GHOST WALKER

Chapter One

It was in the Moon of the Blue Berries, in the
third year of the twelfth cycle of the Treecat
star in the thousand and forty-second turning of the
Wheel of the Universe, when the Hungries first
began to appear and disappear in the Bindigo
Hills. At first they seemed to be like children or like
the giant running-apes, not knowing anything but doing
no harm; then they began to catch animals and
make them disappear, and tried to catch people as well,
but the people ran away and hid in the warrens. Later
the Hungries began to kill people, and roasted and
ate their flesh. Then the hunters of the Bindigo
Warren and the other warrens near where the Hungries
appeared began to slay them, as they hunted the
Flaygrubs and Hootings.
Only in the fifth year of the twelfth cycle
did Kailin Arxoras, patriarch [n.b.
designation unclear] of the Bindigo Warren and
memmietieffos [concept unclear--
untranslatable from Midgwin language *]
draw close enough to the Hungries to walk in their
dreams as they slept, and to realize that they were,
after their own fashion, people too.
* See Enchar T'Krau Shorak,
"Telepathy Among the Midgwins,"
Journal of Intercultural Contacts
very. 93-3, and Neary, R. Jr.,
"Communications Problems with Non-Verbal
Alien Languages," JIC very. 30-
9.

From Songs of the Midgwins, translated and
introduced by Dr. H. H. Gordon, Oxford
University Press.

"Cute little critters, aren't they?" Dr.
Leonard McCoy, hands on hips, surveyed
the silent crowd of rotund, shovel-headed
Midgwins gradually forming in the pale twilight
at the end of the box canyon where the landing party had
materialized. Now and then a Midgwin would
raise its head on an extensible neck, adding
another foot and a half to its insignificant
height, to look with luminous gray eyes over the
heads of its fellows. But mostly they just gazed.
Every pair of bony, three-fingered hands held a
flower; wreaths of flowers circled many
pairs of narrow little shoulders or rested on the
long, webby manes of their hair, and against the
gathering twilight the pale blossoms seemed
to float disembodied, the fragile honey scent of
them unbearably poignant against the faintly musty
odor of the Midgwins themselves.
"Don't let them hear you say that, Bones,"
Captain James Kirk reproved his ship's
surgeon softly. "They killed a dozen of our
scouts and contact personnel before we convinced them
that there was a difference between us and the Klingons."
McCoy looked indignant at the
possibility of being mistaken for a Klingon. Behind
him, Dr. Helen Gordon laughed softly and
said, "I expect we all look alike to them."
"We do." A man's quiet voice spoke
from the shadows of the fat-trunked, almost leafless
barrel plants that huddled thick among the
canyon's stones. "But not in the way you think."
Kirk turned quickly, startled, and annoyed with
himself. Though the planetary contact team had
reassured him repeatedly that the landing party would be
in no danger and must be kept to the absolute
minimum, he was slightly on edge without the
safety margin of Security personnel. He
should, he knew, have heard these newcomers arriving
at the landing site.
They stepped from the encircling blue gloom into the
open two Vulcans and an Argellian in
hard-worn khaki coveralls, led by half a
dozen Midgwins, the foremost of whom was so old that
his smooth, purple-brown skin had faded to a
dusty gray under the whitish ridges of the whorled
scar tattoos. His eyes had faded too. They
were glacier-gray, wise and sad, and the skin around
them, and over his hard little beak, was white, as were the
silky strands of mane that hung down over his
knobby shoulders. Alone among the Midgwins,
he carried nothing in his hands, though he walked with
their rolling two-legged stride instead of--as the
others occasionally did--assisting himself now and then with
one long arm touching the ground.
The male Vulcan, a small, neat little man
whom Kirk knew to be the anthropsychologist
Dr. Shorak, stepped out ahead of the white-faced
Midgwin and presented Kirk, McCoy,
Gordon, and the other two members of the Federation
contact team with two flowers each. "Hold one in
either hand," he advised softly. "It is said that you
cannot lift a hand in anger if it holds a
flower."
"If I stick one behind the wrong ear, will someone
proposition me?" McCoy inquired, sniffing
at the tiny, intoxicatingly sweet blossom.
Dr. Gordon smiled teasingly. "If they
don't, I will," she promised, and Kirk hid
a grin. Unlike Dr. Mei Chu and Dr.
Nomias Gzin, the other two representatives
of the Federation Xenological Institute, Helen
had not kept to herself in the two weeks they'd been
on the Enterprise. She had instead fallen
easily in!comradeship, not only with Kirk, but with
many of the crew. It was becoming difficult for
Kirk to remember what it had been like without her
big-boned, awkward presence among them in the
rec rooms or the labs--without the sound of that soft
husky alto, and the knowledge that she'd be somewhere around when
he came off-shift.
Shorak said, "This is Kailin Arxoras,
patriarch of the Bindigo Warren and ..." He
hesitated fractionally, then decided against giving
whatever other title he would have given. Instead he
took Kirk's hand lightly but firmly in his,
deftly tucking one of his own flowers out of the way
between skeletal fingers, as Kirk saw the
Midgwins do, and reached out to Arxoras with the other.
"Would you permit him to--to see into you? It is not
like the mind meld--it is a surface affair
only, to reassure him of your good intentions. If
you permit it, would you close your eyes, think of
nothing, and count backward from twenty?"
Kirk hesitated as the instinctive caution of
years of dealing with unknown factors balked within
him. "And how will he reassure me of his good
intentions?"
Shorak gave the matter momentary consideration.
After an eighteen-month stint in the bush, he was
heavily bearded, his long black hair braided
back into a short queue. His face, darkened
slightly by exposure to the honey-colored rays
of the star Elcidar Beta, was grotesquely thin,
and under the worn khaki his joints had the
disquietingly knobby look of borderline starvation,
though he seemed healthy and alert. Other than that
he was perfectly neat, sleeves rolled down,
trouser legs tucked into boot tops, every tab
affixed, which was more than could be said of his wife,
Dr. L'jian--a xenoanthropologist of
awesome credentials and comprehensively rumpled
appearance--and Thetas the Argellian, under
whose rolled-up sleeves Kirk could glimpse the
whorled marks of Midgwin tattoos. Both
L'jian and Thetas had Shorak's look of
unnatural thinness, and with it his incongruous air of
health. Kirk noticed, too, that unlike his
Vulcan Science officer and every other Vulcan
Kirk had ever met, Shorak showed no hesitation
about physical contact with relative strangers.
He logged the anomaly in his mind and saw the
half-suspicious puzzlement that narrowed Bones
McCoy's eyes.
"I am not sure you would comprehend it if he
did," the Vulcan answered him after a moment.
"Due to the nature of the local predators, the
Midgwins have evolved communications which are
largely telepathic, and few humans have the
capacity to interpret or even receive them. It is
not imperative that you permit this."
For a moment Kirk balanced his natural
suspicion of unknown--and formerly hostile--
aliens with mind-probing powers against his natural
inclination to demonstrate goodwill, and his innate
faith that if goodwill were shown, in a
significant--if not overwhelming--majority of
cases, it would be returned. But what actually
won out was his curiosity.
"All right," he said, and closed his eyes.
The Vulcan's dry, twiglike fingers
closed on his.
Twenty, nineteen, eighteen ...
To say that he felt nothing would not be entirely
accurate, but at the time he had absolutely no
way to describe what it was he did feel. The
closest was perhaps the psychic equivalent of standing
with shut eyes while a horse sniffed at his
cheek.
... three, two, one.
He opened his eyes, and blinked. Arxoras
looked up at him with that sad gray gaze and said
haltingly, "T'ank 'o, Kep-i-tan," the
two soft tongues shaping words as best they could
around the hardness of the beak. It was difficult
to understand, but with careful listening, Kirk could make
out the words. "They have made a bright warrior their
patriarch, this warren floating in darkness like a
flendag nest in a stream." And releasing
Shorak's fingers, the old Midgwin reached out
to gently stroke the back of Kirk's hand. "I
share to others what I learn of you?" With a
graceful gesture he indicated the other
Midgwins grouped behind him, squatting on their
haunches, watching with those enormous eyes.
Curiously, now that he was a little used to them,
Kirk had begun to distinguish their various
expressions. The crowds of them still squatting around
McCoy, Helen, and Doctors Chu and
Nomias in the scuffed circle of crowding stones
at the end of the canyon were watching their alien
visitors with a look of childlike absorption in
their deeply folded, curiously juvenile
faces, but these grouped around the three researchers
were evidently not so uncritical. Several of them
were old, if the fading of color from skin and hair
was an indication of age; the folds of loose skin
around the protruding beaks were deep and baggy.
All were tattooed to one extent or another. But
in the eyes of some he could see skepticism,
wariness, hostility, at variance with the odd, old
manstchild physiognomy.
"You may share," Kirk said, and turning his
head, caught a worried glint in Shorak's
eye.
In turn, Shorak presented the others of the
new contact team and Bones McCoy to the
patriarch's psychic scrutiny. "A speaker who
will teach us the speech of the Hungries," Arxoras
said of Helen, touching her hand where Shorak, still
acting as link, held it. "A flower that has
felt sun for the first time." And, studying McCoy
for a long time, he said softly, "A healer living
in pain." McCoy turned his face away.

"I shall be glad of the presence of a relief
team," Shorak of Vulcan said later. Full
dark had fallen. They were sitting outside the
door of what Thetas the Argellian solemnly
referred to as the Elcidar Beta III
Xenological Research Institute, a mud and
wattle hut less than three meters in
diameter a quarter of a mile from the outskirts
of the village. A small campfire burned in
the center of a ring of flat river stones and
desiccated chunks of the soapy, soft-textured
local wood; and the low, flickering orange light
highlighted more strongly than ever the thinness of the
researchers' faces, the boniness of the Vulcan's
gesturing hands. He went on, "The civilization
here, though almost completely lacking in
instrumentality, is enormously complex."
"This?" McCoy's eyebrow went up
and he struggled unsuccessfully to keep an
incredulous chuckle out of his voice. Up the
straggling path through the hard, wiry bush jungle of
thorn thickets, rocks, and barrel trees the
first of the Midgwin houses could just be made out in the
gathering gloom, lumpish excrescences of mud that
stuck to the towering rocks, the squat trees, and
to each other, straggling in all directions up and
down the canyon and along the stream. Oddly enough,
even downstream from the village, the water was
clear, though there wasn't a great deal of it. Through
the soft, dust-smelling haze of evening the piping
voices of the Midgwins sounded no louder than the
chirping of cicadas in the night.
Thetas the Argellian nodded--Dr. Thetas
Farnakos Sredji Akunas, whose work on
societal structures was standard reading in every
anthro class from here to the Barrier, Kirk
reminded himself. The photographs Kirk had
seen of him had showed a plump little man with very bright
black eyes in the smooth Argellian face;
only by the eyes had he been recognizable.
Kirk had seen McCoy taking surreptitious
tricorder readings of all three of the researchers
--and had seen him double- and triple-check them.
As if oblivious to all of this, the Argellian
went on, "The rules of social interchanges--
the hierarchies of respect--the philosophical
education--to say nothing of their songs and legends--
all of them are among the most refined I've ever
encountered." He craned his head a little to see through
the tangled jungles toward the center of the
village. "It's truly a delight to work with
..."
Kirk got to his feet and followed the little
man's gaze back toward the lumpish shapes of the
mud huts among the thorn trees. Rose-amber
moonlight drenched the scene, dyeing the towering
rocks golden and outlining every thorn, every twig of the
jungle in numberless shades of orange,
cinnabar, and peach. Dimly he saw shadows
moving in the moonlight, more and more of them, and became
aware that the Midgwins were gathering in force. The
intermittent chirps of the verbal part of their
language had blended now into a soft, thrumming
murmur, like a cat's purr; he thought he could
see long lines of the Midgwins forming, setting
into thick, ridgy, concentric rings, like the rocks
themselves, shoulder to shoulder, hands linked, eyes
shut.
"What are they doing?" he asked softly,
turning back to the little anthropologist.
"It is the Consciousness Web," Thetas
replied. "They do it, not every night, but at least
three nights out of five. Each opens his or her
or its mind to the others, to feel their troubles,
to reassure one another of caring and love, to heal
sickness and hurts."
"So they believe," Shorak put in austerely
--if he hadn't been a Vulcan, he would have
squirmed. The shift of L'jian's eyes was
equally uncomfortable.
"Have you ever done it?" Helen inquired, folding
her long arms around her drawn-up knees. As
Kirk sat down again at her side, his elbow
brushed her shoulder, and he was acutely conscious
of her touch.
"It can be quite dangerous." There was a distinct
frost in the Vulcan's voice. "Any
psychoemotional melding ..."
"I've tried." The Argellian's dark
glance slipped teasingly sidelong at his
disapproving colleague. "My cold did go
away." He looked back at Helen. "It's
an unnerving sensation to have that much of your consciousness
scrutinized and not be able to do anything about it."
"Aren't there mental techniques to protect
certain areas of the mind from that kind of invasion?"
Kirk asked, recalling, uncomfortably, the
twenty-four hours of displaced consciousness he had
experienced not too long ago with the strange,
godlike alien entity Sargon, the few moments
of shared awareness. "As a Vulcan, surely you
would have some kind of shielding."
Thetas's next remark about wearing a cha/y
belt on one's wedding night was cut off
by Shorak saying "Indeed, both my wife and I
have had frequent occasion to utilize such
technique." He was, Kirk noticed, as
brusque and evasive about the topic of mind-sharing
and mental disciplines as Spock was, as guarded
about the dark shadow-side of Vulcan culture,
and Kirk was aware of L'jian's tilted
eyebrow as she exchanged a glance of speculation
with her husband about where an Out-worlder would have
acquired such knowledge in the first place.
Shorak nodded to Doctors Chu and Nomias
and said "We can instruct you in those techniques,
if you have not been so prepared at the Institute--
they are quite similar to certain Vulcan
mind exercises. In a civilization where they are
accustomed to reading one another's dreams, you might
find the disciplines of mental closure useful."
Shrill and sudden, a Midgwin voice cut
sharply through the milky stillness of the night.
Kirk's glance snapped back toward the
village, recognizing the sound of trouble, his every
instinct on the alert.
One of the Midgwin patriarchs had sprung up
on a stone--or maybe it was somebody's hut,
they weren't much bigger--in the center of the dreaming
rings of the Consciousness Web. There must have been
thirty or forty circles of them by this time, thousands
strong, podlike leathery bodies jammed together.
Their eyes were open, Kirk could see, a spiral
galaxy of dimly glowing stars.
The elder gestured, the sweep of his bony arms
filled with tension and fury; even at this distance
Kirk could see that his head was flat to his
shoulders, his beak tightened to the semblance of an
angry bird as he cawed and piped. The huge,
three-fingered hand jabbed out again and again toward the
shabby hut of the Research Institute, a cutting
gesture eloquent of rage.
"What's he saying?"
Shorak, who had risen also and stood, arms
folded, head down, listening, did not reply.
Helen, who had studied the Midgwin speech in
preparation for this mission, got to her feet and said
softly, "He's angry. He says the
Hungries will spread death upon everything they
touch."
"In a pig's eye," McCoy muttered, his
mouth twisting. "By the look of them, these people are
starving themselves to death--their population's outrunning
their food supply, if they're gatherers like you
say, Helen. I haven't seen anything
resembling organized crops ..."
"There aren't any," Thetas replied softly.
"But I do not think that is what the Ghost Walker
means."
"The Ghost Walker?" Kirk nodded back
toward the speaker, swaying furiously on his
rock. He was big for a Midgwin, his shiny,
reddish-dark skin just beginning to lose its color
around the eyes, his coarse black mane hanging
down over the ridgy folds of his back.
Tattoos covered his arms and shoulders like a
macrame cloak.
"Yarblis Geshkerroth the Ghost
Walker," Shorak said quietly, coming over
to Kirk's side. "Do not underestimate him. He
is said to be responsible for most of the disappearances
of the Klingon scout parties during the fighting here
five years ago."
Kirk raised an eyebrow and turned his gaze
back toward the fire, impressed that any of the
pudgy, harmless little race would be able to take on
Klingon armed scouts. "I thought you said they
understood the difference between us and the Klingons."
"What makes you think we understand the difference
between us and the Klingons?" Thetas inquired, bending
forward to rearrange the fire. "Yarblis's
contention is that there isn't any."
"Well, I'll tell you a great big one,"
McCoy retorted tartly. "If we were
Klingons sitting here, we'd be taking target
practice at our flat-headed little friend there instead
of discussing the matter in its philosophical
light."
"Watch out," Dr. Nomias said, and his short
antennae swiveled sharply in the direction of the
path. By this time they were all standing, looking back
up the twisting path through the brush toward the
village. With apelike nimbleness, Yarblis
Geshkerroth had swung himself down from his
makeshift stone rostrum and was waddling with
surprising speed toward the Research Institute.
Others had broken away from the circles of the
Consciousness Web and were following, Midgwins of
all sizes, most swinging themselves along on their
hands as well as their short, stumpy legs. They
moved easily through the thorn brush, their platy
hides making nothing of the barbed spears of the
plants; their eyes were a bobbing and luminous sea
in the dark.
Almost instinctively, Thetas and Shorak
closed their distance to Kirk and Helen; and equally
instinctively, Kirk gestured the others back and
walked out to meet the delegation alone.
"You ..." Squatting before Kirk, Yarblis
looked far more dangerous than a tubby little alien
with wide, glowing eyes should have. D rawn in on
himself, the thick wrinkles of his hide clenched to form
a protective armor, he was far from comical.
One big, three-fingered hand unfurled itself on the
end of the bone-thin arm. "Let me walk in," he
said, his voice shriller, his English and
pronunciation much inferior to Arxoras's. "Let
me see in your mind what you mean for
humankind." And by humankind, Kirk knew he
meant himself and his race.
Kirk hesitated. Sargon, savant of a
nameless and long-extinct race, had in their brief
time of shared consciousness taught him a certain
number of mental shielding techniques;
recently, Spock had been teaching him others.
Too frequently, starfarers who tangled with
telepathic alien races had found themselves enmeshed
in cases of possession that would have had any
exorcist in Earth's history reaching for his
crucifix.
"Let me see!" Yarblis insisted
furiously. "You hide from us why you have come!"
Behind him Kirk heard the scrunch of boots
on gravel, and from the tail of his eye he saw
Shorak coming toward them. Yarblis backed away
a little, hissing. "No! Not through this cold one with a
soul like a stone egg, who has never let us drink
of his dreams. By yourself and for yourself, unveiled
by lies."
From the direction of the village there was a stirring
among the Midgwins crowding the path. In the
gloom, Kirk caught a glimpse of a white
mane like a silken flag. Beside him, Shorak said
softly, "You don't have to ..."
Arxoras waddled from the darkness. Flowers were
braided into his snowy hair. "Please understand
my brother," he said to Kirk, reaching out one hard
hand to stroke Yarblis's bony back. At
Arxoras's touch, Yarblis relaxed visibly,
the taut ridges of his skin loosening, his head
rising a little on its neck. By the light of the
Institute fire Kirk could see the Ghost
Walker's arms were, among the tattoos,
blotched with the crinkly scar tissue left
by Klingon disruptors.
"He has said that you may be self-deceived--that
your belief is that, meaning us well, you can still harm
us. He asks to see deeper into your thoughts, to see
what you intend for us in this Federation your people speak of.
But if this troubles you or causes you fear, do not
regard what he says. I trust your people ..."
Yarblis twisted his head like an owl's on his
neck and hissed something at the old Midgwin.
Arxoras blinked calmly at him for a moment,
then turned back to Kirk. "I trust you," he
repeated.
"You don't have to--" Shorak began softly.
"No." Kirk held out his hands
to Yarblis and mentally concentrated his thoughts in the
best approximation he could find of the disciplines that
Spock and Sargon had taught him. "No, he
has a right to know. And we mean only benefits
to this world." He slowed and steadied his breathing, wishing
briefly he'd made more time to practice
meditation than he had ... An increase in the
production of food, he thought. Better ways of
living, but only if they chose them freely.
Only if they asked for Federation help.
Defense against the Klingons, on whose frontiers
this undefended, undeveloped world lay. That above
all.
The Ghost Walker took his hands.
The shock was horrible. Shared consciousness was
always an unnerving thing, more so the further the alien
consciousness was from human. Sargon had been
civilized, sensitive, intelligent, and,
Kirk now realized trying very hard not to hurt him.
There was an animal quality to Yarblis's
thoughts, a wild dark blur of
pseudomemories, emotions, and snippets of
things Kirk knew he was not meant to see the
pungent fragrance of bizarre lust and the
horrified shock in a dying Klingon's eyes.
He forced his reeling consciousness to hold to the
images of other worlds that had entered into the Federation,
of world councils asking for new food-production
techniques, new learning, new skills. Of the
Halkans refusing to sell their dilithium and the
Enterprise flying silently away.
Yarblis's mind rooted at his, greedy and
rough and very angry. Kirk was shaking when the mind
link broke.
For a moment he and the Midgwin stood, looking
at one another--the man in his gold shirt, his
fair hair damp with sweat in spite of the night
breeze moving softly in off the veldt. The
Midgwin gazed up at him with huge yellow
eyes glowing softly in the dark.
"Are you satisfied?" Kirk felt the probe
had gone far deeper than he'd wanted it to,
far deeper than Arxoras's had, seeing more things
about the Enterprise, about he himself, than he'd
wanted to reveal. But it was a contention he had no
way of proving, not even of expressing--certainly
not to Shorak, Vulcan reticence being what it
was. He wished Spock were there. But evidently
no harm had been done ... "Do you believe now
that we are not like the Klingons? That we
intend you no harm?"
"Yes," the Midgwin said, his flute voice
soft and deadly. "Yes, I believe that you intend
us no harm, Jam-es Tiberius Kirk." And
turning, he waddled away into the darkness.

