before him as he turned his stylus over in his

fingers. The bright lights of his work cubicle

gleamed off the faces of the three terminals on the

immaculate desktop before him. Beyond the little

doorway his sleeping cubicle was dim, warmly

red-lit in imitation of the world in which he had grown

to manhood; the room was comfortably warm, and

quiet, with a privacy which even in Standing Intruder

Alert conditions he treasured above his own

safety.

And in fact there had never been an occasion of the

poltergeist--or intruder--manifesting itself in the

primary hull during the first watch. Whatever it

was, it was a creature of nighttime, a creature

of darkness when no one was around. Like the eschak.

Like McCoy's plantation-haunting ghosts.

He frowned, knowing that he should be contacting Mr.

Scott and Mr. DeSalle to line up his

sweep teams, which he wished to be comprised of

Engineering and Security personnel--Scott in

charge of one, Miller in charge of another. His

mind roved over his own subordinates and

prot@eg`es in Science for other

possibilities ...

But his eyes returned to the computer terminal.

After a moment he unshipped the keyboard from its

recess and opened a screen. Clearing himself through

entry and security programs in a second or

two, he keyed through to the mainframe itself, using the

keys rather than voice commands for greater speed and

precision, as most of the Science personnel did.

Spock's interest in, and familiarity with, the

Enterprise computer was as much with how it worked as with

what it contained. He had found that by skipping the

transliteration into standard English--and in

fact skipping the voice programs alt--he

could access information far more quickly. Some of the

Loglan didn't even translate. Sheerly out

of curiosity, he punched through into the reference

exec programs for a runout on all articles

requested of the reference section in the past five

days since they had left orbit around

Midgwis. From there he narrowed to all articles

requested from terminal PTQ-7767--THE terminal

in the captain's quarters.

The captain had summoned up and read all

articles referring to the possibilities of

electron-state life-forms and how to combat them--

including the obscure report on the Rigel Very

nialigs--within twenty-four hours of returning

from the surface of Midgwis. A brief

consultation with the captain's log--which was double

security sealed, but Spock had long ago

learned to make short work of any form of security

seals--served to inform him that it had been nearly

thirty-six hours before the first reports of the

poltergeist effect had been turned in.

Rumor may have been going around before that time, of

course. Spock was always startled by the speed with which

information was disseminated in the rec room. But the

overheard conversations of Rei lly and Chekov

caused him to doubt whether it would have been taken

seriously at that point. And in that initial

twenty-four-hour period, the captain had placed

all reports regarding Midgwis under seal.

""Curiouser and curiouser,"" Spock

quoted from a piece of literature that nobody in

the crew had any idea that he'd ever read, let

alone liked. He keyed back through to the

captain's log, winkled his way past the access

codes, and studied the entries since the departure

from Midgwis.

They told him nothing except that there was something

that the captain was not writing about. Their terseness was

very unlike his concise but thorough style.

He keyed out. Then, though he knew he was

due back on the bridge, he turned his steps

toward sickbay.

"Nothing." Helen's voice sounded a little

better, though it would be weeks before the internal

scar tissue disappeared--her entire

respiratory system, Spock knew from

McCoy, was similarly damaged. She still

looked haggard, weak, and depleted, her

body not responding well to either regenerative

enzymes nor to the sonic rest treatments that

usually accelerated natural healing. Spock

wondered obliquely how a case like this one might

respond to the Midgwin Consciousness Web

McCoy had spoken about, then discarded the thought.

According to Shorak's reports, the Consciousness

Web itself was largely illusory and its effects

in all probability psychosomatic. Even

Vulcan holistic techniques did not excise

disruptive organisms--merely tapped into the

deep strengths of the patient's own immune

systems and the regenerative properties of the

mortal flesh. And it could well be, he thought,

looking down at the woman's drawn face and

bruise-circled eyes, that her lack of

response to any kind of treatment did indeed

stem from some private inner grief or confusion.

She cleared her throat a little, and as she

concentrated on thinking back, on re-creating the

events on the planet's surface, some of the pain

lessened in her face. "Thetas and the captain were

never alone together that I know about. Dr. McCoy

talked to Thetas for some time by the campfire, but the

captain and I were ... walking. Seeing some of the

planet."

A faint flush stained her cheekbones in the

cool dimness of the convalescent ward, a reflex

that Spock, standing with folded hands at the foot of

her bed, knew to be connected in the human

species with embarrassment. A little puzzled, he

said, "If, as I assume, you were at that time

attempting to make the decision whether to remain on

the planet or to enter Starfleet and join the

Enterprise as a permanent crew member, such

an investigation would have been only logical, as

would the desire to discuss the matter privately

with the ship's captain." From the tail of his eye he

saw Nurse Chapel, who had moved a portable

work station into a corner of the room so that there would never

be a time when Helen would be completely alone,

pause in her analysis of experimental

results. She half averted her face and brought

up one hand to cover whatever expression tugged at

her mouth, she and Helen carefully avoiding one

another's glance. A little stiffly, Spock went

on, "And during this time, neither you nor the captain

saw any ... untoward manifestations of a life-

form that might have been similar to the one with which we are

presumably dealing now?"

Helen pulled straight the sudden quirk at the

corner of her mouth--a quirk that had abruptly

lightened the weariness and strain on her face--and

said, "No. But it was fairly dark, and the thing

we're dealing with seems to be invisible, or at

least very good at hiding."

"Indeed," Spock averred. He thought for a

moment more, while Chapel made another data

entry, fingers flicking over the small keyboard

with barely a whisper of sound. At Helen's

bedside a small earphone hung over the little

reader screen--the convalescent ward was, like the

individual crew quarters, equipped with plug-

in ports for both readers and audiotapes, and the

Enterprise's library was fairly well

stocked with both.

"And you're certain that at no time did the

captain have any sort of private conference with

Dr. Thetas, or with any of the other researchers?"

Helen shook her head. "No. Shorak

introduced us to Arxoras, who ... I suppose

you could say he thought-scanned us. Not read our

minds, really, but I had the impression he could

have. More like taking a sample, testing the water

..." Her dark, straight brows pulled down

into a frown. "The other one, the Ghost Walker--

Yarblis Geshkerroth--did that to him too. That was

when he said that I should think about learning the same

kind of mind-shielding techniques Shorak and

L'jian use ..."

"The Ghost Walker?"

"Dr. McCoy mentioned him." Nurse

Chapel looked up from the tiny screen, crossed

her booted ankles over a rung of her chair.

"He's the leader of the conservative party in that

warren, a complete isolationist. I think he'd

been hurt by Klingon scouts, and wasn't making

any distinctions between them and us."

"Indeed," Spock said thoughtfully.

"But we were all there," Helen went on, "and

Jim didn't--didn't seem the worse for it

..."

"No," murmured Chapel. "But ... Mr.

Spock, I don't know nearly as much as I should

about telepathic technique, but is it possible the

captain could have seen into this Ghost Walker's mind

at the time of the contact, whether the Ghost Walker

wanted him to or not? Could have read malice there

... maybe even a plan?"

"In my experience," Spock said

slowly, "something as linear as a plan is not something

that transmits in chance telepathic contact,

particularly between beings of such widely incompatible

cultures and thought processes. But an

isolated image or series of images can be

picked up by a sensitive or skilled

receptor from someone not skilled in masking his or

her own mind."

"Not a description that fits the Ghost

Walker," Helen whispered, sinking back against the

pillow and frowning up at the tall Vulcan.

"One of the great savants of their planet, they

called him; one of the mightiest. And besides ..."

She hesitated, then stopped herself and shook her

head.

"What is it?" Chapel asked.

She managed a weak grin. "Just being catty.

Never mind." She thought about it for a moment, then

shrugged and said, "Well ... whatever else can be

said about him, I certainly wouldn't accuse Jim

Kirk of being psychically sensitive or

skilled."

"No," Spock agreed. "But I have found him

to be extraordinarily gifted in the interpretation

of subliminal clues." He frowned again,

folding his arms, wondering why the captain would have

lied to him. To back up a deduction based upon

unprovable hypotheses? Or to cement with fear an

order that he was not certain would be obeyed?

Spock glanced at the chronometer visible on

the wall beyond Nurse Chapel's shoulder. It was

1340. The sweep-team roster needed to be

compiled and its members contacted; a strategy

meeting with DeSalle of Security was necessary

to organize logistics, and he still needed to put

together those two additional modulators ... not

to mention getting some rest himself, for he knew already

he would be awake through the night again coordinating the

mechanics of the sweep and--the thought crossed his

mind like a stirring of wind--keeping an eye on

Captain Kirk.

He frowned, not sure why he had phrased it

that way to himself and not comfortable with his own distrust. And

yet ...

He shook his head, dismissing the other possible

course of action that had been slowly forming itself in his

mind. He said, "Thank you, Dr. Gordon, for

your help. Nurse Chapel, I will be

transmitting a memo concerning the precautions

to be taken to shield any scientific

experiments in progress from possible effects of the

sweep ..."

"I've talked to Dr. McCoy about the

possibility," she said, and added, with a rueful

smile, "not that any serious experimentation has

been going on with that--that thing--disrupting the labs."

"Indeed," Spock agreed quietly.

"However, extra shielding may be necessary in view

of the fact that, since the only communication between

primary hull and the Engineering hull and dorsal

decks is through Deck Seven, the proton-

acceleration field will be in place on this deck

while all decks of the primary hull below it are

being swept--a matter of some two to three

hours."

Chapel winced as she thought of what McCoy's

reaction to that would be, then she nodded and said,

"I'll tell him to take that into account."

"Thank you," Spock said formally. "The sweep

on this deck will most likely commence at 2300

hours--my memo, once I have consulted with

Security Chief DeSalle, will give a more

accurate indication of the precise time."

And turning, he started for the door. But before he

had gotten close enough for it to open, he stopped and

turned back. "Nurse Chapel ... as the

labs here have been one of the centers of the

manifestations, there may be a recurrence of them as

the sweep approaches. I realize you will be off

duty at that hour, but ..."

"I'll stay if you think it would help," she

said quietly.

"I do," Spock replied, a little stiffly, for

he knew of Chapel's affection for him and knew

that under the circumstances, asking her for a favor of

any kind was unfair.

"I'll get in touch with you if anything

happens," she promised, herself withdrawing a little,

growing more businesslike as she tried to answer his

own formality. But her long hands, plucking

nervously at the sides of the small keyboard on

its stand before her, gave her away.

"Thank you," Spock said, and then, in a lower

voice, added, "I appreciate it.

Moreover, as the sweep drives whatever this

creature is down through this deck to the ones below, I

believe that it would not be a good idea to leave Dr.

Gordon alone."

At 1800 hours the rostered crew members

assembled in the main briefing room on Deck

4, thirty-six, all told, from the various

watches. Fourteen were such members of Science and

Engineering as Spock deemed able to deal with the

proton-acceleration generators on both a

theoretical and mechanical level--not always

compatible, he reflected, considering the case of

Lieutenant Maynooth the head of the ion-study

lab and one of the most brilliant ab-atomic

particle physicists he had ever had the pleasure

to work with, who could not be trusted to survive an

encounter with a common stapler. The other twenty-two

were selected members of Security, and the briefing

included, as well as Mr. Scott and Captain

Kirk, Security Chief DeSalle, a

big-framed, craggy-faced man who remained

leaning quietly against the wall in the back of the

room, saying very little but watching everything. Above the

door the amber lights of the Alert still blinked, a

constant, silent reminder that somewhere on the vessel

an alien was hiding--invisible, silent, and

potentially lethal.

Spock explained briefly the setup and

takedown procedures of the three generators and

four signal modulators, then outlined the

leapfrogging strategy of the sweep, a pattern

complicated by the necessity of keeping Deck 7

under a constant sweep while the decks of the

primary hull beneath it were swept, then

backtracking and sweeping the dorsal decks before

moving on to the Engineering hull.

"What if it retreats upward from Engineering

through one of the Jeffries Tubes to the engine

nacelles?" asked Lieutenant Bistie, a

middle-aged Navajo who was head of the Special

Studies lab. "I mean, it can hang tight in

the tube until the coast is clear, and then come

down again."

"Insufflation tests with a number-seven neutral

powder have indicated that the standing wave set up by the

generators not only extends through walls, but is

in some degree influenced by resonation patterns

of the walls themselves," replied Spock, to whom

Mr. DeSalle had already mentioned this rather daunting

possibility earlier in the day. "We believe that

a resonance column will be established for a

considerable distance up the nacelle pylons, well

into the region of the proton-disruption field of the

engines themselves."

"But how do we know the disruption field of the

engines will affect it?" inquired Organa,

DeSalle's diminutive lieutenant.

Spock folded his hands on the top of the

generator's polished steel dome which sat on the

table before him. "We have no way of knowing that the

proton-acceleration fields of the generators will

affect it," he replied. "This equipment is, you

must realize, largely experimental, though it is

based upon all information available regarding

electrostasis life-forms."

"Well," Miller said hesitantly, "we

know it can kill recording devices, and cause

malfunctions in molecule-remix units ..."

"Molecule-remix units?" Spock

raised an eyebrow. "No report has been

filed concerning--"

"Er, maybe that was just rumor," said Miller

hastily. "But what if it can short out a phaser

the same way?"

"May I remind you, Ensign," Captain

Kirk snapped from the head of the briefing table, "that

the induction mechanism of a phaser works on an

entirely different principle from that of a recording

device?"

Spock paused for a moment, his eyes going

worriedly to the captain. Then he continued,

"Indeed, we have little evidence so far as to what our

quarry's capabilities may be, or as to what

its reaction will be to being cornered. I can only

recommend that all internal communications of the ship

remain open, and that all life-support,

engineering, and central computer functions remain

double-manned until the sweep is completed. This

may be particularly important the farther down the

ship we go, as the intruder is--if my

calculations are correct--driven into a smaller

and smaller area."

"Captain," said Dr. McCoy, who stood,

arms folded, in the doorway of the briefing room

next to Mr. DeSalle. "Just out of curiosity

... how are we going to know if we've gotten

rid of the thing? It doesn't show up on any

scans now. It isn't merely invisible, it's

apparently literally incorporeal--we have

virtually no proof that it exists at all. So

how will we know when it ceases to exist?"

The captain turned to look at him, and

Spock saw how yellow his eyes gleamed. "The

proof that it exists," he said slowly,

"is that it has tried to kill--and will try to kill

again." His hands tightened, twisting at the metal

stylus grasped between them so that the pale rod

flexed and gave. "I'll know, Doctor.

Believe me, I'll know."

Chapter Twelve

Spock, don't do this to me! Even in the

bowels of the Engineering hull James Kirk

felt the sweep start, a nerve-jarring vibration in

the molecules of air and metal that made up the

bones of his body now, and knew that it would be his

death. God damn you, Spock!

He wanted to rage, wanted to scream, as he

had wanted to scream at him all through last night,

while he'd patiently, fumblingly, moved and

hidden every tool and piece of equipment he could

manage to lift. He was close, he sensed,

to dissolution already, his consciousness straining under the

sheer weight of hours stacked onto hours, of

consciously re-creating the parameters of the body

he remembered hands, feet, ears, toenails,

the hair on his head ... the sheer grinding eternity

of keeping his mind alive. Now he felt in his

shadow bones the chill shudder of the standing wave as the

generators kicked in on the bridge and that first

deck of the Science labs immediately below it, and knew

there was no escape.

He had early found he could pass through walls

only by his consciousness of their composition and of

precisely what lay upon their other side--he

could, he supposed, have passed through the outer skin

of the ship itself. But beyond that skin lay the disorienting

blackness of space, and that would destroy him as

surely as the polarizing disorientation of the standing

wave would.

Can't you see what's happening? he

shrieked soundlessly, hopelessly, toward the groups

of men--his own men, his own crew, his own friends--

who would be milling around on the bridge and the

Science deck below. Haven't you caught on

yet?

And Laundryman Brunowski, checking the

remix settings of one of the particle shakers that

refabricated clean new uniforms out of the

recycled molecules of the old ones, swung

around sharply at the sudden drop in temperature

and shivered, hearing, from among the vast banks of

recyclers in the giant food-fab

chamber beyond, the pounding begin, desperate,

furious, and helpless.

Kirk fled upward, through the faint, shining pain

of the superconductor cables and the wires within the

walls, to sickbay on Deck 7. Being that

close to the decks where the field had been set

up terrified him--even with four decks between, he

could sense it, like a piercing scream that shatters

concentration and thought.

Frenzied, he called out to Helen, lying in her

fitful sleep. Helen, please ... Helen,

listen to me, can't you hear? She heard him, saw

him in her dreams, but he felt her mind flinch

away in repugnance and terror as his face loomed

mistily into her consciousness, felt her shoving him

from her thoughts.

No, he felt the slurred and sleepy

whisper of her dreams. Not him. Not him ...

And he felt, too, all the bitter and soul-

deep hurt of that monstrous betrayal, and with it,

her dark fear of madness, the horror she felt

at the thought of the horror she tried not to know was

true. Somewhere close by him Kirk heard the

pounding start, not in one place now but in half a

dozen, angry and uncontrollable; heard, too,

something go crashing to the floor in a nearby office

and knew that what psychokinetic powers he

possessed were slipping from his conscious command.

Nurse Chapel started up from her chair in

terror, staring wildly around the room as she

flattened back against the wall. She would listen--

he knew she would listen--but he knew of no way

to break the silence between them, no way to bridge the

gap between the material and the nonmaterial, between thought

and operationality.

And he felt him coming. That eerie alter ego,

that thing that had taken his body, felt him walking the

decks down below the shrieking hypersonic whistle

of the induction field. He had no fear. He

need not dread the shattering vibration of the invisible

air. The Midgwin patriarch had a house for his

spirit, a system of nerves and cells in which

to settle the electrical impulses of his being,

a structure around which to twine the incorporeal

vines of his personality--a material body

to act as armature to the transient glitter of his

soul.

And he was hunting him, tracking him, listening

for the hammering of his despair, feeling for the

telltale cold, the raging dread and

terror ... driving him into a corner until he

could destroy him, as a shadow is destroyed when the

lights switch on.

Despairing, Kirk fled.

Arms folded, Spock observed critically as

Miller, Organa, and Fphargn carried the

disassembled components of the proton generator to the

far end of the physics lab, located the power

source nearest the symmetry line of the ship, and

began to set up. Miller worked quickly and neatly,

his blocky, good-natured face set in lines of

concentration, double-checking every connector, reading every

gauge while the two security officers stood

at either side, watching and listening in the silence of the

enormous, dome-ceilinged room.

Spock cast a cursory glance around--all

long-term experiments had been shielded, but he

privately suspected that half of them would be

severely disrupted by the presence of the proton-

induction wave, and in any case all results

would probably be called into question. He had spoken

to the heads of all the labs in the Science section,

and while no one had questioned the necessity of the

sweep, he had seen a lot of gritted teeth.

What made it worse was that he did not agree

with the sweep in the first place.

But it was one thing to question the actions of a commander whose

obsession was putting the safety of ship, crew,

and civilians in danger--as he had in the

incident of the vampire creature of the Tycho

System--and quite another to argue for the continued

existence of a demonstrably deadly, unknown

intruder. It was his instinct against the captain's,

nothing more, and his instinct had been proven wrong

before.

And yet ...

He frowned, remembering unhealthy glitter in

the captain's eyes, remembering a hundred

indications of severe mental strain, of an almost

unbearable secret. The captain, he knew, had

gone on ahead of the sweep prowling the decks below,

looking for ... what?

Again, Spock did not know.

But Midgwis had been its starting point. Of

that he was now certain.

"Setup complete, Mr. Spock," Miller

reported, and Spock, checking the assembly,

nodded. The switches were thrown.

Spock's hyperacute hearing picked

up the faint, whining hum, but the others seemed

to notice nothing. Checking his chronometer and

noting disapprovingly that they were already 2.3 minutes

behind schedule, Spock crossed the enormous lab

to the door, stepping out into the corridors that led

around the turbolift banks to the small lounge in

the center of the deck. Pausing in the corridor,

he removed from the satchel that hung at his side

a bulb insufflator--a slender nozzle

attached to a round metal ampoule of number 7

grade neutral test powder. Holding the

insufflator out before him, he tapped the button

on its side to release a small, measured

puff of powder into the air.

As it had in his laboratory tests, the powder

--which would hang visibly in uncirculating air

for thirty minutes or more--separated into unsteady

bands, marking the frequency levels of the wave.

Spock nodded to himself, and as the incorporeal bands

broke, wavered, and began their slow drift toward

the vents, proceeded into the lounge, where, just beyond the

emergency gangway up to the smaller deck above,

Mr. Scott and his team had assembled the other

generator in front of the doors of the photon

torpedo banks.

That assembly also looked in order. "Any

significant problems, Mr. Scott?" he

inquired, and the chief engineer flashed him a grin.

"Simple as one, two, three."

Spock nodded. "Indeed it is, provided one

is not counting in binary. There are matters to which I

must attend for the next hour or two. I shall leave

you in charge until I return."

He returned, out of habit, to the ion-study

lab where he had been working last night, which he

knew would be vacant still; from the lab next door,

though it was well after the end of the main watch, he

could hear Lieutenant Bergdahl's voice

"Well, of course the experiments will all have to be

done again, Ensign Adams. No data can be

trusted after this kind of disruption ..."

"I'd have thought that the solid-state

crystallography wouldn't be affected by that kind of

wave action." A woman's voice, abashed.

"Well, naturally it probably is not, but

I want no chances taken." A heavy sigh.

"Why they have to disrupt things in this fashion--"

"It tried to kill someone," Adams pointed out

patiently.

"She was probably just careless--and do

not put that beaker on that counter. How many times do

I need to tell you that no organic experiments

are to be brought anywhere in the vicinity of

inorganic experiments?"

Spock sighed, remembering how whenever he

entered Bergdahl's laboratory, the man

unobtrusively followed him around, wiping

whatever he'd laid his hand upon, even though sterile

conditions were seldom required of geological

procedures. He wondered how a reasonably

young human male--Bergdahl was no older than

Captain Kirk, and of the same sturdy, fair-

haired stock--could so absolutely resemble the

fussy, two-century-old Vulcan house

steward whose constant, martyred criticism had

made his own childhood a burden.

He flicked on the terminal, which, being one of the

lab terminals, was capable of far greater access

than, for instance, a library terminal or a

simple reader. Since the information he wished

to consult was classified, the distinction was a mere

bagatelle, but a lab keyboard would be capable

of greater exactness, and exactness was as necessary in

breaking security codes as it was in programming

a decent cup of coffee.

For a long moment he sat there, debating the

ethics of the situation. It was a different matter from

reading the Captain's Log, a document to which, as

first officer, he himself would have access should

circumstances place him temporarily in command.

This was the captain's private realm, and

Spock's own deep sense of privacy felt

violated at the thought of entering it.

But matters had gone too far; his uneasiness

over the captain's behavior was passing over

into alarm. After a pause for thought, Spock

neatly rerouted the information system around its

guards, convinced the central security program

that he had given it a password of whose identity he

possessed no clue, reprogrammed a voice-

code identifier, and finally keyed through

into Captain Kirk's private, personal

log.

There had been no entry made since Stardate

5947.3, the day of the expedition to Midgwis.

Unlike the official Captain's Log,

Kirk did not make entries to his personal

log every day. Such entries as there were concerned

matters beyond the purlieus of official

Starfleet notice, but of possible

importance to the captain of a ship repeated

complaints about certain commodities in the galley

selections; the disappearance of chemical samples

from the Botany lab; the fifth request-for-

transfer in eighteen months by someone working under

Lieutenant Bergdahl; a quarrel that had

broken out in the rec room between Ensign

Phillips from Inorganic Fabrication and

Yeoman Mendez from the galley, which had

apparently been settled amicably but which,

considering the volatile personalities involved,

might flare up later. Kirk, Spock was

interested to note, kept a far closer ear to rec-

room gossip than he let on, which surprised

Spock a little.

