KIRK AND SULU relaxed as Galileo streaked westward at supersonic speed across New America. It was a beautiful day. Sulu flew the little ship just a few hundred meters above the clouds. Kirk drank in the warm, pleasant light of the suns, filtered to gentle warmness by Galileo's hyperpolarized viewports.
It had felt awfully good to take the pressure suits off. They lay limply on the aft deck behind the passenger seats, looking like a couple of rubbery people with all the air let out.
Sulu stretched in his pilot's seat and relaxed. "I remember a day in Hawaii like this," he said.
"Hmm," Kirk grunted pleasurably. "Sometimes I miss this sort of thing a lot." He closed his eyes and enjoyed the warmth. It was blissfully quiet in the cabin, since they were supersonic, and Kirk hadn't had much sleep lately … mmmmm …
"Captain!" Sulu said. Kirk came instantly awake. "Sensors show unknown craft approaching us. Six bogies, tight formation. Bearing two five two, coming up from below. Fast!"
Damn! Kirk thought. "All right, Mr. Sulu. Let's meet 'em. I'll try to raise 'em on the radio." Too bad shuttles aren't armed. Add that to the wish list, Jim.
"Attention, unknown craft. Attention," Kirk said into the microphone. "This is Captain James T. Kirk of the Federation starship Enterprise, aboard shuttlecraft Galileo. Come in, please."
There was a pause and a burst of static, and then a crackling voice. "Galileo, this is Colonel Duncan Smith, commander of the Thirty-sixth Air Wing, Centaurus Defense Command. Welcome to Centaurus, sir; glad to see you made it. We will provide escort to McIverton. Over to you."
"Thank you, Colonel," Kirk replied. "Glad to be here. We'll follow you in. Kirk out."
"Roger on that, Captain. Smith out."
He thumbed the radio to inactive status and spoke to Sulu. "Interesting. They seemed to be waiting for us."
Sulu frowned. "That's not necessarily bad. Don't Federation governments usually provide an escort of honor for a starship captain arriving by shuttle?"
"Yes—but I specifically told Erikkson I didn't want one; this isn't a ceremonial call. He's shoving an escort down our throats anyway. I don't like that much, Mr. Sulu; it makes me think we're being herded."
"That may be the idea, Captain."
"That's what I'm afraid of."
A moment later, a squadron of six combat jets took up a precise formation around, over and under Galileo, providing a standard escort of honor. Kirk could not help noticing that the shuttlecraft was effectively boxed in. He also couldn't help noticing the sleek air-to-air missiles slung under the wings of each jet, a pair to port and another to starboard. Of course, it was normal enough for a warplane to carry such weapons … but the sight of them disturbed Kirk nevertheless. He felt vulnerable, and he didn't like that at all.
The shuttle and the jets continued flying in formation above the clouds, across the rest of New America, all the way west to McIverton. Kirk no longer enjoyed the trip.
About an hour after rendezvous, the seven craft dipped below the clouds just south of the new capital and banked to starboard, beginning their approach to Government Field. The shortwave radio crackled. "Here's where we leave you, Galileo. Your bearing to the field is niner-two degrees; pick up the tower on four five three kilohertz. Been a pleasure, Captain Kirk. Smith out."
"Thank you, Colonel. Galileo out." The six jets peeled away from the shuttle as Kirk twiddled a frequency dial on the shortwave console; there had been no time for Scotty to construct a digital readout, so Kirk searched back and forth within a narrow range for 453 kHz. Finally he heard something, and upped the gain.
It was a woman's voice, brisk and businesslike. "Galileo, this is Government Field Tower. Welcome to McIverton, Captain Kirk. You are cleared to land on the president's flitterpad; we will feed you a directional cue over this frequency. Please let us know when you have visual contact; the pad is marked with a red target. Please acknowledge."
Kirk pushed the talkback. Now I know exactly how Uhura feels, he thought. "Tower, this is Galileo. We are, er, thirteen kilometers south of you, bearing niner-two. Altitude eighteen hundred meters and descending. Send us the cue at your pleasure. Kirk out."
A not unpleasant tone came from the shortwave speaker. As long as Kirk and Sulu could hear it, it meant that Galileo was on a correct heading for the flitterpad; if they lost the tone, Government Field Tower would issue a course correction, which Sulu would follow. But Sulu was very good.
"There's the field," Sulu said.
And it was. Government Field looked like nothing more than the usual civilian airfield one came across on any sufficiently advanced Federation planet—except that this one had an unusual amount of traffic parked in its holding areas. Whatever government was left after the destruction of New Athens had coalesced here, on the other coast, and there had, of course, not yet been time to expand the field's facilities. Kirk did not envy the air traffic controllers their jobs. The arrival of Galileo must be causing them some headaches; even with a heavy volume of air traffic in the area, the shuttle had been cleared for landing immediately.
