KIRK HAD ORDERED his officers to turn out in full-dress uniform when Flint was received aboard the Enterprise. A tape of "Variations for a String Quartet in Dm" recently composed by Flint was playing in the transporter room and throughout the ship as he was welcomed aboard and courtesies were exchanged. Starfleet and the Federation of Planets recognized this exceptional man for who he was, and who he had been, and had decorated him many times over in recent years for his services to humanity, though he had refused to attend the ceremonies. Now that he had been lured off his private planet to help search for the Sparrow, Starfleet Command had urged Kirk to fete him, shower him with honors.
Kirk knew the measure of the greatness of the man, and agreed he should be honored. He would do all that was appropriate. But what was this feeling of repugnance then, when Flint's form shimmered into existence on the transporter pad, and his robot servant materialized, floating behind him? Why did Kirk distrust them both, want to challenge Flint, accuse him … of what?
Still, knowing what his job required, Kirk managed to force a smile, stepped forward, and bowed. "Mr. Flint, our ship is graced by your presence. It is regrettable that we meet again under such trying circumstances. We will do everything possible to accommodate you."
Flint stepped off the transporter pad and moved toward Kirk, studying his face, surprised by such a genial greeting, wondering if it was meant as irony. "I hope my efforts will be of assistance in tracking the missing ship," he said at last.
"Starfleet has every confidence in you," Kirk said, still with forced amiability. He suppressed an irrational impulse to pull back and punch his august guest right in the jaw. What's wrong with me? I must be becoming unhinged.
McCoy stood to the side, at attention, his mouth in a sardonic smile as he watched the exchange. Spock observed it with his brows furrowed in a frown of concentration.
"You remember, of course," Kirk continued, "these two gentlemen, Dr. McCoy and First Officer Spock."
They bowed in Flint's direction.
Flint nodded toward them. Is Kirk trying to shame me with his nonchalance, his forgiving behavior? Or did my Rayna mean so little to such a busy young man with so many romantic intrigues behind him? "I am anxious, Captain, to begin work on penetrating my cloaking device. If you would be good enough to show me to my quarters and the laboratory facilities at my disposal …"
"Certainly, sir. Mr. Spock will conduct you to them."
"If you will follow me, Mr. Flint …" Spock said, anxious to end this interview, moving toward the door.
Flint paused. "There is some equipment I need, still on the planet. M-7 will see to its transport." The robot moved to the transporter consul beside Mr. Scott, who looked dramatically formal in his kilt-styled dress uniform. M-7 inched him out of the way and began punching in coordinates and pulling levers with its long mechanical arms.
It didn't have arms! Kirk thought, glad of a certainty about the past. This must be a new model. "Once you're settled in, Mr. Flint, I'll send technicians to assist you in your work." He was glad to at last see the doors whoosh shut on Spock and Flint, and gave a violent shudder of relief.
Spock watched Flint come on board with what a human would have called a feeling of pain. Obviously, he told himself, he could not have foreseen this. The odds against the ship-obsessed career officer Kirk, and Flint, the avowed recluse, being brought together again on a mission were quite astronomical. Logically, it would have been foolhardy to even consider the possibility. As if he had been attacked, questioned, pressed for it, Spock made the calculation in his head. Odds of easily 6,248.3 to one.
He could hear, in his mind, the voice of McCoy, mocking him. "For all your roots and percentages, Spock, you sure don't know much about life. Life is capricious, and it doesn't perform according to your tabulations." As usual, Jim had beaten the odds. But this time, the situation in which he'd done it was a disaster.
Entering Kirk's mind that way had not been a regulation move, but this did not concern Spock. He would gladly face court-martial, or give up his life if it meant helping his captain. But had he helped him? If he was hurt in the days ahead, the fault would belong to no one but Spock, and his miscalculation.
He led Flint to a small laboratory adjoining engineering, in which Flint could conduct his experiments. Spock explained some of the intricacies of the current computer system, and Flint inserted a tape of information into its consul. Soon he was viewing blueprints and graphs on the room's main screen. The Vulcan stood by him, watching. Occasionally, not looking up, Flint fired questions at him.
"Mr. Spock, I am looking for a flaw in my device. I do not expect to find one, but I am looking. You say the children's ship exposed itself at intervals, then disappeared again. Were the intervals at all regular?"