In several places the captain spoke of

Helen Gordon

In fairness I cannot ask her to consider staying

onboard the Enterprise. She has her own

career to forward, her own advancement to consider. And

though long ago I consciously ruled out the

possibility of such involvement, I keep coming

back to the feeling that there is something important

here that I would be a fool to let go of ...

And, in another place

When I was twenty, I was happy. With Ruth I

had a sense of peace, a sense of belonging, that I

have not known since. I have known many other things in the

intervening years, happiness among them, but never that

quiet joy, that rest, that sureness. When I

left the Academy, she told me she would wait

for me ... maybe in my heart, even then, I

knew that she wouldn't, not past a certain point.

But I've always wondered what would have happened,

had I gone back.

Past Kirk's mellow tenor in the earphone,

Spock's quick hearing picked up Bergdahl's

thin, complaining voice in the Geo lab next

door "... ion-study lab, which he is

certainly entitled to do. I'm sure he realized

just how important Dr. Maynooth's

experiments are, and would be very careful not to disrupt

them any further ... Ensign Adams, you really

must fully index those notes! I'm sure that with

as little as you do around here, you can certainly find time

to input them properly so that they can be

retrieved at a moment's notice ...

Certainly, sir. If you care to wait for him

I'm sure he'll be out soon, he's been in

there for twenty minutes already ..."

Spock flipped to another entry, returned his

concentration to Kirk's voice, listening to the even,

relaxed tone of the voice itself

I have a sense of working one of Lieutenant

Uhura's jigsaw puzzles, trying piece after

piece, scenario after scenario, in my mind, knowing

that somewhere, somehow, there has to be one that fits ...

And after the visit to Midgwis, nothing.

He removed the receptor from his ear and sat

for a time, looking into the depthless darkness beyond the neat

amber letters of the screen.

The personal log revealed a good deal more about

the captain than he had thought to find, and it

articulated, in a curious fashion, the

qualities that Spock knew made the captain

an excellent leader, qualities he himself did

not possess, and in some cases did not completely

understand. Humans were, of course, irrational, the

captain as bad as the rest--Spock was aware that

in the earlier part of the mission his own logical

reactions had made him less than popular with the

crew. But in taking account of gossip that a

Vulcan would have automatically considered none of

his business and beneath his dignity, the captain was

clearly able to tap this irrationality to his own

advantage, to understand that strange, nebulous

quality called "morale" or, simply,

"feel" ... something it would never have occurred

to Spock to do. And part of that, Spock guessed,

had to do with the relaxed quality of his voice, the

easiness and openness with which he could pick up the

slightest changes of circumstance.

That quality of voice, he realized, had been

entirely missing from the later official log

entries he had heard.

That easiness of voice was characteristic even of those

entries in which he questioned his own goals and feelings,

as if they too were matters to be looked at, if

not with proper Vulcan dispassion, at least without

either frenzy or rigidness.

Spock found it very curious t hat the captain would

not have voiced his suspicions of the intruder--

suspicions that were clearly driving him to the brink

of physical breakdown--at any point

in his personal log. Or had he feared that the

intruder would break into it, and find them there?

A possibility, thought Spock, as he

carefully worked his way back out of the program,

remaking the security links around the captain's

personal files and reassuring the computer that it

must not, in fact, ever let anyone through without the

proper code words ... and that in fact it had not

done so now.

Yet it argued for an intruder far more

sophisticated than the precomputerized,

preindustrial, preagricultural Midgwins,

as well as for Kirk's inexplicable awareness that

the intruder was, in fact, so sophisticated.

And it did not explain why the captain had not

felt called upon to comment in any fashion upon

Dr. Gordon's decision to remain with the

Enterprise, nor upon their subsequent

quarrel, if quarrel there had been. Nor, for that

matter, upon her near death at the intruder's ...

hands? The phrase snagged his consciousness.

Hands, fingers ... fingerprints.

There were matters here that did not compute.

Bergdahl was fussily checking a series of

gauges set up along the back of a workbench in the

Geo lab when Spock passed its door, while

a thin, tiny woman with black Oriental eyes

stood, a little awkwardly, to one side. "I

don't care what they say, any kind of a field

being generated automatically nullifies all

experimental results. A duplicate set of

all experiments will have to be set up ..."

"Do we take down the tests in progress,

then?" She had the air of one who has long ago

learned to double-check everything out of sheer self-

defense. Spock remembered that she had put in

for a transfer to Input not long ago, at a

half-step reduction in rank.

"Certainly not! One can learn from everything,

including possible variations of results ... or

their absence. Please compile a list of all

materials to be duplicated once we reach

Starbase Nine--if we ever do reach Starbase

Nine, with all this turning around and turning back

... Oh, Mr. Spock!" He came hurrying

out of the lab to catch up with Spock in the

corridor. "Captain Kirk was here looking for

you. He did not say where he was going, but said it was

of no importance, and that he would find you later."

Natural enough, Spock supposed,

crossing thoughtfully to the turbolift and checking the

chronometer on the wall beside it. The captain would

be checking the decks below for any sign of the

intruder's continued presence ... whatever those

signs might be. He would not be difficult

to locate. On the other hand, if the matter were of

any importance at all, Kirk would have located

him by comm link. And Mr. Spock did not

particularly wish to encounter the captain just now.

The sweep team that had been stationed between the two

emergency gangways had already descended through to the

junior officers' quarters on Deck 4. If

his estimate of time was correct, they would have the

modulators in place and the generator going by this

time. After a moments further thought, Spock

turned back to the ion-study lab, opened a

locker there and took out a fresh bulb of number

7 neutral powder, and several plates for

wave-activated and electric-field

spectrography. These he snapped into a

shielded case, tucked it into his satchel with the

insufflator, and, emerging once more from the lab,

took the turbolift down to Deck 8.

It was now close to 2130 hours, a time when the

recreation areas of Deck 8 were normally at their

heaviest use. Now the vast rec room's tables

and couches were deserted, the room motionless save

for the random, soothing swirls of various pieces of

mobile art; the curved cavern of the gymnasium

echoed emptily, bereft of its usual

basketball game. In what was officially termed

the "Entertainment Center" and unofficially known as

"Central Park"--though the thirty-five-meter

curve of grass and ground cover was, in fact,

not central to Deck 8 or anything else--the

fountain splashed dimly in the silence. Spock

guessed that the converted cargo hold on Deck 7

that served as a cinema was vacant as well, a

symptom of the uneasiness that pervaded the ship, the

atmosphere of waiting to see how the intruder would

react.

Carrying his satchel, Spock walked

quietly past the shut doors of the main computer

chamber. The enormous room, with its banks of

information and terminals, would be not only manned, but

heavily guarded, and judging by the slender information

he possessed on the habits of the intruder, it was

unlikely that it would manifest itself in the presence

of so many onlookers. According to some of the information on

paranormal manifestations it might not

even be possible for it to do so.

But most of the manifestations reported had been

in or near the computer chamber, and there was a

sixty-eight percent probability that the intruder

was near that vicinity, at least for the next thirty

minutes or so.

Keying his way through a minimum-security

door, Spock entered the shadowy va/s of the

automated food-prep facility, where bank after

bank of molecular reconverters, like dim,

square sarcophagi in some unimaginable

necropolis, served the main banks of food

slots in the lounge above.

All was quiet here, the murmuring hum of the

raw-organics conveyor which, like a long, banded

metal serpent overhead, fed the reconverters,

sounding loud in the hush. Through the far wall

Spock's sensitive hearing could pick up the

modulated rattle of the laundry next door,

where a long row of particle shakers formulated new

uniforms to the indent specs punched in by those who'd

turned in their dirty ones, and where three more

conventional cleaning units meticulously

extracted unwanted molecules of dirt and

foodstuffs from the items of personal attire that

crew members did not wish to have recycled, for

reasons of sentiment which Spock presumed would be

comprehensible to the captain.

He made his way over to a corner of the room,

where the control terminal's green and amber lights

gleamed like stars in the dimness next to a long

worktable littered with hardcopy and velfoam

plates. Spock settled himself in one of the

chairs before it, uneasily aware that his actions were

in direct violation of the captain's orders and, as

such, qualified as mutiny. And it occurred to him

that in his present, apparently irrational state, the

captain might very well have him charged with it, if

he found him here.

Spock's whole soul might revolt at the

thought of destroying an unknown alien life-form that

had not yet been proven hostile--the attempt

on Dr. Gordon's life being, for a number of

reasons, suspect. But he had done such things

under orders before.

But something about the whole situation bothered him, as

even so prolonged and bizarre an intruder alert

did not. It was clear to him that the captain was somehow

linked with the intruder, if intruder it was. And at

the risk of his career in the fleet--and quite

possibly the risk of his own life--Spock had

to find out what the nature of that link was.

He cleared a place for himself, frowning with

distaste over the sloppiness of the chief cook and his

assistants as he set aside half-empty

cups of stone-cold coffee and data wafers whose

covers--if they were in covers--were daubed with

greasy fingerprints. It was already sufficiently

dim in the room to comply with conditions of both the

reported Enterprise manifestations and with

similar phenomena mentioned in the records. He

unshipped the protective case from his satchel,

removed a photographic plate and set it on

the table before him. Placing his hands outspread on

either side, he shut his eyes, shielded his mind with

every mental discipline he could muster, and waited,

listening, his senses extended to catch the slightest

shift of atmosphere in the room.

In the silence, he could hear quite clearly the

deep heartbeat of the engines, the thrumming of the

food conveyor that led down to the main recycling

plants in the Engineering hull, the faint tap of

two pairs of booted feet passing through the

corridor ...

"... perfect time to take it to the storage

compartment! The entire deck is deserted ..."

"Yeah, but if we meet any of those sweep

teams how're we going to explain full-size

sets from the Murlgau passion play?"

"We're not gonna meet a sweep team, and

besides, I've got a miniaturized remote

motion sensor hooked up at the lift."

"A motion sensor?"

"Miller made some up for me. For God's

sake, if you work for Birddog you've got to have

some way of knowing when he's coming so you can look

busy enough for him ..."

The voices died away into the silent distances

of the corridor.

Minutes passed.

Then somewhere quite close he heard a dim,

hesitant tapping, as if someone were knocking

faintly on one of the thick squares of the

reconverters with a hard piece of metal, a ring

or a coin or an old-fashioned metal key.

The room seemed cold to him, colder than

usual, though not the bitter, malevolent chill of

before. Attenuated, he thought, as if the center of the

chill were some distance away. Eyes still closed, he

sat listening, not daring to speak, trying

to analyze why he felt that the room was occupied

by someone other than himself, though he had heard no

footfall, no pressurized door hiss, no

breath. Keeping the inner fortress walls of his

mind still guarded, he opened out the channels of

telepathic communication that the Vulcan mental

techniques so stringently taught. He tried

to transmit openness, willingness, and hoped

obliquely that the intruder--if the intruder was in

fact near--was not one of those beings capable of coming

through such guarded channels into the mind of the listener

after all.

But ther e was nothing, only that vague sense that he

was not alone.

Then the chirp of the comm link broke into his

thoughts, and, immediately after, Captain Kirk's

voice. "Mr. Spock ..."

Spock opened his eyes. The room before him was

empty. The photographic plate on the table

before him was blank.

He flipped open his communicator. "Yes,

Captain?"

Kirk's voice was harsh but low, tense,

breathless. "It's here, Spock. The hangar.

It's trying to communicate ... get here, fast."

"I'm on my way, Captain." He

slipped the plate back into the case as he

strode from the room, directly across the

corridor into the turbolift. "Hangar deck."

The doors of the hangar deck slipped

soundlessly open before him, revealing a huge

expanse of empty darkness. Only the dimmest

of emergency lights glowed high overhead; under the

overhanging shadow of the observation gallery, all was

pitch-black. The Copernicus was a solid

rectangle of darkness directly before the vast

clamshell doors which were all that separated the

Enterprise's fragile atmosphere from the

black vacuum of space.

Spock took a few steps into the room,

listening, wondering if the captain had

deliberately reduced the light levels in

anticipation of his own encounter with the intruder. It was

logical, if in fact he was as familiar with its

nature as he appeared in fact to be ...

Then from the shadows of the shuttlecraft he thought

he heard Jim Kirk's voice call out

"Spock!" in a tone of unmistakable fear.

He slipped free of the satchel over his

shoulder and crossed the huge expanse of

floor at a run.

"Captain ..."

There was no one near the shuttlecraft, which was

docked and dogged firmly down, its doors sealed

shut. Spock slipped a handlight from his belt and

flashed it around him, but there was no sign of Kirk

--no sign of anyone. He called out again,

"Captain!" and heard the flat slap of echoes

ring back at him. Overhead, the bare rafters

made a harsh latticework of shadows, and his light

gleamed back off the tough plex windows of the dark

gallery, the round glint of the vent shields below

them.

A noise in the blackness under the gallery

made him turn--for a moment he saw a dark

shape outlined against the whiteness of the corridor

lights as the door opened, then shut again.

It did not open again when Spock approached.

Swiftly he pulled aside the cover panel

for the manual release, and discovered that the handle had

been removed.

As he started toward one of the other doors--though

he knew within a few percentage points of

certainty that it had been likewise sabotaged--

the soft whooshing of the vents began, a trickle of

sound that quickly swelled to a whispering, deadly

gale.

Someone outside had hit the controls to cycle

air out of the hangar, preparatory to opening the

clamshell doors and letting whatever was inside be

pulled out into the freezing black eternity of

space.

Chapter Thirteen

"Furniture started flying around the room

yet?"

Christine Chapel looked up, startled, from the

last of her data corrections to see

Lieutenant Uhura leaning in the doorway of the

convalescent ward. She laughed ruefully and

pushed the small roller table aside. "Believe

me, I've been listening for it."

Uhura nodded back down the corridor toward

the door of the O.r. and the various labs.

"Everything seems intact so far. They're just

setting up on the deck above this one--I think

everyone's a little nervous." She still wore her

duty uniform--she must have put in a considerable

amount of extra duty, Christine

reflected, trying in every way she could think of

to raise the silenced transmitter on

Midgwis.

"Not nearly as nervous as some of the lab chiefs.

Emiko Adams told me Bergdahl's putting

in for duplicate equipment ..."

"Oh, plague, plague!" Uhura widened

her great brown eyes in mock horror and made

ritual signs of aversion. She noticed that

Nurse Chapel, with her odd, old-fashioned

formality, was the only member of the junior crew

to refer to the unpopular Anthro/geo chief

by his right name when not on duty.

From her bed Helen asked, "Do you think it will

work?" Her coloring was a little better, but her

voice still sounded like it had been gone over with scour

solution.

"Mr. Spock seemed pretty sure of it

when I talked to him last night." Uhura

shrugged. "But you can't really know, can you? You just

take aim and hope."

"Besides," Chapel pointed out, rising from her

chair to help Helen sit up and pull a

garnet-red robe over the blue and black

medical smock, "you're the expert on the life-

forms of Midgwis."

Helen chuckled wryly. "So expert they try

to gas me in my room. Which is ironic, because

there's no mention of any intelligent creatures

on Midgwis that can do the things this one does. Or

at least," she added, thanking Chapel with a haggard

grin, "maybe there is and it just hasn't had things

like labs full of beakers, or walls to pound on,

or cylinders of toxic gas to demonstrate its

capabilities on before this." The dark level of

her brow twitched down. "Which is one of the

weirdest things about the whole business ..."

Down the hall, in one of the labs, the sudden

crash of equipment falling made all three

women swing around with a gasp. Helen, pallid

already, went white--Chapel thought she was going

to faint, and sprang back to her side, while

somewhere close by the lunatic, frenzied crashing

continued, as if a maniac were tearing McCoy's

personal lab to pieces. After a frozen instant

Uhura plunged for the door; Christine gasped

"No!" and the Communications officer snapped

back, "Stay with Helen!" The room had gone

deathly cold.

"Come on!" Helen rolled over and

scrambled out of bed, staggering and nearly falling, so

that Chapel had to catch her. The red flash of

Uhura's uniform had already vanished around the lab

door. "Dammit," Helen gasped, holding

herself upright against Chapel's strong shoulder,

"don't let her go alone!"

Chapel gripped the other woman tight around the

waist; the two of them nearly ran into Uhura in

the corridor.

"Come in here," the Communications officer said

softly. She looked shaken as she led the way

back to the Medical officer's private lab,

and for a moment Chapel's mind groped in panic for the

experiments she and McCoy had taken such care

to seal and batten and shield.

"Look at this," Uhura said.

In the doorway of the small lab they stopped.

Helen, holding unsteadily onto Chapel's

shoulder, asked in her raw voice, "Where did the

water come from?"

"It blew out a vent filter." Uhura nodded

upward to the vent, long since locked and fitted with

baffles and guards. All its complicated covering

had been ripped away, and the accumulated water

vapor that always collected under the dehumidifier

screens was spattered over the surrounding walls.

The vent cover itself, filmed with a delicate mist

of infinitely fine water droplets, lay

flung in a corner against the legs of the lab table.

Helen took a second look at the half-

meter square of reinforced duraplast and whispered,

"What the Sam Hill ...?"

Written in the vapor film, huge and ragged,

as if scrawled by a demented child, were the letters,

SPOK--HNGR DEK--HURRY--DEAD.

The three women were in the streaking turbolift

before Chapel said, "We--we should tell the

captain."

"No!" Helen's voice was a harsh gasp.

"It--it might be a trap ..." Chapel's

face was as white as Helen's had been earlier.

"Or it might have wanted to lure us away and

leave Helen alone ..." She had been first one

out of sickbay, literally dragging the others down the

corridor in her fright.

Floors flashed past them, blurred bars of

greenish-white in the dark of the lift shaft.

Uhura, her hand on the control, frowned,

struggling within herself with some thought. Then she said, "I

don't know. The thing is ... the night

Helen was poisoned I ... I was wakened

by something falling, something making a noise--if I

hadn't wakened, I wouldn't have seen her comm

light, and nobody would have gotten to her in time.

Chris, what woke me up was that bronze

calot of mine falling on the floor from the

middle of my dresser. The things around it weren't

tipped over or brushed aside or anything; it was

like the thing had been picked up and dropped."

Slowly, fumblingly, knowing what she was getting

at but unable to fit it with known facts, Chapel

said, "But it ... it tried to kill Helen ..."

"Something tried to kill Helen," Uhura

pointed out. "Something, as Mr. Spock pointed

out, that wiped its fingerprints--or wiped something--

off that cylinder."

"Then there might be--be two intruders?"

Chapel turned her head, hearing the thin sound that

came from Helen's throat; saw her friend pale

again, her face twisted with inner pain. "Are you

all right?" And Helen nodded, her black hair

hanging down to hide her face.

The red warning lights of the opening cycle were

flashing above the door of the hangar deck, visible

as the three women burst from the lift doors.

"Go!" Helen gasped, balking and struggling out of

their grip; they left her slumped against the wall

and ran for the doorway as the lights went solid

red.

Chapel whispered, "Dear God ..." and

heard Uhura say something considerably less

refined as she slammed over the Abort toggle;

for a horrified instant she stared up at the bar of

warning lights, her mind blanking on how long the

cycle lasted, on whether the lights going from

flashing to red meant that the outer clamshell doors

had already opened or were going to open in ... how many

seconds? "God, God ..." She seemed

to be hypnotized by a single, small yellow

light blinking in the panel next to the door.

Blinking amber meant a malfunction somewhere ...

Uhura was already hitting Re-Ox buttons,

then calling up the malfunction cues to the gauge

screen.

P ressure evacuation malfunction--the bay

had never completely lost pressure. The

oxygen-drain mechanisms had jammed.

And a slight mechanical glitch had prevented

the outer doors from cycling open.

In addition to which, Chapel read over

Uhura's shoulder on the amber screen of the

gauge readout, the internal comm link, abort

panel, and manual override systems

operative from within the hangar had all been

tampered with.

They had to use the manual release in the

corridor wall to get the bay open.

Mr. Spock was lying across the threshold as the

doors slid open. With the reoxygenation of the hangar

deck, he was already starting to come to. Chapel

dropped to her knees beside him, feeling for pulse

and cursing herself for not bringing a tricorder. His

skin felt cooler to the touch than she had ever known

it, almost human-cool ...

"It knew English," Helen said softly.

Chapel looked up. Helen, holding herself

upright against the corridor wall, had staggered after

them to the open doorway of the shuttlecraft

hangar. She stood leaning there in her crimson

robe and blue pajamas, her black hair

hanging down in an unruly cloud over her

shoulders, her eyebrows standing out like a scar above

her deep-sunk, tired eyes.

"The intruder," she explained, slipping down

to sit beside Uhura's booted feet. "It knew

English. It wrote, "Spock, Hangar

deck, Hurry ... Dead." Meaning, I

suppose, if we didn't get here, he would be

dead ..."

The three women looked at one another,

Uhura hunkering down beside the other two. "We have

to tell the captain," she said. "Call off the

sweep. Whatever is going on around here, it

isn't the intruder that's been attempting the

killings."

"I doubt that he would comply."

They all looked down. Mr. Spock rolled

up onto one elbow, wiped away the drying

trickle of green blood from his nose, and felt

at his head--Chapel knew he must have had a

terrific headache, if nothing worse. The

pressure drop had bruised the capillaries

around his eyes, smudging them with dark green shadow

as if he'd been struck. She tried to help him

sit up, but he politely but firmly drew

away and sat himself up, his back propped against the

doorjamb of the bay, the bay itself a chasm of

shadow behind him.

"The captain is obsessed," the Vulcan

went on clinically. "Though personally

I am still inclined toward the theory of a Klingon-paid

conspirator among the crew, the captain insists

upon blaming--and destroying--the intruder, and is

behaving with a degree of irrationality most

uncharacteristic. In fact I would almost say ..."

He paused. His dark brows slanted more

sharply down over the high bridge of his nose, and

from the sunken and discolored sockets, his troubled,

coffee-colored gaze met Helen's and held

it.

Softly, almost inaudibly, Helen said,

"It's because it's not really Jim ... isn't it?"

There was silence. Chapel looked, confused, from

Spock's face to Uhura's to Helen's, and

saw that it was an idea new to none of them--something

toyed with, discarded for the best of rational reasons,

yet never entirely dismissable from the dark at the

back of the mind. Far above them, though it was

impossible that she should either hear it or feel it,

Chapel was aware, as if by emanations through the

walls, of the steady downward working of the proton-

induction sweep, the shattering wave that was

designed to destroy whatever it was that had

apparently saved Helen's life by waking

Uhura, and which had certainly risked itself to save

Spock's.

The sweep had been only a deck or two

above them when the warning in the lab had taken place

--who knew how far through the floor the disruption

radiated?

At length Mr. Spock said, "It is a

difficult contention to prove."

Helen shook her head. "I knew it," she

said softly. "I knew it the first night after we

left Midgwis. It wasn't him."

Uhura swore, softly, horror and compassion

in her eyes.

"It would certainly explain his turning the ship

around, and returning to Midgwis," Spock went

on, getting slowly to his feet. Chapel rose

also, and went to pick up the equipment that lay on

the floor just within the doors of the bay, a carrier

satchel stuffed with an insufflator and a

protective case of the sort that

electrospectrographic plates were carried

in. "Though it leaves unanswered the question of why a

substitution--if substitution it is--was made

in the first place. Thank you, Nurse Chapel."

He slung the case straps over one shoulder,

and offered his arm to help Helen to her

feet. Though Chapel knew that Spock

preferred not to be touched, he put an arm around

Helen's waist and a shoulder under hers. Leading the

way across the hall, his strength made no more of her

solid weight than it would have of a child's.

