STAR TREK (R)

WINDOWS ON A LOST WORLD

Chapter One

Captain's Log, Stardate 5419.4

The Enterprise is approaching the

Dulciphar star cluster, once the most densely

populated region in this sector of the galaxy.

Our mission routine archaeological inventory

of the ancient civilizations in the cluster. To that

end, ship's personnel has been supplemented

by a twenty-person team of researchers from the

University of Nexqualy on Perren IX,

led by Dr. Abdul Ramesh Kaul. Dr.

Kaul is the Federation's foremost authority on the

Meztorien culture, whose ruins are widely

scattered throughout this quadrant. It is a distinct

honor to be associated with such eminent scholars

as Dr. Kaul and his team.

"Why me?" Ensign Pavel Chekov

demanded, breaking his stride to lift his arms toward

the ceiling as if imploring some unseen deity

to answer his question. "Why do I have to be the person

who gets stuck with the Djelifan? To listen to her

talk, you would think that God Herself was from

Djelifa and that She used that planet as Her

base for creating the Universe."

Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu ducked his head

to hide a grin. "Do you have proof She didn't?"

Turning the last corner to the turbolift, he

glanced at Chekov from the corner of his eye. As

he expected, Chekov still hadn't gotten the

joke. While Chekov claimed half the

Federation's technology was invented in his native

Russia, the matriarchal Djelifans knew

that everything in the Universe came from their planet.

Whoever paired the visiting archaeologists with

"buddies" among the Enterprise's crew had

obviously been thinking of Chekov's Russian

provincialism when assigning him to work with the

Djelifan post-doctoral researcher,

Talika Nyar. As they reached the turbolift

Sulu gave an apologetic shrug. "Besides,

I didn't get teamed up with any prize.

Meredith is so shy she's hardly spoken three

words to me."

"At least she's attractive." Chekov

stepped into the turbolift. He glanced toward the

intercom receiver.

The orangish-yellow star grew larger and brighter

in the viewscreen, its attendant planets

gleaming like diamond chips in their sun's

reflected light. Captain James T.

Kirk studied the image, trying to guess what

discoveries they would make here. The familiar

rhythms of his ship flowed around him soothingly--

Uhura's voice directing intraship

messages, Chekov and Sulu adjusting the

ship's approach, Spock at his station

correlating the sensor readings as they came in.

He let his anticipation build until he had

to know what this solar system held for them.

"Report, Mr. Spock."

The Vulcan raised his head from his scanner

display and faced Kirk, his movements controlled

and economical. "We are approaching the

Careta system. The star is classified as

F9 and has been fading gradually for the last

500,000 years. It is orbited by ten

planets, most of them small, and has a broad

zone of widely scattered asteroids between the fifth

and sixth planets. The third and fourth planets

are currently in the habitable zone, although the

climates of both are marginal. At present,

neither shows long-range readings that would indicate the

presence of intelligent life."

"In other words, two possible choices for us

to explore." Kirk glanced at the viewscreen,

trying to guess which planet was the more likely

candidate before Spock launched into another round of

statistics.

"The possibility also exists that artifacts

remain in the asteroid belt." Spock's voice

held a note of reproof, as if chiding Kirk

for jumping to so hasty and unscientific a

conclusion. "The Meztoriens often established

orbiting habitats in remote sections of

systems that they did not otherwise occupy. A

detailed survey would be required to establish

whether such habitats were present in this system."

Knowing he would regret it, Kirk took the

bait. "How long would it take to perform such a

survey?"

"It will take 7.25 days to scan the asteroid

belt with sufficient resolution to insure that we have

not missed any potential Meztorien

artifacts." Spock paused, raising one

eyebrow. "We should, in any case, conduct such

a survey. If we confine ourselves

to investigating only the planets, we risk

overlooking significant discoveries. This

quadrant contains an anomalously high number

of "orphan" archaeological sites for which we

have no context. It is possible that the smaller

planetary bodies or the asteroid belt may

contain information that will allow us to determine

predecessor or successor cultures for some of

these isolated remains."

Kirk suppressed a groan. By now, he

thought, he should know when to keep his mouth shut.

"I'll make you a deal, Mr. Spock. You can

survey all the asteroids you like if we find

something on one of those planets to keep our

passengers busy in the meantime. They're getting

anxious to do some serious work."

"Agreed, Captain, although I recommend that

we conduct the asteroid survey regardless."

"We'll see, Spock. First, let's see

what's on the planets." And hope it's big

enough to keep the archaeologists busy for a while!

"Yes, Captain." Spock turned back

to his sensors. Kirk watched him for a moment,

then shifted his attention to the main viewscreen.

Third planet or fourth? Which would it be?

By late afternoon the verdict was in the fourth

planet. After listening to Spock's summary,

Kirk scheduled a briefing for the Enterprise's

researchers and the visiting archaeologists to plan

their investigation.

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy took seats

on one side of the table and waited for the

archaeologists to sort themselves into their places.

Each had brought a personal datapad and several

data tapes, as if unsure what information they

needed for the briefing.

"Forgive our disarray," Dr. Abdul

Ramesh Kaul said with an apologetic smile.

"We try always to be completely prepared."

Kaul was a short, wiry man with teak-colored

skin darkened by the recent weeks of fieldwork.

He was bald except for a narrow fringe of

silvery-gray hair, and he regarded everything with

an impish twinkle in his eye. His two chief

assistants for this system--selected by lot,

Kirk had been told, to rotate the work and the

experience among the team--could not have been chosen

to provide a greater contrast to each other or to their

leader.

One glance at Dr. Talika Nyar

identified her as a native of a high-gravity

planet. She was short and wide, with mousy brown

hair and a huge beak of a nose; her sturdy

bones and powerful muscles made Kirk feel

frail in comparison. Her planet, Djelifa,

had recently joined the Federation, and Talika's

assignment to this expedition was the first contact anyone

on the Enterprise had had with her people. So far

Kirk had heard mixed reviews about

Talika's interactions with his crew. Djelifa

was a strongly matriarchal society--the strongest

in the Federation, if the sociologists' reports

were true--and Talika was having trouble accepting the

equality that prevailed on the Enterprise. The

glare with which she answered Kirk's scrutiny did

not convince him of her willingness to cooperate with his

officers.

In contrast, Dr. Meredith Lassiter was

delicate and willowy, with luminous white-blond

hair and sea-green eyes. Her physique

suggested that she had been raised on the Moon or

a low-gravity orbital habitat, but she had not

volunteered any information about her background. The

few times Kirk had seen her with other people, she had

avoided all eye contact and had only spoken

when asked a direct question. Lassiter slid

into her seat and began fiddling with a data tape,

staring at it as if it would vanish if she looked

away. She seemed as out of place on the

archaeological team as the Djelifan.

When everyone was settled Spock called up his

scans of the planet. "Careta IV is a

class-M planet, with a gravity 0.85 of

Earth. The oxygen content of the atmosphere is below

optimum for humans, although it is well within the

range tolerated by Vulcans. The climate is

cool to cold at most sites, due to the cooling

of the star in this solar system. Preliminary scans

have identified a number of sites worthy of

exploration."

Kaul nodded at Lassiter, who looked up

from the data tape and stared at the wall behind

Spock. "We have run analyses on the five

largest sites to select our initial survey

target." Her voice was soft and whispery, like the

rustle of dry leaves in a forest. "Each site

has unique characteristics that should be explored, but

we feel that Site J3 is the best choice for

our first look at the Caretian

civilization."

Talika requested a closer view of the

site. The screen zoomed in on the area, a

rolling flood plain below columned cliffs carved

from dark, fissured rock. Low mounds marked the

ruins of several large structures. Shadowed

lines, enhanced by the ship's computer, formed a

broken grid across the site. "Sensors less

weathering, more shelter at Site J3 show.

Better preserved should artifacts from destruction

by natural causes be." Talika's voice was

low and gravelly, a match for half the baritones

in the ship's glee club. Although her command of

English was excellent, her sentences were heavily

influenced by the rhythms of her native

language. "Small burial of major

structures later abandonment than elsewhere

suggests."

Spock focused the screen on a large mound

near the cliffs. "This structure was one of the last

built on the planet, judging by the thickness of the

soil covering and the spectral analyses of the

quarries in the vicinity. From the readings it is

impossible to determine when these structures were

abandoned, but we estimate an age in excess of

100,000 years."

Kaul leaned forward, drumming his fingers against the

table. His skin was almost as dark as the pseudowood

fini sh. "A hundred thousand years is somewhat

younger than we would expect for Meztorien ruins

in this sector. By then the Meztoriens in the

nearby clusters had succumbed to the Darneel

invasion, and the surviving fragments of their empire

had fallen into a dark age from which they never emerged.

Construction on even such a modest scale as the

ruins we see here would have been beyond their

capabilities."

Kirk nodded to close down the scientific

speculations. Clearly they were not going to get any

answers without going down to the planet. "Mr.

Spock, what's your recommendation?"

Spock glanced at his display. "The extreme

antiquity of these ruins makes it virtually

impossible to date them from orbit. To obtain

precise information we will have to beam down to the

planet. I concur with the recommendation of Dr.

Kaul's team to study Site J3 first. In

addition to the scientific reasons they have already

cited, the location offers a sheltered area to set

up a base camp."

McCoy nodded. "The vegetation is sparse in

this area due to a combination of low rainfall and cool

temperatures. This minimizes the chances of

running into dangerous native life-forms. About

all we'll have to watch out for is this world's

equivalent of poisonous snakes or insects.

Beyond that, the biggest danger is going to be tripping

over ourselves and our equipment."

"Does anyone else have anything to add?"

Kirk checked the group's reactions. The

archaeologists appeared eager to get down to the

planet, and Kirk saw no reason to deny them

their wish. "Very well. We'll run detailed

sensor scans of the site while Dr. Kaul's

people work out their excavation plan. The survey team

will beam down at first light. Meeting dismissed."

Kirk made his escape before anyone dragged

him into the detailed planning. As the door whisked

shut behind him, he heard Spock launch into a

technical discussion of the types of sensor information

he could obtain for the archaeologists. Grinning

to himself, Kirk headed for the relative peace of the

bridge, where he could decide who from the

Enterprise was joining the landing party.

"It's not fair!" Chekov grumbled, staring at

his landing party assignment. He deactivated the

screen and turned away, Sulu falling in step

with him as they left his quarters and headed for the

recreation room. "Why do I have to accompany her

to the planet, just because I got assigned to show her

around the Enterprise?"

"Some people have all the luck." Sulu's

expression was bland, disguising his relief at

missing this particular planetside excursion.

Although he couldn't justify the feeling, he was

glad he had been assigned to supervise the

comprehensive sensor scans Spock had ordered

of the planet and the solar system. "Besides, weren't

you the one who was talking about specializing in the

sciences? Maybe even trying for Mr.

Spock's job when he gets promoted?"

"Me?" Chekov's voice cracked on the

rising note. "I have just decided to change my

specialization. To something safer, like security."

"Then you could beam down to Careta to help

muscle the equipment into place." Sulu

chuckled and waved to some friends who were hurrying

to catch the turbolift. "I don't think you're

going to win this one, Pavel. The gods

seem to want you on that landing party."

"While you get to stay on the ship, doing all

of Mr. Spock's sensor scans. This time I

envy you. Normally I would prefer being in the landing

party, but this time I do not." He gave Sulu a

rueful grin.

Sulu nodded, his expression gone sober. "I

know what you mean. I can't put my finger on it,

but I wish we'd given this planet a miss."

He clapped Chekov on the shoulder. "If it's

any consolation, I'll be riding herd on the

sensors the whole time. If you get into any

trouble, we'll beam you up in a flash."

"That is very reassuring." Chekov's tone said

differently. A lot could happen in the time it

took to realize someone was in danger. "I would

find it more reassuring if you would tell me what

trouble we should expect."

"Isn't that Mr. Spock's department?" The

recreation room door opened for them. They stepped

through and Uhura waved for them to join her. Sulu

acknowledged her signal, and went to get himself a

cup of tea. "I mean, knowing everything before we

need the information?"

"I suppose." Chekov looked glum. "But

this is one planet I think the Enterprise could

do without."

"Are you sure about this mission, Jim?"

McCoy asked, sliding lower in the chair in

Kirk's cabin. "Is it just me, or is there

something strange about this planet?"

Kirk fiddled with his coffee cup, lifting it,

then returning it to the table without tasting the tepid

beverage. He glanced toward Spock, who was

studying the edge of the table with a look of intense

concentration that triggered warning bells in Kirk's

head. "Would you be more specific, Bones?"

"Oh, that's right. You missed the discussions this

afternoon." McCoy knocked back the remains of his

coffee, grimacing at the taste. "I listened

to Dr. Kaul and his people, and the longer I listened, the

more nervous I got. There's something decidedly

odd about this planet, and no one quite knows what

to make of it."

"Spock? What's this about?"

Spock straightened, shifting his attention

to Kirk's face. "Some of the survey results

are inconsistent. For example, there are

distortions in the planet's magnetic

field near several of the major sites. Also, the

grid patterns associated with the buried cities

do not match anything left by the Meztorien

civilization, although Dr. Kaul has not

acknowledged this."

"That's understandable, Spock." Laughter pulled

up the corners of McCoy's mouth. "He's

spent the last fifty years studying the

Meztoriens. Do you really expect him to jump

with joy at the thought that these ruins might have been

built by someone else?"

"Continue, Spock. What else should I

know?" Kirk gulped the last mouthful of his

coffee. It tasted as terrible as he had feared.

"Our scans revealed several other

anomalies that I am unable to explain at this

time. The civilization on this planet appears to have

disintegrated rapidly and completely, with few or

no survivors. On the other hand, for their

apparent age the ruins are remarkably well

preserved and are surprisingly close to the

surface. One would expect considerably more

destruction after a hundred thousand years."

McCoy grimaced, as if the discrepancies

left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. "Or

new colonists to take over the abandoned real

estate. It isn't natural for a habitable

planet to be this deserted."

Spock nodded. "That was the other peculiarity that

everyone noticed. I have ordered a detailed

inventory of the planet's natural resources

to determine if a crucial deficiency

prevented another race from colonizing this

planet. It is unlikely that all those passing

through this sector missed the Careta system in the

course of their explorations."

"What you're saying is ..." Kirk paused,

fiddling with his empty cup. The facts kept

pointing to the same conclusion. "There is no

obvious reason to avoid this planet, yet

everyone who has come through here in the last hundred

thousand years seems to have done exactly that."

"We better watch our step down there,

Jim," McCoy said, finishing the thought for

Kirk. "Whatever scared everyone else off might

still be waiting for us."

"Warning noted, Bones. Do you have any

suggestions on finding out what this is before we beam

down?" Kirk paused for McCoy to answer, but

got only the silence he expected.

"In that case, gentlemen, we will have to be very

careful until we find out what surprises the

inhabitants of Careta IV left behind." He

couldn't quite keep the grin of pleasure off his

face. Archaeological missions were usually

dull and slow-paced, much too tame for his liking.

A mystery promised to liven this one up. The last

few weeks had been peaceful and relaxing, a

re/l change from their previous assignment, but

now Kirk was ready for some action. The grin

widened as he considered doing a little investigation of

his own. Yes, perhaps Careta IV wouldn't be so

boring after all.

Chapter Two

There was something about materializing on a new

planet, Kirk thought as the transporter beam

released him--a special zip in the air, a

distinctive shiver in the ground beneath his feet. He

had never been able to define, even to himself, why the

first few seconds on any planet seemed so

charged with hidden potential. It wasn't because he

was the first human to stand on a particular world, because

he had experienced the same feeling his first time on

such long-established human colonies as Deneb

II or Rigel IV. And it wasn't because a

planet deviated from the Earth--normal conditions

of the Enterprise. Any of the differences on

Careta IV could be programmed into the ship's

environmental controls. After running through all the

possible explanations yet again, Kirk was left

with the last and least satisfying answer--that the

brief, charged excitement just after he

materialized occurred because this was the first time that

he, James T. Kirk, had stepped onto this

particular world.

Kirk moved away from the beam-down point

to let the next group materialize. Spock

followed him, activating his tricorder to scan the

area for the fine details the ship's sensors could not

detect. The four security guards fanned out

to confirm the landing site for the Columbus, checking

the terrain and other site factors against the

Enterprise's sensor readings. Columbus

carried a cargo of excavating tools, power

packs, and other heavy equipment, and the

archaeologists wanted the shuttlecraft close

to their working site without having it on top of any

important artifacts.

Talika, Chekov, Kaul, and three

archaeological technicians mat erialized

next. The scientists unlimbered their

tricorders and began an in-depth site

survey. Chekov joined Kirk, watching the

archaeologists with a wary expression on his boyish

face. "What is our plan, Captain?"

"Right now we wait for the experts to tell us."

Kirk looked around. From the ground the site

appeared larger and more desolate than it had from the

crisp, impersonal reports of the ship's

sensors. Immense walls of fissured

basalt, fractured into columns, reached for the

sky like a staircase designed for giants. The

thousand-meter vertical sweep of the cliffs was

interrupted by irregularly spaced ledges covered

with shattered rock. More talus had collected below

the towering basalt walls, burying some of the ruins.

A fast-moving river, as wide as the two

kilometers of flood plain between it and the cliffs,

swept past. Its surface was ruffled

to white-rested waves by the stiff breeze blowing

up the canyon. A hundred-meter-long tree,

stripped of foliage, revolved lazily in the

current as it raced downstream. Closer to them,

sparse blades of dried grass and a few

sagebrush-like bushes rustled in the wind.

Spock rejoined Kirk and Chekov, studying

his tricorder with an air of intense concentration.

"This is most unusual. My tricorder readings

suggest that these ruins are almost twice as old as

we originally estimated."

Chekov whistled. "That would make them over two

hundred thousand years old." He shook his head

in disbelief.

"I take it that our friends will have some trouble dealing

with that age?" Kirk frowned, trying to remember the

history of this sector. He wasn't sure, but

he thought that the Meztorien civilization had

risen about 150,000 years ago. If

Spock's newest readings were correct, these

ruins were far too old to belong to any known

civilization. They might belong to one of the

"orphan" cultures that Spock had mentioned

earlier, but most of those ruins were even older than

two hundred thousand years.

"That is correct, Captain." Spock

adjusted his tricorder and scanned the area again.

"The earliest known Meztorien ruins are dated

at 172,500 years before present. It

is possible that these structures come from an earlier

period of the Meztorien civilization, but that would

require a drastic revision of our current

theories concerning their expansion into this part of the

galaxy."

"As I recall, the Meztorien expansion

is one of the better-documented events of that era."

Kirk scanned the desolate landscape around

them. It seemed an unlikely place to discover

anything that would destroy the Federation's

painstakingly reconstructed history of this

sector. "I should think that would be an enormous

obstacle to any major reinterpretations."

"R." Spock consulted his tricorder

screen. "However, we must consider that each new

piece of information we discover contains the

potential for rendering inoperative all our

previous assumptions about a given situation."

Chekov scuffed a rock toward the

archaeologists. "I predict that our "friends"

will be most unhappy when they discover that this planet

does not fit any of their grand theories."

Glancing toward Kaul's team, Kirk saw

that they were huddled in a group, arguing about something.

"It looks like you're right, Mr. Chekov. Shall

we see what they've found?" The breeze

shifted, blowing the sound of angry voices toward

them. The captain exhaled heavily. "Before they

kill each other."

By the time the three Enterprise officers reached

the archaeologists, the argument had escalated almost

to the point of blows. "It is quite impossible to have so

ancient a date for Meztorien ruins."

Kaul's voice was soft, but his tone was

implacable. "Your sensor readings must be in

error."

"I not mistake make!" Talika's voice

sounded like the growl of an approaching thunderstorm.

"Five times checked I readings to confirm.

Inferior Federation machine indefinite results

gives. Djelifan equipment would with one reading

clearer answers show. Ruins for Meztorien too

old are. Therefore from more ancient civilization must

be. Perhaps remnant of "orphan"

predecessor of Meztoriens is."

"There are no older civilizations than

Meztorien in this quadrant," said Kordes, a

post-doctoral researcher obviously trying

to gain points with Kaul. "In two hundred

years of intensive investigations, no one

has turned up the slightest evidence that anyone

was here before them. The so-called "orphan"

cultures are sensationalist media reports

created by publicity seekers who use improper

excavation techniques and careless data

analysis."

Spock stepped forward to interrupt the argument,

holding out his tricorder. "My tricorder also

reports extreme age for these ruins, Dr.

Kaul. It would appear that we are dealing with a find

of extreme importance. May I congratulate

you on your good fortune in discovering these ruins?"

Kaul turned toward Spock, blinking

rapidly. Kirk could almost hear the relays

snapping in Kaul's head as he tried to shift his

processing circuits. Who says Spock

doesn't understand human psychology? Kirk

thought, hiding a smile. "I beg your pardon,

Mr. Spock?" Kaul said, his face

reflecting the ongoing reorientation of his thoughts.

"I said you were fortunate to be the first human

to discover this site. Surely a previously

unknown civilization of such antiquity is a find

of tremendous importance. Such a discovery will

revolutionize our perception of the history of this

quadrant."

"That is true." Kaul's expression

settled into a mask that matched Spock's for

blandness. He focused his attention on Kirk with

such intensity that the captain knew what Kaul

wanted before he spoke. "To catalog a find of

such magnitude will require additional time and

manpower. I hope, Captain, that you will consider

the difficulty of this task and assign me the

resources necessary to conduct the research. If we

are dealing with a previously unknown race, we will

require several weeks to determine the nature

of their civilization and to recommend the follow-up

studies required to do this discovery justice."

"I understand, Dr. Kaul." Kirk finally

let his grin out. If Kaul realized how well

Spock had manipulated him, he showed no

signs of it. "I'll assign extra crewmen

to help with your preliminary investigations, of

course. To extend our stay here, I must consult

with Starfleet Command. However, if the results of

your preliminary survey support your findings so

far, there should be no difficulties."

"Very well, Captain Kirk. When can I

expect the additional men?"

"I'll have the duty officer request

volunteers with the appropriate experience. You

should have them by the time the shuttlecraft arrives with

your equipment."

"Thank you, Captain Kirk. That is quite

acceptable."

"I'm glad, Dr. Kaul. I'll make the

arrangements." Kirk turned away, feeling a

sudden need to put some space between himself and Kaul.

The last few minutes had made him wonder if

he really wanted anything to do with Careta IV

after all. Maybe they would have been better off if

they had not found the ruins. Inexplicably the

image of an ancient plague ship floated

into his mind, a galleon that drifted across the

ocean, majestic and serene, abandoned by all

except the rats.

Kirk pushed the image away, wondering what

had brought it into his mind so forcefully. Careta

IV must be getting to him. He looked around,

checking the desolate landscape for visible

threats, but saw only his own people. There was no

obvious explanation for his reaction. Wondering

what unconscious games his mind was playing,

Kirk reached for his communicator to ask for the

extra help that Kaul had requested.

Why do I have all the luck? Chekov

wondered as he followed Talika along the base

of the cliffs. He would have been perfectly

delighted to coordinate the Columbus's landing

and to set up their base of operations, making sure

the equipment was accessible and ready for use.

Instead, he had been assigned to help Talika

survey the ruins for the most promising sites at

which to begin their excavations. She skipped across the

hexagonal plates of loose rock as if they

were minor annoyances, little larger than pebbles.

Her life on a heavy-gravity world had given

her a massive strength in her lower body, and the

power of her muscles let her bound over

obstacles that Chekov had to strain to surmount.

"Why did not Kirk to me someone competent

assign?" Talika demanded as she paused yet

again to let Chekov clamber over a pile of

loose rock. "Why feeble male who barely on

two feet stays?"

"Just because you are used to twice this much grav-

y--" Chekov tested a large boulder for sta-

bility, felt it totter and then settle more

firmly into a cradle of smaller

stones. He eased himself onto the boulder while

he caught his breath, thinking perhaps Mr. Spock

could match Talika's physical prowess.

"Everybody on the Enterprise would have trouble

keeping up with the pace you are setting. What is the

hurry?"

"Hurry is assignment with distinction

to complete. Although how to work am I, with

flimsiest of Federation devices and only most

substandard assistance, know I not. On

Djelifa, such obstacles to accomplishment we

permit not."

Her words stung Chekov into replying before he

considered how many misinterpretations she could find for

his words. "This is not Djelifa! And we are not

obstructing your work!"

She looked him over with the impersonal

expression of a buyer in a meat market. "Then

what explanation give you for assigning assistant

--and male one, at that--so weak he barely his own

mass supports? How carry you samples or

move rocks?"

"Sorry I asked," Chekov muttered,

probing his right ankle. He had turned it on the

last stretch when a rock had rolled beneath his

boot, but he found no swelling or tenderness in the

joint . This time, at least, he had been lucky.

Still, he wasn't sure which rankled

more--Talika's condescension or his own inability

to measure up to her standards.

"That my meaning is! You Federation-tska all

weaklings are. You like little girls behave who have not

to ritual house gone for duties and

responsibilities of adults to learn." A

scowl twisted her face, deepening as she watched

Chekov check his ankle. "How like boy-child,

whimpering and crying because rocks in path are. Why not

back to ship go and let me without interference to work

finish?"

Because my orders require me to keep you

out of trouble, he thought. Chekov bit his

tongue to hold back the angry reply.

Talika's greater physical strength, combined with

her reluctance to pay any attention to him, made

it almost impossible for him to do his job. The worst

of it was that her impatience could easily send her

charging into danger. Whatever else she knew,

Chekov could see that she was ignorant of the basic

rules for surveying unexplored planets. "I

would be glad to let you do your job without

interference," he said when he had gotten a grip

on his temper. "However, I ask that you grant

me the same courtesy. I am to assist you with your

exploration and, specifically, to watch out for any

unanticipated dangers. We know nothing about this

planet. Therefore, the chances are very great that we will

not recognize something dangerous until it

attacks us."

Talika snorted, a sound that reminded

Chekov of the large draft horse he had seen in

the Moscow animal preserve when he was a child.

"What possible danger could there on deserted

planet be? Weaklings like Federation-tska might

for worry find reason, but as Djelifan, nothing

to fear have I."

"I suppose the mountain will ask if you are a

Djelifan before it falls on you?" Chekov

levered himself to his feet, moving cautiously

until he was sure the ankle would hold his

weight. "Or perhaps the snake will request an

introduction before it strikes?"

"I from non-Djelifans such cowardice

expect. However, to such whinings I will listen not."

Talika started off without waiting for Chekov,

moving at a rapid pace despite the

irregularly shaped blocks of rock beneath her

boots. Dislodged by her movements, several

fist-sized chunks bounced down the hill,

collecting others as they went. The slide gathered

volume and momentum, but fortunately the top of the

slope where Chekov was standing remained stable.

He watched the moving carpet of rock, his

fists clenched tight with nervousness until the

slide began to slow. How long, he wondered, will

Talika get away with such carelessness? When the

dust had settled and he judged it was safe, he

picked his way cautiously across the loose

rock. They had been moving along the cliffs for the

last hour, chasing ephemeral signs of the alien

ruins, and the talus piles had grown larger and more

unstable. Looking at the fissured wall,

Chekov wondered if the rubble was deeper here because

the rocks were naturally more broken or if someone

had blasted the cliffs to bury something. He

paused, trying to remember where Spock had

suggested possible tunnels in the cliffs. Could

something be here, its entrance covered by the rocks that

had fallen from above? He activated his

tricorder and began scanning.

The cliff was webbed with fissures and

cracks that ran in all directions through the rock.

At first, Chekov had trouble distinguishing the

dominant vertical fractures, which broke the

cliffs into columns all along the valley, and the

less prominent but no less pervasive

horizontal fracture set that separated the

vertical pillars into the plentiful hexagonal

plates. In this area the rocks were honeycombed with

randomly oriented cracks. Chekov scratched his

head, trying to remember his basic geology

courses. In rocks like these basalts the joints

were formed by the cooling and contraction of molten rock,

with one set of cracks more or less parallel to the

ground's surface and a second, vertical set

forming hexagons as the rock cooled. The

patterns in nature were never perfect, but neither were

they as chaotic as these readings. After a hundred

thousand years he could not prove that the rocks had

been blasted, but Chekov doubted that even Spock

would dispute the probabilities. Someone had

tried to bury this area so deeply that no one would

ever find it.

"Would you your boots quit dragging and over here

get?" Talika bellowed, her voice as loud as

though she were standing at his shoulder.

In spite of himself, Chekov jumped. Angry

at himself for letting her startle him, he snarled his

reply. "Why don't you be a little more polite?

At least ask why I've got my tricorder

out before you start yelling insults!"

She started back toward him, a puzzled frown

on her face. "For what reason should you your

tricorder have out? Our scans nothing here showed

to investigate. Why time waste?"

The shock almost made Chekov miss his

footing. Talika--curious? It was the first

emotion besides scorn that he had seen from her. He

gestured toward the cliffs beside him. "The rocks

are all shattered here, as if someone tried to blow

up this entire cliff. I would guess that whatever

they wanted to bury, we would be interested in finding

it. The question is, how big is this object, and how

well is it hidden?"

Talika surveyed the talus, worrying her

lower lip with her large, square teeth. He

watched her expression, hoping that he had finally

made a favorable impression on her. It would

make the rest of this assignment much more pleasant

if they could work together as a team. At last she

grunted and activated her own

tricorder.

With a sigh of relief Chekov resumed his

scanning. That she had accepted his idea gave him

hope that he could eventually break through her armor.

With that thought came the knowledge that he was not the only

person in the Federation who would have to deal with this

problem. Thousands, perhaps millions, of other men

were going to have to convince the Djelifan women that they

were as capable as the Djelifans. It wasn't

going to be easy, he concluded, but beginnings

seldom were. Still, it was encouraging to know that

Talika could unbend enough to listen to him. Maybe,

someday, he would forgive the person who had teamed

him up with her.

They worked their way back and forth across the hill

for the next half an hour with no results.

Talika was becoming restive and irritable,

muttering to herself in her own language, and Chekov

was beginning to doubt his hunch when his tricorder

gave him a flicker of an anomalous reading.

"I found something!" He pointed toward the spot

to give Talika the bearing.

She swung her tricorder around, sweeping the

general area. "Nothing!" she growled after the fifth

sweep. She fiddled with the controls, and her frown

deepened.

Chekov adjusted his tricorder, and to his

dismay, the anomaly disappeared. He shook the

device and still got nothing. Puzzled, he swept

the scanner across a wider area. Twice the

readings flickered, then smoothed to the expected

background values. "If I did not know

better, I would think that someone was jamming us," he

muttered. Hearing his words aloud, he felt an

idea explode in his mind. Maybe something was

aware of them. On occasion they had encountered alien

devices that still functioned after exceedingly long

periods of time. Given the age of the artifacts

they had already found on Careta IV, it was more

than reasonable to assume that any surviving

technology on Careta no longer functioned

perfectly. But where does that leave us? he

asked himself. Chekov gestured to Talika,

signaling for her to wait while he picked his way

across the talus to join her.

"If there is a device down there, it must still be

operating at a very low level. It seems able

to detect us when we make enough noise, but if it

does not know our location, it apparently cannot lock

on to the radiation from our tricorders."

He swiped a hand across his forehead, pushing his

hair back. "Do you have any suggestions for dealing

with such an object?"

"How know you this?" Her tone wavered between

curiosity and her previous contempt. "This

impossible is, unlike completely anything

known."

"I agree that it does not act like anything I

have seen before, but that does not make it impossible.

Perhaps we are seeing a defense mechanism

designed to protect whatever is here. If someone

wanted to hide an object or if they wanted

to protect it from destruction, they would not want it

to register on anyone's sensors." He pointed

his tricorder hopefully at the talus. As he

had expected, the readings remained unchanged.

"If someone had placed a jamming field

generator at the base of these cliffs, it would

prevent us from detecting anything beneath the rocks.

Or if someone was being very tricky, he might

want us to think that something was here so that we would not

look in another place for the thing that they really did

not want us to find." He shrugged, grimacing with

frustration. "I could design a device that did

any of these things, but that does not tell us which of these

situations we are dealing with here."

Talika nodded. "What is object? Where

is object? Does object in truth exist?"

Chekov nodded. "If we assume that it

does exist, we still have to answer the other two

questions."

"Job to find artifacts is. Therefore, as working

hypothesis, assumption that object exists is

made." Talika nibbled on her lip, her

eyes darting back and forth as she studied the loose

rocks below them. "If I down hill go, making

much noise, perhaps sensors think both away have

gone. You here wait, being very quiet, and when I

hand raise, both of us for object in area scan.

Do you other way to solve problem see?"

What were their options? Chekov fiddled with his

tricorder while he reviewed the facts. The

radiation put out by their tricorders was either too

weak or at the wrong frequency for the artifact

to detect it without other clues. However, voices

and movements on the rocks above it apparently were

enough to pinpoint their location and trigger the jamming. The

stronger signal of the Enterprise's sensors would

be easier for the ancient equipment to detect, and the

sensors would probably be jammed if he

had Sulu run a quick sweep around his

coordinates. Talika's plan had the best

chance of succeeding. "Let's do it," he said.

"Good luck!"

"And to you."

Chekov settled himself onto a boulder and

deactivated his tricorder. Nodding her

approval, Talika started down the slope,

picking an area covered with fist-sized rocks and

slithering down it as though she were skiing. Watching

her, Chekov was not at all sorry to have been cast

in the role of "weak male." That trick looked

like more of a challenge than he really wanted to try.

Talika reached the bottom of the slope,

surrounded by a moving, clattering, grinding mass of

small rocks. She stopped, letting the stones

flow around her until they buried her ankles.

The last rocks tumbled and clacked themselves into a

charged silence. One minute, two minutes,

three. Finally Talika pointed her tricorder

toward the talus slope and signaled for Chekov

to activate his.

He hit the switch and was rewarded immediately.

Low-level power readings were coming from beneath the pile of

shattered rock. The source was small, less

than three meters in any of its dimensions.

Struggling to control his excitement, Chekov

repeated his scan, both to confirm the existence of the

artifact and to check his bearings. Anything that

small, buried under so many tons of rock, would not

be easy to excavate, even with the best location they

could get.

Chekov eased himself to his feet and picked his

way along the hillside, his tricorder still aimed

toward the mysterious power source. After almost five

minutes of cautious movement, coupled with constant

readings, a rock slipped from beneath his foot. At

the first clatter from the bouncing stone, the power readings

terminated. "Damn!"

"Ah-ii-ya!" Talika's scream of

triumph ripped through the valley. "Alive it

is. After so much time, it still working is.

Ah-ii-ya!"

Only then did Chekov realize Talika's

strongest motivation. Given her culture's

overweening sense of their own superiority, it

rankled her to take second position to a man

on the archaeology team, even to someone with Dr.

Kaul's decades of experience. This discovery

would give her the status within the Federation

to dictate her own terms from now on. Shaking his

head at the scope of her ambition, he started for

their base camp to help bring back the necessary

equipment so they could excavate their find.

Chapter Three

Even running the excavators nonstop, it

took almost twelve hours to remove the rock that

had been blasted from the mountainside to bury the

artifact. Chekov alternated between impatience

to learn what he and Talika had discovered and an

equally strong desire to abandon the planet without

ever seeing what the excavators would uncover.

At first the work went quickly, with the excavator

technicians locking onto the large boulders and

transporting them beyond where Kaul's team planned

to work. Even so, with the large volume of rubble, the

operation required skill and precision to keep

additional debris from sliding down and burying the

site more deeply.

As the sun slid below the rim of the canyon and the

shadows deepened, Kirk ordered Sulu to beam

down half a dozen high-powered floodlights,

and the digging continued. The first landing party returned

to the Enterprise for the night, but they were replaced

by a second shift of technicians and

archaeologists. The majority of the work was still

concentrated at the primary site, where Kaul

believed they were most likely to find critical

information.

Chekov spent the evening regaling Sulu with his

morning's adventures, including comparing Careta

IV'S barren landscapes to the desolate sweep

of Russia's northern steppes. At first he was

relieved to be on the ship, warm and far from the

bleak, eerie planet. However, the longer he

thought about the artifact, the more curious he became.

What had they found? How could it possibly be

active after all these millennia? As often as he

pushed the thought away, it returned. He wanted

to be there when the excavators removed the last

debris from the object. Finally, he surrendered

and requested permission to return to the planet.

"Everyone else in the landing party has already

asked." Kirk's voice held an

unmistakable note of laughter when he came on

the intercom. "You're the last. Be ready to beam

down in fifteen minutes."

"Captain, message coming in from Starfleet."

Palmer, the communications officer for the evening

shift, turned away from her board to face the

captain. Her expression registered surprise,

as though the message was something completely

unexpected. "It's Admiral Komack,

sir."

"On screen, Lieutenant." Kirk

smoothed his face into a neutral expression,

wondering what the admiral had in store for the

Enterprise this time. With Komack it was never

safe to assume anything; one had to be prepared for

unpleasant surprises concealed by the admiral's

bland delivery.

Komack's tanned face, topped

by close-cropped white hair, filled the

viewscreen. His mouth twisted into a tight smile

as the communications link closed. "It seems

congratulations are in order, Captain Kirk.

Your passengers have unearthed a find of considerable

importance. The experts here are eagerly

awaiting your reports."

"Thank you, sir." Kirk straightened in his

chair, waiting for Komack to drop his bomb. With

an opening like that, Kirk could bet that he was being

softened up before Komack handed him an

unpleasant assignment.

"From the preliminary reports that you sent us,

we believe that this is the most significant find

in the last three decades. You have permission

to take as much time as you need to explore Careta

IV, and to use every available means to investigate

this civilization. Our experts are extremely

eager to know why we have found no evidence of these people

before. Please inform Dr. Kaul that I have

instructed you to allow him to call upon the complete

resources of the Enterprise to assist in his

investigations."

Kirk clenched his hand on the arm of his chair.

He should have known that Komack's orders would give

the archaeologists carte blanche concerning his ship

and crew. "I understand, Admiral. We will do our

best."

"Very good, Captain Kirk. Starfleet out."

On the last word Komack's image winked out.

"Kirk out," he muttered to the already blank

screen. Komack's order extended Kaul's

control over their mission, though the archaeologist

already had enough authority to make the Enterprise little

more than a glorified taxi for his team.

Shaking his head, Kirk signaled for the duty

officer to take over the conn. Whether he liked

the orders or not, it was time to beam down to the

planet and see what the excavators had

discovered.

By the time Chekov reached the transporter

room, most of the people had beamed down. Kirk,

McCoy, and two security guards entered the

room while Chekov was deciding whether he had

been made the victim of an elaborate

practical joke. Still, if someone was playing a

joke on him, it was the unknown aliens who had

lived on this planet so many millennia ago. It

was their buried artifact that exerted such a powerful

attraction that he was willing--indeed, eager--

to give up the warmth and companionship of the

Enterprise's recreation lounge to see the

excavators remove the last rubble from the

mysterious object.

Kirk grinned when he saw Chekov waiting

by the transporter. "Not quite your idea of the best

way to spend the evening, Mr. Chekov?" he

asked as he stepped onto the pad.

"No, sir. I'm not really sure why I

feel that I should beam back down." Chekov

took the station behind Kirk while the others moved

into position. The captain signaled for the

transporter chief to energize.

"Because we're all a bunch of damned

fools," McCoy said, resuming the conversation when

they materialized. He pulled his jacket

tighter to block out the sharp wind. A tiny speck

of a moon rode high overhead, emphasizing the

bleakness of the scene with its weak light. "At this

hour we should all be sitting in our quarters, with

our feet up, a good book on the screen, and a

little nip of something to warm the soul."

"I suppose there's something to that idea."

Kirk shot the doctor a speculative grin and

started across the empty ground that separated them from the

excavators. The work area was awash with a

brilliant flood of white, casting workers and

equipment into harsh relief against the surrounding

darkness. "But after a couple of nights doing that,

I'm ready for something else. What about you, Mr.

Chekov?"

After considering the best answer, Chekov gave

a diffident shrug. "I was thinking about doing what

Dr. McCoy suggested, but I was

curious. After all, it is not often that we can

discover a new piece of history."

McCoy chuckled. "Very diplomatic. It

might even save you from my worst on your next

physical."

They stepped into the circle of brightness cast by the

floodlights. Chekov examined the cliff

face, looking for the spot where he and Talika had

crossed the talus slope that morning. He

couldn't find it; the area had changed too much.

Where the artifact had been covered by a hundred

meters of broken rock, only a small mound

remained. The rest of the rubble had been moved by the

excavators, one boulder at a time, exposing the

sharp line of the cliffs.

Spock returned from talking to the

technicians. "Captain, the excavation is

proceeding according to schedule. We should reach the

artifact in approximately 1.35 hours if

the work continues as anticipated."

"Then can we go home after that, Spock?"

McCoy asked, his eyes dancing at the

prospect of baiting the Vulcan. "Some of us

can't stay awake all night like machines."

"Indeed, Doctor. It is fortunate that some

people are better equipped for unforeseen

circumstances." He turned to Kirk. "Since

most of the day shift has beamed down to observe,

I recommend that we take advantage of this

opportunity to scan the base of the cliffs for

further artifacts. The floodlights produce

sufficient illumination to allow several teams

to examine the rock surfaces. We should, in any

case, make a detailed scan of the nearby

area, since it appears that the cliffs were

demolished to produce the rubble that covered this

object."

Kirk tallied the number of people in the area.

If he had been operating the excavators, he

thought, having that many spectators would have made him

too nervous to do his job properly. Spock's

suggestion would clear the area until most of the

rubble was transported away from the site.

"Putting all the sightseers to work sounds like a good

idea to me, Spock. I'm sure the

technicians don't need the audience."

"I would like to have a closer look at those cliffs

anyway." Chekov activated his tricorder and

started toward the wall of rocks exposed by the

excavators. Dozens of meters of

rock had covered the area when he and Talika had

examined it that morning. Now it was stripped of

cover for the first time in millennia, its mysteries

waiting for him to unravel them. It was a heady

thought, to be walking somewhere that no living creature

had been for thousands upon thousands of years.

He programmed the tricorder to cycle through

all the sensor bands with each pass. As he

approached the cliffs, Chekov felt as though the

rocks were tilting over him, waiting to crash down

and bury him. He shuddered, feeling the weight

press against him, blotting out all light and air,

enclosing him in a suffocating blackness that went

on for all eternity.

Chekov pulled himself back to the present. His

tricorder gave no indication that the cliffs here were

any less stable than were those above the rest of the

site. He mustn't let his imagination run away

with him, regardless of the hour or the enigmas

surrounding the vanished civilization on this

planet. Forcing his attention back to his work, he

began the detailed scans that Spock had

requested.

The next half hour went quickly. Buoyed by the

hope that he would find more information about the as yet

unknown civilization that had occupied the planet,

Chekov scanned the cliff face and the surrounding

ground a meter at a time. The semicircle of

loose dirt and rubble that had been covered by the

deepest talus confirmed, to Chekov's mind, that

the rocks had been deliberately blasted loose

to cover something. Someone had not wanted this object

found, ever.

Before Chekov could work through the implications of that

thought, his communicator signaled him to return

to the excavation site. The artifact should be freed

from its rocky cocoon within the next fifteen

minutes, which barely gave the farthest people time to get

back.

By the time he reached the brightly lit area around the

site, Chekov could see that something had gone wrong

with the timetable. A substantial pile of rocks still

covered the presumed location of the object, and the

knot of people around the technicians moved with sharp,

jerky motions. Kirk's face looked grim and

tense in the harsh light, and a deep frown creased

McCoy's forehead.

Chekov slipped in beside McCoy. "What is

wrong, Doctor?" he asked in a low voice.

"They can't seem to find the dratted

object with the sensors," McCoy answered,

keeping his voice down. "One minute it was there,

the next gone." He shook his head. "It's got

to be operator error. Things don't just disappear

from sight."

"Normally that is correct, Doctor.

However, this object refuses to act in a

normal fashion." Remembering how the artifact

had pulled the same trick on him and Talika

that morning, he started forward to see if he could

help. As he did, the air shimmered, and

Scott materialized.

"I told you to take care of your equipment,

Terrensen," Scott said as he closed the distance

to the technicians. "You canna expect it to work

properly if you do not make the calibration runs

every hour."

"We did that, Mr. Scott," replied the

younger of the two technicians, a bean pole of a

man with a tousled shock of brown hair. "We

haven't been taking any shortcuts, I

promise you. We were picking up an anomalous

nothing in the middle of that pile of rubble, but the

readings disappeared from the scanners."

"Let me see what you've been doing, then."

Scott pushed between the technicians and bent over

the control panel, punching in the diagnostic

sequence. As he read the numbers, a frown

crept across his face. He entered more commands. After

a long pause, during which his scowl deepened, the

results from the second group of tests appeared

on the screen. "That's not possible," he said,

shaking his head. "The diagnostics program

reports that the anomaly never was there. Even when

I order the computer to correlate all sensor

readings for the last twelve hours, the programs

maintain that only a pile of rocks is there and that

that is all that ever was there. The diagnostics and the

scanners aren't agreeing on what they're

seeing."

Spock joined Scott, skimming the

diagnostic reports on the displays. "If we

believe the current readings, we have been pursuing

a mirage. However, up to five minutes ago

our analysis showed that an anomalous object,

possibly of considerable antiquity, was buried

beneath that pile of rubble."

Wondering if he could see any resemblance

between the present sensor readings and the ones from that

morning, Chekov stepped forward. "May

I examine the sensor logs from just before and just after the

readings changed? Dr. Talika and I had

similar difficulties this morning, but at the time

we thought they were caused by the rubble piled above the

artifact."

Terrensen hit the playback switch, and the

records scrolled down the screen in parallel

columns. With the advantage of a larger power

supply and stationary operation, the scanners on the

excavating equipment were far more sensitive than the

tricorders and could record a wider range of

readings simultaneously. It took Chekov a

few moments to sort through the data, but when he found

it, the anomaly--a thirty-cubic-meter space

for which the sensors reported no data--stood out

like a beacon. He paged backward through the readings

to confirm his suspicions. "Here, just before the

sensors begin reporting only more stones in this

place. There is a major spike in the lower

frequencies, almost like the power absorption curve

of a biaxial shield generator."

"Is that true, Spock?" Kirk asked as

he joined the group. "And what does it mean in

connection with all this?" He waved his arm

to encompass the cliffs as well as the heap of

rubble spotlighted by the circle of brilliant

light.