But the landing priority given Galileo—the normal sort of priority given any Federation craft bearing a visitor of Kirk's rank or higher—did not reassure the captain. Kirk still sensed an essential wrongness about what was going on in McIverton. He had no justification for that feeling, as yet. But it was there … and such feelings had served him in good stead more than once.
"Coming in for a landing, Captain," Sulu reported.
Galileo was nearing the presidential flitterpad, a concrete square about ten meters on a side. There was a target in its center—six concentric red circles forming a bull's-eye. Kirk could see three large black vehicles parked just beyond the safety line. Flitters? wondered Kirk. They don't look much like—oh! Limousines; I've seen pictures. Well, I'll be. We're getting the full treatment. Kirk had rarely ever seen an automobile. Advanced Federation planets still used them on diplomatic occasions, in the same kind of forced anachronism that once had Earth royalty still riding to their coronations and weddings in horse-drawn carriages more than a century after the introduction of the automobile.
Kirk had been in a car just once, on Iotia, a planet whose inhabitants had drawn their entire social and ethical structure from a book on twentieth-century gangster rule in Chicago. He had even tried to pilot the thing—with mixed results, but he'd enjoyed the experience. Despite his present misgivings, Kirk was looking forward to a ride in a car.
The pad was under them, now. "Grounding," Sulu said. The whine of the shuttle's impulse engines began to die away as the Enterprise helmsman gradually bled power from them, allowing the boxy craft to drift downward easily. Kirk watched as buildings and other structures began to rise into view in his window.
A light went green on the pilot's status board. "Landing legs down and locked," Sulu reported; a few seconds later there was a negligible bump. "Landed, Captain," Sulu said. "Hope you had a pleasant flight. Please exit from the side door, and remember to take your valuables."
Kirk smiled back. "Nice job, Lieutenant. Thank you." The captain looked out the window; Sulu had oriented the nose of Galileo to face the three parked limousines. There was a small group of men waiting there. "Look—a reception committee. And me without my dress uniform."
"Perhaps we could wear the pressure suits instead," Sulu said jokingly.
"Not on your life. Let's crack the hatch and meet the people, Mr. Sulu."
It was early in the local morning, but already the light of the two major Centaurian suns was dazzling. It danced on the white concrete runways and flitterpads, darting painfully into Kirk's eyes. Knew I forgot something, fumed Kirk. Sunglasses! I should have remembered. Squinting, he and Sulu walked down Galileo's landing ramp and over to the welcoming party. A tall, balding man of about forty had his hand out; Kirk shook it firmly.
"Greetings, Captain Kirk, and welcome to Centaurus. I'm Thaddeus Hayes, chief of protocol. Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir."
"Thank you," Kirk said. "Allow me to introduce Lieutenant Sulu, my pilot and confidential aide." Sulu allowed no surprise at his sudden status as aide to appear on his face; he had learned long ago to simply go along with anything Captain Kirk might say. Sulu shook Hayes's proffered hand and wondered what a confidential aide was supposed to do. Probably remain very quiet when the captain's talking, Sulu decided.
Hayes turned and indicated two much younger men. "These two gentlemen are my chief deputies: Roland Samuels and Winston Churchill McKnight." More hands were shaken. "I think that completes the introductions, Captain—oh, I forgot. You'll probably want these." Hayes stuck out a hand, and McKnight gave him two leatherette objects. "Sunglasses," Hayes explained. "I trust they'll fit you both … and if you wear yours, we'll be able to put ours on, too." Hayes smiled apologetically. "Please forgive my bluntness, but it is terribly bright today."
Kirk grinned. "No problem, Mr. Hayes." He slipped the glasses out of the leatherette holder and put them on; the hyperpolarized lenses did much to cut the glare. "Much better. We appreciate your thoughtfulness."
Hayes and the other two men slipped their sunglasses on. "You'll find sunglasses are pretty necessary items here, Captain," the protocol chief said.
"Yes. I must have a dozen pairs of these things kicking around somewhere. Not much use for them Out There, though."
"I'd imagine not, Captain. Well, shall we go? The president is waiting for us."
"Certainly."
"This way, then."
Kirk and Sulu walked toward the second of the three limousines, gently directed by Samuels; a silent chauffeur saluted deferentially and opened the door. Hayes climbed in after them, and only then did McKnight and Samuels head for the third limousine. Then they were off, with the howl of several sirens and the flashing of many red strobe lights clearing the way.