Chapel, hurrying to keep up, asked, "Then

the intruder ... the ghost ... the poltergeist

..."

Spock's voice was matter-of-fact. "Is

in all probability Captain Kirk."

They opened a channel into the main computer from a

reader port in the tractor-beam machinery room

on Deck 23, a deck otherwise given over

to the dim-lit silence of cargo holds. The

terminal had probably never been used for anything

except replays of fastball games and the

perusal of sports magazines in the ship's

extensive library, but Spock deftly

disencoded all security and access-limitation

programs in it, and proceeded--with startling

skill, considering an extremely limited

keyboard--to open routes straight to the

mainframe, while Uhura dug in the wall

locker for a small kit of tools.

"What's that for?" asked Chapel, who had

posted herself unobtrusively in the doorway,

watching the empty hall. No one came here

except, now and then, a duty officer in charge of

repairing the tractor beam, and occasional

maintenance personnel. With the lights turned up

full power, the gray-walled room with its

bulbous wave generators looked sterile and

sordid; greasy napkins lay dispiritedly in one

corner, with several blue-gray velfoam cups

whose rims had been methodically picked to pieces

by someone's nervous fingernails. The place had a

smell of staleness and disuse. All around this deck

the unpressurized hull sections contained raw

materials for recycling, either organic or

inorganic, and the smells of them were a faint,

unpleasant backtaste in the air. Dark and

silent, the cargo holds kept their prosaic

secrets boxes of soil samples,

examples of alien machinery to be taken back for

analysis at Federation starbases and

universities and institutes, alien flora and

fauna cryofrozen wholesale. The deck below

contained nothing but cargo holds and storage. This was

the last corner of the ship where a terminal

of any kind could be plugged in virtually secure

against intrusion, at least until such time as the

sweep was almost at its end.

"We'll need an outpost guard," Uhura

said, removing the cover of her personal

communicator and, after a moment's thought, reaching

into its infinitesimal guts with a needle-fine

magnetic switcher. "I'm cutting out the ship's

pickup channels--I'll do the same for yours and

Mr. Spock's. That way nobody will be able

to hear us."

"I suggest, Nurse Chapel, that you return

to sickbay and bring Dr. McCoy here."

Spock, laboriously coaxing the limited-

capacity screen to cut in a second screenful

of notes to remind him of half a dozen

artificial-intelligence programs not committed

to his memory, spoke without looking up. "We

will need as much help as we can get in keeping

track not only of the sweep, but also of the

captain's movements. And I would be very much

surprised if the good doctor does not have

suspicions of his own."

He cut in a chronometer reading and tightened

his lips--the well-bred Vulcan equivalent of

sizzling oaths and hurling the keyboard against the

wall--when the overtaxed screen cleared itself of

everything save a small, blinking 110.

"He's known something was going on," Chapel said

slowly, keeping her voice soft--with the door

held open to facilitate reconnaissance,

voices would carry in these echoing halls.

"By this time the sweep should be finishing the primary

hull and beginning to clear the dorsal sections,"

Spock went on, touching his way neatly through the

computer language that was so much swifter than the

voice activation most people used, and far more

precise. Uhura, her lips taut, had gone

back to her tinkering with the communicators.

"It will take me approximately thirty-

two minutes to access and disconnect the slave

relays that control the electronic shielding of the

central computer; nearly three hours to tailor

and implement an artificial-intelligence

program theoretically capable of sustaining an

entire pattern of human thought. During that time it

is imperative that we be neither disturbed nor

suspected. And," he added, half turning

to look up at the three women behind him, "we will

need to find the captain, wherever his--

his consciousness, his awareness, the electron

shadow of his entity, is centering itself. Find him, and

bring him back here--if it is, in fact, the

captain, and not an intruder after all."

Chapel shivered as the full import of the

dangerous game they played came to her. Was it

the captain who had tried to kill Spock--

to kill Helen? Or was it an alien who had so

obsessed him that he had turned himself into a

stranger? She had known Jim Kirk for years--

he'd gotten her transferred to the Enterprise

when she'd decided to enter the space service

to look for her fianc`e, Roger. She trusted

him implicitly ... Only, which of them was really

Kirk?

Uneasily, she asked, "How ... What

happened to you?"

"The captain told me that he had cornered the

intruder in the shuttle bay," Spock replied,

as calmly as if he had not come within a few

microns of switch-gap of being dragged out into the

freezing vac uum of space. "I thought that I

heard him call out to me from the back of the bay; when

I entered, the door slammed behind me. Door

controls and communication had been cut--manually,

the wires disconnected and the cover plate

replaced ..."

"But the outer doors didn't open." Uhura

glanced up from her work, the sweat of concentration shining

on her face in the bleak glare of the lumenpanel

overhead. Though the Communications officer was

theoretically able to break down and repair any

piece of comm equipment in stock, few of them were

actually called upon to do so once they'd passed

their entry tests. "I didn't check on why

..."

"Another one of those inexplicable malfunctions

that seem to be part of the poltergeist effect,"

Spock replied evenly, turning back to his

screen. "Certainly at odds with the decidedly

manual efforts of the would-be assassin."

"What was the equipment for?" Helen asked,

nodding toward the insufflator and the case, which lay

on the floor at her side.

"I had gone down to the computer decks

to attempt contact with the intruder," Spock said,

"having for reasons of my own come to the conclusion that

the captain had been behaving in a fashion

aberrant enough to warrant investigation."

"Did you make contact?"

He did not reply for a moment, only continued

to check programs, moving files and

directories to other sections of the computer and

occasionally tapping in instructions of his own. At

length he said, "I don't know. I brought the

electrospectroplates along in the hopes that

the intruder--who had seemed all along to be

attempting to write something in the spilled

liquids in the sickbay labs--would be able

to write on the plate ..."

"He did write," Uhura said, looking up

again. "He wrote in the water vapor of the vent

filter. That's how we found you. And, as Helen

pointed out, he wrote in English."

"Fascinating," Spock murmured.

"Unfortunately, the plate was blank when

I--" He broke off, looking around at the

abrupt clatter as Helen dropped the case on

the floor.

"I knew it," she whispered, and turned her

face away, tears forcing themselves through the thick

black fringes of her shut eyelashes. "I

knew it, I knew it ..."

Uhura, looking down over her shoulder,

gasped.

While Spock had been speaking, Helen had

opened the case and taken out the single used plate.

In the center of it, shadowy black on the gray,

was the ghostly image of a man's face.

The face was Captain Kirk's.

Chapter Fourteen

They had swept the dorsal--running one

generator per deck, it had not taken long--and the

long, narrow hold full of air-circulation

machinery, visicoms, and pumps that ran along the

top of the Engineering hull. They were assembling the

generators on Deck 16 for the final phases

of the sweep.

In the darkness, Jim Kirk felt the thin

shivering vibration that shredded at his nerves and

consciousness, and knew he should move again, move

downward ... Downward to where? He could no longer

remember, nor recall where he was--a dark

place full of machines, he thought, that shivered

with the throbbing of the engines; but that told him little. He

was lost, and even if he moved on, it would only

be to wait for death.

He was tired, very tired. The screaming

haze of the proton-acceleration field extending through

the ceiling of Deck 7--extending down from the

generators on Deck 5--had battered him,

disoriented him; he had fled straight down the

nearest emergency gangway to avoid it, only

to realize that below Deck 7 there was no connection

between the primary hull and the dorsal that led down to the

deeper safety of the Engineering hull. He had

been trapped.

For a moment fear had seized him as he'd

realized there was little he could do except descend,

driven by the sweep, down through the recreation

decks, the fabrication rooms and cargo holds,

until they cornered him in the auxiliary fire-

control room of the phaser banks, down on

Deck 11 ...

Cornered him. Scotty, and DeSalle, and the

others he'd worked with, been friends with ... Using the

machines Spock had made for them ... Spock,

whom, at this point, he didn't even know whether

he'd been able to save.

But even as he thought it, he remembered the

cautiously prowling specters of Ensigns

Gilden and Adams, lugging the first of what he had

later seen was many loads of supernumerary

original hardcopy to his secret cargo rooms

in the outer skin of the ship ... remembered Gilden

saying, "And furthermore, I think it's

ridiculous that there's no corridor, or lift,

or anything between Deck Eight and the dorsal ...

What do they think we're going to do, raid the

food remixers?" And Adams replying,

"There's the food conveyor ..."

And through the food conveyor he had gone,

desperately holding the shadow shape of his body

around him, desperately remembering to create, in

his mind, the contact of his knees with the ridgy

rubberized floor of the repair duct that ran

along the top of the conveyor, the way his arms would

brush the metal sides.

He was safe, he thought now.

But in the darkness he knew he had only

purchased a handful of minutes for himself, and what

did it matter?

He wondered if the women had been in time

to save Spock, if the malfunction he had

caused in the bay-door mechanism had held

once he'd fled upward to the perilous brightness of

sickbay, where he knew at least Chapel and

Helen had to be. Wondered if the

malfunctions on the oxygen and pressure

systems had been sufficient to keep his friend from

perishing of hypoxia and cellular collapse.

He thought he had had some notion of returning

to the hangar deck to see. But all his thought, all

his perceptions, were darkening, collapsing in on

themselves with exhaustion after that final, desperate

effort of concentration required to blow the vent

covers in the lab, the excruciating exertion of

forming letters in the water-vapor mist. He had no

idea of where he was now, this place full of

whispering machinery, nor of how he'd gotten here.

He was only smoke and memory, and soon that,

too, would be gone.

"Jim?"

The voice was soft, somewhere outside the place

where he was. He recognized it from somewhere in his

past ... It was so difficult to remember who he

himself was now, so difficult to recollect, to re-

form, the parameters of his body, the dim clamor

of memories that made up his life. But he

recognized that it was someone he knew.

"Jim, I know you're here. Jim, come with me,

follow me. Spock's worked out a way to save

you."

Spock must have survived. Good.

And he sank a little more in on himself, like the

settling debris of a dying star after all its light

and heat are gone.

"Jim, follow me. We're down on Deck

Twenty, behind the shuttlecraft maintenance shop

..."

Shuttlecraft maintenance shop?

Recollection stirred, putting itself cloudily

back together--the shape of that giant chamber under the

hangar itself, the storage rooms behind it, the cargo

holds behind that ...

"We know what happened to you. We can help you

..." The voice was farther away. He heard the

hissing of a door. Kirk stirred, trying

to summon back the memory of his legs, his arms,

trying to collect a way to walk after that speaker.

He could have drifted, he thought, passing like a

cloud ... only once he forgot what it had

been like to walk, he knew he would never remember

again. And he hadn't the energy to do both.

Footsteps, walking away. The voice

whispered again, much farther off ... stealthy,

surreptitious, like the voices of Gilden and

Adams in the dark of the Deck 7 main

corridor; like the voices of Brunowski and

Miller as they tinkered with their vast bank of

computer controls, trying to get the recycler

machine to form individual coffee beans instead of the

"slab coffee" usually produced; like the voices

of the lovers who occasionally walked, in order not

to meet whoever it was they did not want to meet, in

the dark bottom corridors of the ship.

Of course, he thought. If the intruder, the

Ghost Walker, the creature who had raped him of

body and mind, were to learn of what they knew, it

would certainly find a way to kill them, as it had

tried to kill Spock and Helen. At the very

least, as captain, it could have them jailed until it

was too late ...

And it was very nearly too late now. He felt

the hurt in him grow sharper as the sweep moved

down a deck, as the reassembled induction

generators powered up again, as the standing wave came

closer. And in any case, where could he go? It was

only a matter of time ...

Time until what? They had turned back

toward Midgwis. Planetfall would be in three

days.

The Ghost Walker--the thief who had stolen his

body, who had taken his ship and his command, who had

raped the woman he loved and tried to murder his

friend--had something in mind.

The thought stirred anger in him, anger and the old

stubbornness, the old pride. I am James

Tiberius Kirk, he thought. I am

captain of the Enterprise. You may have taken

my ship, you may have turned my crew against me and

have them hunting me like dogs, but by God, I'll

destroy you if I can.

That had been McCoy calling him.

Bones.

Now he remembered.

He looked around him, turning the shadow shape

of his head. He saw he was in the machine room that

operated the clamshell doors of the hangar deck.

He must have come one deck farther down than he'd

intended, stumbling blindly, trying to see if

Spock had survived.

Slowly, atom by atom--had his body and flesh

still been composed of atoms, and not the electronic

shadows of memory--he drew himself together, clothing

himself again with the memories of his flesh, the

memories of his ship. The blinding scream of the

proton field on the decks above

made it difficult to concentrate, but he pulled

to mind the access doors connecting this room with the

cargo holds beyond and the deck hatches leading up

into the hangar deck above ...

He had hands again, he had feet. He dragged

them back into existence by an act of will. Slowly,

blind and hurting with fatigue, clinging to the bones of his

ship as he would have leaned upon the arm of a lover, he

began to make his way along the decks, following

the voice of his friend.

It would end soon. It had to end.

Captain Kirk--No! he told himself,

shaking his head blindly. Yarblis--Yarblis

Geshkerroth ... I am Yarblis Geshkerroth

the Ghost Walker ... stared with glazed, aching

eyes at the red-shirted Hungries as they

dismantled, for the twentieth time, the unwieldy

proton cannon preparatory to carrying it down

the turbolift, down two more levels. At first

he had been revolted at the mere concept of

creating a machine that would mimic the vibrations of the

mind. Now he was fascinated. There was something

delicate, something hellishly precise, about that

kind of understanding of the way the universe worked; about

coming at it from the outside rather than from the inside.

He turned his eyes away, knowing that the

Hungries became uncomfortable if one stared

too long.

Around him his crew--Kirk's crew!

Hungries! Opaque and greedy and dull--

moved, male and female, their voices hushed as

they had been hushed since the sweep began. That,

too, he had only realized belatedly, had

made them nervous. They were not entirely comfortable

themselves with the world they had created, the capabilities

of the things they used. At the sight of one of the

security officers, a dark-haired female

leaning on the wall, speaking to one of the males, the

human body which he had taken for his own whispered

a greedy wish. Shocked, Yarblis thrust the

thought aside. Yet it returned, with the intrusive

memory of the woman Helen.

He shook his head and moved away, sickened

beyond reason both at the thing he had done and the way

he had enjoyed that dark violence. He had little

experience with controlling such wishes, little knowledge of what

he should and should not do. The memories of such

matters were clouded, jumbled, distasteful to him, for

they were memories of the body and not the

mind.

"Captain ..." It was Mr. Scott, the

engineer--Scott/scotty of Kirk's

memories, who looked at him with deep concern in

his coffee-black eyes--hoisting a piece of the

generator by a strap onto his arm. "I never

asked--did you manage to locate Mr.

Spock?"

Kirk--Yarblis! I am Yarblis ...

Who was Yarblis?--nodded. "He said he was

going to check a report of manifestation down on

the shuttle deck, but that was nearly two hours

ago." How perilously easy it was becoming,

to speak in hours and minutes ... how simple

to think in them, when there was no sun, no moon, no

wind to mark the turning of the day! He frowned, as

Kirk did, and after a moment said, "And that in itself

bothers me." When they found the bay doors open,

he thought, when they reached the shuttle deck, only

a few decks beneath them now, the sweep would be

simpler. They would ask no more questions, have no more

doubts. They would be avenging one of their own.

Kirk, the real Kirk, had saved Helen.

Since he had slipped out of the shuttle bay--and

causing Spock to think he had called him from the

shadows of the tiny ship had been a simple

illusion, of the type he had used to lure many of the

dark Klingon Hungries to their deaths--he had

been worried that, somehow, what was left of Kirk

had been able to save Spock as well. But there

had been no outcry, no summons for the bone

setter McCoy, so he did not think Spock

had survived.

Instinctively, he knew that Spock had been

a danger to him.

Like all the Hungries, he thought as he

walked down the corridor to the lift, Spock

worked from the outside rather than from the inside. But he

was aware now, as he had not been aware when he had

first conceived the idea of taking over Kirk's

body, of using the ship of the Hungries itself

to implement the terrible plan by which he would save the

world from the pernicious effects of their influence, that

his masquerade was not as thorough, as complete, as

he had thought it would be. Though they had no

Consciousness Web--something he still found hard

to picture, with the pain of separation from the web an

agony he lived with, as he would have lived with a gut

wound--they nevertheless knew one another better than

he had thought they could. He knew he had

made mistakes. And Spock, the Counter of

Everything, had counted those as well.

He paused, looking around him at the sterile

white walls, the flat floors, flat ceilings

... hating, with all the passion of his soul, this

flat place that stank everywhere of the Hungries.

They made their world into this, he thought. And they would

lure his people into making the true world, the real world, the

beautiful Rhea, the Mother Spirit place, into this as

well, this hateful place where everything was divided

into Mine and Not-Mine, into Me-Don't-Touch and

Others-Not-Me ... lure them with promises of

how easy life would be, how good.

Life was not supposed to be easy or good. It

was supposed to be beautiful, and beauty lay in

peril, in cold, in hunger as well as in rest and

comfort. It was something they clearly did not understand.

And in a generation, or two, there would be many in the

world who did not understand either. And in time they would all

become Hungry too.

And beauty would begin to disappear.

But he would keep that from happening.

He looked around, even reached out his hand--

Weak little hand with tiny fingers!--to touch the

flat, cold wall that had never been organic,

never been made from anything, and smiled a taut,

exhausted smile.

This place, this ship, was his now. If only he

weren't so tired, if only his bones did not

hurt with bitter, consuming loneliness, he would have

laughed his triumph. For when he was done, there would

be no question, then or ever again, of the Hungries being

able to violate the world and offer their dream of

satiation in trade for his people's souls.

"The sweep's down to Deck Nineteen,"

Lieutenant Uhura reported, from the doorway

of the half-deserted rec room, thumbing open a

channel on her communicator and hoping to hell

she'd disconnected the right switch and the conversation

wasn't being picked up on the bridge. "Any

word?"

Helen's voice, gritty with the aftereffects

of the gas even if there hadn't been a world of

static and the buzz of a loose connection, replied,

"Nothing yet. He's just sitting in the machine

room in the dark, waiting. It's so cold down

on this deck, it's hard to tell if ... if

anything's happening." She still couldn't bring herself,

Uhura observed compassionately,

to mention the captain's name.

"Keep me posted," she said, her voice

soft, and keyed out. At 0735 in the morning--and

Uhura groaned when she thought about having to be on

the bridge after a night like the one she'd just been

through--though the rec rooms of both primary and

Engineering hulls were usually vacant, the gyms and

exercise rooms invariably were in use by those who

either enjoyed getting their blood well and truly

circulating first thing in the morning, or by those who

wanted to "get it over with" before starting their day.

At this hour the pool deck--in whose doorway

Uhura was now standing--was generally stirring with men

and women, its ceiling echoing with the voices bounced

back off the water. The sharp slap of feet and

steady beat of music would be drifting in from the

gym, where the martial arts enthusiasts would be

striding through their before-breakfast katas, and the dance

room where Organa would be drilling her students

in pli`es and stretches.

But the uneasiness Uhura had noticed last

night on the crew deck--and in the rec rooms--

was still in force. A lone swimmer stroked his way

steadily through the pale aquamarine glimmer of the

pool; gym and dance room were swathed in hush like a

sheet-draped empty house. The crew members

who used the Engineering hull facilities might,

Uhura supposed, have gone up to the primary

hull this morning ... she didn't know. Tension

cannot be sustained over long periods of time--a good

deal of the air of nervous waiting had abated from

sheer exhaustion--but she deduced that the crew in

general were taking no chances until the intruder was

pronounced good and dead.

She sighed. It was as late as she could let it

get. She rubbed her face wearily and headed for the

nearest lift, her boot heels echoing in the

empty spaces of the rec room, in quest of a quick

cup of the strongest coffee she could get, a shower in

her room, and the hopes--probably vain--that it

would be a quiet day on the bridge.

"Nothing." Bones McCoy spoke barely

above a whisper, looking down at the woman who

sat on the floor just within the machine room door.

"I've been through every back corner and service

hallway of the ship--places I didn't even

know existed--and I haven't felt a thing. Not that

I'd really know it if I felt it ..." He

hesitated, thinking about that. Then,

slowly, he added, "But I think I would."

Helen nodded. "I think we'd all know,

now."

Oddly enough, McCoy saw that she looked far

better than she had even that afternoon. Still exhausted,

stretched to the limit of her physical endurance,

yes ... but that dead look, that hopeless weariness,

that glint of haunted fear in her hazel eyes, was

gone. She still had the look of a woman who had

been badly hurt, emotionally even more than

physically; but life was back in her face,

life that had been gone, buried under hopeless

confusion and the fear that she was insane, since they'd

beamed up from Midgwis that last time.

The communicator chirped softly. Helen

flipped it open.

"Sweep's down to Deck Twenty," said

Uhura's voice softly. It was past 0800

hours, and McCoy guessed she was monitoring

audio pickup from the comm links. "Anything

yet?"

"Not a thing."

McCoy sniffed, and looked away. "I always

knew there was something about that damned transporter

I didn't like," he grumbled. "Scrambling a

man's atoms like a bushel of rice ... it must

be how the Ghost Walker killed the Klingon

scouts, back on the planet."

Helen nodded. "All he'd have to do was wait

till they transported down and take one over

on arrival, then wait his chance."

"But on the other hand," McCoy went on,

"I suspect that it was only because of the kyrillian

stabilization effect of the transporter beams that

Jim was able to survive at all."

Helen's mouth quirked. "Which leads to some

pretty unpleasant speculations about why

Yarblis Geshkerroth decided to take over the

position as captain of a starship."

Then, from in the dark machine room behind them, they

heard Spock's voice whisper, "Captain?"

Helen and McCoy looked back. The little

room was nearly dark, illuminated by the faint

amber glow of the reader screen and the dim light of a

burning candle--begged from Gunner's Assistant

Barrows, who had a stock of them, though whether for

religious or erotic purposes, Helen

didn't know--which picked out the angles of

Spock's aquiline face and left the hollows

of his eyes in darkness. Spock had

read, conscientiously, the literature involving the

manifestations of nonphysical beings, and one thing

mentioned repeatedly was the necessity for low lighting

--possibly to give greater scope to charlatans,

he had remarked, though it was equally possible that

light waves themselves had the effect of confusing and

lessening the powers of a creature that existed as no

more than a collection of electrostatic

impulses itself.

The Vulcan sat like a strange, impassive

idol in the candlelight now, his bony hands

outspread, palms upward, on the grubby

drekplast of the tabletop, his eyes shut. The

room was chill--Helen could not tell, as she had

said to Uhura, from what cause.

Softly, the Vulcan spoke again.

"Captain, are you here?"

And from somewhere, dimly, there came a knock, like

the dropping of some hard object onto a concrete

floor.

"Come closer to me," said Spock softly.

"The katra ... the essence of the soul. The inner

being. It can be transmitted from body to body; it

can be held in the mind of another for a time, as

Sargon's katra, his personality, was held

within yours. My mind is open to you, Captain ...

Jim. Come closer to me--enter the part of my mind

that is open and ready. I have removed the

electronic guards around the central computer

... I have programmed a bank of artificial-

intelligence programs to store your self, your

knowledge, your being ... until we can restore you to what

you are. Do you understand?"

But there was no reply.

"We can save you," said Spock, his voice

barely above a whisper. "Programmed into the

computer, you can exist indefinitely ..."

The silence in the room continued, but Helen could

feel an emptiness, as if something that had hovered

there was beginning to depart. The sweep, she

remembered, was only a few decks above them

now; Jim would have existed without his body for over a

week. It might very well be that he had not the

strength to return, or had forgotten how.