"I think you should take Shorak up on his offer
of instruction," Kirk said quietly.
The glow of the dying fire, visible away to their
right among the thorn trees that surrounded the camp,
turned Helen's hazel eyes a greenish
amber, like a cat's would be if a cat were ever
to think seriously about giving up hunting.
He hesitated a long moment, wanting to bring
up the subject and not wanting to, not willing
to face what he had known from the first would have to be
faced ...
Oh, what the hell, he thought, and blurted
out, "If you're going to stay here."
And the next instant he felt thoroughly ashamed
of himself for that kind of blatant fishing. Helen
has her own career, he thought, as he had thought
since that evening when they'd first lain together talking and
he'd thought, This is different ... First-contact
team is an advance for her ...
I can't ask her to forego that kind of
advancement ...
His hands tightened around hers.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have
..."
She glanced across at him, a rueful smile
pulling at the corner of her mouth. "Shouldn't have
said the Big If?" She moved a little closer
to him as they walked, their booted feet as if
by instinct finding the narrow, scuffed trail that led
along the edge of the thorn forest. She spoke half
jokingly, the easiness between them as relaxed, as
trusting, as if they'd been lovers for years instead
of two weeks. "You don't think it's been
itching and eating at me already?"
Behind them, among the stumpy thorns and towering
rocks of the plateau rim, the swollen,
cantaloupe-colored moon hung like an
enormous fruit, outlining the crowding domes of the
warren's close-packed mud shelters in amber
light. Before them the grasses of the veldt stretched
away inffdistance, the sigh of the tepid breeze a
silken music, shifting melodies of flowers and
dust. Somewhere a night lizard cried, a
heartbreaking alto sweetness. Mr.
Spock had noted, back on the ship, that the
gravitational pull of the moon here was
relatively strong, and Kirk wondered if that
had anything to do with the strange sense he had felt
ever since his arrival the sense of bones and blood
being more deeply tuned to matters beyond his waking ken.
An unbelievably beautiful world, he thought.
A world that seemed to breathe life. As captain of a
starship--that strange combination of explorer,
strategist, and diplomat--he was well-aware
of the implications of that untouched beauty, conscious
that those virgin grasses that made such music
meant that no agriculture was being practiced here
and that the population was balanced on the precarious
knife edge of starvation; that the constellations of
jeweled stars overhead were maps of Klingon
territory.
If Helen stayed here ...
"I don't want to make things harder for you
than they are."
"Sure you do." She grinned, and stopping,
turned to kiss him with a gentle passion on the
lips. Then she sighed and shook her head, her
big, bony hands curiously light in his grip.
"Dammit, Jim ... the universe is so big.
It's so easy to lose things. All those roads
leading away, and there isn't one of them that
doesn't have a one-way sign on it."
"The Enterprise will be back in six
months." He put his arm around Helen's waist,
solid with muscle like the bole of a young tree. The
Big If.
"In six months ..."
She shook her head, the coarse dark abundance
of her hair hissing softly against his shoulder.
"It wouldn't be fair." Her husky voice
barely broke the deep-breathing sigh of the wind in
the grass, the half-heard multivoiced humming
of the Midgwin Consciousness Web that seemed
to fill the night. "Not fair to the others, to Chu and
Nomias, who would hardly be settled into the
research and teaching by then; not fair to my
replacement, coming in late and having to learn
everything in twice the hurry. No." Her voice
was nearly inaudible, as if she spoke to herself.
"We really have to decide now."
Kirk said nothing. Helen's arm slipped around
his waist and they walked a little farther, both
automatically keeping a bearing on the tiny glow
of the Research Institute's fire--the
only fire in the village. Though Shorak had
assured them that the major predators--the
Hootings and the Flaygrubs--did not approach the
warrens at night, Kirk instinctively kept
an ear cocked for any sound of danger in the long
grass. Glancing back, he could see McCoy
and Thetas still sitting by the fire. The two
Vulcans, Chu, and Nomias had retreated to the
Institute's hut to prepare the few small
artifacts to be taken up to the Enterprise when
the landing party returned for the night. The village
Consciousness Web, now over ten thousand strong, still
swayed in the darkness, humming, whispering, singing
shared dreams and healing songs.
It would be easier, Kirk thought, for Helen
to make her decis ion on the ship, surrounded by the
environment, the people, she had come to enjoy ...
easier for her to make the decision to stay there. But
much as he wanted her to stay--to become a part of his
crew, a part of his life--he wanted her to make
her decision clearly, fairly, without doubts.
She had to see this planet, these people, this place that
was the alternative road--this beautiful world and its
curious, secretive, fascinating people, this
civilization without artifacts, the work of a lifetime
spread out before her like a field of flowers.
Arxoras's words came back to Kirk A
flower that has felt the sun ... Was he himself the
sun? he wondered. Or was it this place?
"Will the Enterprise be back in six
months?"
There was a long silence. Then Kirk shook his
head. "If everything goes as it should."
"Mmm." Helen nodded wisely, her eyes
shadow and silver-glint in the moonlight. "You
know, I did notice how much everything always goes
as it should on exploration-patrol missions."
Jim had to laugh at the mock gravity of her
voice, but he knew she was speaking the truth. In
six months, God knew what could happen.
"On a starship, I'd never be more than a
cataloger of other people's finds, you know," she went
on. "Sending back superficial evaluations for
others to follow up. It's not what I want."
She turned and put her hands upon his shoulders.
They were almost of a height. Her voice was thick,
hesitant, the voice of one with little experience in
saying how she felt or what she wanted. "But
I don't want to lose you."
Slowly, he said, "I won't always be
on exploration patrols."
It was the first time he had spoken of what he would
do two years from now, when the Enterprise's
current mission was done. The first time he had thought
of applying for anything other than another five-
year stint of the same. Even as he said it, the thought
gave him a curious pang, a wrenching hurt, as
if he stood at the starting line of a race,
electing to remain where he was while everyone else
vanished into the distance.
But on starbase duty he would at least be able
to see her. To have some kind of life with the woman,
to put in the time it took to build a future with
someone, to build something that would last beyond a few
years.
Helen laughed softly. "Oh, Jim! Even
if you were base commander, you'd drive yourself into a
nervous breakdown in a year watching starship
captains screw up things you'd think you could do
better!"
"Oh, thanks a lot!" he groused, laughing
too as he gave her a mock shove, because he
knew she was right. She shoved back, and they
tussled in the dappled moonlight beneath a stand of
stumpy, thick-boled trees, giggling like
teenagers until their mouths met.