"The second occurrence of this pattern in the

readings greatly increases the probability that it

is not caused by random fluctuations in the energy

output levels of the device we are attempting

to locate." Spock examined the data. "Mr.

Chekov's inference that the effect is caused by a

biaxial shield generator may be correct.

However, if so, it is a device of completely

alien manufacture, a supposition supported

by the rest of our findings on this planet."

"But what's the purpose of the shield,

Spock? Why is it here?" Kirk gestured

sharply toward the displays as if expecting them

to show him the answers in block capitals.

"Unknown, Captain." Spock, too,

glanced toward the screen, as if to discover whether

Kirk had found something of importance. "Either

someone is taking great pains to conceal an artifact

from us, or they are trying to make us believe that

something is hidden in this area when, in fact, there is

nothing."

"And we have no way to tell which is the correct

answer." Kirk shivered and pulled his

jacket tighter around himself. The air

temperature had dropped several degrees in the

last half hour, and a sharp wind had come up. Before

long the cold would become decidedly

uncomfortable.

"Not without removing the rest of the rubble to see

what lies beneath it." Spock glanced again at the

screen, looking for clues to how the unknown aliens

had thought. Unfortunately, with so little to go on, the

facts could be interpreted to support many different

conclusions. "When we have finished the excavation,

logically we will either find an artifact, or we

will discover that someone created conditions that were intended

to convince us that an artifact was present. The

null sensor readings support either hypothesis."

Kirk nodded, even though Spock had told

him little that he didn't already know. With the sensors

reporting only rocks and more rocks, they would have

to operate the excavators blindly, increasing their

chances of accidentally damaging anything that was buried

beneath the pile of rubble. "What is your

recommendation, Mr. Scott? Can you adjust the

scanners on the excavating equipment?"

Scott shook his head. "There isn't a thing more

we can do, Captain. The equipment was designed

to compensate for most types of interference because many

of the civilizations in the Dalreth sector

routinely screened their important monuments with

shields or scramblers. If these sensors

canna do the job, nothing can."

Kirk weighed his options. Without the

excavators they would have to move the rest of the

rocks by hand, a slow and labor-intensive

process that no one would like. "Let's see if

we can finish clearing the area using visual

cross-checks, then."

The technicians started working again, referring

back to the earlier scans for reference to prevent

them from accidentally catching a piece of the artifact

with their transporter beams. After moving five

boulders in fifteen minutes, they gave up.

"I can't do it," said the older technician, a

short, wiry man nearing retirement age. "I

don't know which is rock and which is artifact, even

extrapolating from where we thought the earlier scans

told us the object should be. I'm just not sure

what's real and what isn't."

Terrensen nodded his agreement. "At this stage

we dare not make any mistakes--and suddenly

we're working blind. Even after looking at

twelve hours of anomalous sensor data,

there's too much guesswork in this one."

"Very well. You did your best." Kirk

turned to the crowd that had gathered expectantly

around the console. "You heard them, everybody.

We're reduced to old-fashioned methods to get

the job done."

With surprisingly few protests the

twenty-five crewmen fell to, lifting the

irregular blocks of basalt and shifting them a

dozen meters from the artifact. Once the rocks

were clear of the area where they thought the artifact was,

the technicians locked on to them and beamed them to the

pile of excavated rubble. In a surprisingly

short time, the broken rock had been cleared

away, revealing four huge basalt slabs standing

on their edges, capped by a fifth. The stone cube

was twice as tall as Kirk, and the edges of the

stones fit tightly together, as though they had been

ground to form a tight seal.

Kirk shook his head, marveling at the

perversity of the universe. Such huge sheets of

stone, balanced in such a position, could not be

natural, even though they also could not be the source

of the power readings Chekov had first noticed, nor

could they have caused the total absence of sensor

information they had been tracking earlier. Also,

unlike the boulders they had moved, the standing

rocks could not be shifted by a few crewmen.

"Spock, what do the sensors say now?"

"Absolutely nothing, Captain." Spock

adjusted a lever and repeated his readings. "The

scanners report that the object we are looking

at does not exist."

Chapter Four

For a few seconds thirty pairs of eyes

stared at Spock in utter disbelief. "What do

you mean, Spock?" Kirk asked when he found his

voice. The object had to exist. They could see

it, they could see the inky shadow it threw across the

uneven ground, and most of them had touched it as they

removed the boulders that had covered it.

Spock stepped to one side so Kirk could read

the displays. "I mean, Captain, that despite

the evidence of our senses, the object does not

register on any of our detectors. I would

surmise the presence of a class-B jamming

field of an unknown and extremely

sophisticated design, probably controlled

by a biaxial shield generator as Mr. Chekov

suggested. The logical corollary is that we will

be unable to detect any other protections the

artifact may possess."

"How likely do you-all expect that to be?"

McCoy strolled over to join Spock and

Kirk. Leaning against the console, he crossed his

arms over his chest. "This object is hundreds of

thousands of years old, but you're saying it's

protected by some of the latest and most

sophisticated technology known to our science."

"That is correct, Doctor. Many

civilizations have attained a high degree of

technical expertise. I see no reason for you

to doubt the authenticity of the artifact simply because

it does not conform to your preconceived notions of the

way things should be."

"Enough." Kirk gestured both men to silence.

"What I need are solid recommendations on

how we should proceed. Ideas, anyone?"

Kaul, who had been summoned from the primary

site, pushed his way through the crowd. "What's this

about an object that doesn't exist?" he asked,

breathless from his hurry. "If the object is that

well protected, its significance is

incalculable. This find merits our most careful

attention."

"See for yourself," Kirk said, pointing to the

readouts. "And while Dr. Kaul is checking

that, does anyone have any ideas on what to do

next?"

Scott glanced from the displays to the artifact,

as if to assure himself that the object really was there.

"A class-B jamming field renders most of

our tractor beams and antigravity lifters

inoperative. However, mechanical methods should

serve to open the structure."

"Then you believe something is hidden inside those

slabs?" Kirk asked the question mostly to hear their

reasoning. After the trouble someone had taken to conceal

the stone cube, something had to be inside it.

"It would be illogical to expend so much effort

to conceal an object unless it was extremely

dangerous." Spock studied the black cube, his

face taut with concentration. "However, at the

moment, we possess no information to indicate why

the object is dangerous."

Kirk felt the decision click into place.

Given the Enterprise's assignment and

Admiral Komack's restatement of their

orders, his next words were inevitable. "Nor will

we know anything until we open the cube. Taking

risks is our business, gentlemen. Let's

find out why someone worked so hard to hide that thing from

us. Mr. Scott, beam down the equipment you

need to open it."

"Aye, Captain." Scott stepped away from

the group, pulling out his communicator.

After several minutes of spirited discussion, a

pile of equipment and three more technicians

materialized a dozen meters from the artifact.

Scott hurried to the new arrivals, waving his

hands broadly to show where things should go. He

promptly drafted any spectators who got

too close, and before long a spidery construction of

poles and braces took shape over the black

stone cube.

Kaul scurried around the workers, poking his

tricorder against the artifact, demanding that they

hurry so he could proceed with examining what was

inside the cube. Talika followed behind him, her

bulk dwarfing Kaul's slight frame.

Occasionally, over Scott's shouted orders and the

clanks and bangs of the construction, Kirk made

out snatches of Talika's sharp-toned

monologue. She was arguing with Kaul over the

significance of the find and disputing his proposals

for studying the object.

"Some things never change, do they, Jim?"

Shaking his head, McCoy chuckled at the sight

of the massive Djelifan shadowing the slight

Indian.

"What's that, Bones?" Kirk, who had been

watching Scott oversee a tricky connection between

three crossbeams, turned his head to follow

McCoy's pointed look. The mismatch between the

two archaeologists could not have been more

incongruous.

"How these young upstarts always get so wrapped

up in their own ideas that they can't see beyond the ends

of their noses." He shot Kirk a sideways

look. "Although you have to admit that, in Dr.

Nyar's case, she has a decidedly longer

view than most."

In spite of himself Kirk smiled. Like the rest

of her physique, Talika's nose was not

small. "Now, Bones, you know the Djelifans

consider a long nose to be a sign of beauty."

"I suppose the next thing you're going

to tell me is that she's the pan-Djelifan

beauty queen or something." McCoy rolled his

eyes upward. "Her voice reminds me too

much of my ex-wife."

Kirk shrugged, unsure how seriously he should

take McCoy's words. "I can't help you with

that, I'm afraid, but I'm told that Dr.

Talika is a very attractive woman, according

to her people's standards." Pulling his jacket tighter

around himself to ward off the sharp breeze blowing down

the canyon, he started toward Scott. The night

air was dry, smelling of dust and of ozone from the

hot lights. "By the way, didn't you read the

briefing on Djelifan customs?"

"I skimmed through it, but there's a lot of

technical material there." McCoy fell

into step with Kirk, shaking his head in perplexity.

"I'm just an old country doctor, Jim. It

seemed to me that the person who wrote that briefing

went out of his way to use the most obscure jargon

he could possibly find."

Spock joined them, his long legs easily

matching Kirk's unhurried pace. The lower

oxygen content of Careta's atmosphere was slowing

the humans down, but the air and temperature

reminded Spock of a winter day in the

L-Langon Mountains. "What the captain

means is that you should have paid more attention to the section

on Djelifan naming customs. Each woman,

when she reaches her age of majority, earns the

right to her own unique personal name. Males and

female children who have not proven their worth to the

society are known by their clan name and group

designator."

McCoy shot Kirk an annoyed look.

He didn't think the captain had found any more

time than he had for unraveling the report, but

Kirk and Spock were acting as though everyone should have

gleaned the one important fact from the briefing.

"Does his lecture have a point, Jim? That

section was the worst part of the entire report."

"I'm afraid it does, Bones." Kirk

gave the doctor a rueful grin. The loose

rock crunched beneath his boots, the sound

surprisingly loud in a brief lull in the work

noises. "What he's trying to tell you is that

buried beneath the technical jargon was the crucial

fact that it is considered exceedingly rude

to address an adult Djelifan woman by her

last name."

"Oh." McCoy frowned, trying to remember

what he had deciphered from the report's

deliberately obtuse language. "How was I

supposed to know that's what it said?"

"I guess that's why we keep Mr. Spock

around to translate." Before the doctor could

reply, Kirk shifted his attention to the

construction. The framework over the artifact was

complete, and several crewmen were reinforcing the

joints while others hoisted into position the metal

plates that would form the work surface. "How long

before you're ready, Scotty?"

"How long?" Scott stepped back,

surveying the scaffold with a proprietary air.

"It shouldn't be more than five minutes before we

get everything locked down and the winches secured to the

decking. But if you wouldn't mind, Captain, I

would prefer to have everyone except the lads helping

me stand back a wee bit when we make our try

at the cube. Until we lift its top off,

we won't know why someone thought it was necessary to seal that

beastie up so tightly."

"Good thinking. We'll start clearing the area

now, so we won't have to waste time when you're

ready."

"Thank you, Captain. We'll give you enough

warning, in case everyone hasn't moved back."

He checked the workers who were wrestling the winches

into place. Two teams had their first units

securely fastened and were climbing down to get their

second, while a third team was hauling its

second winch up to platform level. The fourth

team had gotten a unit onto the decking but was

struggling to maneuver it into position.

After watching them briefly, Scott bounded up

the ladder. "Here, lads. Let me show you how

to handle these darlings."

With a grin of amusement, Kirk turned away.

"Come on, gentlemen. Let's get the

sightseers back to a safe distance."

Scott's five minutes stretched to fifteen,

but Kirk barely noticed. It took that much time

to convince everyone to retreat to a safe distance and

remain there. The archaeologists in particular were

hard to persuade. Kaul wanted to be near the

artifact when it was opened, fearing that the sensors

would still be jammed and that his skills as a trained

observer would be needed to record the details of the

scene as the huge basalt slabs were lifted from

their positions. Finally, to end the argument,

Kirk agreed to a compromise. Since they did

not know what a safe distance was, he allowed the

archaeologists to station themselves halfway between the

artifact and the designated perimeter. He

suspected that if the unknown aliens had intended

to leave a lethal trap around the artifact,

everyone would need to be much farther away. Kirk

frowned, wondering if he should order his people back

to the Enterprise.

Spock raised an eyebrow at Kirk's

expression. "Captain, you seem concerned about the

possibility of unanticipated defenses

associated with the artifact."

"The thought had crossed my mind, Spock."

Kirk glared at the artifact, willing it

to surrender its secrets. Scott and his crew were

anchoring the last cables with suction grapples, the

final step before lifting the upper slab of dense

black basalt. "If you have any thoughts on the

matter, I'd appreciate hearing them before

Mr. Scott lifts the top off that thing."

"My analysis of the defenses we have encountered

so far indicates that they are intended to disguise the

presence of the object and to render it difficult

to approach. I would conclude that this pattern will

continue and that nothing contained within the enclosure will

prove more than incidentally lethal."

""Incidentally lethal"?" McCoy asked.

"Is that something like "accidentally dead"?"

Kirk decided to interrupt before the doctor

launched into a full tirade. "You mean something like

being caught under one of those slabs when it falls?"

"That would be a prime example. The intent of the

aliens seems to be to render this artifact

inaccessible, not to deliberately injure anyone

who seeks to discover what is here."

Scott turned toward the captain and raised his

hand, signaling that the last cable was secure. "I

hope you're right, Spock. Here goes the test."

Kirk ordered Scott to activate the winches.

The motors hummed to life, first drawing in the

slack on the cables and then pulling against the weight

of the slab. At first nothing happened. Scott

increased the power to the winches, and still the slab

refused to move. The humming rose to a shrill

keening as the motors labored against the weight.

"That is most unusual." Spock moved to the

excavator's console and rerouted the power

supplies for the digging equipment and the

floodlights. "Any two of those winches

should have been sufficient to lift that mass. The

others were to insure control over the slab once it

was raised."

Kirk reached for his communicator. "Are you

sure those slabs weren't bonded together?"

"Visual inspection showed no signs of any

bonding compounds. Of course, we were unable

to obtain any meaningful results with our

tricorder scans." Spock flipped the last

relay, and the floodlights dimmed to half

intensity.

Kirk activated his communicator.

"Scotty, the power supply from this station is

available to you."

"Thank you, Captain," Scott's voice

replied from the communicator. He moved to his

controls and tied the extra energy into his power

grid. The shrill whine of the winches climbed in

volume and became harsher, the overlapping sounds

beginning to pulse in rising and falling beats.

Several people covered their ears to block out the

noise. A deep, irregular groaning joined the

din, its unevenness more disturbing than the steady

shriek of the motors.

Everyone held his breath, waiting. The winches

could not withstand much more stress, and Kirk was

surprised that Scott, usually so protective

of his equipment, had not shut down the motors

already. He grinned. Like everyone else, Scott

was determined to solve this mystery, even if it

meant spending the next three days reconditioning

the overtaxed equipment.

The groaning became louder, and Kirk realized

it was the sound of the basalt slab scraping against the

walls of the cube. With a loud crack and a final

shriek of protest, the near end of the slab pulled

free. The cube shuddered and came apart, the

vertical slabs tilting outward under the pull of the

guide cables attached to them. The slabs toppled

in slow motion, as though they were falling in

microgravity, but the shock waves rippled

outward from their impact. A cloud of dust

billowed up around the slabs, obscuring their first

sight of the artifact.

The whine from the winches dropped to a normal

pitch, although Kirk thought the sound was a little ragged.

Then from the work crew on the platform came the

sounds of retching and gagging. Before Kirk could

wonder what was happening, the dust cloud reached

them. A heavy, nauseating smell

permeated the air. Before he had consciously

identified the suldanic gas, Kirk was on the

ground, retching.

A communicator chirped nearby. "Spock

to Enterprise. Emergency beam-up. All

personnel on the planet. Repeat, emergency

beam-up. Now." The Vulcan's voice sounded

strained, as though he were barely controlling his own

response to the gas.

Mercifully, the technicians in the

transporter room worked quickly. They beat the

ship's record time for recovering that many people under

field conditions by a full minute. Even so,

Kirk thought as he left sickbay after receiving his

antidote and antinausea shots, there were going

to be a lot of people under the weather on the

Enterprise tomorrow. Someone had truly not wanted

that artifact to be discovered.

Chapter Five

He had been right about the "morning after," Kirk

thought grimly as he surveyed the group around the

briefing table. Even though he had been treated

promptly, the brief exposure to the suldanic

gas had left him with a headache of monumental

proportions and a stomach that felt as though he were

coming down with a case of the Bilindian flu.

Judging from McCoy's complexion, the doctor

felt as bad as he did, while Kaul and

Talika, who had been stationed closer to the

artifact, looked even worse. Chekov was

holding himself together mostly by youthful enthusiasm for the

mystery presented by the artifact, and Spock's

Vulcan control was standing him in good stead, but they

both were obviously fighting the aftereffects of the

gas. The only person in the room who looked

halfway human was Meredith Lassiter, who had

monitored the artifact from the safety of the

Enterprise, but even she had dark circles under

her eyes from working all night to process the

scanner data on the artifact.

"This, apparently, is what someone tried so

hard to keep us from discovering." Lassiter cued the

image onto their screens.

The object was about two meters high and four

meters long, but only ten centimeters thick.

The back side was a metallic blue-gray, with

no scratches or tarnish to mar the finish. The

other side reminded Kirk of a pair of

plate-glass windows enclosed in a flat

black frame. The illusion was enhanced by the

lifelike landscape on the left, showing a

rolling plain covered with knee-deep grass.

However, the right side of the object was blank. The

glassy sheen of the windowlike surface was the

only thing that differentiated it from its background.

"What is it?" Chekov asked, his expression

reflecting the bewilderment everyone felt. "Is that

what we almost got killed for?"

Lassiter nodded. "What it is, we're not

yet certain. However, it appears that the

safeguards connected to the stone cube were intended

to prevent us from gaining access to this object."

Spock put a list of numbers on the

screen. "This object is definitely the source

of the power readings first detected by Dr. Talika

and Ensign Chekov. We surmise that the barrier

surrounding it contained a dampening field. However,

in the time since the field was activated, it had

become defective. Stray energy fluctuations

escaped the containment field and permitted us

to detect the object. The shielding also produced

a jamming field that completely blocked our

sensors when it detected our scanning beams.

However, this function of the containment field operated

with much impaired efficiency. Our preliminary

analysis of the emissions from the artifact show that

its major mode of energy release is at a

subharmonic frequency that has been shown

to produce feelings of extreme uneasiness in

some humans. As a final note, the power

levels emitted by the object climbed steadily

for 7.3 hours after we removed the barrier and have

remained constant since then."

"Almost like it was charging up its energy cells for

something," Chekov murmured. "But what is it

waiting for?"

Kirk nodded. "That's a good question. Any

ideas, Mr. Spock?"

"None at present, Captain. Dr.

Lassiter and her team have accumulated an

impressive amount of data, but as yet we have

no clear idea of what the object is or what

its function might be."

Lassiter twisted her fingers through a lock of

her pale gold hair. "We don't even know

who left the object here. Nor who walled it

off like that. The stone slabs and the protection

fields are far younger than the artifact

they concealed. We surmise that the Meztoriens were

responsible for camouflaging the remains of a much

older civilization, although we do not yet have any

incontrovertible evidence for this conclusion."

"Recommendations?" Kirk looked toward

Kaul to see if he had any suggestions. His

face gone waxy, the senior archaeologist

swayed in his seat. His eyes fluttered closed,

and beads of sweat sprang out on his forehead.

McCoy shoved himself from his seat, his movements

less steady than Kirk would have liked, and

hurried to Kaul's side.

Spock hit the intercom switch. "Medical

emergency. Dr. M'Benga to the briefing

room."

McCoy checked Kaul's pulse and breathing.

"Secondary reaction to the suldanic gas," he

said. "We were hit by a particularly nasty

variant. If Dr. Kaul's reaction is

typical, I recommend that everyone report

to sickbay for another round of mylezan."

"I'll make that an order, Bones," Kirk

said. "When this briefing is over, everyone gets a

second round of shots. We don't need people

falling over at critical moments."

The door opened, and M'Benga entered,

followed by two orderlies and a stretcher. The

orderlies lifted Kaul's limp body onto

the stretcher and headed for sickbay, while

M'Benga stayed to hear McCoy's

diagnosis. "I will have the mylezan shots ready

by the time you're through with the briefing," he said, heading

for the door.

"Now, where were we?" Kirk asked as the door

closed behind M'Benga. He gave the group a

moment to settle down after the interruption.

Talika and Lassiter were engaged in a staring

contest to decide who would direct the

archaeological efforts in Kaul's absence.

Kirk shuddered, thinking he wouldn't want to get

between Talika and something she wanted as strongly as

she wanted to vindicate her theories about this

planet. Lassiter apparently reached the same

conclusion. She broke eye contact and stared down

at the table, her face screened by the silver-gilt

curtain of her hair.

"We must with greatest care artifact study."

Talika's voice was heavy and measured. "Because

of danger, I will explorations personally conduct,

using assistant for supplemental data

recording. Others will from safe distance investigations

observe."

At her announcement, Chekov's face went

white. For a moment Kirk thought he was suffering from

a reaction similar to Kaul's, but then he

stiffened his back as if accepting an impossible

assignment. Suppressing a grin, Kirk

asked, "Are you volunteering, Mr. Chekov?"

Chekov's mouth twitched as if he wanted

to refuse, but his sense of duty won out. "I would

be honored to assist Dr. Talika in

investigating the artifact."

"Thank you, Ensign. Your enthusiasm is

commendable." Kirk turned back to Talika.

"When do you propose to begin your work?"

"We will in half hour commence. Dr. Meredith

and I must sensors recalibrate for reporting

significant data now missed. If Mr.

Spock assists, we will much sooner finish.

However, time is to administer medication needed, for

those to harm on planet last night exposed."

She shrugged her massive shoulders. "On

Djelifa everything more efficiently handled is.

Since crew of Enterprise Djelifan is

not, schedule to innate weakness of humans must

concede."

Kirk bit his tongue to hold back an

angry reply. He seriously doubted that a team

of Djelifans could get things done any faster

than the crew of the Enterprise, but he knew

anyone who heard Talika's unfair comparison

would go out of his way to see how slowly he could do

what she asked.

Spock, guessing that Kirk was struggling

to avoid an undiplomatic response

to Talika's arrogance, answered her. "The

sensors have already been recalibrated, Dr.

Talika. The job was completed an hour ago, and

it remains only for you to specify which bands you wish

to analyze."

"Thank you, Mr. Spock." Kirk couldn't

quite keep the smug look off his face. "If no

one has anything else to add, this briefing is

dismissed. The landing party will beam down to the planet

in half an hour."

The morning light didn't improve the

planet at all, Chekov thought as he and

Talika started toward the artifact. His pounding

headache, a reminder of the suldanic gas

attack the previous evening, only made the

scene less appealing. The landing party had beamed

down next to the control console, hoping it was a

safe distance from which to detect any more surprises

either group of aliens might have concealed to discourage

people from investigating the artifact. Privately

Chekov wondered if any distance, even that of the

ship's standard orbit, would be enough if someone really

intended to prevent later explorers from gaining

access to the artifact. The closer they got to the

object, the less reassured he felt to have

Spock and his team of scientists watching their

efforts from the "safety" of the console. Either they were

too close and would be injured in the next

attack, or they were too far away to save

Chekov and Talika from a localized assault.

Talika seemed unaffected by any second

thoughts. After surveying the artifact and comparing her

visual results with the data on her tricorder

screen, she motioned to Chekov. "You to the right

circle, I to the left. We inward spiral

make, scanning object, until we at center

meet."

"Whatever you say." Chekov activated his

tricorder and started walking, splitting his

attention between Talika and the black object. The

artifact was still surrounded by the spiderwork of

Scott's scaffold; the fallen slabs of

basalt that had imprisoned it for so many

centuries had been pulled off to the sides. If

Talika truly wanted him to run his traverse

as a mirror image of hers, Chekov thought, she

should have given him more specific instructions. At

the very least, she could have told him how far apart

to space his circuits. However, precision before

the fact did not seem to be a Djelifan

characteristic. Talika, at any rate, preferred

lecturing after he did something wrong to explaining

what she wanted beforehand, even in response

to direct questions. Maybe she thinks I can read

her mind, he thought sourly. Certainly that would

explain why she consistently acted as though he were

deliberately misconstruing her requests.

For once Talika seemed in no hurry

to reach her destination. Chekov easily matched her

pace, timing his circuits to cross her path within

seconds of when she reached the overlap points.

His tricorder readings remained unremarkable,

showing only the steady power output from the artifact.

Nothing else registered--no hidden

devices beneath the rubble-strewn ground, no

scanners buried deep in the cliffs above them,

no clues about the origin or the function of the

object they were examining.

Four revolutions on their spiral path brought

them to the front of the object. The air near it

seemed cooler, almost as if the object contained a

low-level refrigeration field, and Chekov

shivered involuntarily at the sensation.

Refrigeration fields that produced such external

leakage had not been in use in the Federation in over

fifty years, and even then they had been

restricted to specialized functions such as

long-term storage of biological materials.

Either he was misinterpreting his sensations or something

else was happening here.

Chekov took three steps backward and

pivoted slowly, watching the temperature readings

on his tricorder. They climbed steadily until

his back was toward the artifact, then began falling

as he completed his rotation. Next to the artifact

the temperature was almost ten degrees lower than

it was on the flood plain upriver from his location.

Frowning with puzzlement, he extended his

tricorder toward Talika so she could read his

results.

She shrugged. "It in shadows freezes. So

what?"

He shook his head and scrolled through the

temperature scans. "You do not get so drastic

an effect just from the shadows. Something about the

artifact is creating this temperature

differential."

"Why should that to me important be?" She

turned her back on him, deliberately moving

toward the black object.

For a moment Chekov stared at her, wondering how

she could dismiss the anomaly so easily. To him the

temperature readings spoke of ancient

equipment of strange design and unknown

purposes still functioning after millennia, of

enigmatic aliens with incomprehensible motives

and mysterious purposes, and of unsuspected

dangers lurking at the edge of possibility.

Dismissing any clue to the puzzle seemed

criminally irresponsible, but Talika acted as

though she already knew all the answers. Somehow

Chekov didn't think being Djelifan, her

standard reason for ignoring suggestions, would convey

any immunity to the dangers of an

unexplored planet.

Rather the opposite, he thought sourly as he

stepped in front of the object and ran his

tricorder over the smooth, windowlike surface

that formed the object's right side. The device

reported only the object's presence, which was

less information than he would have gotten if he had

pointed the tricorder at a mirror. It should have

told him the composition of the artifact, located the

power generating equipment around the site, and given

him a dozen other useful facts. At the very least

he should have gotten readings characterizing the type and

strength of the shields that prevented him from obtaining

any other information.

Tentatively Chekov reached toward the

object. About a centimeter above the surface,

he felt a faint tingling in his fingertips. When

he pulled his hand away, the sensation stopped. He

tried again at a different spot and got the same

result. Slowly he moved his hand over the

artifact, tracing the field that clung like an

aura to its surface. The tingling stopped at the

edge of the glassy surface, and Chekov wondered

if the black frame was the source of the field or

if it inhibited the field from expanding further.

All the while he was tracing the extent of the

field, Chekov kept one eye on the

tricorder screen. To his surprise, the

readings remained absolutely unchanged. Most

force fields registered at least minor power

fluctuations when someone or something probed their

perimeters, no matter how slight the challenge.

Something was not right here. Finally, with no other tests

he could do, Chekov spread his fingers and pushed his

hand firmly into the force field.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the

ground two meters from the object, gasping for

breath. His right arm was completely numb, and the

shoulder blade felt as though it had been

dislocated. Awkwardly he levered himself to a

sitting position, hampered by the useless right arm.

"What silly game this is?" Talika glared

down at him. "Sleeping on job?"

Chekov groaned and tried to stand. Not

surprisingly, his legs were too unsteady to lift

him, and he dropped back to the ground. "It threw

me away. When I tried to touch the object."

"Can you not believable excuse invent?" She

scowled, the expression twisting her face into a

grimace that reminded Chekov of the Hag

Mask from the Creation Play on Deveron 5.

"Djelifan assistant would not so stupid be."

Chekov felt his temper unravel. "You try

it! See if you have any better luck."

"Already have. Hand through surface of window

reaches." Her scowl darkened. "Stupid male!

Why think you that catching lies so hard would be?"

"Maybe it recognizes Djelifan

superiority," he snarled before he realized the

importance of her words. Talika had been

exploring the left side of the artifact, with its

beautifully detailed scene of some other place

or time. That side had allowed her hand

to penetrate the surface, while the blank side

he was examining had actively rejected his

attempts to reach below the field on its

surface. Clearly, although they had many features

in common, some basic differences distinguished the two

sides of the artifact. If Talika's hand could

reach into the window, could something else also pass through

it?

He levered himself to his feet, noticing with

relief that most of his shakiness had passed. For the

first few steps, the muscles in his legs twinged and

pulled, telling him how hard he had landed on the

rocks, but moving worked out the discomfort. Taking his

time, Chekov approached the artifact, studying it

with great care.

The object did not yield its secrets

to his scrutiny this time either. Whatever it was hiding,

it was doing a good job of it. Finally he stopped in

front of the windowlike panel, glancing between his

tricorder and the artifact. The tricorder

reported the same readings as it had earlier on the

blank right panel, and the scene in front of him

showed no signs of changing in response to his

examination.

He inspected the scene more closely, thinking

how much it looked like the Russian steppes. The

rolling surface of the land sloped away into the

distance, with knee-deep grass rippling in the

breeze, and the late afternoon sunlight laced long

shadows through the golds and dull greens of the

vegetation. The view was so realistic and so

lifelike that Chekov was certain he could step through

the window and walk across the open plain.

After several minutes of careful observation,

Chekov extended his hand toward the artifact. He

had hoped he could find the answers without risking

another attack from the object's

defenses, but the tricorder readings were still

suspiciously minimal. If he wanted to learn

anything, he would have to take another chance.

Slowly Chekov extended his hand toward the

artifact, anticipating the tingling resistance of the

force field. Instead, when his fingertips were about a

centimeter from the surface, a soothing warmth

began to envelop them. Without thinking he reached

forward, grateful for the heat to counteract the chill

of the air near the artifact. Before he realized how

far he had gone, his hand had disappeared up to the

wrist.

Shocked, Chekov tried to pull his hand out.

At first it felt like the arm was encased in a block

of plastiseal that prevented him from moving it. He

braced himself and pulled harder. Straining every

muscle in his body, he finally broke the hold

on his arm. Before he could catch himself, he stumbled

backwards and sprawled in an undignified heap

at Talika's feet.

"Stupid!" she said in a disgusted tone. "Said

I that you could it touch."

Mustering what dignity he had left, Chekov

clambered to his feet and looked for something to use

as a probe. Several lengths of cable left from

building the scaffold lay around the area.

Except for that, the ubiquitous rocks were the

only tools that came immediately to hand. Chekov

picked up a fist-sized chunk of rock and lobbed

it toward the artifact. It traced a lazy arc

into the air, intersecting the artifact's surface

while at the top of its trajectory.

Instead of passing through the window as he had

expected, the rock came whizzing back at

Chekov. He dropped to the ground, barely in time

to escape being hit. Talika wasn't so

lucky. Chekov heard a dull thud, followed

by a grunt of pain, as the rock hit her in the

shoulder. He braced himself, waiting for her to start

yelling at him for his carelessness, but to her credit

she did not.

Chekov scrambled to his feet and turned

to face her. Perhaps he could forestall her temper

tantrum. "I apologize for not anticipating

that reaction from the artifact, Dr. Talika. I

did not think I had thrown it so hard."

She frowned and ignored the apology. "You

did not. Artifact threw back rock."

"Very interesting." Chekov frowned, trying

to decipher the significance of her

observation. The artifact had liked his arm and had

tried to pull him into it, but it had actively

rejected the rock. Still frowning, he picked up

several small pebbles and one larger rock from the

ground.

Taking the rock in his left hand, he reached

toward the window. Again a sensation of warmth started in

his fingers and traveled up his arm. He tried

to release the rock inside the field, but his fingers

were immobilized. Quickly, before his arm could be

drawn further into the artifact, he jerked it

clear.

"It does not seem to have any absolute

prejudices against rocks," he said, staring at the

artifact in bewilderment. He had expected it

to push the rock away, repulsing his hand at the

same time.

Spock joined Chekov and Talika. "It would

appear that the device has a decided preference

for materials of organic origin. With Dr.

Talika's permission, I propose that we

conduct more extensive tests."

"What tests?" Talika pulled her attention

from the artifact to look up at Spock. "If

object organics wants, send organics.

Worthless male flunky Federation must have

to investigation do."

Chekov ground his teeth to suppress an

angry protest. There was no doubt in his mind that

Talika's preferred course of action would be

to send him into the artifact in hopes that he would

learn something useful.

Spock, however, ignored her remark. "I

would recommend a more conservative approach than

sending someone into the artifact. First, I propose

that we confirm our preliminary deduction that the

artifact can distinguish between organic and

nonorganic materials."

A stubborn expression settled on

Talika's face, twisting her mouth into an

unpleasant frown. "What proposals you have?"

"Our first priority should be to determine the

exact parameters of what the artifact will and will not

allow to penetrate its surface. At the same

time, we should take more extensive sensor readings

to determine what effects, if any, our

investigations are producing on the energy output

of the object or the scene projected onto its

surface. Only after we have analyzed the data

collected from these tests should we consider

allowing a person to investigate the artifact."

Talika raked a hand through her mousy brown

hair, the jerkiness of her movement betraying her

annoyance. "Proposal unnecessarily timid

is, but of Federation obstructionism typical. You

will faster work if we your suggestions follow rather

than proper Djelifan investigation run?"

Spock's face assumed its most bland

Vulcan mask. "Almost certainly, it will take

less time to do as I have suggested than it will take

to convince Captain Kirk to do it your way. The

probabilities suggest strongly that we will have

to send someone into the artifact at a future time.

However, the preliminary tests will enable us to equip

that person to obtain the maximum amount of data

with the least amount of risk."

"Very well." Talika's scowl gave the lie

to her words. "In interests of

Djelifan-Federation cooperation, things will we do

your way."

"Thank you, Dr. Talika." Spock

turned to Chekov. "I noticed that you had

collected a handful of rocks. When Dr.

Talika and I have removed ourselves from the

artif act's line of sight, will you toss the pebbles

at various parts of the object's surface?"

"Of course, Mr. Spock." It was

difficult to put any enthusiasm in his voice,

Chekov thought, but at least he kept most of his

irritation to himself. Junior officers expected

to draw the hazardous assignments, and this one

didn't seem overly dangerous. It wouldn't have

bothered him at all, except that Talika kept

treating him as incompetent because he was not

Djelifan and as expendable because he was male.

From her tone, you'd think that Djelifans

created the Universe and are subleasing it to the rest

of us so they don't have to run the whole show.

Shoving his rebellious thoughts aside, Chekov

stationed himself about five meters from the artifact

along its center line. He lowered himself to the ground

and piled his handful of pebbles where he could reach them.

Dozens of other suitable rocks lay within easy

reach. When Spock signaled that he and Talika

had reached a safe distance, Chekov picked up the

first stone and lobbed it toward the artifact.

Fifteen minutes and four dozen rocks

later, all they knew was that rocks rebounded from the

artifact with more kinetic energy than had been used

to throw them. The energy for the recoil had

to come from inside the object, but its shields were

impenetrable and interfered with all their instruments.

Frustrated, Chekov removed his uniform

tunic and wadded it into a ball. If the artifact

would only accept organic materials, perhaps they

could get some useful information when the carbon-based

polymer fabric penetrated the field.

Scrambling to his feet and moving closer,

Chekov tossed the shirt into the center of the

windowlike panel.

The shirt rebounded and unrolled, wrapping itself

around his face. Startled, Chekov stepped

backwards, tripped, and fell on his rear. As

soon as the fabric came free in his hand, he

relaxed. It was just his shirt. To make sure,

Chekov retrieved his tricorder and scanned the

shirt. As expected, it was no different from any

other garment synthesized by the Enterprise's

equipment. He was shrugging back into the shirt when

Spock and Talika rejoined him.

"It would seem that our hypothesis was in error."

Spock ran his tricorder over the artifact

yet again. In a human, the gesture would have

suggested deep frustration at the inability

to obtain results. "The artifact appears to know

when a higher life-form wishes to penetrate the

field."

"It allowed me to put a rock into the field as

long as I physically held it in my hand."

Chekov glared at the object, as if to demand the

code that would unlock its secrets. "Will it

allow anything to penetrate it, so long as it is

being held by a person?"

Spock picked up a five-meter length of

cable from the ground. "Please test your theory,

Mr. Chekov. This cable is sufficiently long

to permit us to see what will happen when the cable

reaches the other side of the artifact."

Chekov took the cable and gingerly poked the end

at the artifact. Despite Spock's apparent

confidence in his suggestion, he more than half

expected the object to throw the end of the cable back

at him. When nothing happened, Chekov pushed a

little harder. Ten centimeters of the cable disappeared

into the unwavering scene on the window.

"The sensors still detect no changes in the

artifact's status. The reverse side remains

unaffected by our activities," Spock

reported. "Continue with the experiment."

Twenty centimeters, thirty

centimeters, forty. Chekov felt a slight,

tingling warmth spread up the cable to his hands, so

weak that he might have been imagining it. He wiped

one hand, then the other, against his pants legs

to remove the nervous perspiration and continued to feed

more cable into the window.

One meter, one and a half. Chekov could no

longer ignore the heat traveling through the cable,

although the source of the energy did not register on

Mr. Spock's tricorder. Neither did the

free end of the cable appear in the scene they were

viewing. He released his hold for a moment to wipe

both hands. With a sizzle and a pop, the cable

dropped to the ground beside the artifact, its end

neatly sheared off. At the same time, the other end

of the cable dropped into the scene in the artifact.

Spock picked up the cut end of the cable. It

was fused to a mirror finish so perfect that

Chekov saw a tiny image of himself when Spock

turned the cable for him to examine. "How did the

object know I had released the cable?" he

asked, shaking his head in bewilderment. The thought of

such power was frightening, especially when no one knew

how to control it. He shuddered, wondering what would

happen if the artifact lost interest in a person

when he was partway through the window.

"I would surmise that we are being scanned,

although I am unable to detect any radiation leaking

from their sensors." Spock paused to consult his

tricorder. "I suggest that we attempt

to place a tricorder inside the field."

It took them fifteen minutes to secure the

tricorder to the end of a metal rod and to locate

a pair of gloves to protect Chekov's hands

from the heat generated by the artifact. Spock gave

the settings on the device one last check before

signaling for Chekov to proceed with the experiment.

Slowly he pushed the rod toward the artifact.

At first, nothing happened. It felt to Chekov as

if he were shoving against a solid wall. He

centered the tip of the rod against the window and pushed

harder. Again nothing happened.

Scowling with the effort, Chekov leaned against the

rod with all his weight. The tricorder broke

free of its fastenings and catapulted down the rod

toward Chekov. At the same time, the rod

penetrated the field with an abruptness that caught

him off guard. He staggered, trying to keep his

footing, and sprawled on the ground.

For a moment he lay still, catching his

breath. As he rolled to his feet, he heard the

sputter of the rod being cut into two pieces.

Spock reached past Chekov to retrieve the

tricorder. The silence stretched as he examined

its screen, one eyebrow raised. "This device

recorded no significant information during its

contact with the artifact. That result leads us to an

inescapable conclusion." He paused, waiting for

Chekov and Talika to catch up with his reasoning.

Chekov sighed, knowing what was coming next. "If

we cannot send through a tricorder rigged for remote

telemetry, we will have to have someone hold it in the

field. However, that person may have

difficulties maintaining his position, since the

artifact exerts a pull on anything within its

power."

Talika grunted. "Typical human

whimpering. You tricorder in field hold, I you

hold. Nothing on planet can Djelifan in

proper stance move."

"I hope the artifact knows that." Chekov

took the tricorder from Spock, checked the new

settings that the Vulcan had programmed into it, and

swung its strap around his neck for extra

security. Talika braced her feet and one

heavily muscled arm against the frame of the

artifact while wrapping the other arm around

Chekov's waist. He wasn't sure it was the

position he would have chosen, but it did feel

secure. It would take a great deal of force

to budge Talika.

Slowly Chekov extended the tricorder toward

the window. As it encountered the edge of the field, it

gave off a low whine, but its screen remained

blank. He extended his arm further, feeling the

tingling warmth travel up his arm. As the pull

increased, he had to fight to keep from jerking clear

of the field. To get the data they needed and

to discover what lay on the other side of the window,

he needed to get the tricorder as far into the

artifact as he could.

A centimeter at a time, Chekov's arm

disappeared into the window. He could still feel the arm,

could feel the weight of the tricorder in his hand, but

all he could see was the view of the rolling plain that

the alien device had shown them since they had first

released it from its protective walls. The

idea that his arm might end at the edge of the window was

extremely disconcerting.

The pull on his arm increased sharply as

his elbow disappeared into the window. Startled,

Chekov jerked back, and his boots missed their

footing on the loose gravel. Unbalanced, he

pitched toward the window, drawn in by the pressure

on his arm. Talika's hold slowed his movement,

but his momentum pushed her arm against the surface of the

window. The field caught her, too, and both of

them fell into the window.

Chapter Six

"Explanation, Spock?" Kirk's question was more

order than request. The five security men who

had beamed down with the captain fanned out, surrounding

the artifact and covering it with phaser rifles. The

whine of the transporter signaled the arrival of

six more guards, who promptly joined the cordon

around the artifact.

Spock's eyebrow rose. "Are the security

men necessary?"

"Two people disappeared." Kirk glared at the

object. The left window, which had swallowed

Chekov and Talika, was now as blank and

featureless as the right-hand window. "Can you explain

what happened? From the ship's scans, it looked

as if the artifact dragged them inside itself."

"That is essentially what occurred, Captain.

Ensign Chekov reported that the artifact

exerted pressure on his arm when he extended it

into the object. Apparently he stumbled and

inadvertently pushed Dr. Talika's arm

inffcontact with the protective field that overlays

the surface of the artifact. Before either of them could

recover, they were dragged inside."

"Why? For what purpose? Where are they now?

Are they still alive?" As the questions bubbled to the

surface of Kirk's mind, the featureless

panels of the object took on a dark and sinister

appearance. "There isn't enough room inside that thing

for it to be holding them captive."

"That is correct, Captain." Spock

glanced down at his tricorder, as if hoping he

could read Kirk's answers from its screen.

Apparently it told him nothing new, although he

scanned the object again before responding to the

captain's questions. "However, I have a theory. I

believe the artifact is a relay station for a

matter transmission device. The most

logical assumption would be that we are looking at

a portion of the aliens' planetwide

transportation network. If that is the case,

Ensign Chekov and Dr. Talika have been

transported to some other location on this planet.

All we need to do is locate them and beam them

back to the ship."

Kirk flipped open his communicator.

"Kirk to Enterprise. Uhura, have the ship's

sensors located either Ensign Chekov or Dr.

Talika yet?"

"Negative, Captain." Uhura clipped

her words short, betraying her frustration at having

no information to help them locate the missing people.

"We've detected no signs of them or of their

equipment. There's no change on any of our

scans of the planet, either."

"Thank you, Uhura. Kirk out." He

turned to Spock. "Do you have any other

suggestions, Mr. Spock?"

"Not at the present time." Spock studied his

tricorder screen with concentrated intensity.

"Unless they were transported to a location

directly within the Enterprise's line of sight,

it may take a little time for the ship's sensors

to find them. Although it is a reasonable hypothesis

that the scene we saw through the device is their

destination, particularly since the light spectrum

and the vegetation correspond to what we have observed

on this planet, other possibilities do exist.

At the moment we have insufficient data to construct

a valid model of how this device operates."

"And how soon do you expect to have sufficient

data?" Hearing the sharpness in his tone, Kirk

paused to rein in his impatience. It wasn't

Spock's fault that they knew so little about the

artifact. "What recommendations do you have for

"persuading" the object to give us some

answers?"

"At the moment I am uncertain of the best

method to employ, Captain. I am consid-

ering--" Spock broke off, his words interrupted

by a shout from one of the security guards.

On the left side of the object, bands of

color were flickering across the windowlike surface

in spectral sequence--shifting from violet through

red and back with an irregular, pulsating

rhythm. Kirk felt his stomach twisting to the

tempo of the erratic cycle, and he looked away

before the nausea built to uncontrollable

proportions.

When he glanced back, the window had

cleared and was again showing the rolling, grass-covered

plain. In the nearest foreground a length of cable,

a piece of metal rod, and several

familiar-looking objects were scattered across the

trampled grass. Kirk moved closer, even

though he was certain he would recognize

Enterprise equipment anywhere.

Chekov's tricorder and communicator lay

to the right of the scene, at the start of a wide swath of

flattened grass that traced a drunken course

down the hill and out of Kirk's line of sight.

Talika's communicator and the ceremonial

Djelifan dagger she kept holstered in her

boot lay several meters from Chekov's

equipment at the head of a second strip of

trampled vegetation. There was no sign of the

missing people.

"Fascinating."

Kirk jumped, startled to hear Spock's

voice at his elbow. He had been so absorbed

in studying the scene that he had not heard the

Vulcan come up beside him. "What is it,

Spock?"

"That path through the grass. It is far too

wide for Mr. Chekov to have made unless he

laid down and rolled."

"Hmm. I think you're right." Kirk examined

the track carefully. The abrupt zigzags in the

band of broken grass would be difficult for a

rolling human to produce. "I don't know why

he'd want to roll down that hill, but he'd find

it virtually impossible to follow that course.

He should have gone straight down the slope."

Spock nodded. "You are correct,

Captain. I submit that we are seeing evidence

that our people found traveling through the artifact to be a

disconcerting experience."

"Could you be more specific, Spock? We need

something more definite to go on if we're going to get

them back." Something about the scene in the window

nagged at Kirk. As they watched, the setting

sun spread a wash of crimson and orange across

the rolling hills and painted the shadows a deep,

velvety black.

Sunset! Kirk felt his thoughts snap

into focus. He reached for his communicator.

"Kirk to Enterprise."

"Uhura here," came the immediate response.

"Uhura, tell Mr. Sulu to search along

the sunset terminator. We believe

Ensign Chekov and Dr. Talika were

transported elsewhere and released by another

artifact onto the surface of the planet in an

area that is ..." He paused, glancing at

Spock for a better estimate of the time in the scene

they were seeing through the artifact.