Spock had no clues to offer. "No, sir. Our helmsmen tried to calculate this, to plot it on a graph in time and space. Their findings show that there is no discernible pattern to the Sparrow's appearances. How often they occur, the light-year interims between them, the speed of the craft, all seem to be erratic, entirely random. This leads us to believe that the children occasionally switch off the device, or do not take the proper steps to maintain it. In the same way, they have occasionally used ship-to-ship radio—perhaps to taunt us."
Flint nodded.
"Of course," Spock went on, "these calculations were done before the Sparrow's incursion into Klingon space. Their warp drive seems to be gone, now, and Starfleet has assured us that the other ship systems will soon be going critical as well."
"Did they?" Flint said. "Unfortunately, Starfleet Command really knows nothing of my device. In a ship altered for the use of my cloaking device, the device will be self-protecting. It will maintain itself at all costs and, in a crisis, divert power from other failing systems for its own needs. It considers itself more important than warp drive, phaser power, even life support. It was designed to provide last minute camouflage in a danger zone, a combat situation. Only when the sentient beings aboard are lethally threatened by heat and oxygen loss will it give another system priority over itself."
Spock considered the complications this presented. "A system as hardy and enduring as yourself, sir," he said. In the past, he and his captain had encountered other such obsessive geniuses who tended to design their computers and machines in their own image.
"As hardy and enduring as I once was, Mr. Spock, before I chose to wander into space, away from Earth. I have proved vulnerable—so must my device."
He returned to his charts and calculations, tested a thousand times before for accuracy, hopefully probed now for a sign of weakness.
Spock watched him but did not speak again. Flint soon began to mutter to himself; Spock's excellent ears were able to pick up remarks about personal folly, how a defensive weapon had become the cause for galactic confrontation, he never should have designed it … Spock realized Flint was simply talking to himself. Perhaps he had forgotten Spock's presence entirely.
The murmurings died away, as Flint seemed to have hit upon something. He was asking the computer for readings of various substances, their chemical makeup, and the feasibility of reducing them to powder.
After two hours had rolled by, Spock ventured to remark on this—his curiosity was tugging at him.
"Mr. Flint, if I may venture an observation, the methods you are using, the experiments you are conducting, have little to do with cloaking device technology, as I understand it."
Flint nodded. "Quite correct, Mr. Spock. And that is because the cloaking system I developed was a major break from the usual methods of cloaking a vessel, hiding it from sensors. Earlier, more primitive devices sought only to mask a ship. Mine confuses sensors so that they pick up unclear or completely false readings. They will report that the ship is in several places at once. Or they report it to be an asteroid, or a pocket of asteroid rubble. Or they read it as an ion storm, a quite effective illusion in this quadrant. Or they sometimes read it as the empty void of space. The device causes the illusions to alternate and provide the ship chameleonlike camouflage which complements the ship's surroundings. For example, it will read as an ion storm in an area where real storms frequently occur. The illusion of the void of space is the easiest to penetrate once the ship is generally located. But it will never maintain that illusion for too long."
Spock nodded, impressed. He had not understood before precisely what was meant when Starfleet's secret tapes stated that the Flint device "misinformed" sensors. "A most clever method to use, sir."
Flint smiled. "Too clever, I'm afraid. I tried to invent a cloaking device that could not be penetrated. I may have outwitted myself in the process."
"Then you see no hope?"
"Not of getting clear sensor readings of the Sparrow, no. You see, even if we penetrate several of the illusions, the device will have many more still in store, and it could, if necessary, project an illusion far away from us, as a decoy, to distract us … What I am pursuing now is the idea of throwing some substance at the ship which will stick to it, make its outline discernible. The substance must adhere to the hull of the ship, must be producible in mass quantities, and, as it coats the Sparrow, be beyond the cloaking device's ability to hide it."
"Of course," Spock said, on his face a look akin to excitement. "Yet you've been experimenting with granulated trititanium, and dilithium splinters … the Enterprise cannot produce these in large enough amounts …"
"I am aware of that, Mr. Spock. So, something cheaper is needed, something producible in bulk, but with the same qualities as these substances."
"Properties of both energy and matter?"
"Exactly," Flint said.
"Mmmm," Spock fairly purred. "I shall instruct engineering to take inventory of all such substances on board, and to supply you with a list."