The windowglass of the limousine was itself hyperpolarized; Kirk, Sulu and Hayes took off their glasses. It was Sulu's first trip to Centaurus, and Kirk himself had never been in Mclverton.
They were approaching the city from the southeast. McIverton was the only city of any size on the west coast of New America; further expansion would have to wait a few generations. There were villages, though, mostly settled by highly individualistic types who thought McIverton, a town of two hundred thousand, was too big. They were passing through one such now: a conglomeration of houses of all architectural designs, from traditional suburban to NeoFuller. But all the houses had lawns, shrubs and cultivated plant growth. A few people could be seen taking their ease in those gardens, protected by sunbrellas; no one dared sunbathe during this planet's long summer without taking special precautions.
"This road's in good repair," Kirk remarked to Hayes. "Smooth ride."
"Thank you, Captain," Hayes said with pride, as if he'd had something to do with the maintenance of the highway himself. "We don't have much automobile traffic anymore, but quite a few people keep motorcycles and mopeds for recreational and commuting purposes. Lord knows this planet has plenty of oil to crack for gasoline; no one ever exploited it before we got here, and we've been careful not to remake Earth's mistakes. Oil is a nice little export business for us, considering Earth's so nearby."
Kirk knew that "nice little export business" accounted for billions of credits in the Centaurian treasury annually; Earth's hunger for petroleum had never abated, despite that day in the middle of the twenty-first century when the last drop of terrestrial oil had been pumped.
Fortunately for Earth, though, by the middle of the twenty-first century Earth was not the only possible source of petroleum. There, were, for instance, the virgin oil fields of Centaurus.
Although Earth now used the precious fluid only for the production of plastics and pharmaceuticals, Earth produced a lot of plastics and pharmaceuticals. Liquid hydrogen, small nuclear fission and fusion power plants, microwaved solar power and a range of less efficient but environmentally friendly alternatives met Earth's energy needs.
But Centaurus's spacefaring supertankers were grounded for the duration—until Spock and his crew could solve the Defense Center problem. Add economic dislocation to the list of problems we have to solve, thought Kirk wearily.
The limousine surmounted a hill, and the highway began to dip. McIverton lay ahead of them.
Hayes pointed. "I was born here," he said. "McIverton's a port, but we don't do much ocean shipping. Everything goes by cargo flitter. But we have a lot of recreational boating. The east coast has a little shipping, but the east is much more heavily settled. New Europe, the southern continent, has a few settlements that are out of easy flitter range of New America, so we'll sometimes run a ship or two down that way. Easier to use airplanes, though. They might be old-fashioned, but they get the job done."
"What about the third continent, across the Western Ocean?" Sulu asked. "Any settlements there?"
"Not yet, Lieutenant," Hayes answered. "We don't plan to open up New Asia until the next century, at least. Some people go there for vacations in the wild, but there are no facilities except for a handful of scientific stations. Mostly they handle zoological studies and other things you can't do very well from orbit." Hayes paused. "Of course, with all the satellites out, we might have to continue some space-based surveys from the ground. We'll have to see."
"You mentioned zoology," Sulu said. "I once specialized in biology. I know Centaurus has a goodly stock of Earth flora and fauna. What I was wondering was, how does it all cope with the nightless days you get here at maximum solar separation?"
Hayes nodded. "That was tricky, all right. We've got three stars in this system, of course, but only two of them count for anything. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf that orbits Alpha about a sixth of a light-year out. It's dim, cool and not worth worrying about." Sulu nodded; that was elementary cosmography.
Hayes continued. "Most of Centaurus is semitropical; Alpha Centauri is pretty bright. Beta's smaller and dimmer but adds a little warmth, too. Centaurus orbits Alpha, while Alpha and Beta orbit each other, like a big bolo in space." Both Kirk and Sulu grinned at that; it was quite an image. "Alpha and Beta were as close as they ever get to each other about nine years ago; we called it the Great New Year and celebrated like crazy."
Hayes grinned sheepishly. "I could tell you stories . . . but never mind; it's only once every eighty years." Kirk could not help grinning; he'd been there for it. The chief of protocol continued. "The stellar separation on Great New Year is about a billion and a half kilometers, and it gets a little warmer here. Thirty-one years from now, when the suns are at their widest separation—more than five billion kilometers—it'll be cooler."
"But what about nightfall?" Sulu wondered. "I can see the twin suns are together in the sky now, but there must be several months during your year that the suns are on opposite sides of the sky. And it must get worse as the suns draw away from each other; one will eventually rise half a day after the other, which effectively wipes out your nighttime. Or did I miss something?"
Hayes nodded. "Then we use Big Blotto."
"'Big Blotto'?"