"I estimate that the second artifact is

approximately thirty-five minutes on the

sunward side of the terminator. This assumes that

we are viewing a location in the middle

latitudes. I could give a more precise

estimate if the scene contained any information that would

allow me to estimate the distance and direction from the

equator."

Sulu's voice answered, "I got that,

Captain. I'm shifting orbit now to put us

directly over the sunset terminator."

"Very good. Keep me posted. Kirk out." He

snapped the communicator closed and returned it

to his belt. "Any other suggestions, Mr.

Spock?"

"I would like to record more data on the

artifact, using every tricorder available. I will

need approximately twenty minutes to adjust

them to scan slightly different but overlapping bands

and to station people all around the artifact. Logic

dictates that a shield generator of such

extreme antiquity should have developed leakage

somewhere in its operational range. However, the fact

that we have not detected it yet suggests that we must

look outside the frequencies we normally

search."

"Assuming the leakage is there," Kirk

muttered in disgust. Until now, the aliens'

technology had seemed so far in advance of the

Federation's that Kirk was starting to feel like a

preindustrial savage. Shaking himself to break the

mood, he nodded to Spock. "See what you can

do. It sounds like our best chance."

"Yes, Captain." Spock ordered one of the

security men to collect everyone who had

tricorders, both in their area and at the primary

excavation site. By the time Spock finished

adjusting the instruments, he had thirty

tricorders to station around the artifact.

"While each of you scans the artifact from your

designated position," he told the combined group

of crew and archaeologists, "I shall attempt

to cause the artifact to respond to my presence.

Given the results we have obtained so

far, analysis from the Enterprise's computers

may be required to obtain any meaningful

results. However, I cannot overemphasize the

importance of keeping your tricorders pointed at

the artifact, whatever happens."

"That was quite a warning." Kirk, watching the group

disperse to their assigned locations, kept his voice

low so no one would overhear him. "What do you

really expect will happen?"

Spock raised an eyebrow, as if to ask why

Kirk should be worried about such things.

"Logically, Captain, we must be prepared for every

possible outcome. However, the probabilities

distinctly favor an anticlimactic

resolution to our efforts."

"In other words, you don't really think it's

going to do anything."

"Correct, Captain." Spock checked

to see that everyone was in position. "However, I

intend to do my best to produce a response.

Therefore, my actions introduce an element of

uncertainty into my ability to predict the

outcome."

"Of course, Spock."

"I am glad that you appreciate the dangers

inherent in the undertaking." With his eyes on the

ground, Spock started toward the artifact,

pausing to pick up every fist-sized rock he saw.

When he realized what Spock was planning,

Kirk began collecting rocks, too. Before

long, they had assembled a sizable cache of

ammunition.

Spock stepped back from his rock pile and

studied it with a critical eye. Even the

smallest chunk massed several times more than the

pebbles Chekov had thrown at the artifact.

Among the miscellaneous supplies that had been

beamed down but not used for building the scaffolding

above the artifact were several half sheets of

decking material. Choosing one, Spock hauled

it back to his pile of rocks and crouched behind it,

using the metal plate as a shield.

Seeing what Spock intended, Kirk knelt

beside him. "If I hold it, that will leave you both

hands free. That should make things easier."

"I appreciate the help, but I would prefer

that you not expose yourself to needless risk, Captain.

It might be advisable for you to remove yourself to a

less dangerous location." Even as he said the

words, Spock shifted his position

to give Kirk more room behind the metal plate.

Grinning at how well the Vulcan knew him,

Kirk maneuvered himself into the crowded space.

"I may be mistaken about this, Spock, but I

suspect that this is one of the safer locations in the

area. So if you don't mind, I'll stick around

and try to keep you from getting hit when that thing

returns your presents with interest."

"I appreciate your concern, Captain."

Spock's tone was even more neutral than

usual, but he pulled several rocks behind the

shield. Weighing the first two in his hands, he

peeked around the metal plate, calculated the

distance, and hurled the rocks toward the artifact.

Moving swiftly, he grabbed two more rocks off

the pile, tossed them, and followed them with two more

before ducking behind the shield. The rocks hit the

upper edge of the window with sharp cracks that sounded like

the det onations of a string of firecrackers.

Moments later, the first rock crashed against the

metal plate with a bone-shaking reverberation. Before

Kirk could recover from that impact, the other five

rocks pounded against their shield.

"Fascinating," Spock murmured when the

metal had quit vibrating. "It returned all

of the rocks to their point of origin."

"So?" With his ears still ringing, Kirk failed

to grasp the significance of Spock's words. The

loud noise at such close proximity had

triggered the headache that had been threatening

to return all morning.

"A projectile thrown at a flat

surface should rebound at its angle of incidence,

reflected around a perpendicular line that

intersects the surface at the point of

impact." Spock pulled another handful of

rocks behind their shield. "The probability of

any one of the rocks returning to its point of

origin, much less all of them, is so slight

that--"

"I get the picture." Kirk shuddered. Between

the aftereffects of the suldanic gas and the onset

of the headache, he wanted Spock to finish his

experiment so they could return to the Enterprise.

"Just get on with your test."

"Yes, Captain." Spock pitched the next

group of rocks toward the artifact. They, too,

were returned, bouncing off the metal shield with more

force than the first batch.

Kirk gritted his teeth. The noise

was so loud that it felt as if each rock had hit

him directly on the head. "Quit dawdling,

Spock. If it's going to do that on all of them,

just get it over with so we can go back to the ship!"

"As you wish, Captain."

A grin flickered across Kirk's face as he

realized that Spock found the artifact's return

salvos as unpleasant as he did. In fact,

he thought as the next rocks crashed against the

metal, Spock with his Vulcan hearing

probably found the noise more intensely painful

than Kirk, with his pounding headache, did.

Spock reached for more rocks, and Kirk braced

himself. The artifact returned the missiles with still

greater force. Kirk stumbled backwards under the

assault. Groaning with the effort, he dug his

feet into the loose rock. Spock must know what

he was doing, he thought, and that left it to Kirk

to see that he got the data he needed to determine

what had happened to Chekov and Talika.

Four sets of rocks later, Kirk was less

sure that Spock had thought his plan out carefully.

The artifact returned each group of rocks with

increasingly greater force, and Kirk was staggering under

the pounding. The throbbing in his head expanded with each

trial, and his entire body ached with the effort of

keeping the metal sheet upright while the alien

device tried to flatten them with its return

fire. It was almost as though something inside the

artifact was becoming annoyed at their attempts

to investigate it.

"This is the last group," Spock said, his

voice harsh with strain. He sidearmed the rocks

toward the artifact in rapid succession and then

moved to help Kirk support their shield.

For an awful moment there was total silence, but

before Kirk could wonder what it meant, he had his

answer. All six rocks slammed

simultaneously into the decking with enough force to dent the

metal. Even their combined strength was inadequate,

and Kirk and Spock were thrown to the ground.

Dimly, through the thunder in his head, Kirk heard

someone shouting for emergency beam-up.

Kirk surveyed the subdued group of senior

officers around the briefing room table. From their

expressions, no one was eager to report the

results of the last four hours of work. All bad

news, then--or, at least, no unqualified good

news, he thought, although he knew that no

one would have held back something favorable just

to report it at the briefing. "Mr. Sulu,

what's the progress with the search for Mr. Chekov

and Dr. Talika?"

"So far, not much, Captain. We located their

equipment near another of the windowlike artifacts

at Site Nbled. Neither the communicators nor

the tricorder were functional, so we beamed them

back to the Enterprise for analysis." Sulu

frowned, not liking the idea that something could damage

the equipment. "Since then we've concentrated our

search near the second artifact, with no

success. They shouldn't have wandered far, but we

haven't detected any human or Djelifan

readings within fifty kilometers of Site Nbled.

The only life-forms in the area that are larger than

a rodent are two solitary crablike

animals, both about five kilometers from the

artifact and moving on different headings."

Lassiter looked up from her datapad,

frowning. "But our previous scans didn't

reveal any such indigenous life-forms," she said

in her soft, whispery voice. "How large are

these creatures?"

Sulu called up the sensor data. "One is

about seventy-five kilos and the other is closer

to a hundred, as best we can tell without closer

examination. Both seem to be traveling in random

patterns, with no discernible purpose to their

movements. Beyond that, we don't have sufficient

scanner resolution to give us detailed information.

We would have to send a reconnaissance probe down

to the area if we wanted to study them more

closely."

Kirk nodded his approval. "Do it. If our

previous surveys missed something as large as these

creatures, we need to know how and why."

"Right away, Captain." Sulu relayed the

order to the bridge.

"Also, can anyone explain why the second

artifact was not hidden in the same manner as the

first?" He glanced around the room, looking for

someone who wanted to answer the question. When no one

volunteered, he turned toward Spock.

"We have no explanations at this time,

Captain. However, the sensor readings from that

region of the planet altered when we released the

first artifact from its shielding." Spock called

up the data on the screen. "Some of the effects

are quite subtle, but as a working

hypothesis, we are assuming that the shielding around

the first object somehow inhibited the functioning of

other, similar objects elsewhere on the

planet."

"I see, Mr. Spock. What luck have you

had analyzing the data we collected down on the

planet?"

"Our results are, of course, preliminary,

Captain. However, I have located several

frequencies that show large fluctuations in the

energy output and through which it may be possible

to penetrate the artifact's shielding with our

sensors. I recommend that we position several

arrays of scanning equipment around the object before

we conduct more tests on the artifact."

Kirk nodded. "Tell Mr. Scott what you

need after this briefing. By the way, what tests do you

propose to conduct?"

"Logically, we should repeat the tests that Mr.

Chekov attempted after we get the more sensitive

scanner arrays into position." Spock glanced

at his screen. "However, the computer reports

only a 2.35 percent chance that we will obtain

any new information if we repeat the rock-throwing

experiment. Therefore, I recommend that we omit

that test and that I have the computer reprocess the

data we obtained this morning after we have analyzed

the later information for the appropriate correction

factors."

"I'm all in favor of that." Kirk rubbed a

hand against his temple, thinking how little he wanted

to repeat their earlier adventure and how

reluctant he would feel to order someone else

to submit to the same punishment. For that matter,

if the artifact's data processors decided

that the second set of tests were a continuation of what

he and Spock had done, it might start

escalating the force from where it had left off with them.

That could quickly become lethal for the people receiving the

artifact's return fire. He shook himself

to break that train of thought and turned to his chief

engineer. "Scotty, have you determined what's

wrong with the communicators and the tricorder we

recovered from the planet?"

"In a manner of speaking." Scott shrugged,

an eloquent summary of his frustration with the alien

technology. "The damage resembles that found in

objects sent through a transporter where the

reintegration beams are misaligned. Everything is

just a wee bit off, but I canna find

any definite pattern to the damage. My lads

are still working on it, trying to get a handle on that

alien contraption, but for the moment I canna tell

you more. It's unlike anything I've ever seen

before."

"Does this mean that you can't predict when--or

if--you'll be able to protect our equipment when it

passes through that object, Scotty?"

Scott's face went glum. "Aye,

Captain. That's what it means."

"Very well, gentlemen. Mr. Spock will

conduct his tests, and we'll hope they give us

some answers. However, regardless of the results,

if we have not located Ensign Chekov and Dr.

Talika by local dawn in the area where we think

they disappeared, I am leading a security team

through the artifact to find them."

Spock straightened in his chair, his back

rigid. "Captain, may I protest this

hazardous course of action? You must not

jeopardize yourself in this manner. I am the

logical choice to lead the security team, if

such an attempt becomes necessary."

"Objection noted." Kirk drew in a deep

breath. "However, I'm the person who will go. If

something goes wrong with our rescue attempt,

we'll need you here to figure things out."

"I see." Spock's flat tone said that he

disagreed with Kirk.

Kirk ducked his head to hide a brief grin.

Who said Vulcans had no emotions? Spock's

disapproval was so strong he could almost touch it.

He glanced toward the Vulcan. "With luck,

Mr. Spock, we'll find the missing people, and this

discussion will be academic. I'm not sending anyone

through that artifact simply for the sake of satisfying

our curiosity about its function. It's far too

dangerous."

Spock raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps the

danger to people entering the object is why the artifact

was buried in the first place, Captain."

"Aye," Scott murmured, half to himself.

"That would explain why it was so difficult

to locate."

Nodding, Kirk pushed himself to his feet.

"Regardless of why it was hidden, we have to get our

people back. Unless someone has something more to add, this

briefing is over."

Spock's science teams worked

feverishly to force answers from the artifact, but the

alien device remained an enigma. The sensor

arrays showed minuscule energy fluctuations at

certain frequencies when lengths of cable were pushed

through the window or when someone came inffcontact with the

protective force field. However, none of the

leaks in the shields around the artifact were

sufficient to give Spock precise information about

how the artifact functioned or what had happened

to Chekov and Talika. The Enterprise's

sensors continued to report the two alien

life-forms near the second artifact, and the

probes following the two creatures recorded

no significant information about them.

As dawn approached at the second site,

Spock drove his people harder to solve the mystery.

Kirk watched the frenzied activity with curious

detachment, waiting for Spock to concede that the

artifact had evaded analysis. He knew,

without being able to say why, that he would have to go through the

windowlike transporter to rescue the missing people.

Full daylight had spread itself across the rolling

hills in the "window" when Spock finally

admitted defeat. "Captain, I regret

to inform you that we have been unable to produce any

significant information about the object. However,

I strongly recommend that you postpone passing through

the device until we have breached its shields and

determined how it operates. The risk to your life

is too great when there are so many unknowns in the

equation."

"Risk is our business, Mr. Spock. You

know that as well as I." He turned toward the

mysterious object, studying its

uncommunicative exterior. "Besides, we owe

it to Mr. Chekov and Dr. Talika to do everything

in our power to rescue them. Since we aren't

getting any results from here, I'm going after

them."

"Yes, Captain." Spock gestured for

several of his scientists to join him. While he

briefed them on what to do when the captain and his men

entered the artifact, Kirk summoned his

volunteer security team.

Ten minutes later Kirk and the three guards

were standing in front of the artifact, ready to pass

through it. The Enterprise had stationed probes near

the second artifact to record what happened when

the men emerged from the "window" on that side, and

Spock had teams positioned around the first

artifact, ready to record every detail.

Kirk checked one last time to see if his men were

ready. As the last man nodded, he started forward.

"Let's get this show on the road."

Centimeters from the window, he slowly extended

his arm. A soothing, gentle warmth climbed

upward from his fingers, pulling him toward the

artifact. Before Kirk realized what was

happening, his arm was inside the window up to his

shoulder. Beside him the security guards also had their

arms inside the force field. The pull was

irresistible, and Kirk yielded to it.

The "window" engulfed the four men and went dark,

swallowing them without apparent effort. Spock

moved from group to group, checking their results, but

to no avail. Once again the sensors had not

detected any changes in the energy output of the

artifact. They had no clues as to what had

happened to Kirk and the security guards.

Chapter Seven

It had been a jagged transition, he thought,

struggling to get all eight appendages beneath his

carapace. The old relics in Maintenance were

putting less and less into keeping the equipment in

any better condition than their own decrepit and

fading carcasses. Soon the transit frames

would be as useless as the ancient matriarchs who

ran the ceremonies, protected by the residual

shreds of prestige they drew about their discolored

shells. With those antiquated and bloated relics

remaining in control of the Kh@fflict worlds, it was

little wonder that everything was falling down around them.

Something should be done, someone ought to do something, maybe

he would do something ... but later. There was something

important he must do first, if he could only

remember it through the tidal crash of the blood past

his tympana.

His senses reeled with the ebb and flow of

disorganized perceptions. The light was wrong,

too red and too weak, adding to his disorientation.

Where was he, then, if he had been sent so far from

home? Which cool, fading star was this the matriarchs

had exiled him to, what world gone sere and

lifeless beneath its dying sun?

He looked behind him, saw the transit frame

on the hill far above him with its pyar-runes

fading as the power drained back into the grid. The

patterns proclaimed the glories of the homeworld,

the center of Kh@fflict civilization. Such

praise was embedded only on the transit

frames of the homeworld. That meant he had been

sent to a region where no one usually went. The

penal zone at the southern pole, perhaps? Even that

did not explain the too-cold temperature or

the strangely reddened sun. Both were mysteries

he could not solve at present unless he assumed

the matriarchs had installed a new class of force

field around the penal zone. If that was indeed where

he was, he needed to put as much distance between himself

and the transit frame as he could.

He staggered forward, surprised at the

tremors that ran up his appendages. The

Kh@fflict form was perfectly designed, its

eight limbs providing the ideal combination of

strength and agility, balance and power. Every hatchling

in its first soft shell knew how to coordinate its

appendages for maximum speed or to gain the power

and leverage needed to destroy a rival. A

Kh@fflict who staggered was as alien as--as this

desolate landscape filled with the ocher whisper of the

grasses and the dry beige rattle of the

bitter-leaves that grew in the dark, secret

hollows of the land.

He strained to move one appendage, then

another, needing all his concentration to force his legs

to do what instinct should have directed them to do without

any intervention from his conscious mind. If the

matriarchs had sent him here for a reason beyond

malicious whim, he must escape the range of

their surveillance before they carried out the next

murky phase of their plan.

A broad swath of trampled grass led

downhill, away from the transit frame. In his

current abnormal condition, the thought of following

someone else's pre-broken trail was immensely

appealing. After he put some distance between himself and the

frame, he could prepare countermeasures for

whatever surprises they planned to spring on him.

With an effort he urged his leaden appendages

into motion and started down the hill.

He hadn't felt this bad, Kirk thought,

since that three-day shore leave on Argelius

early in his first deep-space tour of

duty. Kirk hadn't believed the old hands, had

thought they were pulling his leg when they cautioned him

against mixing Argelian ale with anything else.

From the smug "I-told-you-so" expression on the

Farragut's doctor's face when she had

given him the shot for his hangover, he realized that

he had fallen victim to a long-standing ship's

tradition--delivering an honest warning about the

deceptively mild ale in such apprehensive

tones that no junior officer would take the

advice seriously.

The ground lurched beneath him as his body struggled

across the irregular terrain. He tried to focus

his eyes on his surroundings, fighting against the growing

disorientation. The scene twisted and blurred,

shapes stretching and contorting into impossible

angles, colors pulsing between gloomy drabness

and hallucinatory brilliance. His perspective

was wrong, distorted, his eyes too close to the

ground and responding to his commands as though they were

no longer firmly anchored in his eye sockets.

Kirk thought that was impossible until he looked

down at his feet.

Instead of his familiar boots, a long,

pincerlike appendage stretched into his field of

view. Shock jolted through him, scrambling his

thoughts and locking his muscles. His legs froze

in midstride, but his momentum carried his body

forward, and he overbalanced. He flopped on his

belly, skidding on the dry grass. The land

dropped away beneath him, and he continued to slide

downhill, his body picking up speed as the

slope steepened. Dizziness and extreme

disorientation overwhelmed him, making it impossible

to interpret what he was seeing. Finally, in

self-defense, Kirk surrendered to the madness and

let his consciousness escape.

His carapace scraped against a rock and spun,

careening off at an angle from its previous

trajectory. Anger washed through him, anger and

shame at his clumsiness. No Kh@fflict past

his first molt ever tripped over his own claws.

With eight appendages one could always keep enough

pincers on the soil to avoid falling down

hills. What had the matriarchs done to him when

they forced him through the transit frame? What

damage had they done to his mind and his body that

he could no longer perform the most basic acts of

living? Perhaps this was his punishment--this

incapacity and lack of coordination. Perhaps he

did not need to worry about further punishment.

The spinning slowed his forward momentum, and

gradually friction brought him to a stop near the

bottom of the hill. A wide, greenish-gold

swath of flattened grass marked where he had

descended, a clear beacon to anyone who was

trailing him. If the matriarchs sent out a

squad of enforcers to see that the terms of his

punishment--whatever they were--were observed, the

young females would have no trouble locating him. As

long as he remained in this grass, he w ould find it

impossible to hide from pursuers. Somewhere there must

be a safer place for him to wait until he could

devise a way to turn the tables on the

matriarchs.

Cautiously he pulled each limb beneath his

carapace, flexing the joints and testing for

injuries as he did. A severed ligament could

explain his fall, but nothing seemed obviously

damaged. For all their apparent malice, the

matriarchs had not left him incapacitated beyond the

disorientation and the huge gaps in his memory. He

should know why he was here, but he didn't. Who he

was, his color-grade in his cohort, or even

which cohort claimed his participation were also

mysteries. Only an elementary outline of his

life remained, consisting mostly of facts known

to every Kh@fflict who survived past the larval

stage. The details, the colors and textures

of his individual life that would shape his passage

through the Final Transition, were missing as though they

had been buried under a thick dun coat of mud.

When he was sure his body was undamaged, he

levered himself off the ground. For a moment everything

wavered, flickered to blackness, and then resumed the

disquieting ruddy shades that distorted everything in this

strange place. He took one step and then

another, testing his coordination and balance to rule out

any unsuspected injuries. When he still could

find no apparent cause for his awkwardness, he

began moving faster, hoping to put some distance between

himself and whomever the matriarchs had sent to follow

him. Clearly, the best and most obvious

explanation for his disorientation was to make him

vulnerable.

Again a tremor of uneasiness rippled through his

neuroprocessors. If his punishment was to have

any meaning, he should know his crime and the rules

governing his sentence and probable

execution. Even with the entire Kh@fflict

totality watching the proceedings via the remote

viewers, the punishment would be worthless unless he

also knew what offense had earned him so dreadful

a penalty as isolation from all his kind and death in

a place whose naming-colors he would never learn.

He headed downhill, away from the transit

frame, although he knew that direction was the most

predictable. Still, the dark, rocky gullies

tucked between the beige and dusty green folds of the

land offered some slight hope for confusing his trail.

The grass there grew in irregular patches,

giving him the hope of choosing a route where he

did not flatten a wide swath behind himself and where his

claws did not leave sharp impressions on the

boulder-strewn surface. With luck his

executioners would be fooled by his apparent blunder

into the obvious. They would not expect it when he

doubled back onto the first strip of rocky ground

and circled around behind them.

The first two spots he investigated were

disappointing, with the grass coming in thick and tall within

easy view of the gully. The third rockslide

was more promising, although he had to watch his step

to avoid triggering a new slide, which would alert his

pursuers by the russet freshness of the disturbance.

In a way, he was relieved that the slope was so

unstable. If he succeeded in conquering it before

anyone located him, he stood a fair chance of

evading them. The difficulty of the ascent would

convince them that he had continued down the gully,

hoping to float himself to safety in the cloudy

waters of the river that must lie farther in that

direction. If the enforcers could be misled for only

half a day, he could hide himself so thoroughly that

no one would find his location unless they had watched

him through a viewer perched on his carapace. And that,

he knew, was unlikely; he could not feel the

telltale weight or the unbalanced pull when

he moved, either of which would have alerted him to an

object anchored to his carapace's crest.

The climb was slow and exhausting work, with the

difficulty compounded by the need for extreme

caution. Even so, he saw no signs of

pursuit as he mounted the pile of loose rubble.

At the top he paused, checking his back trail

for the bright flash of color that would signal the

enforcers' location. Nothing except the grass

moved anywhere in the bleak, empty land. He

wasn't sure whether the desolation was

reassuring or not, whether he should believe that his

tactics would deliver him from pursuit or if the

matriarchs had devised a more subtle trap for

him than he could imagine.

Either way, he could not stand on the top of the

hill, glowing his triumph like a beacon. His

radiant colors would certainly attract the

attention of any Kh@fflict within his line of

sight. He damped them down, coloring his

carapace to match the duns and beiges of the earth

and the dry grass. Starting off, he picked his way

through the sparse grass with exquisite care

to avoid calling attention to his passage.

Somewhere there must be a cave or a tunnel or a

cut bank where he could hide from aerial

surveillance. Once he found that place, he

could conceal himself and begin to make plans to overcome

the enforcers that would soon be following him. He could

not afford to let them find him; when they did, they

would dismember him a joint at a time, trying

to prolong his suffering as an object lesson

to any other Kh@fflict who had committed the same

offense. His only hope lay in avoiding

capture for a turn of the seasons, until the

matriarchs decided his isolation had become a

greater torture than the punishment to which he was

originally sentenced.

Kirk gradually became aware of the flow of the

grass and the chaotic patterns of loose rock

passing his line of vision. What, exactly, had

happened was still unclear, but this time he told himself

to take things slowly and to analyze all the

evidence before letting his grotesquely distorted

perceptions trigger another violent reaction.

He couldn't afford to act until he learned all

he could about his situation.

His body was climbing a talus slope,

carefully picking its way across the unstable

surface. Kirk knew he could not perform such a

complicated motor skill while on automatic

pilot, especially not in an alien body. That

meant that, as an initial postulate, he must

assume another consciousness was also occupying this

body. He could not detect any foreign presence

directing his thoughts, so he decided that the alien was

walled up behind its own mental barriers. That

made things easier, since it gave Kirk a

chance to observe the situation without worrying that his

host would be distracted from navigating the

treacherous slope, but it might create

difficulties later when he tried to make

contact with his host.

At first he concentrated on the visual information

flowing into the alien's brain. The colors seemed

oddly subdued and skewed toward the red end of the

spectrum. Most life-forms evolved visual

systems where the peak sensitivity of the visual

sensors corresponded to the median wavelength

of the incoming light from their planet's sun. That

meant one of two things Either his host had evolved

in a much different star system than this one, or his

race had died out before this sun had begun to dim.

Normally the second hypothesis would have been

extremely far-fetched, but given the antiquity

of Careta IV'S artifacts, Kirk decided

that a cooling sun might have caused the death of his

host's civilization. Massive climate

changes, with the attendant disruptions in food

supplies, had rung the death knell for many

civilizations. Certainly this barren and unforgiving

land seemed an unlikely place to support the

civilization that had created the artifacts and the

buried ruins they had found.

His next priority, he decided, was

to figure out what kind of creature his host was.

The obvious solution--to take control of the

body's functions and experiment until he had his

answers--was out of the question as long as his host

continued on his present course. It was almost as if

the creature expected pursuit, and Kirk

wondered if he should worry. Presumably,

none of the creature's people were left on Careta

IV, but the Enterprise's sensors had

suddenly reported two large life-forms after

Chekov and Talika had fallen through the window.

Even if, like Kirk, those life-forms were native

hosts that contained the consciousnesses of his missing people,

Kirk realized he had no way to determine what

directives had been programmed into the minds that

controlled the bodies. For all he knew, the

artifacts could have been designed for alien war

games, with the rules and allegiances programmed

into the bodies when they exited the objects.

With direct experimentation temporarily out of the

question, Kirk settled down to watch his surroundings.

From the way the scene changed from wide-

to narrow-angle views, he decided that his eyes

must be mounted on stalks, allowing them to rotate

freely. The narrow views gave

stereoscopic vision, much like what Kirk was used

to in human form. After he adjusted to the

unfamiliar sensation of seeing up to two hundred

and seventy degrees around himself, he began

to appreciate the benefits of the panoramic

views. The more directions a being could watch, the

less the chance that something could attack without warning.

After a time Kirk was able to interpret the

sensations from other parts of his new body. He had

eight limbs, each ending in a pincerlike claw

that could be closed tightly when walking or opened for

fighting or to manipulate tools. All the

appendages could perform most tasks, although Kirk

sensed that the creature preferred using certain

limbs for certain functions, much as Kirk

favored his right hand.

While he had been analyzing his host's

body, they had climbed off the talus pile

onto a long, sloping ridge that led back the

way they had come. The creature started climbing,

following the crest of the hill until he found

another talus pile. The rocks here were larger and

more solidly packed than the precarious slope

they had climbed earlier. However, when the

creature started picking its way downhill,

Kirk began wondering if this was any safer than

their previous adventure. The rocks didn't

look all that stable to him, and he wasn't sure

why they didn't head back for the artifact.

To his mind, but obviously not to his host's, the

best solution to their predicament was to return to the

object so Spock could reverse this unwelcome

fusion of human and alien.

The thought of Spock brought up another problem.

How was he going to communicate with the Vulcan?

Unless Spock knew he was trapped inside this

alien body, he would assume that Kirk had

vanished into limbo--or, worse, been killed

outright--when he stepped into the window. How did these

creatures communicate with each other? He had

sensed no effort on the part of his host to speak or

to make sounds of any kind. If he couldn't find

a way to control his host's body, he would be

unable to let anyone know what had happened to him.

The problem required thought, and since he dared so

little else while the creature was traversing the

talus, Kirk focused his mind on devising a

way to communicate with his crew.

At the bottom of the talus slope,

a wide, rocky channel meandered between the rolling

hills. He approached the shallow stream and

crouched to reach the muddy water, straining out the

gritty sediment with his drinking filters. His thirst

satisfied, he started upstream, hoping that any

enforcers who had followed him this far would look for

him in the predictable direction. He did not

think the unit pursuing him would be large enough that they

could divide their forces. At any rate, it was a

gamble he would have to take.

The sun was nearing the zenith when he spotted

what he had been looking for. The valley had

narrowed to a tight canyon between yellowish dun

walls, fissured and broken in many places.

To his right, almost hidden in the sooty shadows, a

narrow cleft opened in the rock face. He

moved toward it, carefully picking his way across the

rock-strewn stream bed to avoid leaving any

tracks.

The gap opened at carapace level and was

barely wide enough for him to squeeze through, which made

it all the better for his purpose. The enforcers

might check for him in such a place, on the

assumption that he would go to ground in the smallest

hole he could find. However, even if they thought this

was a likely spot, most females--even the

youngest ones--were larger than he was. In all

probability they would not be able to wedge themselves through

the fissure.

He pulled himself into the cleft one claw at a

time, taking care not to dislodge the loose rock

around the opening. It was hard work--far harder than

he thought it should be--and again he wondered what had

happened to his body during its passage through the

transit frame. Strength, coordination, and

memory had all been damaged by the transition,

and the cumulative effect was beginning to wear at

him. All the essential elements that defined him

as a Kh@fflict had been weakened or destroyed,

leaving him with an identity as shattered as the cliffs

that surrounded him.

That thought led to madness, he realized. With a

shudder he pushed it aside, to be considered after he

had protected himself from the inevitable pursuit.

For the moment he was busy enough just keeping his balance

on the treacherous footing. The narrow, twisting

stream course acted as a trap for the loose rock

that cascaded down from sheer walls above him. As

he moved, the rubble shifted and turned beneath his

pincers. Only his superior physique

made it possible for him to retain his balance on the

precarious surface. He rejoiced at the

difficulty his pursuers would have in following him;

the more massive females would find it almost

impossible to negotiate the treacherous footing

without having the rocks slide from beneath them.

The hiding place was so well concealed that he

almost missed it. Sometime in the distant past, a

large sheet of rock had fallen from one of the

walls and was now tilted across the cleft. Talus

had buried most of the slab, leaving only a very

small gap to serve as an entrance.

He poked around the area for several minutes,

trying to convince himself that no one was waiting to ambush

him when he finally dared to tackle the opening. At

last, knowing that he had nothing to gain by waiting, he

circled to the uphill side of the slab and began

to shift the rubble. In a surprisingly short time,

he cleared away enough rocks to squeeze himself

inside. He wriggled through the hole and into the

space beneath the yellowish-tan slab of rock.

There was barely enough room for his carapace to fit

inside, and he had to move more loose rock to get

all his appendages safely out of sight.

However, once he finished the work and his body was

safely hidden, he began to relax. The small

opening on the downstream side of his hideout gave

him a clear view of anyone approaching from that

direction. With surprise operating in his favor,

he would be able to take out the first enforcers and arm himself

with their weapons before they realized he was there. Even

without scouting farther up the cleft, he knew his

rear was protected. The matriarchs would not send enough

enforcers after him to allow them the luxury of a

multipronged attack. Secure in his choice

of a hiding place, he shifted the colors of his

carapace to match the shadows beneath the slab of

rock. As long as he was patient and maintained his

concealment, he would be the certain victor in the

upcoming fight.

When he realized that his host had gone to ground and

intended to remain where he was for some time, Kirk

began phase two of his plan to explore the

body he was trapped in. After passively

watching how they had negotiated the uneven ground,

he concluded that the creature's body greatly

resembled an Earth-normal crab enlarged

to human size. As best he could tell, the

creature had four pairs of legs, which

were coordinated by a complex series of rules

Kirk's host did not consciously remember when

he moved. Kirk, however, needed to learn those

rules so he could control the alien's body, should

he need to take over his host.

Don't force it, he told himself, although

everything in him screamed for immediate and decisive

action. As difficult as he found it, he needed

to take a lesson from Spock, to be patient and

work out his situation precisely before he tried to do

anything. This creature was so very alien it would not be

easy to establish contact with it. Besides, whoever

controlled this alien body would probably not be

eager to surrender its position to Kirk, and he

would need to exercise caution.

With that idea firmly in mind, Kirk

concentrated on the body in which he was imprisoned.

At first he had little luck. It was almost as if his

mind had been encased in an alien android with none

of the sensory inputs connected. That thought was

disheartening; if it were true, he had no way

to sense his environment or to control events. Still,

he couldn't be completely isolated, since he

could interpret what the alien was seeing. That might

mean that the artifact had only given him visual

input, but Kirk rejected that idea for the moment.

He stood a much better chance of learning something

if he assumed that his host's physiology and

anatomy were so alien that his human thought

processes were not recognizing the information

presented to him. That meant that the alien's mind

probably did not recognize his presence, either.

He observed the view down the narrow canyon

that was absorbing the alien's attention, noticing again

how red the light appeared. That perception, at

least, was not being reinterpreted for his benefit, and it

gave him a place to start. The tumbled boulders

and broken cliffs were monotonous and

claustrophobic, but the alien kept at least one

eye focused downstream at all times. That gave

Kirk an idea.

Focusing on a location about thirty meters

away and as far above the canyon floor, Kirk

imagined something creeping down the sheer rock face

and becoming visible at that spot. The alien

twitched his eyes upward, then jerked his view

downward to check the canyon floor. Kirk

concentrated harder on visualizing someone climbing

down the canyon wall. At first he got no

response, but then, ever so slowly, the

alien began scrutinizing the cliff from the base

upward, studying each fissure and jutting boulder

for hidden enemies.

Halfway through the search, Kirk sensed a

growing irritation, as though his host did not believe

anything could attack from that direction.

Deliberately Kirk shifted his attention

downstream, letting the alien check for the pursuers

he obviously expected. When they saw no one,

Kirk again focused on the canyon wall. This

time the alien's eyes shifted upward more quickly, and

Kirk worked to direct his attention to various

spots on the cliff face.

The rocks were varicolored reds and browns and

tans, with deep black shadows that could easily

hide a man in dark clothing. As they searched the

cliff, Kirk sensed a growing uneasiness in his

host, as though the aliens could also hide themselves from

sight like ninja. When he tried to focus on that

thought, the perception slipped away, leaving Kirk

with his own sense of disquiet. The multicolored

rock face disturbed his host greatly, and Kirk

realized that he would learn a lot about the alien if

he could solve this particular riddle. However, he

did not know how to get at that information, so he put

the problem aside.

With a measure of control established over his

host's eyes, Kirk tried to manipulate other

parts of the alien's body. Wedged into the tiny

space beneath the slab of rock, Kirk could not

afford any ener getic experiments, but he needed

to know how this strange, crablike body operated.

A human confined in such a restricted space would

have been screaming from muscle spasms and pinched

nerves long ago. Was the alien immune to such

things, or did its physiology provide a

filter that kept physical discomfort from interfering

with its cognitive processes? And how would he

be able to determine the answers to such questions?

Concentrating on a mental image of his hand,

Kirk visualized closing his thumb against his

forefinger and lifting his arm until the hand was in

front of his face. Nothing happened, or, if it

did, he could not detect it. Is this what it's

like to be paralyzed? he wondered. It was

disconcerting to give orders to his body and not

feel any movement or tactile sensation from his

extremities. It was even more disturbing to realize

that he was at his host's mercy until he learned

how to connect with the alien's nervous

system, how to decipher the creature's reactions

in a given situation, and how to control this strange,

crablike body.

It would have been no small order to accomplish

all that if he had known exactly how to do it.

Unfortunately, he had never heard of anything like

this happening before. That left him with no guidelines

and no suggested procedures for making a first

contact with a previously unknown race--from inside

one of their bodies.

Chapter Eight

"Spock to Enterprise." It took all of

his Vulcan control to keep his voice pitched

to an absolute, flat tone. Around him he

heard a ripple of dismay pass through the landing

party. He could almost hear what the humans were

thinking as clearly as if one of them had spoken the

words aloud--the captain had disappeared into the

artifact without anything registering on their

tricorders, and Spock was acting as if Kirk

had stepped out for a morning stroll. He debated

lecturing them on the futility of squandering energy

on emotional outbursts, but decided not to waste the

time. Finding Kirk was a higher priority than

educating humans on the virtues of controlling

their passions. "Enterprise, has Captain

Kirk come through the other side of the window yet?"

A long pause answered him. As the seconds

stretched, Spock calculated the odds that something

had gone wrong equipment failure,

unidentified ships dropping from warp just beyond the

Enterprise's orbit, the communications officer

being away from her post. He had almost convinced himself

that the problem was with his communicator when the device

crackled to life. "Enterprise. This is

Sulu, Mr. Spock."

"Report, Mr. Sulu. Have the captain and

his party come through the artifact yet?"

"We don't know, Mr. Spock." There was a

long, uncomfortable pause. "At the precise

moment when the captain entered the window, something

zapped the probes we had positioned around the

second artifact. Besides destroying all our

sensors in the immediate area, the energy beam--or

whatever it was--scrambled the ship's sensors, so

we haven't gotten any information about what's

happening in the immediate vicinity of that artifact."

"Are you taking sensor readings of the

area now, Mr. Sulu?"

"Negative, Mr. Spock." Sulu

exhaled sharply. "Or, to be more accurate, our

attempts to reestablish sensor contact have

produced no information. Our readings are so garbled

as to be worthless. We estimate the interference will

dissipate in approximately ten minutes,

sir. We are preparing a new set of probes

to send down to the planet at that time."

"Very well, Mr. Sulu." Destroying the

probes had not been a scenario they had considered.

Since they could not detect any radiation from

inside the artifact, it had seemed unlikely that

something inside the object would recognize their

probes. Since that assumption had been proven

false, Spock realized that many--perhaps most--of

their other inferences about the artifacts and their

creators might be wrong. At the very least he would

have to reanalyze their data until he found a

way to penetrate the artifact's shields. He

gestured for the men around him to give him their

tricorders. "Mr. Sulu," he said, "beam

me up immediately. Then commence transporting up the

landing party, except for a pair of security

guards, who will maintain a constant watch on this

artifact from a discreet distance."

"Aye, sir." Spock had barely enough time

to clip his communicator to his belt and pass the

tricorder straps over his shoulder before the

transporter beam took him.

Six hours later Spock was beginning to wonder

why he had assumed that he could solve this problem

quickly and easily. The readings from all the

tricorders and sensor arrays had been fed into the

computer, and he had analyzed the information so many

ways that even he was losing track of the

permutations. The results, though, were discouraging in

their extreme lack of usable insights. Every time

two groups of readings showed a correlation, the

next data set contradicted it.

What would Captain Kirk do now? Spock

wondered. Logic and scientific analysis were

producing no discernible results; it was time for one

of Kirk's leaps of intuition. The artifact

operated by some disturbingly illogical rules.

As if to underscore Spock's lack of

success, the bridge doors whisked open, and

McCoy strolled over to the science console.

"Well, Spock, how much longer are you

going to twiddle your thumbs before you bother to locate

Jim?"

Spock continued studying the data on the screen

in front of him. "I am not "twiddling my

thumbs," as you so picturesquely put it,

Doctor. However, this device appears to have been

designed by creatures nearly as irrational as

you."

"I beg your pardon?" McCoy straightened,

an expression of wounded dignity spreading across his

face. "Since when does not thinking like some

Vulcan machine make a creature irrational?

Just because you're temporarily in command gives you no

cause to insult those of us who don't follow your

rules. The poor defenseless beings who built that

artifact never did you any harm."

"I wonder at your definition of the word

"harm," Doctor." Spock lifted his head

from his viewer and fixed his most severe look on

McCoy. "I submit that creating a device that

causes any member of this crew to disappear

constitutes "harm" in the accepted meaning of the

word. It is also a fact that our analysis has

not revealed any rational pattern to the object's

operation. Therefore, describing its operating

principles as "irrational" also does not

constitute disparagement."

"I surrender, Spock." McCoy rolled

his eyes toward the ceiling, as if seeking divine

guidance for dealing with the Vulcan. "I don't

suppose it occurred to you that the aliens might have

designed their machinery to operate according to their idea

of "rational"? Unless, of course, you're going

to tell me that Vulcan principles of logic

are the universal standard throughout the galaxy, even

for a race who died out millennia before your

precious Surak was born."

"I had considered the idea, Doctor."

Spock gave the computer a new set of commands.

Indicators flashed red and amber in response

to his orders. "A race as ancient and alien as

this one probably did operate according to principles

that we do not understand, although current

anthropological research indicates that any

sufficiently advanced civilization will converge on

the Vulcan norm in matters of logic and

moral principles."

"Sorry I asked." McCoy started toward

the door, stopping at Uhura's station to talk with

her.

After watching McCoy long enough to make sure the

doctor was not coming back for another salvo,

Spock turned back to his computer. As much as

McCoy's irrational approach to life dismayed

Spock, at times the doctor identified the

essence of a situation. His questions had suggested that the

artifact's shields might randomly shift

frequencies. If properly done, the inevitable

gaps in the shields would vary over time, making it

nearly impossible to scan inside the artifacts

and discover anything about their design, construction, and

operation. While such protection methods were

completely logical, a society that used them

on their public transportation devices was not.

In fact, Spock found the idea of so paranoid

a society almost incomprehensible, even after his

long association with humans. He wondered if the

aliens were protecting themselves from outside invaders

or if their security precautions had been

directed against their own people.

The first ten formulas he tried failed to make

any sense of the data they had recorded on the

planet. As he studied the results, Spock

began playing with the concept, trying to decide how

he would create an absolutely invulnerable

security system. Clearly, he should use a

composite randomizing function, built from two or

more standard formulas, so that a first-level analysis

would not detect any pattern to the variations in

field strength.

As he considered how many combinations existed for

writing such a function, Spock realized the key

question was who the assumed enemy was. An internal

security system could be fairly simple; the

ruling class would reinforce its control over the

citizens by restricting education. However, if the

security measures were to protect against an

external threat, the security system would be

extremely complex so as to defeat the enemy's

best minds.

Which assumption was the most likely? Spock

stared at his screen, searching for the pattern that the

computer had missed. The problem, at its core,

was that they did not have sufficient--or anywhere near

sufficient--information on the people who had built these

artifacts. They were an unknown race, and their

civilization had disappeared so long ago that it no

longer figured even in the legends of the successor

cultures in this s ector. Given that, had they

encountered other civilizations? Or had

these people lived and died isolated from other

intelligent races, existing in the nebulous time

period between the Meztoriens and the still earlier

so-called orphan civilizations that some people

believed had once occupied this sector of the

galaxy?

The computer estimated that it would need seven

hours to search the archaeological data banks for

indirect references to such an ancient culture.

He ordered the computer to start the search, knowing it

would take too long to produce any useful

information. However, since they needed a fast

answer, Spock chose the simplest premise.

If the security measures had been directed

against the aliens' own people, the computer should be able

to solve the shield frequency equations far

sooner than it could locate possible references

to this culture.

Spock programmed the computer to look for the

simplest class of composite randomizing

functions and then deliberately turned toward the

main viewscreen. Built from the images from a

dozen probes, an aerial view of the rolling

hills around Site Nbled filled the screen.

Parts of the image were crisp and detailed, but other

portions of the scene were degraded to a vague

blur. Even after six hours they had not been able

to eliminate all the residual jamming fields.

"Status, Mr. Sulu."

Sulu swiveled his chair to face Spock.

"No change in the last hour. We think there are

six alien creatures near the artifact, but

half of them are within the areas of maximum sensor

distortion. There could be as many as eight creatures

or as few as one in the areas where we're not getting

good information. Another creature has gone to ground

in an area of extremely broken terrain, and

we're having trouble pinpointing its location."

Spock read the notations on the screen. The

possible life-form readings were scattered over an

area with a thirty-kilometer radius centered around

the second artifact. That there were probably six

aliens, and that their appearance coincided with the

disappearance of the people from the Enterprise, suggested the

two items were connected. However, the continued

interference with their sensors left him with little solid

information. The aliens could have been released from

internal stasis inside the artifact when the

humans entered the object, or they might

represent a bizarre transformation of the

missing people. With the poor sensor data they were

getting, he didn't have sufficient information

to decide what had happened. "What progress

is being made with the sensors, Mr. Sulu?"

The helmsman shook his head. "We can't

isolate the origin of the fields that are disrupting

the sensors. It's almost as though something down there

knows we're looking for it and is hiding to keep us

from finding it."

"Please start a new search for the source of the

disruption using that idea as your basis. Logic

dictates that we choose a more complex set of

assumptions once our initial premise has

proven inadequate." Spock examined the

viewscreen again, comparing the loci of disruption with

those he had noticed earlier. The most distorted

areas had moved--but was there a systematic

pattern? "Mr. Sulu, please analyze how

the sensor disruptions have migrated through time."

Sulu's eyes widened in surprise, then

narrowed. "Right away, Mr. Spock." Scowling

at his own slowness, he ordered the computer

to replay the images at a high speed and

reduced detail.

Three of the distorted patches had been moving

since they first appeared. Evidently something on the

planet was trying to keep their sensors from observing

the alien life-forms. If he could decipher the

design of the moving disruption fields, Spock

thought, he would have a major clue to how it was that this

ancient technology was more than a match for the best

the Federation could send against it.

The computer took two hours to determine the

equations for the shields that protected the

artifacts. As Spock studied the result,

making sure that this time they had gotten a real

answer to their question, he couldn't quite suppress a

flicker of satisfaction. The function was so

simple that it could only mean one thing--the

protection system had been designed strictly

as an internal security measure. Whatever the

race that had lived on this planet, it had been

alone.

He turned his attention to the sensor distortions

that had been giving Sulu so many problems. The first

two aliens had appeared without any disturbances,

but the Enterprise had not had probes stationed

nearby when Chekov and Talika vanished into the

artifact. When Kirk had led his

security team through the window, the area around Site

Nbled had been saturated with probes and remote

sensing equipment from the Enterprise. After the

artifact had destroyed their scanners, the jamming

fields appeared near the artifact, coincident

with the arrival of several more aliens. The disruption was

not total, and little effort seemed directed toward

hiding information they already knew, but the distortions had

prevented them from learning anything about the aliens.