Quietly, she reached up and took

McCoy's hand. It was something else she had

read, in the literature of s@eances; something

Spock had mentioned, but had not understood. Now,

suddenly, it made sense to her. With McCoy's

help, she rose to her feet and drew the

doctor farther into the darkened room. Without a sound

they took seats on the other chairs near the table.

Helen's hand closed gently around the Vulcan's

strong, slender fingers--startlingly warm with the higher

temperature of his blood--and after a moment

McCoy took Spock's other hand in his. As

he did so, completing the circle, Helen felt

immediately that Kirk was somewhere near.

Closing her eyes in the dark, she could feel

him as a living presence. Standing close

to Spock, she thought ... standing just behind his

shoulder. She didn't try to form any thoughts,

any images, in her mind; just sat in the hard-

backed plastic chair and relaxed, letting her

mind open, her thoughts reach out, to give him one more

thing to touch, one more thing that was familiar to him ...

one more thing to orient himself, to draw himself back. In

the deepening silence they sat, a ring of energy, of

friendship, of offered strength.

Then she heard Spock's breath catch and

felt the tightening of his fingers on hers. Gently

he disengaged his hand, and, as she opened her eyes,

he turned away to the reader once more, spreading his

palms over the housing he had opened above its

tangle of cable and superconductor, his eyes still

closed in meditation.

Across the table she met McCoy's eyes, but

he said nothing. She eyebrowed a question to him, and he

nodded.

At the reader's simple keyboard, Spock

began to type. For a long time there was no sound but the

deep, throbbing hum of the engines, a bone-shivering

tapestry of half-subconscious noise down

here, and like a dry counterpoint, the quick tapping of

Loglan keying through. In the gold candlelight

Spock's face had a blank look, though his

eyes were open now, he worked without hesitation,

sure and calm and detached, and behind him his shadow

wavered hugely on the blank, grease-stained

wall.

Quietly, McCoy and Helen rose from their

places and stood behind him, looking down over his

shoulders at the screen.

Beneath long columns of Loglan he had typed

a question in English ARE YOU THERE?

And after a long time, words formed themselves below.

YES. THANK Y. THANK YOU ALL.

CAN SLEEP NOW.

And the screen went dark.

Chapter Fifteen

"By the way, Spock ..." McCoy's

deep, slightly drawling voice broke the long

silence of the candlelit machine room. "Do you

remember you're dead?"

"Indeed, Doctor." Spock brought one hand

up and gingerly rubbed the back of his neck. Now that

he was no longer locked in the concentration necessary

to write and set up an artificial-intelligence

program--not to mention compacting every other program

in the computer to make space for something that

extensive, and programming the computer to lie about

how much space was in use--and no longer immersed

in the deep meditation needed to accomplish the state

of shared katra, no matter how briefly, he

realized his head still ached from the pressure drain in

the shuttle bay. Reaction, long delayed, was

setting in, reaction to those endless minutes of

near-panic as he'd tried to operate first the

manual overrides to get himself out of the bay, then

the alarms to summon help before the pressurization

cycle was complete and the outer bay doors opened.

He had blacked out, he recalled, in the midst

of it. Even at the time, he remembered thinking,

with a final flash of logic, that this was probably

preferable to being conscious when the blinking red lights

went solid and the slow, freezing drag of

space's utter vacuum began to pull him toward

the opening doors.

He shook the thoughts away, and the cold seed of

remembered fear they brought with them, as

irrelevant. McCoy's communicator

chirped; at a button's touch Chapel's

voice said, "Sweep down to Deck Twenty-one

--have you had any word? Anything at all?"

"We're safe," McCoy replied

shortly. "Rendezvous in sickbay ..."

The reader beeped softly. Though equipped, like

most readers, with a limited sound-effects

capability, there was no voder-vocoder attached

to this, primarily an entertainment and schematics

terminal. Turning, Spock saw written on the

screen

HE'LL LOOK THERE FOR YOU AS SOON

AS THE SWEEP IS DONE. A HULL

SECTION HAS BEEN PRESSURIZED 30

METERS DOWN THE STARBOARD CORRIDOR

ON THIS DECK--YOU CAN

RECOGNIZE THE BULKHEAD THAT CONCEALS

IT BY THE SCRATCHES ON THE

BOLTS. THE COMPUTER TERMINAL THERE

IS LAB-QUALITY. SPOCK CAN HIDE

OUT THERE. THE REST OF YOU RENDEZVOUS

THERE AT 1800.

They all stared blankly at the screen; then

McCoy blew out his breath in a sigh. "Well,

if I didn't believe it before," he said

wryly, "I do now. Nurse Chapel ..."

He spoke into the communicator. "I'll be up

to sickbay in a few minutes with Helen ..."

Helen's communicator beeped also; they heard

Uhura say, "He's in the lift with the first of the

generators, on his way down to you ..."

"We're clearing out," Helen responded

swiftly. "Jim's safe."

"He was murdered." James Kirk--Had

he another name? he wondered, with clouded and aching

mind ... Surely he had ... Gesh ...

Gesh ... Yarblis Geshkerroth ... He

shook his head, turned slowly to scan the faces

of his senior officers, grouped in the small

briefing room, trying to read them and failing. "This

... this creature, this intruder, that we destroyed

with the machinery Spock made, even as we were

hunting it, destroyed him." He rubbed his hand

across his face, the alien flesh aching. Yes, he

thought, he was Geshkerroth, Yarblis Geshkerroth

the Ghost Walker. He had slain Hungries,

defending his people, defending the world, defending Rhea.

He remembered that now. As he was defending her

again.

His body hurt with a dull, continuous pain, and

words were increasingly hard to find, but none of the men and

women gathered seemed to find that strange.

Scotty's dark brows were drawn together, forming a

small upright line between them, his black eyes

following Kirk's every movement. On the other

side of the table, Bones McCoy and

Lieutenant Uhura were alike wrapped in

silence, though he saw a glance flicker between them

--communicating ... but how could they truly

communicate without the Consciousness Web? Mr.

DeSalle, next to Scott, clenc hed his fist

convulsively and hissed beneath his breath.

"What--what happened, sir?" That was Sulu,

the navigator, the muscles of his face

pulling a little, as the faces of the Hungries had

when he had turned on them, slain them, in the

forest.

Memory of that grounded him a little more into himself, and

he was able to steady his voice and fish forth Kirk's

patterns of speech. "As far as I can tell,

Spock was lured into the shuttlecraft hangar--

we'll probably never know how. The lock was

depressurized, the doors were opened."

"But that's not possible!" protested Scott.

"Not while traveling at warp speed--every alarm in

the ship would have gone off!"

"All alarm systems connected with the bay were

disarmed," Uhura said, folding slender hands the

color of thorn tree stems. "It didn't

register anywhere, except as a note in the

systems computer."

"Dear God ..." Scott whispered,

appalled.

"He would have been unconscious," McCoy

said to him quietly, "by the time the doors opened

... There are worse ways to die than

anoxia."

"But the important thing is," Kirk--

Yarblis--continued, pacing restlessly across the

front of the room, "that the sweep was successful.

The intruder--the murderer--was destroyed, there

is no sign of it anywhere now on this vessel."

"There was no sign of it before," Sulu

muttered, sotto voce, to Uhura. But his

black eyes slid sidelong to his captain, the

look of pain and shock replaced by another which

Yarblis could not read.

Yarblis passed a hand across his face again, as

if touching the flesh, the skin, would make it hurt

less. "I'll make ... the announcement ...

to the crew ... Mr. Sulu, we're to make

all speed back to the world ... back to the planet

Midgwis. We're clearly dealing with

creatures who would stop at nothing, and I fear

what the silence of the research party may mean.

Gentlemen, dismissed."

They rose, casting quick, furtive looks at

him as they filed from the room. He waited while

they did, then stepped across to touch McCoy's

sleeve. He had debated, seeking in the

captain's memories for what the man would do in the

circumstances of his first officer's murder. The

reaction was different from those of the other Hungries,

the dark Klingon Hungries he had

taken over, and he was not certain whether this was an

individual difference or one common to their

family. It was harder for him to think now, harder for

him to remember, to sort through those murky areas of

emotion and instinct. The strange urges and fevers

of this human body were pulling stronger and stronger

on his mind, the alien food he ate clouding his

awareness, the killing need for sleep that he barely

dared take ... and above all, the overwhelming,

hurting loneliness, the isolation from the web. He

had not spoken to another true soul, had not shared his

self with any other, in day after endless day.

Only a little longer, he promised himself

quietly. Only a little longer, and I will be

back in the world again ... the world that will be safe, and

true, and whole.

"Bones ..."

McCoy halted, his head tilted slightly.

Yarblis was aware of the Speaker with Everyone, the

lady Uhura, pausing just outside the door as

if to listen.

"How's Helen?" he asked, catching

Kirk's softer inflections just so.

McCoy's thin mouth tightened. "I meant

to tell you when this was over, Jim," he said

quietly. "She's not well--she's taken a

turn for the worse."

He made his brows pull down and his breath

catch a little. "Can I see her?"

The doctor shook his head. "I'm afraid

I've had to put her back in ICU for continuous

monitoring. I don't think there's anything

to worry about, but ... she was badly hurt,

Jim. She's just not able to get over it."

"I see." He did his best to sound worried,

as indeed he was. She might yet die without

further help from him, but it was clear that under

continuous monitoring, it would be very difficult

to make sure that she did, in fact, die. He

shook his head again. In two days they would return

to the world. After that, whether the woman lived or died

would not matter. All that mattered was that she was not

able to be up and around, that she was not able to speak to the

others ... and that the others not believe her.

"Jim, I'm ... I'm sorry about

Spock."

Still not entirely clear as to what the man Kirk

would have responded, Yarblis spoke from what he

recalled of the other Hungries, and only said,

"He was revenged. Let us hope we will

not need to avenge those back on the ... the

planet."

And turning, he passed Uhura in the

doorway and walked away to Kirk's quarters.

Perhaps, now that he could discern no trace of his

ghostly alter ego anywhere upon the ship--now that

Kirk's lingering self had been at last dispersed

--he would be able to sleep.

"Surely there's something we can do!" Christine

Chapel looked anxiously from Spock's face,

austere in the dim glow from the computer screen and the

yellowish glare of a low-powered lumenpanel--the

only lighting wired into the dark cave of the hull

section--to McCoy's, then back to Helen herself,

who sat in one of the hard flexiplast chairs at

her side. The doctor was slouched in the other

chair, as befitted his rank as a senior officer;

his blue eyes looked hard but very tired. Helen

felt in complete sympathy with him--she herself was

exhausted almost beyond thought, hurting for sleep in

spite of the stimulants she'd bullied McCoy

into giving her to attend this conference. She could see

Chris glancing worriedly down at her from time

to time, clearly of the opinion that she should be in bed,

a judgment call with which Helen one hundred

percent concurred ... Except that nothing would

induce her to return to sickbay, even to the

Special Observation Ward, without one of the others

as a guard.

Politely, Spock inquired, "Such as?

Possession is at best a tricky legal

concept, and nearly impossible to prove ..."

"And considering how long it took to remove it from

standard jurisprudence," Kirk added, "I would

almost rather ... remain as I am ... than have it be

returned." The voice that issued from the voder-

vocoder was almost like his own had been, with only the

tinny flattening and expressionlessness to betray its

artificial nature. Uhura had smuggled the

voder down from Communications stores immediately after

Yarblis/kirk's post-sweep briefing, and

Spock had put in twenty minutes or so, in the

midst of his endless tinkering, in lowering its pitch from

the standard female register to a close

approximation of Kirk's steel-flexible tenor.

The remark itself, Helen thought, was so

absolutely typical of Jim that, like

McCoy, she thought, If I didn't

believe it before, I believe it now.

He's there. He's in the computer, alive

...

She didn't know why the knowledge brought a hot lump

of tears to her throat and a burning to the scorched-out

membranes of her eyes. She turned her face

away, so that the others would not observe ... and

wondered how much Kirk could see.

"Except that there's no question of you remaining as you

are." As always when he was tired, McCoy's

southern drawl had deepened. "He didn't steal

your body and your ship for a joyride. We're

heading back to Midgwis full-bore. He's

got to be doing it for a reason."

"I know," Kirk said. "Believe me, there were

times when I think it was only that thought that kept me

hanging on."

There was a moment's silence, save for the rattling

hum of the jury-rigged air circulator which kept

the aromatic smells of coffee and chocolate, with

which the room was replete, from drifting into the

corridor outside. Then McCoy chuckled

softly and said, "Give it up, Jim. You're not

going to convince anybody who knows you it wasn't

sheer stubbornness."

There was a faint noise, a sort of brittle

crackling, from the voder. Spock frowned sharply

and turned from the schematics he was calling up on

the screen of the portable terminal--which Chapel had

brought down from sickbay to hook into Miller's

existing tangle of components--to examine the

circuitry.

"Are you there, Captain?" he asked. "Are you

all right?"

"Fine, Mr. Spock. What's the problem?"

"A fault in the voder, I believe ..."

But Helen, smiling a little wearily to herself,

realized that the sound had been the closest

approximation the voder could summon up to Jim's

laughter.

"According to the computer's internal log," Spock

continued after a moment, "Yarblis has been

spending five to six hours a day studying every

operation of the ship, with special attention, it

appears, to the computer itself. Computer schematics

and manuals are among those programs which he has

caused to be printed out in his cabin ..."

"No wonder he looks like he hasn't

slept in a week," McCoy muttered.

"That," Kirk said, "and the fact that he's been

prowling the corridors, either looking for

something, or refamiliarizing himself with the layout of the

ship."

"That means potentially he could figure out that the

captain's hiding out there," Uhura pointed out from

her post by the door. At either end of the dark

corridor the miniature sensors borrowed from

Emiko Adams kept unseen watch. In the

hull section itself the food remixer that filled

two thirds of the space--and where Brunowski had

acquired it was a mystery, as no such equipment was

listed as missing from Stores--had fallen silent

after its last self-clean cycle had spun through,

the ends of its cable leads looped neatly out of the

way.

"Potentially," Spock agreed, returning his

attention to the portable terminal and keying in a long

sequence of commands. "However, I took the

precaution, when I allotted space for the

artificial-intelligence program that currently

serves the captain as a pseudobody, of

compacting all nonessential programs and

library reserves in the computer, so tha t the

additional usage would not be noticed, and of

programming the computer itself to report no change

in its spatial allotment."

"I always thought you'd make an efficient

criminal, Mr. Spock," said Kirk's

voice from the voder.

Spock stiffened. "Considering the trouble I have

gone to to save your life, Captain, there is no

need to insult me."

"Insult?" McCoy grinned. "That's a high

compliment."

"To a human, I have no doubt," Spock

replied blightingly. "Nevertheless, crime is the

refuge of the unresourceful; a retreat from

perfect logic."

The grin in Kirk's voice was almost palpable.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Spock--I only

meant that you would exercise your customary

efficiency in whatever field of endeavor you

undertook."

"Thank you, Captain." Spock bridled a

little, like a dandy who possesses fifteen

mirrors and claims to be above looking into any of

them--if he'd been a cat, reflected Helen,

he'd have washed his whiskers. "That is a compliment

indeed."

"But Bones is right," Kirk said quietly.

"I can't stay as I am. And certainly

none of us can afford to let him remain as he is.

Bones--Spock--Helen--is there any way,

anything you can think of ..."

"Short of murdering him," McCoy said,

"no. And I wouldn't even advise that, since I

have no idea how this mind swap works ..."

Spock looked up again from his primary

keyboard, which, as Kirk had promised, was of the

highest lab quality or better, thanks

to Miller's adept tinkering. "I estimate that

if Yarblis Geshkerroth can be induced to abandon

the captain's body and mind, we will have fifteen

or twenty minutes' leeway to return the

captain's consciousness to it without physical

deterioration of the brain tissue."

"You could stretch that out further with the stasis

chamber," McCoy added. "But how're you going

to induce him to leave? Serve him eviction

papers?"

"He may leave on his own," Chapel said,

shifting her shoulders uneasily against the wall.

"By the way he looks, I wouldn't be surprised

if Yarblis is having his own problems maintaining

his hold on your body."

"We must hope that he does, at least for the time

being," Spock responded. "For should Yarblis

abandon the captain's body at this point, and the

captain return to it, Yarblis will have no choice

but to take the captain's place in the computer--

something he could easily do, now that I have removed

the electromagnetic safeguards."

"That's all we'd need," Uhura muttered.

"He sure wouldn't have any problem protecting his

planet from us then."

"An unwarranted assumption, Lieutenant,

if you believe that from his position in the computer

Yarblis might destroy the ship. There are

extensive backup systems within the computer itself

to prevent a failure of that kind. Even with the

amount the Ghost Walker has learned about the

makeup of the ship, he would not be able to turn the

computer against us. On the whole, Captain, at the

moment I consider yours to be the superior

position."

"Unless there's a power cut," Helen pointed

out quietly.

Spock shook his head. "Power failure to the

computer itself is virtually impossible. The

backup batteries--"

"I didn't say "failure,""

she replied, her eyes somber in the grimy

shadows. "I said "cut," as in, "cut with a

sharp instrument through an access hatch.""

She looked inquiringly up at Uhura, who

nodded. "A few minutes of complete down-power

at most will crash the nonessential systems,"

said the Communications officer. "You don't

"hold" even the essential ones in a crash--

they're automatically replaced from a hard-wired

digital backup two nanoseconds later, and

nobody knows the difference."

"And that's fine," Helen said, "for a system.

But can you do that with a ... a living entity?"

There was a long and intensely uncomfortable

silence, which Spock eventually broke. "The power

core of the computer is extremely well-

protected ..."

"But the lines leading into it from the converters

aren't," Uhura said. "The wiring conduits run

straight up the back of the dorsal

infrastructure. You can get to any of them through those

doors beside the food slots in the observation

lounges--or, on Deck Eleven, through

Gilden's office. It would be fairly easy

to know exactly what to look for if you consulted the

engineering files, which you say is exactly what the

Ghost Walker has been doing."

Helen looked from Spock's troubled face to the

silent stack of components on the table, as if that,

too, had a face ... though it was a face her

mind shied from remembering. "Couldn't he have turned

back--couldn't he have made the attempt on my

life an excuse to turn back--because he wants

to be in orbit around his home planet again when he

destroys this vessel in order to keep his world

safe from Federation interference once and for all?"

Chapter Sixteen

But that wouldn't work, Chapel protested

faintly. "Destroying a ship would never keep the

whole Federation away. If anything, it would bring

them down on Midgwis full-force."

"Does he know that?"

"If he knows what the captain knew, he

does," Uhura pointed out.

"Maybe," Helen said, sinking back into her

chair. "If he's rational, and not a fanatic.

But the Federation's only detailed reports about

Midgwis at the moment are in the

Enterprise's logs. They wouldn't become

common knowledge until they were transshipped from Starbase

Nine. And if destroying the Enterprise wouldn't

buy complete noninterference in his planet's

affairs, at least it would buy him time."

"Time for what?" Uhura demanded. "Isn't it

obvious to him that unless they accept at least some

of the techniques the Federation is holding out to them,

they're going to starve? Or risk becoming

subject to Klingon protectorate?"

"And in fact there are a number of Midgwins

who are coming to just that conclusion ..."

"They've dealt with the Klingons before ..."

"Helen's right." It was Jim's voice,

quietly, from the computer. The anthropologist

shivered, hearing his voice in the dim-lit room,

more than ever like a haunting ... She found herself

looking around, expecting to see the traditional

pale ghost-shape of him, floating in a corner.

And dreading it. Dreading the memories--good and

bad--the sight of his face might bring. But there was

only the angular collection of spare scanner

drives and data cubes, cable and screens, that

Ensign Miller had borrowed from Stores, for

whatever Brunowski's secret purposes were,

green and amber lights on the remixer glinting like

spectral eyes.

"The population of the Midgwins is split,"

Kirk went on ... Helen could almost see the

gesture of his hands. "Geshkerroth's party--the

out-and-out isolationists--are in a minority now, or

were in a minority when we left, but we have no

idea what's been happening on the planet in the

past week, nor why communication was severed with the

research party."

"My guess is that Geshkerroth's

accomplices in the warren trashed the

transmitters as soon as we left orbit,"

Helen said.

"Did he have them?" Uhura asked.

"According to Thetas, there are about a dozen shades of

opinion over what should be done with the Federation's

offers of assistance," added McCoy, folding his

arms and leaning his flat, bony shoulders against the

wall at his back. "Most of them have to do with

acceptance on some kind of terms, but at heart

none of them are really willing to give up the old

way of life."

"Nor should they have to," Kirk said. It must

be driving him crazy not to be able

to pace, Helen thought, amused in spite of

weariness and strain. Or perhaps the kinetic portion

of his brain was pacing. "Nor will the Federation

require them to, if that's their choice.

Unfortunately," he continued, "their old way of

life is in danger whichever way they slice it,

now that the Klingons have put in for rights of

protectorate over the planet. My

impression is that very few of them realize that, or

want to realize it, but the Klingons may very well

make a case for the fact that having no

agricultural development, they should not be

considered a "culture." Given time, the Ghost

Walker might amass considerable support for

complete isolation. In any case it doesn't

matter whether he actually could or not, but only that

at the moment he thinks he can. And time may be

what he's playing for."

"Most illogical," Spock said

disapprovingly.

Abruptly, the red light on Uhura's

small hand-held scanning panel blinked on with a

soft chirp. "Someone coming," Uhura reported.

"They're past the sensor out in Corridor Six

..."

Spock cut to visual monitoring on the

portable screen. In the off-duty quarter-power

lighting of the corridor they could discern a short,

burly figure wearing the red coverall of

LandRather, striding along with, incongruously, a

dancer's lightness.

Uhura identified him. "It's Yeoman

Brunowski."

Spock switched off the screen, and Uhura

flicked the makeshift toggle controlling the

lumenpanel wired overhead, leaving the room in the

darkness in which they had originally found it.

"Stay where you are, everyone," came the

Vulcan's deep, slightly grainy tones out

of the blackness, and Helen heard the faint swish of

his clothing as he crossed the room to the hinged

bulkhead that had at one time--before Brunowski had

talked his friend into tinkering with it--formed a part of the

internal pressure skin of the ship.

The dim lights of the corridor seemed very bright

as the door swished open, outlining the blocky

silhouette. Like the jointed limb of a spider,

Spock's arm intruded into that rectangle of

light, resting lightly on Brunowski's

shoulder. The hapless laundryman's

knees buckled and he collapsed without a sound.

"I suggest he be given an injection of

trichemizone and be kept under sedation for forty-

eight hours, Doctor," Spock said as he

r eached up to turn on the lumenpanel again and

pulled the bulkhead shut. "No one must know of

our headquarters here ..."

"You'd better get Miller too, then,"

Kirk put in. "I see him rostered as off

duty tonight, since he was up all night running the

sweep, but I can hear his voice through the voder

circuits, down in Central Computer having a

cup of coffee with Ensign Giacomo."

"You don't think they've told her about this

place ...?" worried Chapel.

"Now, wait a minute," McCoy

protested, his grizzled brows descending sharply.

"Maybe this isn't the time to balk about ethics, but

I did take an oath once upon a time not

to use medicine as a means of imprisoning the

innocent."

"Perhaps," Spock agreed quietly, kneeling

once more at Brunowski's side. "But

logically, this man is scarcely to be described

as "innocent." Moreover, should he be

imprisoned in any other fashion, he and his

accomplice would both be in the severest danger from

an alien who has already attempted two

assassinations in order to preserve his secrets,

to say nothing of the danger thereby resulting for all

of us."