Chapter Two

Coming back through the tepid darkness, Kirk
heard Thetas's voice and McCoy's, a
quiet murmuring beneath the sighing purr of the
Consciousness Web in the warren beyond. The
Enterprise's doctor and the little Argellian
anthropologist sat side by side on a chunk
of river rock, the jittering firelight before them
glinting on the gold line of service braid on
McCoy's sleeves and the streamlined arrowhead of the
Starfleet emblem on his breast, seaming Thetas's
emaciated face with shadow. Seeing the
Argellian reminded Kirk again of the plumpness
of the man in his earlier pictures, and he shivered
at the thought of Helen growing that thin, that wasted-
looking ...
But no, he thought. It was part of her mission
to teach agriculture, to help these people stave off the
starvation overtaking the planet.
"What do you mean, resistant to learning
farming?" McCoy was saying as Kirk and Helen
emerged from the tiny game trail along which
they had walked. "They're gatherers, it's the most
inefficient way of making a living no matter
what planet you're talking about! The food
resources of the countryside are just this side of
exhaustion! Can't they see they're one good drought
away from planetwide catastrophe? You say
they cherish life--"
"They cherish life upon their own terms," the
Argellian replied, folding his skeletal
hands. "Their standards, their intentions, are based upon
other things. To them, all things are deeply bound
together. They cherish life as a quality ..."
McCoy sniffed. "Nobody's quality of
life has ever been improved by malnutrition.
Didn't any of you ever explain Malthus to these
people?"
Thetas smiled sadly. "It is difficult
to explain any of this to someone who hasn't lived
among these people--it's difficult enough for me to try
to get some of it across to Shorak and L'jian, who
won't participate fully in the Consciousness
Web. There isn't an insult scatological
enough, poisonous enough, to be the equivalent of
calling someone here mi'ik--greedy, grabby. The
thought of deliberately cultivating food, rather
than living day to day upon what Rhea--the
Planet Mother Spirit--chooses to send, is
absolutely repugnant to the Midgwins on a
number of levels."
The deep humming of the crowd, subtle and
pervasive as the slow throb of surf, filled the
darkness around them. Turning his head, Kirk could just
glimpse the backs of the nearest of those concentric
circles, up the path in the warren, swaying in the
velvety moonlight. Even the children, little pale
grublike creatures who hid throughout the daylight
hours, curled, dreaming in the circles, bathed in
the unvoiced songs, the warm closeness, the
profound comfort and content.
Behind them Dr. Chu's voice said something about the
new subspace radio they had brought,
to replace the old and almost worn-out one the
Institute had been using for years. "Do you think
we should lay in a supply of emergency rations?"
"They're not stupid," Thetas went on
quietly, turning, like Kirk, from the
Institute's low-voiced activity toward the
serene stillness of the warren. "They know food is
scarce. They know there are far too many warrens, that
the warrens are far too large. In the
distant past they simply used to let the sick
die, the weak succumb to predators. They won't
do that now, haven't done that for hundreds of years.
Many of them are now saying some kind of compromise
should be sought, but the conservatives say that they will not,
as they say, make the land their slave, force it--
her--to yield beyond what is her will, her free and
loving gift. The idea is repulsive to them, the
start--according to what Arxoras has told me--of
fighting over possessions, of living for things instead
offor one another. In a way, it's hard to fault
them for this."
"Do they have an alternative solution?"
McCoy demanded irritably, poking at the
fire with a stick. The yellow spurt of the light
showed the cynical anger in his face, the anger of a
doctor who sees a man drinking himself to death in
spite of every warning.
Thetas shrugged, and smiled again, his wrinkled
face and bald head dyed honey-gold in the
fire's glow against the squatty screen of barrel
trees behind him. "For the most part they say things are
not so bad yet, and may not grow any worse."
And, when McCoy made a gesture of impotent
disgust, added, "How many years did the people of your
planet, and of my own, even the well-meaning ones,
say the same in the face of the Malthusian
alternative?"
"And unfortunately," Kirk put in,
folding his arms and leaning one broad, gold-clad
shoulder against the nearest tree stem, "the concept of
ownership and the practice of agriculture are
important points of definition in the index of
civilization as set out in the Settlement
Accords with the Klingons."
"But that's absurd," Helen protested.
"What about the Suriaps? And the Organians
themselves? Those definitions of civilization were
obsolete before the Settlement was signed! What
about the Drommian Belters?"
Kirk shrugged. "Revisions to the index have been
proposed for years, but the Settlement is still in
force. And as long as Midgwis lies in the path
of Klingon expansion, you know they're going to push
to have the Midgwins declared subsentient and the planet
opened for "development" ... Going by their
track record, the kind of development they
tried with the Organians."
"The poor things," Helen said impulsively,
and Thetas chuckled with genuine amusement.
"Scarcely that. One of the main Klingon
arguments that the Midgwins are animals and not
human is the number of their "researchers"--
read "scouts"--who attempted to investigate
this planet who never returned."
"I don't know," McCoy returned with a
wry grin. "I'd call that a pretty good
argument to the contrary, considering the differences in
size and firepower. If what you said about our little
friend the Ghost Walker is true--"
"But how could he?" Helen asked, her dark
brows pulling down over the bridge of her nose.
"They don't seem to have much technology. I
don't think I've seen a weapon--or a tool
of any kind--or even fire, for that matter ..."
A muted commotion from the Research Institute's
doorway cut off her voice. The makeshift
curtain--a silvery survival blanket hung
in the low door arch--was lifted aside and the
others emerged, Shorak and L'jian carrying a
few small sample cases, Doctors Chu and
Nomias bearing the empty sections of crate in
which the new subspace transmitter had been
delivered. "Those will make good seats, when we
get an annex built for you," said L'jian,
shaking back the end of her sloppily braided
queue from one thin shoulder. "And you'll find the
survival blankets you have brought will have their
uses, in spite of the relatively high ambient
temperature ..."
"It will take getting used to," panted
Nomias, whose pale blue skin was drenched in
sweat despite the brevity of his thin shorts and
singlet. Kirk smiled a little as L'jian nodded
her agreement, knowing that this area's slow baking
warmth would be as uncomfortab ly hot to the Andorian
as it was chilly to the two Vulcans.
"And you say there is nothing else at all that
resembles an artifact?" Chu inquired of
Shorak, looking up from her tiny height at the
skeletal Vulcan beside her. "No pottery,
no food bowls ..."
"They sometimes pile seeds and fruit upon pads
of flap lichen they strip from the rocks," Shorak
explained. "Invariably they eat the lichen,
however--they do not keep anything."
The little Earthwoman sighed. "I suppose
we'll be able to make a case for the braided flower
chains, but it will be awkward. The Klingons are
sure to say that anyone can braid flowers
--but then, anyone can chip an arrow point. And the
predators they hunt ...?"
"In the single hunt we saw," L'jian
said, "they drove the Flaygrub over the edge of a
cliff--the spindars of M-428 do that to the
galfirdach, and no one would argue that the spindars
are sentient."
"Except Horace Frill of Oxford
Institute, in that dreadful article he wrote for
Interstellar Studies, no," Chu agreed
thoughtfully, and then turned back to Kirk. "We
are satisfied as to the conditions here on this
planet, Captain, both in terms of our
physical safety and the safety of the next
phase of this mission. Has what you have seen
satisfied you?" She spoke formally, as she had
always maintained a formal distance from him, but in her
tiny crone face her dark eyes were shining, as
Kirk had seen Helen's shine as she looked
around her at this strange and beautiful world.
He smiled. "Yes," he said. "I have a
few concerns, but nothing that Dr. Shorak has not
also expressed. I'll report to Starfleet that
I find no exceptional or immediate dangers here;
that contact phase can proceed. Tomorrow--"
"If you please," Chu said, again with a formal
inclination of her head, "my colleague and I have
accepted Dr. Shorak's invitation to spend the
night here--our first night upon the planet. We can
return briefly to the ship tomorrow before it leaves
orbit." The joy of it, the eagerness, was palpable
in her voice. "Helen ...?"
Kirk turned, to look at the woman who had
suddenly fallen so silent at his side.
He thought, I may never see her again after
tomorrow ... His past had taught him to be
philosophical about good-byes, and that people always
did turn up again.
But he knew, too, that when they turned up
again, it was seldom the same.
Helen said slowly, "I ... I think I'll
spend the night on the ship." She did not look
at Chu--didn't look at Kirk either. Her
hazel eyes were lowered, her angular face very still.
Nomias's prim mouth flexed a little,
repressing whatever his thoughts were, but Chu came
over to the tall woman and took the powerful hand in
her own tiny one. In her neat little khaki
coveralls and heavy boots, she looked like some
strange little wrinkled doll, oddly
similar to the Midgwins themselves. Her voice was
neutral as she said, "Then you can bring our things with
you when you beam down in the morning." Her black
eyes, looking up into the downcast hazel ones, were
understanding behind their scholarly detachment. Or not,
she seemed to add, unspoken.
"It will save us a trip back up," she went
on chattily, while her wise, dark glance
flicked over Kirk, as if evaluating the
decision she knew Helen would have to make, while
saying nothing that would influence it. And indeed, since
the decision was, as Mr. Spock would say,
completely irrational, there was nothing much that she could
say that Helen hadn't already considered. Instead she
continued, "I agree with the good Dr. McCoy on
the subject of transporter beams ... I
never did like the thought of having the component atoms
of my being disassembled and reassembled like a bagful
of puzzle bits."
Helen chuckled softly in spite of herself, and
squeezed Dr. Chu's hand. "Thank you."
The old woman smiled, and patted her arm.
"Good night. My things are in the corner of my
room by the door ... If you'd check the backs
of the drawers for me I'd appreciate it.
Nomias's things are all boxed up beside his
bunk. We shall see you in the morning."
Or not, Kirk's thoughts echoed again. He
put the words from his mind.
Helen said nothing, only turned and walked up
the path toward the warren, passing close to the ropy
lines of dreaming Midgwins, toward where the rocks
of the box canyon sheltered the transporter
coordinates. McCoy was already on his way there,
the sample cases he'd taken from L'Jian
tucked under one arm--the pitifully slim evidence
that this "rich and complex" culture, as Thetas had
termed it, was in fact culture at all, and not
an anthropologist's dream that politicians
could exploit. The world, untouched
by agriculture, was ideal for colonization. A
braided wreath of flowers--a few mud-smeared
sticks ... to be carefully cryostored by the
small Anthro department, and eventually passed
on, as Helen had said, for others to analyze more
fully.
Watching her walk away into the darkness, Kirk
felt a pang, knowing in his heart what she would be
leaving behind here. Behind him he heard Nomias say
to Chu with a slight, superior twist to his
high voice, "If you think you're seeing that
woman in the morning, you're deceiving yourself."
Chu sniffed as the two of them turned back to the
hut, her long white pigtail gleaming like frost-
killed grass in the moonlight. "Oh, don't
be a fool."
"I'm pleased you feel yourself able to make a
favorable report on conditions here," Shorak
said quietly, as he and Kirk stood for a moment
beside the dying fire. "I will admit to an occasional
mistrust of Starfleet's view of certain
matters. The Midgwins are not easy
to explain."
Up the thorny slope behind them, the warren had
sunk into near silence, though, peering through the
moonlit blueness of the night, Kirk could see the
Midgwins still sitting in their crowded, hand-linked
lines. They were no longer swaying, but the peace, the
joy of their communion, seemed to lie on the night
like the scent of summer grass, healing, caring,
enfolding. Cherishing even this prim Vulcan
researcher, Kirk thought, with some amusement, whether
he admitted it or not, as it would cherish the new
research team ... cherishing everyone, every living soul
in the village, in the world, who stood within its
spell.
He smiled. "I'm not sure I understand the
explanation I've been given. But nowhere in the
Federation Charter does it say that we have to understand
each other ... only that we be willing to try."
He extended his hand, and Dr. Shorak took it
without even the slight hesitation that Spock showed--
and Spock's instinctive avoidance of physical
contact was far less than most Vulcans'.
Evidently, living among the Midgwins had had
at least some effect.
The moon was setting as Kirk climbed the
thread of path and passed through the silent warren.
Everywhere, Midgwins sat in their close-furled
spirals of caring peace, their triangular,
flat-topped heads gleaming like a pavement of
cobblestones in all directions, a sea of life
washing up against the low domes of their houses, the
high sides of the rocks. So many of them--thousands
--in this one small area, he thought, trying to eke
a living from wild fruits and grains.
And yet Shorak--and Chu--had refused
supplemental food supplies, which, Helen had
explained, would have alienated them irreparably from
the community. It was grabby, greedy ...
and lacking in faith in Rhea, in the Earth Spirit
Mother, who gave her children what they needed when they
needed it.
He shook his head. No, he thought. He did
not understand.
Ahead of him in the dim starlight that filtered
down into the canyon's darkness he made out the
shapes of Helen and McCoy. They weren't
talking, though Helen had taken one of the sample
cases and was holding it folded in her arms. Her
head was down, her rumpled coveralls bleached
colorless by the filtered light; McCoy, a little
apart from her, was looking quietly around him, thinking
his own thoughts of this strange and beautiful world.
Bones would know, Kirk guessed, as well as
any of them did, what it meant that Helen was
returning to the Enterprise tonight. Bones would
realize what the decision to remain with the ship would
mean to her.
If that's the decision she comes to.
She raised her head at the crunch of the stream
gravel underfoot as he stepped clear of the shadows
of trees and rocks, and she greeted him with a
half-apologetic smile; by it, he knew that the
jury on that one was still out.
He wanted her to stay. And, he reflected,
half amused at his own reactions, he wanted
to know now what her decision was to be--wanted
to feel safe. He knew already he was in for a long
night of wondering whether he'd have this woman at his
side for the next two years--with luck, the next
sixty--or not.
But like Chu, he knew there was nothing he could
say.
Still, there was a feeling of relief in his chest as
he flipped open his communicator and said,
"Three to beam up, Scotty."
The final setting of the moon had softened its
shadows. A diffuse fill of starlight touched
what had been pockets of velvet blackness and
glimmered on the strange, low-growing plants that
clogged the canyon walls, the spicy sweetness
of their blossoms drenching the dusty air. And in the
shadows of the rocks, Kirk saw, suddenly, the
shape of a solitary Midgwin, its stumpy,
podlike body barely distinguishable from a plant
or a stone itself. In the same moment that he
wondered what any Midgwin was doing absenting itself
voluntarily from the comfort and healing of the Consciousness
Web, he recognized by the dim starshine
the ropy network of tattooing and the ugly blotch of
disruptor scars, and read the malevolent hatred
in Yarblis Geshkerroth's fishlike yellow
eyes.
Then the cold glitter of the transporter beam
enveloped him, breakin g his atoms
into electricity, his mind into a flashing stream of
neurons leaping across the dark.

Chapter Three

Something was wrong.
Mr. Spock's hand shot to the Emergency
Quarantine button almost without his conscious thought.
The band of amber lights sprang inffbeing like a
coronet around the transporter room's ceiling,
and blast doors slipped down into place with an
oiled pneumatic hiss almost before the three gold
figures in the light of the beams solidified
into human shape. Assistant Transport
Chief Oba looked over at him in surprise;
Captain Kirk stepping swiftly down from the
transport disk after one quick glance at the
flashing lights, asked, "What is it, Mr.
Spock?"
But after that first second--and indeed, even during
the flare of the impulse itself--the Vulcan himself could
not have said. "I'm not sure, Captain." There was
no apology, no uncertainty, in his deep,
slightly rough voice, and even as he spoke he
looked around the brightly lit chamber, searching,
analyzing ... McCoy had stepped off his
transport disk with his usual celerity, as if
he feared--which he half did, in spite of
Transport Chief Kyle's repeated
reassurances--that the beams would come on again and
snatch him back into electrostatic limbo.
Dr. Helen Gordon remained for a moment where
she had appeared, holding a duraplast sample
box cradled in her arms and regarding the captain
worriedly.
"My impression was that something else
materialized with the transporter beams."
Kirk's eyes narrowed and he scanned the
room again. "But you didn't see anything?"
"Negative, Captain," Spock replied
formally. "A subliminal impression only."
"Mr. Oba?"
The communicator in the console crackled on;
the voice of the night officer on the
bridge came on. "Mr. Spock? We've
got a reading of Emergency Quarantine down there
..."
Kirk touched the switch on the console's
front and turned to the small black eye of the
in-ship visual receptor high in the wall.
"We have a possible alert situation here, but nothing
serious at the moment." He turned back to the
transport assistant.
Oba shook his head. "Looked kosher to me
until Mr. Spock hit the panic button."
His long, slender, ebony fingers were already keying in
a playback sequence. All of them, including
Helen now, were grouped around the console as a
readout single-framed through.
"I always said you can't trust those things,"
McCoy growled with a glance back at the
transport disks, cold silver circles on
the red floor of the chamber itself.
"I sympathize with your objections,
Doctor," Spock replied, mechanically
punching in a visual replay of the transport
sequence, "but the Enterprise does not carry
rope ladders long enough to reach from the planet's
surface up to our current orbit."
"Oh, come on, Mr. Spock," Dr.
Gordon teased with a shaky grin, "you couldn't bring
the ship in a little closer to the planet?"
"Not even to oblige Dr. McCoy."
Spock studied the slow-motion sequence as it
replayed on the console's small screen the
preliminary glitter of the matter beams, the
gradual taking-shape of those shimmering, cutout
forms, swiftly solidifying as the atoms
reassembled. Then he played it through again, studying
the spaces behind and around the materializing forms,
while Captain Kirk, who had been watching the
screen over his shoulder, prowled cautiously to every
corner of the small room and up onto the
transport platform itself, hazel eyes half
shut, turning his head this way and that as if listening,
scenting for some anomaly.
"I see nothing abnormal on the visuals."
The captain came back to the little group around the
console, touched the communications switch.
"Lieutenant Dawe? Can we have an intensive
life-readings scan of the transporter room at
a submicron level? Feed it through to us here."
The transporter rooms, the designers of the
starships had known, were the ship's weak
point on missions of exploration. They, and the
shuttlecraft hangar were equipped not only with the
capability for almost instantaneous quarantine, but
with the finest and most accurate of the ship's internal
scanners. In the early days of warp-drive
exploration, there had been far too many cases of
hideous stowaways in the form of viruses,
larvae, and unknown parasites that, multiplying,
growing, or cloning in the ventilator ducts or
electrical conduits, could easily wipe out a
ship's crew before they could be destroyed, sometimes
before they were even detected.
But, studying the readouts fed to them by the ship's
computer, with McCoy looking over his shoulder,
Spock could detect no anomaly within the room
itself, no evidence of any life-form whatsoever
unaccounted for. And indeed, even that first, fleeting
impression that there was something else in the room was
fading. He could not recall exactly what it was
that he had sensed, only that he had sensed something
wrong and had reacted instantaneously to prevent
its possible spread.
"Most curious," he said after a half hour's
examination and reexamination of the readouts revealed
nothing. He looked across the little room at the
captain, who was still pacing slowly along its
metallic walls, touching them every now and then and
looking up at the lighting and ventilator ducts,
as if searching for some means of possible egress.
"Captain ..."
He paused, for the captain had shut his eyes,
his eyebrows pulled slightly together, listening--
scenting, Spock would almost have said--for something, some
clue, as to what might have been heard or seen.
But at the sound of Spock's voice, those eyes
opened quickly. "Yes, Mr. Spock?"
"Have you a hypothesis from information learned on the
planet?"
The captain hesitated for a long moment; then his
glance shifted. "I don't ... I'm not sure.
No." He shook his head, and said more strongly,
"No."
"Dr. Gordon? You have studied the native
life-forms of Elcidar Beta Three."
Dr. Gordon, who had remained quietly
to one side during most of the examination, shook her
head. Mr. Spock had not been unaware of
Dr. Gordon's increasing intimacy with the
captain; he had, indeed, not been surprised in
the slightest when the captain had gone over
to the researcher's table in the mess room the first
night out of the Institute.
Three years of interested observation had made
Spock familiar with James Kirk's
reactions to the female of the human or humanoid
species, and though he himself felt no physical
attraction to any of these women, these days he could
usually pinpoint which female of a group would appeal
to the captain's gallantry. Dr. Gordon had
few of the physical characteristics typical of the
captain's choices--she was six or seven
centimeters taller than the tallest
representative of the romantic sampling so far
that Spock knew about, nearly the captain's own
height, her eyebrows darker and thicker and her chin
squarer. At first glance Spock had been
deeply curious about the nonphysical factors
at work, though of course he was not about to pursue
such information verbally among other males of the human
species, like Dr. McCoy or Mr.
Scott.
Within a very few days he had come to understand how he
himself could find this woman appealing, had he
permitted his human side to overcome the
Vulcan training inculcated into him by his father's
people--not to mention his own unspoken determination to be
completely Vulcan in his soul, even if he could
not be so in his chromosomes. Dr. Gordon had
a fine intelligence and a clear-thinking logic, a
high degree of abstract aesthetics, and a quick-
witted, if sometimes regrettably frivolous,
verbal facility. But Spock surmised on the
strength of previous observations that these were only
secondary factors in the captain's initial
interest. Nevertheless, he had, in three years,
only once seen the captain so seriously
involved with a woman. It had taken the captain a
long time to recover from the loss of Edith Keeler
--in some ways, Spock suspected that he never
would recover. His Vulcan logic deplored an
involvement which was, to say the least, an invitation
to inefficiency--but some rebellious human corner
of his soul applauded Kirk's judgment.
Not, he reminded himself austerely, that it was any
of his business.
Dr. Gordon said now, "There are some very
small, very quick predators listed in the Midgwis
initial reports, and something called a sheefla,
which is supposedly very hard to see. But according
to Shorak, sheefla avoid the
villages, especially when the Consciousness Web
is in operation."
"And either of the smaller predators would have left
a physical residue on the walls if it had
gotten into the vents," Dr. McCoy added,
walking over to where the captain still stood, his clear-
cut, boyish features stained honey-gold by the
amber warning lights as he looked up at the
steel-blocked vent shafts nearest the
transport chamber itself. "And there's no trace
of that in the microscans."
"And in any case," Dr. Gordon added,
"they couldn't have moved swiftly enough to beat the blast
doors down. And there's no sign of them on the
playbacks."
"No," the captain said slowly, and looked
back at McCoy and Spock as if seeing them
for the first time. "No, I suspect it was some kind
of electromagnetic surge effect from the
transporter itself, like a static backfire ...
Isn't that possible, Mr. Oba?"
Oba nodded. "Now and then I've heard about the
beams throwing off a "ghost" ... I've never
seen it, though. I'll ask Mr. Scott."
"Do," the captain said. "I recall reading
something about it in the 23.5 issue of Starship."
He crossed between them to the console and touched a
switch. "All systems check out here, Mr.
Dawe. False alarm. Deactivate
quarantine." His fingers flicked through the four-
digit security code. A moment later the
blast doors hissed open and the amber lights went
out.
As always, Spock felt the slightest flinch of
uneasiness as they did so, wondering if he had
truly investigated all possible contingencies.
Preoccupied with this, he was for a moment barely
conscious of Dr. Gordon stepping a pace
toward the captain as Kirk strode with his usual
briskness through the opened doors. But his ears were
quick, and he heard, as probably few others in the
room did, the soft breath of her uncertain
voice whisper, "Jim ..."
The captain was already turning back in the
doorway, silhouetted against the crisp white
lighting of the corridor outside. For a moment
Spock thought he was going to speak--either to himself or
to Dr. Gordon, who stood at his side.
But shaking his head, the captain thought better of
it. He only said, "Good night,
gentlemen ... Helen." And was gone.