Spock leaned back in his chair, his hands

steepled in front of him. It could hardly be an

accident that the Enterprise was missing six people and

that their best estimates showed six aliens on the

planet. The question was--had Kirk and the others

been transformed into these alien creatures, or had

the artifact exchanged them for captives it had

held in suspension for millennia? Spock

wasn't sure how to communicate with the aliens

once he met them, but clearly that was his next

step. It was impossible to collect any information

from the ship as long as the jamming fields remained

in operation. He turned toward the communications

station. "Lieutenant Uhura, notify Dr.

Kaul that we will be transporting down to site

Nbled at first light in that area. Please advise

him that among the personnel on the landing party I

wish to include his languages expert."

"Aye, sir."

Spock resumed his study of the site. Which of the

aliens should he contact? There were, of course,

no guarantees that his efforts would be successful.

However, it was the best option he could see on an

extremely short list of ideas. He would have

to search their sensor records carefully before

choosing which alien to approach.

Chapter Nine

Near sunset, Kirk's host drifted

to sleep, exhausted by the day's exertions. To his

surprise, even though he had been a passive

spectator on their strenuous trek, Kirk

felt the drowsiness overtaking him as well. His

last thought was that he must be more than a passenger

here. There must be a physiological link between the

alien's brain and his consciousness.

Later, although he was not sure how much time had

passed, he became aware of random images

drifting through his mind. Strange crablike beings

with translucent shells floated and

tumbled past the rock spire where he was sitting,

watching a string of tiny moonlets rise in the

east. At first he was content to observe the

creatures--they called themselves the Kh@fflict,

Kirk realized without knowing where he had gotten the

name--as they performed their aerial ballet for his

benefit. The intricate patterns of their

movements, carefully choreographed spirals and

starbursts and other shapes he couldn't name,

mesmerized him. He felt he could lose himself in

their strange dance for the rest of eternity.

It was only after many minutes, in dream time, that

he perceived that the inky black splotches on each

dancer's carapace were tiny antigravity units.

Once he spotted them, the devices stood out in

stark contrast to the rainbow hues of the Kh@fflict's

shells, and he wondered how he had missed them

before. Even in a dream, it was preposterous

to believe that a crab who weighed as much as a

full-grown human could fly on a world with nearly

Earth-normal gravity. These creatures must have

had a marvelous civilization, he thought, if they

could devote even a small portion of their

resources to such a beautiful art form.

As he watched the colors flicker over their

carapaces, he began to see patterns that

repeated themselves over and over. At first he thought the

color sequences were an embellishment on the

performance, with the changing hues complementing and enhancing

the beauty of the dance. However, the longer he

watched, the more he became convinced that the

Kh@fflict were singing. The color patterns and the

timing of the changes formed the basis of the

Kh@fflict language.

Suddenly Kirk felt himself floating upward,

his body drifting in lazy circles that brought him

closer and closer to the other Kh@fflict. Without a

conscious effort on his part, he slipped into the dance

as though he had been part of it all his life. In

the language of movement and color, the history

of his civilization unfolded around him--from the first

proto-Kh@fflict that emerged to conquer the land up

to the mighty builders who had ruled the known

universe.

The ancestral Kh@fflict had been

primitive creatures with few accomplishments and

fewer needs. From the simple spiral movements

and the neutral colors of the other dancers, Kirk

sensed the distaste that the Kh@fflict felt toward

their beginnings; these memories survived

in the Kh@fflict racial consciousness only because

Kh@fflict hatchlings passed through a similar

stage as they matured. As the history of the

Kh@fflict civilization unfolded, the dance

became more complicated, the dancers' colors

became brighter, and the tempo of the movements

increased, reflecting the development of a highly

complex and stratified society. To maintain the

unity of their civilization, caste rules,

language, and specialized motor skills were

permanently imprinted on the lower brains of the young

when they reached a certain size. For a brief

moment Kirk was hypnotized by the terror and awe

that each youth felt as his being was filled with the knowledge that

bound him to the totality of his people. Shaped by that

defining event, the unique elements of each

Kh@fflict personality emerged and were stored in the

higher brain.

The interwoven patterns of color and movement

carried Kirk into a universe where all things

flowed from the Kh@fflict totality. Stepping into the

artifact had transformed his body into that of a

Kh@fflict, the only intelligent race

imaginable to the device's programmers. At the

height of their civilization, the Kh@fflict had

lived on over a hundred worlds. Some planets

had been similar to the Kh@fflict homeworld, warm

and lush, filled with abundant food animals and

ripe for serving Kh@fflict needs. Other

planets had needed much work--exterminating

indigenous life-forms, reforming ecosystems, or

altering climates. The dance became a flashing,

swirling, twisting maelstrom recounting the

glorious conquests of the Kh@fflict people.

Sorting through the flood of information, Kirk

realized that he owed his survival as an

individual to the Kh@fflict's unique

bicameral brain. His human memories and knowledge were

stored, separate and isolated, in the higher

brain, while the lower brain contained the knowledge for

functioning in a Kh@fflict body and using

Kh@fflict technology. If he could access the

information in his lower brain, he might be able to use

the transit windows to return to his human form.

It was a hope, and Kirk grabbed for it with the

eagerness of a dying man reaching for a miracle

cure.

Under the force of his excitement, his dreamscape

fractured into a kaleidoscope of images that

whirled and gyrated around him. He

struggled to reassemble them into a coherent pattern,

but before he could gather the fragments together, he was

wrapped in a rising tide of mist and carried

away, smothered in soft gray wool.

In the morning everything seemed clearer, more

sharply defined. Kirk let his mind swim through the

remnants of his dreams, sifting and culling the

chaotic images for the truths beneath them. If he

could master the linkage between the Kh@fflict brains

and find a way to cross the mental barriers at

will, he could control his host body as he had in his

dream. Moreover, if his guess was correct,

his Kh@fflict persona was little more than a

housekeeping program for the creature's body.

Yesterday's journey proved that rudimentary

elements of personality and free will resided in the

lower brain, but most Kh@fflict believed those

functions belonged only to their higher brains. The

separation of instinct and intellect suggested that

Kirk's extended flight across Careta IV'S

grasslands was a response to something

preprogrammed into his host's lower brain.

That thought brought images of the Kh@fflict

justice system into Kirk's consciousness. For the

most serious crimes against the Kh@fflict

totality, offenders were transported to a deserted

location and hunted to death like animals by specially

trained squads of enforcers. Given the deep

understanding of crime and punishment imprinted on a

young Kh@fflict, Kirk decided it was almost

inevitable that his host would panic at its

unfamiliar surroundings. Deprived of direction

from the higher brain, the Kh@fflict mind had

followed instructions encoded into the memories of

its people two hundred thousand years ago.

With a start Kirk realized how many ways his

personality went against the Kh@fflict norm.

All Kh@fflict males were juveniles, and the

Kh@fflict matriarchs did not permit any

male who challenged their authority to survive.

The artifact would not contain an appropriate

template for a dominant male and had apparently

settled on the closest available model--a

convicted felon. It was an unsettling thought, but

it at least explained his circumstances.

His next step, Kirk decided, was to test his

new insights by convincing his host to return to the

transit frame. Although he still could not

recognize the signs of physical

discomfort in his new body, Kirk doubted that the

Kh@fflict had any greater tolerance for remaining

motionless for hours than humans did. That meant

his crablike body, which had been jammed into its

hiding place for almost eighteen hours, was long

overdue for some attention. He remembered seeing

a weak trickle of water in the creek bed they

had left to enter this narrow canyon. That would

solve the first of his worries, but he had no

idea what to do about food. Presumably his lower

brain knew what he should eat, but that didn't

mean he could find anything edible. His host's

reactions told Kirk that Careta IV had

changed so much that the computer that had created him no

longer carried information that fit the conditions on the

planet. From that alone Kirk knew the

Kh@fflict had died out a very long time ago.

Getting water would be the first test of whether he

could order the Kh@fflict body to do his bidding.

If survival skills had been programmed

into his lower brain, his host should have moved during the

night, letting the darkness protect him while he

got water, scouted for food, and made his

hideaway more secure. That the alien had not done

so told Kirk two things. First, his host was too

young to appreciate the benefits of surviving at

any cost and against all odds. Second, the

information preprogrammed into the Kh@fflict brains

did not include such basic tactical skills

as how to avoid surveillance and capture by one's

enemies.

As he thought about his body's needs, Kirk

became aware of a dry, chalky taste in his mouth.

A feeling of satisfaction swept through him. He

had been right, then, to assume that the Kh@fflict

lower brain mediated such activities without

intervention of the higher thought processes. His next

job was to take control from his host's instincts.

With the image of a refreshing drink of water

firmly in mind, Kirk tried to move from his

hiding hole. At first there was no response, and

he began to wonder if he could overrule the

deeply imprinted programming that constrained the

Kh@fflict lower brain. If a human had been

trapped so long, he would have raced for water at the

first opportunity. Kirk doubted that basic

physiology would ever change so much that a thirsty

creature would refuse a drink unless something was

suppressing its survival instincts.

On the other hand, perhaps he had been

here for so long that the body was unable to move.

Considering how much warmer Careta IV had been

when the Kh@fflict ruled the planet, perhaps his

host's physiology was unable to cope with the colder

temperatures. If that was the problem, if he had

been immobile for so long that his muscles had

locked in their present position from the cold, then

it would take extra work to escape from this rocky

trap.

Remembering what it felt like when his arm fell

asleep, Kirk shuddered at the idea of having

pins and needles in eight legs at the same time.

However, he could not let that keep him here until

his host's body died of starvation or dehydration.

Instead he returned to his experiment of the

previous afternoon, concentrating on bringing his pincers

together and slowly lifting an appendage to eye

level.

This time he got a response, although the faint

scritch of chitin-analog against rock as he

twitched one appendage was not what he had hoped

for. At that rate he would be there all day just trying

to unlock his joints and limber up his muscles.

He had envisioned a quick dash back to the

artifact, followed by five minutes to readjust

the equipment so that he would emerge from the window as

he had started--James T. Kirk, human.

Now, at the very least, his timetable would need serious

revisions.

Kirk threw himself into mastering his Kh@fflict

body, imposing his will on nerves and muscles

paralyzed by the long inactivity. Between fighting the

basic Kh@fflict physiology, which was so ill

adapted to Careta IV'S present climate,

and wrestling with his ignorance of how to control the

alien body, his progress was slow. It seemed

a hopeless task to break down the barriers between his

consciousness and the Kh@fflict mind that shared the body

with him. After fifteen minutes he could still move

only one set of pincers or bend one joint, and

he was beginning to fear he was trapped. He kept

trying, knowing it was the only way he could escape,

and finally his perseverance was rewarded. Extending one

of his legs beyond the edge of the rock slab, he

drew half a circle in the air, flexing and

bending every joint through its full range of motion.

Progress came more quickly after that.

Apparently his muscles needed to reach a

critical internal temperature before they would

work, one more proof that the Kh@fflict had

evolved in a much warmer climate. Once he

could move one appendage, he loosened the others

up quickly. With relief Kirk dragged his

Kh@fflict body from beneath the slab of rock and

struggled to stand. His legs felt wobbly and

uncertain, reminding him of a colt he had seen

on his grandmother's farm when he was a boy.

I wonder if this is what that horse felt

like? he thought as he took his first step. Only the

fact that he had moved just two of his eight legs

kept him from falling on his face. Why was he so

shaky? Hunger? Thirst? The aftereffects of the

long night? Whatever the cause, he couldn't

wait for someone to rescue him. Presumably

Spock would be looking for Kirk and the security

men who had been with him, but the Vulcan would not be

expecting to find his captain in Kirk's present

condition. The alien life-forms would attract

attention from the Enterprise's search teams, but the

crew wouldn't know who they were. They would

probably assume they were an indigenous

species not detected in their initial survey

of the planet. It was up to Kirk to locate the

search party and tell them what had happened.

He tried to walk again, going slowly and checking

his balance with every stride. Again, as with his initial

efforts to move, there seemed to be a critical

point that he had to reach. In this case, he

decided as he struggled over an unstable cone of

loose rock, the difficulty was establishing

control over the Kh@fflict body. Yesterday's

flight, directed by his lower brain, had

occurred without any input or intervention from his

conscious mind. Now, however, Kirk was trying

to command the alien body against its instincts, and that

required breaking through two sets of mental

barriers to establish links between the Kh@fflict's

upper and lower brains that had not been present before.

He was, in essence, training this body to do things

no Kh@fflict had ever dreamed of doing.

By the time he reached the mouth of the narrow canyon,

Kirk felt reasonably confident of his ability

to manage the Kh@fflict body. He was not up

to fighting off a pack of Careta's master

predators, whatever they had been, nor was he

sure he could negotiate the steeply broken

country that his host had clambered over yesterday.

However, if he stuck with cross-country hiking and

returned to the artifact as quickly as possible, he

knew he could manage.

The stream was muddy and unappealing, but Kirk

decided he didn't have much choice for available

drinking water. Before he could act on the thought, his

lower brain took over, bending his knees until

his jaws were resting below the water. The water was

tepid and bitter from dissolved minerals, but his

sediment filters removed most of the suspended

grit and clay. He allowed his body to drink

until it could hold no more water.

Next he needed to get back to the artifact.

Kirk looked around, assessing the canyon for

routes to the uplands above. In his human form he

might have been able to scale the steep, crumbling

rock faces, although any experienced climber

knew that it was foolhardy to risk your life on

such unreliable surfaces unless your

alternative was certain death. Trying it now, in

an alien body over which he held only tenuous

control, seemed uncomfortably close

to suicide.

Reluctantly he started downstream, away from

his goal. Somewhere the canyon walls would flatten

out, and he could climb up onto the surrounding

hills. As he searched for a way out of the canyon,

he could feel the tension building in his lower brain.

The Kh@fflict programming was still functioning, and

his lower brain believed the enforcers would spring up from

behind every boulder.

As he moved along, searching for a route out of the

canyon, Kirk considered what he had learned

about the Kh@fflict and their technology. He could

not risk any more of his crew on this planet, he

concluded. They had no way to recognize how

dangerous a Kh@fflict artifact might be

until someone fell victim to the alien

technology. As soon as he was changed back

into his human form, the Enterprise was leaving

Careta IV. It went against his usual desire

to learn everything possible despite the risks.

However, he felt a growing uneasiness about

remaining here, and although he could not put his reasoning

into words, he knew his conclusions were based on

information he had learned from his Kh@fflict host.

Kirk was still debating his decision to leave

Careta when he reached a break in the canyon

walls. A huge section of the cliff face had

slumped into the canyon, forming a hummocky mound

of rubble. Three smaller landslides disfigured

the scar left by the primary slump; one of them was

large enough to make a ramp that led almost to the

rim of the canyon. Kirk clambered up the

landslide, eager to escape to the freedom of the

hilltops. The climb was easy going until he

reached the canyon wall.

The Kh@fflict form had not been designed for

rock climbing, Kirk thought as he surveyed the

last ten meters of cliff that separated him from his

goal. The jointed and fissured rock offered

dozens of hand- and footholds. In his human form

he would have been over the top in less than a

minute, but he had no idea how to clench his

pincers inside a crack to anchor himself while

climbing that vertical rock face. The smooth,

inflexible shell covering his digits more than

offset any advantage he might have gained from the

extra limbs.

Still, there had to be a way to make the climb, and

Kirk settled down to find it. In over an hour

of walking, this was the first place where he had had the

slightest chance of escaping the canyon, and it

looked like it might be a lot longer before he found

another place. He had no idea how far his

host had come after descending into the canyon

yesterday, but Kirk's impression was that he had a

long way to go before he reached that spot. He could

easily waste a lot of precious time exploring

dead-end escape routes from this canyon.

Spurred on by that thought, Kirk picked the most

promising spot and wedged his pincer into a crack.

Chapter Ten

A sharp wind was blowing out of the east as the

Enterprise's landing party materialized on the

hill at Site Nbled. Spock moved away from

the beam-down point and began scanning the area. The

security men fanned out, searching for clues that the

remote sensors had missed. The hum of the

transporter signaled the arrival of the science

personnel from the Enterprise's crew and from

Kaul's archaeology team. The scientists

began examining the artifact and the area around it

immediately.

Signaling to a security guard to accompany

him, Spock started downhill along a band of

flattened grass. His night's work--analyzing the

sensor data to confirm the presence of six aliens

in the area--had turned up no definitive

information about the crablike creatures or where they

had come from. Even if he assumed that the

artifacts had transformed the missing people into the

image of their creators, he had found nothing

to tell him which of the creatures was Kirk. In the

end, Spock had decided to contact the

individual closest to the artifact to learn if

he could communicate with the aliens. After that he would

attempt to contact the being who was hiding in the

canyonlands to the northwest of the artifact in the

hope that it was Kirk. Although the justification for this

decision--that the captain would react differently

than the rest of the crew--was weak, he had not

found a better reason for choosing which alien

to contact.

He started off, swinging his tricorder in wide

sweeps to record his surroundings. One of the

aliens was over the first hill, moving in slow,

random zigzags that had kept it in the vicinity of the

artifact. Spock and the guard with him approached

the alien cautiously, giving it plenty of time

to see them coming. At first it gave no indication that

it saw them. Instead it continued to amble along as

though it were the only living thing on the planet.

"Fascinating," Spock murmured, watching

how the alien's eyes rotated on their stalks.

"It appears to be looking past us as though we are

not here."

"But it's looking straight at us," the guard

replied. "Each eye is sweeping out a

180-degree arc, with overlap in the center

to allow stereoscopic vision."

"That is correct." If his deductions about the

aliens were correct, the human inside this body

should be doing everything to attract his attention by now.

This apparent indifference was not natural.

"Ensign, cover me while I move in

closer."

"Yes, Mr. Spock."

The guard trained his phaser on the alien while

Spock moved beside it. Even this failed

to produce a response until he stepped

directly into the creature's path. Then,

inexplicably, it froze, its limbs locking

beneath it. Spock prodded its carapace and scanned

it with his tricorder, but the alien remained

motionless. Finally Spock reached for his

communicator. "Spock to Enterprise. Lock

on to the alien who is at these coordinates and

beam it aboard."

He stepped back from the alien, and the

transporter effect coalesced around

it, dissolving the creature into golden sparkles.

Spock waited for the ship to request additional

instructions, but his communicator remained silent.

A human would have been demanding answers, he

knew, using the comparison to keep his curiosity

at bay. Finally the instrument chirped to life.

"Mr. Spock, we had a wee problem with that

beastie you had us transport up. It went

berserk the moment the transporter released it, and

it cut up Mr. Kyle fair bad before we could

hit it with our phasers."

"I presume Dr. McCoy will be able to tend

to Mr. Kyle's injuries. What is the status

of the alien?"

"Aye, the doctor will be having no problem with a

few scrapes and gouges, Mr. Spock. But the

critter dinna take too kindly to our phasers.

It's dead, sir."

"Mr. Scott, your phasers should have been on

stun setting." The alien's death, and its reaction

to being transported, meant they would have to proceed with

even greater caution than he had originally

assumed. "We were hoping to study that alien alive

in order to learn how to communicate with it."

An exasperated sigh came through his

communicator. "The weapons were on stun

setting, Mr. Spock. Unfortunately, we

failed to "communicate" what that meant to our

"guest.""

"I see." Stun setting should not have been

lethal to any being the size of the one they had beamed

to the Enterprise. Why was the alien dead? He

had better hope that his original deduction--that this

alien was not the captain--was correct. By any

reasonable set of assumptions, the creature should

not be dead. "Have Dr. McCoy perform an

autopsy on the alien as soon as possible.

Perhaps he will find some clue that will tell us what

happened."

"Aye, sir. Enterprise out."

Spock returned his communicator to his

belt and started across the hillside to l ook for

clues. The grass whispered and rustled beneath his

boots. Although the vegetation ranged through the light

and medium tones of grayish-green, it seemed

dry and unhealthy, as though it found this cold and

empty planet as hostile as the Enterprise's

crew had.

Spock shook his head, wondering where that thought

had come from. True, the star in this solar

system had been fading for millennia; such things were

inevitable, and it was illogical to ascribe any

emotional value to the event. Besides, the death of a

star like the one in the Caretian system was a slow

process, and the native plants and animals had

had plenty of time to evolve with the changing

climate.

Halfway around the hill, the display on

Spock's tricorder began flashing random

patterns. He adjusted the controls, trying

to isolate the source of the disruption. Instead the

display flickered more violently. Spock moved

off the swath of flattened grass and continued

to scan the area. The disturbance built, spreading

until the air seemed to vibrate around him. A

sound like the buzzing of a swarm of angry hornets

enveloped him, starting softly and crescendoing to a

deafening tumult. He pressed his hands over his

ears to block out the noise, but it grew louder.

The air turned massive and viscous with the weight

of the sound, and Spock had to fight to drag the thick

air into his lungs. Each step required a

superhuman effort, as though his feet were encased in

lead. Then suddenly the world tilted, and the ground

rushed upward to meet his face.

Spock stirred and opened one eye

cautiously. McCoy's face swam

into focus, with color and detail spreading outward

from his nose to encompass the worried look in his

blue eyes and the concerned frown that wrinkled his

forehead. With an effort Spock forced his other

eyelid open. The soft humming and chirping of the

medical diagnostic equipment told him he was

in sickbay. He rolled onto his side and

tried to sit up.

McCoy pushed him back onto the bed. "Not

so fast, Spock. You fainted down there, and I'm

going to know why before I let you out of that bed."

This time, knowing the move McCoy would use

to restrain him, Spock ducked under the doctor's

arm and sat up. The room was quiet and normal,

with only the expected equipment noises in the

background. No intrusive buzzing threatened

to overwhelm him. Whatever had happened on the

planet had been deliberate, an attack

aimed at preventing him from investigating the

artifact and the mysterious aliens. "I presume

your instruments tell you that there is nothing wrong with

me."

"Yes, dammit! You fall on your face

down there, and this blasted equipment pretends that

everything is normal." McCoy directed a

poisonous glare at the diagnostics panel.

"As if anything is normal about your mixed-up

physiology."

"Your concern is noted, Doctor." Spock

pushed himself to his feet, checking for any

residual effects of the attack. He felt

somewhat light-headed, as though an intruder in the

back of his mind was waiting to attack again the moment

he returned to the planet. Closing his eyes,

he concentrated on the sensation, isolated it, and

built a wall around it. Next time he would not

underestimate the artifact's ability to bring

novel weapons to bear against the Enterprise's

crew. "However, there is no need for you to exert

yourself further on my behalf."

"Just what is that supposed to mean?" McCoy

scowled, annoyed that Spock's Vulcan

demeanor had never wavered. "I thought that you said that

Vulcans never faint."

For a moment Spock stared at the doctor, one

eyebrow raised. McCoy, who refused to learn

the operating instructions for the newest equipment

Starfleet issued him, could remember the most

trivial facts when they served to score him

points in an argument. When he saw that the

doctor was winding up for a scathing denunciation of

Vulcan inconsistencies and self-deception,

Spock replied, "You are correct,

Doctor. Vulcans never faint. Fainting is

a human response to strong emotional stimuli.

However, Vulcans can be rendered unconscious

by virulent disease organisms or by the exercise

of external agencies."

"Why, you pointy-eared--" McCoy stopped,

blinking rapidly. His forehead wrinkled with a

puzzled frown. "What did you say? What do you

call that total collapse you experienced down

on the planet?"

"I was rendered unconscious by the efforts of an

external agency." Spock started for the door,

knowing that McCoy would follow, if only

to satisfy his curiosity. The door whisked

open, and Spock started for the turbolift.

McCoy fell into step beside him. "Would you care

to translate that into plain English, Spock?"

The turbolift door opened, and Spock

stepped inside. "Bridge."

"Spock!" McCoy's tone was sharp with

exasperation. "As your doctor, I want an

explanation. Otherwise I'm declaring you unfit for

duty until you submit to a complete

physical."

Spock heaved a sigh. "Very well,

Doctor. Something attacked me. It started as a

faint buzzing noise, and the sound grew louder

until it was a tangible force beating against me."

"No one else reported any such

attacks." McCoy glared at the Vulcan,

daring him to stick to his story. "Why should you be the

only one affected?"

"That, Doctor, is a very good question." Spock

subjected McCoy to his most impassive

stare, noticing the doctor's astonishment at the

implied compliment. "I will entertain suggestions for

determining the solution to that problem, since it may

be a critical issue in discovering how the

artifact functions. Perhaps Vulcans are more

susceptible to its attacks than humans, or

other factors may be at work. To date we have

been unable to obtain any meaningful information on this

technology, nor have we ascertained anything of

importance about the beings who created it."

McCoy faced Spock, his expression

incredulous. "And you're asking my help in

solving this mystery?"

"At this point, Doctor, I would welcome

any assistance, no matter how unlikely the

source. We must learn what has happened to the

captain and effect a rescue. We are at a

singular disadvantage until we can discover how

to operate the alien devices. I presume your

autopsy results will give us some fascinating

data to work with."

"No doubt they will, Spock, when I've

gotten back the results of the lab tests."

McCoy bounced on his toes, his chin thrust out

at a truculent angle. "But as you well know,

these things take a certain amount of time, no

matter who needs the answers."

"I am all too aware of that, Doctor."

The turbolift door opened, sparing him the need

for further reply. Spock headed for the science

station. Behind him the turbolift doors whished shut

on McCoy's request to return to sickbay.

Sulu, in the command chair, started to rise, but

Spock signaled for him to remain seated. "As you

were, Mr. Sulu. Status

report."

"No change since you were beamed aboard, Mr.

Spock. Our security people have combed the area

looking for clues to what attacked you. Three people

reported momentary distortions in their tricorder

readings, but the effect didn't last long enough for us

to isolate it. Of the remaining aliens on the

planet, four are approximately where they have

been for the last twelve hours. The alien that was

hiding in the canyonlands is moving, but we don't

know why."

"Continue monitoring the aliens, Mr.

Sulu. I shall analyze the tricorder and sensor

readings to determine what I can about the force that

attacked me." He slid into his chair,

letting the familiar contours support his body.

The sensation was so familiar, so expected, that for a

moment he forgot the import of the last day's

events. Solving the alien technology was a

puzzle, an intellectual challenge of the type

at which he excelled.

When Spock began reviewing the scanner

data, the problem lost its abstract beauty and

became again a matter of personal urgency.

What had he been about to discover that had triggered the

attack against him? How had he been isolated and

rendered unconscious without the attack affecting the

security guard with him? And, last but not least,

what had happened to the captain? He knew the

answers had to be hidden in the mass of data they

had collected, but the noise-to-signal ratio

was so high that they had not been able to glean any

worthwhile clues from their sensor readings. What

new techniques could they use to see through the

distortions?

Three hours and countless dead ends later,

Spock wondered what they had missed. The

sensor logs contained more information than he needed,

but he could not reduce the data to anything useful.

Solving the randomizer function for the transportation

windows' shields should have let him penetrate the

secrets of the alien technology, but instead his

results were showing another layer of security

measures that surrounded the internal mechanisms

of the alien machinery. It was as if something was

predicting his next move and scrambling the data

to make his analysis worthless. Two days ago

he would have dismissed that idea as irrational.

However, after spending so many hours in

fruitless research, Spock began wondering if

the artifacts' defensive system changed its

tactics according to its predictions of how someone would

analyze the data. Such a system would require

a pulsed scrambler beam to keep jumbling the

data. The effort Spock had put into unraveling

this problem implied that the aliens had used

extremely sophisticated security measures.

He ordered the computer to analyze how such a

defensive system would operate.

"Mr. Spock, look at this!" Excitement

sharpened Sulu's tone. Faces turned toward the

main viewscreen, which showed the wavering shape of a

crablike creature attempting to scale the

ten-meter scarp at the top of a landslide.

Silence gripped the bridge, broken only by the

chirps and whispered reports of various

monitors.

The crablike body was not suited for climbing,

yet the creature chose its handholds with a caution

that spoke of much practice. Could it be Captain

Kirk? Spock thought, remembering how many times

the captain had asked him to go rock climbing.

Spock had always refused, citing the press of

work or professional commitments as reasons not

to go. In truth, he could see no value to the

sport. Humans had an inordinate need to pit

themselves against every hazard the universe offered them, and

they seemed to get a thrill out of the danger.

Spock found neither motivation compelling, nor could

he find much to interest him when he observed from a

safe distance. However, watching the crablike being

attempt to scale a cliff that it was in no way

equipped to climb convinced Spock that Kirk was

trapped inside the body of that alien.

"Mr. Sulu, I will need a squad of

security men in fifteen minutes. We are

beaming down to contact that alien at our earliest

opportunity." He started to turn away, then

realized he was overlooking the obvious--if he

wanted to contact the alien, the most important

member of his landing team was Dr. Kaul's

language expert. "Also give our regards

to Dr. Kaul and request the assistance of

Nadia Hernandez. If we are going to talk to that

alien, let us hope that she can translate what

it says for us."

"Yes, sir."

McCoy marched onto the bridge and

slapped a data tape onto Spock's

console. "Preliminary autopsy report, just in

case you're planning to rush back to that planet

any time soon."

"Thank you, Doctor." Spock dropped the

tape in a slot, hoping it would explain these

creatures for him. He could have skimmed through the

material faster on his own, but McCoy seemed

determined to add a verbal commentary.

"Visually they look like giant king crabs,

even though they're missing one set of legs.

Also, the external ornamentation is completely

different from anything that ever developed on Earth,

and the claw structures are a strange mixture

of delicate manipulator, walking surface,

and lethal weapon." McCoy's shrug was

eloquent with frustration. "For that matter, the

skeletal structures and the ligament attachments

in the limbs are unique to these creatures."

"I had noticed those particular differences,

Doctor. The skeletal bracing and the tendon

linkages give these creatures considerable striking

power in their limbs." Spock slowed that section

of the tape, confirming that the heavy exoskeleton

on the limbs, ornamented in places with

triangular spikes, had evolved as a fighting

weapon.

"And did you notice that feeding nozzle,

Spock? I don't think these boys had

particularly elegant table manners."

"You may be right, Doctor." The creature

had three triangular teeth that could have severed the

spinal cord of a small animal or broken the

carapace of an Earth-normal crab. However,

instead of grinding or shearing teeth to break up its

prey, the creature had a long, retractile

proboscis with a serrated edge for piercing its

victim's flesh.

"You could get a hell of a mosquito bite from

that creature." Shaking his head, McCoy left

Spock to examine the rest of the report.

By the time the landing party was assembled, the

crablike being had almost reached the top of the

cliff. Spock took one last look at the

viewscreen and ordered his team to beam down out of

sight near the top of the cliff. After their

results with the alien they had beamed aboard the

Enterprise, Spock was taking no chances.

Even if Kirk was inside the

creature's body, he would not expect a group

from the Enterprise to greet him as he crawled the

last centimeters over the lip of the canyon. It

would be far better to remain hidden until he was

clear of the unstable rim.

Spock and five security guards

materialized about thirty meters downslope from

where the alien would crest the cliff. The vegetation

was sparse and dry, mostly ragged clumps of

grass that rattled in the breeze. Even this

close to midday, the air was cold, and Spock

knew he would not be able to keep his people stationary for

long. The wind brought the chill factor down

to dangerous levels. Although their protective

clothing helped, the humans needed to move around

to generate enough body heat to prevent hypothermia.

The hum of the transporter told Spock that

Hernandez and five more security men had

materialized behind them. He signaled to them to fan

out and crouch behind any convenient tuft of grass.

Logic suggested that if Kirk controlled the

crablike being, he would head uphill, away from

their current position. However, Spock wanted

the landing party to be as inconspicuous as possible,

in case his assumptions were wrong.

Even after McCoy's autopsy report and

after studying the probe records for hours,

Spock found the first sight of the alien unsettling,

like a dull toothache that did not seem to belong

to any one tooth. Except for its size, the

alien resembled a king crab, with an outsized

body perched on top of long, stout, segmented

legs. The carapace was translucent but blotched

with purples and blues that shifted from moment

to moment. The eyes were similar to human eyes, with

central pupils surrounded by magenta irises,

but they were mounted on stalks that allowed them

to swivel independently. The terminal claws on

each leg were closed into footlike units for

walking, but the individual digits were capable of

surprisingly delicate manipulation. Spock

allowed himself a moment's admiration at the elegance

and efficiency of the anatomical design.

The creature pulled itself over the edge of the

cliff and staggered to its feet. For a moment it just

looked around, its color shifting to a deeper, more

uniform blue. It pivoted its body back and

forth, as if scouting out the terrain, but did not

notice the Enterprise's landing party. Its

examination finished, it turned away from the

humans and started uphill, moving at a

deliberate pace.

Spock extrapolated its heading. Unless he

completely misjudged the alien's intentions, it was

headed toward the artifact. He stood and followed

the alien, gauging his speed to allow himself

to overtake it slowly. The rest of the landing party

spread across the hillside and followed him at a

cautious distance. Spock was certain that the

creature's eight-legged locomotion could attain

far greater speeds than he was capable of reaching,

if the alien desired. However, if his deductions

were correct, Spock expected the alien to stop

when it realized it was being followed.

Five minutes later it was clear that he had

missed a critical factor in his analysis.

Although he had partially closed the gap, the alien

had increased its speed and showed no sign it had

noticed him. Behind him Spock heard several of the

security men struggling to breathe in the oxygen-poor

air. Spock could continue the chase for several

hours, although long exposure to the Earth-normal

environment on the Enterprise had lessened his

tolerance for such conditions. However, he did not

wish to confront the alien alone, without the support

of his security men. He hoped that their

tricorders would record vital information about the

meeting, but especially after the violent reaction

of the creature they had beamed aboard the

Enterprise, he wanted their phasers for

safety. The creature might decide he was a

gourmet meal.

Spock stopped to let the others join him.

While he waited he pulled out his

communicator. "Spock to Enterprise.

Twelve to beam up, with the first contingent returning

to the planet immediately. We wish to materialize

one hundred meters uphill of the alien in a

location where he cannot miss us."

"Aye, sir," came the reply. Spock

selected four guards and Hernandez to accompany

him. This had better work, he thought as the

transporter beam formed around him. Because if it

didn't, he did not know what his next course of

action would be.

Chapter Eleven

Kirk dragged his Kh@fflict body over the

top of the cliff. How he had made the last

meter and a half, he wasn't sure, but somehow the

tenuous claw holds had held his weight.

Twice he had been positive that the rock was

too weak, that it would crumble away from his outspread

pincers before he could anchor himself in a more stable

fissure. However, his luck had held, and he

pushed himself over the rim even as he heard the

rock fragments from his lowest claw hold

cascading downward and bouncing off the rubble at the

foot of the cliff.

He gave himself a moment to collect his wits

after the climb. The Kh@fflict lower brain, he

sensed, was almost incapacitated from terror at what

he had forced his body to do. When he had started the

climb, the concept of scaling a vertical rock

wall had been so alien to the Kh@fflict

mind-set that Kirk had negotiated the first meter

or so before his lower brain had realized what he was

doing. By then innate caution and the need for

survival had forced the lower brain to leave Kirk

in control, even though the Kh@fflict's inborn

instincts screamed against the unnatural act

Kirk was forcing his body to perform.

Dragging himself away from the treacherous rim,

Kirk stumbled to his feet. His legs were

dangerously unsteady, partly from the stress of the

climb, an activity for which the Kh@fflict form was

singularly unsuited, and partly from the

physiological response of forcing the

Kh@fflict lower brain inffconflict with its own

programming. The best thing for this internal warfare,

Kirk decided, was to keep his body moving,

to use the familiar patterns of walking and scouting

his surroundings to subdue the conflict between his human

memories and consciousness and his alien

physiology and instincts.

He checked the area for signs that the enforcers had

been there. Enforcers? After a moment's confusion,

Kirk realized the Kh@fflict had originated that

thought. His host was still convinced that his society's

equivalent of the Gestapo was after him. The slope

below him was dotted with scraggly clumps of grass

and misshapen, odd-colored boulders, but there was

nothing that could hide a Kh@fflict large

enough to hurt him. With a feeling of profound relief,

he turned uphill and set out at a measured

pace.

After a few minutes, as his host's brain

decided that no enforcers--or any other

Kh@fflict--were in the area, it began to relax

and to move his legs with greater coordination.

To Kirk's relief, he doubled his speed, although

he was heading uphill. The faster he could

travel, the sooner he would reach the artifact and

could return to his normal form.

When the bipedal creatures appeared

directly before him, the Kh@fflict brain seized

with terror. His limbs froze in midstride, and

momentum carried his body forward, pitching him

ignominiously to the ground at Spock's feet.

Mortified at this betrayal, Kirk struggled

to reassert control over his body. It was like trying

to unravel a pile of wet spaghetti. His

appendages had snarled together, and his attempts

to regain his feet produced random tremors that

did nothing to improve the situation.

"Fascinating," Spock said, studying his

tricorder readings with the familiar cocked

eyebrow. "This creature's physiology shows it

to be totally unrelated to any known species in

the galaxy."

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Spock?"

Hernandez stepped forward with a second tricorder.

"Dr. McCoy's autopsy showed the

bioparameters were similar to the dominant forms in

the Selevai system."

"That's an interesting suggestion, Dr.

Hernandez." Spock changed his tricorder

settings. "We should consider the possibility that

these creatures evolved in that sector, although the

readings I am getting now clearly show this group

of life-forms to have developed along independent

lines for the last several hundred thousand years.

If our estimations of the age of these ruins are

correct, it is conceivable that they diverged far enough

in the past to account for the large genetic

discrepancies."

Hernandez nodded. "That would be consistent with our

other findings. It's also probable that the groups who

migrated from the home planet underwent genetic

manipulation to survive the natural dangers of

their new homes."

"I will analyze that hypothesis when we

return to the ship. For the moment we must

concern ourselves with why this creature is here now when

our earlier scans of the planet revealed no

large indigenous life-forms." Spock circled

around Kirk, his tricorder clicking and whirring.

Kirk struggled to regain his feet but discovered

that his Kh@fflict brain had retreated from the

reality facing it. His coordination, his motor

functions--in fact, every physical action that

might come under conscious direction from one of his

brains--had been completely shut off. Struggling

to remain calm, Kirk tried to tap into his

Kh@fflict awareness to discover the cause of this

sudden catatonia.

At first the random images and chaotic swirls

of color that surged through his mind reminded him of the

Kelv@as, the abstract art of Denaya 4. The

rigid and stylized patterns of the Kelv@as

required a detailed knowledge of Denaya's culture

and history in order to interpret the multiple

layers of symbols incorporated in each

design. And as if that wasn't enough, different

combinations of symbols or different colors used

together changed the meaning of the basic pattern. On

his first visit to the planet, Kirk had tried

to learn enough to avoid offending his hosts, but despite

his best efforts, he had never been able to remember

more than a few of the basic modulations.

Now, to his horror, he realized that the bright

abstract images filling his mind represented the

Kh@fflict language. Somehow, if he was

to interpret the store of information encoded in his

host's brain, he would have to learn the distinctions between

the varying shades and patterns. Humans

processed massive amounts of visual information

in their daily lives, but Kirk didn't think it

was an accident that their most basic communications

came through sound rather than from vision. Vision could be

fooled so many ways, by changing light intensity or

wavelength, that a language based on color and

shape seemed doomed from the start. Still, if his

impressions were correct, that was exactly what the

Kh@fflict had had.

He relaxed and let the patterns flow through his

mind, trying to follow the emotions that accompanied

them. At first fear and confusion excluded everything

else. The appearance of the Enterprise's landing

party had deeply disturbed the alien. As the thoughts

repeated themselves, Kirk deciphered the gist of how

the crablike aliens viewed the world.

The Kh@fflict had evolved many grand

cycles of eights ago, when Careta IV was a

far different world. They considered themselves the

pinnacle of life, the goal toward which the

universe had been striving since its hatching. As

they developed space flight and moved outward from

their homeworld, their discoveries confirmed their belief

in their superiority and uniqueness. Many planets

in the sector had evolved life, but nowhere did

the Kh@fflict recognize organisms with even

incipient intelligence. Any beings that interfered with

their expansion or contradicted their worldview were

thoroughly and ruthlessly exterminated. Kirk

tried to examine that last thought in more detail, but the

uncontrolled flood of Kh@fflict history from

his lower brain swept it aside. The further the

Kh@fflict explored, the more firmly they came

to believe in their natural right to dominate all

they encountered. That they were the only intelligent

race that had ever evolved--or that ever would

evolve--became the foundation of their collective

view of the universe.

Kirk allowed himself a moment's amusement as

he imagined what Spock's appearance would have

done to a Kh@fflict in its full minds. As it

was, his host had been thrown into panic by the

appearance of a lower life-form that controlled

technological devices. Worse, the design

of Spock's equipment implied a

non-Kh@fflict origin. Following that thought to its

logical conclusion forced Kirk's host into an

untenable position It must either reject what it

saw or deny the racial wisdom of its people.

Briefly Kirk felt sorry for the

Kh@fflict, even though the body he occupied was

an artificial construct produced by the aliens'

matter transport system. The artifact had

reproduced the instincts and the racial memories

of a genuine Kh@fflict so well that it was hard not

to think of his host as an authentic member of that

long-dead race. With a surge of horror, he

realized the implications of that thought.

The Kh@fflict mind-set was so fiercely

xenophobic that Kirk could barely comprehend the

intensity of its faith. Even the most unreasonable

beings the Federation had encountered conceded the

possibility of other intelligent races, although

a few granted outsiders no more credit than

humans awarded their dogs. To deny that other

intelligent beings could exist, even when staring one

in the face, went beyond the most outrageous

limits ever conjectured by anyone in the Federation.

If Kirk had needed proof, this one fact was

sufficient to tell him how isolated--and how

fanatically closed-minded--the Kh@fflict had

been.

That knowledge, however, did nothing to solve his current

problem. He had been trying to return to the

artifact to contact Spock, and miraculously,

Spock had found him. Unfortunately, his

Kh@fflict body, with its preprogrammed

assumptions of how the universe worked, was not

willing to let him communicate with the Vulcan.

How could he catch Spock's attention before he

decided that he had learned enough about the new

life-form confronting him? How had the Kh@fflict

communicated with each other? And how could he convince

the Kh@fflict lower brain that the Enterprise's

crew was his own kind and that he needed to talk to them?

Kirk felt inspiration strike. Fighting

to contain his growing sense of urgency, he

concentrated on the thought that Spock was one of his

own. Hot, angry zigzags of red and black--

powerful symbols of rejection and denial--surged

through his brain. The Kh@fflict lower brain would not

yield its prejudices so quickly.

"Fascinating!" Spock said, his eyebrow

rising higher. "The colors and patterns on the

carapace are changing with a rapidity that suggests this

is a normal function of these creatures.

However, there are only a limited number of

uses in nature for such ostentatious displays."

He ran his tricorder over Kirk's shell,

with the sensors only a few millimeters above the

surface.

Communication! Kirk thought with all the intensity

he could muster. With a mind meld Spock could read

his mind, but he would not necessarily be looking for

his captain inside the crablike alien. Also,

Kirk was not sure if the physiology of the

Kh@fflict brain permitted telepathic

transmission. It didn't seem like a safe

bet, and even if Spock had deduced what had

happened, the Vulcan would begin to doubt his

reasoning if he failed to make contact soon.

Kirk had to establish communications quickly.

He concentrated on talking to Spock and

explaining to him who and what the Kh@fflict were.

A soothing pattern of interwoven blues and

greens washed across his vision. The Kh@fflict word

for "communication"? Kirk wondered.

Even if it was and even if his carapace was

transmitting the same motif, he had no way

to translate that particular combination of shape and

color for Spock. He was only guessing at the

meanings himself, based on his dominant thoughts when

each shapestcolor cluster appeared in his mind.

With another Kh@fflict or another human in a

Kh@fflict body, he might be able

to communicate, but without a partner who shared his

understanding of the language, he could not hope

to exchange enough information to solve his problem.

Adapting the Kh@fflict language so he could

contact Spock was impossible. The Kh@fflict

system of projecting shapes and colors on their

translucent shells and the deep-seated imprinting

of their language on their lower brains defeated his

desire to write English letters on his shell for

Spock to read. He needed a different

approach.

Kirk took inventory of the Kh@fflict's

physical limitations. Surprised that he had not

noticed sooner, he realized that he had no

vocal apparatus and could not produce any sounds

whatsoever. The Kh@fflict had modified their

visual language of color and form by clicking

their claws in rigidly formalized patterns. It

wasn't much, but it was worth a try.

Kirk tried to lift his foreleg, but nothing

happened. A flare of brilliant white, as

hot as his anger when he realized the totality of

his failure, washed across Kirk's vision. The

instinctual programming of his body would not allow

him to do anything that ran counter to the Kh@fflict's

hard-wired directives. At the moment his body

was frozen by the catatonia that had seized the

Kh@fflict when the landing party first appeared, and his

host was trying very hard to reject Spock as a

hallucination. How could he make the alien's

instincts work for him rather than fighting every attempt

to contact his crew?

"Most creatures with such conspicuous displays

use them to enhance their desirability to potential

mates," Hernandez was saying. "The shifting

color patterns are usually a form of sexual

display, although I am at a loss to see how that

works for our current subject."

"An interesting hypothesis, Dr. Hernandez.

However, I would recommend that you speculate

less freely on matters of motivation until

we have determined the basic physiology

of these creatures." Spock ran his tricorder

over Kirk's head and throat, concentrating on the

areas where the vocal apparatus was found in most

creatures.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Spock?"

Hernandez was a small woman with an

aggressive, determined manner, but at the moment

a nervous frown wrinkled her forehead.

Spock looked up from his tricorder screen.

A sharp gust of wind ruffled his bangs before moving

on to other mischief. "I presume that your

tricorder reports no evidence of any vocal

apparatus capable of reproducing a spoken

language."

"Yes, but Dr. McCoy's autopsy

report implied that we were dealing with an

individual abnormality in the alien he

autopsied." After a moment's delay, the light

dawned for her. "You mean none of these creatures

has the capability of producing a spoken

language?"

"That covers the facts we have observed so far,

Doctor. Have you discovered any relevant

information that we have omitted from our analysis?"

Spock circled Kirk, studying the Kh@fflict

anatomy.

A sense of relief, which washed his mind with a

soft apricot haze, swept through Kirk.