McCoy's mouth quirked dryly. "I should have

known you'd come up with a logical reason." He

fished a hypo from the case at his belt and fitted

an ampoule to the gun.

Spock regarded him in some puzzlement. "If

that is the case, Doctor, then why--"

The hypo hissed venomously; Brunowski

sighed and seemed to settle like a beached whale.

"We'd better get him out of here," McCoy

said, and between them, he and Chapel hauled their

patient to his feet. "I don't like it, but--"

"Take Service Lift Three," Kirk

advised. "It's never in use this time of night."

And, as they were manhandling Brunowski's not

insignificant bulk out the door, he added

quietly, "Helen?"

She paused, half turning back. In those

few minutes of complete darkness she had felt the

eeriest sensation, the impression that Jim

was in the room with them, was standing close beside her ...

though her common sense told her that Jim was, in

point of fact, really up in the Central

Computer room on Deck 8, only listening

to them, speaking to them, through the threads of the computer's

superconductive nerve endings which ran down the

dorsal wiring pipe to the redundant computer

chamber on Deck 19, and thence, through finer nerve

endings into which Miller had shamelessly tapped, to this

darkened hold.

But still, she felt that he was there.

His voice continued to issue, eerily, from the

tiny black box plugged into the terminal's side.

"Thank you," he said. "For helping me ... for

saving me ... for believing. And for choosing to be here

on the ship, for choosing to stay, for giving up what

you did. I'm sorry beyond words that it's cost you

what it has ..."

She shook her head quickly. "Jim, I ..."

How did you touch a computer? How did you put

into words what couldn't be said? She felt tears

burn at her again, and realized she was trembling with

sheer exhaustion, the efforts of the past twelve

hours falling on her in a single slamming

tsunami of fatigue. She wanted, more than

anything else, to lean on his shoulder, to feel his

arms around her, to feel the protection, the warmth,

of his caring, the way it had once been.

But it was something she had put away from her, in

those hellish days of knowing that Jim was not Jim, and

though she reached for it now, it still wasn't there.

Only an eerie proxy, a disembodied voice

--Eric in that ancient story singing to his beloved

Christine from behind a wall ...

But there was an analogy in that she didn't

want to pursue. She sighed, bracing herself against

disappointment and weariness, pushed back her black

hair from her face and straightened her back.

"I can't talk," she said simply. "I'm

tired ... But I'm glad, I'm so glad."

And turning, she stumbled after Chapel and McCoy

and their unconscious burden. Uhura was waiting

outside the nearly shut bulkhead, to put her arm

around her waist and take her weight on her

shoulder, helping her back down the corridor

toward the service lift that would carry them all

to sickbay's problematical refuge.

Spock rested his elbows on the table's edge and

folded his hands before his chin. "Most interesting."

"Dammit, Spock ..." The voder

was not capable of registering the complete vocal

inflections of irritation and fatigue, but it came

close.

"I refer to Dr. Gordon's capacity for

faith in an apparently illogical conclusion,

based upon subliminal cues. It is very similar

to your own."

Kirk's voice was weary. "If you knew

what I had to go through, trying to get your damned

attention, Spock ... trying to get you to listen in

spite of your logic ..."

"My apologies, Captain." The Science

officer inclined his sleek head. Then, after a long

moment, "And my ... gratitude. Both for your

efforts in saving my life in the shuttle bay

... and for the fact that you are still with us at all."

"Oh, go to sleep," said Kirk. "We all

need it. We'll figure out what Yarblis is

up to in the morning."

Spock remained hidden in the hull section

until the Enterprise was in orbit around

Elcidar Beta III--MIDGWIS--ONCE again.

Deck 23 was a portion of the ship unfrequented

by anyone even during the main shift, only a

deck above the dark cargo holds of the hull

bottom. They were undisturbed.

Much to Mr. Scott's distress, Ensign

Miller fell victim to the same mysterious

virus that had incapacitated his disreputable friend

Yeoman Brunowski. Dr. McCoy tested a

dozen other crew members for signs of the virus

and published a list of twenty or so symptoms.

Lieutenant Bergdahl promptly appeared,

claiming fourteen of them, plus several which had not

been listed, but was released after examination, to the

considerable disappointment of his staff. Aside from the

fact that more uniforms had to be returned as

improperly fitting due to the usual slight

intolerances of the molecular remixer programming,

and a tendency of starch-based substances in the food

slots to be flaccid and rubbery, not a great deal

was affected, but among the junior members of the

crew there was whisper that a jinx had been put on

the ship.

Whether the captain knew of this or not was

unapparent. On the bridge he was silent and

withdrawn, but in that he was no different from the rest

of the bridge crew. Unemotional and precise,

the Vulcan had never been universally

popular with the crew, but among those who had worked with

him for three years, his absence--his murder--

was deeply felt. There was a fanatic glare in

the captain's fatigue-shadowed hazel eyes as

he stared at the fore viewscreen, or endlessly

studied ship reports and voyage logs on their

proximity to Midgwis. "And no surprise,"

said Mr. Sulu quietly, over an after-dinner

cup of coffee with Chekov in the main rec room.

"First Spock, and now Helen. Chris Chapel

says she's doing worse ..."

Chekov cursed in Russian. "I saw him

this way when he went after that thing that destroyed half

the Farragut's crew. If that's what the

Midgwins can do, no wonder he's worried about

that research party."

The object of these concerns himself passed his time,

in partnership with Jim Kirk, in communion with the

Enterprise's computer. Since the adjoining

bulkhead section contained the raw carbon-

hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen from which all food on

the Enterprise was formulated, it took only a

determined study of the remixer tech manuals in the

ship's library computer for Mr. Spock

to manufacture his own food, andwitha little

experimentation, he discovered that the breadboarded

dials permitted a far finer adjustment of

flavorings than the digitalized program

settings in the rec room, with the result that, for the

first time in three years, he was able to get really

edible Vulcan m'lu. Lieutenant Uhura and

Nurse Chapel smuggled him blankets, upon which

he slept in a corner of the room, when he

slept at all. Mostly he and Kirk scanned

through the files of the computer itself, investigating

anything that might assist them in second-guessing

Yarblis's intentions when they reached their destination.

With a little coaching from Spock, Kirk was able

to enter even the most highly classified of

files, to circumvent voice-code locks and

retina scans and display anything for perusal on

Miller's terminal screen. But nowhere did they

find any program, any file, any comment

regarding the intentions of the Ghost Walker, the

pseudo-Kirk who controlled the ship.

"And I doubt we will," Kirk commented, while

Spock tinkered with a third work terminal which

Uhura had smuggled down to him from Stores.

"He can use the computer, and understands how it works,

but he doesn't think in terms of it. It

doesn't come as second nature to him, to keep

a log, or make files of information, as it does

to you and me."

"No," the Vulcan observed, tapping his way

neatly through the more stringent of the computerized

safeguards set on the inner core of the ship's

utility programs. He was currently engaged

in finding and removing his own specific sensory

parameters from the computer's memory so that another

life scan of the ship would not register his presence,

even as a scan of the computer's directories would

not register Kirk's. "It was, in fact, one

of the things that served to confirm my impression that you

were--in the old Earth parlance--not yourself."

"Confirm," Kirk repeated thoughtfully.

"I'm curious, Spock. Did you suspect

before that time?"

Spock was silent, surveying the two screens

full of figures and directory paths glowing

before him. The room's original screen--the

terminal connected to the voder--was, as usual,

dark, save for a blinking cursor light and a few

cryptic symbols concerning the misleading

directory paths behind which the A.i. program

hid.

"I knew that all was not well," he said

slowly. "Thou gh I hesitated to ascribe such a

comprehensive dislocation of your customary reactions

to so illogical a cause as your involvement with

Dr. Gordon, I was also aware that I was dealing

with a matter which in my observation always causes

extreme irrationality in members of your

species. But I believe that my first definite

suspicions came from playing chess with your alter

ego. In spite of knowing everything about the game which

you knew, he did not have your ... adeptness."

Spock frowned, leaning forward a little on his

elbows, his hands framing the glowing screen before him

as he cast his mind back. "He was ... more

ruthless than you. And less careful to conserve his

pieces. His attack was more reckless, his guard

weaker. And he had no interest in the strategy of the

game, beyond winning it."

"I know," Kirk said softly. "And that's what

worries me about the fact that the ship is still under his

command."

Kirk was also, again with coaching from Spock, able

to cut himself into all the intership monitoring and

communications devices, permitting him to observe

what was going on in nearly any part of the

ship he chose, though only able to do so in one

location at a time, as he had been able to hear the

voices of the staff in the Central Computer

room. On the whole, this required such effort on

his part that they still relied on Emiko Adams's

miniature sensors for their first line of defense.

"He still walks the ship at night,"

Lieutenant Uhura said, perching on a corner

of the crowded computer bench, long legs crossed

gracefully while McCoy unwrapped the

assortment of small tools from the clean uniform

shirt he'd brought for Spock. "But whether he's

prowling, looking for something, the way he did before the

sweep convinced him you were no longer a threat to him,

or whether he's doing something--cutting wires,

planting charges, whatever, as Helen suggested--

there's no way of telling."

"Can you pick him up on a monitor?"

McCoy suggested, as Spock examined the shirt

--slightly too short, like so much of what was coming

out of LandRather these days. "Run a sensor sweep

and find him?"

"I'm afraid not, Bones." Even in

twenty-four hours Kirk had acquired more

control over the nuances of the voder--Uhura would have

sworn the captain was in the room with them. If she

closed her eyes, she could almost see him, sitting

on the other end of the table, just behind Spock's

shoulder, where the Vulcan sat in his hard

duraplast chair. "For one thing, something that large

would show up on the computer's internal log. For

another, Spock could be picked out on a scan

because of the specific differences in a

Vulcansthuman physiology, the same way

an alien intruder could be--because they're unique.

Physically, I'm standard-issue."

"And the damn thing is," Kirk went on after a

moment, "nobody thought to put video pickups

on the inside of walls or hatch covers the way

they did at all the intersections of the halls and in

most rooms." Spock, when he had gone

to reroute the visual pickups that covered the

starboard corridor of Deck 23 to simply

repeat the image of the portside corridor, had

discovered that Miller had already taken this

precaution. ("We ought to put that boy in

Security," Kirk had remarked, to which Spock

had replied austerely, "We ought to put that boy,

as you call him, in the brig.") "If anything

has been planted, we'll have to look

for it."

"Considering that there are 1,576 access hatches

and service ports on board the Enterprise,"

Spock said, "of which, at my best calculation,

342 could be deemed of critical importance for the

safety of the vessel, this could be an extensive

task."

"Can't we do this the easy way?" Uhura

asked, with a gesture of one slender hand. "Can't

Dr. McCoy here declare him unfit to continue his

duties, and put him away like we've done

to poor Danny and John? He's certainly

given us enough evidence of irrationality, you know."

"For one thing, sickbay is not an auxiliary

brig!" McCoy retorted--he still felt

vaguely uneasy about the Hippocratic oath.

"For another, since there is nothing physically

wrong with him, and since he's not in any way

endangering the ship or the crew, it would take a

couple of days of hearings, and we're now less

than twenty-four hours from planetfall on

Midgwis."

"Not to mention the fact that Yarblis appears

to be in sufficient command of himself to talk his way out

of such charges," Spock added. "Moreover, such

action would not put us any closer to reversing the

exchange of personalities between him and the

captain."

"That doesn't matter, if the ship and its

personnel can be kept out of danger ..."

"Permit me to disagree, Captain. No

proof exists that such an exchange took place.

He could, with very good reason, claim that you are

nothing but a highly sophisticated artificial-

intelligence program invented by me, with the aim of

usurping his authority. Such an action would only

result in tipping our hand. We would very likely

find ourselves in the brig for mutiny, he would still

remain captain of the Enterprise, and he would

assuredly attempt his scheme again. No."

Spock shook his head. "Our sole logical

recourse is to wait, and to thwart whatever scheme

he has as best we can."

I will destroy them, he thought, his boot

heels clicking on the hard slick surface of the

starship's deck, the cold white lighting that, on

these levels, never changed nor failed, glaring

hurtfully in his tired eyes. I will destroy

...

Long ago, he remembered being taught

by Arxoras that to destroy life, any life, was

bad. And something inside him hurt, for he had

loved Arxoras then, loved his old teacher

deeply. And he loved him still, for all that he had

given, for the wisdom he had shown him, and the never-

failing luminous serenity of his spirit. Looking back

on those days, the hurt returned, but like a wound

which, after a time, scars over--a profound loneliness

that had replaced his longing for the old comfort of the

Consciousness Web.

The hurt changes, he thought to himself,

remembering the hideous burns the weapons of the

Hungries had left upon him, the twisted faces

of his comrades when he had found their shredded

bodies in the woodland glens. But it never

ceases to hurt. Sometimes even now, in this new,

sleek, alien body, it seemed that the scars

left on his old body, his real body--asleep

deep in its cave beneath the canyon rocks, and

tended by Yngash and Ka'th Ka'who his

accomplices and nest siblings--still ached.

As he entered the Healing Place, a glass

observation window caught his reflection,

clumsily elongated and huge in his dull and

ugly wrappings of yellow and black, with its

featureless little bulb of a head, its pathetic rag

of hair, its tiny and feeble hands. Yet at the

same time he saw, beyond the window, the woman

Chapel, and beside her the bed where the woman Helen

lay, and the alien flesh he inhabited warmed with the

thought of them.

No! he thought, in sickened disgust.

To want such as they--smelly, vapid,

lifeless ... But he did want them, with a

hunger that was not unlike a pallid echo of his own

desperation to join with the minds of his friends, with the minds

of his people, the true submersion in the caring and concern of

others.

Soon, he thought. Rhea, Mother Spirit,

soon ...

In the Special Observation Ward he saw the

woman Helen reach up and clasp Chapel by the

hands. They were speaking together, Chapel and this woman

whom they had told him was so ill that she could not be

left unattended; Helen gestured with her hands as

she spoke, and shook back the dark torrent of

her hair. They seemed almost like two people of his own

warren, happy together in one another's company, and

he hated them for that, hated them for having,

somehow, what he was denied.

No, he corrected himself. They do not have

it--had never had it--do not even understand what it is,

without the Consciousness Web. Through the glass he

heard their voices, faintly, though the hearing of the

Hungries was so thick it had taken him days

to get used to it.

"... shuttlecraft down to the surface. You

can wear one of my uniforms and get on early;

we'll need someone down there who understands a little of

what's going on. Do you feel up to it?"

"Pretty much." (they had told him, he

thought, that Kirk's woman was too far gone

to speak.) "Has any contact, anything at all,

been established?"

Chapel shook her head. "Uhura's been

trying since we came down out of warp speed. The

planet's on the fore viewscreens now, we'll

be making orbit in twelve hours. Not a sound.

She thought she might have picked up traces of an

ion trail from some other ship, but can't be sure

..."

Helen's face tightened with pain. "Dammit

... Nomias was a pain in the neck sometimes, but

the thought that even he might have met with some harm

... And Chu was like a mother to me."

"We'll be taking two security guards ...

Dr. McCoy thinks it's best," she added as

Helen made a quick gesture--like a denial,

Yarblis thought. "Whatever's going on down there,

we don't want to take chances ..."

Take them or not, he thought, it will do you

no good.

Quietly, he slipped away. So they

suspected, he thought. They--or Chapel on her

own, though most likely the physician was in it

too--were lying to him to keep him away from

Helen, and would lie tomorrow, to get her down to the

surface of the world and supposedly out of his reach.

Well, let them, he thought, ticking over

in his mind all he had studied, all he had

learned, about the ins and outs of this queer floating

warren, this terrible thing like a giant flendag nest

of metal, floating, as Arxoras had said, upon the

waters of eternal night. Twelve hours

... The part of him that was Kirk knew how long that

was, and something in him flinched i n agony. Every

hour, every minute, was a trial of endurance to him

now, a race against the pain of holding to this flesh

until his goal was accomplished, until

the world was finally made safe.

Whether or not the woman Helen went down to the

world with McCoy, he thought, they would still be caught

in the destruction he would cause; they would still die

in the midst of the terrible thing he knew he had to do.

Chapter Seventeen

"Where are they?" Helen ducked under the lintel

of the deserted hut. Ms. Oyama--one of the three

security personnel who had, against Helen's

better judgment, accompanied the shuttle party--

followed close at her heels, phaser in hand.

Latticed peach-colored daylight filtering through the

round window showed them the two piles of flattened

grasses that made up Thetas's bed and that of

Shorak and his wife. A bag of plaited vines

hung from one of the bent saplings that supported the

low ceiling of mud-covered thatch and daub. When

Helen had last seen it, it had contained the few

research items the party had used--tricorders,

the first aid and medicines--keeping them off the ground

and safe from dust and the local dirt crawlers. It

was empty now, as were the shelves that had held

spare clothing, the mini-computer, and the repair

kit. Like the Midgwins, Shorak and his party had

dispensed with bowls, pots, or dishes, and had

eaten the slender yield of the grasslands as Rhea

chose to give it.

It still seemed to Helen a reasonable thing to do,

if one were to live among these people as closely as

possible, a necessary procedure for a contact team.

She thought, I'll have to ask Chu how it is,

getting used to it, and then her lips tightened hard

at the thought of the austere little Chinese.

Dammit, please don't tell me she's

dead ...

She ducked again, to leave the hut.

"Nobody in there either," McCoy informed her,

gesturing toward the squat shape of the newer hut that

had been erected for Chu, Nomias, and, she

knew, herself. The daubing of the roof thatch had not

even been completed, and inside, the dust glittered

in a hundred mottled slits of uneven light.

"The beds look like they've been slept on, but

there's no bedding--the whole place has been

stripped."

"How could you tell?" Security Chief

DeSalle muttered, looking around him at the

stillness of the clearing. His red shirt, and

those of Oyama and Gomez, made dark

scarlet splashes against the purple-brown stems

of the surrounding thorn trees, the pale rocks in

the soft amber haze of the light. The savannah

beyond them stretched away to shimmering distance, harsh and

almost white with summer, marked here and there with the low

spinneys of dark foliage, the lumpish red-

barked barrel trees and the occasional insect

hill. Seeing it for the first time in daylight, Helen

realized how naked the landscape looked, like an

overgrazed pasturage, every food-bearing stem

picked clean. The air felt hot and close,

weighted with a soft humming that at first she thought must

be insects. Nothing moved except, far out over

the veldt, the indistinct, loping shapes of a

small herd of pfugux, with the attendant gray

rustle of small predators--licats or

sheefla in this country--gliding in their wake.

Then she remembered that Midgwis had no

flying insects.

"Could the Midgwins have overpowered them?"

Chapel asked, shading her eyes as she looked

around at the sun-drenched stillness.

Security Officer Gomez raised one

black brow. "Those little things?"

DeSalle shook his head. "If they did,

they did it without shedding anybody's blood," he

pointed out, squatting to study the ground around the

burned-out firepit. "These ashes are four,

five days old ..."

"Over here," McCoy said, beckoning from the

rear of the original hut.

There was a sort of alcove there, like a little shed

built of thorn stems and roofed with mud-daubed

grass. Helen remembered Thetas telling her that

though it was no secret to the folk of the Bindigo

Warren that the researchers had a transmitter, they

generally kept it out of sight to lessen the sense of

their alienness. What was heaped on a torn

blanket on the floor of the shelter was clearly the

remains of both the Institute's old subspace

transmitter and the newer device Chu and her party

had brought with them. Most of the parts were jumbled together

in the center of the blanket, mixed with dirt and

pebbles and twigs, but some had been neatly sorted

into a pile on either side.

"Old transmitter and the new," DeSalle

remarked, turning a flattened microchip over in

his fingers. "They were trying to repair them."

"Here's where it was done, sir,"

Oyama called from a dozen feet away, among

the boulders at the head of a nearby gully.

"Scratched-up branches used to lever it

to pieces, a couple of big rocks and a boulder

they pounded it on ..."

DeSalle went to check, leaving McCoy,

Chapel, and Helen--their blue Med Section

uniforms dyed a dull olive by the brazen light

--under Gomez's watchful care at the shed. He

came back with Oyama a few moments later,

saying, "By the scratches on the boulder, it

looks like it was done a week ago." He

frowned, and pushed back his thick, brown hair from

his forehead. In general he remained on board the

Enterprise, Captain Kirk preferring to head

planetary details himself. But like most

Security chiefs, he was meticulous and

observant, and a childhood spent on various

Class-3 colonies had given him considerable

experience in rough country, as well as a rather

empirical outlook on life.

Helen found herself wondering what the interloper,

the pseudo-Kirk, had told him, to justify the

departure from the norm. Technically, of course,

any senior officer could head a landing party--some

ships in the fleet routinely assigned the job

to the Science officer (who might or might not be

second-in-command). It was, in fact,

largely a matter of temperament who headed landing

parties, and among the senior officers of any

starship, it was generally obvious who should be doing the

job. Kirk was one of the few captains who made

a habit of taking the position himself, because, as

he'd told her once, he wanted to have firsthand knowledge

of the situation if it turned ticklish. ("The

hell you do." Helen had grinned up at him,

lying against the hard muscles of his chest, and had

reached up to tweak a lock of his hair. "You just

can't stand to be left out of things." And he'd

grinned back, and confessed, "Well ... that

too.")

She looked at DeSalle now, over the

smashed remains of the transmitters, and his face

was grim. "By the tracks, there were two or three

of them ..."

"You said Geshkerroth had accomplices in the

warren," McCoy murmured to Helen, and she

nodded.

"Looks like they did it as soon as the

Enterprise was well away,"

DeSalle remarked, and cast another glance up

the narrow path through the thorn trees to the towering

rocks around the box canyon, his light eyes

narrowed. "I think it's time we went up to this

warren of theirs."

"No," Helen said quickly. She shuddered at the

thought of what Shorak would say to the armed invasion

of the warren whose trust he'd worked so desperately

to win. "I'll go ... alone. These people could barely

be talked into having researchers here at all;

they're very much of two minds about any kind of

contact with the Federation ..."

"Looks like they came to some kind of decision,"

McCoy remarked grimly.

Their eyes met, his wary, warning. Helen

remembered Yarblis, and the fanatic, haggard

gleam in the eyes of the man who had once been

Jim Kirk as his face bent over hers.

Remembered the shut door of the shuttle bay, the

red bar of lights over it; remembered the blinding

sense of total evil that had wakened her from her

dreams. Remembered, too, that Yarblis had

accomplices in the warren of whose capabilities

--and intentions--she was ignorant. But she

remembered also Shorak's reports, the

painstaking patience required to establish contact

with the Midgwins at all. It had been almost

axiomatic in every class she'd taken how

easily a careless word, an action wrongly

performed, could give everyone in the community under

study a contempt, or a fear, or a distrust of the

researchers, which would take months or years

to repair. Shorak had begged Kirk not to send

security down on the Enterprise's first

reconnaissance of the planet. We're having

enough problems getting them to distinguish between you and the

Klingons as it is, he had said.

"No," she said, shaking her head so that her

thick, dark braid slapped at her shoulders.

"I'll be careful--I won't approach the

place unless it looks safe. But I need

to talk to Arxoras, and I'm not going to undo

everything Shorak and his party worked for by walking into the

warren with a bunch of armed guards."

"Let me follow you, then," DeSalle said

reasonably. "I'll keep my distance in the

bush, if it looks like I won't be needed. There

may be a perfectly simple explanation for this.

But until I know what it is, I don't want

any of us going around alone."

"Spock!" The urgency in the captain's

voice broke him sharply from his meditations--

meditations he was certain he would need, as much as

he would need the information on Midgwis that he had

managed to dig out of the computer's backup

memory. Rising from his kneeling position on his

blankets, he crossed swiftly to the worktable,

the screens of all three terminals dimly glowing

in the low light.