"Are you all right?"
The small guest stateroom was dim--it was
possible to cut even the very low safety lights for
sleeping, but few people did--and the lights of Deck
5's corridors that streamed in from behind
Lieutenant Uhura as she stood in the
doorway weren't much brighter at this hour of the
night. But by then the Communications officer could see
that Helen had packed to leave, small bundles
of personal possessions lying in a neat row
along the wall opposite the bed.
A backpack. A small duffel. A pair
of good rock-climbing boots. A carrier of
books on wafer--Uhura knew from earlier
visits to Helen's cabin that they were mostly
classics of interstellar field anthropology
and all preliminary reports on Midgwis and
its inhabitants.
Helen herself, clothed in pajamas of thin white
lawn with her shaggy, coffee-colored tail of
hair spread out over her shoulders, sat cross-
legged on the rust-colored coverlet of the narrow
bed, a look somewhere between relief, pleasure, and
disappointment in her eyes.
She had, Uhura realized, been half
expecting the captain.
And half dreading the interview.
"I'll be fine."
"We'll all .be "fine" in twenty
years," Uhura said with a smile. "How are
you?"
And Helen laughed with a soft, ironic
amusement as Uhura perched herself on the other end
of the bed. She gestured toward the packed bundles
along the wall. "The others said they'd spend the
night on the planet. I said I'd be down in the
morning."
Uhura said nothing, understanding from her own
experiences that last, desperate push against a
decision that has to be made. The tall
anthropologist sighed, a deep hurtful gust that
seemed to come from the core of her bones, and folded
her long arms around herself. "God, this stinks,"
Helen said without rancor, as if she knew that
Uhura would know exactly what she meant.
"You want some coffee?" Uhura asked--for
Helen looked chilled with the inner cold that had
nothing to do with the Enterprise's
excellently controlled climate.
Helen nodded. The VIP guest cabins were
all equipped with food slots; as Uhura
crossed the room to punch in the order, she
remarked, "Well, that's too bad, because all
you're going to get is what comes out of this."
It surprised Helen into laughing, as Uhura
had hoped it would. "Oh, come on! Yeoman
Brunowski would commit seppuku if he heard you
imply he couldn't get a decent adjustment for
coffee out of his remixers."
Uhura took the blue-gray velfoam cup
from the slot and turned back toward the bed. "They
can warp spacetime and unravel molecular
structure, but even with the kind of fine tuning you can
get with a starship's computer, they still can't really
get coffee right except with real beans. Will you?"
she added quietly. "Be down in the morning?"
Helen looked up at her with a lopsided twist
to her mouth and eyes that shined suddenly with moisture
in the dim glow of the reading lamp beside the bunk.
"I don't know," she said helplessly. And when
Uhura sat down beside her again, folding up her
long legs under the red-and-black caftan she
wore when off duty, Helen added, "I don't
think so."
Uhura sighed, and there was a moment's silence.
Then she said, "I checked for you. You're way
overqualified, but once we get to Starbase
Nine, you can enlist as ensign and work as
Anthro/geo assistant to Lieutenant
Bergdahl ..." She paused as Helen winced.
"That's the only position open? With
Bergdahl?"
"I'm afraid so. And that's only because
Emiko's willing to transfer to Input. It's a
tight area."
"And I expect Emiko's only looking for a
way to get out of working with Bergdahl," Helen
added glumly. It was a conclusion Uhura had come
to already.
"He's a damn good researcher," Helen went
on, "but he's never going to forget that I've got
my doctorate, and he doesn't ... and he's
never going to forget that I came on as the
"captain's woman."" There was sudden
bitterness in her voice. Uhura made a
noise of protest, fractionally too late--she
knew Helen was right, about the sour and prissy
Anthro/geo chief at least, and
possibly about others onboard besides; Helen's
eyes were defensive as she said, "You know that's
what they'll say."
"Only for a little while. And only the people who
always say things like that. And everybody," Uhura
added wisely, "knows who those are. Technically
you'll both be working under Spock. You won't have
to see old Birddog half the time ..."
"But the other half I will." She set the
coffee aside--it was just as flavorless as always,
despite the cutting edge of remixer technology
--and shook back the loose tangle of her dark
hair. "Dammit, Uhura, I can't avoid the
man I'm going to be assistant to, no matter
how many holes he picks in my work. And I'm
coming on this ship to work, to do a job ... to salvage
what I can of my career after I ..." She
visibly bit back the words blow it to be with the
man I love ...
Uhura said nothing. There was not much, she
reflected, that one could say under the
circumstances.
"Dammit ..." Helen whispered again.
"You do have six months," Uhura began
hesitantly.
The younger woman looked back at her with weary
irony in her eyes. "Do you really think the
Enterprise is coming back to Midgwis in six
months? That there won't be some emergency, some
unexpected mission, that gets it transferred
forty sectors away? That's what starships do,
Uhura. They're the knights of the fleet, not the
pawns. How many times has the Enterprise been
able to return on a regular basis to a planet
it visited? Jim isn't his own master, any more
than ..."
She bit off her words again, and Uhura finished
for her "Any more than I am?"
Helen's cheeks reddened in the ocher glow of the
lamp.
Uhura's lips framed a wry smile.
"Why do you think we get to be such close friends in
Starfleet? We're all we've got ... if
anyone's got anything, that is. And you don't.
You never do."
"No," Helen sighed. "No, you never do."
She pushed back her hair again, stared out into the
shadows of the tiny room. It seemed to remind her
of something, for she glanced over at Uhura again and
asked, "Did you check on who I'd be
rooming with if I signed on?"
"I tried," Uhura said guardedly. "But
that's something you can't really know in advance. The
computer's usually pretty good about match-ups, but
with a mid-voyage transfer it's catch-as-catch-
can. I know Zink's roommate just
transferred--"
"Zink's roommates always transfer, according
to what Giacomo from Computers told me. Zink
never shuts up."
She was silent for a time, rubbing her big hands
together as if with cold, her knees drawn up under
her chin. The VIP guest quarters were better
soundproofed than most of the ship; here there was not even
the faint murmur of voices passing in the
corridor. Only the soft, subliminal throb
of the ventilators, and the distant hum, more felt
than heard, within the walls themselves, the resonances
of engines and pumps, the heartbeat of the ship itself.
At length Helen said softly, "But the thing
is, I don't want to lose him. To lose ...
I don't know. These six months, this year, or
two years ..." She got to her feet, an
impulsive move like a big lioness's, and paced
the confines of the room, her bare feet making no
sound upon the floor. "Time can be so precious, and
it disappears so fast. I don't want to look
back when I'm fifty and say, "I found a
man I loved like I've loved no one else, but
we both had other commitments.""
Uhura's lips tightened suddenly, and she
looked aside.
"All my life I've studied, and learned,
and trained myself to add to the knowledge of the universe,
to learn how to work with other species ... but never with
people of my own species. And my work is mostly
done alone. And I want ..." Helen shook
her head, her voice faltering like a cracked beam
under sudden weight.
"And the captain?" Uhura asked.
"This isn't easy for him either." Helen
paused, and drew a deep breath. "I won't
always be a third-class assistant to Uriah
Heep, you know. Some kind of compromise is
possible if we're together. If we're not ..."
She shook her head. "We have nothing. There!"
She grinned shakily, though her eyes glinted with
tears again. "Now I've talked myself into it."
Uhura got to her feet with one smooth motion,
strode over to Helen and hugged her
firmly. "I want to say, "Don't do
anything you'll be sorry for later,"" she said
gently. "But what I'm really thinking is, I'm
glad you'll be with us for a while longer. Welcome
aboard."
Helen squeezed her hand, a powerful grip like
a man's. "Thank you," she whispered, and
Uhura could sense the tears perilously near the
surface. "Thank you for coming."
She would cry, Uhura thought, when she was
alone.
So she bade her good night, and walked away
down the corridor in the dim lighting of the late-
night shift, for everyone in this sector worked the day
watch, and everyone--or nearly everyone--would be
asleep. She had said, "Don't do anything
you'll be sorry for later," but either way she knew
Helen would be sorry. It was the nature of
choice. But she knew from her own experience that
nothing was so hurtful as a decision unmade. When
Helen cried, they would be tears of regret for the
road not taken but the pain would be less
desperate, less awful, than indecision would
be.
Uhura wrapped her caftan more closely
around her, hugging herself as if with cold, though the
mild coolness of the Enterprise's corridors
never varied. She remembered her own decisions,
the roads untaken that would have led her anywhere but
here.
It was something one couldn't afford to think about too
much. Infinite diversity, infinite combinations,
Mr. Spock would say ... But unless you picked
one of those infinite roads at the crossing of the
ways, you would never walk on any. And in space
the distances were so great, and the times so long. She could
only hope that Helen would be happy in the choice
she had made.
And Captain Kirk ...
She turned down the corridor that led to the
turbolift up to the junior officers' quarters
on Deck 4, and stopped.
In three years she had walked these
corridors in the muted lights of the late-night
watch hundreds of times, even when, as now, they
lay before her completely empty, silent but for the
almost soundless throb of the engines far below. Even
returning from rec-room showings of the gruesome
horror films to which Mr. Sulu was addicted,
she had never felt nervous or uneasy
with the empty dimness ... For all her lively
imagination, Uhura's practical mind did not
work that way.
But now she felt it, the creeping chill of
irrational dread.
She fell back a pace, telling herself not
to be silly, but her hands were cold. Her eyes
searched the shadows, quartering the corridor ahead
of her with quick efficiency, searching for anomalous
shadow, for movement, for a break in the familiar
pattern that would have caused her senses to shrink like
this, would have caused the alarm bells to go off in the
back of her brain.
There was nothing. Only a darkness not
noticeably darker than it had ever been before, a
stillness that seemed to wait for her, to watch her with
dreadful intentness from some point along the right-hand
wall between where she stood now and the turbolift's
shut doors.
Uhura stood for several moments looking down
that empty corridor, feeling the slow growing of a
creeping cold over her, fighting desperately
against the terrible sense that something was coming toward her,
something moving slowly, gropingly, uncertainly
along the wall ... Something that reached out toward
her, and tried to form the syllables of her name.
There is nothing there. She fell back
another pace and told herself this two or three
times more ...
Then suddenly she turned and walked quickly
back the way she had come. There was only one
turbolift from Deck 5 to the smaller decks
of the primary hull above this point, but she followed
the corridor around to one of the lifts going down to the
ship's central lounge on the deck below. As she
emerged from the turbolift and threaded her way between
the tables and couches of the brightly lighted room,
waving a greeting to her various acquaintances of the
small late-night shift taking their breaks at
its white plastic tables over remixer coffee and
various other delicacies fabricated from the
recycled raw elements in the lowest holds, she
cursed herself inwardly, calling herself a fool ...
At the far end of the lounge, which sprawled
enormously across the center of Deck 6, she
got back into the main turbolift that led up,
eventually, to the bridge and tried to sound casual
as she said, "Deck Four." She felt
obscurely embarrassed, as if the turbolift
computer would recognize her voice and
ask her why she'd made such a pointless detour.
As she hurried down the long, dimly lit
corridor from the turbolift to her room, she
kept glancing back over her shoulder, though she
knew there was nothing there to see.