"Our handy-dandy sun eradicator."
"Oh," Sulu said, catching on. "You blank out one of the suns. Beta, I guess?"
"That's right. Big Blotto is an automated station in a Luna-type orbit about half a million kilometers from Centaurus. It makes one complete turn around the planet per standard month. The station sets up a giant hyperpolarized field, and Beta's effectively gone from the sky, blotted out. Of course, it's really still there, but its heat and light never reach Centaurus because the planet sits in the 'shadow' of the hyperpolarized field. Then we get an artificial night on the side of Centaurus not facing Alpha; we get a mild planetary winter out of the deal, too, not to mention all the solar power the field absorbs. Big Blotto costs a bunch to run, let me tell you … but we all think it's worth it."
Sulu looked quizzical. "But doesn't all this have some effect on native Centaurian life-forms? I mean to say, they evolved under vastly different conditions …"
Hayes nodded. "There are problems. We think some forms—minor ones—are already extinct. But others are still thriving. Besides which, we need a day-night cycle for the Earth forms we brought here; they have priority. Without night, our animals would die and we'd have few if any edible crops—and a colony that winds up importing all its foodstuffs isn't much of a colony at all."
Sulu nodded agreement. "I've been on worlds that depended on food imports. Sooner or later, there's always some disaster."
"Right," Hayes affirmed. "Can you imagine, for instance, if we were dependent on imports to feed ourselves? We haven't had a ship land on the planet in nearly a week. We'd be running short even now; we'd be starving in another few days. There'd be chaos." Hayes sighed. "As bad as things are, they could be worse. We can at least take care of ourselves."
There was a short silence, which Kirk broke. "I take it, Mr. Hayes, you haven't been chief of protocol for very long … ?"
Hayes looked at him with a small smile. "Does it show that badly?"
Kirk smiled back. "Not at all. I bring it up only because you're the first unpretentious chief of protocol I've ever met."
Hayes laughed. "I'll take that as a compliment, Captain. Thank you. No, I haven't been doing this for long. President Erikkson pulled me out of the Ministry of Labor Relations for this job; I used to mediate labor disputes from an office right here in McIverton. The old protocol chief was in New Athens when the balloon went up, unfortunately. Most of us are new at our jobs, as a matter of fact."
"What about the gentlemen we've already talked to? Ministers Perez and Burke?" Kirk asked.
"They're from the old president's Cabinet; President Erikkson asked them to stay on, and they did. The three of them were on a west coast tour together when New Athens was destroyed. They were the only high government officials not in the capital when it was destroyed, as far as I know."
"Do you know the new president well?"
"I've barely met him, Captain. He was minister of state; he wasn't somebody I'd run into very often in the Ministry of Labor Relations. I don't know the other two gentlemen, either, although Minister Burke interviewed me for the job as chief of protocol."
"Mr. Burke is the internal security minister, isn't he?" Kirk asked.
"That's right."
"You had to pass a security check?"
Hayes nodded slowly. "Yes, I did."
"Why?"
Hayes was silent for a moment. "Forgive me, Captain—but I'd rather you talk with the president or Minister Burke before I answer any question in that area."
"Oh. All right." Feeling a touch awkward, Kirk looked out the window. "We seem to be in the city already."
"Yes, we are," Hayes said with all the enthusiasm one can bring to a gratefully changed subject. "This is Gregory Avenue; John Houston Gregory was the first man to land on Centaurus. The actual site is a few kilometers north of town; there's a village there now, called Gregory's Landing. We're using the government offices in Planetary Plaza, not far from here, as a temporary Government House. It's not nearly big enough, but there's nothing we can do except sit on each other's laps. At that, we had to evict umpteen government agencies to do it—including, I might add, the Ministry of Labor Relations." Hayes chuckled. "At least I got to keep my old office."
The motorcade made a left turn onto a wide boulevard—Kirk saw a sign that said FOUNDERS WAY—and it began to slow. "We're arriving," Hayes said just as the limousines entered an interior driveway leading to an underground garage. There were armed guards on both sides of a narrow pedway parallel to the ramp. Kirk and Sulu's car continued downward, stopping sidewise to a large elevator.
"Sorry for the back-door route, gentlemen," Hayes apologized, "but we have security problems at the present time." There were more guards here; one of them opened the passenger door and saluted smartly. On leaving the limousine Kirk smelled a peculiar odor, at once smoky and oily, not unlike one of Scotty's cruder lubricants; he could not place it because he had never before in his life sniffed the distinctive smell of a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine in a confined space. It wasn't pleasant.
"The elevator, gentlemen?" Hayes beckoned. He gestured toward it, and the three of them entered.