"Yes, Captain?"

"Computer sensory cutoff on Deck Five.

The whole area's blacked out of communication."

"Officers' quarters," Spock said

automatically, cutting in the second screen.

"Also all emergency battery rooms for the pri-

mary hull, upper phaser banks, and air-cir-

culation systems for decks One through Seven ..."

It was odd, thought Spock, to hear a computer

swear.

"Where does the cut-through have to be, Spock? The

auxiliary lines have to have been severed as well

..."

"Once out of the dorsal column, access

tubes Four and Seven," the Vulcan said after

only a moment's hesitation--having logically

deduced the danger areas for sabotage, he had

taken the precaution of refreshing his own memory

of the schematics of the ship. "Though with a cutoff from

computer sensors, I doubt that Mr. Scott's

repair crew can find the breaks before Yarblis

makes his move."

"Particularly since we've taken the

precaution of keeping his best assistant under

sedation? You may be right ... I've patched through.

Mr. Scott?"

There was no hookup to hear the engineer's

reply, but a moment later Kirk said, "We've

got a report of computer blackout of Deck

Five, main system and auxiliary as well

..."

Spock, knowing the Scots engineer, could almost

hear his shocked protests of there being no way it

could happen short of--

"I thought that too. Get some personnel to find

the cut, but more important, get whoever you can to the

air-circ pumps and the battery rooms to check for

possible malfunctions there as well."

Aye, Captain, thought Spock, mentally

providing the other half of the conversation, and

nodded concise approval to himself for the captain's

deft manipulation of the voder mechanisms, which

permitted him to transmit his own voice over the

comm link. He had learned quickly.

"With the personnel at Mr. Scott's

disposal," he remarked, "the chances are at least

twelve to one against finding any act of sabotage

in so many areas before it happens--forty-three or more

to one against if Yarblis attempts something

outside the immediate area of the life-support

system."

"Greater than that," Kirk said grimly.

"What would you do if you were some Engineering ensign

checking around an emergency battery and you met the

captain of the vessel down there and he said,

"I've already checked this area, you go that way and

check out the latrines.""

Spock raised a brow. "I see,

Captain, that I am not the only senior officer

of this vessel who would make an efficient

criminal. Since the order of probability is

high that the threat will involve Life Support,

if you will excuse me, I will take the precaution

of securing an oxygen mask from the nearest

emergency station." He paused by the corner of the

worktable to check the small hand screen that was

currently monitoring the sensors at either end of the

corridor, then worked the lever to open the bulkhead

and slip out. Moving with quick stealth, he slipped

down the hallway to the emergency station at the foot

of the gangway by the doors of the deserted

cargotransporter room.

Even in the middle of the main shift, no one was

there--the room was seldom in use and Kirk, from his

position in the computer, would have picked up any

communication requesting bulk shipment from the

surface. Still, he listened carefully from the

shadows before moving into the open. It would scarcely

do, he thought, for reports of sightings of his own

ghost to follow so hard upon those of the ship

poltergeist.

The emergency station was recessed behind a panel

in the bulkhead beside the turbolift doors.

Spock glanced swiftly in one direction, then

the other, listening especially for the sound of the

turbolift descending. But all was still. With the

small sonic extractor he'd brought with him,

he unfastened the alarm panel that would have registered

breakage of the safety seals on the station itself, then

opened the panel and took a mask from the

neat row within.

The oxygen bottle attached was empty.

Frowning at the carelessness of the Security patrol

responsible for checking such things--though it was easy

enough to neglect, down at this untenanted level--

he replaced it, drew out another ...

And that bottle, too, was empty. All of the

eight in the station bore the small red gauge

light of critically low supply.

And all of them had been turned so that those

lights would not show through the clear plex inspection

port on the bulkhead.

He prowls the ship all night, Uhura

had said.

His heart cold within him, Spock strode

back to the concealed hull section. McCoy was on

the planet. So were Chapel and Helen. Uhura

would be on the bridge at this time, though it was a

safe guess that Yarblis would not ... not if he

was working his way systematically from air-circulation

pump to air-circulation pump, directing

ingenuous ensigns to investigate latrines while

he himself sabotaged the oxygen of the entire ship

...

"Lieutenant Uhura?"

"What is it, sir?" Her voice was normal

and absolutely calm, though she had to be aware

that he wouldn't contact her on the bridge, even

using the doctored communicators, without urgent

need.

"Is Yarblis on the bridge?"

"No, sir, he isn't."

"It appears likely that there is going to be an

attempt on the ship's oxygen systems within the

next fifteen minutes." That was the soonest,

Spock estimated, allowing for the minutes occupied

by his own check of the emergency station, that major

damage to the air-circulation pumps could be done,

even by someone who knew what he was doing, as

Yarblis by this time undoubtedly did. "It also

appears that some, if not all, of the oxygen masks

in the emergency stations have been tampered with. Bring

as many operative ones as you can locate down

to Deck Twenty-three immediately."

"Yes, sir. Right away, sir. Should I

contact Security, sir?"

"And tell them what, Lieutenant?" Spock

inquired a touch acidly. "That someone who has

been in clandestine hiding in an illegally

pressurized hull section containing

misappropriated Starfleet property

alleges that the captain of the vessel is about

to commit an act of sabotage? And in any

case, we have no proof of what is about to occur."

"Very well, sir," Uhura replied in her

most neutral tones. "I'll see to it at

once."

"And let's hope," the Kirk voice

remarked from the computer as Spock keyed off, "that

she doesn't meet me in the turbolift on the

way down."

The soft humming that filled the air grew

stronger as Helen climbed the path from the Research

Institute's little clearing among the thorn trees

to the tall rocks surrounding the Bindigo Warren

itself. She and DeSalle walked half bent

over, keeping to such cover as they could; the

Midgwins, of course, with their short stature and

tough hides, found in the shoulder-high thorn forest

more than adequate concealment from the airborne

Hootings, the long-necked and thoroughly

repulsive predators of this part of the world. The

Flaygrubs, the major predators of the planet

--for years regarded, along with the Bargumps, as

its predominant life-form--were seldom to be

found this far south in the relatively waterless

savannahs; the only real dangers to the

Midgwins in their clustering warrens of mud

shelters were the licats, shaggy and long-bodied and

hideously fast. Helen recalled in Shorak's

preliminary report an account of an attack

by a pack of them on the Bindigo Warren; how the

Midgwins had crawled to safety in the tall

rocks of the canyon and had huddled, jammed together

in their thousands, for most of the day in thirst and hunger

until the predators had gone away. He had

noted that Arxoras and the other patriarchs had

forbidden the researchers to defend the warren, and

Shorak, as any researcher would have, had agreed,

even at the risk of his own life.

Helen hoped no ill had now befallen them.

The hot gold sun beat upon her face, warming

her; she had forgotten how much she missed the touch

of air moving on her skin. Whatever was going on

here, whatever peril had cleared the research camp,

here on this planet she felt a curious sense of

release. Here, at least, she would be in no

danger of meeting that terrible pseudo-Kirk, the

very sight of whom made her flesh

crawl.

We have to find Arxoras, she thought, striding

up the dusty path. Patriarch and

memmietieff, he will know what to do, how

to return Jim to being who he was ...

The soft humming increased, a curious

sweetness in the dusty air. To her nostrils

came the musky pungency of the Midgwins themselves,

and another sound, the dry, scaly rubbing of their

hides that she associated with the whisper of the night

wind in the long white grasses, the deep scents

of evening on the veldt.

She realized then what the humming had to be.

The entire population of the warren, nearly ten

thousand of the pear-shaped, wrinkled little Midgwins,

were formed in the thick concentric rings of the

Consciousness Web, skeletal hands entwined,

round eyes closed, rocking gently from side

to side and humming in the thrall of their dreams. The

delicate folds of their faces, the wrinkles

of the skin around the little beaks of their mouths, were

utterly relaxed. Hot sun shone on the knobby

little purple-brown shoulders beneath the long cloaks

of spidery hair, and the golden air seemed

to pulse with some alien peace, some deep union

born of contentment and the acceptance of fate.

Helen signed to DeSalle to remain where he

was, and stepped clear of the shelter of the thorn

trees. None of the Midgwins opened its eyes,

or seemed to hear, despite the fact that she

knew that licats hunted during the day, and that the

Midgwins generally posted guards to flash

telepathic warning signals from the rocks above the

camps. But she saw no such guards. No sound

broke the amber brightness of the afternoon, save for the

deep, purring hum of the web.

As quietly as she could, Helen walked toward

the thick-braided lines of bodies and arms.

The patriarchs of the warren, she knew, started the

web, sitting in its center, near the rocks that

marked the village spring. She could get nowhere

near that point, so close were the Midgwins packed

around it, but she climb ed up on one of the immense,

bubble-shaped red boulders that littered the ground

all around the warren, and from that vantage point

scanned the purple-brown faces near the center

for the telltale white muzzles of the patriarchs,

and most particularly for Arxoras's milk-white

hair.

But nowhere did she see him, or any

other of the old ones of the group. And, if she

remembered Shorak's reports correctly, it

was most unusual for the warren to enter web in the

daytime, when the danger of predation was greater and the

sun shined so hotly down. Yet even the children of the

warren were there, rocking and swaying in the lines beside

their parents, infants rolled close in their fathers'

pouches--not an unusual circumstance for a web,

she thought, but the children, being without armor and unable

to run, generally stayed in shelter during the day.

Her sense of foreboding increased. She dropped

back off the rock and returned to where DeSalle

waited in the shadows of a barrel tree a dozen

yards beyond the warren's edge. "He isn't there,"

she said softly, wondering what the hell they were

going to do now. Surely Yarblis couldn't have

gotten rid of all the patriarchs ...

DeSalle frowned, recognizing the anomaly

even from the little he knew about Midgwin society.

"Is there any way we can wake one of them up

and ask?"

Helen shook her head. "They're not really

asleep ... and I doubt that we could bring one of

them out of it, or that doing so would be a good idea.

Thetas told me they stay in the web for three or

four hours at a time, sometimes longer ... I

don't know whether any of them ever tried to break

into the trance. It would be horribly bad manners

at the very least ... I'm not even sure whether it

might be dangerous."

DeSalle's mouth twitched. "Sounds counter-

evolutionary to me," he commented, scanning the harsh

thorn jungle around them as they turned back down

the trail. "As far as I can tell, there are no

guards posted, no lookouts ..."

Helen shook her head. "I didn't see

any, and Shorak said there usually are in the daytime.

It's odd ..." She looked back over her

shoulder at the tight-crowded bodies, rocking

gently like the lapping of a calm sea, her heart

sinking within her. Her boots scuffed the thin dust

of the trail, the scent of it mingling with the dry,

strange smells of the thorn jungle, of the spring

around which the warren was built. Curious, she thought,

how the village itself didn't stink, the way so many

tribal villages did--the Midgwins were

fanatically clean. With that heavy a population,

she thought, you'd have to be, if only to avoid disease

and drawing predators to the spot ...

"It's odd that they'd be holding web

in the daytime," she said after a moment, her

anthropological training puzzling over the

problem even in the face of what might mean

serious trouble--for Jim, for the ship, for them all.

"And odder still that the patriarchs would be gone."

DeSalle was scanning the low thickets around

them as they walked, his phaser held ready, his

eyes narrowed against the hazy golden light. "One

might have something to do with the other."

"Maybe," Helen agreed worriedly. "And

both might have to do with--"

They stepped into the clearing in front of the

Research Institute and stopped dead. Standing in

front of Shorak's hut, wearing the mottled

gray-and-bronze camouflage of a battlefield

unit, were two Klingons.

Chapter Eighteen

"Attention ... Intruder alert! Repeat,

intruder alert! Red Alert!" Pacing the narrow

confines of the hull compartment, Spock looked up

sharply at the sound of the captain's voice.

"All Security personnel report for search

of decks Fifteen, Sixteen, and Nineteen

immediately! Repeat, all Security personnel

report for search of--"

"Is that you, Captain?" He turned

swiftly back to the computer. "What proof have you

that--"

"It's not me," replied Kirk's voice from

the voder. "It's the false me--or the real me,

whichever way you want to look at it. The computer

wouldn't have accepted a voder voice for an Alert

command--that's one thing you can't tamper with either."

"Of course not ..." Spock frowned. "Nor

could it have been overridden. An attempt to throw

Mr. Scott off the track, and to divert

personnel from a search of Deck Five and the

air-circulation equipment on Eight ..."

The warning light Uhura had installed blinked

suddenly on. Spock crossed to the locked

bulkhead in a stride, listened, and recognized

Lieutenant Uhura's characteristic swift step,

but native caution made him wait until she

herself opened the panel.

"These were all I could find on Deck Four."

She held out three masks to him. "I couldn't

wait to search further, but everything on the bridge

level and the Science section has been

emptied." Her dark eyes were wide and grave in

the flashing red light of the hall outside. "I'm

going back up--if there's going to be a

pressure drop, some kind of alarm has to be

sounded, and I don't care how much trouble we get

inffbecause of it."

"I agree," the Science officer said, taking

the masks--triangular face shields of the

immemorial pattern equipped with small

bottles of highly reduced oxygen and a CO;

[This formula is written in Nemeth Code]

filter system--and hooking their straps to the

utility satchel he had had with him during the

sweep. "And I believe that it is now incumbent

upon me to come with you. There is little to be gained by my

further concealment, since I believe that,

logically, Yarblis has violated any further

possibility of retaining the illusion of

normalcy on this ship."

Uhura rolled her eyes. "Yes, I'd

say that when the entire life-support system

goes down, that does blow the illusion of

normalcy ..."

Spock paused in the act of gathering tools and

slipping them into the satchel at his side.

"Remember that even if there were a major

rupture in the pressure skin of the ship, or a

serious drop in pressure, the bulkhead seals

would activate automatically to contain the danger

areas. In the event of pump failure,

sufficient oxygen would remain in the ship to permit

evacuation to the planet long before the emergency

masks would be needed. The fact that the masks were

tampered with indicates--"

"Spock ..." Kirk's voice from the voder

cut into his. "We've got another blackout

... on the Auxiliary Phaser deck, this time.

All computer control to the main phaser banks

has been cut."

Dimly, from the corridor, a warning siren

hooted; Spock stepped to the bulkhead and put his

ear to the thick wall, listening through it--Uhura

shouldered him aside and opened the bulkhead a

slit so that she too could hear. Through the crack the

red flash of emergency lights spilled over their

faces like intermittent lightning.

"Pressure drop alert," the computer's

female voice intoned. "Pressure drop

alert on decks Nine and Ten ... Emergency

situation on decks Seven and Eight.

Immediate evacuation procedures on decks Seven

and Eight ..."

Uhura swore.

"Sickbay," Spock said. "Main

transporter room, galley facilities,

Security, all recreation areas--"

"Spock!" Kirk's voice called out of the

computer. "Get to the bridge! Internal sensors

are picking up coolant gas flooding those

decks!"

"I shall contact you from there, Captain." Spock

slung on the satchel and, with Uhura at his

heels, strode out of the bulkhead room, locking

its hidden panel behind them. As they hastened through the

flaring splash of emergency lights toward the forward

turbolift, Spock conducted a rapid mental

inventory of his tools and the time it would take him

to use them, to break through the sealed pressure

doors, to repair whatever had been Yarblis's

precise target. He wondered too, as he and

Uhura rounded the corner, whether the temperature

controls had been likewise sabotaged, and how

long the hulls would retain heat.

He stopped before the doors of the turbolift.

Nothing happened.

The turbolifts were dead.

"We arrived not more than forty-eight hours after

Dr. Chu's transport ship departed," Commander

Khoaltar said, shaking his head politely as

Dr. McCoy waved him toward a seat on one

of the log seats around the Research Institute's

long-cold fire. "No, thank you ... we have

better means of displaying our civilization than

by sitting in the mud with the ... I suppose they must

be called "natives" now, instead of "local

fauna," since the United Contact Council

seems disposed to vote with the Pan-Sentients."

He rubbed his slender hands--he was small, almost

delicate looking, and his bronze-and-black

field-combat uniform was foppishly neat. But

there was something in the dark eyes that told a different

story McCoy reflected that he wouldn't have

wanted to have to patch up what was left of anyone

foolish enough to pick a fight with this man. Among the

several combat badges on his sleeve was the

small gold insignia of a high-ranking scholar.

"Oddly enough," the Klingon added, looking around

him at the circle of Enterprise medical and

security personnel, "I'm beginning

to believe that such a designation might be

correct."

"Now, whatever led you to that conclusion?" McCoy

asked sarcastically.

"And what happened to Dr. Chu and the others?"

Helen put in, sitting on the log at the

doctor's side. She looked exhausted, even

from the short walk up the trail. Though she could not

have been left on the ship, McCoy thought, she

should have remained on the shuttlecraft to rest.

"Did you ..." She hesitated.

"... have anything to do with it?" Khoaltar raised

one carefully trimmed brow. "In a manner of

speaking, yes."

"We can surely find a more comfortable place

to discuss this than here," his companion added, a

taller and somewhat older man named Urak. He

was more obviously a scholar, despite the mottled

camouflage garb. Probably, thought McCoy,

a civilian who'd been pushed through the same kind

of remedial physical training he'd had to put

up with when he'd joined the fleet. "Our own

research station is just on the far side of the hill;

though it's not completely set up yet, we can at

least offer you chairs to sit in, and something

civilized to drink."

DeSalle shook his head. "I think we'll

stay here, thanks." Oyama and Gomez,

unobtrusively stationed a short distance away in

the brush, were visible from the camp but too far off

to be caught in any single line of fire. Though

DeSalle had appeared to accept completely the

Klingons' assurances of peaceful intent, he

wasn't a man to take chances.

"We'd need to in any case," Helen added

quietly, "as we need to speak with the patriarchs

of the warren as soon as they come out of their trance."

"Don't plan on it being soon," Khoaltar

warned, folding up his slender form to sit on the

logs at McCoy's side. "They've been in

that trance, on and off, for over a week now, ever

since news of the plague reached them."

McCoy and Chapel glanced at each other.

"Plague?"

"In, I believe it is called, the

Walpuk Warren," the Klingon said. "It lies

downriver not far from here--I suspect they will be

returning at any time now. We had been here, as

I said, less than twenty-four hours when word

first reached the patriarchs here of it. They

must have meditated, trying to heal from a distance, as it

is their belief that they can do ..."

"I think it's more than a belief," Helen

remarked softly.

"But less than a certainty," Khoaltar

replied, "as even they were willing to admit after a

day and a night. There is only so much one can do

against the effects of prolonged starvation and

undernourishment ..."

McCoy's fist clenched sharply on his knee.

"Dammit, I tried to tell Thetas that ..."

"He did not disbelieve you, Doctor," the

Klingon replied in his soft voice. The slim

brown hand picked up a twig from the ground,

scratched a random, shuffling pattern in the

sulfur-colored dust. A crimson lizard

skittered along the thorn stem behind him, regarding

the strangers with a bobbing blossom of stalked,

black, hysterical eyes. From the warren the soft

hum of the web continued, gentle and buzzing in the

heavy heat of the afternoon.

"And in time, even the Midgwins themselves

apparently believed. Because their patriarchs went

to Dr. Shorak asking for his assistance in the

matter--medical assistance, and technical knowledge,

for a matter which, for the first time, was beyond the limitations

of whatever psychic powers these creatures may

possess."

McCoy sighed bitterly. "I told him.

I told him it was only a matter of time ..."

Helen looked curiously across at the slender

form in its mottled black and bronze, sitting,

almost invisible, in the harsh patchwork of shadows at

Dr. McCoy's side. "But Shorak didn't

have anything in the way of medicines," she said.

"Medical knowledge, yes; L'jian is a doctor.

But not the medicines, the antibiotics necessary to stem

that kind of an outbreak. It was their commitment

to living truly among these people, to teaching them and working

with them. Even L'jian couldn't have done more than

advise."

"No," agreed Urak, from his standing position,

gently stroking his short, soft black beard, behind

his aristocratic colleague's shoulder. "He

couldn't. However, we had no such commitment ...

and we did happen to have a certain amount of pan-

biotic medicines, as well as concentrated

nutrients to temporarily combat the starvation in that

area of the planet that was one of the chief causes of the

plague."

"And you gave it to them?" McCoy asked,

deeply suspicious.

"We are not monsters, Doctor," Khoaltar

replied with a haughty inclination of his head. "As

well as researchers, we are in a way of being

diplomats. And, since the United Council

seems disposed to regard the Midgwins as

sentient, and will very likely so vote, it behooves

us to present our own case for the development of this

planet in the best possible light. Very likely

we will be censured by the eistry of Expansion for

wasteful expenditure but in ten years, or

twenty, it may be an investment that will pay

well."

"Then it wasn't you who wrecked the

transmitter?" Chapel asked doubtfully.

Khoaltar turned upon her a smile of

surprising sweetness. "My dear lady," he

said, "if a Klingon wishes to wreck a

transmitter, believe me, he will go about it with more

efficiency than a wooden lever and a rock. According

to Dr. Thetas--who for the first day of our stay here was

the only member of the Federation party who did not

avoid us with hostile glares--both

transmitters were found demolished the morning after

you left the planet. I suspect that after a

state of d@etente was reached, Dr. Shorak would

have unbent sufficiently to request the use of our

transmitter--he is shockingly prejudiced for a

Vulcan."

"That may have something to do with his wife's sister

having been taken prisoner at the battle of

Plethak," DeSalle remarked, and Khoaltar

made a deprecating gesture with the twig he still

held in one graceful hand.

"As I myself was only five years old at the

time of that battle, I would not know," he said.

"Urak, perhaps you would care to go back to the

encampment and bring us all something to drink? Mr.

DeSalle, if you find this activity

suspicious--as you very well may, this being a

disputed world--you may wish to send one of your

guards, either with him or behind him. But I assure

you that if we were to destroy your party--and if we had

destroyed Dr. Shorak's earlier--the

consequences to us would be ... unpleasant in the

extreme."

"From the Federation? Or the Organians?"

McCoy asked thoughtfully, as DeSalle nodded

to Oyama to follow the Klingon at a

careful distance, back through the hot, spiky fringes

of the bush, toward the site of their alleged research

camp. "Or from your own Emperor, for complicating

an already complicated situation?"

Khoaltar was silent for a few moments, dark

eyes returning to the patterns he sketched, with a

calligrapher's light hand, in the dust. Then he

said, "All three, certainly, but ..." He

glanced up, and there was worry in the onyx gaze.

"But mostly from the Midgwins themselves."

"Damn you, man, what d'you mean, the

programmin's been blanked?" Scotty shouted

into the intercom on the emergency bridge, his

accent, like McCoy's southern drawl, becoming

far more marked under stress. "It's a bluidy

utility program, man!" His blunt fingers

stabbed another toggle as lights on the small

unit on the arm of the chair in which he sat--the

captain's chair, smaller than the one on the

main bridge, but like it, equipped with full input

from every intercom on the ship--flared on again.

Sulu's voice was clipped and terse with

tension. "Mr. Scott? Any word from the

captain? We've got everything below Deck Six

evacuated--we're running an accountability

check ..."

"To hell with the accountability check, are you

gettin' the air-circ feeds straightened out?"

"As well as we can, sir. But they were booby-

trapped--as far as we can tell, they were set up

to reroute the xyrene gas until the doors of the

systems rooms were opened--then they blew.

We've got Bray on repair of one of them,

and he says the damage isn't too bad ...

Can you get up here?"

"And how am I to do that with the turbolifts shut

down and Deck Seven swamped in gas? You know

there isn't a--" He broke off and swung around

as there was a stir in the crowd around the emergency

doors into the bridge. The crowd of security

personnel, originally sent to chase the putative

intruder from decks 15, 16, and 19, had been

gathered on the auxiliary bridge--which was far too

small to hold that many people--ever since the start of the

alert, unable to make their way back to the primary

hull where the trouble now seemed to be. The harried

engineer opened his mouth to demand who the hell that

was, and left it open.