Chapter Four

"Helen!" At the sound of the transporter-
room door opening, Chief Engineer
Montgomery Scott slid out from under the main
console's access hatch and stood up with a smile.
On the few occasions on which he'd visited the
rec rooms--mostly at mealtimes--in the past
few weeks he'd had a couple of long
conversations with Dr. Gordon, and she was one of the
few people onboard who shared his taste for bagpipe
music. Then, too, as one of the older members
of the crew his instincts as a matchmaker were strong.
His pleased expression wavered a moment as he
saw that she carried packs and duffels, but she
smiled at him and shook her head.
"Chu and Nomias," she explained.
Scotty beamed. "Then you're staying?"
She nodded. But looking at her again, the
Engineering chief saw the marks of sleeplessness on
her face the smudgy look under the eyes, the
lines around the mouth. It had been a hard choice
for her, he realized, though privately he
couldn't understand how anyone would deliberate for even
a moment between joining the crew of the Enterprise and
spending who knew how many years on a godforsaken
backwater planet whose inhabitants not only
had not invented the wheel but had no intention of doing
so. But still, it was the job she'd prepared for.
She smiled, and forced cheer into her voice.
"I'm putting in for provisionary fleet status
today; my papers should be waiting for me by the time we
reach Starbase Nine. I'll be in
Anthro/geo with Bergdahl."
"Garh," muttered Scotty in alarmed
distaste. "Never let that whey-faced laddie catch
you takin' a glass of wine, then, if you don't
want to hear about it for the next three months." As
he spoke he took the two heaviest duffels from
her and carried them to the transporter disks,
Helen following behind with the rest of the assorted
packs. "What did the captain say when you
told him?"
She hesitated awkwardly on the
steps of the transport chamber itself. "I haven't
told him yet," she admitted. "I didn't
decide myself until late last night."
Scotty's eyes twinkled. "Then he should be
down here himself any minute"--he smiled--
"thinkin' he's going to see you off."
Her self-conscious blush belied the quick shake
of her head, but he'd seen the way she'd looked
around the room when she first came in, half
expecting to see him there. "Is there some problem
here?" she asked quickly, gesturing toward the console
where Transport Chief Kyle's red-
coveralled legs still protruded through the open
access panel.
Scotty shook his head, all considerations and
speculations of his captain and his captain's
romances dropping from his thoughts in the face of the
larger consideration at hand. "Nothing that we've been
able to find," he said.
"You mean something that caused the feedback ghost
we got last night?"
"Aye. And feedback's likely all it
was." Scott shrugged. "It happens now and
then, if there's some bit of dust or foreign
matter in the transporter room that picks up a
sympathetic resonation. You'll get an energy
jump, but it's nowhere near strong enough to be of
danger to anyone. Just a bit of a sparkle. Mr.
Spock's not the first man who's pulled down a
quarantine on the strength of it."
He walked back over to the console and hunkered
down to check the readings on the micro-fine ion
scanner. It registered zero. There was not so much as
an atom of foreign material inside the
console's sealed circuits, not even the occasional
film of water vapor that would sometimes leak through the
vent filters ... nothing. Pleasing to know, of
course, but it did leave an unanswered question.
He straightened up again, and shook his head.
"It used to happen more often, before they began using
filex shields on the wiring. I remember a
shipwide intruder alert that kept us orbiting
Lyra Omicron Six for twenty-four hours
while we went over this ship with flea combs, and
nary a thing did we find except the head
librarian's cache of chocolate bonbons. But
you have to be careful."
Helen smiled, ducking her head a little. There
was a small silence.
"We've a few minutes till beam-
down time," said Scott after a moment. "We can
open a channel to the planet, if you'd like to tell
them you won't be joining them after all."
"I'll speak to them from the bridge, when Jim
... when the captain makes contact. I
suppose," she added with a half-smile, "that
I'll have to learn to call him Captain if I
become part of the crew. Thank you." She glanced
at the chronometer on the wall. "It's 0700
hours ... he'll be on the bridge now, won't
he?"
"Aye ..." Scott nodded and saw her shake
her head a little, as if putting aside some thought
or disappointment, or telling herself not to be
silly.
She smiled. "I'll speak to him there, then."
And she was gone, leaving Scotty to return to the
puzzle of the ghost that shouldn't have been there.
On the bridge the usual quietly efficient
commotion was under way as the Enterprise prepared
to leave orbit. Helen caught a sidelong
glance from Uhura as she walked over to the
captain's chair, where Kirk was listening to Mr.
Spock's summation of conditions between the star
Elcidar Beta and Starbase Nine. Helen
waited until he was done, then took a step
closer and said, "Captain?"
He turned his head, and Helen flinched a little
with startled shock. She had guessed that James
Kirk would get little sleep last night, but never
that it would have done this ... His face looked strained
and oddly gray and it flashed through her mind that if
concern about what her decision was to be--about what it
would mean to him in terms of their commitments to one
another--could do this to him ...
But of course it couldn't, she thought. It was
laughable vanity on her part to even consider that it
might.
Something else was bothering him, something serious.
It was in his voice as he said, "Yes ...
Helen?"
She kept it short. "I'm here to request
transfer to the Enterprise ... admission on a
provisionary basis into Starfleet."
Something changed in his eyes. Her peripheral
vision picked up the quick motion of Mr.
Spock's eyebrow, the slight tension of
Sulu's shoulders, and Chekov's, as they stopped
themselves from looking around from the Navigation console and
grinning congratulations at her ... But the
captain only nodded, and began, "Do you have a--"
and cut himself off quickly. But just for an instant he
looked as if he were groping for a response,
trying to sort out what his next step was to be.
He's surprised, Helen thought with the same
sense of shock she would have experienced if he had
suddenly dashed a pitcher of cold water into her
face. He didn't really think I'd do it.
How could he not have? After all we said on the
planet ...
Everything in her seemed to turn cold; as if
life support and gravity had suddenly
glitched.
He recovered quickly from his surprise, and
manufactured a smile. "Lieutenant
Uhura, transmit a subspace request for
processing to Starbase Nine. It can be ready by the
time we reach there."
"Aye, Captain." Helen could hear the
pleasure in the Communications chief's warm
contralto voice. But looking back at Kirk,
baffled, hurt, and shaken to her bones, she could
see the veiled uncertainty in his eyes.
She stared into the polite, slightly wary
blankness of his eyes, and thought, I've said
I'll be in the fleet, I can't turn around
immediately and say no I won't ...
Before she could speak, Uhura broke in on them
again, saying, "Communication coming in from the research
party, Captain. Shall I put it on the
visuals?"
He turned away a little too gratefully.
"Pipe it in, Lieutenant."
And there, on the main screen, was the place that
would have been her home, the people who would have been her
family, for the next three years at least, years
that would now be spent on this ship ... with Jim ...
Jim who had reacted with that blank-faced
surprise to what they had spoken of last night
...
Long morning shadows splashed a hot blue
on the dusty ground around the Research
Institute's insignificant, lumpy bulk.
In the sulfurous light of the planet's
surface, everything seemed strange, burning. The
short trunks of the barrel trees loomed in a
golden screen behind the hut, and beyond that, the dark
tangle of thorns, the gentle, amber meadow
stretching away down the hillside ... the meadow
along whose edge she and Kirk had walked
last night--Stop thinking about that! Around the
extinguished firepit before the door were heaped the
packs she'd taken down to the transporter room
half an hour previously, and standing beside them were the
people who would have been her colleagues Thetas, like a
small and quick-moving gnome, with his great, dark
Argellian eyes and the whorls of scar tattoos
spread like a jungle over his arms and back;
Shorak, prim and scholarly with his carefully
trimmed beard, and L'jian impatiently pushing
a metal comb into her wild hair; Nomias, with
his supercilious smile, and Chu, wrinkled and
tiny and kind.
At the corner of the screen, at a respectful
distance, a small group of Midgwins stood,
great fishlike eyes watching and blinking
inscrutably. Among them Helen recognized the
old patriarch Arxoras, his long white hair a
thin cloak over his skinny shoulders, a white
flower in either hand.
"Dr. Shorak, Dr. Chu," James
Kirk said, and Helen felt her chest get cold
and heavy with dread, wondering what he really
felt, and wishing she were sure of herself, one way
or the other.
It had all seemed so clear at two o'clock that
morning ...
"Dr. Gordon has decided to turn down the
mission on Midgwis, and has opted instead
to return with the Enterprise to Starbase Nine."
Any of the researchers could have done that, if for
whatever reason--from prevailing climate
to personal health to an inauspicious
astrological conjunction--he or she decided not
to participate in the mission that they had all trained
for. But Helen read the downturned flick of
Nomias's mobile blue lips, and the slight
slump of Chu's shoulders as she realized her
younger colleague had made the choice, taken the
road that ran in the direction she herself had long
ago chosen not to travel.
Kirk went on, "We will make arrangements
from Starbase Nine for a replacement to be
selected and sent from your list of alternates; one
should be out here by the earliest possible transport."
"Leaving us one short--" Nomias began, and
Shorak cut him off.
"Thank you, Captain. Dr. Gordon ..."
Helen stepped forward, into the narrow range of the
small visual pickup unit, part of the
new transmitter that the Enterprise had brought
out to them with the additional research team.
"We respect you for your choice," the
Vulcan said, "and for the courage it took to follow
an alternate course at this late date." With a
nod he stepped back; Vulcans, once away
from the elaborate formalities required by their own
hierarchical culture, tended to speak baldly
to the point.
But Chu said, "I wish you every happiness--and you,
Captain. Thank you for a most pleasant
voyage."
Kirk inclined his head, and the screen went dark.
Standing beside him, Helen watched his profile from the
corner of her eye. His face was unreadable. Then
she saw his glance slide to her, studying her
sidelong, inscrutably considering, and she thought,
It was a sham. Jesus, it was a sham ...
She felt sick to the core of her being. With a
formal, "Captain," she inclined her head to him,
and quietly left the bridge.
Behind her she heard him telling Mr. Sulu
to set a course for Starbase 9 at warp
factor 4.
Captain Kirk remained on the bridge when
the shift ended, deep in the study of the reports
on yesterday's transporter ghost. Lieutenant
Uhura, after checking the guest VIP
staterooms, ran Dr. Gordon to earth in
sickbay, in a small lab where Nurse
Christine Chapel had stayed on after hours to run
an analysis of herbs brought up from the
planet's surface.
Uhura heard Helen's voice as she came
down the corridor, and stepped through the door. It
slipped shut after her, just as Chapel turned on
her high lab stool to regard Helen with deep
compassion in her blue eyes. Helen had spent a
lot of rec-room time with Uhura and Chapel,
working jigsaw puzzles and talking--
inconsequential talk, most of it, but it
overlay a growing core of friendship. Upon the
workbench before the thin-featured blond nurse a row
of a half-dozen graduated cylinders was
arranged, each filled with a clear liquid; a
pile of flimsiplast hardcopy lay before her,
annotated in Dr. McCoy's nearly
illegible script.
"You can still go back, you know," Chapel pointed
out gently.
Helen, who had been pacing the room, only
shook her head. She still wore her many-pocketed
khaki researcher's coverall, her dark hair
bound up in a leather thong and a bronze pin. She
looked over at Uhura, her hazel-green
eyes puzzled, and said, "You were there. Was it just my
imagination? I didn't expect him to fall
into my arms weeping with delight, but ... he
looked surprised. Not even floored, not
knocked for a loop--certainly not relieved. Just
a little surprised. You know him ..."
"I'm not sure any woman really does,"
said Uhura, bringing up a second lab stool and
perching one flank on it as Chapel turned back
to her procedure, adjusting the temperature
control on one of the cylinders.
In practice, neither Chapel nor Dr.
McCoy was ever off shift. Though they had more
unstructured time than anyone else on the
Enterprise, in fact they were like the senior
officers, always on call. Uhura had known
she'd be able to find Christine here--if she hadn't
been working on one of Dr. McCoy's ongoing
procedures she'd have been working on the paper she
was writing for the Journal of Alien
Pathologies--and had known that Helen would
probably be with her. She had passed Dr.
McCoy's office and had seen him, too, still
hard at work. On a mission of exploration, no
medical officer could afford to simply rely on
existing information or practices. In dealing with a
constant bombardment of alien microbes, unknown
conditions, and shifting biosystems, awareness of
new possibilities could literally be the difference
between life and death for every person in the crew.
Uhura leaned an elbow on the workbench and added
quietly, "I would have said, "except you.""
"That's odd ..." Chapel paused in the act
of jotting a note of the numbers which had flickered
to life on the small screen at the rear of the
bench.
"What?" Helen came over and Uhura
turned, both distracted for the moment from the puzzle
of Captain Kirk's behavior by the uncertainty
in Chapel's voice.
"Well ..." Christine consulted Dr.
McCoy's notes again. "The odd thing is that
there's nothing odd. I mean, these are just ordinary
homeopathic herbs. There's nothing in them to account
for some of the medical effects Dr.
McCoy--and Dr. L'jian--observed down on
Midgwis."
"He mentioned he was puzzled by the tricorder
readings he got," Helen said thoughtfully. "I
know he kept taking them."
Chapel punched up a reading on the second
of the series of vials, and the third, jotting notes
on her stylopad as she spoke. "He said they were
all badly deficient in ten or twelve
essential vitamins ..."
"They looked like they were just this side of starvation,"
Helen said frankly. "It ... it scared me, a
little."
"At that level of starvation, they should have
virtually nothing left of their immune systems--
and according to the readings, they don't! Like the
Midgwins themselves. In L'jian's analysis of
ancient bones, she says the Midgwins are
se verely malnourished in comparison to what they were
even fifty years ago."
Uhura frowned; even she sensed the anomaly,
and Helen said, "That was mentioned in the preliminary
reports. But everyone down there seemed fine."
"Exactly." Chapel looked up from her
note making. "It's got Dr. McCoy
stonewalled. According to Thetas, there have been a series
of plagues, the sort you start having once a
planet's food resources are bottoming out.
But each of those plagues stopped, cut itself short
after a dozen casualties. Dr. Shorak
attributes this to some kind of herbal medicine, but
I can't find anything in any of the herbs we've
tested to justify that contention. In your reading, in your
prep work on the planet, did you find anything that
might account for it?"
Helen thought back for a moment, then shook her
head. "There's been almost nothing written about
Midgwis, you see," she said. "The early
reports described the Midgwins as
nonsentient--certainly not the dominant life-form
of the planet, which is the Bargumps. The
Midgwins just colonize whatever land the
Bargumps aren't breeding in and stay out of their
way. It wasn't until five years ago that
anyone guessed they had a culture at all, and
not until the Organian Peace Treaty two
years ago that the Federation was willing to fund
research to keep the Klingons from going in and
stripmining the place like they did Marcipor
Two. They still don't know whether the
Marcipex were a sentient race or not--no one
ever will, now. But they've found artifacts ...
That's why the mission on Elcidar Beta is so
important, why the finds there will be so ..."
She broke off suddenly, and Uhura, seeing
the flinch of pain of those dark brows, remembered the
strange, gold-lit landscape she'd seen in the
viewscreen, the alien beauty of the place.
Chapel must have seen it, too, for she asked
quietly, "Have you talked to him?"
Helen did not reply.
"He hasn't left the bridge all day,"
Uhura said.
"I know," said Helen softly. "I thought
he'd come to the rec room, like he used to when he
took a lunch break, even a brief one ..."
She shook her head again.
"I'm not very good at this, you know. It sounds
stupid," she added. "At the age of twenty-four
you'd have thought I'd have had at least some kind of
experience, but ... I worked damn hard for my
scholarships and studied hard once I got them.
Oh, yeah, I had boyfriends, but they never seemed
anywhere near as important to me as studying."
She shrugged, and looked away from Chapel's
worried compassionate gaze. "So I don't
really know if he's reacting strangely or not.
If he's avoiding me, or if this is just something
men do."
"It's something some men do," Uhura said
quietly. "But I would have sworn, not the
captain. He's never been deliberately
insensitive ..." She frowned, remembering
back to the captain's preoccupation all day on the
bridge, to his repeated checking and rechecking of the
ship's internal systems reports. "To tell you
the truth, my impression is that he's had something
on his mind since he came back up from
Midgwis."
"That could be," Chapel said thoughtfully.
"And as a relatively minor member of the
crew," Helen finished, with a lopsided smile,
"it's none of my affair what it is." There was
relief in her face, but Uhura guessed it was
an uneasy relief, a hope against hope that she
hadn't seen what she knew perfectly well she
had.
"Minor member hell," Uhura said
firmly. "At the moment you're the only one
onboard who's done extensive research
about Midgwis. If it was something on the planet
that worried the captain ..."
"Nurse Chapel ..." The lab door slid
abruptly open again, framing the spare, blue-
smocked figure of Dr. McCoy. He nodded
a greeting to Uhura and Helen--people were always coming in
and out of sickbay and none of it ever seemed to throw
Chapel's work off-stride--and turned back
to his assistant. "Did you by any chance leave the
door of the small med lab unsecured?"
Chapel shook her head. "No ... those
samples need to settle out in a controlled
environment if we're going to get any kind of
an accurate reading on them."
"And you didn't mention the changed door code
to anyone?"
"No. You only changed it the day before
yesterday, and it isn't as if anyone but you and me
ever goes in there."
"No," agreed McCoy quietly. "Come in
here for a moment." When Helen and Uhura glanced
at each other and made to go he added, "You
ladies might as well see this, too. The
experiment's shot to hell anyway."
The small med lab was situated almost 180
degrees around the curved central corridor of
sickbay, in a position corresponding to that of
McCoy's private lab on the other side of the
central ring. It lacked the elaborate
facilities of the main med lab or the biochem
lab, and was generally used for long-term experiments
that needed to be left in a sterile environment out of
everyone's way. "This was just a routine
precipitation analysis of blood and fluid
samples we picked up at Persis Nova,"
McCoy explained as he stood aside to let the
three women precede him into the bare-walled little
room. "Aside from the fact that the information's necessary
to a preliminary report on another planet in
the disputed border zone with the Klingons, there was
certainly nothing unusual about them."
"Good heavens!" Uhura exclaimed, drawing
back and looking around the small room in dismay.
"Why on earth ...?"
Every vessel, every beaker, every test tube on the
long table and the shelf behind it had been overset;
even the petri dishes full of soft, ashy,
dried precipitates and powders were surrounded
by scattered dunes of their contents, as if an
impatient hand had knocked them sharply
back and forth. Distilled water pooled on the
floor, and the more viscous solutions lay in
colored puddles on the table, or clung in
half-congealed blobs around the vessels that had
contained them. The dim, sweetish pungency of
organic decay filled the air, making Uhura
wrinkle her nose with disgust.
"Look over here." McCoy gestured to the end
of the table where the blood precipitates had been.
Chapel frowned, puzzled and a little alarmed.
"What ...?"
"It's as if someone tried to write in it,"
Uhura said slowly. "To write with their finger,
look." Her own slender hand traced the drawn-out
smears pulled from the sides of every sticky,
purplish puddle, jagged, childish tracks that
wavered and went nowhere.
"Why would anyone have done something like that?"
Chapel asked, baffled.
"And how would they have gotten in?" Uhura
demanded, looking up at the join of ceiling and
walls where the narrow vent shafts opened. "The
ventilator grille's only ten centimeters
square ..."
Helen, too, was looking at the small metal
square above the door, gauging the distance between it and the
table with a calculating eye. She turned her head
to meet McCoy's speculative gaze.
"A projection out of the vent, maybe?"
"A tentacle or a pseudopod?" he added
thoughtfully. Behind them Uhura and Chapel traded
a nervous glance, for picking up an intruder, an
alien stowaway, was the nightmare of every man or
woman who had ever traveled the spaceways, and the
source of a thousand tales, authentic and
apocryphal, with which the junior crew regaled
one another in the rec rooms after hours.
"It would account for a certain amount of clumsiness
across that distance ... but I could swear those marks were
made by a finger." Cautiously, he brought the
lab's single tall-legged stool up under the vent
and, taking a small magnifier and a tiny
flashlight from one of the table drawers, stood on the
seat. He shined the light down the vent shaft as
far as he could--which was only as far as the filter
twenty centimeters or so in--and sniffed the soft
flow of cool air coming out, then examined the neat
mesh of the grille, first visually and then with a
tricorder Chapel handed silently up to him.
"Nothing," he said after a time. "No
deposits or smudges of any kind, not even
of the precipitate solutions. No scratches,
no marks, no sign that the vent cover was
removed." Bracing one hand carefully on the
wall beside him, he climbed down and looked around
him again at the disrupted lab. Then he walked to the
communications panel beside the door, punched in the
number of the captain's personal page and said,
"This is McCoy, Jim. We've had a
problem in sickbay. I think you'd better get
down here."

Chapter Five

"And an internal scan of the ship shows nothing?"
The captain glanced beside him at Mr. Spock as
they emerged, last of the group of Science and
Security personnel that had for the past hour been
going over the small lab with every analytical
tool on the ship.
Spock paused, looking back over his shoulder
at the bright, small, evenly lit room, with its
tumbled beakers and its liquids pooled
untidily on the floor. It had not been
hermetically sealed, true, but something about the
situation disquieted him.
"Negative, Captain. Both the scan run
immediately after the quarantine alert, and the scan just
completed, account for every life-form aboard the ship,
including the plants in Botanic, the rec
room, and Mr. Sulu's quarters."
"I wouldn't put it past one of Sulu's
babies to have gotten loose and stuck a tentacle
out that vent," McCoy muttered, folding his arms
and regarding the disordered lab dourly. More
security officers came around the curve of the
corridor in which they stood--the main offices of the
Security section were just a few corridors
away. "That thing with the gold flowers he picked up
on Iolos Six ..."
"The aetavis spengleris would have very little
interest in anything with the protein chains characteristic of the
Persis Nova life-forms connected with your
experiments," Spock remarked quellingly.
"Its affection f or you, Doctor, was based
solely upon body temperature ... most
plants being entirely lacking in aesthetic
judgment."
"I could tell that by the way it went after you,"
McCoy retorted. Spock merely
raised a dismissive eyebrow and turned back
to Kirk as Dr. Gordon came around the curve
of the corridors and into view from the direction of
Nurse Chapel's duty station.
Spock, though well aware that it was no more his
business than had been any of the captain's other
numerous affairs, was interested to note the
diffidence with which Dr. Gordon approached the
captain--the way she stopped for an instant when
she first saw him and then approached with an
uncertainty that amounted almost to hesitation, as if
she feared a rebuff. That morning on the bridge
he had seen her disappointment when Kirk had
made no acknowledgment of her decision to remain
on board the Enterprise--a decision that had
lowered Spock's opinion of her powers of
logic. He personally regarded it as irrational
of her to expect congratulation on the forsaking--or
at best the postponement--of her career, even from the
man for whose sake the decision had been made.
But why Dr. Gordon would have felt--or
feared--rebuff was, to Spock, a mystery.
"I've been over all the preliminary
research reports on the life-forms of
Midgwis," she said in her gruff, rather abrupt
way. "There's nothing that would have been able to get
into the locked lab, nothing that would even have been able
to get onto the ship undetected ..."
"That you know about," Kirk said softly.
Helen hesitated. A short ways down the
corridor, Security Chief DeSalle had
opened another outlet of the vent shafting and was
checking the square metal duct with infrascope and
magnifier for marks or smears in the fine film
of moisture that collected on the filters.
Back in the lab itself, Nurse Chapel was
holding a reflector for the ship's photographer
to get shots of the puddles of liquid from every
conceivable angle and in every conceivable lighting and
perspective, for analysis both by computer and
by DeSalle himself.
The captain went on, "You said yourself the
reports are preliminary. Your--" He stopped
whatever his next remark would have been,
reconsidered, then said, "The research teams
made only a cursory survey of the planet.
Even Shorak and his party saw only a small
portion of the world, never truly appreciated ..."
He paused, a frown appearing suddenly between his
fair brows, as if he were picking his words
carefully, sorting through a tangle of ideas for
what he wanted to express. "My impression was
that even their observations were ... frequently at
fault."
McCoy looked around sharply, as if startled;
Spock raised one eyebrow for amplification, but
Kirk shook his head, not able or not willing to say
more.
"We have not, of course, eliminated the
possibility that the intruder entered the lab in a
perfectly normal fashion through the door,"
Spock pointed out after a moment. "Nor the
possibility that the intruder was a member of the
crew ..."
"Why would anyone have wanted to disrupt that
experiment?" McCoy demanded, and Spock
regarded him with mild surprise.
"I am not an expert on the vagaries of
human motivation, Doctor. I am merely
saying that in our quest for the apparently impossible,
we should not overlook the obvious. It is a
fairly easy matter to disrupt a simple
security latch on a door of that kind."
"No," Kirk said quietly. His gaze
moved, not restlessly, but with a kind of narrowed
deliberation from the door of the violated lab along
the curving, light blue walls, taking in the vent
grilles, the doors, the small access hatches
and conduits that led into the mazes of the ship's walls
and tunnels. DeSalle and his assistant were
packing up their findings, shaking their heads
uneasily; everything having been photographed,
McCoy and Chapel were beginning to pick up the
fallen beakers and vacuum the spills. "No,
there's something. I knew it in the transporter
room. I felt it."
"Computer analysis reveals nothing
amiss--" Spock began.
"I would say that merely reveals the limitations
of the computer."