"That would be most helpful."
Silence fell again as Flint monitored on his computer screen experiments with antimatter being conducted in a decompression chamber on the other side of the ship. The antimatter proved too volatile and unpredictable to be useful. "As I expected," Flint said softly. He punched the results into the computer's problem-solver information bank. "Mr. Spock," he said mildly, as the results of the experiment were tabulated, and another trial substance was selected by the machine, "your captain, to all appearances, harbors no ill feeling toward me. Is this, in fact, the case?"
Spock hesitated, then replied, in a voice impossible to read. "It is unknown to me precisely how the captain now regards you. Or what his feelings are about what occurred when we visited your planet."
"And yet his duty to Starfleet, and to me as a guest, appears to be his first consideration. Such strength of character in a man is to be admired."
Inwardly, Spock firmly agreed with this view of Kirk. But he wasn't sure that it was this, exactly, that had motivated him to be so genial to Flint in the transporter room. He was eager to redirect the conversation and had been curious about Flint's behavior since the remarkable ancient had come on board. "If I may venture to say so, sir, your bearing and behavior seem changed from what they were when we were on your planet. You seem at peace … somehow more calm and resolute."
Flint smiled slightly. "Yes, Mr. Spock. Grief over Rayna's death, and knowledge of my new mortality have turned me into the man you see now. There is a despair that I must fight, and my impending death which I must triumph over by living fully and achieving until the end. Does this make sense to you?"
"Indeed. I believe that it does." He bowed slightly. "Mr. Flint, I will leave you to your work."
Spock left the lab and turned toward engineering as the doors slid together behind him. He delivered the request for an inventory of substances to Mr. Scott, all the while brooding over his exchange with Flint. Then he headed for the turbolift and his cabin.
The warmth and silence of his quarters were soothing. He sank into his chair and gave himself over to reflection. It was fortunate that Flint had decided to attribute Kirk's lack of hostility to the captain's noble character. It seemed that Flint would force no confrontation or embarrassing discussions with the captain. Still, it is a time bomb. Even if Flint never brings it up, it's unfair to Jim to keep him in the dark about what happened.
Spock considered the changes he had observed in Flint, and his mind wandered back to Boaco Six. For Flint, now grave, noble, sad, reminded Spock sharply of old Mayori, the veteran of that planet's long struggle, the oldest member of the Council of Youngers.
Flint had murmured something to himself, as Spock had stood attending him, observing his experiments. A phrase Spock now identified as a Longfellow quote from "The Building of the Ship": "And in the wreck of noble lives/Something immortal still survives."
The mein of both aged men seemed to embody for Spock a tenet of the philosophy of his own world that had been handed down from Surak: the belief that inner peace could be maintained in the face of all external forces. That a person who married his actions to his beliefs, and kept his conscience clear could, in the face of all trials, maintain his center, his balance, his contentment with the change and flux of I.D.I.C.—the Vulcan credo of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination.
But for one without this inner certainty, he thought ruefully, who doubts the merit of his actions, no matter what his situation, there could be no rest, no center, no peace.
The Vulcan stroked his chin and wondered what would happen if war broke out between Boaco Six and Boaco Eight, with the great powers of the galaxy arming both sides in the struggle. Surely carnage and escalation would follow, and the destruction of the fragile order of the Boaco Six revolution, Mayori's young program of prison reform along with it.
Spock picked up his Vulcan harp, let his fingers trail once across its strings, and then laid it down again. Mayori's efforts were worth saving. Perhaps it would take the slow, deliberate efforts of Flint to salvage the slow, deliberate efforts of that other veteran of the years.
Yes, Flint's efforts. And those of a captain who was carrying more burdens than he knew or understood. A captain who had to work with Flint, accommodate him. A captain who trusted his first officer implicitly in all things, and yet had been deceived … Spock leaned back in troubled thought.
There could be no center, no inner peace for Spock until Jim knew. The captain was agitated, confused; Spock must bear a large measure of the blame. His mind ran back over other times they had discussed sensitive matters, let down their guard enough to expose their frailties and lend each other support. In this very cabin … problems had been discussed. What the stiff and clumsy instruments of language could not express was understood between them. What was not understood was felt. He would make a clean confession to his captain.