Spock had deduced how the Kh@fflict

communications system worked. That meant he had

only to manipulate the alien's physiology

long enough to tell Spock what had happened to him.

With the colors and patterns being controlled by the

Kh@fflict lower brain, his prospects of

bypassing the programmed responses seemed

remote.

Suddenly he knew what to do. If his lower

brain projected designs on his carapace in

response to his thoughts, he could alternate between

two contrasting ideas to produce a message in

old-style Morse code. The question was, did

he remember the signals well enough to get

Spock's attention on the first try? If he

didn't, he wasn't sure he would have a

second chance. Unless he got past the

obstructions created by the Kh@fflict programming

soon, Spock would return to the artifact to work

on the puzzle from that end.

Kirk tried to remember the games he had

played with his brother when they were children. One

vacation at his grandparents' home in Vermont,

he, Sam, and the three McLaughlin boys from the

adjoining farm had spent an entire month

pretending they were Indians battling the invading

white settlers. Their long-range communications

system had been a set of talking drums they had

built from designs Tommy McLaughlin had

scrounged off the computer network. At the time none

of them had considered that their parents, whom they had

cast in the role of the invading British, were as

capable of translating their messages as they

were. Still, by the end of that summer, Kirk had been

proficient at using Morse code, and he

felt he should remember it, even if he had not

used it much in the intervening three decades.

The next question was what would catch Spock's

attention the fastest. The traditional SOS was a

simple, repetitious pattern that would give him

a chance to experiment with controlling the Kh@fflict

physiology. On the other hand, signaling his name

would tell Spock what had happened, but the longer

and less regular pattern to the letters spelling

"Kirk" increased the chance that he wouldn't be

understood. In addition, once he got Spock's

attention, he could repeat complex messages

until Spock understood them.

His decision made, Kirk concentrated on

"communication" until the interwoven blues and

greens swam across his vision. When the pattern was

established in his mind--and, he hoped, reflected

on his carapace--he summoned his anger and

frustration at being trapped inside the Kh@fflict

body. As soon as the white flare crossed his

vision, he released the anger and focused again on

communicating until the peaceful blues and greens

returned. Then he called on his anger again,

relaxed into thoughts of talking with his crew, and

finished the S with a final flare of anger.

The O was a little harder, requiring him to hold

onto his rage longer and to time the intervals so that his

dashes would be distinguished from the dots. After that

effort it was a relief to return to the

relatively simple task of putting out three

dots for the final S.

Halfway through the O, Spock paused in his

circuit around the crablike Kh@fflict body.

He stared at Kirk's upper back as though

trying to remember some long-forgotten fact, and his

expression didn't change while Kirk finished

the second S. Dismay washed through

Kirk as he realized that Spock had not

deciphered his message. Since he was sure that

the Vulcan remembered Morse code far

better than he did, Spock's reaction could

only mean that Kirk's attempts to produce

dots and dashes by changing the colors on his

carapace were not clear enough to be read.

Kirk started the message again, trying to make

the transitions in his thoughts as sharp and precise as

he could. It seemed to him that he was getting a

feel for how the Kh@fflict brains worked together, and

that the shifts between the two contrasting concepts were

cleaner and quicker, but Spock's expression

didn't change as Kirk finished his second

SOS. Discouraged, Kirk repeated the signal

again, hoping that Spock would figure out what he

meant and not reject the changing patterns as the

Kh@fflict equivalent of a facial tic.

"Dot-dot-dot," Spock murmured to himself

as Kirk began the third SOS.

"Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dot. SOS."

He moved to the Kh@fflict's front. "Are you

human? Is that you, Captain Kirk?"

The apricot haze flooded across Kirk's

vision. Spock had figured out what had

happened! Dash-dot-dash-dash. Dot.

Dot-dot-dot, he signaled.

Dash-dot-dash-dash. Dot.

Dot-dot-dot. YES! YES! Now that

Spock knew what had happened, everything was going

to be all right.

Chapter Twelve

Spock flipped open his communicator.

"Spock to Enterprise. We have located the

captain."

"Sulu here," came the response. In the

background Spock heard subdued cheering as the

bridge crew reacted to his announcement.

"What's the captain's status? We're not

picking him up on our sensors."

"That is correct, Mr. Sulu. The

captain is being held prisoner inside one of the

alien creatures. At present our working

hypothesis is that, when our people passed through the

artifact, it gave them the bodies of its

creators. We are attempting to learn more but are

limited by the aliens' methods of communication."

"Do you know when you will be able to reverse

the process, Mr. Spock?" Tension raised

Sulu's voice half an octave, and the

complete silence in the background told Spock

that everyone on the bridge was waiting for the answer.

"Negative, Mr. Sulu. However, I

wish to communicate with the other aliens in order

to correlate their information with the captain's.

Please direct Security to locate the other

four creatures and guide them back to the

artifact. At present I suggest that this be

accomplished on foot, since these beings do not

respond well to our transporters. If those

four are our missing crewmen, they will understand what

is being said to them, although they lack the vocal

apparatus to answer."

"If they can't speak, Mr. Spock, how are

you talking with the captain? Could the security men

use your system with the other aliens?"

Spock mentally reviewed the personnel

files, but very few contained any mention of Morse

code. He and Kirk were able to communicate because

both of them had at one time memorized that

particular code. Unfortunately, he could not

expect the other victims to have the appropriate

information in their memories. "The aliens

communicate by changing the colors of their shells,

Mr. Sulu. The captain has discovered a way

to display messages using an old-style system

known as Morse code. Unless the other people

trapped in the alien bodies remember a

similar code and have the force of will to impose their

wishes on the alien physiology, I fear that

we must confine our c ommunications to yes-or-no

questions. At this time I see no way to bypass the

limitations of the system."

"I understand, Mr. Spock. I'll pass that

along to the security people and have them begin moving the

aliens back to the artifact."

"Very well, Mr. Sulu. Spock out." He

returned his attention to the captain. Kirk's

crablike body was sprawled on the ground, its

eight limbs jutting from beneath the carapace at

awkward angles. The captain had lost control

of his body at the first sight of the Enterprise's

landing party and had not moved since. Such a reaction

suggested that the alien body contained

preprogrammed responses that operated without

Kirk's direction and that might interfere with his

wishes. What information was stored in the alien's

brains, and how much of it could Kirk

access? Could they use that information to gain control

over the transporterlike artifacts and change

the Enterprise's crewmen back to their human

forms?

With so many unanswered questions, it was difficult

to know what to ask first. Waiting for Kirk's

responses in Morse code would make

exchanging information exceedingly slow, but the captain

was limited by the alien's physiology. Until

they could circumvent that difficulty, they would have

to work with it.

Resigning himself to taking whatever time he would

need to get his answers, Spock lowered himself to the

ground. Crossing his legs, he pointed his

tricorder at Kirk and began asking questions.

The setting sun had painted the landscape with the

colors of Vulcan's Flaming Desert and a

frigid wind was slicing across the hills when

Spock called a halt to the interview. For the

last half hour, Kirk's answers had been

slower and the distinctions between the dots and the dashes

increasingly blurred. Kirk's alien body was

tiring, and soon he would need to find food and

shelter for the night, but Spock had balanced that

against the need to learn all he could. The more he

knew about the aliens, the sooner he could control the

technology that had transformed Kirk into an

alien.

Finally, seeing how far Kirk had pushed his

body, Spock stood. "Captain, I shall

analyze this information and discuss it with our science

teams. By morning I hope that we shall have some

positive recommendations for solving this

dilemma."

GOOD, Kirk signaled back, his carapace

flickering between mixed blues and greens and an

apricot color that appeared several shades

darker in the ruddy light. One front claw

twitched briefly, reminding Spock of a

farewell wave. It was the first time that Kirk had

moved since the Enterprise's landing party had

materialized in front of him. Spock took the

motion as a favorable sign, hoping it meant the

alien programming was releasing its grip on

Kirk's motor functions.

Pulling out his communicator, Spock

signaled the ship. "Enterprise, beam up

remaining landing parties for the night. Inform all

scientists that we will hold a briefing

at 2100 to analyze our data and to formulate a

plan of action. Spock out."

He moved away from Kirk, and the security

guard with him took up a position at his side.

The transporter beam formed around them, dissolving the

crimson- and orange-painted landscape and

reforming the scene into the familiar hues of the

Enterprise's transporter room. Spock

headed for the bridge, aware of the questions in the eyes of

every person he met. Word of what had happened

to Kirk and the other missing people had spread among the

crew, and everyone was wondering if he had found an

answer to the problem. Involuntarily his hand

tightened around the strap of his tricorder. The

answers, if he had them, lay in the mass of

data he had obtained from his long interview with

Kirk.

The turbolift door whisked open, and he

stepped inside. "Bridge." Security had not

reported the results of moving the other aliens

back toward the artifact. That could mean one of

several things; knowing what had actually occurred would

enhance his analysis of the aliens' psychology and of

how their world view governed the design of their

technology.

Stepping onto the bridge, Spock saw that

most of the day crew was present, still briefing their

replacements and otherwise dawdling over the shift

change that should have taken place fifteen minutes

ago. "Status report, Mr. Sulu," he

ordered, circling to the science station.

"All operations normal, Mr. Spock."

Sulu's tone said differently. Spock

recognized the tension in his voice, which pointed out

how worried everyone was about Kirk and emphasized

how deeply loyal the crew was to the captain.

Worry was a human emotion, Spock reminded

himself, and it would not necessarily undermine the

crew's efficiency--as long as it didn't cloud

anyone's judgment. He would have to make sure that

the crew did not work beyond capacity before a

superhuman effort was required. If a crisis

developed, he would need everyone in top form.

"Have the security teams been able to move the

aliens back toward the artifact yet, Mr.

Sulu?" Spock slid into his chair and pulled

the data disks from his tricorder. Dropping them

into the playback slot, he turned to hear

Sulu's report.

"All teams reported failure in

moving the aliens, Mr. Spock." Sulu reached

across the board to call up the scanner logs.

"Two of the creatures became extremely

agitated and attacked our people. The largest alien

completely ignored all attempts to contact it,

as though the security men weren't even there. And the

other creature went catatonic, refusing

to move or acknowledge that anyone was in the area.

In fact, you appear to be the only person who

has had any luck in dealing with--well, with whoever

is down on the planet."

"I see." Spock shifted the visuals

to his display and ran through them, now in extreme

slow motion, now speeding the replay to nearly a

blur. He found no obvious flaws in the way

the guards had handled the aliens, but only the

captain showed any willingness to communicate with the

Enterprise's landing parties.

He could at least explain the catatonic

alien, if he had understood Kirk's

narrative. The creatures--the Kh@fflict, as

they called themselves--had evolved in such isolation that

they were absolute xenophobes to whom even the

possibility of finding other intelligent beings was

so alien and so inconceivable that thinking about the idea

sent their mental processes into hysterical

disorder.

The two Kh@fflict who attacked the

security men were harder to explain, but their actions

corresponded to the other half of the classic

fight-or-flight response pattern. The first

Kh@fflict had retreated from a situation it found

incomprehensible, but the second pair had tried

to destroy the Enterprise's security teams in

order to erase the unacceptable fact that other

intelligent beings might exist. He wondered

if that reaction reflected normal behavior for the

Kh@fflict, and that suggested another thought What

would have happened if the ancient Kh@fflict had

encountered other intelligent races? Could violent

encounters with the Kh@fflict explain the large

number of so-called "orphan" cultures whose

fragmentary remains were scattered around this

sector? After a moment he set the computer

to searching for data on the statistical distribution

of sentient races through time for this quadrant, with

particular emphasis on the areas where the

Kh@fflict might have traveled, and then returned

to the immediate problem.

The last Kh@fflict on the planet,

the one who had completely ignored the security

men, was the most puzzling. The ability to ignore

certain discordant elements in one's surroundings

was a trait shared by all intelligent races, but

a species' survival precluded as total a

denial as this creature displayed. Even with

Kirk's explanation of the Kh@fflict's

xenophobia, Spock had trouble interpreting the

largest Kh@fflict's actions. It was as though the

creature recognized the Enterprise's

security team and dismissed them as unimportant.

Spock replayed the tapes of that

Kh@fflict, noticing how it ignored the humans

and how oblivious it was to every attempt to attract

its attention. Suddenly, without being certain of every

step in his proof, Spock knew that the largest

Kh@fflict was Talika Nyar. The combination of

Kh@fflict xenophobia and Djelifan racial

self-centeredness led the creature that housed

Talika's consciousness to dismiss the humans as

irrelevant rather than attacking them or retreating

from them as the other Kh@fflict had done. It was as

though both halves of her mind agreed that the

humans were not intelligent. Apparently the

artifact had based its choice of Kh@fflict

host persona, at least to some extent, on the

personalities of the individuals who entered the

artifact. What that meant for their mission Spock

did not know, but he filed it away until he had

enough facts to evaluate the hypothesis properly.

With his analysis completed, Spock turned his

attention to the bridge crew. "Mr. Sulu, you

and the rest of the day shift may stand down now."

Sulu opened his mouth to protest but

reconsidered. While there was no absolute

prohibition against the day shift remaining on the

bridge to await further developments, the only

benefit--being where they could hear news first--was

psychological. "Yes, Mr. Spock." He

and Uhura led the rest of the day crew from the

bridge.

That settled, Spock turned back to his

console. The computer had finished its first

analysis of the data from his interview with Kirk,

and now he could examine the results. The bizarre

and mutable biological parameters required

careful examination.

Because of the late hour, there were only five people in

the briefing room. However, Spock had

authorized anyone with a science rating above Tech

One to monitor the discussion and, if they chose,

to relay comments and suggestions to him. Given the

complexity of the problem and the large gaps in their knowledge,

it was the only way short of holding the briefing

on the hangar deck to insure that everyone could

participate. In conducting the meeting this way,

Spock was following an old Vulcan

precept The time required to solve a problem

is inversely proportional to the amount of knowledge brought

to bear on the subject. The more scientists who

reviewed the data, the greater the chance that someone would

find the key to the puzzle.

Spock presided over the briefing from behind the

computer station. Kaul, still looking washed out and

shaky from his reaction to the suldanic gas, was

fiddling with a stylus as he paged through the summaries

on his data pad. Lassiter was at Kaul's

side, her face pinched with exhaustion and her skin

almost as pale as her white-blonde hair.

McCoy sat opposite the two

archaeologists, his mouth compressed into a stubborn

scowl and his eyes glittering with more indignation than

usual. The chief biologist, Lieutenant

Dara Niles, completed the group. Niles was a

quietly competent woman of medium stature with

close-cropped dark hair.

"I presume everyone has reviewed our

earlier findings," Spock said to open the briefing.

"Therefore, I will begin by summarizing my conversation with

Captain Kirk."

"Are you sure it was the captain?" McCoy's

drawl was as thick as his skepticism. "It's

an awfully big leap of faith for us to accept that

Jim has been turned into an overgrown

crustacean, even one as offbeat as the creature

I autopsied."

"I realize that, Doctor. However, I

conversed with the creature at some length and am convinced

that the captain's consciousness is housed within the

body of this alien." He punched the playback

button, and the record of his conversation with Kirk

scrolled across the screen. For those who were not

fluent in Morse code, the computer supplied

translations at the bottom of the screen.

"How was this accomplished?" Lassiter's

voice was barely above a whisper. "Does

Captain Kirk understand anything about the

technology that made this alteration?"

"The captain's impression is that the

windowlike artifacts are matterstenergy

transmission devices that function in a manner

analogous to our transporters. He believes

that the error detection protocols within the

artifact caused him to rematerialize as a

Kh@fflict because their system's program reads

absolutely that an intelligent being must be

Kh@fflict."

"Are you certain of this?" Niles asked. "How

do we know the device didn't transfer his

consciousness to an alien body?"

"That is a good question, Lieutenant." Spock

forwarded the log of his interview with Kirk to where they

had discussed that subject. He let Kirk's

statements play across the screen as he continued

talking. "First we have the basic Kh@fflict

assumption that all intelligent life must be

Kh@fflict. Given that, they would presume that

any intelligent creature using their

transportation system must be Kh@fflict.

Second, all matterstenergy transmission

devices require a source of matter

to reconstitute at the end of the transport path.

The simplest design for such a system--and

simplicity guides most engineering solutions--

is to convert the body of the transportee into energy,

transmit that energy using a zero-loss

protocol, and reconstitute the original body

at the receiving location. The captain's analysis,

based on knowledge contained in his Kh@fflict brain, is

that his body was altered during reintegration to that of a

Kh@fflict. This is supported by the fact that his

mass as a Kh@fflict is, within acceptable error

limits, identical to his mass when he entered

the artifact. In the morning we will measure the

mass of the other Kh@fflict to determine if this

applies to them as well."

"Don't you think this is a little farfetched,

Spock?" McCoy nibbled the end of his stylus.

"I mean, we come halfway across the galaxy,

discover a race of aliens that died out over a

hundred thousand years ago--and their transporters

don't work any better than ours. And how does

all this theory help us get the captain back?"

Spock straightened in his chair, his back going

as stiff as a bracing beam. "One cannot hope

to decipher the intricacies of a complex

technology without an understanding of the underlying

principles. Even you should appreciate that

fact, Doctor."

McCoy's expression hardened. "What I

appreciate, Mr. Spock, is that Captain

Kirk is missing and that you seem more interested in

theorizing about the technology of these creatures

than you are in retrieving the captain. Does

Scotty have anything to say about all this?"

"As a matter of fact, Doctor, we have

finally collected enough data to begin constructing

models of the artifacts' internal workings. Mr.

Scott is running computer simulations to reduce

the number of possible designs. Once we have

determined the most likely parameters, we will

attempt to reprogram the devices and

retrieve our people."

McCoy snorted his disbelief but said nothing

further. Instead Niles rapped her stylus on

the table for attention. She pointed to her screen,

where different colors of text highlighted several

messages. "My people have been analyzing the

Caretian ecosystem, particularly with regard

to the nutritional requirements of the Kh@fflict.

It is our conclusion that most, if not all, of the

plant and animal species that provided food

for the Kh@fflict have either become extinct or have

evolved, thanks to the fading sun, into something no

longer recognizable. Since the Kh@fflict

rely heavily on preprogrammed information, we

surmise that our people on the planet will face

starvation within a very short time, particularly since

we have no idea what these creatures ate."

Stunned silence, followed by an outburst of

overlapping questions and exclamations, followed

Lieutenant Niles's announcement. Spock

marveled at how so few humans could generate so

much noise. Pitching his voice to be heard above

the hubbub, he asked, "Do you have the data

to substantiate that, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir. The information is in master file

alpha-three-two-nine-chi-omega. It will be

accessible to everyone within ten minutes." Niles

tugged on a handful of her dark hair. "Given

what has been said about the Kh@fflict rejection

of outsiders, we may have difficulties

providing food to our people. Even after we figure

out what they ate, someone will have to devise a way

to get them to accept the food from us."

"Understood." Spock tagged her files for

further study. "Lieutenant Niles, please

work with Dr. McCoy to determine how we can

provide appropriate rations to our people.

If no one has any additional information, this

briefing is adjourned."

For once even McCoy was silent. Spock

stood, signaling the formal end to the meeting, and

headed for the door. Sifting through the files that the

biologists had compiled would make for another long

night. However, somewhere in the mass of data that the

Enterprise's scientists had collected,

Spock knew he would find the answers to getting

their people back. Like any problem in the sciences, it

was a matter of working long enough and hard enough to assemble

the information in the proper logical sequence.

Chapter Thirteen

Kirk watched Spock and the security guard

dissolve into sparkling motes of energy. A cold

breeze whistled across the hilltops, ruffling the

dry, flattened grass where Spock had sat for the

last several hours. The final rays of the setting

sun skimmed the hilltops, emphasizing the

immensity and the emptiness of the land around him. A land

that had once been populated by millions of

Kh@fflict who had looked like he did now and who

had thought and believed the same things as the being his

host was patterned after. It was a frightening and a

depressing thought to realize how totally the

Kh@fflict had vanished from the collective

memories and histories of this part of the galaxy.

Even after Spock disappeared, it took half

an hour for his host to recover from its catatonic

retreat. The last rose tints were fading from the

western sky when Kirk felt his Kh@fflict

lower brain convince itself that the humans were a

hallucination brought on by the bad transition through the

transit frame. With the internally imposed

restrictions on his movements gone, he needed

to find food and a place to spend the night. He

sensed that the Kh@fflict were normally less

active after dark, but he could still make out his

surroundings in shadings of lighter and darker grays

that resembled the patterns from a translation

algorithm for a night-vision scope.

Cautiously he sent a message to his

limbs, hoping they would respond after the long

hours of immobility on the chilly hilltop.

At first nothing happened, and he was afraid he

would be stuck where he was until the morning sun

warmed his body. He was almost ready to give up

when he felt one of his front pincers

flopping loosely in response to his

directive.

It wasn't much, but it gave him a place

to start. Kirk flexed the joint, working it until

the blood began flowing into the limb. Next he

concentrated on the other joints in that appendage,

twisting and bending them until they responded to his

commands. Soon he was able to work the adjoining

appendages, and finally all eight legs were under his

control.

Kirk heaved himself to his pincers, thinking how

tiresome it was to go through this warmup routine every time he

let his body remain motionless for more than a few

minutes. How had the Kh@fflict ever managed?

They must have evolved in a much warmer climate and,

during the time when they ruled Careta IV, the

planet must have had an unusually uniform

distribution of diurnal and seasonal

temperatures. Any creatures so thoroughly

incapacitated by cold would quickly be exterminated

by predators.

First he needed food, Kirk decided as he

started uphill. However, he had no idea what

the Kh@fflict ate, much less what food he

could find in this barren land. At the thought of eating,

he felt a hollowness in his interior. His host

should be hungry, he guessed, considering that it had

been a day and a half since Kirk had eaten.

He didn't know how that translated for a

Kh@fflict, but he had been making tremendous

physical and psychological demands on his

body since he had emerged from the artifact. If

his host did not need fuel to keep going, its

physiology was radically different from anything

known to Federation science.

He concentrated on the idea of eating a good

meal. Letting his imagination have free rein, he

conjured up his memories of the ten-course

Japanese banquet he had attended the last

time he had been called to Starfleet Command.

To his surprise, the image triggered no

response in his host's brain. That puzzled

Kirk; every civilized race he knew of placed

a high value on the rituals that accompanied

dining and food preparation. He doubted that the

Kh@fflict were so alien that what they ate was of no

importance. The other possible explanation of the

Kh@fflict's disinterest was that it found nothing

appetizing in the meal Kirk had remembered.

Recalling the quantity and the variety

of food served at that meal, Kirk could not

believe that there had been nothing on the menu that would

interest his host. Clear soup, sashimi, a dozen

kinds of sushi, tempura vegetables, chicken

teriyaki, steamed rice, sukiyaki with more kinds

of vegetables than Kirk had been able

to identify, shrimp custard, a fabulous

lemon-soy tofu salad--he let his mind

dwell on each dish, savoring the details of

aroma and texture and flavor.

Quickly, from the surge of revulsion that shook him

at the thought of eating plant matter, Kirk

realized that the Kh@fflict had not been

vegetarians or even omnivores. In fact,

the Kh@fflict's strongest criterion for

identifying inferior--and presumably

nonintelligent--species was that they consumed

plant materials as food. By that standard,

humans failed to meet the minimum Kh@fflict

requirement for sentience.

With that insight, Kirk concentrated on the

sashimi and the meat dishes. Even the latter, he

discovered as he went over them in his mind, had

contained more vegetables than meat, and the idea of

slicing and cooking the meat seemed alien to his

host. The sashimi--paper-thin slices of raw

fish--provoked a little more interest from the

Kh@fflict lower brain, but Kirk sensed that the

preparation method was almost as alien as the concept

of a food source obtained from the ocean. In their

prehistory the Kh@fflict must have evolved from

marine animals, but they had not looked to the sea for

food within the collective memory of their race.

Given his host's reactions, and the lack of them,

Kirk decided the Kh@fflict had eaten their

meat raw and with very little preparation. He found the

idea unappealing, but he realized that the

Kh@fflict lower brain would overrule his

squeamishness if suitable prey crossed his path.

But what would his host find suitable?

Still thinking about the problem, Kirk continued his

trek back toward the artifact. Once he got

the hang of coordinating eight legs, he found that

the Kh@fflict body could move rapidly, even

over rough terrain. He returned to his question about

suitable prey for a man-sized crab. With the

ability to summon brief bursts of speed, the

Kh@fflict would have been formidable predators.

Furthermore, with millennia to develop the

infrastructure of their civilization,

Kirk realized that they could have bred their food

sources to be docile and slow to alarm, much as

humans bred their cattle to be easily

managed.

A vision swam before his eyes. He saw this land

crossed with a network of closely slatted fences

enclosing lush pastures carpeted with a variety of

herbs and grasses. Each enclosure was stocked

with rabbitlike creatures that nibbled on the

succulent forage until they were plump and their

flesh was flavorful and juicy. A hungry

Kh@fflict walked out into the pasture and chose his

meal by the herbs he wanted to flavor the meat. As

one of the docile nanthken came within reach, it was

impaled on a pincer that flashed out and swept the

doomed creature into the air. The Kh@fflict

sheared through the animal's spinal cord with its

sharp, triangular teeth, shaped much like a shark's

teeth and equally useless for chewing flesh. Ducts

in the upper tooth injected the still-living prey with a

combination of fast-acting neurotoxins and digestive

enzymes. Within minutes the flesh began

to dissolve, and the Kh@fflict sucked up the

savory juices through its proboscis, much as

terrestrial spiders fed on their prey.

Feelings of intense pleasure accompanied the

Kh@fflict's memories of catching and feasting on

a squealing and twitching nanthken. Kirk was

glad that he was not in control of his body at that

moment, because he was revolted by the cruelty he

sensed in the Kh@fflict's thoughts. Eating

animal flesh was one thing; torturing the animal

before eating it was another. Kirk's sense of

civilized propriety and his human squeamishness

made starvation seem like an attractive option.

However, since he needed food to survive,

Kirk hoped that his Kh@fflict instincts would

operate without conscious direction if he found

appropriate prey. So far he had seen nothing

in this barren land that even approximated the

Kh@fflict's memories of its standard fare.

Until he did, he was worrying needlessly,

since he was much more likely to starve than

to reject a potential meal through squeamishness.

For now all he could do was keep moving and hope

to find something edible. The landscape around him faded

into weaker, less contrasting shades as the heat leaked

from the land and radiated out into space.

* * *

About midnight, Kirk's host began to stagger

with exhaustion, and it became a struggle to move

even one appendage at a time. Most of the heat was

gone, making it difficult to see where he was going

or to avoid the obstacles and pitfalls in his

path. Kirk looked around, trying to find somewhere

to spend the rest of the night. With the Kh@fflict lower

brain struggling to dominate his actions, he found it

interesting that he had to actively change a

directive that he had imposed on the

reluctant Kh@fflict instincts.

After half an hour of searching, Kirk

discovered a spring hidden in a small grotto

halfway down the hillside. Below the spring was a

brackish pool covered with a thick mat of

algae. Both his human and his Kh@fflict

programming agreed on how revolting the pond

was, but Kirk steeled himself to ingest as much of the

organic material as he could. The bulk of the

Enterprise's food was reconstituted from an

algal base, so he knew that the basic

nutrients his body needed should be present.

Beggars can't be choosers, he told himself

sternly as he sucked the algae through his

proboscis. Gourmet food it wasn't, but he

hadn't seen anything larger than an insect in the

last two days. Considering the energy he had

expended, Kirk knew his body needed food,

no matter how marginal or unpleasant the

source, if he was to continue to function.

When he could not hold any more algae and water,

he retreated into the grotto and settled himself into a

sheltered niche. The ship's sensors had

reported no dangerous predators on the

planet, but he sensed that the Kh@fflict slept

only when their backs and appendages were

protected. Such caution was fine with Kirk; the

confined space would conserve his body heat and make

it easier to start moving in the morning. He was

beginning to realize how important that was and

to appreciate how much conditions had changed on

Careta IV since the Kh@fflict civilization

had flourished there.

Morning brought, if not answers, then at least

the outline of a plan for moving closer to a

solution. Somewhere in the strange half-waking

state where his mind absorbed memories of the

Kh@fflict world and the Kh@fflict way of life,

Kirk realized how deeply

xenophobia was bred into the Kh@fflict. Spock

would never be able to contact the others who had passed

through the artifact unless he changed himself into a

Kh@fflict. Only Kirk's overriding need

to look after his crew and to prevent anyone else from

becoming a victim of the Kh@fflict technology

had enabled him to surmount his host's denial that other

intelligent races might exist. He doubted that

Chekov had the experience to defeat the Kh@fflict

psychology, and he was sure the security

guards' training wouldn't have prepared them to cope

with the schizophrenic responses of a Kh@fflict

body inhabited by a human mind. In all

probability the others had not been able to establish

any contact with their lower brains or exert any

control over their bodies. If that was the case,

they were completely at the mercy of whatever

programming the artifact had imprinted on their

lower brains.

The best thing he could do to further their mission,

Kirk concluded, was to locate the others, explain

what had happened, and get them to return to the

artifact. He didn't know what would happen after

that, but by then perhaps Spock would know how to change them

back to their human forms.

His decision made, Kirk set off to find the

other Kh@fflict. Locating them was easier than

he expected, once he got near the artifact.

The tall, dry grass yielded when someone

passed through it and, once flattened, did not

straighten again. The humans had combed the area

close to the artifact, crisscrossing it with more

trails than the best bloodhound could unravel.

However, once he circled farther away, six

wide swaths of broken stalks radiated away

from the transit fra me. After eliminating the one

he had made, Kirk chose a track at random

and set off.

The trail meandered across the hillside and

zigzagged into an adjoining valley, then wandered

along an almost-dry stream bed for several

kilometers. Judging by the spacing of the tracks,

the Kh@fflict lower brain had not felt an

urgent need to be anywhere. That confirmed Kirk's

guess that the human inside the body had not

established a connection with the Kh@fflict mind and

had either gone along for the ride or had retreated from

a reality he found too grotesque to believe.

Either way, Kirk covered in two hours the distance

the other Kh@fflict had traveled in

two days.

He approached carefully, his carapace

blinking a brightstdark pattern for attention long before

he thought the other was looking his way. As a

human, he would have scuffed the pebbles with his feet

to catch the other's attention, but when he tried that

he could barely hear the sounds he was making.

Considering how well he had heard Spock the

previous day, Kirk decided that the Kh@fflict

hearing was highly selective. He wondered if

that was because nothing in their environment had used those

frequencies or if there had been so much noise

in those ranges that selective deafness was a

survival trait.

Finally the other Kh@fflict noticed him and

stopped, its carapace flickering a question in muted

browns. @ghParent"...@ar

Kirk searched through his intuitive recollection

of Kh@fflict vocabulary. He could not

remember any concepts analogous to military

rank, but that didn't mean much. There were still

immense gaps in his knowledge of the Kh@fflict, although

practice was making it easier for him to tap into the

information stored in his lower brain. However, until

he discovered what the Kh@fflict pattern was that

meant "captain," the word "parent" was probably

as close as he could come to his true title.

He relaxed and let the Kh@fflict lower brain

translate his thoughts.

@ghallyes, son. I am here.@ar The message

was projected with an apricot overtone of

reassurance that, while not strictly necessary, seemed

to reach to the other person.

@ghWhy am I hungry, parent"...@ar the other

Kh@fflict asked, his question colored with the petulance

of a very young child.

@ghThere is food back the way you cameea@ar

Kirk told him. That wasn't exactly a

lie, but Kirk knew he was shading the truth more

than a little. After several hours to think about the question,

he was convinced that there was no longer anything on

Careta IV that a self-respecting

Kh@fflict would consider edible. Anything they ate,

short of skimming more algae from scummy ponds,

would have to come from the Enterprise. @ghally should

retrace your steps until you find x.@ar

@ghAnything you say, parent.@ar The Kh@fflict

turned around and started back, his movements

erratic from lack of food.

Kirk watched until the young

Kh@fflict disappeared over the crest of the first

hill, thinking that convincing him had been almost too

easy. This Kh@fflict had been pathetically

eager to take orders from him. His own Kh@fflict

lower brain had fought much harder to maintain control,

and Kirk wondered why the difference between the two

Kh@fflict minds should be so great. Was starvation the

sole reason, or was there some other, more

satisfactory explanation for the wildly

divergent behavior?

The only way to find out, he decided, was

to locate the rest of the altered humans. Two

individuals did not comprise a statistically

significant number; any conclusion drawn from

such a small sample had to be suspect. Even

with data from all the changed people, they could hardly

prove anything, but Kirk hoped they would not have

any more data points for this experiment. He started

off to find the next track, hoping it would be as

easy to convince the others to return to the artifact.

It took him almost an hour to find the next

track. When he found the broad swath of

flattened grass striking across the rolling hills

like a superhighway on Old Earth, Kirk

felt a stirring of excitement in his Kh@fflict

brain. What it meant he wasn't sure, but a

premonition tickled at the edges of his mind.

Something was different about this Kh@fflict, something that

aroused his host deeply. Perhaps, Kirk thought, he

should leave this track and its creator alone, at

least until he discovered why his host was so

interested in it.

He took a few steps past the trail,

intending to search for the next Kh@fflict, but his

body veered around and started to follow the strip of

flattened grass. Kirk tried to turn away,

but each time he did, the Kh@fflict lower brain

reasserted itself as soon as Kirk relaxed his

control. Finally curiosity overcame him, and he

yielded to the mysterious pull.

This Kh@fflict had wasted no time in its

travels and had covered a considerable distance.

Kirk's lower brain forced his body to move at a

vicious pace, as if trying to make up for lost

time. The longer he followed the trail, the more

agitated and aroused his host became. With his mind

no longer actively controlling his body, Kirk

tried to reason out the cause for his host's sudden

compulsion. Given the strength of his determination,

Kirk knew he was either dealing with an

intense personal delusion or an overwhelming

biological imperative. The difficulty, as

far as Kirk could see, was that he probably would

not learn which it was until too late to forestall

whatever the Kh@fflict brain was programmed to do.

After several hours of rapid travel, the

subject of his pursuit appeared on the

horizon. A jolt of electrifying excitement

shot through Kirk, and his Kh@fflict lower brain

forced his appendages to move even faster than before.

The Kh@fflict on the horizon was the most

powerful, most beautiful, most terrifying

creature he had seen in his life, and he could not

reach her soon enough.

With a dawning sense of horror, Kirk

realized what this entire chase had been leading up

to. His mind howled a protest and struggled

to assert itself, but the Kh@fflict biology was in

control. Like it or not, Kirk could only go along

for the ride.

Chapter Fourteen

Spock found the night of analyzing the

biological data on the Kh@fflict

pleasantly re/l after the day's turmoil.

However, the intellectual challenge of piecing

together the life cycle of a dead race did little

to solve his more immediate problem. The captain and five

other people had been transformed into creatures who had

died out millennia ago, and one of those people was already

dead. Worse, the creatures had left behind

only a few mysterious and dangerous artifacts

and no written records that the archaeologists had

been able to find.

Leaning back in his chair, Spock let his

eyes wander over the sensual contours of his

Vulcan harp, hanging in its usual place on

the wall of his cabin. The harp was an aid

to meditation; the orderly precision of the musical

scales directed his thoughts into crisp and

logical channels. His eyes still on the harp,

he steepled his hands and rested his chin on his

up-pointed index fingers.

With what they knew of the Kh@fflict

physiology and anatomy, a written

language using a conventional system of

inscribed characters was improbable. Much of the

Kh@fflict's knowledge was imprinted directly on their

brains, and such a procedure implied a

repository for the knowledge that was passed down.

Pretechnological Kh@fflict would have been

forced to transmit their heritage by mind-to-mind

contact using methods analogous to the Vulcan

mind meld, but Spock doubted that they had relied

on such techniques once they could manufacture

devices to perform the same functions. The clarity

and precision of the hard-wired information that Kirk had

accessed to answer Spock's questions implied an

artificial repository; transmission by mind

link was less faithful, with losses and shifts in

the data accompanying each transfer. The

Kh@fflict at the height of their civilization must

have used a more reliable system for disseminating the

information than their own inadequate minds.

The question was, where was this insight leading him? They

had found few Kh@fflict sites on the

planet, and none appeared more significant than

the one they had chosen for their initial examination.

If there were any major cities on the planet,

they were well hidden. When he considered what they

had found so far, Spock knew the Kh@fflict

must have made a much greater mark on Careta

IV. The sophisticated technology of the

transit frames implied a highly advanced

civilization. The ruins they had explored showed

no signs of outside destruction, but the shielding

around the first artifact implied that someone had

wanted very badly to keep it from ever being discovered.

The archaeologists were still working to prove that the

Meztoriens were responsible for hiding the

artifacts, but as far as Spock was concerned, who

was responsible was not as important as how or

why.

How would one camouflage an entire city?

Spock wondered. The method would have to function for

tens of thousands of years. Ruins springing out of

nowhere on a supposedly deserted planet would

attract more attention than if they had been left

to decay without the protective concealment. That

assumed the relics could decay, which was not yet

proven. The Kh@fflict objects that they had

found were surprisingly well preserved, considering

their great antiquity, and the power utilization

curves on the transportation windows suggested

they would be exceedingly difficult to destroy.

"Computer, display records of the

magnetic flux readings for the major land

masses, compression factor one hundred." If

other shielded Kh@fflict relics were hidden on

the planet, subtle variations in the screening

fields should mark the objects when one

specifically search ed the data for those effects.

"Working." The computer's response seemed

sluggish, as though the machine were reluctant

to carry out his orders. Spock's eyebrow lifted

slightly. Where did that irrational thought come

from? he wondered. Attributing emotions to a

machine suggested that he had been around human

illogic for too long, but the computer might still be

developing a subtle malfunction. He ordered

a full diagnostic of the system, then returned

to his current task.

The data scrolled across his screen. To have

escaped notice until now, any systematic

variations in the magnetic flux had to be

minuscule, little more than background noise. The

question was, if every Kh@fflict artifact was hidden

by highly sophisticated force screens, would the

Enterprise's sensors have detected the energy

leaking through those shields? Their data analysis

programs had not been written for such situations.

He had finished skimming their first eight hours

of data when his door buzzer sounded.

Involuntarily he glanced at his chronometer.

Only Kirk and McCoy presumed that he would

be awake so early, and even they would not show up

unannounced at his door at such an hour. A

crisis serious enough to need attention before the humans

had breakfast and their morning coffee meant the ship

was on Red Alert. Putting the computer on

standby, Spock cued the door release. "Come."

Meredith Lassiter stepped through the door,

pausing as it whisked shut behind her. Her face was

as pale as her hair, and she looked as though she

had not slept in the last two days. "I hope

I'm not intruding, Mr. Spock, but something has

happened that has a bearing on the mission. I

hesitate to report anything so subjective, but

I feel that my knowledge may affect the success of this

mission."

Spock gestured to the chair beside his work table,

consciously imitating the gesture he had often

seen Kirk use in similar situations. What

else would the captain do? he asked himself. His

ability to rescue Kirk and the others depended on

his skills for managing humans,

including the visiting scientists who were not bound

by Starfleet regulations to obey his orders.

"Please make your report, Dr. Lassiter.

I have often observed that humans have a remarkable

talent for reaching valid conclusions without considering

every link in the chain of their logic."

Lassiter gave him a weak smile. "I

guess that's one way of putting it. Another way

would be to tell you that I am a native of

Bendilon. Have you heard of that colony?"

"Affirmative." Bendilon, more often called

Space Haven or Dreamtime by humans, had

been settled in the early days of spaceflight.

The colonists had used such diverse models as

the Australian aborigines and the Amerind

peyote cult for their society, and no outsider

had ever figured out how it worked. People sent to study

the culture either vanished into the social fabric

of Bendilon, becoming more dedicated Bendiloni

than the natives, or they never saw any of

Bendilon's unique institutions. Bendilon was

a classic Academy case study in how

observers lost their objectivity when studying

alien cultures. Several theories of how the

Bendiloni subverted outsiders recurred in the

student analyses, but Spock had not seen any

solutions, either student or professional, that

completely explained this perplexing society.

"I presume that being from Bendilon has some

bearing on what you wish to tell me."

Lassiter nodded. "Our people place a high

value on subliminal perceptions, dream

messages, and certain forms of extrasensory

perception." She gave a diffident shrug.

"Among our people I'm considered something of a

cripple because I do not easily perceive the dream

plane or observe events that occur beyond what I

can see or hear. I can generally perceive only the very

strongest messages from the shadow world."

Spock nodded to encourage her. As with many

humans, when among strangers, Lassiter felt

she must establish her credentials before presenting

her data. Schooling himself to patience, he waited

for her to make her point.

"When we arrived here, I felt something stirring

in the dream plane. It was an incredibly

ancient and malignant force, possessed of an

indescribably cold and undying hatred. I

didn't want to believe in anything so terrible, so

inimical to intelligent life."

"I see." How did this relate to their

mission? Was she sensing the Kh@fflict racial

consciousness? "Dr. Lassiter, what can you tell

me about these mental emanations?"

She twisted her fingers through a lock of her

hair and brought it to her mouth, nibbling on the

frayed ends. "The hatred, mostly. I'm not

sure who or what this thing is, but it hates

everyone and everything."

"Can you sense its physical nature or

tell me to what species it belonged?" Spock

was not sure how the answers to such questions would help

him, even if Lassiter could isolate the

information. After so long Spock could not expect the

surviving remnants of the Kh@fflict

subconsciousness to be intact or fully sane.

"I'm not sure about any physical

parameters." She flicked her fingers free of

her hair and then recaptured the strand. Her

forehead wrinkling with a frown, she chewed on the

ends. "All I know for sure is that this entity

hates all intelligent creatures, probably

even its own kind."

"Fascinating. Can you sense anything more about it?"

That she had perceived what she had was remarkable,

Spock knew. Asking for more information was as

illogical as praying for a miracle to restore

Kirk and the others, but Spock would not reject

divine intervention if it got the desired

results.

Lassiter chewed harder on the ends of her

hair. "Its projections have been growing stronger

and stronger. The longer we are here, the more it hates

us."

"I see." Spock studied her face. If

he had learned to read humans at all, she was more

relaxed than he had seen her since the

archaeologists had come aboard the ship. "Can you

tell me anything else, Dr. Lassiter?"

She dropped her hand to her lap. "I don't

believe so, Mr. Spock. It's possible that

something may have escaped my analysis, but I

don't know what."

Spock stood. "In that case, Dr.

Lassiter, I will not keep you from your duties.

If you discover additional information, I would

appreciate hearing it. Anything we learn about the

previous inhabitants of this planet will be of

enormous value."

"I'll be glad to tell you anything

I learn." She stood and moved toward the door.

Just before she reached the sensor, she turned and gave

him a short, formal bow. "I thank you for your

courtesy in listening to my story."

Before Spock could answer, she stepped

backwards into the sensor's range and then slipped

through the door as it opened. He called up the

results of his computer analysis, but his mind

kept trying to fit this new information into the

increasingly bizarre problem.

The bridge crew was unusually quiet,

Spock thought as he glanced from his hooded viewer

to the main viewscreen. Careta IV'S largest

continent lay directly below them, its irregular

shape obscured by high wispy clouds and a dust

storm brewing on the western edge of the land mass.

He had been sifting through the reams of data the

Enterprise had collected on the planet for so

long that it seemed as though he knew Careta almost

as well as he knew Vulcan.

By midmorning he had isolated thirty sites

that might contain major Kh@fflict artifacts.

He chose the most likely anomalies and

ordered intensive scanner observations while

security teams prepared to examine the sites in

person.

He was switching back to check Kirk's

activities when the bridge door whisked open.

McCoy left the turbolift and strolled toward

Spock's station. "I thought you would be down on that

planet asking Jim what we can do to help him."

"I am helping him." Spock bent his head

over his viewer in an attempt to discourage

McCoy. "I am analyzing the device that

changed him into a Kh@fflict."

McCoy perched on the edge of the console, one

eyebrow lifted in imitation of Spock's

favorite gesture. "Wouldn't it be better if

you asked Jim about the technology? I mean, from

what you said at the briefing last night, Jim is

cohabiting that body with one of the alien

what-you-call-'ems."

"They call themselves the Kh@fflict, Doctor.

And while you are correct that the captain is sharing

a Kh@fflict body with the lower elements of a

Kh@fflict intellect, it appears that his host

has very little knowledge of the fields in which we most need

information. This fact is disquieting, since we cannot

acquire data about the Kh@fflict

sciences and technology except through the

"memories" of our crew who have been altered

into Kh@fflict."

"Well, now I've seen everything." McCoy

shook his head in disbelief. "You're telling me

you are waiting for someone else to tell you what

to do?"

Spock exhaled heavily. "That is

essentially correct, Doctor. Unless we can

find a storehouse of Kh@fflict written

records and can translate them, we must rely

on what our people report that they have learned from their

Kh@fflict memories."

"Which brings us back to my original question,

Spock. Why are you up here talking to that dratted

computer of yours instead of down there asking Jim

to use his special knowledge to unravel the secret of

those windows?" McCoy rested his thigh on the edge

of the console and let one foot swing free.

Realizing the doctor wasn't leaving soon,

Spock pushed the viewer aside. "I believe

I just explained that the captain has very little information

that will help us return our people to their natural

bodies. Should you not be determining the Kh@fflict

nutritional requirements so we can supply our

people with the appropriate foods?"

"I've already got a rough guess at that--as

near as I can, anyway, using the sketchy i nformation

you gave me." McCoy drummed his heel

erratically against the access panel, reminding

Spock of the pseudo-random pattern used by the

pythonlike Vulcan pandree to lure prey

into its sand traps. "I still want to know why you

aren't down there checking up on how Jim's

doing."

Resisting the urge to strike McCoy's leg

the way he would have attacked a genuine pandree,

Spock flipped a switch on his console.

Three views of the planet's surface sprang

to life on the screens above his station. "Doctor,

if you would turn around, you will see that I can

monitor the captain's activities quite well.

At the moment he is locating the other

Kh@fflict and directing them to return to the

artifact."

McCoy glanced at the screens but refused

to be budged. "I still don't see why you aren't

down there helping him out."

Struggling against an all-too-human reaction

to McCoy's perversity, Spock

activated a fourth screen. This one showed a

closer view of Kirk's host marching

resolutely through the dry grasses. "Given the

Kh@fflict's xenophobia, I scarcely think

that the captain needs--or even wants--our

assistance. My interpretation of what he has

told me suggests that he has a better chance of

accomplishing this task if he is not hindered by our

presence."