"Status report, Mr. Scott?"

It was the late Mr. Spock, looking very much

his usual calm Vulcan self, with a flustered and

rather rumpled Lieutenant Uhura in tow.

After one swift gulp of astonishment,

Scotty vacated the command chair, in which Mr.

Spock seated himself as if he had never been on

the shuttlecraft deck in his life. "All

turbolifts are out, sir," he reported,

making a heroic recovery. "The engineer in

Turbo Control reports the operations program

that guides them has been taken out of the computer--not

only the main computer, but the backups as well.

We've had power blackouts all over the ship--

all owin' to cuts in the communications lines ...

decks Seven and Eight are flooded with xyrene,

and there doesn't seem to be a full oxygen

mask on the ship ..."

"Leaving the auxiliary phaser controls

isolated at the bottom of the primary hull,"

Mr. Spock concluded. "Can the turbolifts be

operated manually?"

Scott shook his head. "Not a chance, Mr.

Spock. And the captain's gone missing ..."

"Mr. Spock ..." Kirk's voice cut

in from the intercom on the arm of the chair, and even with the

flattened quality of the speaker, Spock's

sensitive hearing identified the limited range

of a voder-manufactured artificial voice.

"Yes, Captain?"

"I've found it. Among the programs

Yarblis copied for his own reference onto wafer

was the entire inventory of all the main phaser-

bank programs. He can now upload them into a

590-capacity or higher portable computer--of which

the ship has two, and three 670's, counting the

one Miller borrowed to program Brunowski's

remixer ..."

"Captain," Mr. Scott broke in, "where

are you? They've been lookin' high and low for ye

..."

"I'm quite safe, Mr. Scott, but I'm

trapped where I am on Deck Eight," he

replied, quite truthfully. "You've done an

excellent job of coping with this--t hank you ..."

"And who's this Yarblis fellow?"

"The intruder," Kirk said quietly. "The

intruder who has been with us since Midgwis

... an intruder who may very well be capable of

mimicking my voice. He has, as I have said,

every ability to take over the main phaser

deck now. And by linking back the program into the

phaser controls at their source, he can either use

the phaser banks himself ... or override the

damper backups, and blow up the ship."

"Do you know, Doctor, what it was that disposed us

to take seriously the claims that the Midgwins were

sentient at all, and not the ... subsentient

primate species that everyone--including Federation

researchers--originally thought they were?"

McCoy glanced back up the path in the

direction of the towering rocks that marked the warren.

The soft, humming coo of the Consciousness Web could

still be heard, though it was growing softer now, sinking

into a whisper. He remembered the preliminary

reports which described it as herd behavior,

possibly having something to do with mating or the

protection of the old and the infants of the warrens, for

those were the ones closest to the centers of the webs.

Even after Dr. Shorak had discovered the largely

telepathic nature of Midgwin communication, the

Klingons had continued to claim that the Consciousness

Web was more analogous to the swarming instincts of

various forms of hymenoptera or espikotherae

than to anything relating to sentient beings.

"Because they were able to kill your scouts?" He had

begun to speak sarcastically, but didn't, for it

suddenly occurred to him that such might very well have

been the thing that had won the Klingons' respect.

"Not the fact in itself," Khoaltar said. "That

definition would qualify Denebian slime

devils for sentience--though I do not doubt that there

are some bleeding hearts in the Pan-Sentient

League who eventually will attempt to claim

exactly that, and file suit against everyone who

has mined the swamps of Deneb Cantios Four

for violation of the Prime Directive. But the

way in which that killing was done."

DeSalle, who had been leaning against the

trunk of one of the stunted trees and

unobtrusively watching the 360-range sensor

in his palm, frowned. "I thought they were just

reported as ... killed."

The Klingon shook his head. "There is evidence

that one or more Midgwins ... in effect, took

mental possession of the bodies of members of the

scouting parties. This we have deduced from analysis

of transmissions of the various parties' reports.

It appears that at least some of the Midgwins could--

possess--control--our men, knowing what

they knew, understanding what they would have understood. And

thus disguised, they bided their time, and waited for

unguarded moments."

"Yes," McCoy said softly. "Yes ...

I know."

DeSalle looked startled--Khoaltar

turned his head sharply, his dark eyes narrowing.

"Do you?"

But McCoy made no further reply. After

a moment Khoaltar continued, "But you see,

to understand, and to use, the information they found within their

victims' minds, they had to be ... sentient,

surely. And almost certainly intelligent. And

to tell you the truth, Doctor ... in spite of the

fact that it is our mission to learn as much about them

as possible, to establish communication and trade with

them if we can, I am just as glad that they have kept

their distance from us."

Chapter Nineteen

"You're sure this is how you want to do this,

Mr. Spock?" Scotty's voice echoed

strangely in the long, narrow hull of the machinery

room which ran the length of the Engineering hull's

uppermost level--Deck 15, whose dim shadows

pulsed with the faint throb of the air-circulation

machinery for all the decks below, and whose curving

walls seemed to reverberate with the power of the twin

engine nacelles on their pylons far above. "I

mean, I could handle the repair of those air

pumps mesel' and let you take a security

guard with you instead of me bringin' along Bistie

to make my job quicker."

Spock shook his head, and slipped the oxygen

mask down over his eyes and nose, transforming his

head, in the uncertain light, into a strange

insectoid shape of straps and bulbs and

monstrous, crystalline eyes. "Repair of the

air-circulation system is of the first priority,"

he said, "followed, as quickly as possible, with the

reprogramming of the turbolifts. From there help

can be gotten to us."

"But if the captain's trapped on Deck

Eight--that area of the ship's flooded with gas."

His dark eyes were filled with concern.

"The captain is quite safe where he is,"

Spock replied evenly, and turning from the

still-baffled chief engineer and his assistant--one of the

few who could repair one air system

unaided while Scott worked on the other--he

opened the repair hatch that let into the food

conveyor which ran all the way up from the main

recycling plant on Deck 21 up to Deck

8. He switched on the sharp white beam of his

mask light, contemplated the narrow, pitch-dark,

and rather slimy tube with its linked ladder of

bucketlike carriers, and with stoic distaste

climbed in.

In any environment but that of a starship, he

thought, rapidly ascending the steep-slanted

tunnel by means of the stilled conveyor chains, such

a place would invariably have been the haunt of

both vermin and molds of every description.

Despite meticulous sealing and sterilization

procedures, the place seemed to be faintly

coated with a thin organic residue, the dark

semiliquid of pure CHON that could be

theoretically recombined to form anything from the most

delicate of blancmanges to Romulan chili,

though in practice the results were frequently

less than inspired. Spock was well aware that

the stuff was perfectly clean, and that neither rats,

nor insects, nor Antraean garbage

worms, nor molds of any kind, existed on the

ship ... nevertheless, the long, dripping passage

stretching away into the darkness above him looked like the

sort of place that might contain all of them. He

was glad he was wearing his oxygen mask. Pure

CHON might be absolutely clean and

healthful, but its odor was scarcely aesthetic.

Moreover, there was no telling how far the

coolant gas had leaked down the tube from Deck

8.

Xyrene gas was heavy and tended to flow

downward; the first drifts and filaments of it were

detectable in the glow of his mask light and the

crisscrossed, swaying beams of Scott's and

Bistie's, four or five meters below the place

where the tunnel itself leveled out to pass above the

remixer room in the primary hull. By the time they

reached the level stretch, the concentration was high

enough, according to the gauge of Spock's tricorder,

to have caused unconsciousness and rapid death in

anyone breathing it. The deck below them must be

heavily flooded.

"There should be another repair hatch about five

meters ahead," came Scott's voice in his

earphone.

Spock moved his head; the beam of his

mask light flashed across the access port, through

whose unsealed edges the pink gas was leaking in a

wavering veil. "I see it," he replied.

"Mr. Scott, I believe matters would

proceed most expeditiously if you and Ms.

Bistie both proceeded up the gangways

to Deck Five and effected repairs on the

pumps controlling Deck Seven, rather than

attempting to repair those on this level that control

the decks below."

"I'm not sure I've got enough oxygen in this

little bottle to do a major repair anyway,"

came Bistie's voice through Spock's

earphone.

"Indeed. I shall proceed downward to the main

phaser deck ..." He opened the hatchway and

put his head cautiously through. With the failure of the

pumps, the lights had cut out too. Only the

ghastly reddish glare of the emergency systems

glowed, intermittently illuminating a hellish

swamp of shifting pink mists drifting between the dark

islands of the remixers below. Spock reached up

to adjust the beam of his mask lamp to widest

scan. It showed him no danger, and his sensitive

hearing picked up no sound of footfall or

breath. Sitting up cautiously in the narrow

space, he dangled his legs through the aperture,

let himself carefully down by his hands, and

dropped.

"You be careful, Mr. Spock." Scotty

dropped down after him, his red uniform shirt, his

trousers, his hands and face--where his face could be

seen through the strapwork of the mask that covered it--all

smeared with a brownish film of CHON in the

bloody glare. "I don't want to be losin'

you again before I hear how you got out of that hangar

deck in the first place."

"It was elementary, my dear Mr. Scott

..." They halted before the emergency gangways that

ran up either side of the silent turbolift shaft

--massive pressure doors had slipped from the

walls to seal them off. "The pressure drop, of

course," Scott muttered, unshipping the pin

laser from the utility satchel he wore and going

to one knee to begin cutting at the locks. "And good

odds the one above this'll be the same ..."

"As indeed it should," Spock replied

austerely. "They are designed to prevent loss

of atmosphere, or, conversely, the sort of

contamination that would occur were the deck above

us not already thoroughly flooded."

"But it means the deck bel'll be sealed too.

Shall I come down with you to cut that?"

There was a swift crackle of the intercom near

the turbolift door--Kirk's voice came

on, the voder voice, the computer voice, as far

as Spock could tell. Of course, he thought. From

the safety of the computer, the captain was perfectly

capable of tracking them through the in-ship comm link.

"It'll take too long," Kirk cut in

crisply. "The hull storage compartment behind the

forward emergency transporter room has been

pressurized, and there's a trap down into a hull

section below that--also pressurized--and one below that.

They're a littl e cold, but they're livable. That'll

put you on Deck Ten, below the level of the

pressure drop ..."

"Pressurized a hull section?" Scott

demanded, shocked that anyone would take such

liberties with his beloved ship. "Now who the

divil ...?"

"Just don't trip over Mr. Gilden's

collection of magazines--we owe him that at

least."

"Very good, Captain." Spock switched off the

comm link and turned to Scott. "Get Deck

Seven cleared and bring Security through to the phaser

deck as quickly as you can," he said, his deep

voice quiet. "If you have any communication from the

captain while you are repairing the pumps ..."

He hesitated, wondering what he would do if the

pseudo-Kirk started giving orders again.

Wondering what he would do if it was not the real

Kirk, the computer Kirk, who had just guided him

by that perilous route ... it was very difficult

to identify a voder voice as such on the tinny

comm link. He knew too that Yarblis had been

prowling the ship, seeking out its secret ways, for

nights. If Yarblis had guessed that someone was

using a voder to replicate Kirk's voice

... "Ask him which side of the ship Yeoman

Brunowski's chocolate factory is on, and

upon what deck. He should tell you Deck

Twenty-three, starboard. If he does not,

distrust whatever he says."

And with that Spock turned and strode off down the

circular corridor toward the emergency

transporter room, his angular figure quickly

swallowed up in darkness and bloody murk.

The time was at hand.

Yarblis Geshkerroth the Ghost Walker sat

in the deepest chamber of the floating warren of the

Hungries, staring into the screen of the Arkresh-

670, the auxiliary portable into which he had

downloaded all the killing-ray programming ...

the terms for these things, even, were beginning to cross and

meld in his mind. The Hungries, who counted

everything, measured everything, had made machines

to ape the powers of the mind and the body, had more words

than his own people did, and those words were easier to say

with the mind than to use the longer, slower terms that

forced the mind to consider what it was that was actually being

done.

It would be so easy, it would be so pleasant, not

to consider what it was that he was about to do.

Around him the red lights flared on and off, like the

rising and dying of hideously shortened days, and with every

glaring blink of red, there followed a swoop back

into eternal night. Beyond the wired plex interior

windows, the machinery of the phaser banks themselves was

dyed a gory crimson, from which lines of scarlet

eyes stared at him with the single-minded intensity of

madness. There had been sirens hooting a warning like

the mating cry of a Bargump, but he had, at

least, found the tannoy speaker for that--his hand still

bled a little from the rage-induced strength with which he'd

ripped it out of the wall.

The silence was balm to his soul as he worked,

programming in those things that he had written down,

studied, memorized all these endless, hellish

days and nights--plans assembled from all the

schematics he could find in the computer, all the

data and skill he could glean out of the memory of

James T. Kirk.

Soon he would be free.

And Rhea would be safe.

Rhea.

He could see her in the forward viewscreen, as

he had seen her yesterday from the bridge--as he

had seen her for one blinding, heart-breaking moment

that first day of his masquerade, as the Enterprise

left orbit. He had barely been able to force

himself to tear his eyes away from her--barely been

able to act as he knew the captain would. And that,

too, had angered him ... that they had become

casual about the soul-hurting beauty and wonder of

seeing a world.

But she filled the viewscreen now, and he was

free to look his fill. She was so dark,

so golden, with her silken oceans and the soft

chevelure of saffron clouds. The infinite

beauty of her mottled colors, amber, smoke,

the chocolate-brown of bare rock and the purpled

hues of the seas; snowfields like the bloom of

frost upon a ripe and delicate fruit. Had it

been possible, he would have broken out the windows of

every observation port on the ship, so that he could lean

out and hear her sing.

He worked deftly, the small, soft little hands

that it still amazed him to see, adept on these

keypads of letters, forming concepts precise enough in

their detail for these hateful counting machines

to comprehend. He had cut through the leads from the main

computer, the open access port gaping like a wound in

the wall behind him, just beneath where the tannoy speaker

dangled on its faintly sparking wires. He

had plugged in the secondary computer and used his

voice--the voice of the bright warrior Kirk--

to route his way through the guard on the program. It

would be, he estimated, a long while before the

evil air could be coaxed away from the decks that

separated him from the redshirt guards, as long perhaps

as it took to gather a double handful of edible seeds in

a dry summer. They would come as swiftly as they

could, knowing their computer had lost touch with the killing-

ray place, but the gangway doors were sealed, and

it would take them time to cut through.

More than enough time.

Then Rhea would be safe, and he could go home.

Home to the Consciousness Web. Home to those

who loved him, and whom he loved. For one instant

at the thought of it, though he clamped the disciplines

of his soul down upon it immediately after, something inside

him cried like a child.

Later, he thought, later there will be time for

relief ...

He had explored this vessel thoroughly enough that

he knew that, even when he abandoned this abominable

alien body--consumed now with fever and exhaustion

as it was--he could find his way to the transporter

room and operate its controls. It was harder

to think than it had been, harder to remember

everything. Perhaps it would be easier, better, when he

was clear of this poisoned, exhausted body, this

sink of instincts and memories and lusts that were not his

own.

Now he concentrated his mind on the task

ahead, referring at times to the notes he had

made and brought with him, programming in the

proper commands, the proper numbers, the grid

sequences having to do with things that as Kirk he

understood but that as the Ghost Walker he did not

... orbital shift and firing order, power

levels and primary ignition. So intent was he

on this that he did not hear the stealthy creak of

boot leather in the corridor outside until it

was almost upon him; it was in fact the faint,

preliminary grind of the manual door control that

made him swing around in his chair and duck behind the

console even as the doors slammed open and the white

beam of a phaser stabbed into the alternate glare and

darkness of the room.

Furious and shocked as he was that any could have

avoided his precautions--he had not fought the

Hungries for years for nothing--his mind, the

trained psychic skill of a memmietieff;

slashed out in defense, slamming the doors like

pinching jaws at the intruder's arm and body. As

the intruder sprang and rolled free of them--into the

room--in the bleeding glare of the lights he saw

that, impossibly, it was the Vulcan Spock, the

Counter of Everything, and at once many things became

suddenly clear.

He had not died in the hangar deck, and the

attempt had crystallized his suspicions of his

captain. He knew what his captain had become

--he had used his logic to discover the nature of the

threat.

Rage exploded in Yarblis, rage fed

by loneliness, by grief, by all that he had done--

rage and fear that at this late moment his plan for the

saving of Rhea would yet be crossed. This rage

gave strength to the psychokinetic abilities

latent in the brains of all these alien beings. As

Spock flung himself along the wall to get a

clear shot at him where he crouched behind the console,

Yarblis reached out again with his mind and ripped the

dangling tannoy speaker away from its wires,

sent it hurtling through the half-dark air at the

back of the Vulcan's head.

Spock tried too late to duck, the corner

of the speaker gouging into his shoulder, tearing the blue

shirt he wore and bringing blood green as keval

sap welling from the flesh beneath. The room was almost

bare, containing little beyond the phaser control console,

the two chairs before it, and the small computer that

Yarblis had used to bypass the ship's main

controls; they could hide from one another on

opposite sides of the console, but

Spock was armed. Staggering with shock, the Vulcan

rose to fire straight down across the console at

him, but Yarblis reached out with his mind again, this time

catching him in the same whirlwind of angry force

that he had used to hurl the speaker, flinging him

back against the far wall of the room with bone-

cracking force. The phaser fell from his hand,

clattering on the floor. Even so, Spock

tried to get up again, groggily fighting

unconsciousness, and Yarblis flung at him

all the smashing impact of his mind.

Spock's body hit the wall with the hard

crack of a skull striking metal. He slid

to the floor.

Yarblis picked up the phaser, set it

to kill, and walked around the console to where the

Vulcan lay, beneath the vast viewscreen filled

with Rhea's gold and damson face.

The grinding whir of the doors alerted him again.

He swung around, leveling the weapon ...

But there was no one framed in the hard, open

rectangle of flashing crimson light. He

took two steps toward it across the round chamber,

moving cautiously, listening for the whisper of breath,

the rustle of clothing ...

And then he saw it. Stepping forth from the wall that

held the open access port he'd used to cut

into the computer leads, he saw him, as he'd seen

him for those few hours in the moonligh t down on the

world ... the ghost shape of James T. Kirk.

He saw the shape quite clearly, though he knew

it was not his eyes that beheld the strange, elongated

body, the tiny head with its fair hair, the

hazel eyes and decisive chin which stared back at

him unbelieving from the mirror every morning.

That Kirk's spirit, his mind, should have retained its

cohesiveness after this long away from his body was

impossible, unbelievable. A few days, a

week perhaps ... He had searched the ship, time and

time again, after the sweep, searching for the whisper, the

faintest clue, as to the presence he had felt in

its shadows every day, every hour before. And he had felt

nothing. Shock held him speechless.

"Don't do it, Yarblis," he heard

Kirk's voice in his mind. "Destroying this ship

will gain you nothing--nothing but the possibility of war

between the Federation and the Klingons, because neither side is

going to believe that the Midgwins were capable of

blowing up a starship. And your people are going to be

caught in the middle of any conflict."

He drew his head back into his shoulders,

an instinctive gesture of defense, and hissed,

"Destroy this ship? Do you think I am a fool?

No, they would never believe ... they think we

are fools, and children, who need only to be guided

into the right way, the way of Yours or Mine, the

way of first seducing the Earth Spirit Mother and then

raping her and making her their slave ... Your

way. The easy way of the Hungries, the way

of the full belly and the empty soul. It is not this

ship, this ... this metal driftwood floating

on a sea of nothing with its cargo of dirt

crawlers, that I will destroy."

The very gesture of his head was the same,

remembered, re-created, in the faintly glowing

shape that the mind can be trained to retain when it

leaves the body. "What then?"

"What do you think?" Yarblis demanded

savagely, his very soul hurting as he pronounced

the words. "The Bindigo Warren--the tumor where the

poison is growing--the place where your seducers

have started already on the souls of humankind. My people

have begun to listen to what yours have to say. You have

taken the soul of our greatest, of my friend, my father,

my brother, Arxoras the Wise ..." His

voice broke with the hurt of it, with the grief

at killing his friend, the greater grief of seeing

what he would become. He shook his head

violently, tears of that grief, that fury,

filling his eyes.

"And when they see the warren destroyed by the

bolts from out of the heavens, never will they trust you

anymore. And that is as it should be, for you will turn

our people into what you are."

And he saw Kirk's face first stunned, then

slowly change with shock. "They're down there,"

he whispered.

"A mother can transmit disease unto her child with a

kiss, golden captain," Yarblis said, his

borrowed voice cracking under the strain. "It is

better thus."

"And you would murder your friends ..."

"My friends in the warren who are helping me with

this, who concealed my body and cared for it ... they

would rather die in Rhea's defense than live

to see what would become of her, when the beauty of

living dies. And those others ... If they knew

what they would become in time, after your ways have

taught them to say Mine and Yours, after your ways

have killed the warmth of the web that binds us

all each to each, they would thank me, and welcome

the fire. If Arxoras could see what he will

become, as I can see it--"

The red lights flashed, on and off, on and off.

Kirk was silent with horror, and Yarblis

remembered, dimly and belatedly, that the woman

Helen had gone down to the planet, and also the

healer McCoy, whom Kirk cared for ... But that

was impossible, he thought in the next second,

impossible to truly care without the Consciousness

Web ...

"You don't know the future, Yarblis."

"I know what you are!" Yarblis screamed

back at him, at that impossible, glowing shape in

the scarlet-drenched darkness, at that alien mind that

should have dissolved shrieking as the other Hungries

had dissolved into the soft golden air of the only world

worth having, the only world worth saving, the only

world worth living in. "I know what you have done

to yourselves, and what your people will do to mine! You will feed

them the food that makes them Hungry inside, that

makes them forget what Beauty is. You will deceive

them into asking for that death! And I know that my people would

rather die than become as you are!"

He felt Kirk's mind grope out, seizing

at the broken piece of the tannoy speaker to fling

at him, and with his own mind he hurled it aside.

Then like a splintering crash of light, he threw his

strength against the strength of Kirk's mind, tearing

at it, like the scream of the induction field from the

sweep, seeking to break it impulse from

impulse, spark from spark. The power and rage of

his mind were such that the wired plex of the internal

windows bulged and shattered, fragments of it showering

across the floor of the room and rattling like scarlet

hail upon the machinery beyond. He felt Kirk

cry out in pain and felt the wrenching twist of his

despairing strength, flinging the debris of the speaker

at him, trying to strike him with it, to break his

concentration ... to kill him perhaps. He struck the

speaker aside again, and Kirk retreated before him

into the hallway, trying to pull the doors shut,

to protect himself ...

The blast of Yarblis's mind wrenched the

doors from their sockets, sending them clattering on

the hard and flat and hateful floor, and over them

he strode into the hall in pursuit.

He caught a glimpse of Kirk's

glittering shape near the door of one of the storage

holds which were the only other rooms on this

level, fumbling with the limited strength of his mind

to open the door, to get at the objects inside--

alien weapons, stones for analysis by the Geo

lab, boxes of samples of earth. Yarblis had

seen the inventories, as he had seen the

inventories of every storeroom on the ship. Though

he had very little control over it, Kirk's

electrostatic spirit shadow had the random strength of

psychic energy--and obviously, thought Yarblis,

he had more power than he had given him credit for.

He must be destroyed, and destroyed quickly, before

he found another way to thwart the plan.