Back in his quarters Mr. Spock, with his
customary deliberation, activated his computer
screen and scanned again through the results of the
security investigation of the small med lab, the
results of the shipwide life-form scan that had
accompanied that investigation, and the results of the
earlier scan during the quarantine emergency.
He punched through a request for the latest results
from the analysis lab, where he knew
DeSalle would still be working, despite the late
hour, on what little he'd found. But as he had
himself earlier informed Captain Kirk, there were no
anomalies.
Still, he was uneasy. He knew the captain
had an acutely developed awareness of
subliminal cues, a hair-trigger sensitivity
to almost-indetectable breaks in patterns that
humans tended to refer to as a "sixth sense,"
though it was in fact merely a more efficient usage
of the existing five.
And he trusted the captain's judgment
implicitly. In dozens of tricky and
dangerous planetary missions, and in hundreds of
chess games, he had seen James Kirk's
wits and instincts in action, and knew that the
captain had something that he himself lacked the
conviction that hard data had limitations, and the
ability to spot those limitations.
Something was troubling the captain. He'd known it
that morning on the bridge, seen it in the stress
lines of his face, the marks of sleeplessness and
strain. He suspected now that Kirk had lain
awake most of the night, quite possibly going over
these same scan results on his own
viewscreen, trying to find some flaw, some
telltale clue to tell him that his own instincts were
correct--that against all evidence to the contrary, they
did have an intruder on board.
And, like Spock, he must have found nothing, for there
was nothing to find.
For a long time Spock sat gazing at the
computer screen in the warm dimness of his room--the
Enterprise was a vessel designed principally
for an Earth-human crew, though at maximum
setting the temperature controls for his private
quarters could approximate Vulcan's
pleasant heat. After some moments he reached forward
and keyed in another sequence, and played through,
frame by frame, the video of all the events in
the transporter room the previous night. He
saw himself hit the quarantine button, but oddly
enough, there was not even the characteristic glittery
flicker of a feedback ghost that everyone assumed
he must have seen.
There was nothing at all.
Nothing except his memory of that momentary,
fleeting conviction that there was something in the
transporter room that should not have been there.
Then behind him, very faintly, he heard a
footstep on the floor.
Spock's reflexes were quick. Even as he
turned, his mind groped at the anomaly, the
sense that there couldn't have been anyone in his
quarters when he came in, dim though the lighting
was, for his acute hearing would have picked up
breathing, the creak of boot leather, the thousand soft,
subsensory rustlings that the clothed human body
makes ...
And there was, in fact, no one behind him at
all.
For some moments Mr. Spock sat, half
turned around in his chair, looking back into the
small, somewhat featureless room behind him. Even
officers' staterooms on a starship were not large,
and offered very little in the way of either architectural
interest or places of concealment. Despite his
subsequent return to speaking terms with his father,
Spock's departure from his family on Vulcan
had, for all its exquisite politeness, been
stormy enough that he cherished few souvenirs to remind
him of the world that had always considered him a half-
caste and an outsider. A shelf held a few
geological curiosities he had picked up
on various worlds; three terminals on his desk
permitted him access to as many programs or
scientific journals as he wished to peruse at
any one time. One could have bounced a coin off the
Spartan bunk, had one wished to utilize so
illogical a method of testing the taut neatness
of its coverlet.
There was nowhere in the room that anyone or anything
could hide, and no corner of it not immediately visible
from the chair before the desk.
Nevertheless Mr. Spock got to his feet and,
in a manner reminiscent of Captain Kirk's
recent behavior, walked slowly around the little
room, looking, listening, almost scenting, for further
anomalies, further clues to account for what he
had heard or thought he had heard.
There was, of course, nothing. Dismissing the
matter as some chance refraction of sound, but filing
the incident for possible later reference in his mind,
Mr. Spock stripped, showered, meditated, and
retired to bed.

"Jim?" As the door slipped closed behind
Helen, the light from the hall--dimmed, as they were
in this part of the officers' quarters, for the
Enterprise's artificial night--
caught on the eyes of the man sitting at the little
desk, and just for a moment she paused. He'd
turned quickly to look at her as she came in,
and for that instant his eyes had had a wariness, an
almost animal quality that turned them into the eyes
of a stranger.
But then the shadows hid him, and his voice was
Jim Kirk's voice. "Helen." He got
to his feet, came to her and took her in his arms.
"Jim, wait a minute!" With her hands against
his broad shoulders she held him off; for an
instant his grip tightened greedily around her
waist, dragging at her, and she felt,
fleetingly, a strength that would not listen, that would not
let go.
But the next moment his hold slacked a little and
he drew back, regarding her, his face with its
strange new lines of worry and stress
inscrutable in the dimness.
"Jim, what's the matter?" Her voice
shook a little, for even in his arms, where she had
wanted to seek what comfort she could all day, she
felt a kind of strangeness, as if he were holding
off from her, holding something back. His head tilted
a little, the single night lamp in the sleeping
cubicle beyond catching a gleaming edge on his fair
hair. He said nothing.
"We said ... the truth," she went on,
stumbling over her words, cursing herself for not knowing
how to say what she wanted to say without
inadvertently destroying what lay between them.
"Please tell me the truth."
"The truth about what?" His voice was stiff,
mechanical, unfamiliar. She had thought at one
time she'd been able to read its every variation, its every
gradation ...
She had thought she'd known him. What should she do
now? Pretend there was nothing wrong and hope it
sorts itself out?
"The truth about me," she stammered slowly.
"The truth about ... about us. This morning on the
bridge, when I said I was staying with the ship, you just
... you just said, "All right, fine--"'" She
cut herself off, fumbling for what to say, trying not
to sound like a clinging vine petulantly reminding him
of fancied promises, and whining because he hadn't
paid her sufficient attention. But there was something
wrong. She couldn't say what, couldn't say how
she knew it. She felt burningly conscious of his
hands, resting on her sides.
Still he said nothing, and she went on quickly, "But
you were--surprised, or you looked surprised
... Does it bother you that I decided to stay?
I can still go back ..." Her whole soul cringed from
the thought of what she knew Nomias would say.
His silence--the silence that felt to her so
calculating--unnerved her. "Jim, talk to me!
Tell me what's going on with you! I know you
love your ship, I know you need your career, I'm
not asking you ..." Her voice tailed off
despairingly. Looking across at his face, she
could see little of it, for his back was to the dim desk
light, but she could almost hear the wheels of his thoughts
spinning, calculating, piecing together this explanation
or that. Under her hands she could feel the tension in his
pectorals, the uncertainty as he hesitated
over what would be best to say.
At length he said, "Helen, I ... You're
saying that I didn't react as you expected this
morning. But how did you expect me to react?"
"I'm not saying that!" she pleaded, exasperated
and tired and desperately confused. "I'm just
asking how you did react!"
Another long pause. Then, slowly, still
picking his way carefully, as if piecing together
bits of sentences from previous conversations, "This
is something that's never happened to me before. I am
... new to this ..."
He hesitated again, then went on quickly,
"Helen, can we speak of this another time?"
"I'm sorry!" Remorse stabbed her. "I
shouldn't have sprung this on you now. You did see--
or sense--something in the transporter room,
didn't you? The same thing Mr. Spock
sensed?"
"Yes." He almost pounced on the words.
"Yes, there is--something aboard the ship. I know
it. I feel it. Give me a few days,
Helen. We will ... we will talk of this. We will
sort this out. But not now."
"All right." It was better than nothing, she
thought--it probably didn't have anything to do with her
at all ...
She turned to go, but his arms tightened suddenly
around her, dragging her to him. More surprised than
anything, she yielded.
She had wanted him all day, wanted the day
to end just as it was ending ...
But what she had wanted was not his body, but
reassurance, and in spite of his words,
she felt only deeper and deeper confusion, not
knowing if it was appropriate to go or to remain,
to protest her own needs or to yield to his.
Never had she felt so much that, as a man, he was
a species utterly alien to herself, and more than
anything else, as he dragged her to the bed, she
wanted to ask Uhura what she ought to do ...

The crashing noise jarred Spock awake
to darkness, disorienting and profound. For a moment he
lay listening, the silence around him thick and
waiting, wondering what it was that he had heard.
Logically, he should not have heard anything, he
thought. Though the soundproofing of crew quarters was
an expensive luxury, at least some measure of
it was necessary on a five-year mission, and all
crew members--even the real convivials like Mr.
Scott and Bray in Maintenance--observed the
noise regulations fairly strictly. Most of the
time even Mr. Spock's hypersensitive hearing
could not distinguish words, though he could usually hear
voices through the doors of any room he passed
and occasionally through the walls of his own quarters.
But as he lay listening, he heard nothing, for it
was the deep of the Enterprise's artificial
night.
Engine noise? he wondered. But the
subsonic, throbbing hum of machines and systems,
the veins and nerves of the ship's metallic flesh
that made a background tapestry to all his other
perceptions of the ship, sounded normal. Still, he
thought that what he had heard had been a ship
noise, not human ...
Then he heard it again. Somewhere close ... For
some reason, he did not think it was in the room with
him, though logically he could not have heard it so
clearly had it not been.
Someone hammering on a bulkhead?
The noise was impossible to identify beyond that it
was a pounding dull, heavy, furious. There was
something in its rhythm that made him think it was
sentient, not mechanical; a scream of frus-
tration, of hopelessness, by that which cannot make a sound.
The room felt cold. A timer was set
to reduce the high temperature at night, in
mimicry of Vulcan's desert climate which still
ruled his physiology, but for some reason there was a
bitterness to this chill, a malevolent clamminess.
Spock drew the coverlet over him more
closely, but it did not help--after a
moment he threw it back, switched on the
bedside light and walked to the door.
In the corridor outside he could not hear the
pounding at all.
It was possible, he thought, considering the dimly
illuminated line of the shut doors of other
officers' quarters stretching out before him around the
curve of Deck 5, that certain sounds could carry
within the walls themselves, if the harmonics were
correct--and indeed, that might account for whatever
soft, almost stealthy noise it was that had disturbed his
thoughts earlier in the evening. But that could very well have
been some sound in the corridor itself--his
Vulcan hearing frequently picked up
footfalls and voices of the people in the passageway
that ran by his door.
When Spock entered his room again, the pounding had
ceased. It was warmer than he had thought it had been
when he'd first awakened; cold as the Vulcan
nights, but without that icy frigidness. He turned
on the main lights and by their prosaic white glare
walked around the small room again, examining the
ventilators with the half-formed notion that the sound
might have carried along an access tunnel or
vent shaft.
Finding nothing amiss, he shut off the lights
and returned to bed.
But he was still awake an hour later when he
heard stumbling steps go by his door, and the muffled
sound of a woman crying as she returned to her
rooms.

Chapter Six

Even before the alert came, it was a queer and
curiously disquieting voyage toward Starbase
9.
Very little of the talk filtered up to the senior
officers at first, but there was a subcurrent of
rumor, especially among those who worked at the
farther corners of the ship. Ensigns Brunowski
and Miller spoke of hearing a kind of knocking
or pounding while working in the main computer room on
Deck 8. At least Miller was working;
Brunowski, being off-shift from Laundry and
Recycling--or Lose and Ruin, as the ship's
cleaning and molecular breakdownstreassembly
facilities were fondly known by those who liked
to wear something other than uniforms while off duty
--was keeping his friend company. The sound
seemed to be coming from somewhere close by, possibly
carried in a vent shaft or in the walls themselves,
but ceasing before they could get any kind of fix on
it. Miller, a prot@eg`e of Mr. Scott's
seconded to Computers because of a temporary
shortage in that area, said that the sound didn't
strike him as being mechanically produced; more like
someone or something pounding on a wall.
Ensign Gilden in Historical reputedly
heard something similar, while working alone in his
cubicle on the Deck 11 dorsal; a tapping
noise coming, he thought, from somewhere among the maze of
metal shelves filled with historical
documentation gathered from various planets which he was
inputting, though he admitted that he did not go
seeking the source of the sounds until after they had
ceased. He was one of the several who complained of
objects being moved--coffee cups, note
tablets, bundles of hardcopy and styluses that were
no longer in the places where he was sure he had
set them, though a glance at the assistant
historian's tiny cubicle was, on the
surface, sufficient explanation for the phenomenon
of disappearing objects. Nevertheless, as
Lieutenant Uhura pointed out one evening in the
rec room, Gilden could hardly have survived this
long in the fashion that he did without developing a
fairly strong sense of where he'd placed things.
But hers was a minority opinion, at least at
first.
Those were the things that got talked about. There were
things that didn't.
Mr. Scott, whose cubbyhole down in the
Engineering hull was another place that suddenly
seemed to suffer from disappearing or oddly
transported objects--the most inexplicable of
which was the coffee cup that was missing from his desk,
subsequently found on top of a two-meter
storage cabinet--mentioned to no one the strange
sensation that had overwhelmed him while working alo ne in
the shuttlecraft hangar deck, the certainty that
had overcome him that someone was standing nearby. The
hangar deck itself was nearly thirty meters long,
unlit--being out of immediate use--save for a single
line of half-strength lumenpanels across the center
of the ceiling and the localized white glow of
Scotty's worklights near the open access hatch
he was testing. The shuttlecrafts Herschel and
Copernicus were looming masses of shadows at
one end, but the area around the hatch itself was
clear in all directions for thirty feet or
so, and sitting up, startled--for he had not heard the
inner doors open--Scott had drawn in breath
to speak, assuming whoever was there was one of his
assistants.
But there was no one there.
And a prickle went down his spine, a
coldness, an irrational dread that brought sweat
to his palms. In that first second he fumbled
to hold his worklight up, illuminating the space
all around him more brightly. "Who's there?" he
called out, his heart beating fast.
But no one answered. The only sounds were the
distant throb of the engines, the faint humming of the
worklight itself, and the occasional muted chirp of test
gear cycling through.
Annoyed with himself, Scotty went back to work.
But after a few moments the dread, the uneasiness,
at being alone in that great echoing space grew so
strong that he got up and, taking his worklight with him
--an unnecessary precaution that he would never have
considered under other circumstances, since the vague
illumination provided by the lumenpanels far
overhead was sufficient for him to see, and he knew
the hangar as well as he knew his own cabin--he
crossed to the main switches and lit the entire
giant chamber.
He shook his head at himself as he went back
to work, all his pragmatic Glaswegian
sensibilities offended. But the fact remained--
he felt better with the lights on.
At about this time Mr. Spock was called down
to the central computer chamber.
"We've heard it three or four times,
sir," Miller reported, rubbing a big hand through
the stiff brush of his hair. "Kind of a tapping
noise sometimes. I've heard it, Giacomo's
heard it ..." He shook his head. Spock was
familiar with his work, both as Mr. Scott's
assistant in Engineering and as a fill-in for one
of the higher-level computer techs, and knew his
judgment could be trusted.
"Common sense tells me it's got to be
mechanical--you just don't have mice on a
starship--but the timing is just enough off that I don't
know."
"Fascinating." Spock walked thoughtfully
around the central computer core--a shoulder-high
monolith two meters long by nearly a meter
thick, surrounded by concentric rings of
data banks, terminals, program-logic
cubes, worktables, wafer scanners, and
monitors, and painted a neutral shade of
Starfleet blue. His boots thumped hollowly
on the raised subfloor which masked the tangle of
cables and wires connecting this immense nerve center
with every monitor screen, visicom, and reader
port on the ship. "Where does the noise appear
to be centered? In this room?"
"Not really. The first thing I thought of was that it
might be something under the floor--there's about forty
centimeters of crawl space down there. But
to tell you the truth, sir, it's damn difficult
to tell."
Spock nodded. It seemed almost impossible
to him that a human's hearing, particularly in terms
of direction-finding, could be that poor, but it was also
difficult for him to understand how humans stood the
overpowering, sickly gaminess of the animal
proteins on which they routinely glutted themselves.
At least Miller was reporting accurately, and
perhaps the odd, adirectional quality of the sound was
significant in itself.
"Thank you, Ensign," he said, returning to the
worktable where he'd left his small troubleshooting
kit to extract a handlight. "I shall be here some
time. Dismissed."
He had been at work 1.3 hours, finding
nothing, when he heard the noises himself.
The first he knew of anything amiss was the sudden
blare of gritty and outlandish music from the room
above him--for he was lying in the narrow confines of the
space between floor and subfloor, meticulously
checking every centimeter of cable and wire with the
handlight and an ion beam. The noise made him
flinch, and he barely caught himself from banging his
head on the underside of the floor above. He
recognized one of the more outr`e forms of what
passed on Earth for popular music, and realized
that someone--probably Miller--had hooked up a
dot player somewhere in the room, though how anyone
could work with such racket going on was a source of
mystification to him.
A moment later he realized that he had not
heard the hollow thump of footfalls crossing the
floor above him to switch on the device.
He emerged from the hatch and located the player,
a smooth black box the size of his hand tucked
into a shelf with the spare backup batteries. He
keyed it off and stood looking around him
at the vacant room.
He would assuredly have heard, had anyone
crossed to that shelf from the door.
With the abrupt cessation of the noise, the silence
in the room seemed even more profound. The central
computer chamber lay in the core of Deck 8, a
nerve center carefully protected in the event of
attack or disaster, and though it was surrounded on
one side by the recreation and entertainment areas, and
on the other by the galley and LandRather, such was its
shielding that no sound penetrated to it from the
corridors and rooms outside. Spock stood,
the player cradled lightly in his bony hands,
listening, and it seemed that a queer, creeping
uneasiness prickled at his skin and, just for an
instant, quickened his breath.
It was absurd, of course. He slowed his
breath and concentrated on finding the source of that
... dread? His hearing was acute enough to detect a
subsonic note, and there was no such thing in operation
--a scent, perhaps? There were gases that instilled
anxiety, and the Enterprise's ventilation system
was sufficiently selective that one area could have
been flooded while adjacent rooms were left
clean. But stepping quickly to a reader, he keyed in
the code for an air-quality report and found
nothing amiss in the screenful of numbers that
flashed, a moment later, before his eyes. And there was
nothing to account for the sudden sensation of icy cold.
Then, quite near him, he heard the knocking.
Miller was right. There was absolutely nothing
mechanical about the sound.
It was, in fact, virtually identical to the
tapping he had already heard in his own cabin,
seventeen hours after departure from Midgwis. It
was less violent, less enraged--why, he
wondered, did he persist in anthropomorphizing
it with an emotional context? Another subliminal
cue to be investigated ...
And as Miller had said, it was virtually
impossible to detect from which direction it came.
Belatedly, Spock realized he was still holding
the dot player in his hands. Miller would
undoubtedly object to the loss of his entertainment
software, but Spock switched the little machine
to recording mode, multi-directional; then
turned to key into the nearest monitor for readings of
every life-form, every energy source, atmosphere,
gravity, anything at all, concerning the room in which
he stood.
There was absolutely nothing amiss. No
anomalies, nothing unaccounted for.
The knocking ceased before the computer had finished
giving him its information.
Playing back the dot recording later,
Spock found that though the machine had erased
Radovic Ja'an's Shaken to the Bones
album, it had picked up no sound at all.