"Forgive an old country doctor his

foolishness, Spock, but why do we want all

those creatures herded into one spot?" McCoy's

Southern accent had thickened noticeably as he

assumed his "country doctor" role. "When we

want to, we can just transport them to where we

need them, can't we?"

Spock lifted an eyebrow. "Doctor,

don't you remember what happened when we tried

that before? The Kh@fflict believe, as an article

of faith bordering on fanaticism, that they are the

only intelligent beings in the universe. The

sight of us or of our technology drives them

into hysterics. Only the rarest individuals

retain sufficient mental flexibility to accept

our presence. Even the captain is barely able

to overcome the responses programmed into his

host's brain."

"You mean to tell me that Jim doesn't want

to talk to us?" McCoy's posture was too

relaxed for him to sincerely mean the antagonism

in his words. That suggested he was trying to generate a

friendly game of "Insults" to distract himself from his

own concerns; Spock concluded that the doctor's

research was not progressing as well as McCoy

would have liked. "Though I must admit, not talking

to you is probably a step in the right direction."

Deliberately Spock lowered his head to his

hooded viewer. "I am uncertain of the basis for

your analysis, Doctor, although I, too, must

confess to experiencing a touch of relief when I do

not have to encounter certain levels of human

irrationality. However, we were discussing the

Kh@fflict. Did you say you had determined their

nutritional requirements?"

"Of course not!" McCoy scowled. "I've

got a first approximation, for all the good it will do

us. When I told the computer to run the last set

of simulations and calculate the ideal

Kh@fflict field rations, it gave me a

readout that looked like whole blood. Some

of the element distributions were skewed, but in our

opinion, the Kh@fflict were carnivores who

guzzled their food in a liquid or

semiliquid form." A wicked grin crept over

McCoy's face. "I'd be happy to provide

you with more details on their table manners, if you

like."

"No, thank you." Spock swallowed, disliking

the idea of surviving by killing other creatures.

"At the moment I am more concerned about keeping the

five Kh@fflict down there together in one area.

When we discover how to reverse the transformation,

we will return everyone to proper form and leave this

system immediately."

"Well, it's about time!" McCoy shifted

position, and to Spock's relief, his heel no

longer rapped against the grille. "That's the first

intelligent thing anyone has said since we came

to this benighted planet."

Spock raised his eyebrow. "I doubt that it

is the first intelligent thing anyone has said, but

it is quite certain that we are not equipped

to explore this planet. It is illogical

to risk our people on a mission that requires greater

proficiency with alien technology than even the

crew of the Enterprise possesses."

McCoy's boots slammed onto the floor

with a resounding thump. Bouncing on his toes, he

leaned over Spock's station. "I thought that between the

two of you, you and Scotty could do everything."

Spock tilted his head to one side, studying the

doctor's face. To push so hard for no apparent

reason, McCoy had to have something on his mind. were

the results he had obtained on the Kh@fflict

that disturbing to humans, or was it his lack of

results that bothered him? "You are correct,

Doctor, when you say that Mr. Scott and I

are capable of solving most problems. However, there

are perhaps four people in the entire Federation who

possess the expertise needed to unravel this

technology. I would be honored to assist them in

their efforts, but I myself do not possess the full

range of skills needed here. Unless, of

course, your biological studies have revealed the

key to these creatures."

As Spock was talking, McCoy's

expression alternated between triumph at

Spock's admission that he did not know everything and

dismay that they might not be able to rescue Kirk.

However, when Spock suggested that his

biological studies might hold the necessary

clue, consternation chased all other emotions off the

doctor's face. "Are you out of your Vulcan

mind? You can't seriously mean that the answers to those

creatures' technology is hidden somewhere in their

physiology. You'd better get back down

there and have Jim talk some sense into that thick head

of yours."

"Doctor, I see no need for us to continue this

discussion. You have your methods, and I have mine. I

suggest that you pursue your research with a little more

alacrity." As he turned back toward his

viewer, a flicker of movement caught

Spock's attention. It was on the screen that showed

Kirk's activities.

Kirk was on his back, sliding down a long,

steep slope using his carapace as a toboggan,

his legs flailing the air in a vain attempt

to gain control of his movements. A plume of

beige dust rose behind him, spreading into a broad

rooster tail in the stiff wind. As they watched

he picked up speed, shooting over the dry

grass as though his shell were coated with

lubricant. "Oh, my God," McCoy

murmured, his imagination telling him how hard

Kirk was going to hit when he finally reached the

bottom of the slope.

Chapter Fifteen

Kirk felt the agitation mounting in his body as

he raced toward the Kh@fflict female, his

legs extending to their maximum to attain the greatest

speed possible. His host's reactions were so

intense, so insistent, that Kirk could follow the

Kh@fflict's thoughts with very little trouble. He was

pursuing the most seductive, the most

provocative, the most desirable female he

had seen in his short life. It would be a singular

honor to lose himself to so commanding a mate. Perhaps,

if he satisfied her sufficiently, he would be

granted the rare privilege of fathering her other

clutches and of being her acknowledged consort until

the Change took him.

The intensity of his host's desire triggered a

cascade of thoughts that flooded Kirk's mind with the

details of the Kh@fflict life cycle. With a

growing sense of horror, he monitored the

feelings, the needs, and the preprogrammed

responses of his host, trying to find where

he had misinterpreted the information. He had to have

made a mistake somewhere; no intelligent race

known to the Federation had such bizarre and

transmutable biology.

The Kh@fflict instincts forced his legs to move

faster, pushing his body to its limits. The cold,

dry air pulled every molecule of moisture from his

gill membranes and parched his air ducts all

the way to his lungs. Still his body tried for

greater speed, although the ground was rough and littered with

irregular chunks of rock. His guesses must

be true, Kirk realized. Nothing else could

explain the intensity of the Kh@fflict's drive

to reach the female ahead of him.

Shock surged through Kirk's mind, blotting out

the Kh@fflict instincts. His legs stiffened and

skittered off the loose rocks beneath his pincers.

He scrambled to regain his footing and

overbalanced, pitching on his side. Kirk

skidded, tried again to catch himself, and rolled off a

low bank. His momentum flipped him onto his

back, and he began to slide, picking up speed

as his smooth carapace skipped across the dry,

slick grass.

In scraps and snippets, images of the alien

landscape registered on Chekov's consciousness.

How he had gotten here, why he was here--or even

something as simple as how he was traveling across this

arid and unfamiliar landscape--seemed beyond his

comprehension. It was as if he had been drugged and

then turned loose to wander on an uncharted

planet.

When the other creature had approached, he

felt intensely relieved to know that he wasn't the

only person on this desolate world. He was even

more relieved to learn that food, shelter, and others

of his kind lay back across the hills in the

direction of the sunrise. Following the instructions

of his elder, he began retracing his footsteps.

Already he could feel the weakness in his body, the

deep shakiness that emphasized his need for food and

drink. And it would be nice to see others of his

kind, to converse with them and exchange images of

what they had seen and done in this wide and empty

land.

He did not think he had traveled far,

especially since the elder had reassured him that

the food pens were very close at claw. However,

time stretched, and he seemed no closer

to his destination, even though his limbs were shaking from

the effort of dragging his body across the rolling

hills. It must have been much longer since he had

hunted than he thought. Surely he must have had his

sunrise nanthken yesterday--or was it the day

before?

When he thought about it, he couldn't remember when

he had last eaten. He knew the answer should be

the first thing in his mind--the color of the nanthken's

fur, how much effort it had taken to capture it,

what rituals he had observed in conjunction with his

meal. If he could not remember that, he was losing

the colors and textures that defined his life and

gave it meaning. Suddenly he was no longer sure

of anything.

When the transit frame appeared on the

horizon, he almost turned around again. The elder

had said that food and others of his kind lay in this

direction, but even a fool knew that no sane

Kh@fflict put food pens near a transit

frame. in the dim past thieves from competing

cohorts had stepped through the frames, caught their

meals, and disappeared before anyone detected them.

In lean years such depredations forced the

sacrifice of the younger males in the cohort to feed

the matriarchs. Even in the present, more enlightened

era, the ancient customs held and the food pens were

several major eights of walking distance from the

frames.

Perhaps the elder had meant the food pens were beyond

the transit frame, he thought as he drew

closer to the black object. The elder's

directions had been vague and somewhat confusing,

especially in his present state of body. His

thought processes were always confused and muddled when

he went too long without eating.

At first he didn't even see the strange

creatures swarming around the transit frame. From

the barren and empty landscape, he had not

expected any life except a few scrawny

nanthken and the survivors of their exploration

team. The only possible reason for him to be in

such a desolate place was if he had been part

of an exploration team searching for new places

to settle. They must have seated the transit

frames before the disaster. He wasn't sure what

had gone wrong, but something had scattered their team

and destroyed their food supplies. The elder must

have tried to tell him, but both of them were too addled

after the accident.

His next look at the bizarre animals

stopped him in his tracks. Never within the lifetime

of his race had anyone reported life-forms as

deformed and appalling as these. They moved on two

feet, like the arboreal fruit-catchers in the

tropical jungles of the homeworld, but there the

resemblance ended. These animals were on bare

ground, scouting as though for prey. However, nothing

with so few appendages and with eyes pointed

strictly to its front could succeed as a

terrestrial predator in competition with the mighty

Kh@fflict.

He studied the beasts, wondering if they were the

food the elder had said was near the transit

frame. After a few moments he decided they were

not edible. If the elder had intended that, Chekov's

Kh@fflict mind decided, the elder's thoughts were

even more distorted than his own.

That left him with two choices. Their food

supply was either beyond the transit frame or it was

through it. Both alternatives meant that he had

to pass the strange, deformed animals. His body

rebelled at being near anything so repulsive, but

in the end hunger won out. He needed that food

quickly, before starvation further clouded his mind and

destroyed his reason.

Having reached that conclusion, he regained control

of his limbs. He started forward, picking up

speed as he did. Going through the transit frame

seemed the better choice. This was not the master

frame, so most of their supplies and equipment were

probably not in this area. Also, crossing through the

transit frame would put some distance between himself and

these bizarre animals and would give him time

to puzzle out their significance and the role they

fulfilled on this strange planet.

As he ran toward the frame, several of the

beasts made noises and moved toward him. At

each step their ungainly two-legged strides

made them look ready to fall on their faces.

How could anything designed along such irrational

lines survive? he wondered. Chekov moved

faster, his legs reaching for the distance-eating stride

used by messengers in the dim past. If these

animals were not food, he had no use for them.

He should get past them quickly so that he could find the

food pens and replenish his depleted energy

stores.

He was only a few lengths from the frame when

two of the creatures moved in front of

him. Chekov could not have stopped if he had wanted

to. He shifted his course slightly, aiming

straight for the largest animal. The soft, deformed

body went down under the impact, its alien flesh

deforming satisfactorily beneath his pincers. The

edge of his carapace brushed the other beast,

knocking it toward the transit frame. Chekov

charged through the portal without waiting to see what

happened behind him.

Once he quit worrying about his speed,

Kirk discovered that sliding downhill on his back

was not too bad. It reminded him of tobogganing

when he was a boy, but this time he did not have

to worry what would happen if he hit a bump.

His sled covered his body and would not go flying in one

direction while he went in another. His only

concern was injuring himself when he reached the bottom

of the slope.

Experimentally he flung out an appendage

to see what would happen. His body wobbled a little,

but his course seemed unaffected. He had started

downslope with his head uphill, so he could not see

what lay ahead of him, and the weight distribution in

the Kh@fflict body seemed to favor that

position. If he worked at it, he guessed he

could turn his carapace around, but he wasn't

sure that was a good idea. This way, even though he

could not see where he was going, he did not risk

putting out an eye if he crashed into something head

first. Until Spock changed him back to his

human form, he needed to keep all the

faculties of his Kh@fflict body in prime

working order. Also, he didn't know if any

injuries he sustained while in the Kh@fflict

form would be carried back across the transition. That

meant he didn't want to do something that would leave

him crippled when he returned to his human

form.

The slope flattened, and a flicker of relief

went through Kirk before he returned to worrying about

what lay ahead. If his luck held, friction

would slow him down before he collided with something;

any other outcome he would know about only when it was

too late to prevent. His descent began to slow,

and he reminded himself that the only way he could have

kept out of this situation was to have controlled his

reactions to the Kh@fflict sexual cycle. After

his human responses interfered with the

Kh@fflict's motor functions, he

had earned whatever he got.

He hit a patch of gravel and started to spin.

Once the rotation started, he couldn't stop it, and the

uneven forces on his carapace sent him spiraling

down the hill. As the scenery spun around him, he

told himself that the rotation would further decrease his

speed. The argument was firmly grounded in

physics, but Kirk didn't find the thought very

reassuring. Ahead of him was a dry stream bed

littered with boulders and cobbles. It took very little

imagination to know that he would be bounced around like a

starship in an ion storm when he hit those

rocks.

Kirk racked his brain for some way to stop

himself, but in his inverted position he had no means

for gaining leverage against the ground. The reduced

slope and the spinning were slowing him down, but he still

hit the stream bed with more speed than he liked. The

water-worn cobbles slipped beneath his carapace like

ball bearings. He skittered and bounced against the

boulders, and the clatter of the impacts echoed and

re-echoed in the confined space.

This is slowing my momentum, Kirk told

himself. Really. The physics books never

lie. Still, it was difficult to convince himself,

particularly when his random collisions increased the

illusion of speed. He began wishing for a larger

rock, one big enough to absorb his momentum when he

hit it head-on. A moment too late he

remembered the adage about being careful in your

choice of wishes.

A sharp spur of rock loomed ahead of him,

its jointed cliffs of dark basalt forcing the stream

into a sharp bend. With no control over his

movements, Kirk slammed into the wall of rock,

rebounded into the air, and flipped. He smashed

onto the rocky stream bed with one appendage

trapped underneath his body and two others twisted

into unnatural positions.

The brutal landing left him disoriented. At

first he couldn't remember where he was or how he

had gotten there. As his mental numbness

dissipated, he noticed aches and twinges everywhere

in his body. The Kh@fflict's heavy shell had

protected him from the worst of the beating, but several

of the impacts had caused internal bruising.

Kirk shuddered, realizing how sore he would be when

the injuries stiffened. Unlike a human, any

swelling would be confined by his carapace, and the

pressure on an enlarged joint could

become intensely painful.

It was, however, too late for him to worry

about avoiding the bruises and strains. His best

hope was to keep his muscles loose by continuing

to move and to hope that the cold air would keep down

any swelling. One at a time he tried moving his

appendages, flexing each joint to assess its

condition. To his relief, nothing seemed to be

broken, but several of his midlimb joints felt

like they would be stiff from swelling around stressed

connective tissues.

He levered himself to his pincers, testing each

joint and appendage as he stood. At first his

balance was unsteady, but after a few eights of

steps, the black rocks and the purplish sky

quit swinging around him. He staggered upstream

until he f ound a gentle slope leading out of the

stream bed.

The way was not difficult, but it took more out of

him than he had expected. His Kh@fflict

body was reaching the end of its reserves. He

needed to round up the other transformed humans

quickly and then find himself some food and a place

to rest.

An hour of climbing brought him back to where his

foolish mistake had sent him for the long slide.

He debated what to do next, but Kh@fflict

physiology decided matters for him. A gust

of breeze tickled his gills with a whiff of something

dark and mysterious. The Kh@fflict's instincts

took charge, and his body bolted in the direction

the female Kh@fflict had gone.

Chekov tumbled through the transit frame, his

entry speed disturbing his balance as he stumbled

through. The transition was rough, as though the maintenance

crews had not serviced the mechanism recently,

and it took a moment for him to regain control of his

limbs. He looked for the base camp and the food

pens that should have been waiting for him, but only a

desolate, rust-colored plain stretched as far

as the eye could see. Suddenly, as though someone had

raised the curtain of fog that shrouded his brains,

he knew where he was. Behind him, even before he

turned around, his mind showed him the canyon with the

narrow path cut into its wall. Halfway down,

secure from outside attack, lay the caves and the

city that controlled the world. Beyond, at the bottom

of the canyon, safe from all depredation, lay the

food pens with the fattest, tastiest

nanthken any Kh@fflict had ever slid its

proboscis into. Some disaster greater than he could

imagine must have occurred if his world had been

turned into this desolate wasteland.

He started to turn, pulled toward the vision of a

feast his mind was drawing for him. Distracted, he

didn't realize another Kh@fflict was coming through

the transit frame. He shouldn't have had

to worry; proper etiquette forbade following

at such a short interval, but apparently this

individual was trying to force a status battle.

If that was the case, Chekov would be glad

to oblige him.

The second Kh@fflict charged through the window

at full speed, crashing into Chekov's flank and

spinning him halfway around. Chekov staggered but

kept his limbs beneath him. He turned to face the

threat. The pincers flexed on his second set of

appendages, and glancing down, he saw that the

claws were tipped with sharp, thick spikes that would

pierce another Kh@fflict's shell when aimed with

sufficient force. His other pincers were also tipped

with spikes, but they were not as strong as the second

set.

His opponent attacked, his carapace flashing

a chaotic design of reds and blacks streaked with

every other color of the spectrum. Chekov read the

other's rage and disorientation, but most of the

patterns were chaotic, carrying no meaning. This one

was crazy, with an inborn insanity that must be

destroyed before he impregnated a female with his

defective genes or--worse--sired his

predestined quota of offspring and changed into one

of the females who ruled their world. Chekov's

duty was clear He must eliminate this one before his

defects spread through the sacred Kh@fflict

genome.

The other Kh@fflict swung a pincer at

Chekov's eyes, trying to sever the basal

attachments. It was so primitive and so

predictable a move that Chekov could barely

believe anyone, no matter how deranged, would

try such an opening attack. Chekov swung his

left second pincer in a sweeping circle,

aiming for the vulnerable spot near his opponent's

mouth, where the joint between the upper and lower plates

of the carapace was thinnest. His blow connected

solidly, and he felt the shell yield, but he

did not penetrate deep enough for a decisive blow.

The other charged past and turned, his

pincers skittering on the gravel.

Chekov pivoted to follow his opponent's

movements. The other was still flashing colors of

hate and turmoil, now tinged with something else. The

patterns changed too fast for Chekov to follow

them, and he was afraid to take the time to puzzle

them out. His opponent was strong, much stronger than

Chekov had expected, and he needed all the

skill he possessed to hold his own until he

found an opening.

The next three attacks were the same as the

first, down to the slices aimed at his eyes, and

Chekov began wondering why his opponent was being so

predictable. Even a deranged individual should

know to vary his technique, especially when it

hadn't worked the first time. To protect himself in

case his opponent was setting up a subtle

trap, Chekov varied his response, first

attacking the other's limb attachments, then trying

to flip the other Kh@fflict on its back. He

didn't believe either approach would succeed against

a heavier, stronger opponent, but it made his

actions harder to anticipate.

When his opponent started his run for his fifth

attack and Chekov realized it would be no

different than the previous four, he was ready.

As the other Kh@fflict approached, he pivoted

to the side, moving his body out of its expected

position. His opponent's stride faltered as he

tried to follow Chekov's movement. Chekov

rammed the spikes on both his second pincers

deep into the other's carapace. The chitin yielded

with an ugly, muted crack.

Momentum carried the other Kh@fflict forward,

tearing Chekov's pincers clear with a wet, ripping

sound. Bluish-purple fluid spilled from the

wound and splattered Chekov's pincers, the ground,

and the dying Kh@fflict. Instinct took over, and

Chekov mounted the corpse, his carapace flashing

an aroused and triumphant kaleidoscope of

purples and oranges. His proboscis

protruded from his jaws, its serrations erect and

gleaming wetly as he inserted it into the gaping wound

and gorged himself hungrily on the sweet, hot

blood.

Chapter Sixteen

They beamed the wounded security guard up and

rushed him to sickbay, bleeding from several deep

puncture wounds. The Kh@fflict's claws had

penetrated deeply in two spots, one on the

shoulder and the other on the leg, and sliced deep

gashes across both arms. Shaking his head at the

damage, McCoy refused to let Spock

interview the patient and took the guard

into surgery. Left with only the preliminary

reports, Spock returned to the bridge

to search for the guard who had followed the Kh@fflict

into the artifact.

The remotes near the sites he had

identified that morning showed nothing new in those

areas, and no one, human or Kh@fflict, had

recently passed nearby. That meant the

Kh@fflict and the security guard had

materialized somewhere else. At least Spock

hoped that they were somewhere else, although he would never

admit to such an irrational impulse as hope.

Diligent search techniques would find them much

sooner than all the hope in the universe.

It took him fifteen minutes to sort through the

Enterprise's orbital-altitude scanner

logs. The Kh@fflict had materialized

halfway around the world, in an area with no evidence

of any Kh@fflict transit frames or other

Kh@fflict ruins. By the time the Enterprise's

scanners zoomed in on the area, the two

Kh@fflict had fought, and the smaller Kh@fflict

was proclaiming his triumph upon the body of his

defeated foe.

Spock was sure the Kh@fflict's victory

rite, with its ritualistic cannibalism and

systematic disfiguring of the corpse, would fuel

many hours of debate, but for now they had a more

serious problem. Although both creatures looked

and acted as though they were aliens, human minds

were trapped in both bodies. The physical death

of a Kh@fflict body marked the death of its

human resident, whether either of the two beings was

aware of its own humanity or that of its

opponent. The ethical and moral implications

of the problem were staggering, even if no one considered

the legal ramifications.

"Killed in the line of duty," the log entry

would read, with nothing more explicit to tell what had

happened. Spock hoped that whoever was involved would

let it drop there. Delving deeper could

become exceedingly unpleasant, both for the

crewman trapped inside the surviving

Kh@fflict body and for the relatives of the man

killed in the fight.

The only benefit was that they had another

Kh@fflict body to examine. From their meager

scanner data, Spock thought the dead man was the

guard who had been pushed into the artifact, but the

information he had was not conclusive. When the victor

wandered off, Spock had the body transported

to the Enterprise and taken to sickbay for

examination. Since the man was dead, the least

Spock could do was wring the maximum amount of

information from his death. Perhaps his body would tell them

how to prevent similar insanity from destroying the

other altered humans on the planet.

"Spock, are you out of your Vulcan mind?"

McCoy's voice exploded from the intercom.

"You want me to autopsy another crab and

to determine who he was? As if he was carrying his

identification stapled onto his shell? I'm a

doctor, not a marine biologist. I haven't a

clue what to look for, Spock. Invertebrates

are not my specialty."

"I am aware of that, Doctor." Spock

heard McCoy draw in his breath to renew the

assault. Before he could speak, Spock continued.

"Seven people, including the captain, have been changed

into these creatures, and two of them are already dead.

We need all the information we can obtain about these

beings. In particular, we need positive

identification of this crewman to support our

conjectures concerning his identity. I can send you

help from the biology section. I am certain

Lieutenant Jylor or Ensign Bovray will

be delighted to assist you."

"I'm sure." McCoy's voice was heavy

with sarcasm. "Don't do me any favors,

Spock. McCoy out."

Don't do me any favors. The words

repeated themselves in Spock's min d, underlining their

difficulties on Careta IV. Although he

relished the intellectual challenge of learning

about new people and their worlds, Spock heartily wished

that they had never heard of Careta IV or of the

Kh@fflict.

After McCoy signed off, Spock went

back to searching for more Kh@fflict artifacts.

With the discovery of an operational

transport window that had not been found earlier, the

problem required more attention. He needed to know

what factors signaled the presence of

Kh@fflict ruins.

With the deadly turn their mission was taking,

Spock wanted every scrap of information as quickly as

he could get it. The Kh@fflict artifacts were

dangerous, and the least of their threat came from his

ignorance of their purpose and function. Without knowledge

he had little chance of reversing the transformation

process or of preventing the artifacts from

accidentally changing more people into aliens whose behavior

was as puzzling as their technology.

Half an hour later, a movement on the

monitor caught his eye. Most of the remotes

showed tranquil scenes of Kh@fflict wandering

across the dry, rolling hills near the second

artifact. Kirk was hurrying after the largest

Kh@fflict as if it was the most important thing

in his life. However, what had attracted

Spock's attention was a different scene, that of a

small Kh@fflict trying to descend a vertical

cliff.

Putting his data on hold, Spock

broadened the scan and identified the fighter who

had killed the Kh@fflict McCoy was

autopsying. Replaying the tape, Spock

watched the small alien circle around the

artifact and wander along the top of a deep

canyon. Its movements seemed intent and

purposeful, as though it was searching for something.

After ten minutes it apparently found its

objective. With cautious movements the

Kh@fflict picked its way over a pile of

rubble and crept across the treacherous surface of

an ancient landslide. On the far side of the

crumpled ground, a trail was carved into the

canyon wall. The small Kh@fflict started

down the trail, its movements jerky from

impatience and desperation.

Ordering the remote to show him the entire

canyon wall, Spock began examining the

two-kilometer-high rock face. From a distance

the sharp line incised into the wall proclaimed its

artificial origins. Up close there were gaps,

some of them impassable. In many places erosion

had tumbled great masses of rock and debris

across the trail, while in others the rocks had

been worn away from below.

The treacherous path and the small

Kh@fflict trying to negotiate it told

Spock that a major site must be concealed

nearby. He sent the remote closer to the

canyon wall, scanning the layers of blocky

red sandstone and fissured gray limestone. Most

of the way down, nearly hidden beneath a massive

landslide, Spock found the unmistakable signs

of long-deserted alien habitation.

A small hole was the only part of a broad,

arching ceremonial entrance that was unblocked

by fallen rubble. Once he knew what to look

for, Spock found remnants of the decorative

carvings that had surrounded the entryway. Some of the

vandalized scenes showed alien prisoners being

slaughtered on low, blocky altars, while

others showed graphic and violent depictions of

Kh@fflict in contorted positions. Spock

decided that he could safely postpone examining that

aspect of the Kh@fflict civilization. He

directed the remote to report what lay inside

the opening.

At first the readings were confused. One moment the

sensors reported a huge cavern, large enough

to hold the Enterprise with room to spare. The

next instant there was only solid rock from the

cliff face back as far as the sensors could

penetrate. Neither set of readings was logical,

which suggested a third possibility. Inside the

cliffs lay a major Kh@fflict site concealed

by a jamming field similar to the one that had hidden

the first artifact. The landslide had probably

been triggered to conceal the entrance.

Spock ordered a landing party to report to the

transporter room in fifteen minutes. If his

guess was correct, they might soon have the

information they needed.

* * *

The ledge was so narrow that the landing party had to beam

down two at a time. Spock and a security

guard were first, materializing a safe distance from the

rocks that buried the entrance. Spock tied a

rope around his waist and gave the end to the guard

to belay. If the caverns were booby-trapped in

addition to the camouflage that obscured them, he

wanted to give himself those extra seconds for the

Enterprise to beam him to safety. Being thrown

to his death by the security measures of a long-dead

alien race was not the way he would choose to end his

life.

As he started up the rock pile, he

heard the whine of the transporter effect as two more

guards materialized on the ledge. After that, if

his initial report was as expected, three

groups of scientists were waiting to beam down.

Spock edged his way across the rocks, testing

each step before trusting the rubble to stay in place.

Twice blocks of weathered sandstone crumbled beneath

his weight, and the fragments skittered down the

slope. However, despite its apparent

instability, the pile did not begin moving as he

had feared. He reached the opening and paused

to examine the bas-relief on the massive stone

lintel. Originally the figures had been

exquisitely defined, and the detailing on some of the

carvings still bore traces of bright pigment, but the

sculpture had been vandalized. The fragments

of the scene depicted a ritual sacrifice, but

the brutality of the remaining icons penetrated

even Spock's control. The eviscerated,

flayed, and dismembered bodies of half a dozen

non-Kh@fflict races--including two known

only from single, isolated occurrences--were

spread across stone altars, reminding Spock of the

Aztecs' brutal sacrifices of their

captives. He knelt to examine the entrance before

the guards realized how disgusting he found those

images.

At close range it was obvious that someone had

blasted the overhanging rock wall to bury the

caverns. The opening had once been completely

concealed, but the rubble had since fallen away

to expose the opening. His tricorder could not give

him a definite age for the carvings or for their

burial, although he estimated the site had been

built over 250,000 years ago. That age was

consistent with everything else they had found on

Careta IV.

Pulling out his torch, Spock worked his way

into the opening. Inside the rubble spread across the

floor of what had once been a large cavern.

Now fallen columns and slabs of rock

littered the floor and clogged the space.

Reflections off random bits of metal and

assorted junk told him the cavern was not

purely natural, as did the remnants of

carvings on several of the columns. A thick

layer of dust covered everything, as though nothing had

ventured inside in millennia. Conceivably, the

last people to enter the room were those who had blasted the

entrance shut.

Spock eased himself back out and stood, pulling

out his communicator. "Spock to Enterprise.

Commence beaming down the science teams. The presence

of a large cavern behind the rock slide is

confirmed. We will investigate this site

thoroughly. Inasmuch as this promises to be an

archaeological find of some significance,

please request Dr. Lassiter to join the landing

party, along with anyone Dr. Kaul wishes

to send down." He allowed himself a moment's

relief that Kaul was not yet sufficiently

recovered from his reaction to the suldanic gas to be

able to join the landing party. Until the senior

archaeologist accepted the importance of their

discoveries, Spock did not look forward to handling

the personality conflicts Kaul's disbelief

provoked.

"Acknowledged." Relays clicked on

Uhura's board as she passed on his orders.

"Is there anything else you need, Mr.

Spock?"

"Not at the moment, Lieutenant Uhura. I

will keep you informed if the situation changes.

Spock out." He replaced his communicator on

his belt and descended to greet the new arrivals.

By the time he reached the stable footing of the trail,

Lassiter and seven other science specialists

had materialized. Tallieur, the ship's

assistant historian, was huddled against the

cliff, casting apprehensive looks toward the

sheer drop a meter from his feet. On the

opposite end of the spectrum, a security

guard and the young man who had come with Lassiter were

leaning over the edge and discussing the best technique

for attempting an unaided descent.

"May I have your attention, please?" He

paused. "We have discovered a major Kh@fflict

center. Unfortunately, someone has vandalized the

site. Given that a later civilization,

probably the Meztoriens, has taken great

pains to conceal all signs of the Kh@fflict, we

should proceed under the assumption that there is something

even more dangerous about the Kh@fflict than what

we already know."

Tallieur cleared his throat. "Mr.

Spock, um, if the Kh@fflict civilization

or, um, its successors were so dangerous,

shouldn't we know about them, even if they died out so

long ago? Most races survive in, um, in

the legends of their successors."

"That's one of the questions we hope to answer,

Lieutenant. So far a computer search reveals

no references to the Kh@fflict, unless we

assume that the vast majority of the so-called

orphan cultures were destroyed by them. However,

we are continuing the search in hopes of turning up

definitive answers. Does anyone else have

questions they wish to raise at this time?" When no one

did, Spock hefted his torch and turned back

to the talus pile. "In that case, let us

proceed with our investigation."

Chapter Seventeen

The inside of the cavern was far brighter than

Spock had expected. He moved forward, and with every

ste p his boots raised clouds of powdery beige

dust that turned golden when they caught the slanted

rays of sunlight coming through the opening. Five

meters from the door, he stopped to examine his

surroundings. Details of partially destroyed

carvings stood out in sharp relief, as though lit

by direct sunlight, and the expected dust was

absent from the incised designs, which showed more scenes

of mass sacrifices and ritual murder. No

light source was visible in the cavern, and the center

of the room was heavily shadowed, but whatever system

the Kh@fflict had used to illuminate this area was

still working.

Silence, broken only by the whirs of half a

dozen tricorders, told him the rest of the party was

also looking around, trying to decide what to study

first. The chamber had once been as large as the

Enterprise's hangar deck, with elaborately

frescoed walls and ornately carved columns.

However, the blast that had piled tons of rock

over the entrance had disrupted the room's

buttressing and toppled many of the decorative

pillars. The facings had sloughed away from the

structural supports, forming piles of broken

rock and plaster at the base of the metal

columns. Fallen ceiling panels, smashed

into rubble or flung around like cards discarded by a

gigantic child, choked the area with debris. At the

northern end of the room, where the blast had been

strongest, all the supports had collapsed, and the

roof and outer wall had been reduced to fragments

little larger than Spock's fist.

"Comments, anyone?" Spock asked, wondering

how many anomalies he had missed. The

contrast between the areas of complete destruction and the

bits of still-operational Kh@fflict technology,

such as the lighting system, was striking.

"All or nothing," Lassiter murmured,

scanning the back wall with her tricorder. "Either

it's destroyed or it's untouched."

"Some of these carvings are almost three hundred

millennia old." Amtov Kordes,

Lassiter's assistant, was a chunky,

dark-skinned man with a thick Dindraed accent,

broad on the vowels and burred on the

consonants. "Yet their surfaces are as fresh

as if the work was finished yesterday."

"I don't understand the lighting technology at

all." A frown twisting her round face, the

Enterprise's alien technology expert,

Ensign Temren Knealayz, pointed her

tricorder overhead and scanned the ceiling a

third time. "I should detect something now that we're

past the jamming field."

Spock duplicated her tricorder scan.

His readings showed nothing but solid rock over their

heads. "Ensign, characterize the jamming field."

"The field is extremely directional and

strongly focused outward to screen this site.

I'm not familiar with jammer designs that serve

this specific function, but I'd certainly know more

if we could locate the projectors for the

field." She shook her head, sending a train of

ripples through her golden brown hair. "From this

side of the field, I've obtained a crude

frequency modulation profile. I wouldn't

call my data definitive, but the pattern

resembles some Meztorien field generators

I've examined in the past."

Lassiter referred to her tricorder. Keeping

her eyes on the screen, she said,

"Approximately half of all Meztorien

devices, normally those from the last millennia before

their disappearance, can be restored to working order.

However, no devices have continued to operate to the

present."

Kordes stepped forward, swinging his tricorder

in rhythm to his strides. "The devices

normally fail because they lack an appropriate

power source. It has long been theorized that the

Meztoriens were capable of creating a technology

that would survive through the millennia, if they'd

gained control of the required energy sources.

Dr. Kaul will be gratified to learn that

his hypotheses have at last been vindicated."

Lassiter's mouth tightened as though she had just

bitten into a sour stonefruit. "What we're

seeing here, Amtov, implies that the jamming

field generators were tied into an older

technology. It's hardly a vindication of

anyone's theories. At least, not until we've

traced everything to its source."

Interpreting human motivations was not his

specialty, Spock knew, but no one could

miss the hostility between Lassiter and Kordes.

Kordes was trying to undermine Lassiter's

authority, either with Kaul's blessing or because he

thought it was the fastest way to promote his own

career. To avoid an ugly confrontation, Spock

directed the discussion toward their immediate

objective. "Locating those devices is an

excellent suggestion, Dr. Lassiter. We will

begin detailed examinations of this cavern immediately.

All personnel should pay particular attention

to locating power conduits and possible exits

to adjacent sites."

Tallieur tilted his head to one side.

"Does that mean you think there's more here than just this

room, Mr. Spock?"

Spock considered the question. Was there more to the site

than this partially destroyed room? With great effort

the Kh@fflict had built the access trail down

the cliffs and decorated the entrance and the walls with

detailed carvings. When he added the fact that the

small Kh@fflict seemed very determined to get

here, everything pointed to the significance of their

find. "Indeed, Mr. Tallieur. The question is

whether our technology and our powers of observation

are equal to the task of penetrating the

protective measures that someone used to conceal this

place."

"Understood." Tallieur started to examine one

of the undamaged bas-reliefs, which showed several

Kh@fflict butchering a group of avianlike

humanoids. The others took their cue from

Tallieur and began working. With the confrontation

averted, Spock started on his chosen project,

examining the ceiling to determine how the illumination

reached the carvings on the walls and spread through the

enclosed cavern.

"I'm a doctor, not a marine invertebrate

biologist," McCoy muttered to himself for the tenth

time since the body of the dead Kh@fflict

had been delivered to his sickbay. He knew

the statement was illogical; the Kh@fflict had not

been sea-dwellers in more millennia than he

wanted to think about. However, because it let him hide

his uneasiness about this particular autopsy, the

irrationality was comforting. Although the Kh@fflict

body plan bore a striking resemblance

to terrestrial crabs, the physiology was

radically different. To make matters worse,

although the corpse was alien, he kept remembering

that it had once, however briefly, housed a

human consciousness.

"Christine, what did we get from that latest

chemistry panel?" he called, catching the flash

of her blond hair as she returned from the lab.

"It'll be another half hour." Chapel

ignored the impatience in his tone. Each lab

report suggested new tests, and McCoy had

spent the entire afternoon demanding the results as

soon as the samples were delivered to the

laboratory. That they both knew why he was so

impatient did nothing to lessen his testiness.

Comparing the test results of the two dead

Kh@fflict was finally giving them a handle on their

physiology, but the answers were still painfully slow

in coming.

"If we don't figure out what makes these

creatures tick pretty soon, they're all

going to starve. How will it look to Starfleet Command

if we let Jim and the others die for lack of

food?"

"You have a point, Doctor." Chapel turned

to her computer screen, where she was correlating the

corpses' physical parameters with the records

of the missing crewmen. "However, I believe we

have a little more leeway than you think."

"The problem, as I see it, is that they'll

start shrinking inside those shells, and their muscles

will start pulling away from their attachment points."

He switched the scanners to a different channel

and waited for the enzyme readouts to appear on his

diagnostic screen. "A man in a baggy pair

of pants is funny, but I don't think any of

these crabs are going to find anything amusing about

walking around in an oversized shell. In fact,

I think it might make them downright irritable."

"It may." Chapel entered the command for

"Repeat analysis" into the computer, and a moment

later the screen flashed, "Duplicate

analysis confirmed." She turned the

display toward McCoy. "Doctor, we have a

confirmed identification for the second dead man.

He's Ensign Bradford Nairobi, the guard

who was pushed into the artifact by the crab's charge."

McCoy grunted. "Nairobi? Pull up

his records and see if there's anything unique in

his profile. Anything we can use to help us

identify the rest of our people."

"Yes, Doctor." Chapel started back to the

lab, the tapping of her boot heels receding as

she left the room. McCoy glanced after her,

knowing that the lab technicians must be as tired of his

late-breaking flashes of inspiration as he was of

having a new idea spring up every time he was ready

to concede to the mysterious Kh@fflict. Still, his real

problem was that the people on the planet, however bizarre

their present form and physiology, were human, and

he had to keep them alive until Spock could

return them to their proper form.

He returned to his study of the Kh@fflict's

bicameral brain, trying to unravel the nerve

connections that led from each sub-brain. It was the

strangest way of controlling a body he had seen

since his school days, when his exobiology

class had constructed plausible brain

structures for the great brontosauroids of

Earth's far-distant past. Because of the vast length of

their spinal cords those immense beasts had needed

secondary neural nodes to control their motor

functions. Without the subsidiary hip nexi

to coordinate their reflex actions, they could not have

responded rapidly to emergency situations. The

Kh@fflict had evolved a similar arrangement

for subdividing their neurological func tions, but

without the justification of extreme size.

The dead bodies gave McCoy few clues

to how this arrangement functioned in life, although

Spock's interview with Kirk provided some

tantalizing hints. For Kirk's identity

to remain intact, it had to be housed in one section

of the brain, presumably the area that governed the

higher mental functions. Furthermore, that

sub-brain must function independently of the areas that

controlled the Kh@fflict instinctual behavior and

contained the preprogrammed learning.

McCoy knew his speculations would be

difficult to prove, but he couldn't be too far

off base. Unless Kirk's identity was

spatially isolated from the Kh@fflict functions,

the distinctions would break down, and the

Kirk/kh@fflict composite would become

dysfunctional. The evidence so far, supported

by Spock's interview with Kirk, was that the

dysfunctions they were seeing in the Kh@fflict were

caused by isolation of the two halves of the brain rather

than conflicting spatial mapping of separate and

incompatible identities.

That the Kh@fflict programming could--and perhaps in

most cases would--dominate the composite seemed

clear, given Kirk's reports on the strong

hard-wired component of their culture and

biology. When McCoy added in the disorientation

that the humans would feel on finding themselves in the

bodies of aliens they had not even known about three

days ago, he realized it was a miracle even

one person had been able to communicate with them. His

next job, after figuring out what the Kh@fflict

ate, was to reach the other human minds trapped

inside Kh@fflict bodies and reassure those people

that help was on the way.

Chapel returned from the lab, carrying the

summary tapes from the latest tests. "I think

we may have something here, Doctor. At least

Dennis thought there was enough to try constructing a usable

formula."

"Let's see." McCoy flipped on the

stasis field to preserve the corpse.

Technically, he shouldn't need to worry about

decomposition for several hours, but long

experience with starship medicine had taught him that

interruptions always appeared when you hadn't planned

for them. The stasis field would hold the corpse

if he did not get back to his autopsy

immediately, although standard procedure called for

cryostorage in addition to stasis. Certainly for

such a unique specimen, Starfleet Medical

Branch would want to examine the corpse, and

McCoy wanted to give them both Kh@fflict

bodies in prime condition.

McCoy dropped Chapel's tape into his

computer and began reading, pausing occasionally to refer

to his autopsy notes. The Kh@fflict had

three triangular teeth set in the front of a

tiny jaw. The arrangement of the teeth allowed the

Kh@fflict to puncture its prey or to shear through

soft tissue, but was ineffective for chewing food.

Without any grinding teeth and with most of the space

inside the mouth occupied by the proboscis when it was

retracted, the Kh@fflict had to have survived on

a liquid diet. The enzyme studies

and the structure of the siphonlike proboscis

suggested that they had injected their food with powerful

enzymes. When the food liquefied, they sucked

it into their gullets through the proboscis.

He shuddered, realizing what those digestive

enzymes would do to a human body. Luckily for

humans, Kh@fflict biochemistry was alien enough

that humans would not seem appetizing. In that the

crew was fortunate, McCoy decided, considering

the savagery portrayed in the last artifacts

Spock had found on the planet.

Shaking his head, McCoy went back to the

biochemical data on his screen. The

Kh@fflict were predators, he concluded,

functioning like certain terrestrial spiders. That

meant that their natural foods resembled blood

or pulverized meat. All he had to do was create

a nutritionally sound formula that appealed to the

Kh@fflict palate.

"We don't have to do much, do we?" Chapel

commented, her thoughts traveling on a course

parallel to his. "Just invent gourmet fare for a

race that died out a hundred millennia ago.

No problem."

McCoy chuckled. "I'll settle for something

they'll manage to choke down at this point.

Whether it's gourmet dining or pig swill, I

don't care, as long as it does the job."

"All things considered, even that's a tall

order, I'm afraid." She called up the

data on her console. "Why don't I figure

out how to feed it to them while you work on the formula?"

"Just what I was about to suggest." He gave her

the relevant section of his autopsy notes,

even though she knew Kh@fflict anatomy almost

as well as he did. "Let's see how quickly

we can get this done."

"Yes, Doctor." Her tone was grim, showing

she, too, knew they were struggling to prevent their people

from starving on a planet that could no longer

support the life-forms they had become.

Their break, when it came three hours later,

was so like a scene from one of Kirk's favorite

cheap entertainments that at first Spock could not

believe what was happening. Tallieur had been

scanning a section of the wall decorations

repeatedly in various spectral bands. Spock

was about to ask him why those carvings were so fascinating

when Tallieur pushed against the central

medallion in the design. Without warning a section

of the wall vanished, leaving a dark hole in its

place.

"What did you do?" demanded Kordes in a

tone that assumed he was in charge.

"Please report, Mr. Tallieur."

Spock stepped forward and blocked Kordes without

seeming to notice him. If he gave Kordes

the slightest opportunity, the archaeologist would

bully everyone around him into taking his orders. That

Spock could not permit if they were to accomplish their

goals. Kordes placed his career above all

else, but their mission was to rescue the captain and the

other people who had been changed into Kh@fflict.

Anything else was secondary.

Tallieur faced Spock, deliberately

ignoring Kordes. "These carvings resembled

similar work found on Belesov V. There the

purpose of the carvings was to conceal the hidden

passageways around the royal audience chambers.

I wondered if similar considerations influenced

these decorations, sir."

"So you tested your hypothesis. Did it occur

to you that it might be unwise to do so in a room

full of people?" Spock glanced at his tricorder,

which confirmed that the weak flickers he saw in his

peripheral vision were power surges in a force

field that filled the opening. They were safe as long

as the field remained in place.

"Yes, sir. It occurred to me. However, my

readings indicated that, if the opening existed, the

space could not be much larger than my tricorder."

Tallieur blushed a deep crimson. "In

future I'll remember that this technology is

too advanced for us to reject any possibility

simply because our instruments don't register its

effects."

"A wise rule." Spock studied the opening.

Experimentally he touched the surface. A tingling

warmth, similar to the one that surrounded the transit

frames, crawled up his arm. He reached in

farther, waiting for the overwhelming pull that characterized the

fields around the Kh@fflict transporters, but

it didn't come. Finally he withdrew his arm, nodding

to himself. "This field is different from the ones we have

previously encountered. Ensign Knealayz, do you

have a preliminary analysis?"

Knealayz gave him an apologetic grin.

"It doesn't match the parameters for any

class of field known to our science.

I've got some theories, sir, but I'll need

several hours of sensor readings before I can conduct

the analysis."

"We do not have the time to wait." Spock glanced

at his tricorder, but his readings made no more

sense than their earlier data. The long-dead

aliens had not wanted their relics to be found after

they had gone. "Mr. Tallieur, would you put

your tricorder through the field and see if it can

tell us anything?"

Tallieur slid his tricorder into the darkness.

Spock kept his instrument trained on the field,

and Knealayz and Lassiter scanned on a

broader focus around the opening. Unless they knew

where the mechanisms were housed, any tricorder

might record the information that would give them the key

to the Kh@fflict technology.

After several minutes Tallieur withdrew his

arm. His tricorder was still working, its sensors

whirring normally although it had just passed through a

Kh@fflict force field twice. Spock

nodded. "This field is definitely not the same

as the others. Did anyone observe something of

note?"

A chorus of negatives answered him.

Spock nodded again. Since their efforts to date

had produced so little data on the Kh@fflict

technology, it would have been surprising if they

had detected any changes this time. However, he

had needed to be sure before making the next test.

"Will someone volunteer to walk through the field?"

Tallieur's response was immediate. "I'll do

it, sir. I activated the field, so I should be

the person to risk its effects."