The door gave suddenly, crashing open;

Yarblis saw Kirk duck inside. He still

followed the routes of human form and flesh, as if

instinctively knowing they bound him together. Yarblis

strode after him, slamming the doors back with his

mind as Kirk tried to get them to remain shut

against him. The white blaze of his mental energy

he threw at that flickering ghost, shredding at it,

weakening it, distracting it, and somewhere in the darkness

of the hold he heard the violent, random knocking

of that embattled soul's terror and rage. A

heavy box of soil samples bounded down from a

shelf, missing him by yards, rolled like a leaf

across the floor of the hold.

He swung around again, sensing where Kirk had

to be hiding among the banks of shelves, the

stacks of boxes in the shadowy gloom.

Outside, Yarblis could hear the dim throb of the

warning sirens from elsewhere on the deck, reminding

him that time was short--that he must accomplish his deed

soon. He knew where Kirk was hiding, and his own

fury and desperation swept the shelves between them

aside as if they had been dry weed stems,

sending them crashing down in a shower of rocks and

dust and bursting crates. Kirk tried again

to hurl a massive sample of some kind of ore,

some rock that smelled of distant worlds and alien

seas, at his head, but his strength was lessening, his

control almost nonexistent. It was not a matter of

hiding, of dodging, as it had been with the Vulcan

Spock and his phaser--it was a matter only of

strength to strength, of will against will, and Yarblis

knew his will was stronger.

He smashed at Kirk's will with his blind brute

strength and felt him stagger, felt him founder and

slip. His will he sent forth like the blasting roar of a

battle cry, the battle cry of the will that had

shattered the dark-skinned Klingon

Hungries when they had materialized on his world

in a shower of sparkling bodiless fire. He felt

Kirk cry out in pain, and stones sprang from the

shelves that remained, whirled in the air like blown

leaves and then fell clattering on the floor.

Before him he could only see the glowing form of

Kirk, flung back against the wall as Spock

had been flung, arms raised as if they could

protect him ...

Spock, he thought. Spock was in the room

with the phaser. If he revived, he would come

seeking him again, seeking to kill this body, and he

could not stand against them both.

He flung one more blast of his mind against

Kirk, and saw the pale glow of him flicker and

fade. Turning, he fled from the storage hold

back toward the phaser control chamber,

remembering suddenly all the precepts of

gunnery ... Had Kirk been trying to delay

him, deceive him, trick him into abandoning his post

until the planet's orbit had taken the

Bindigo Warren out of his range?

He would do it, he thought, to save the woman

Helen, and his friend McCoy, down there in the warren

--down where the fire would fall.

But it would not save the warren from destruction.

He, Yarblis, would not allow this chance to be

wasted, this last chance to cut the cancer from the body of

Rhea, this last chance to awaken those he loved to the

danger in which they stood.

Spock still lay unconscious where he had

fallen, the broken crystal of the window glittering

all around him, green blood leaking from the cut in

his shoulder and the savage gash on the side of his

head.

Gasping with his exertions, barely able to walk,

Yarblis leaned his short human arms upon the

console and looked down at the re adings.

The Bindigo Warren was still within range.

He raised his head and looked up at the

viewscreen, where Rhea still hung against the

darkness, the face of beauty, of love, of song.

For a moment the thought of the Consciousness Web

overwhelmed him, and a despairing gladness that the

Bindigo Warren was still in daylight--that they would not

be in the web when they were destroyed. But the other

warrens would know. And he would spread the word, would

tell them what the Hungries' ship had done--

he would force them to turn aside from that soft,

sweet poison forever.

And he himself would have peace.

Behind him, dimly, Yarblis could hear the far-

off knocking of a poltergeist, like the last helpless

cries of the dying. His mind was James T.

Kirk's, clear and concise and knowing what he

did. He finished setting the coordinates

to take in the Bindigo Warren and an area ten

miles around it, flipped the primary ignition

switches, waited while the lights behind the

shattered spiderwebs of the internal windows blinked

from red to green.

He would go home. Back to the Consciousness

Web ... back to the love, the strength, the

sweetness of Rhea--Rhea as it should be, and now

always would. He could see his hands--Kirk's hands

--trembling, felt the sweat running down his

face, and recognized that the last effort of will, of

psychokinetic energy, had sapped the final

strength from this borrowed body. Good, he thought,

with a final burst of rage at the creature who had

so nearly thwarted all his plans. I have not

only defeated you, I have hurt you ...

He was thinking of James T. Kirk as the

last lights went from red to green and he hit the

firing switch.

On the forward screen he saw the red beams

lance out into darkness, and a moment later saw the

pinprick of fire blaze forth on the planet's

shadowy flank.

Then he sank his head down to the controls, and

closing his eyes, gratefully embraced the dark.

Chapter Twenty

"For the dear God's sake, would you mind

tellin' me what that was all about, Mr.

Spock?"

Spock looked up from the diagnostic gauges

on the outside of the stasis chamber, beyond whose thick

crystal portholes he could see the body of

James T. Kirk, sheet drawn up to his

naked chest and arms, face relaxed in sleep.

He had still been breathing when Spock had lifted

him off the control console of the phaser banks; it

had been only a matter of a minute or two before

Uhura had contacted him over the comm link to let

him know sickbay--and in fact most of Deck 7

--had been cleared of the contaminant gas. Spock

had carried him back up through the illegally

pressurized--and crazily junk-

filled--hull compartments, to the hole Scotty had

made in the floor of Deck 7 directly over

the uppermost of the three--a hole, coincidentally

enough, in the floor of Mr. Spock's own

office.

Though Spock was not a medical doctor, the

gauges on the stasis chamber all looked

normal.

He turned to Mr. Scott, who was leaning in

the doorway. The chief engineer was still smeared head

to foot with brown CHON residue, his hands

further blackened with oil, and his red sleeves

blotched with assorted other colors from pressure

fluids, lubricants, and burns.

"We got the turbolifts going again,"

Scotty added, brushing back his short black

hair and leaving a long greenish streak on his

forehead. "And Deck Eight is about cleared.

Lieutenant Uhura tells me there's a log

entry of Transporter Room Four operating,

though that was when that part of Deck Seven was still

flooded with gas ..."

"Indeed?" Spock said, raising an eyebrow,

and nodded to himself.

"You mean to say you expected that?"

"Of course. It was only logical." He

considered the captain's unconscious face once

more, hollow-cheeked and lined with exhaustion, then

stepped over to the comm link switch on the wall.

"Lieutenant Uhura, can you patch me through

to Dr. Gordon on the surface of the planet?"

"Dr. Gordon?" Scott whispered

unbelievingly. "Last I heard, the poor

lass was in intensive care and not expected to get

over it! You mean to say--"

"Yes, Mr. Spock?" came the scarred,

gritted voice over the comm link.

"Did you succeed in getting in touch with the

patriarch Arxoras?"

There was a long pause. Then Helen replied,

"Er, yes. Yes, I'm here with him now. The thing

is--"

"I think it is necessary that you convince him

to return to the ship with you as quickly as possible.

Please reassure him of the safety of the

shuttlecraft, and of our good intentions toward him and

his people ... but I have reason to believe that the Ghost

Walker has returned to the planet ..."

"Yes," Helen said. "Yes, I know he

has."

Spock paused, hearing the flat note in her

voice.

After a moment she went on, "How is the

captain?"

"I think that is the reason," Spock said, "that

Arxoras should be here."

There was another silence. Then she said, "I'll

see what I can do."

Spock sighed as the channel closed out, and

rubbed the bridge of his nose with tired fingers. His

head ached in spite of the pain suppressants in

the small medi-patch that the second-shift nurse

had placed over the gash in his temple--a patch

that stood out startlingly rosy against the greenish cast

of his skin--and he felt weary to his bones. Before

they had closed the captain in the stasis chamber,

he had entered, hesitantly and cautiously,

into a mind meld with him, and had been disturbed

by what he had sensed. Perhaps one of the great

Adepts, one of the ancient masters of the

kolihnar, could have understood that frantic

flickering of impulses, could have reordered it,

straightened it, eased it. But he was a scientist,

understanding only what every Vulcan schoolchild

learned of the spiritual disciplines--he did not know

if, as things now stood, his friend could even be saved.

The weight of that lay on him like a shroud of

lead.

He turned back, to see Mr. Scott

regarding him with worried eyes.

"An explanation of all things," Spock said

slowly, "will be ... forthcoming."

"I certainly hope so." Scott looked

relieved to see him emerge from whatever dark

reverie held him. "Including an explanation of

why--All right, all right!" he added, as the

second-shift nurse, a soft-footed young

black woman, disapprovingly held out to him a

handwipe. "I know this is a sterile environment

I'm muckin' up! Including an explanation,"

he went on, turning back to Spock, "of why this

alien intruder, after damn near drivin' the

captain out of his mind and doing his best to murder you

and Dr. Gordon, should have done all this just to blast

a forty-hectare hole in the middle of the most

uninhabited desert on the planet?"

Spock paused, considering how much of the events

of the past week should--or could--be reasonably

explained. At length he said, "That was ... an

error on his part."

"How could he make an error?" the chief

engineer asked curiously. "It's not like he was

shootin' off a hand phaser, you know. He had the

best guidance program in the galaxy to aim with."

Spock shook his head. "His error," he

said, "was to leave me alone with his targeting

computer."

Helen folded up her communicator and turned

back to the group assembled around the cold ashes

of the fire between the two huts of the Research

Institute, their faces grave and weary and, for a

large part, dust-covered in the tawny citrine

light. To Kailin Arxoras, squatting on one

of the log sections with his long white hair knotted

back and tangled with the grime of travel, she said

simply in the tongue of the Midgwins, "He

needs your help."

The patriarch, though he had been days upon the

road and had not yet even returned so far as the

main warren, nodded and said, "He shall have it."

And on the other side of the circle Yarblis

Geshkerroth the Ghost Walker, destroyer of the

Hungries and guard of his planet, hissed.

"It is a trap! They will ..."

"They will what, Yarblis?" asked Arxoras

softly, and those who could understand the speech of the

Midgwins--Helen, Thetas, Doctors Chu and

Nomias and the two Vulcans--felt beneath the

sweet, high chirping of the simple words all the

colorings of tone and pacing that made up the

language's delicate nuances, and sensed the

telepathic component of the language that flowed still

further beneath. "Will they destroy me who hold out

my hand to them as a friend, if it is friendship with us that

they seek?"

Yarblis hesitated, looking from face

to face, groping for what he would say next. When

he had entered the group around the Research

Institute--the group that had itself been a gabbling

reunion of Dr. McCoy's party and the small

caravan that had only minutes earlier come threading

its way out of the thorn jungle from the plague

warrens of the south--Helen had thought Yarblis

looked thoroughly taken aback, shocked and

disoriented, staring around him at the dark-stemmed

thickets, the wind-hissing gold sea of grass,

the tall, pale rocks of the warren beyond them, as if

he could not believe his senses. Helen had taken

Arxoras aside and had been in the midst

of explaining to him what she thought Yarblis had

done, while, in front of the huts, McCoy and

Nurse Chapel had listened to Dr. L'jian's

account of the battle against plague--and the famine that

had caused it--in the Walpuk country. Thetas,

Chu, Shorak, and Nomias, exhausted from days

and nights of travel, of inoculations, of tests and

nursing, had only slumped quietly against the

side of the Research Institute and numbly

accepted the fructose-dripping rations handed to them

by the two Klingons, while DeSalle and his

myrmidons had looked on.

Then, angry, the Ghost Walker burst out,

"They will twist you! As they have begun to twist you

already, Arxoras my father, my friend! They will make

you their friend with lies!"

"Is this w orse than making me their enemy with

lies?" the patriarch asked quietly, his wide

silver eyes fixing themselves on Yarblis's

immense yellow ones. Helen, seeing the small

uneasy shifts in the musculature of the Ghost

Walker's lined, sunken face, shivered,

recognizing every fleet, delicate expression,

every habitual twitch. For a moment she thought she was

going to throw up and turned away, cold and

sickened with the depth of the recognition.

"They are ... our enemies," Yarblis said.

"They are ... the enemies of life. They will

make us the enemies of life."

"What is life?" Arxoras asked slowly.

"And why is life? Will they be greater enemies of

life than one who would destroy life so that his

opinion might triumph?"

"Only ... only some life. Not all life

..." Yarblis whispered desperately. "It was

necessary ..."

"These aliens ..." The long, skeletal arm

gestured with a beautiful sweeping motion toward the

dust-coated forms of the two Vulcans, the

emaciated little Argellian, the tiny old

Chinese, and the Andorian half asleep with

exhaustion between the two Klingons who carried him

gently toward his hut. "These aliens have worked with us

in the saving of lives of our families at

Walpuk, searching far out into the distant ends of the

warren where the licats had begun to hunt when the

protection of the Consciousness Web failed,

risking the illness itself, which could have killed them as

surely as it was killing all those others."

"The Consciousness Web ..."

"The Consciousness Web was not strong enough to combat

this illness," Arxoras went on. "The

Consciousness Web had held for days, and yet they

died, and more and more died, and the vermin and the licats had

begun to hunt through the warrens and take the sick and the

dying." On the end of his round-sectioned neck, his

head was tilted to one side, his eyes compassionate

with pain as he looked upon the hunter, the friend, the

brotherstson he had loved. In the dusty stillness

of the late afternoon, only the skreeking of the scarlet

lizards could be heard in the thorn jungle around

them--the soft humming of the web that had filled the

air had ceased a short time before.

"Yarblis, what were you going to bring back to the

Consciousness Web with you? You are memmietieff

enough to have hidden the things you did, yes, so not to have

polluted the web ... so as not to have anyone know that

what you told them of the destruction of this warren was a

lie. But you would have brought lying into the web. And

what you would not have hidden, because it did not occur to you

that it was something that should be hidden, would have been your

conviction that it was right to lie to us all for what you

yourself considered good. That it was right to deceive us all, for

what you yourself considered good. That it was right to kill,

for what you yourself considered good. That it was right to make

your concept of good--which might indeed .be good, or

might not, but you cannot know that--the rule by which we must

all live, will we so or not.

"You did evil, that great good might come. And the

evil that you wanted to do among us, to us, was greater

still, and greater than you know, for these Hungries"--

he nodded toward the door of the hut through which the

Klingons had taken Nomias--"are dangerous,

and would have taken fearful steps against us ... Though

perhaps you would have come to want that too."

And Yarblis looked away.

"You thought you had the right," Arxoras went on

softly. "That is the seed of all evil. And so

it is ..." The deep folds of the patriarch's

face, each lined with pale dust, contracted, and his

great eyes filled with tears. "So it is,

Yarblis my son, that I cast you out of the

Consciousness Web. No one in the warren will turn

against you, you will never lack for food, nor for a

place to live, nor for a place of protection,

for that is not something that we can do. But you are dirty

with a dirtiness that would spread throughout the web, even

as you feared that the dirtiness of wanting the life of

one another more than the life of Rhea would spread

among us. And for that, no more will the web have

you. No more will you be our sibling. No more will any of

us speak to you, or let you touch our minds, or our

dreams, ever again."

For a moment Yarblis Geshkerroth stood in the

midst of them--the aliens, and the several other

patriarchs who had gone with the aliens down

to Walpuk when the strength of the web had proved

insufficient to the strength of the famine and the plague.

"I did it for you," he whispered.

And Helen, looking back at him, saw him

for the first time clearly in the sunlight, saw the

huge extent of the disruptor scars that covered his

chest and arms, that had blotched his scalp and caused

the long hair that lay braided down over his

ridgy back to be streaked with ashy gray; saw the

passion and the weariness in his yellow eyes, the

fierce strength of his lined face down which tears

tracked like a river, glinting in the molten light.

Arxoras held out a hand to touch him, but the Ghost

Walker stepped back and turned away, waddling

slowly past the tall aliens around him and out of the

clearing, passing without sound or stirring of

branches into the thorn forest beyond.

Kailin Arxoras turned back to Helen and,

reaching up, took her soft, baby hand in his strong

one. "Come," he said, and she saw that tears,

too, streaked the dust on all his many facefolds

as if he had stood in rain. "We must go now and

heal your friend."

Dr. McCoy grumbled surprisingly little about

shutting down the lights in the convalescent ward where

they took Kirk after removing him from the stasis

chamber--evidently, Helen thought, he had been

thinking over what had taken place in the machine

room and its relationship to the needs of the less-known

side of the human organism. Gunner's

Assistant Barrows's cache of candles was

raided again--their soft glow gently illuminated the

room where Kailin Arxoras, surprisingly

calm for one who had never seen so much as a wheel

before in his life, sat beside the bed, holding the

captain's icy hand and singing softly in his high-

pitched, birdlike voice. Now and then voices

would pass in the hall, the muted murmur of the ship

returning to normal.

"We can take him to a soundproof room,"

McCoy offered to the little alien, but Arxoras had

shaken his head.

"He needs to hear the sounds of his

beloved as she breathes in her sleep," the old

Midgwin replied, tilting his flat head a little

to peer up into the doctor's face. "Among my people

we would have flowers, and grasses, and grains in the

room to help with the healing, that the dreamer may

smell them and so be encouraged to return. But the

smells of such things are less to him than the

smells of ..." The brow ridges folded a little

deeper as he tried to identify what the ship

did smell like. Metal and thin green

vilfadge carpeting and recycled oxygen

McCoy picked out, when he thought about them ...

and, in this place, disinfectant and alcohol. But

at length the old Midgwin only shook his head

and concluded "... the smells of this place. But have

his friends here with him, that he may know them, and come

back."

And so it was that Helen, and Mr. Spock, and

Uhura, and Scotty were in the room when James

Kirk opened his eyes and blinked uncertainly up

at the ceiling in the semidark. For a moment he

only lay, a slight frown of puzzlement

creasing his brow, as if trying to remember. Then

he turned his head a little, first to one side, where

Arxoras sat on one of the tall-legged chairs

designed to bring short aliens up to the height of

things on a human-crewed starship, then to the other,

where McCoy sat, holding his other hand.

"Bones?" he said softly, wondering why the

physical touch, the warmth of flesh and the solidity

of bone, was so deeply reassuring. The

transporter ...

But the thought eluded him.

McCoy nodded. "You'll be all right,

Jim."

Carefully he disengaged his hand and reached out.

"Helen?"

She took his fingers, warm now and strong in

hers. Her face was expressionless and very white, but

in the dimness, in his exhaustion, he only saw that

she was with him. He smiled, profoundly

relieved. His memories of what had happened

to him were dim and chaotic, a confusion of images--

a blurred recollection that something had happened

to Helen, something terrible ... something from which he had

tried desperately to save her. An image,

fragmentary but very clear, of Spock lying

unconscious before the sealed doors of the

shuttlecraft deck with the red warning lights

blinking wildly across his body. A

vague curiosity about whether he really had

crawled through the food conveyor from Deck 8, and

if so, why in the galaxy he'd done it ... A

nagging sense of wondering something about a secret

room on Deck 23.

He had a dreamlike sense that reminded him of

his old Academy acquaintance Finnegan's

descriptions of having been extremely drunk

--only Kirk had never been so drunk in his

life that he couldn't remember what he'd done.

Already it was fading, losing its reality ...

"Spock?"

"Present, Captain," the Vulcan replied

formally. After a moment's hesitation, Spock

stepped forward and took his hand. "I am ..."

Spock hesitated again, not quite sure what it would

be proper form to say, then concluded, "I am

gratified to see you well."

Kirk's laugh was no more than a whisper and a

lightening of his eyes. "I am overwhelmed, Mr.

Spock." And then, as suddenly as the extinguishing

of a candle flame, he dropped into sleep again.

"He will sleep for a long time now," Arxoras

said, climbing carefully, with Chapel's help,

down from the chair. "Half a day, perhaps. Good

sleep. I feel within his mind that this body of his

has had little. It was cruelly used, and his spirit

also. You will fin d there are things he does not

remember from his time of wandering, for such memories will

have no place in the flesh to lodge, and will have been

lost. Some only may come back to him later.

Then you must help him deal with them as best you may.

You are his siblings, his nest brothers. His healing

is with you."

"You speak as if this were something you've dealt with

before," McCoy said doubtfully, and the Midgwin

cocked his head again, his long, dusty white

braids tangling across his shoulders, to look up

at him.

"I have," he said simply, and thereby opened a

new chapter to Federation studies, not only of the

Midgwins, but of the structure and composition of the

mind.

In the corner of the room Mr. Scott was questioning

Spock in a low voice about the ultimate fate

of his assistant Ensign Miller--now in the

next ward recovering, along with his opprobrious

partner, from the throes of their peculiar virus.

"Well, you've got to admit that when all's said,

all they were doin' was trying to make

decent chocolate--for which God knows there's enough people

on board who'd thank them."

"The fact remains that they appropriated

Starfleet property for their own use, for whatever

purpose. Neither of them was authorized to operate

an experimental laboratory, much less to--"

"And no worse than what Dr. McCoy

did, puttin' the pair of 'em under hatches

wi'out so much as a by-your-leave ... You're

no' going to clap that poor laddie Gilden in

irons, are you? You'd be dead yoursel' if it

wasn't for his book collection."

Silently, Lieutenant Uhura slipped out

the door into the bright lights of the corridor. None

saw her go, any more than they had seen Helen

leave a moment before.

"Helen?"

She was leaning against the wall of the main

corridor of sickbay. Her face was chalky and

she looked almost worse than she had after she'd

been gassed.

"What is it?" Uhura asked.

And Helen shook her head and smiled.

"Nothing," she said. She started to turn away,

then paused, and looked back at her friend--tall

and coffee-dark and beautiful in her crimson

uniform, one of the closest of the first group of close

friends she had made in her life. After a moment

she came back and took her hands.

"Uhura," she said softly, "will you tell

Jim something for me when he wakes up?"

Uhura was silent, looking into the other

woman's face. An older face than she'd

had when she came on board the Enterprise a

month ago; ravaged, as her voice had been

ravaged. According to McCoy, the scarring on the

vocal cords would heal in a few weeks. From

her own experience, Uhura guessed that the look

in the back of those hazel eyes never would.

"Anything you want," she replied.

"Tell him ..." Helen paused, and shook

her head, as if trying to clear away something--a

dream, maybe, or a nightmare. "Tell him

I understand that it ... it wasn't him. That it was an

alien that had taken over his body, that it wasn't

his fault ... that he has nothing to do with what

happened. And maybe in six months, when the

Enterprise is back--if it doesn't get

rerouted elsewhere--or maybe in a year, I'll

... my stomach, my guts, my skin will

believe it, if I should happen to see his face,

or hear his voice, or feel his hand touch me.

Tell him I know it wasn't him. But right now

..." She forced her voice steady. "I can't

look at him anymore."

"I'll tell him," Uhura said.

Helen embraced her quickly, then turned and

walked away, heading for the turbolift that would

take her down to the hangar deck to wait for

Arxoras, and thence, by shuttlecraft, back to the

world that would become her own. Uhura stood for a

long time beside the sickbay door, listening as the

click of boot heels died away along the

corridor.

After that the patriarchs of the many warrens united in

Web to speak among themselves of the question of healing that the

physicians of the Hungries had raised; and

whether they should be asked to go away and never

return. The Hungries themselves, both the dark-

bearded Hungries and the pale Hungries with

smooth faces, swore that if they were permitted

to remain, they would only live among themselves and

learn the stories of the Real People and talk to them about

the way of Rhea.

As for Yarblis Geshkerroth the Ghost

Walker, on the second night after the ending of the

plague, he went to the hut of the woman Helen and

asked her pardon for having hurt her, both in her

body, and in her voice, and in her mind. This

pardon being given, he went out of the Bindigo

Warren and away from the places where people dwelled, and

casting himself in the river, was drowned.

From Songs of the Midgwins, translated and

introduced by Dr. H. H. Gordon, Oxford

University Press.