It was Ensign Reilly who first said the word,
"Ghost."
"Gah," Chekov said, sorting out his cards.
"Trust an Irishman to go looking for spooks
..."
"Trust an Irishman to beat you hollow round
the cribbage board, you mean--and who's to say
there's no such a thing? It was you Russians who
set up the Vorodny Institute ..."
"Of course. We went about it in the correct
way, scientifically."
Reilly snorted. At the other end of the long
rec-room table, Uhura and Chapel were engaged
in sorting out the pieces of the latest of the
Communications officer's collection of jigsaw
puzzles. Across the room Yeoman
Brunowski, square and dark and sloppy in a red
LandRather coverall, was playing ragtime piano with a
touch surprisingly light and sure; and Ensign
Tracy Giacomo was singing one of the more
scurrilous of the spaceways ballads, to the great
amusement of a handful of the junior crew.
"And precious little you found at it, didn't
you?" Reilly retorted, moving his cribbage
counter several more places ahead of Chekov's.
"Because there was nothing to find," the Russian
replied, glancing up from his disappointing
collection of fives and sixes. "Why don't you
say we've got a werewolf on the ship and have
done with it?"
Sulu, kibbitzing over Uhura's shoulder,
laughed. "Can't you picture a werewolf on a
planet with four moons that all come full at
different times? He'd have a nervous breakdown
..."
"Or a vampire on a world like Trigonis that
has three suns and the biggest silver deposits
in the galaxy?" Uhura added, looking up from her
puzzle bits with a grin.
"Scoff all you may, you heathens," Reilly
said serenely. "It'd be a clever
werewolf, or a vampire either, to get into the
labs and spill whatever's to be spilled, wouldn't
it, Christine?"
"That was just an accident," Uhura said quickly.
But when she looked across at her friend for confirmation,
the nurse had her eyes fixed on the bright-
colored blobs of plastic she was moving about on
the tabletop, and her thin cheeks were flushed.
"Once is happenstance, as the Great Man
said," Reilly went on goadingly, shaking back
the loose lock of brown hair that fell over his
forehead, "and t wice is coincidence. How many
times has it been, Chris?"
Chapel raised her eyes to Uhura's.
"Last night," she said quietly, "made
four."
"Four!"
In the shocked silence Yeoman Zink's rather
strident tones could be heard relating the details
of an ex-roommate's love life to several
interested third parties; a gust of laughter
swirled around the piano, and over by the food
slots Lieutenant Bray from Maintenance was
griping about the remixer program's idea of
chocolate.
"The labs have been locked every time," Chapel
went on in a muffled, uneasy voice. "It's
never the same lab--just wherever there are liquids.
Covering the flasks doesn't help; the covers
are pulled off, if the flasks themselves aren't
broken." She sorted a straight-edged piece from
the tangle before her as if it were of some critical
importance, and moved it over to where the other edged
pieces were, never raising her eyes to her
audience.
"Have you tried staying in the lab and watching?"
Reilly asked, leaning forward on his elbows,
fascinated by the prospect of a ghost story.
The blond head nodded. "That was the time all the
bottles in the doctor's liquor cabinet were
opened and spilled." She extracted another edge
piece, long fingers working as deftly as they did
when they were manipulating bits of experimental
paraphernalia, or the implements of life and
death. Even in her off-duty clothes--exercise
tights and a baggy Starfleet sweatshirt--there was
something formal about her, some of that quiet aloofness that
frequently made her seem older than her
years.
"Last night we set up a
recorder in each lab. Three of them worked fine.
In the fourth--the lab where the beakers were spilled--
it hadn't recorded. It must have jammed, though it
worked perfectly well in the morning. It just ...
didn't switch on."
Reilly and Chekov had abandoned their game and
come close to listen, though it was to be noted that
Reilly kept hold of his cards. Though her
chair was close by, half concealed from the table by a
grotesque potted plant known to all as the
Man-Eating Monster, Helen Gordon did not
look up from the small reader screen in the arm of the
chair before her, though Uhura was aware that Helen
hadn't touched the next-screen key for nearly ten
minutes.
Chapel fingered another piece free, and after a
judicious moment, fitted it into one to which it was
obviously the mate. "The thing is," she went
on, "about half those puddles of liquids had
been ... touched. Like someone pulled a finger through the
edge of them, trying to drag out liquid and make
streaks with it ... Sometimes the powders that get
spilled have been traced in too. And I mean
liquids that have blistered ceramic countertops and
would take a man's fingertip down to bone in
seconds. So in spite of what Mr. Spock
says about how easy it is to disrupt a security
lock--and it might have been the first time, though
we've had all of them upgraded to tens since then
--it really doesn't look like it's some member
of the crew playing pranks."
Giacomo had finished her song, and amid the
chatter and talk near the piano Brunowski could
still be heard playing, shifting from ragtime
to Vivaldi with a delicacy of touch utterly at
odds with his unprepossessing appearance. Miller
had joined him on the bench, and a moment later the
sweet mournfulness of a harmonica threaded into the
melody.
"That still doesn't mean it was a ghost," Chekov
said stubbornly. "For one thing, nobody has died
..."
"Don't be ridiculous, boyo," Reilly
retorted. "Since the start of the mission we've
lost dozens!"
"What's likelier," Sulu said quietly,
"is that it's the intruder." He'd come in from the
gym next door, still clothed in his close-fitting
black bodysuit; his bare arms and face gleamed
with sweat like oiled oak in the gentle
light.
"Now who's being ridiculous?" Chekov shot
back. "They've run life scans on this ship
backward, forward, and upside down, and no
trace of an intruder has shown up. And
anyway, why would an intruder spend his time
breaking into Dr. McCoy's laboratories
to spill things?"
Under cover of the general noise, Uhura rose
with her usual dancer's grace and circled past the
Man-Eating Monster to where Helen still sat
silent in her chair. Uhura rested one slender
hand on the younger woman's shoulder. Helen looked
up with a start.
"What is it?" Uhura asked softly.
Helen did not look well. Her hazel
eyes were surrounded by dark rings of fatigue, and the
lines of strain from nostril to mouth, around her eyes
and back from their corners, were deepening to gullies.
She had been quiet, too quiet, and looking
down at her now, Uhura could see the puffy
flesh that spoke of tears--not tears shed once and
forgotten, but of hopeless weeping, again and again,
alone in the guest VIP cabin that she would occupy
until she officially entered Starfleet at
Starbase 9.
"Look, if we had an intruder somewhere on the
ship," Chekov was arguing to Chapel, oblivious
to the fact that Reilly was surreptitiously
changing the position of the markers on the cribbage
board, "it has to have shown up somewhere on the
readings. Even electrostasis life-forms will
read on an ion scan ..."
"The ones that we know about," Sulu returned.
"And anyway, there are no electrostasis
life-forms on Midgwis ..."
"That we know about," Sulu said again. "I know the
captain has sent a subspace message back
to the research party there to ask about it ..."
"It's nothing," Helen replied to Uhura's
question, her voice almost inaudible under the general good-
natured clamor around them. Her hand played
nervously along the edges of the reader screen, and
Uhura saw how bitten the cuticles of the
nails were, how fidgety their touch. It troubled
her to see how Helen had changed from the strong,
sure woman who had come onboard with the research
party--even from the woman, uncertain of her
future but confident that all would be well, who had
come onto the bridge and quietly
looked up into Kirk's face and said she was
requesting a transfer to the Enterprise. ...
Something had happened since then. Something
drastic.
Slowly, without looking up at her friend, Helen
went on. "I--It's just that I've ... I've
decided not to apply for Starfleet status after
all. Once we get to Starbase Nine I'm
going to subspace back to Midgwis, and ask if
they'll still have me."
Uhura said nothing for a moment. The rec-room
doors slipped open and Mr. Spock came
in, crossing the room with that curious, graceful
aloofness to the chessboard, where he began to set up
the pieces for a game. The way Christine
Chapel's head turned wasn't lost on
Uhura, the hopeful look in her eyes that
changed so swiftly to carefully concealed hurt.
Mr. Spock frequently neglected to greet
anyone when he came into the rec room like that, there
being no logical reason to do so, but Uhura
knew that Chapel--though Chapel herself was the first
person to admit the illogic of it--was wounded
by being thus ignored.
Dammit, Uhura thought unhappily,
doesn't she realize she's asking for water from
a dry well?
Then her eyes returned to Helen. "Would you like
me to send a message back to them now?" she
asked softly.
Helen shook her head. "And anyway we've
had no messages from them even in reply to the ones
the captain sent." Protocol aside, there was
something deliberately distant in her use of
Kirk's title, as if, Uhura thought, Helen
sought by it to put him from her.
She frowned a little. The messages had troubled
her. "No, we haven't," she said slowly. "And
that's beginning to worry me. I checked out that new
subspace transmitter we left them myself.
Nothing should have gone wrong with it."
"They might be busy ..."
"Too busy to answer a question about a possible
intruder on a Starfleet vessel? That's one
of the top priorities on any--"
The rec room door slipped open again and
Captain Kirk came in. He paused in the
doorway and looked around him, as was his habit, and
it struck Uhura, looking at that trim,
broad-shouldered form in the gold command
shirt, that he, too, had the appearance of a man
who'd been spending his nights wrestling demons in
the dark of his room. Like Helen's, his face was
taut and weary, though he hid it better; the
smile he manufactured as he crossed the
room toward Spock and the chessboard was a strained
facsimile of his usual grin. Not that Spock
would consider it any of his business to ask about it,
Uhura thought dourly. She knew for a fact from
Christine that the captain was avoiding McCoy and
sickbay as he would a pest house.
She saw him catch sight of Helen and
pause. But Helen got swiftly to her feet,
and before either Uhura or Kirk could speak to her,
crossed the room to the doors. They swished open
sharply before her. Kirk said, "Helen ..." but
she was gone.
For a long time he stood there, looking at the
shut doors, and there was something that disturbed and
frightened Uhura greatly in the speculative
expression of his narrowed hazel eyes.




Chapter Seven

"Are you sure we're not going to get in trouble
for this?" Ensign Gilden shifted the weight of the
box he carried in his arms, and the bulky squares
of the fat paper books rustled inside it--a
complete set of the Margolian novels, with the
original Brodnax covers. At this point in the
second watch, the medical labs flanking the
long corridor from the dorsal elevator to the
emergency bridge in the center of the saucer were
usually deserted, and in the low lighting, the shadowy
forms of the assistant historian and the
Anthro/geo clerk had a furtive air not
materially lessened by the sturdy plastic boxes
they carried or by the mechanical cargo runner that
hissed along like an overloaded donkey in their
wake.
"What we're doing is not illegal,"
Ye oman Emiko Adams said softly.
"Bribing Ensign Miller to clear out and
pressurize a hull section is not illegal?"
"I didn't bribe him," Lieutenant
Bergdahl's clerk pointed out reasonably. "And
if Brunowski can talk Danny
into pressurizing one of the hull sections down on
Deck Twenty-three to set up that secret lab
of theirs, for God's sake, the least you're
entitled to is to do the same to store objects of
antiquarian value."
Gilden ducked his head a little--a thin,
depressed-looking young man of medium height,
slightly stoop-shouldered in his red Ship
Systems shirt. "Well," he said modestly,
"I don't know about antiquarian value ..."
"Of course the original faxes of the
bulletins from the Castorian wars have
antiquarian value," Adams retorted
bracingly, her delicate oval face--with the
flat cheekbones and bright black eyes that were,
with her diminutive height, her private
despair--peeking around one side of the enormous
box of Mongese romances, the complete
illustrated collection of all the various
cycles. "And I don't care what the computer
jockeys say, copying the stories from the novels
--or copying the "best" of a series, and who's
to say that the really trashy ones aren't just as much
fun?--or copying "relevant" articles from
the Earthlog journals isn't the same as having
them to look through, to hold them in your hands."
"Well ..." said Gilden, who was a little
embarrassed by the way his pack-rat instincts had
gotten out of hand. "The thing is, it's not like they
give us all kinds of room, even for
"temporary storage." "Only until
input," they say ... Do the people who write the
regs have any idea how long it takes to feed a
book into the computer? Even with automatic input
scan? And to check the translation? And you always have
to go through and check the analysis. And what do they
give us? Two rooms partitioned out of the Deck
Eleven dorsal observation lounge, and we had
to fight for those! They've got a goddamn bowling
alley down on Deck Twenty-one, and they
say, "Dump the hardcopy after the relevant
stuff is input" ..."
"That bowling alley is full every shift,"
Adams pointed out. "It's one of the most popular
rec rooms on the ship."
"Well, it shouldn't be. People should have better
things to do with their time. And anyway," he added, his
sparse eyebrows pulling together. "Even after I'd
input the information, I couldn't just let them get
rid of this stuff. I know there're
copies in the Institute Special
Collection, and on Memory Alpha, and in
other places. But I just ... I couldn't."
"Nor should you," Adams said. There was a soft,
nostalgic look in her shoe-button eyes, for
she was a pack rat too.
Their voices dropped as they passed a
bulkhead beyond which other voices could be heard, the
voices of Security Chief DeSalle and the
ship's photographer, examining the computer
analyses of the latest lab-breakage incidents,
and Gilden and Adams hurried their steps a little.
"And furthermore, it's ridiculous that there's no
corridor from the Deck Eight dorsal lift
across to the central lift," breathed Gilden as they
ducked into the alcove near the biochem lab where the
turbolift doors were. "We have to go right past
DeSalle's office ..."
"We could have taken the turbolift straight
across from the dorsal."
"Nobody does it at this time of the late
shift," Gilden pointed out. "Somebody'd be
bound to ask who's running fifteen trips back
and forth from the pylon at this time of night. It's
all worked through the central computer, and it logs it
for Fleet Statistics ... What do they think
we're going to do, raid the food remixers?"
The turbolift doors slipped open--
Adams and Gilden had a certain amount of
maneuvering to get themselves, their respective
burdens, and the high-piled bulk of the cargo runner
in at the same time. Adams had to do considerable
backing and filling with the little hand toggle that controlled
the thing in order to get its burden of ephemeral
hardcopy clear of the closing doors. "I mean,
what're they gonna do in an emergency? Deck
Nine," he added, speaking to the ceiling.
"There's the food conveyor," she pointed out as
the turbolift whirred into life. "It goes from the
pylon into Deck Eight."
Gilden sniffed disdainfully.
There was no sound in the materials reclamation
section on Deck 9, but they heard the soft
throbbing of the molecular breakdown units, and beneath
that, the subsonic whisper of the engines, like the
half-heard beat of the ship's heart. Decks 9
and 10 of the saucer, like the lower decks of the
Engineering hull, were the automated stomach upon which
the Enterprise and its crew traveled, the nameless
mechanical processes without which the
strategies of the bridge, the genius of the labs,
and the wisdom of the computers were pointless ephemera,
helpless before the cold black vacuum of entropy
and space. There was no night shift here, barely
any day shift, save for an occasional patrol
to make sure things were functioning as they should; the
huge, echoing rooms with their crowding, angular
machines, their tangles of cable and pipes, were
almost dark. Gilden and Adams moved uneasily
along the curved wall of that shadowy corridor,
the click of their boot heels and the soft humming
of the cargo runner echoing in an oddly comforting
manner.
"Here." Adams set down her box in the
gloomy, odd-smelling cavern of the organic
fabrication room and set to work with a small
ganymede driver to extract the bolts of a
bulkhead. "Miller pressurized three
sections for you, the one below this and the big one above.
That should give you plenty of room ..."
"What a guy," Gilden said admiringly,
putting his head through the resultant opening and peering
around. It was utterly black--Adams produced
a small handlight from her belt and shined it around.
The chamber beyond the bulkhead was some three meters
wide by five deep, and still held the faint,
slightly nasty pungency of the raw carbon-
hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen compounds it had contained
--the basic raw elements from which all food and
water on the ship were fabricated. It was icily
cold there, and the clerk's breath puffed whitely in
the dim yellow beam of her light.
"Danny said along with the pressure, he'd
run in some heat bled off the power conduits from the
molecule shakers. He says it'll warm up a
little more."
"That's fine. Cold never hurt paper."
Gilden ducked through and set his box of books
down, then began to unload the cargo runner.
"I'll have to do something to thank him."
Adams shook her head and smiled. "He owes
me one," she said. "I helped him and
Brunowski move the computer terminal in."
"For what?" Gilden asked, puzzled.
Her grin widened--she lost her look of
geisha fragility when she grinned that way, and
became all street urchin. "It's not
illegal," she reassured him.
Gilden thought about what he knew of Dan
Miller and John Brunowski, and said
hastily, "I don't think I want to know."
Adams ducked back through the hole in the
bulkhead and screwed it shut again after her friend.
"Here, you'll need this." She handed him the
ganymede. "I mean, they're not stealing anything
or smuggling anything or running a still or a
gambling game or selling fleet secrets to the
Klingons ... nothing like that."
"Then why do they need a lab-quality computer
terminal? Or a food remixer? Or a--"
"Well, it's just that John--" She broke
off suddenly and looked sharply around. The huge,
silent chamber, curved in the shape of the saucer's
hull, all at once seemed deathly cold.
"Do you feel ...?" she whispered, and Gilden
held up his hand for silence. Above his short-
clipped beard his face was chalky.
There was something else in the fabrication room with
them. They both knew it, could feel it; the cold
had nothing to do with the icy vacuum of space
outside. It was somehow personal, aware ...
centered somewhere near them, among the crouching shapes
of the molecule shakers, hidden in the gloomy
shadows. From where they stood, pressed against the
wall, most of the vast room was hidden from them, lost
in darkness and in the curve of the walls that took in
ninety degrees of the saucer's arc. But for some
reason, Adams felt that whatever it was, was
near them ... and moving.
Beside her, Gilden whispered an archaic curse
word; her hand automatically sought his. Across
seven or eight meters of floor the dark
rectangle of the door loomed ... If we
ran, Adams thought, if we ran across the
floor ... what if it didn't open?
Somewhere among the looming monoliths of the
machines a knocking started, a faint tapping
sound, ringing hollow, metallic. Adams fumbled
with her handlight and flashed it in the direction of the
sound, but nothing moved there, no shadow, no
stirring. Only that hollow knocking, like something
seeking its way ...
With sudden strength Gilden thrust her forward
onto the low platform of the cargo runner, pulled
the control from her hand and thumbed the toggle for full
speed. In a whining whoosh the little cart bolted
toward the door, which slashed open before them, whined
shut in the dark behind them as they swooped along the
corridor's arc, clinging against the yaw of
centrifugal force and heading for the
turbolift as fast as the cart's engine could carry
them. They didn't get off the runner until
they'd reached the lift, springing in and manhandling the
runner in after them rather than taking the time to maneuver
it with the toggle.
They ran the lift straight across Deck 7 and
down to the Deck 11 dorsal lounge--deserted
at this time of night--and to hell with who was logging
trips. Neither wanted to get out and walk that
dimly lit, echoing corridor that ran between the
central and dorsal lifts.
They didn't speak until they were back in
Gilden's office again, a cramped c ubicle
partitioned, as he had said, off the dorsal lounge
on that deck, and crammed--floor to ceiling around
the walls, and shoulder high in most other places
--with old books, old sets of magazines,
box after box of scrolls, files of letters,
cases of notes ... the original hardcopy of
historical records, gathered up from every planet
the Enterprise visited, from every culture and
civilization it discovered or explored, information
waiting to be logged, digitalized, input for
retrieval and transmission to the central knowledge
banks of the Federation on Memory Alpha. Some
of it had not been looked at for years--or
centuries--even on the planets from which it had
been gleaned. In the dim light of the small desk
lamp the place had the claustrophobic air of a
cavern; Adams huddled nervously on a chair
between two mammoth stacks of old books and
videotaped adventure serials while Gilden
ran hot water out of the food slot that was a
legacy from the days before the room had been partitioned
off the Deck 11 lounge.
"This is real licorice tea I bought on
Starbase Twelve," he said, handing her an
unwashed ornamental cup. "The remixers only
have camomile and mint and they both taste like lawn
clippings."
She gave a whisper of a chuckle, but her hand
was trembling as she took it. "Thank you."
Gilden still looked very pale in the upside-down
reflections of the tiny lamp, and he almost spilled
his own teacup when he picked it up.
Their eyes met.
"Do we report it?"
She remembered that dreadful cold, the sense of
overwhelming fear--the knowledge that something she could not see,
could not detect, had been in that room with
them ... "You want to explain what you were doing
down in organic fab at this time of night?"
He hesitated, visibly torn between his sense
of duty and what he knew the ship's historian
would say about the sequestering of useless hardcopy that
had already been input. He thought about all the rest
of his precious caches of odd weapons, ritual
implements, sets and series of arcane books--
scrolls and notebooks and letters from and to people a
century dead whom he'd encountered in the
historical byways of a hundred worlds--that
stacked his tiny personal quarters to the ceiling and
crammed every cranny and corner of Historical's
meager storage area and the minuscule closets of
every friend he could talk into providing them room.
Gently, Adams said, "It won't be there if
we send someone to look, you know. Not now."
"No," Gilden said shakily, sipping at his
tea. "No, I suppose not." He shivered
again, thinking about the knocking he had heard in this
office. Thinking about the way things had begun
to appear and disappear when he wasn't looking, about
the sense he had had, once or twice, that there was
something in the room with him ... about the night he'd
come down to this office and had heard, beyond its locked
door, movement within. "And if it is when we
take the next load down ... I guess
we'll deal with it then. You think you could get
Danny to borrow a bigger light for us?"