"Very well, Mr. Tallieur. You, Dr.

Lassiter, and I will examine your tricorder

readings for any pertinent information. Everyone else

may return to his or her previous

activities." He reached for Tallieur's

tricorder. Tallieur and Lassiter closed

on either side of him to read the data.

"I protest this procedure," Kordes

announced in a loud voice, planting himself in

front of Spock. "I should be the person

to explore this new discovery."

"Request denied." Spock didn't look

up from the tricorder. "If Mr. Tallieur's

test proves that passage through the field is

safe, we all will explore beyond this room.

Until then you may resume your

previous investigation."

"I refuse to accept your unlawful orders."

Before Spock could react, Kordes ran to the

opening and dived through. The force field flared bright

gold, then returned to black.

Lassiter replayed the data for Korde s's

disappearance on her tricorder. "It wasn't

pointed directly at the portal, but it was

running," she said in an apologetic tone. "And

here, when I turned to watch him, we can see through

the gap that opened for him. It looks like a

corridor or a long, narrow room."

"Mr. Tallieur's readings show the same

phenomenon. They also confirm that the atmosphere

on the other side is identical to that on this

side." Spock looked from the tricorder to the

opening. "I do not believe we will learn anything more

without sending someone through and trying to bring him back.

Are you ready, Mr. Tallieur?"

The historian squared his shoulders. "As ready

as I'm going to be, Mr. Spock." He took

his tricorder from Spock and switched it back to

"Record" mode. Crossing to the opening, he

took one last look around and then stepped through the

force field.

Once again the field flared to gold and then

faded to black. One second, two seconds,

three. The interval stretched to over a minute before

Tallieur, still in human form, stepped back through

the field. "There's an extensive system of

corridors and rooms behind this entryway, Mr.

Spock. I would guess this force field is here

merely to keep the uninitiated from entering the heart

of the complex."

"I hope you are correct, Mr.

Tallieur, because our answers are not in this

chamber." Spock called the ship, telling them

of the discovery and his decision to explore further

inside the mountain. He ordered Sulu to keep the

transporter room manned constantly, ready

to pull them out of trouble at a moment's notice.

With the formalities taken care of, Spock lined

up his team, and one by one they stepped through the

Kh@fflict force field and into the unknown.

Chapter Eighteen

The female had traveled farther than he

thought, given the immediacy of her scent, and

Kirk could feel the shaking in his legs by the time he

once again approached her position. Reason

told him to break off this pursuit and find food,

but reason didn't seem to be high on the list of

things that motivated his host. Once he sensed the

female in the area, the Kh@fflict's instincts

would not let go until he had mated with her. All

other considerations had been erased from his mind.

When the female came in sight, Kirk

realized his host had made a serious

miscalculation. She was on the next ridge.

A deep, narrow canyon divided them, the

vertical walls near the stream course making it

as impassable as Earth's Grand Canyon would be

to a human. His host could never make the crossing

on his own, and Kirk briefly entertained the

idea of aiding the Kh@fflict, if that was the only

way to ease the compulsion that drove his host. He

could see dozens of hand- and footholds in the

fissured rock below him, but he was reluctant

to try any more rock climbing in a Kh@fflict

body.

That left his host with only one option, if he

was determined to gain access to the female. He would

have to retrace his course until he found a

place where the canyon was passable. If Kirk

was lucky, he would travel far enough that the

Kh@fflict would lose scent of the female, and

Kirk could regain control of his body. Then he

would resume searching for the other missing people.

Logic told him the female must be Talika,

since she was the only woman who had been changed

to a Kh@fflict, and his mind shied away from the

diplomatic repercussions of the liaison his host

was contemplating. Kirk wondered what the

Kh@fflict equivalent of a cold shower was, but

the thought did not trigger any answering impressions

from his host. He would have to wait until events

returned control of his host's body to him.

The Kh@fflict started along the ridge, forcing

his legs to move as fast as they could. Kirk sensed

that the creature would have pushed the pace even more, but

his body was faltering. The long marches and the lack

of food had drained his energy reserves, and even

the bellyful of algal scum that Kirk had forced

down the previous night would not keep him going much

longer.

Even so, the mating drive overrode all other

concerns, and the Kh@fflict kept moving as fast as

he could. The female was back there, and she could not

wait; if he did not get there soon, some other

male might impregnate her. He could not let

that happen.

The sun dipped toward the horizon, and still his

host struggled to return to the female. After three

abortive attempts to cross the canyon, he

reached its upper end. Circling around the splayed

stream channels at the canyon's head,

Kirk's host reached the ridge where the female

had been. Kirk struggled to head back toward the

artifact, but the Kh@fflict's instincts were still in

control. His host poured on the speed, finding

reserves of energy Kirk did not know he had.

An hour before sunset he finally caught up

with the female. She was standing on the end of a headland

overlooking a small, muddy lake. Even through his

thick carapace, Kirk felt the icy bite of the

wind, and he shivered at the idea of spending a

night on this point, unprotected from the wind and the

falling temperatures. It had been many thousands

of years since this desolate land had supported

life as the Kh@fflict knew it.

At first the female seemed unaware of his

approach. She kept her back to him, and her

carapace remained a neutral beige.

Surely she should have recognized the arrival of so

strong and eager a partner by now. If she was

ignoring him, it meant either that someone had beaten him

to his goal or that something catastrophic was

preventing her from responding to the most basic

drive a Kh@fflict could know.

He moved closer, blinking a kaleidoscope

of eagerness and submission, alternating with boasts

of his skill and prowess. The latter, Kirk

realized, were empty images, formed out of his

host's biological imperative and not based on

actual experience. As alien as the Kh@fflict

were, some things transcended all barriers. Young

Kh@fflict males told the same exaggerated

stories about themselves as did young males from almost every

known race in the universe.

His host moved forward, clicking his pincers and

scuffing rocks to get the female's attention.

She turned finally, flashing orange bars of

irritation. @ghWhat do you want, boy"...@ar she

demanded. @ghBe gone and leave an Elder in

peaceff@ar

@ghOh, most high Elder, I crave the

honor of serving your needs in any manner that

pleases y.@ar Kirk's host moved forward, his

bold movements contradicting his groveling words.

Given the female's attitude, Kirk thought it

would be wise to leave immediately, but his host could not

read the rejection in her images. He moved

closer, rubbing his carapace against her side.

@ghBe goneff@ar she flashed again, her images more

forceful. @ghI have no need of soft-shelled

babies like yff@ar

"Oh, most high and powerful Elder, let me

prove my worth you." Kirk's host rubbed

harder against the female's side, trying

to impress her with his virility. The Kh@fflict

mind seemed unable to recognize that her refusal

was sincere and permanent. How could he regain

control of his body before the female retaliated

against the unwelcome advances?

Before he could try again to overcome the

Kh@fflict's instincts, the female responded.

Hooking her legs beneath his carapace, she shoved.

He flipped over and landed on his back, sliding

downhill. A warm glow surged through his host at

the thought that this was the greatest, most powerful female

that had ever existed. Oblivious to his admiration,

the female gave him another shove, and he

picked up speed.

Suddenly the ground dropped away from beneath him,

and Kirk was sailing through the air, a hundred

meters above the rusty surface of the lake.

Kirk remembered wondering about the Kh@fflict

equivalent of a cold shower. He had a horrible

feeling he was about to find out what it was.

It must be here somewhere, Chekov thought, scouting

across the surface of the landslide. He knew the

path to the hidden city lay on this cliff face,

concealed behind enough obstacles to keep individuals from

other cohorts from stumbling upon it accidentally. The

question was, had he missed it himself, given his dazed

and weakened condition? The battle had taken more from

him than he had thought, using energy reserves he

knew his body couldn't spare, although he had fought

a smart duel and had taken his fill of his

defeated enemy.

To top everything off, the area had changed since

he last saw it. The vegetation had withered and died,

the weather had turned cold, and the camouflage had

been redesigned. He was starting to feel

like an invader in his own cohort's stronghold

instead of the conquering hero returning against the odds from

a difficult mission. What had happened? Why

was his memory so misty about the significant

images that surrounded his life?

He moved farther, clambering on top of the

landslide in hopes of gaining a better view.

Nine times out of ten, his lower brain reminded him,

only a rock wall stood beyond the slumped

debris. This pile of rubble showed all the

earmarks of being just such a piece of camouflage,

its presence intended to fool invaders inffbelieving

that it concealed the trail. There might even be a

false path leading around the corner, tempting

intruders to follow it onto a blind shelf.

Still, his memory insisted that this was the trail to the

hidden city, so Chekov took the path when he

saw it. Maybe the invaders had been so numerous

that the Elders had concealed the main trail. He

could not believe they had destroyed it utterly,

especially when the Elder had not informed him of the

change. The trail was here, and he would find out

what had happened when he reached the city.

The danger must be severe if the Elder had

been unable to tell him when they met. Chekov was

sure that no one had bee n within seeing distance, which

meant that the Elders suspected the destruction of

his world and its life-forms was the work of one of the

technologically advanced cohorts. Less than

an eight of cohorts possessed scrying

devices capable of watching someone's conversations

without others being aware that their devices were nearby.

The longer he thought about his meeting with the Elder and

considered how little his world matched his memories, the

more Chekov realized the magnitude of the disaster that

had befallen him. He should have remained on the other

side of the transit frame, should have offered the

Elder whatever assistance he could.

Still, the Elder had sent him to find food, which

said that the Elder knew more than he did. The

Elder wanted him to fortify himself for a great

mission. He was being made ready to save his people.

As soon as that thought occurred to him, Chekov

knew it was right. The wasteland around him, the

drastic alterations that made his world almost incapable

of supporting life--everything pointed to the need for a

savior to redeem his people. He was the Chosen One,

the mighty warrior who would save his cohort from the

ruin visited upon it by their evil opponents. Now

that he knew the truth he could not fail in

the great assignment the Elder had given him.

The visions of his glorious mission carried

Chekov across the next three landslides and

inspired him to traverse the narrow gaps where rock

falls had removed the support for the trail,

leaving only open air and fissured rock to hold

his weight.

With each new obstacle Chekov felt his

confidence wavering, but he reminded himself that the

Elder was counting on him. He had to reach the hidden

city to see what his cohort needed from him. It was

his duty to accomplish the great deed that he had been

given.

Clambering over rock piles and inching his way

along fissures that were too narrow by half for him

was exhausting work. In addition, a cold wind

gusted down the canyon, kicking dust in his eyes

and threatening to slap him off the cliff. Chekov

knew he must believe in his mission. Surely the

Elder would not have asked the impossible from him.

Suddenly Chekov knew he had misunderstood

the Elder. The trail was so bad that the Elder could

not have meant for him to descend all the way to the

canyon floor. Reminding him of the nanthken

pens in the valley below was only the tool the

Elder had used to start him in the right direction.

There were other ways to reach the valley floor, and the

Elder must have intended for him to use the lift

tubes inside the city. Anyone with such a vital

mission would have all the resources of the cohort at

his disposal.

He paused, trying to get his bearings. The

upper entrance into the city had always been well

concealed. With the current modifications to the

camouflage, it would be hidden even better than

before. He hunkered down on the trail to minimize

his exposure to the wind. He had to be close, but

for several long eights he couldn't remember enough

landmarks to tell how far he needed to go. Hunger

was dulling his mental processes and slowing his

reactions to an unbearably sluggish pace. The

Elders would have to let him feed before he could do any

important work. He only hoped they had a

bunch of fresh nanthken waiting for him, their hind

legs lashed together in the traditional manner of

offerings given to his cohort's greatest heroes.

The late afternoon sun made it difficult for him

to see where he was. Unbidden, the memory

surfaced that his people only used this trail in the

early morning, when the cliff was in

shadows and the uneven light disguised their carapaces

as they worked their way down to the city. Still, he

didn't have much choice. Given the urgency of his

mission, he had to gamble. His uncertain

recollections told him the entrance was a few

eights of paces farther down the trail. With

nothing better to guide him, Chekov heaved himself

back onto his pincers and started down the trail.

Chapter Nineteen

The corridor was wide and its walls were a

mottled rusty beige, the variations caused

by color differences in the sandstone into which the complex

had been excavated. The low ceiling, which fit

Spock's predictions for Kh@fflict

architecture, was barely high enough for the humans

to stand erect. At intervals broad portals

pierced the walls, their doors deeply carved with

violent and brutal scenes similar to the ones that

had been vandalized in the outer cavern. Several

panels depicted mass sacrifices, and among

the victims Spock recognized several races

known only from isolated artifacts that had

survived their makers. The difference between this area

and the outer cavern was that no one had disturbed these

carvings since their creators had vanished many tens

of millennia ago.

In fact, despite the immense age of the

complex, everything was in pristine condition, and there was

little dust anywhere. Only a light powdering on the

floor carried the imprint of Kordes's

footprints. Whatever cleaned this part of the complex

was still functioning despite its age. Spock

lifted an eyebrow, thinking how many people in the

Federation would kill for the resale rights to a still-working

technology created by a people who had been dead so

long that even the legends of their existence had been

forgotten.

After everyone had come through the portal unharmed,

Spock started down the corridor, looking for

clues that would direct them to the control center for the

complex. He had no doubt that it existed; the care

with which the Kh@fflict had concealed this location pointed

strongly to its being the headquarters for all their

activities on Careta IV. Somewhere

nearby, Spock hoped, they would discover a

still-functioning library computer that contained the information

they needed. He would have to translate the data

into a usable form, but Spock was certain his

computer skills were more than equal to deciphering the

Kh@fflict's data storage systems. After that

it became a race to change their people from Kh@fflict

back to humans before more of them were killed.

They stopped to look behind some of the doors,

choosing at random which ones to investigate. All

opened into square rooms with very low ceilings. The

interior walls were plain and unadorned, although

occasional piles of fibrous debris suggested that

tapestries might once have covered the stone.

Most of the rooms contained objects made of

sandstone slabs, which resembled narrow, waist-high,

backless benches that could have supported a

Kh@fflict's body while letting its pincers

swing clear of the floor. In the center of about half

the rooms were larger objects that looked like desks

or tables made of blocks of gray limestone.

Nowhere did they learn who had used the rooms or

what function they had served, although Tallieur

suggested that they had been used for ritual penance

or indoctrination.

By the time they had gone a hundred meters,

Spock realized that distances inside the complex were

deceptive. The lighting was the same diffuse,

indirect illumination that had confused them in the outer

cavern. No apparent energy source provided the

light, and no one had determined how it reached its

targets. Patches of darkness spaced randomly

along the corridor suggested that the system was

failing, but that told Spock nothing, since he

had yet to figure out how it worked.

A hundred and fifty meters from the entrance,

they reached the first cross-corridor. It stretched

in both directions, appearing no different than the

corridor they were in. If they encountered many such

intersections, Spock realized the humans would have

trouble retracing their route. With his inborn sense

of direction, he did not anticipate trouble, but

the others were not so well-equipped.

The farther they moved away from the entrance, the more

frequently other corridors crossed theirs. As

he counted the number of intersections, Spock

felt increasingly certain that this was the master

complex. The landing party had started from the

ceremonial entrance, which was designed to awe and

intimidate anyone who came to the cavern. The

rooms near the entrance, which seemed so uniform and so

uninteresting, appeared to be meeting rooms for

individual interviews, training, or

indoctrination. If they had known where

to look, they might have discovered the Kh@fflict

equivalent of two-way mirrors concealed in the

walls overlooking the cavern. The Kh@fflict

priesthood had probably not stored much of

value in the rooms closest to their temple for

fear that the complex would be looted or, worse, that

someone would subvert their followers into rebelling

against their ruling class. In most highly

repressive societies, Spock thought, the

rulers displayed an extreme degree of

paranoia.

Such speculations did not help him locate the

main control center, however. Finding that depended

on choosing the right path through this maze of rooms and

corridors, and Spock's estimation of the size

of the complex increased with each step. Their

tricorders gave them no long-range information

on their surroundings, which suggested that the walls

incorporated shields that severely attenuated

their scanning beams. Even knowing their location, the

Enterprise's sensors had been unable

to distinguish the complex from the background noise. The

ship was keeping its fix on their position only

because of their communicators, and Scott refused

to beam additional personnel inside the complex.

However, he had locked onto Kordes's

communicator and beamed him back to the

Enterprise, fighting mad at having his

personal expedition canceled by Spock's orders.

Anybody they wanted to join them would have to beam

down outside the cavern.

For the first half hour, they moved inward, checking

rooms at random to see if they contained anything of

interest. The Kh@fflict did not seem like beings

whose rulers would be easily accessible, and once

they were away from the entrance, the choices became

less obvious. If their tricorders or the

ship's sensors had told them even roughly how

large the complex was, Spock could have estimated

where to look for their objective. As it was, they

were hunting blind.

"Damn! I'm just not getting anything!"

Knealayz pivoted, swinging her tricorder in a

full circle. "No shielding should be so good that

we can't find variations in the background

magnetic flux."

"Or something to indicate which end is up," added

Tallieur. He frowned, searching the walls as

if expecting a map to be engraved in the stones.

"It's not like everything is so deteriorated

that what we're looking for vanished a million

years ago. Most of this looks like it was abandoned

yesterday."

Lassiter nibbled on a lock of her pale

hair. "It's got to be so obvious that we're

missing it completely. This is the place; this is

their center. I sense that much, but I don't know

where to go from there." She blushed a deep crimson,

realizing how much she had revealed with those few

words, but no one challenged her.

"The only things we know about the Kh@fflict are

what Captain Kirk has told us and what we

see around us." Spock tried to see their

surroundings from a Kh@fflict perspective. This

corridor, like all the others, had been cut from

solid rock, and no effort had been made

to alter the natural colors or textures. In

the distance they had traveled, the rocks had gone from

the massive rusty sandstone near the entrance to a

finer-grained and lighter-colored sandstone to the buff

siltstone that surrounded them here. If the

Kh@fflict had left the rocks unmodified,

perhaps they had some significance. What was it?

"Mr. Spock, you said that their language was

based on color and gesture, didn't you?"

Tallieur was frowning at his tricorder. "And that

most of the information is carried in the colors and the

visual patterns?"

"That is correct." An image of the cliff

face flashed through Spock's mind. The rocks were

tilted at a thirty-degree angle so that a

rock layer that started at the canyon's rim would

eventually reach stream level. Also, since the

canyon cut across the rocks in an oblique

direction, the layers also sloped backward into the

hill. A tunnel driven straight into the cliff

would eventually intersect every different type of

rock found in the canyon. "Can we correlate

the types of rooms we've been in and their location

along this tunnel?"

Lassiter flipped through the records on her

tricorder. "We have sampled the rooms randomly

and have found three basic plans so far." Her

voice rose in surprise. "The room layouts

appear to be constant within each rock type.

However, given the percentage of the complex that

we've seen, we haven't come close to sampling

a statistically valid subset of the rooms

available."

"I am aware that we do not have

sufficient data to support a scientifically

defensible conclusion, Dr. Lassiter." Her

reluctance to speculate gave Spock new

insight into Kirk's often all-too-apparent

irritation with his own caution in similar

circumstances. He promised himself to reexamine

his own actions later, when he had time for such things.

At the moment, however, they needed a premise for

locating the center of this complex as quickly as

possible. "In the interests of shortening our

search, can we formulate a working hypothesis that we

can test with our explorations?"

Tallieur lifted three fingers. "The outer

rooms had benches of the same stone as the walls,

and some had desklike objects of gray

limestone. The rooms in the lighter-colored

sandstone had more desks, but these were made of the same

rock as the walls. And the last rooms we've

checked contained nothing at all."

"The only thing that stands out is those limestone

desks." Lassiter chewed harder on the ends of

her hair. "We were speculating that those rooms

might be audience chambers for the priests or

whatever high officials ran this place. Would the

limestone have special significance for them?"

"Do we have anything stronger to base a conclusion

on?" Tallieur asked. "I'd prefer something

more solid, but I'll gamble on just about anything."

Knealayz gave the corridor another sweep

with her tricorder. "Why not? We've traveled

far enough that I should be detecting differences in the

e-m flux, if nothing else. After all, we

can see that their equipment is still using power;

otherwise the lights would have gone out. So anything

is better than stumbling around waiting for a lucky

break."

"Very well." Spock had not expected them

to agree so quickly. "In that case, we shall

proceed down this corridor with all possible

speed until we encounter the limestone unit from which

the desklike objects were obtained. Meanwhile,

everyone is to consider the means by which the Kh@fflict

moved from level to level within this complex. What

we seek may be above or below us, and we must

discover a method for contending with that possibility."

To the chorus of acknowledgments, Spock started

down the corridor at the fastest speed he

considered the humans capable of maintaining. So

far, despite the low oxygen content of Careta's

atmosphere, the group was holding up

well. However, he dared not push them too far,

or they would not be fit to cope with the unexpected,

should it arise.

Two hours later Spock was beginning to question the

logic that had started this enforced march. They had

crossed two fault zones, each of which thrust the

lower section of rocks toward the surface and

placed them back in the rusty sandstone. By his

estimation they had covered almost fifteen

kilometers of corridor without getting any

closer to their goal. Spot checks of the rooms

along their route continued to support the correlation

between rock layer and the surrounding rock type but

gave them no new information to work with. The humans

had long since lost their enthusiasm.

Without a clear idea of what to do, he ordered

a stop in the next wide intersection. With the

additional open space afforded by the

cross-corridor, Scott beamed down ration

packs and freshly filled canteens for everyone.

The food and a few minutes of rest immediately

boosted the morale.

"I think Mr. Spock had it right before,"

Tallieur said around a mouthful of his ration bar.

"These people were so paranoid they wouldn't trust their own

mothers."

"Would you trust your mother if she let you put

something like that on your door?" Knealayz pointed

to a door opposite them, which showed another

graphic scene of ritual torture and

sacrifice. The victim spread over the altar

would have made a good illustration for a textbook on

Kh@fflict internal organs.

"Just so." Tallieur took a gulp of water

to wash down his food. "Anyway, we've walked

and walked and still haven't got anywhere. Just when we

think we're making progress, a fault shoves

the rocks around, and we start over at the beginning

of the section. I'll bet the geologists would

love it, but I'm tired of seeing the same

rocks over and over again."

"And I'm still not getting any flags on the

background energy flux." Knealayz shook her

tricorder in frustration. "Why aren't we

getting anything? There has to be some band that they

forgot to shield."

Lassiter pulled her legs against her chest and

rested her cheek on her knees. "It's more

likely that their shielding is where rather than

what. I mean ..." She paused, nibbling on

her hair. "We're out here, where anyone who

gets into the complex would be. If we're hostile

invaders, they don't want us to see anything, so

they shield against everything we might scan with."

Spock straightened, wondering how many times he

was going to confront the obvious before he finally

unraveled the mysteries of the Kh@fflict. "That

would be logical. It also means we must

penetrate beyond the first set of rooms along these

corridors."

Tallieur glanced pointedly at the red

sandstone walls. "My recommendation, for what

it's worth, is to backtrack to the last fault and

check everything in the immediate area. If there's any

validity to our assumption that function

correlates with color and rock type, we can

examine the most alternatives in the smallest

area."

"That does seem reasonable, Mr.

Tallieur. I suggest that everyone finish eating

quickly so that we may resume our investigation."

Groans and protests greeted his words, but within

five minutes they were marching back toward the last

fault zone. When they reached it and the group fanned

out to make a preliminary survey, Spock

examined the fault itself. Straddling the break, with

one foot on buff siltstone and one on rusty

sandstone, he noticed something he should have seen before.

The difference in the two rock types implied that

the rock layers had at one time moved several

kilometers relative to each other. However, the

floor of the corridor was as smooth as the day the

Kh@fflict had bored out the tunnel.

Geologically, such stability was not impossible,

but it was, to say the least, extremely

improbable. Somehow the Kh@fflict had

stabilized the fault zone for many kilometers in

all directions--and they had done it so well that the

result had survived their civilization by at least

a hundred and fifty millennia. From what they

had seen, Spock had concluded the galaxy was

better off for the extinction of the Kh@fflict, but they

were poorer not to know the secrets of their technology

and science.

Twenty minutes of scouting narrowed their

choices considerably. Most of the rooms were

identical to the ones they had been examining all

along, with the same types of furniture and only

one door leading to the corridor. These

chambers were discarded without furthe r study. Half a

dozen rooms, randomly placed along the

passageway, had a second door that led away

from the hallway. Spock chose teams

to investigate, but the results were disappointing.

Each chamber was connected to another much like itself, which

in turn was connected to another, similar room.

Eventually the last room in the chain opened onto

an adjacent corridor on the same level of the

complex. The exploration teams returned dusty,

thirsty, and more aggravated with the Kh@fflict than

ever. When the connections were drawn out on a map,

they resembled a drunkard's walk from one point

to another, but the conclusion was inescapable. Those

chambers led nowhere they wanted to go.

That left the last two rooms, which straddled the

fault plane. They had been avoiding them,

hoping that they would find their answer elsewhere. "It

would figure," Lassiter murmured, scanning the

doors while trying not to look at the carvings. In

these panels the Kh@fflict had depicted their

scenes of torture, sacrificial slaughter,

and ritual brutality with such precise and

graphic detail that no one was eager to explore

how these rooms reflected that aspect of

Kh@fflict society.

"I can't think of a more effective way of

discouraging people from opening this door." Tallieur

glanced at the images, then looked away, shaking

his head. "I thought the Aztecs were over the edge."

"The Aztecs were amateurs compared to these

characters." Knealayz swallowed. "Who wants

to bet the transporter controls are right under the

altar?"

Spock pushed at the door, and it swung open

soundlessly. The room was long and narrow, with the

fault line bisecting its entire length.

Ghostly light flickered in the corners, leaving

most of the room in deep shadow. The exception was

a pool of brightness that surrounded a block of

gray limestone. Splotches of purplish

black stained the altar's sides and spattered the

floor around it.

"Not possible," Knealayz muttered in dismay

as she glimpsed the blood-splattered altar.

"Not bloody possible. Besides, no stasis

field is that good." She began scanning the

closest wall, deliberately ignoring the

anomaly at the far end of the room.

Activating his tricorder, Spock

advanced toward the object. After so many

failures, the probabilities were against their

finding anything useful, but he had to try.

Halfway down the room, the readouts began

jumping too fast for him to follow. He switched

the display to half speed but continued to record on

all channels. Behind him he heard gasps of

surprise as the others repeated his discovery. It

was as though a barrier divided the room in half.

Once they crossed it, their instruments detected

all the information that had been screened from them before.

One by one the landing party reached the far end of the

room, circled the altar, and stopped with

tricorders pointed at the gray block of

limestone. "That is the source of the anomalies,"

Tallieur said, saying aloud what they already

knew. Given the Kh@fflict fondness for

repetition, rooms containing similar furnishings

and equipment probably straddled every fault in the

complex.

"Sorry I suggested it," Knealayz

muttered. "These people are too appalling

to contemplate."

Privately Spock agreed with her. Still, if

you didn't want unauthorized individuals

to use your intrabuilding transport system, the

best location for the control mechanism was the last

place any sane person wanted to go. The

Kh@fflict may have been brutal, disgusting, and

loathsome, but they had not been stupid. Unless he

completely missed his guess, no low-ranking

Kh@fflict would willingly enter a room such as this

unless he knew someone--or something--else would be

the sacrifice. Taking a deep breath, Spock

ordered, "Mr. Tallieur and Ensign

Nakamura, would you move the altar so we can see

what the controls look like?"

The two men crouched beside the block of gray

stone and put their shoulders against its splotched

surface. Their first shove had no effect.

Stepping back, they looked at each other and

shrugged. "It's a lot heavier than I thought,"

Tallieur said.

Nakamura nodded, and they braced themselves for a

second attempt. Sweat beaded on

Nakamura's forehead and trickled off

Tallieur's face. Finally, with a terrible

screech, the rock began to move. The next

instant, everything went black.

Chapter Twenty

Consciousness returned slowly. Spock

allowed his surroundings to seep into his awareness before

he opened his eyes, listening for the soft, uneven

breathing of his people almost lost in the emptiness

surrounding them. When he heard nothing besides the

sounds he expected from seven unconscious

humans, he cracked one eye to confirm his

impressions. The Enterprise's landing party

appeared to be the only living beings in the area.

Knowing he could not be sure while he was on the

floor, he rolled to his feet, reaching for his

phaser as he stood.

A quick circle revealed no immediate threats and

no other living beings. The transport system they

had triggered by moving the altar stone operated

differently from the Kh@fflict's main system.

Instead of transforming the humans, this

transporter had knocked them unconscious and

delivered them--where? The mechanism had been

preset to send them to this location, wherever that was.

Lowering his phaser, Spock began a second

turn, this one slow enough to take in the details.

They were in the center of a huge amphitheaterlike

room lit only by small, diffuse lights

hidden among the rafters of the high, vaulted

ceiling. Looking around, Spock had the distinct

feeling that the last occupants, when they left so

many millennia ago, had turned out the lights and

walked away as though they expected to return.

If he knew where the switch was, he could bring

the room back to life.

At one end of the oval-shaped arena floor, a

broad ramp led upward to an enclosed area.

Unlike the rest of the complex, the doors to that

room were plain and uncarved, as though the people

expected here didn't need to be intimidated.

The ruling class, if they fit the pattern found

in ninety-nine percent of such civilizations, had

reserved the vulgar intimidation for their followers.

That also meant the humans had finally gotten the good

fortune they needed. When they discovered where the

Kh@fflict had hidden their intrabuilding

transport system to prevent its use by outside

invaders or by the uninitiated, the system had sent

them to the control center for the entire complex.

Spock turned away from the mesmerizing bulk

of the enclosure. They needed to explore that

structure, but the rest of the area demanded

his attention first. The arena was encircled by wide

tiers that stepped upward into the shadows. Squares,

rectangles, and strangely shaped boxes

filled the space on each level, although there was

room to maneuver around most of the objects.

Spock's curiosity stirred at the thought of

exploring this room, but he had more important

business to settle first.

Knealayz stirred, and he went to her, checking

her pulse and respiration. Both were normal, and

before he finished, her eyelids fluttered open.

"It's all right," he told her. "Their

transport system worked better than we had

hoped."

She sat up, rubbing her neck. "I take it

that means I'm still alive, sir?"

"Affirmative." Spock inclined his head

toward the other members of the landing party, most of

whom were stirring. "Checking everyone is our first

priority."

"Yes, sir." She pushed herself to her feet,

moving unsteadily, and started toward one of the

security guards. Reassured that the others would

come out of the strange transport experience as

easily as he had, Spock started to help

Tallieur.

A scream ripped through the stillness. Lassiter

jerked upright, her hands shoved against her face and

her fingers digging into her temples. Knealayz,

who was closest, went to her and crouched at her

side. Sensing a presence nearby, Lassiter

swung wildly, catching Knealayz across the chest

and knocking her to the floor.

Spock grabbed the emergency medical kit.

Pulling out the hypo, he set it to deliver the

combination tranquilizer and psi-suppressant he

had insisted that McCoy include in their

supplies. He shoved the injector against

Lassiter's shoulder and triggered the spray.

The contact sent her inffconvulsions, her body

jerking and twitching like an epileptic's. Spock

grasped her shoulders and eased her to the floor.

A flood of emotions and information inundated him

when he touched her. Disoriented, he broke away

and stumbled clear of the group until his thoughts

settled.

They had indeed reached their goal, Lassiter's

involuntary outpouring had shown him, the control

center for all Kh@fflict activities on

Careta IV. In the dim past the

Kh@fflict High Elders had ruled from here with

an absolute life-and-death dominion over their

people that had never been matched, even by the most

brutal dictatorships of the previous

millennium. The equipment and information stored here

had programmed, directed, and controlled the

Kh@fflict people with a completeness made possible

only by the unique construction of the Kh@fflict

brain.

In the almost-forgotten past of the Kh@fflict, they

had passed information from generation to generation through a

complex coming-of-age rite that imprinted crucial

knowledge on the lower brains of the adolescent

Kh@fflict. Over time the ritual had become so

detailed and so elaborate that most of the

Kh@fflict culture was programmed into the young

when they were admitted into the adult world. From there it

had been a short step for someone to invent machines

to transcribe into the young absolutely faithful

copies of everything the rulers wanted them to know,

and for the rulers to entrench themselves throug h their control of

what they taught the young. Just when the culture had

descended into the ruthless savagery unequaled

by any known civilization, Spock could not tell from

the images he had received from Lassiter, but he

understood why someone had tried to erase all

signs that the Kh@fflict had ever existed. From the

earliest days of their space explorations, the

Kh@fflict had exterminated every alien race they

encountered, leaving themselves as the only intelligent

race within their sphere of occupation. Even now the

brutality of their civilization, coupled with their

indestructible and irresponsibly self-centered

technology, made the knowledge that they had existed a

threat to the galaxy. The idea of Kh@fflict

technology in the hands of a spacefaring Hitler

or a latter-day Kahless the Unforgettable was

horror enough to chill even Spock's blood.

He pulled himself back to the present. The

drugs had calmed Lassiter, and the other members

of the landing party were stirring, shaking their heads in

groggy confusion. Going to Lassiter, Spock

helped her to sit. "I apologize for the

inadvertent intrusion, but I detected most of the

images you were receiving. Is there anything else you can

tell me about this place, Dr. Lassiter?"

She shook her head, her face ghost-white.

Her expression showed more confusion than denial.

"I seemed to be reading the massed thoughts and

lives of billions upon billions of

Kh@fflict. Of every Kh@fflict who ever lived."

She shuddered. "How could such horrible people exist?"

"I do not know, Doctor." Spock stood,

bringing himself to eye level with the lowest tier of the

amphitheater. From Lassiter's images he

recognized bank upon tilted bank of machinery.

The controls, laid out on the sloping surfaces,

were designed to be manipulated by Kh@fflict

claws, and in many cases several limbs were needed

to reach all the appropriate contact points.

Worse, there was no writing to identify anything.

Instead the consoles were color-coded, and the only

readout devices were small screens that displayed

the colors of the spectrum on a two-minute

cycle.

An unaccustomed sensation of frustration gripped

Spock. If these machines contained the information that

would let him change their people back to human form,

only a Kh@fflict could decipher the data fast

enough to help them. Lassiter's reaction made him

wonder how this place would affect a Kh@fflict,

even one with a human consciousness in control, but he

saw no other way to unravel the mysteries of the

Kh@fflict technology soon enough to save their people.

Given sufficient time, Spock knew he could

crack the Kh@fflict language, but time was the

one thing he did not have.

He pulled out his communicator. "Spock

to Enterprise." When only static answered

him, he boosted the gain to maximum and tried again.

"Spock to Enterprise."

"Uhura here, Mr. Spock. Can you boost

your signal? We can barely read you." Her

voice, through the static, was almost inaudible.

"Negative, Lieutenant Uhura. I'm

already at maximum." He glanced around him,

calculating the interference generated by the

Kh@fflict equipment. "You'll have to compensate

on your end. Meanwhile, please have Mr.

Scott beam the captain to this location. We are

inside a large facility with enough open space

to give him considerable leeway on the

transporter coordinates."

The crackle of the interference filled the pause.

When Uhura returned, her voice was stronger,

but the transmission was still poor. "Mr. Scott

says he has grave doubts about transporting

anyone through the electromagnetic disturbances that

are localized around your coordinates. Can you

suggest any alternatives, Mr.

Spock?"

"Negative. We are in the Kh@fflict

control center, but we are not certain how we got

here. The captain's assistance is urgently

required to gain access to the Kh@fflict computers

and other devices located in this room." He

looked around again to see if anything could be operated

by humanoids, but the design was too alien. If

he had several months, the intellectual

challenge would be stimulating. Under the present

circumstances, his paramount concern was finding how

to change their people back to humanoid form. "Please

request Mr. Scott to take appropriate

care in enhancing the transporter signals, but

to get the captain here at once. Spock out."

Returning the communicator to his belt, he

started for the nearest bank of equipment. Although he

could not accomplish much without Kirk to interpret the

data screens, he wanted to examine the

devices. He had reached the narrow ramp leading

to the first tier of machinery when he heard a shout behind

him.

Coming from nowhere, a small Kh@fflict charged the

landing party. Its carapace flashed brilliant,

coruscating patterns that signaled complete

madness, even if Spock didn't understand the

Kh@fflict language. The creature's limbs

moved in rapid, staccato jerks, flipping its

lethal claws in deadly arcs with each stride.

The landing party scattered, giving the Kh@fflict

half a dozen separate, moving targets.

Spock fired his phaser, his shot catching the

Kh@fflict an instant before the security guards'

shots hit it. Under the combined force of four light

stun beams, the Kh@fflict collapsed. Its

momentum carried it forward, skating on its belly

like a flat stone skipped across a lake. It

grated to a stop where most of the Enterprise's

landing party had been sitting.

Spock approached the unconscious

Kh@fflict, giving himself room in case it woke

up. The security guards remained in defensive

position, their phasers trained on the

Kh@fflict. Circling the inert form, Spock

compared it with his recollections of Kirk's

Kh@fflict body. With the endless changes in

pattern and color that characterized the Kh@fflict,

Spock had to rely on more subtle clues

to identify the person before him. This Kh@fflict was

smaller than Kirk, and the longer

Spock looked, the more subtle variations he

noticed in the bumps and scallops that ornamented

the carapace.

Without accessing the ship's records, he could not

be certain that this was the same Kh@fflict that had

been on the canyon's rim earlier that afternoon, although

the odds favored that conclusion. He wondered if the

ship's sensors had recorded where this Kh@fflict

had penetrated the complex and if they could retrace

its path, should the landing party need an escape

route. After studying the Kh@fflict, he decided

the body probably housed Chekov's

consciousness. The security guards who had

accompanied Kirk through the artifact had all

outmassed the captain by fifteen or twenty

kilos, leaving Chekov the smallest person to be

transformed into a Kh@fflict.

By the time Spock finished his examination,

Chekov was still unconscious. He holstered his

phaser and gestured to a guard to join him. "While

he is unconscious, we will roll him on his

back to prevent him from attacking us again."

"Do ye ken that be enough, Mr. Spock?" the

guard asked. "That beastie were tryin' fair hard

to spread our innards across the floor."

"I will entertain suggestions, Mr. McGaren.

However, we are short of the necessary supplies

to execute any of the ideas that immediately present

themselves."

"Aye, sair. If that aren't the truth." His

face settling into grim lines, McGaren

clipped his phaser to his belt.

With Spock at the front and McGaren lifting

in the rear, they rolled Chekov onto his back.

Moving away, Spock studied the unconscious

Kh@fflict. Chekov might be able to rock himself

back onto his feet with a determined effort, but not

before someone in the landing party noticed. Given how

agitated his attack had been, Spock considered

it unlikely that Chekov could muster the necessary

concentration to flip his carapace, and the first attempt

would bring the landing party's phasers to bear on him.

For the moment this problem was solved.

"Do ye ken the captain will be as much gone when

he arrives, sair?" McGaren asked.

"Impossible to say." How would the Kh@fflict

lower brain that controlled Kirk's body react

to the Enterprise's transporter? The guard they

had beamed up to the Enterprise had gone berserk,

and they had no reason to believe Kirk

would arrive in any better condition than Chekov.

He would have to gamble that Kirk's lower brain would be

reassured when it found itself in Kh@fflict-built

surroundings. "Mr. McGaren, you and the other

security men place yourselves where you have a clear

view of the arena. We must be prepared for all

contingencies."

"Aye, sair."

The guards positioned themselves around the perimeter,

each with his back against the lower wall. The

scientists fanned out to examine the equipment,

although they could do very little without someone to read the

Kh@fflict language for them. As he climbed

up the ramp, Spock felt his sense of urgency

intensifying. If Chekov was an example of

what happened when humans were trapped too long

in a Kh@fflict body, they needed to rescue their

people fast.

Chapter Twenty-one

One moment Kirk was falling, tumbling pincers

over carapace toward the rusty surface of the

lake. The water approached with alarming speed, and

Kirk wondered how well his Kh@fflict body

would withstand the impact. It was an experiment he would

have gladly avoided.

Twenty meters above the lake, as he watched

the abridged version of his life superimpose itself

across the orange froth foaming off the choppy

waves, he felt the welcome tingle of the

transporter effect envelop his body. He

materialized briefly in the Enterprise's

transporter room. "Welcome aboard,

Captain," Scott said as his hands worked to lay in

a new set of coordinates. "Mr. Spock

is wanting to see you immediately on the planet's

surface."

Kirk felt the shock radiating from his lower

brain, but the transporter engaged be fore the

Kh@fflict mind could respond. When he

rematerialized, it was worse--far, far worse.

He was on the arena floor in the Holiest of

Holies, the place where a Kh@fflict male was

only allowed once in his short life. That he was

here for a second time, and that he was surrounded by these

inconceivable alien monsters, was more than he could

handle. Once again Kirk felt his Kh@fflict

brain close down all the voluntary functions

of his body. His legs locked, and he

flopped on his belly on the hard stone floor.

"Captain? Captain Kirk, can you hear

me?" Spock, approaching from beyond his line of

sight, crouched in front of him.

After what seemed like forever but was only a few

seconds, Kirk regained his ability

to communicate. The terror at finding himself in his

people's most sacred sanctuary had affected his host

even more deeply than the initial trauma of

confronting other life-forms who possessed the

minimal attributes of intelligent life. The

Kh@fflict lower brain was trying to retreat far enough

to avoid acknowledging these impossibilities.

YES, I HEAR YOU, Kirk finally managed

to signal. THANKS FOR THE RESCUE.

"That is good." Vulcan or not, Spock

sounded relieved. Kirk felt a moment of

sympathy for his first officer. If being a

Kh@fflict was hard on Kirk, Spock must be

finding it harder to be responsible for determining the

means of returning him and the other people to their human

forms. "Captain, we need your help to decipher

how these machines work. This is the central control

complex for the entire planet, but we cannot ascertain

how anything works. The data screens display

information in the Kh@fflict language, and we do not

have even the most rudimentary translations for the

colors and symbols."

NOR LIKELY YOU COULD GET THEM,

Kirk signaled after sorting through the chaotic

images that surged through his lower brain. THE

LANGUAGE IS VERY CONTEXT

SPECIFIC. MEANING CHANGES DEPENDING

ON WHAT COLORS OR PATTERNS

ARE JUXTAPOSED.

"Captain, we believe the answers to your

problem are contained in these machines." The dim

light in the room left Spock's face in

shadow and deepened the gaunt hollows of his

cheeks. "Can you translate for us so that I can

implement a solution?"

Can I do it? Kirk asked himself. The

Kh@fflict lower brain, terrified as it was to be

where no Kh@fflict of its age and gender was ever

supposed to be, would not make it easy. In

addition, Kirk did not think his host knew much of

scientific value. However, if Spock needed

a Kh@fflict to translate the data screens,

Kirk was the only one available. Why, he

couldn't say, but he knew that the other

transformed humans were getting even less

cooperation from their Kh@fflict hosts than he was from

his. It was as if they expected to banish the

Enterprise and her crew from their world by refusing

to acknowledge that they existed. Kirk, at least,

had forced a small measure of cooperation from his

host. While it wasn't much, it was more than

Spock had to work with now. He would give it a

try.

Kirk searched his host's brain, hoping to glean

information from the Kh@fflict's memories that would

help Spock. To his dismay, the mere idea of

telling these strange--animals--anything so

disturbed his host that Kirk feared he would drown in

the resulting maelstrom of horror and fear. For

several minutes, the Kh@fflict's reaction was so

overpowering that all Kirk could do was ride out the

flood of emotion, hoping that his host would exhaust

its ability to react so violently.

When Kirk again became aware of his

surroundings, Spock was reaching for his

communicator. The Kh@fflict's panic was

subsiding, but Kirk could not force the creature's

nervous system to transmit Spock's words.

While he could perceive some frequencies clearly,

the Kh@fflict's hearing membranes were

inadequate to distinguish the nuances of human

speech unless he could focus his full attention

on the sounds. With the Kh@fflict's present

mental distress, understanding Spock was an

impossible task.

A few minutes later, while Kirk was still

struggling to calm his host, the air before him

shimmered, and something coalesced from the transporter

effect. While Kirk was trying to figure out

what the odd purplish fluid in the

hundred-liter monopore pouch was, his host

leapt into action. Throwing itself on the pouch, the

Kh@fflict stabbed its proboscis into it and began

sucking greedily. From its reaction Kirk

realized that the odor of the pouch's contents had

triggered the Kh@fflict's feeding reflexes.

Mentally Kirk thanked McCoy for recreating a

Kh@fflict meal from the meager clues available.

As his host fed, Kirk felt a growing

calmness settle over the Kh@fflict. At first

he thought it was from gorging after so long a period of

starvation, but the Kh@fflict did not descend into the

torpor Kirk expected. Instead it was gripped

with an odd sense of serenity, as though

divorced from its surroundings. With a flash of

insight, Kirk realized that Spock had ordered

McCoy to drug the food. If they were lucky,

with his host in this euphoric daze, Kirk could

mine the Kh@fflict's brain for information and relay

it to Spock.

WHAT DID YOU DO? he asked, in

Morse code, checking to see if he was right.

"Diazilyrion." Spock studied him with an

air of satisfaction. "Your body should be quite

inebriated for several hours. There is no

danger, as long as you exercise caution while

attempting movements that require a high

degree of coordination."

I SUGGEST WE TAKE ADVANTAGE

OF THE SITUATION. Kirk swiveled his

eyestalks around to examine the room with more care

than his host had permitted until now. He could

feel the diazilyrion working its way deeper

into the Kh@fflict's physiology, erasing the

creature's inhibitions. It decided the humans

were creations of its imagination, strange

hallucinations sent to deliver a message that

only it could hear. With profound relief Kirk

felt the Kh@fflict descend into a state of

babbling lunacy in which all the information imprinted

on its brain became accessible in response to the

right questions.

His first look at the tiers of equipment was

disappointing. Bank upon bank of sloped teaching

machines reached from arena level to the back walls

of the cavern. Every young Kh@fflict was brought to the

Holiest of Holies after he survived his rite

of passage. An Elder tested each youngster and

assigned it its adult position in Kh@fflict

society, after which the youth was led to the

appropriate tier of machines. With elaborate

rituals each young Kh@fflict was strapped and

wired to a machine, and all the knowledge it would need for the

rest of its life was implanted into its lower

brain, much of it guarded by subconscious triggers

that would release the information when it was needed.

When the programming was complete, the young

Kh@fflict--who, at this stage of their lives, were

all male--were turned loose on the

planet's surface to fend for themselves until they

had sired their predetermined quota of offspring.

At that point the Kh@fflict surviving males

metamorphosed into young females.

After spawning several clutches of

eggs, the females gradually shifted their focus

from reproduction to scientific work or the outright

pursuit of power. Much of this was determined by how the

young Kh@fflict male had been programmed, but

individual aptitudes also influenced the

occupation of a Kh@fflict female. Kirk sensed

that this aspect of Kh@fflict society was a

deep mystery to his host, who had not traveled

far enough along the path to maturity to have accessed the

appropriate information from his ingrained lessons.

The flood of information slowed, giving Kirk time

to sort through it. While the Kh@fflict

biological cycle was the most bizarre he had

ever encountered, knowing its details did not tell

him how to change himself back to a human. The

answers must be in the computers that controlled the

teaching machines. That brought up the question of which computer

directed the other machines in this complex. He

felt as though he was in the antechamber with no

signs to tell him which doors led deeper into the

complex and which only led to the Kh@fflict

equivalent of the ladies' room.

Looking around again, Kirk felt drawn to the

featureless enclosure at the head of the arena. His

host had not been near that part of the amphitheater and,

when he thought about it, Kirk realized that no male

Kh@fflict had ever been closer to that enclosure

than the base of the ramp. The conviction erupted

full-strength in his mind--that was where they should look

for their answers. IT'S IN THAT PLACE,

SPOCK. I'M SURE WHAT WE NEED

IS THERE.

Spock lifted his eyebrow in surprise.

"We considered exploring that structure,

Captain, but our tricorders indicated that nothing

was inside it."

I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S IN THERE,

SPOCK. BUT THAT ENCLOSURE IS THE

ONLY UNIQUE THING IN THIS ROOM.

Kirk paused to collect his thoughts. Using the

cumbersome dots and dashes of the Morse code

to spell out every letter was draining him of energy at a

far greater rate than he would have imagined. He

wondered how much longer he would be able to force his

Kh@fflict body into the unnatural responses

that talking to Spock required.

Spock's forehead creased with the ghost of a frown.

"If you are certain that the enclosure is our

goal, may I recommend that you ingest more

nourishment before we explore that area?

We have discovered that not all Kh@fflict rooms

are as they appear to be."

This is news? Kirk thought, wondering if

anything on Careta IV was as it appeared.

Certainly everything that the Kh@fflict had touched

seemed bent against its normal grain. I AM

SURE, SPOCK, he signaled. THESE

STATIONS ARE DUMB TERMINALS. THEY

TRANSMIT INFORMATION FROM THE CENTRAL

COMPUTERS TO THE BRAINS OF THE YOUNG

KH@FFL ICT. THEY HAVE NO OTHER

PURPOSE.

"In that case, Captain, we will investigate

the enclosure when you are ready." He conferred with

Lassiter and the other scientists while Kirk

ate. Given the energy he was expending, he

figured his host would need to eat often;

furthermore, increasing the amount of diazilyrion

in his bloodstream would make it easier to get the

information he needed from his Kh@fflict lower brain.

Spock returned just as Kirk felt he could

not force down another drop of food. Staggering from

his full stomach and from how punchy the

diazilyrion was making his host, Kirk followed

Spock up the ramp. His tricorder held before

him like a shield against attack, Spock circled

around the structure. "The only openings are on this

side, Captain," he reported. "Is there

any difference between the doors?"

I could have told him the entrance was on this

side, Kirk thought as Spock made his

report. A detailed schematic of the

enclosure wall flooded his vision. Acting on

instinct, he moved between the doors and placed four

of his pincers on the precise spots that he saw

in his mind. The wall went transparent, and a

whirling vortex filled the space beyond. Knowing it

was the right thing to do, he stepped forward into the

maelstrom.

Kirk landed in darkness, his head still spinning

despite the solid stone beneath his pincers. His host

retreated again, frightened by where he was. Kirk

let the Kh@fflict mind escape into oblivion

while he sorted out what had happened.

Slowly the darkness receded. Bulky objects

coalesced from the shadows, taking on definition and

solidity as the light built in intensity. He was

sprawled on the floor between two tilted,

misshapen consoles that resembled the teaching

machines in the Holiest of Holies. However, the

complex control panels on these machines told

Kirk that they were the master units that directed

everything in the complex. Somewhere in this room they would

find what they had been searching for.

His next step, Kirk decided, was to find

Spock. He could not see the Vulcan anywhere

nearby, and the room shifted perspective around him

like an Escher drawing. Between the twisting

perspective and the massed banks of equipment,

Spock could be three meters away, and Kirk

might not see him. He tried to stand, pulling his

limbs beneath his carapace and forcing them to lift his

body off the sooty gray limestone. Even with his

bloodstream full of diazilyrion, his host was

on the verge of dissolving into gibbering terror. With

an unpleasant shock Kirk realized that only

the oldest and most powerful Kh@fflict females

were allowed in this room. That his host knew of its

existence and its functions meant that someday, with great

age, he would have become one of the Elders who

controlled Kh@fflict society. However, at his

present age and as a male, it was a capital

offense for him to be here.

This is an exception, Kirk told his

Kh@fflict alter ego. The Elders chose us

to solve the mystery of these aliens while they work

elsewhere on the problem. They don't want the

aliens to see them. We're the only ones who can

do this job.

To his surprise, the specious argument worked,

and his host calmed. He figured the Kh@fflict

would see through the reasoning eventually, but until then

it gave him control of his actions.

It took Kirk fifteen minutes to find

Spock. The Vulcan had materialized less

than a dozen meters away, but the shortest route

between them was as snarled a maze as Kirk had ever

seen. If the enigmatic floor plan and the

shifting perspective were designed to discourage

intruders, the Kh@fflict architect who had

designed the room knew exactly what she was

doing.

Spock had just managed to push himself to a sitting

position when Kirk found him, but even that movement

had left him swaying dizzily. He glanced at

Kirk when he came around the last corner but

quickly looked back to his knees. "Captain,

I regret to report that I am experiencing

extreme sensory distortion. I am

uncertain whether I shall be able to function in this

place."

WHAT'S WRONG? Kirk's gills

fluttered with agitation. They needed Spock's

scientific expertise to solve the riddles of the

Kh@fflict technology. His host did not

possess enough scientific knowledge to interpret the data.

"I think ..." Spock squeezed his eyes

closed. His face had turned the washed-out green

of grass grown indoors and with insufficient light.

"There seems to be a distortion field. It is

affecting my vision and balance--to the point that I

cannot--maintain my equilibrium."

Distortion field? As soon as Spock said

the words, Kirk knew exactly where to look for the

controls. Around the corner and three consoles from the

end was a small gray unit that managed the

security measures for the entire complex. Kirk

retraced his steps, climbed up the sloping

control panel, slid his pincers into the control

sockets, and squeezed the activation bars. The

screen cleared to a welcoming lavender, then

requested his input.

Amazed that it was so easy, Kirk asked how

to deactivate the security measures for the control

room. The computer showed him the command sequence on

its screen, and Kirk let his body act out the

complicated dance of pincer movements and color

displays. When he entered the last command, the screen

informed him, @ghSequence correct.

Protective field deactivated until

further command, Oh Bright One.@ar

Kirk withdrew his pincers from the sockets and

rejoined Spock. Already the Vulcan's skin had

returned to its normal sallow hue, and he was

examining his surroundings with interest.

"Thank you, Captain. I presume we have

reached our goal." He pushed himself to his feet,

still moving a little unsteadily. In most things

Spock's Vulcan physique was an

advantage that often left Kirk envying his first

officer's strength and endurance. However, the

Kh@fflict field had apparently disturbed the

powerful links between his mind and body, turning

Spock's strongest asset into a grave

liability.

YES, SPOCK. THIS IS THE CONTROL

CENTER.

"Which computer contains the information we need?"

Spock's gaze lingered on some sets of

controls and slipped quickly past others. His

expression told Kirk how daunting he found the

prospect of examining this massive array of

equipment. From his mounting sense of urgency,

Kirk realized that Spock was more concerned than he

had let on about how much time they had left

to solve this problem.

Kirk studied Spock's question, turning it around

to look at it from several angles. No matter

how he rephrased the words, his Kh@fflict lower

brain did not respond. TRY MORE

SPECIFIC QUESTIONS, SPOCK. I NEED A

CONCRETE TRIGGER.

Spock's eyebrow rose. "May I ask

what told you how to eliminate the Security

measures?"

WHEN YOU SAID THE WORDS "DISTORTION

FIELD," I KNEW WHICH CONSOLE WAS

THE CONTROL UNIT. THE COMPUTER GAVE

ME THE DIRECTIONS FOR DEACTIVATING

THE FIELD. At the time he had been so

concerned about Spock that he hadn't considered how

remarkable it was for his Kh@fflict lower brain to hand

him the key to the entire planet's security

system. In retrospect, it was frightening to think

what else might be buried in his head.

"Fascinating," Spock murmured. He was

quiet for several moments, as though analyzing

exactly what they needed. "Can you show me how the

transit frames work?"

At first Kirk felt no response. He

wondered if he had misinterpreted the

Kh@fflict's reactions, or if he had

misunderstood the Kh@fflict term for their

long-distance transportation devices.

By rephrasing the question several ways, each time adding

a slightly different twist and increasing the

urgency of the request, he finally got something from his

host. The transit frames were mere

technology, a subject fit for underlings and

technicians but too insignificant to interest a

future leader.

Annoyed, Kirk informed his lower brain that

aliens were secretly infiltrating their world by using

the transit frames and that he had been assigned

to prevent that from happening anymore. That

satisfied his host, but the information he provided was

vague and confused. I DON'T THINK HE

REALLY KNOWS, SPOCK, Kirk signaled.

I'VE GOT A ROUGH NOTION

WHERE TO START, BUT I FEAR WE'RE

GOING TO HAVE TO DO THIS BY TRIAL AND

ERROR.

They started off, searching the maze for the console that

matched Kirk's impressions. It took them

almost an hour to find it along the far wall.

Early in the search, Kirk had asked for

directions from the consoles he and Spock passed,

but he had been unable to access the information.

Finally, after having to retrace their steps three

times and begin afresh, they reached their objective.

Sandwiched between two environmental control units

and surrounded by the waste management computers for the

major Kh@fflict cities, it was the only

active unit in a battery of equipment as dead

as the people it had once served.

"Are those units permanently deactivated

or merely on standby?" Spock traced his finger

across the blank screen of a waste recycling

computer. Even after being abandoned for the millennia

since its creators died, this section of the complex

was immaculate, with no speck of dust to mar the

esthetics or the functionality of the control center.

When Spock asked the question, the answer floated

to the surface of Kirk's mind. DEAD. THE

LINKS BETWEEN THE CITIES THEY SERVED

AND THEIR COUPLINGS TO THE GEOTHERMAL

POWER GRID HAVE BEEN SEVERED. He

paused, feeling more information coalesce in his mind.

THEIR SUN ISN'T THE ONLY ENERGY

SOURCE THAT'S FAILING. THE KH@FFLICT

TAPPED THEIR PLANET'S GEOTHERMAL

RESOURCES HEAVILY TO COMPENSATE FOR

THE COOLING SUN. THAT LED TO THE

COLLAPSE OF THEIR CIVILIZATION AND

THE EXTINCTION OF THEIR RACE. THIS

EQUIPMENT STILL FUNCTIONS BECAUSE THE

UNITS NEED LITTLE POWER WHEN IN

STANDBY MODE.

They set to work exploring the control systems

for the transit frames. It was slow work, with

Spock sometimes redirecting his questions five or

six times before triggering any response from

Kirk's host. Even then the information was so vague

and confused that Kirk had to experiment for several

minutes with the console's controls before he could get

any data they could use.

When they stopped near midnight for Kirk

to eat, Spock said what was in both their minds.

"This is not working, Captain. Your host

does not possess the scientific programming

we require to solve this problem."

TRUE. It was a frustrating and depressing

thought. They were so close to the answers--he

literally had his pincers on them. However, at the

rate they were progressing, it could take days, or

even weeks, to locate what they needed. Kirk

did not think he could survive that long inside a

body that had to be drugged almost senseless so that he

could force his Kh@fflict alter ego to give him the

information he needed to free himself.

"There is only one solution." Spock reached

for his communicator. "I shall go through one of the

transit frames and then have the Enterprise

transport me back here. Logic dictates

that I will be given a Kh@fflict persona with

considerable technical expertise."

NO, SPOCK. IT'S TOO

DANGEROUS. I ABSOLUTELY FORBID YOU

TO TRY X. It was bad enough that they already had

five people to change back. Adding to the number only

increased their problem, and there was no guarantee

Spock's Kh@fflict body really would

possess the information they needed.

"Spock to Enterprise. One to beam up."

He sidestepped Kirk's attempt to knock the

communicator from his hand and moved behind him. Kirk,

his pincers slipping on the stone floor in his

haste, completed his turn as the transporter beam

took Spock.

Chapter Twenty-two

Spock materialized half an hour later

with a communications rig adapted for Kh@fflict

pincers strapped to his carapace. Kirk knew

immediately that Spock had drugged his Kh@fflict

body heavily with diazilyrion before letting

Scott transport him back into the control

center. Even so, the erratic flickers of color

on his carapace and the skittering twitch in his

movements told Kirk that Spock's host was

even less comfortable being here than Kirk's was.

Kirk suspected part of the uneasiness was caused

by the newness of the transformation, and that, after Spock

established his dominance over his host, much of the

discomfort would disappear. However, they did not have the

time to wait for Spock to pacify his Kh@fflict

lower brain.

Spock moved to the sloping console that

governed the transit frames and fitted his

pincers into the sockets. Within ten minutes he was

shifting levers and twisting controls with a facility that

made Kirk envious. After five hours he had

not attained that much rapport with the unit. Feeling

left out, he watched the patterns flicker across

the screen, almost too fast for him to translate.

Before long Spock had gotten so deep into the

programming for the system that Kirk could not understand

any of the images. With nothing more he could do,

Kirk settled down on his appendages and

drifted off to sleep.

A heavy thump close by aroused him from his nap.

With an effort Kirk twisted his eyestalks around

until he located the cause of the noise.

Spock was sprawled on the floor beside the

console, his carapace pulsing an unhealthy

grayish green. @ghWhat's wrong"...@ar Kirk

asked.

@ghI--don't know.@ar Spock's words were

distorted by random flickers of green. @ghI feel

--dizzy. Faint. As if I can't breathe.@ar

@ghally don't look very good.@ar In fact,

Kirk thought, he looked downright sick. The

green color nagged at Kirk's

subconscious. It was important, but he could not

bring the reason into focus. @ghAre you making any

progress with our main problem"...@ar

@ghI believe so, Elder. However, I have

reached a--restricted level--for which I do not have the

access code. I believe we will need to locate

a female Kh@fflict--what the system calls

a High Elder--to proceed further.@ar Spock

settled his limbs around his body as though preparing

to stay put for some time.

@ghLet me try x.@ar Kirk worked his way

around Spock and slipped his pincers into the control

sockets. It was easy to find where the system had

rejected Spock's commands, but Kirk had no

better luck in getting around the safeguards.

Finally he dropped his pincers in defeat and

turned back to Spock.

In the time Kirk had been working on the computer,

Spock's color had darkened to a brighter green,

almost the hue of Vulcan blood. That thought

crystallized into a certainty as Kirk realized

what the problem was. @ghSpock, did you run

any blood chemistry workups on the

Kh@fflict? Could the copper in your system be

making you sick"...@ar

@ghIt is--possible--Elder. There may not be

--enough iron in my system--for me to breathe

properly. The copper--in my blood--may be

poisoning--the Kh@fflict physiology. I

sense that I must--reverse the transformation--

soon. Or I shall die.@ar

@ghally won't die if I have anything to say about

x.@ar Kirk activated the communications unit and

tapped in his message. There was one Kh@fflict

female on the planet, and it was time she helped

them. Kirk wasn't sure how he would convince

her, should Talika decide that the humans were on

their own in this, but he had few options. Spock

needed her assistance immediately.

Talika materialized in a high fury,

ready to tear apart anyone who approached her.

Her reaction was coming straight from the Kh@fflict

section of her brain, and Kirk was intensely

grateful for the security team that Scott had sent

down to control her. A calculated burst from their

phasers immobilized her without rendering her

unconscious.

@ghally must help us, Oh Highest One. We

need access to the computer system so that we may

change ourselves back to our human form. Only you

can give us the access code we need.@ar Kirk

had to struggle to keep his colors and his posture

properly submissive, but remembering that

Spock's life was at stake made it much

easier.

Talika's carapace darkened to a contemptuous

fuchsia. @ghallyr blasphemy in invading this

place merits death. No male has ever stood

where you are and lived.@ar

@ghAnd I would like to be elsewhere, Most

Magnificent One. I need the access code

to remove my unwelcome presence.@ar Even

to himself, that argument sounded weak. What could he

suggest that would get to her? Kirk wondered. Her

rationale sounded purely Kh@fflict, but he

wondered how certain he could be of which persona was in

control. In some ways there was little to choose between the

self-centered Kh@fflict world view and the

Djelifan perspective, which was nearly as

restricted.

@ghWhy should I bother? I can rip you open with

my claws and let the cleaning robots carry off

the mess.@ar The fuchsia overtones gave her

statement a more sinister meaning, implying that the death

she intended for him would be both painful and

slow.

Kirk decided to try a different approach.

@ghally can kill me, Your Gloriousness. And the

other male with me will die soon. That will erase the

blasphemy you so detest, but it will also leave you with

only three subjects to rule.@ar A slight

flutter in her color told Kirk that his words were

reaching her, although she was struggling to deny the truth of

what he said. @ghAnd if you look behind you, you will

see four aliens from a race unknown to any true

Kh@fflict. I guarantee they will kill you if

you harm me.@ar

@ghBlasphemy! Heresy! Desecration! No

self-respecting female should be forced to hear such

vile insultsff@ar Talika's words came through

strong enough, but flickers of doubt punctuated

each phrase.

Sensing how close she was to the edge of her

reason, Kirk delivered the final blow. @ghally

are as alien in this place as I am! Look

into yourself, and you will know that you do not belong hereff@ar

@ghHeresy! Blasphemyff@ar she repeated,

her colors growing paler as Kirk's meaning

reached her. @ghally are still inferior! You must

acknowledge the natural order of lifeff@ar

He could not have explained why, but Kirk knew

those last words were from Talika, not from her

Kh@fflict host. He delivered his clinching

argument in gentle, supportive colors.

@ghIf you want to see your sisters again, Elder

Talika, you must give Spock the access code

so that he may free you from your present form.@ar

@ghallyes.@ar One of her pincers twitched.

@ghallyes. Tell them I need access to the

console.@ar

Kirk tapped a message into the communications

unit, telling the guards to let her move. By the

time he finished, Talika was able to drag herself to the

console that controlled the transit frames.

Pulling herself into position, she slid her pincers

into the sockets and shifted the levers in an

intricate pattern that Kirk would have thought was beyond

her in her present, half-stunned condition. When

she finished, she withdrew her pincers and wandered

away, her movements unsteady and wavering.

Worried, Kirk watched her leave but

realized that Spock needed his help more. His

gills were quivering erratically, their surfaces a

dry and unhealthy green. Spock struggled to get

to his feet after Talika left, but his

strength was almost gone. Two of the security guards

lifted him into position on the sloping console. With

slow, hesitant movements, he entered a long

string of commands into the system. Watching the screen,

Kirk kept wondering when the computer would reject

the overrides, which went so far against everything that had

been programmed into the system by its builders.

Even more, he feared that Talika had entered a

trap code that would send Spock's programming

back at them as a weapon.

Finally Spock wi thdrew his pincers from the

sockets. @ghI believe--I have--done--it. The

best--test--is that--I try x.@ar

Everything in Kirk cried out that it was too

risky for Spock to be the first one through the

reprogrammed transit frame. Talika's

code could still be false, and the trap would spring when

someone used the frame. However, Spock's

condition was critical, and it was much too likely

that he would die while they tried to check out the

system. @ghVery well, Spock. You test it, and

I will persuade the others to go through.@ar

He signaled the ship to transport him,

Spock, and the security guards to the nearest

transit frame. Although it took no longer than

usual to beam them there, it seemed like the longest

few seconds in Kirk's life. They

materialized on the rocky ground where Chekov

had fought his duel with the security guard. Spock

tried to stagger through the frame, but he was too weak

to stand, and his carapace was turning a ghastly,

mottled green.

Unslinging the communications set from across his

body, Kirk ordered the security team to carry

Spock to the frame and push him through. On the other

side, Kirk saw several security men

clustered around the first artifact. As Spock's

front pincers disappeared into the window's

surface, the scene wavered and broke up.

Kirk thought that he aged a lifetime before the scene

from the receiving end of the transit frame reappeared.

An emergency medical team led by Dr.

McCoy was clustered around Spock's inert but

fully restored body. From McCoy's

abrupt, impatient gestures, Kirk knew that

Spock was in bad shape. The question he needed

answered was whether the last passage through the

transit frame had caused further damage or

if Spock was suffering only from his inability

to function in a Kh@fflict body.

Hoping McCoy would have an answer for him

soon, Kirk turned his attention to getting the

others back through the transit frames. There would

be fewer difficulties, he knew, if the

Kh@fflict saw no signs of the Enterprise's

crew or their equipment. However, if there were

problems with the transformation process, he wanted

medical teams standing by to give immediate emergency

aid. Also, given how hard he had worked to get

everyone back to the second artifact before he

realized how traumatic they found the sight of their

former crewmates, Kirk feared that the security

guards would suspect a trap awaited them on the

other side of the frame.

The thought of entrapment twisted through his brain,

repeating itself in a dozen variations before Kirk

noticed the mental loop. Something was happening

to him, sending him off in a mental fugue that

threatened to become a paranoid's dreamland. With that

thought, the explanation unfolded itself. He had been

feeding his Kh@fflict body massive doses of

diazilyrion to suppress his host's reaction

to a situation the Kh@fflict's programming

considered impossible. His body was building up a

tolerance for the drug, and soon the Kh@fflict mind

would go insane rather than obey Kirk's orders.

He had to get the others to go through the transit

frames before that happened.

The place to start was with the two people here, he

decided. Hoping that both Chekov and Talika

had ingested enough diazilyrion-laced food

to tolerate the shock of the Enterprise's

transporters, Kirk ordered Scott to beam

them to him.

Chekov arrived first, his carapace glowing with

submissive golds and tans. @ghOh

Worshipful Elder, I am so grateful for the

mercy you show in freeing me from the Forbidden

Zone.@ar

@ghThere is no need for thanks, Little One.

Simply pass through the frame so you will be outside

the reach of the Evil Ones who sent you there.@ar

Kirk thought his speech was simple and his logic

compelling. If it's this easy, he thought,

they'll all be safely back on the

Enterprise in half an hour.

@ghallyr mercy in freeing me shows no bounds.@ar

Chekov showed no sign that he had read Kirk's

words. @ghI shall walk in your shadow forever.@ar

Kirk repeated his request for

Chekov to enter the transit frame, this time making

his patterns simpler and his colors purer. Still

Chekov did not see what Kirk was saying but

continued to stagger drunkenly along a path only

he could see, repeating his own message. After the

fifth try, Kirk acknowledged that Chekov was

too far gone in his fantasy world for him to reach.

He considered ordering the guards to shove Chekov

through the artifact but rejected the idea. Until

he knew what had happened to Spock, he would not

force anyone through the windows. Reluctantly he

let Chekov wander away and waited for Talika.

When she materialized Talika was further out

of touch with reality than Chekov. As far as

Kirk could tell, she was completely unaware of

her surroundings and his presence. Her carapace

kept repeating the same patterns, but Kirk could

only interpret about half of them. She was

haranguing someone about female superiority, but

Kirk could not tell whether her Kh@fflict or

her Djelifan persona was in control. Brushing

past Kirk as if he wasn't there, she drifted

off on a course parallel to Chekov's.

Fighting his frustration, Kirk ordered Scott

to beam him to the other artifact and to clear away the

signs of human occupation from around the transit

frame. He materialized within sight of the two

surviving guards. Immediately Kirk began flashing

them a message of the fabulous food source he

had discovered on the far side of the transit

frame. As he had guessed, his images

captured their attention, and they followed him

eagerly toward the artifact.

It was a longer hike than Kirk had thought, and

it took them almost an hour to reach the transit

frame. During the last half of the trip, he

sensed a growing instability in both his companions,

and he was beginning to wonder about his own capacity for

sane judgment. However, as the black

rectangle grew on the horizon, Kirk's

fears receded. These two, at least, would soon be

safely returned to their human forms.

A hundred meters from the frame, the smaller

guard flared to a bright crimson and jumped on his

companion. The larger guard reared in the air,

flipped his attacker, and bolted. His escape

took him away from the artifact at high speed,

and he was out of sight before Kirk could react.

The smaller Kh@fflict went inffconvulsions,

thrashing violently until he bounced

against a spur of rock and caromed toward the lip

of a nearby wadi. He tumbled over the edge and

landed on the rocks below with a sickening crack.

Kirk felt the tide of insanity rising

inside him, reaching for his mind with seductive,

consoling arms. It would be a relief to surrender,

to never make another life-and-death decision that

affected someone else. With the last vestiges of his

sanity, Kirk forced his limbs into motion and threw

himself through the transit frame.

Chapter Twenty-three

He awoke in a place of brightness and shiny

equipment where panels of blinking lights and

shifting patterns covered the walls and soft

mechanical voices murmured a ceaseless

lullaby. A woman's face, tired and

drawn, framed by golden hair, floated into his

line of vision. "Captain, how are you feeling?"

The words should have meant something, but they didn't.

What was it she wanted from him? A worried frown

creased her forehead when he didn't answer.

"Captain, are you all right? Can you hear me?"

Her voice was sharper, carrying a new sense of

urgency. She turned away from him, raising her

voice to be heard by someone farther away. Dr.

McCoy! The captain is awake, but he is not

responsive."

Still not sure what he was supposed to do, he

remained silent. Sooner or later someone would

tell him what was expected, and then he would do it.

When a man's face, older and more lined than the

woman's but equally haggard from lack of sleep,

floated into view, he was not surprised. The man

gave him an affectionate smile that lit his

rugged, kindly face. After a moment the worry

slipped back in place, making the doctor

seem more tired by contrast. McCoy

surreptitiously pointed a small device

toward his head. "Well, Jim, how are you

doing?"

Since they still had not told him how he was

supposed to answer those words, he again did nothing.

Openly now the doctor waved the device over his

body, paying special attention to his head and

one of his knees. When he tried to move that leg,

he discovered that the joint was painfully swollen.

The doctor made a second sweep over his

body, keeping his eyes on the wall

over his head. Curious, he tried to sit up so

he could see what was so interesting, but his body was

strapped to the bed with wide bands of material.

"Total amnesia." The doctor snapped his

hand closed around the device in his hand. "Complete

inhibition of the nerve impulses coming from every area that

affects memory recall. Christine, how long

do we have?"

"He's been here for fourteen hours,

Doctor," the woman answered. "Mr. Scott

has been calling every half hour to find out when he

can take over command."

"And there's no change in Spock's condition."

McCoy heaved a deep sigh. "I hate to do

it, but get the cortico-synaptic modulator.

We can't wait for him to come out of this on his own."

"Yes, Doctor." Her boot heels

rapped a staccato tattoo on the floor as she

disappeared from sight. When she returned, she was

carrying a small black object with a silver

grille on one end and several controls on its

largest flat surface.

McCoy took the object from her and did

something to one of the controls. At the same time, the

woman made some tapping noises on the console

beside his bed. They finished their work at the same time.

She looked at the doctor, frowning. "Current

research indicates that the best results are

obtained by starting at the threshold level and

gradually increasing the intens ity over a period of

hours, until the subject's memory is

restored."

"If we had a "period of hours," we

wouldn't be using this gadget at all. I prefer

to let nature take its course."

"Agreed, Doctor." She made a few more

tapping sounds. "The captain's brain scans are

on the screen, along with the cortico-synaptic

results for several test subjects with similar

brain-wave patterns."

"You've been busy, Christine." The

doctor's voice held a warm note of

approval. He left the bedside and went

to examine the data.

"I feared this approach would be necessary,

Doctor, after what you found on the first test

series." She shrugged. "Besides, I didn't have

anything better to do in between checking their readings last

night."

"Well, it's saving us some time now."

He adjusted the settings on the control panel.

"Four point three should be enough, but I'm going a

little higher. I'd rather not have to wait through the

neurological rebound to take a second shot

at it."

"Yes, Doctor." She stepped back.

"He's ready."

McCoy passed the black object across his

forehead and a blinding flare erupted in his brain.

Everything he had ever seen or tasted or touched or

smelled or felt seemed to be happening to him

again, all at the same time. It was too much. He

couldn't handle the flood of information that was clamoring

for recognition. Then, mercifully, everything went

black.

Kirk awoke with a splitting headache. The

bleeps and pings of the sickbay monitors only

intensified the pain. Since when does Bones

use one of his diagnostic beds for a simple

headache? he thought, trying to roll to his feet.

The restraining band across his chest held him to the bed.

"Bones, let me out of here!"

As if conjured up by his words, McCoy

appeared at his bedside. "How do you feel,

Jim?"

"My head hurts, but other than that I'm

fine. Let me out of here!" A terrible sense of

urgency gripped him, telling him that he was

desperately needed somewhere else.

"Not so fast." McCoy ran a scanner over

him and confirmed the report on the overhead

monitor. "What do you remember about the last

couple of days?"

"The last couple of days? Don't be

ridiculous! We've been ..." His voice

trailed off as he tried to remember what he had

been doing for the last two days. The Enterprise

had been hauling a bunch of archaeologists around

the sector, and they had discovered ... Slowly the

details of their investigations on Careta IV

drifted into focus an ancient and sinister

race, inexplicable artifacts that still operated after

two hundred thousand years, being transformed into one

of the aliens. "How's Spock?"

A pleased grin lit McCoy's face, but

he sobered immediately. "He hasn't regained

consciousness, Jim. I was afraid to do too much

for him until I knew what exactly had

happened. He wasn't in very good shape

when he came back."

"He wasn't in very good shape before he came

back. We guessed that Vulcans don't have the

right biochemistry to make good Kh@fflict." He

squinted his eyes against the light. "Can't you let

me up and give me something for this headache,

Bones?"

McCoy released the restraining straps and

reached for his hypo. Kirk pushed himself to a sitting

position, rubbing his forehead. The hypo hissed as

McCoy pressed it against his arm. "Your guess

about Spock is probably a good one. We'll

let him recover a little longer on his own, then.

You came through fairly well, except for your

memory. We had to use the cortico-synaptic

modulator to bring it back quicker."

"That explains the headache." Kirk eased

himself to his feet, testing his balance and checking for

minor injuries from his adventures as a

Kh@fflict. He found a few bruises and

strains, but nothing that wouldn't heal within a few

days. "What about the others?"

"You two are the only ones who've come back

so far. Scotty said you were trying to herd everyone

through those window things, but he guessed the others had

gone pretty far around the bend. Anyway, we were

waiting to hear from you or Spock before we tried

anything more."

"How long have I been out?" Vaguely he

remembered someone falling off a cliff and

cracking something. He didn't know how well the

Kh@fflict withstood that sort of injury, or even

how serious it had been, but he did know that the

guard should have been treated quickly.

"Sixteen hours, all told." McCoy

nibbled on his lip, reluctant to volunteer

anything, but continued when Kirk gave him an

angry frown. "For a while your readings were so

erratic that we were afraid to do anything. Christine

thought it might have to do with that drug that Spock was

feeding you, so the best thing we could do was let your

body flush it out on its own."

"I see." Kirk crossed to the intercom and

called the bridge. He began issuing orders

even before Scott could congratulate him on being

back on his feet. "Scotty, I need the four

strongest security men we have. Equip them with

phasers set to heavy stun and give us one of your

heavy-duty cargo nets. Have everyone meet me

in the transporter room in ten

minutes. Kirk out."

He turned back to McCoy. "Have your

emergency teams standing by, out of sight, to assist

our people when they come through. We'll find them and send

them through one at a time."

"Are you sure you feel up to going down there,

Captain?" McCoy's face was creased with

worry. "The sensors can find them without your

help, and I'm not sure you're fit for duty

yet."

"I'm all right, Bones. Besides, it's not the

general locations I'm worried about. It's what

they'll do to hide from people on the ground." Kirk

flashed him a smile and tapped his head. "At the

moment I'm the only person who knows anything about

the way a Kh@fflict thinks."

McCoy looked ready to push his objections

further, but instead he shrugged. "Good luck,

Jim. I think you're going to need it."

"I'm afraid you're right." Giving the

doctor a rueful grin, Kirk strode from

sickbay.

Dawn on Careta IV was even worse than

he remembered it. A cold, dry wind roared out

of the sunrise, threatening to sweep them from its path.

It smelled of dust and desolation, two things that

Kirk knew he would always associate with this

planet, and the rattle of the desiccated grasses

sounded like the death knell of some ancient and withered

being. Perhaps it was a fitting epitaph for the

Kh@fflict, he thought. Certainly his experiences

here left him glad that their legacy had been as

impermanent as the march of sand grains before the wind.

The galaxy was incalculably poorer for the loss

of the civilizations they had destroyed with their

genocidal xenophobia. If he had his way,

when the Enterprise left Careta IV, the

Federation would impose as absolute a ban on this

planet as they maintained on Talos IV.

The ship's sensors easily located both the

Kh@fflict who were near the third artifact, the

one that stood on the canyon above the underground

complex. Once she had been transported to the

surface, Talika had wandered off and was hiding in

a fold in the land. Chekov, however, presented a

more dangerous problem. He had again started down the

trail toward the subsurface city, and since they

had not discovered how he had entered the first time,

Kirk had no idea if he could get

inside again. The sensors showed that he was stationary

for the moment, but they had no way of telling how long

that would last.

Kirk and the security guards started down the

trail, picking their way cautiously over the

loose talus and unstable slump areas that all but

obliterated the trail in some places. That

Chekov had negotiated the treacherous path as a

deranged Kh@fflict not once, but twice, was a

tribute to the tenacity of living beings, whatever their

physical form or societal values. Kirk

found he was having enough trouble managing this trail in

his human form, and he could tell the security men,

with less hiking and rock-climbing experience than

he had, were having greater difficulties.

It took them over an hour to find Chekov.

When he had pushed his Kh@fflict body to its

limits, Chekov had pulled himself off the trail

and crawled uphill across a landslide. Near its

head a small ledge formed a den just big enough for his

body. The fist-sized chunks of rock that

littered the ground below the opening made a quiet

approach almost impossible and promised treacherous

footing when they tried to dislodge him from the hole.

After studying the hillside, Kirk heaved a

sigh of frustration. "There's only one thing we can

do. Stun him from a distance and then drag the body out

into the net. At least we'll be able to beam back

to the artifact instead of carrying him up the hill."

Stunning Chekov was easy, but extracting his

body from the tiny hole proved a bigger

challenge. He had chosen a hiding place that

fit him like a second shell. Finally, after an

hour of slipping on the unstable footing, struggling

to gain a position where they could exert leverage on

the inert Kh@fflict, and swearing at everything in

general, they got Chekov onto the net.

"Energize!" Kirk ordered, relieved to have

finally retrieved one person. They materialized

half a dozen meters from the artifact, carried

Chekov up to it, and shoved his inert body through the

window.

"One down, three to go," said Timmons, one

of the guards. His voice was tense. If Chekov

was any example, the rescue was going to take much

more time and effort than they had hoped.

They walked past Talika's hiding place

three times before Kirk spotted the deeper shadow

of a pothole beneath the low cutbank. They should have

located her sooner, but their tricorders

had started giving them spurious readings when they

entered the section of the canyon where she was hiding.

Probably a Kh@fflict graveyard, Kirk

thought, promising himself not to mention the location to the

arch aeologists. It might be the only

Kh@fflict site on the planet that it was safe

for them to explore, but he wasn't willing to take

the chance. He had experienced more than enough of the

Kh@fflict to last him several lifetimes.

Talika was already unconscious when they found

her. Even so, Kirk ordered the guards to stun

her in case she woke up when they moved her.

If their tricorders couldn't get a good fix on

her at close range, they didn't dare trust

that the ship's transporter would do any better.

Dragging her body out of the hole was hard,

dirty work even after they used their phasers to cut

a ramp. They had to crouch under the overhanging

bank, and even before he had squeezed behind her

to help push her out, Kirk's back was complaining.

With him shoving from behind and two of the guards pulling from

the front, it took them fifteen minutes to get

her up to the level of the creek bed.

Timmons wiped his forehead, leaving a grimy

streak across it. "You wouldn't think it would be so hard

to move her, would you? My warmup weights start

heavier than that."

The other guards nodded in agreement. Before they

could carry the discussion further, Kirk ordered

Scott to beam them to the artifact. With Talika

sent through and returned to her own form, Kirk and the

guards transported to the second artifact

to find the men who had gone through that window with Kirk.

The country around the second artifact

provided fewer good hiding places, but their search

went much like the hunt for Chekov and Talika. The

guard who had fallen into the wadi had managed

to drag himself several dozen meters before finding a

hole to crawl into. Knowing what to expect, they

were able to rescue these two victims more quickly than

they had retrieved either Chekov or Talika.

Then, tired, thirsty, and filthy, they beamed

back to the Enterprise. They were the last party of

humans to leave the planet.

"What's the prognosis, Bones?" Kirk

asked. The doctor was still in the transporter

room, examining the last unconscious guard.

McCoy straightened and signaled the

orderlies to carry the stretcher to sickbay. "The

prognosis, Captain, is that you need

a long shower, a hot dinner--and eighteen hours of

sleep."

"Bones, that's not what I meant!"

Exhaustion made his tone sharper than he

intended. "What about the people we just brought back from the

planet?"

With a shake of his head, McCoy relented.

"They should be fine after they take a few days

to recuperate. Even Jacobs, with the broken

leg, should be back in fighting form by this time next

week. But you won't be, unless you follow the

prescription I just handed you."

"Yes, Bones." Kirk packed as much

exasperation as he could into his voice, but he

knew McCoy was right. He had pushed himself

to his limit to rescue those people. Food and sleep

sounded exactly like what he needed. He left

orders that no one was to beam down to the planet for

any reason whatsoever and headed for his quarters

to follow his doctor's advice.

Chapter Twenty-four

Five days later everyone was recovered enough

to evaluate their experiences on Careta IV.

Surveying the subdued group around the briefing

table, Kirk decided they all needed a rest

leave after this assignment. Spock, his complexion

still a little greener than normal, sat in his usual

place at the library computer. For once

Chekov was not talking before the briefing started, and

McCoy seemed fascinated by his stylus.

Dr. Kaul was present, released from

McCoy's care after an experimental treatment

at last overcame his violent, recurring

reactions to the suldanic gas. Lassiter and

Talika flanked Kaul, and both women were as

silent as Chekov.

Is it only two weeks since we sat

here to decide the best way to explore this

planet? Kirk asked himself as he waited for

everyone to settle into the seats. It seemed more like

half a lifetime. "All right, everyone," he said

when he thought they were ready. "We're here to discuss

what should happen with this planet and the Kh@fflict

artifacts. The unofficial consensus is

to quarantine the planet. Does anyone

wish to contribute any thoughts on this issue?"

Spock straightened in his chair. "Captain,

I have been exploring options for severing the links

between the Kh@fflict devices and their power

sources. At present there does not seem to be

any possible way to do this short of destroying the

objects themselves. I am uncertain whether even a

direct hit with one of our photon torpedoes

would be effective in obliterating the transport

windows. The Kh@fflict designed their systems

to withstand all forms of tampering and, indeed, most forms

of mass destruction.

"It would appear that we are not the first people to make

this discovery. The jamming fields that surrounded many

of the Kh@fflict sites were the work of another

civilization, which explored this system after the

Kh@fflict became extinct." Spock inclined

his head toward Kaul to acknowledge the

archaeologist. "Our analysis suggests the

Meztoriens explored this system and discovered the

Kh@fflict artifacts. We theorize that they had

similar experiences to ours and that they also concluded

that the Kh@fflict artifacts were extremely

dangerous. We believe that their experiences so

frightened them that they attempted to conceal or render

inoperative all the Kh@fflict ruins on the

entire planet. The shielding mechanisms they

placed around the transit frame at Site

J3 functioned to inhibit much of the transport

system. Coupled with the jamming fields that they

installed at all the major localities, their

efforts effectively prevented anyone from learning

of the Kh@fflict's existence for over one hundred

thousand years. It is a remarkable tribute

to both civilizations that significant components

of their technology continued to operate up to the

present."

"I have been assisting Mr. Spock in his

investigations," Chekov added. "We have been

unable to discover a way to operate these devices

unless the operator is wearing a Kh@fflict

body. Since so much of their information was

programmed into their brains, the computer systems

assume that the operator knows this data. In some

cases, as Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk

discovered, specific information is programmed

only in the brains of certain individuals.

Without a Kh@fflict body containing that

programming, I doubt if we can ever determine

how the system should work."

Talika lifted a massive hand to request the

floor. "No one must ever again Kh@fflict be.

When Kh@fflict I was, believed I that of

universe sole ruler was I. God almost.

Humans less than animals were. Of value

none, since not even food were they. When again as

myself woke I, realized I that Djelifans

often others almost as badly treat. This to be wrong

know I now. If persons must to study

Kh@fflict evil become, then study

Kh@fflict they should not."

Lassiter nodded her agreement, one hand

twisted into her pale blond hair. "There is an

evil presence lingering around this people-planet. I've

sensed it ever since we arrived, although it took me

several days to rather-realize it. Mr. Spock found

tangible evidence of this evil in the one underground

city, in the carvings that decorated their temple.

The Kh@fflict gloried in every horrible activity

we've ever heard of. From the references Mr.

Spock has discovered in our computers and from the

evidence of their own carvings, it is can-clear that the

Kh@fflict exterminated every intelligent race

they ever encountered. We can not-now account for

seventy-three people-percent of the "orphan"

cultures in this sector by do-direct reference

to Kh@fflict carvings that show these people being killed.

The true horror of the Kh@fflict's genocidal

massacres is that they never can-considered that the

other races they encountered might be intelligent.

Their world view said that they were alone, and so all

life-forms they encountered were but-by definition

inferior.

"You have all seen the carvings they left behind, how

evil and brutal these people-people were. By the time

their civilization fell, their brutality permeated

everything they touched. I can't--really--explain

what I'm that-trying to say, but I'm sure that the

evil was people-programmed into their computers along with

all the other information that they stored there. And since

the only way we can learn their language and

study their knowledge is to become one of them, we

can-cannot escape their evil, even though we

tell ourselves we are searching only for the good."

"I protest." Kaul's face was rigid with

anger. "This is the discovery of a lifetime, and you people

want to bury it forever. Science deserves the chance

to explore what the Kh@fflict have to offer us."

Kirk looked around the room, seeing how

Kaul's words sparked an answering

fury in the others. He wants his name in the

history books, Kirk could almost hear them

thinking. He wants the glory that would come from

having made such a revolutionary discovery. He

shook his head to break that train of thought. Kaul's

objection, no matter what his motives, was

valid. "I agree in principle with Dr.

Kaul that every discovery should be explored to learn how

we might benefit from it. However, in this case,

I don't see any way we can study the

Kh@fflict civilization from the outside."

Spock looked up from his computer screen.

"Dr. Lassiter and I have given that question

considerable thought, Captain. We have regretfully

concluded that there is no possible way to gain

access to the Kh@fflict computers without a thorough

knowledge of the Kh@fflict language. And since the

only way for the language to be learned is for the

computers to imprint it on a juvenile

Kh@fflict brain"--he held out his hands,

palms upward--"either the students must become

Kh@fflict, or they cannot study the society ."

Kirk nodded. "When you add to that the fact that the

Kh@fflict brain is almost incapable of accepting

the concept of other intelligent beings, you have a

ready-made prescription for disaster. None of us

was able to maintain his own identity all the time, and

we have no reason to assume anyone else would have

an easier time. Trying to coexist in a

Kh@fflict body with a Kh@fflict lower brain

is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone."

"Aren't you forgetting something, Captain? You're

sounding awfully casual about this business of people

changing into alien bodies." McCoy tilted his

chin upward at the angle that said he was preparing for

an argument. "I've had the privilege of trying

to put the lot of you back together again after this-here little

adventure. Now, you and Spock came out of it

reasonably well, but everyone else has had more

than a few problems trying to get some mental

balance back. The problem is, I don't know

whether I should help everyone regain his or her

memories, especially considering what some of them

have gone through, or if I should bury them so deep that

they will never surface. So, Captain, I

don't think two out of eight is particularly good

odds, especially when another two out of that eight

didn't make it at all. If anyone else was

thinking about changing into Kh@fflict, I sure

wouldn't want to guess which people would come through

it in any better shape than anyone else.

It's much, much too risky an experiment to be

trying ever again! And that's my official medical

opinion."

Kirk looked around the room. Everyone but

Kaul was nodding in agreement with McCoy's

words. He made a mental note to have the doctor

keep close tabs on everyone who had been

transformed into a Kh@fflict, particularly

Chekov. However, unless Chekov's memories

of his actions while in alien form surfaced in

coherent form, Kirk thought it would do more harm than

good for anyone to discuss the matter further. "That's

it, then. Our official recommendation is

to quarantine Careta IV and permanently ban

all investigations of its surface."

"I protest!" Kaul jumped to his feet,

slapping both palms against the table. "I protest

most strongly at this refusal to examine a find

of such significance!"

Taking his time, Kirk unfolded himself from his

chair. Using his height to dominate the shorter

man, he pinned Kaul with a steely glare. "We

were down there on the planet, and you weren't. It is

the considered opinion of everyone who had firsthand

experience with the Kh@fflict--including your own

people--that we have had more contact with this civilization than

is good for anyone's mental stability. The

Kh@fflict and their technology are too

dangerous for us to meddle with, and we dare not let

one of their genocidal crusades loose in the

galaxy. Your objections will be noted in my

official report, Dr. Kaul, but the

quarantine recommendation stands. Briefing

dismissed."

Before Kaul could collect himself for further

argument, Kirk made good his escape. The

bridge seemed wonderfully clean and peaceful and

orderly after his experiences on the planet.

Settling himself into the familiar contours of his command

chair, Kirk gave the order they had all been

waiting to hear for the last five days. A subdued

cheer went around the bridge in answer to his command.

"Take us out of here, Mr. Sulu. Warp

factor two."