"Helen ..." It was Uhura's voice,
worried and frightened, a moment after the quick, light
flurry of taps on the door. "Helen, it's
Uhura."
Lying on her bed in the darkness, Helen made
no reply. She did not trust her voice
to remain steady, and in any case, what could she have
said? In time she heard her friend's soft sandals
retreat up the corridor, leaving her alone.
Alone with despair, and desperate confusion of
mind. Alone with the memory of both a dream and a
nightmare.
The dream ...
Helen dropped her head to the flat, tidy,
regulation Starfleet pillow.
The last evening on Midgwis returned to her,
with a clarity so intense that it hurt her chest with
physical pain. She could feel the warm strength
of his fingers enclosing hers, the firm gentleness of
his lips--smell the dry, sweetish
scents of the grass and feel the warmth that radiated
back upon them from the ground itself. In that
honeysuckle moonlight the expression of doubt
in his face had been clear as by daylight. If
he'd known he was lying, would he have felt doubt?
Or was the doubt merely something he'd faked
to convince her?
Or had she made it all up?
She rolled over and stared at the ceiling above
her, a flat and neutral blue-gray, like
everything else in Starfleet. It had that
impersonal sameness that she'd always despised about
the service, that regulation-issue simplicity of the
lowest common denominator that she'd been willing
to embrace for his sake.
She shook her head bitterly. How could she
have been that stupid? To fall in love with Jim
Kirk--to still love Jim Kirk, or still love
the man she thought she'd known ...
But she realized she hadn't known Jim Kirk
at all.
That, she knew, had to be the source of the
nightmare.
At the thought of it, she reached over quickly to the
bedside lamp, switching it on to surround the
narrow bunk in its comforting glow. She'd been
sleeping with it on for the past four nights.
Rationally, her waking mind knew what the
nightmares had to mean. They were, she told herself
in the voice of every psychology teacher she'd ever
had, just the reflection of her own horror at
finding out that Jim wasn't what she'd thought he'd
been. That was all.
That was absolutely all.
But waking in the night--or dreaming of waking
here, in her cabin on the Enterprise--or
worse still, dreaming of waking in Jim's cabin,
waking up and looking over at the thing in the bed beside
her, the thing she had been making love to, and
thinking it was Jim ...
As a xenoanthropologist, she had never been
repelled by the concept of sexual congress with
alien species, in spite of years of
hackneyed anthro-department jokes. But in the
nightmares, it had not been the alienness that
repelled her, but some deeper and undefinable
horror. And always there would be a moment when it would
turn to her with its slow grin, and look at her with
eyes that were hazel like Jim's--but not Jim's.
She shuddered, pushing the recollection
of the dreams away. A glance at the clock told
her it was 2200 hours, and she wondered if the
novel she'd picked to read that night would keep
her awake, as she'd hoped it would ... wondered
if the nightmares would cease when they got
to Starbase 9 and she got off this haunted ship.
Footfalls tapped in the corridor. She
heard McCoy's voice, the soft southern accent
rising and fading in conversation "... swear I
haven't felt like that since the time my Butler
cousins and I dared each other to spend the night in
what was left of the old Hawks plantation ..."
She wondered if McCoy could give her something
to keep her from dreaming, but shrank from the thought of
asking him.
Because then he would ask her about the dreams.
And he'd ask her when they'd started.
And she couldn't very well tell him that they had
started the night she had gone to Jim's quarters
after they'd left Midgwis, the night that, lying in
his arms she'd looked suddenly up into his face
and had thought, abruptly, blindingly, and for no
reason that she could fathom
This man isn't Jim Kirk.

Chapter Eight

He walked the corridors of the Enterprise
alone, as he had walked them he did not know how
many times.
There was something in the familiarity of the action itself
that helped him, grounded his mind and soul. Without the
Enterprise, he did not think he could have
survived.
In that first second in the transporter room,
when he had realized there was something wrong, when with the
tingle of rematerialization he had felt the
brute shock, the wrenching pressure of an alien
mind forcing him away from the reassembling atoms of
his body, it had only been the fact that he was on
the Enterprise, in the place that he knew as he
knew the nerve endings of his own body, that had let
him remember who and what he was.
He was James T. Kirk, and the
Enterprise was his ship.
He would not be forced out. He would not be displaced.
He would not die.
But in those first few seconds, staring in
panicked horror at his own body, seeing it
move and speak to the others ... seeing them
respond ... it had been a very near thing.
How well he remembered it, as he moved
silently now down these corridors--moved step
by step, forcing himself to supply with his mind the
recollection of his own footfalls, the slight
jar of now-vanished muscle and bone. He was
passing along the observation gallery that overlooked
the shuttlecraft hangar, an area known to be
deserted at this time of night--an area where he
knew he would not meet that other self, that alter
ego, that creature that walked the ship now in his
body. To his left the long transparent
aluminum windows looked out into the bluish darkness
of the chasm of the hangar, where the single
shuttlecraft always ready for swift emergency
egress--the Copernicus, he knew, from
walking this gallery a dozen times--sat docked,
a small, square, dark shape in the gloom.
First had come shock, hideous and disorienting as
he realized there was something amiss; then horror as
he'd seen himself stepping down from the transport
disk, speaking to Spock in a voice of command
...
And then rage, like a red explosion of heat.
Maybe it was the rage that had saved him, yanked
back the unraveling elements of his mind to a
fiercely personal center.
The rage burned him still.
Whatever it was, he thought, moving along those
shadowy hallways in the deeps of the night watch,
whatever alien mind had taken possession of his
rematerializing body--whatever it intended to do with
his ship--he would survive. He would win.
But how he would do it without a physical body,
without any means to communicate with his friends, without
even the ability to tell them that the man they spoke
to, the man whose or ders they took, the man who
commanded the Enterprise--HIS Enterprise--
was an impostor, he did not know.
And so he walked, alone.
In Engineering on Deck 16 Scotty was
lovingly dismantling and cleaning one of the power
exchangers at the base of the starboard Jeffries
Tube in the support pylon, going over every cable
and servo with cleaning solvent and the finest of
hairline lasers, and explaining to Miller--
crouching on the floor just outside the hatch in a
neatly arranged welter of tools, with his head
thrust in to listen--exactly where each of the power
lines ran from and to, and why.
"... now, on the destroyers, the Saladin-
class cruisers, you'll no' be gettin' this much
power to the slave relays off the main drive. The
housing's about half a meter wider, and the lines
run around it--see?"
Miller wedged himself into the base of the tube at
his mentor's side and shined a handlight up into the
narrow space. He'd already put in a full day
in the computer room to which he'd been seconded, but
like Montgomery Scott, he was a man who'd rather
tear down an engine than eat his dinner. "So if
you needed to shift the azimuth, and the servocams
quit on you ..."
Scotty beamed with delight at having a
pupil who thought the same way he did.
"Well, I'll tell you a little secret.
There's an access tube for the mechanical cable
stringers that goes up this side of the housing, but in a
pinch a man can get up there and change the angle
manually ..."
Miller turned his head suddenly, slithering his
upper body out from the tube and whipping around to scan
the wide, red-lit chamber behind him, and Kirk
saw fear in the young man's brown eyes. He
remained still, close to the great dark mass of the
starboard turbine; a few meters away from him,
Miller stood flattened to the wall, looking up
the corridor toward the shuttlecraft deck, then
swiftly back into the main turbine room again.
Scotty moved out of the tube to stand beside him, and
his face, too, broad and homey and dark-browed,
was troubled. "What is it, lad?"
"I don't ..." Miller hesitated.
"Nothing," he finished. "Did you feel it get
colder?"
Scotty thought about it for a long time before shaking his
head. Kirk moved silently away down the
corridor, past the dark maintenance shops, the
deserted repair bays and the auxiliary
infirmary, seeking silence and safety once again.
It was becoming more and more difficult for him
to remember what his arms and hands and feet had
felt like, what it had been like to walk, to speak,
to breathe. He had to concentrate harder to call them
back, to create moment by moment in his mind the
electron shadow of every eyelash and fingernail, and the
concentration tired him more. Sometime, he knew, he
must sleep--and without living tissue to contain that
shadow, everything he held together by his will, by his
mind, would vanish like smoke in the wind.
After his experience of consciousness shared with the alien
ruler Sargon, he had asked Spock about the
mechanics of this type of personality
autoprogramming. Spock, who had his own
unpleasant memories of the experience, had been
silent for a time, and then he had talked--for the first
time since he had known the Vulcan--about the
Vulcan concept of katra.
Katra, as far as Kirk understood it, was the
inner consciousness, the mental reality of a sentient
being--the soul, though being a Vulcan, Spock had
spoken in terms of the neuroelectronic
patterns of the brain and their interaction with the
physical form of the body. There were exercises
to consciously strengthen and ground the katra against
dissolution, he had said.
Later, seeking a means to deal with the stresses
of captaining a starship, Kirk had gotten his first
officer to teach him some of the Vulcan forms of
meditation, and though he did not pretend to comprehend
any of the spiritual lore of that ancient and
secretive race, after practicing the meditation's
outer forms, he began to get a dim inkling of what
it might be about.
That, too, he thought, had saved his life now,
by at least giving him a rough idea of what he must
do.
But he didn't know how much longer he could
keep it up.
As it was, he could only cling to what he
knew, the memory of his body, and the bone and nerve
and artery of the Enterprise itself.
Down on Deck 23 all was dimness and
silence, save for the deep throb of the molecular
reconverters in the main fabrication plants on
the deck above. Here among the cargo holds all
was silent and still. Along the dark corridor only
a streak of light marked the bulkhead panel behind
which Yeoman Brunowski tinkered with his arcane
schemes, whatever they were; above the faint,
slightly metallic smells of dust and grime
and machine lubricants in the big cargo holds,
the dreamy odor of bittersweet chocolate
drifted on the air.
In the clandestine lab itself, a five-by-four-
meter bulk-storage compartment in the outer hull which
Brunowski had talked his incurably good-
natured friend into rigging with "borrowed" pressure,
the LandRather yeoman himself sat at a makeshift
table, a lab-quality terminal before him,
with an assortment of archaic knobs and dials
breadboarded between it and what looked like one of the
molecular remixers from the galley. Jury-
rigged wiring snaked up the wall, connecting the
whole shebang with the main computer line and the power
lines that fed the fabrication facilities on the
deck above. Overhead, a roughly wired
lumenpanel shed a half-strength yellow glow on
the young man's unruly dark curls, always just--and
only just--this side of Starfleet's regulations
about "clean and neat." His dark eyes held a
look of almost maniac concentration as he moved the
dials hairline fractions of millimeters,
listening to the infinitesimal changes in the
remixer's soft hum.
Abruptly the lumenpanel made a faint
sput and went out.
Brunowski swung around in his chair and sat
frozen, staring at the narrow rectangle of the opening
in the bulkhead. Kirk stepped back a little,
though he knew that his own shape would not be
silhouetted in the dim corridor lights. He
was aware that he himself had, in some way, caused the
makeshift wiring to fault. It was something
associated with the energy of his presence, like the
strange cold that emanated from him, something that he
could not always control, as he could not always control the
knocking that seemed to arise near the places where
he stood. From a dozen minor disciplinary
brushes, he knew Brunowski was a difficult
man to frighten, but by the faint amber illumination of the
terminal screen, he saw fear now in that shapeless
unshaven pudding of a face.
After a long moment, never taking his eyes from the
hinged bulkhead, Brunowski groped for the handlight
on the table beside him and flicked it on. The
reflected glow sparkled on the sudden film of
sweat on his forehead, but the beam was steady as it
flashed across the opening where Kirk had stood.
Slowly, hesitantly, the laundryman got
to his feet and approached the place, and Kirk
fell back a few paces into the dark of the
corridor again.
Behind him the remixer gave a soft cough and the
smell of bittersweet chocolate was abruptly
replaced by that of sweet-and-sour pork--a
Starfleet standard. Brunowski cursed quite
surprisingly, and added to himself, "I swear to God
this place is haunted."
But like Gilden and Adams, Kirk
knew the laundryman would tell no one, no
matter how many times he might sense his presence
in these lower decks.
It was now late enough that he felt he could
venture higher, up the central pylon to the
saucer itself.
These nights of endless walking, of moving through the
familiar corridors and empty, darkened labs,
he had been aware that the other Kirk, the
impostor who had taken his place, walked too.
He wasn't sure why, for he kept strictly
away from any chance of meeting a creature whose
mental abilities might very well encompass his
destruction should they meet, but he knew that the
impostor did walk, prowling the decks and
corridors of the ship as he himself did. Perhaps,
he thought, seeking for some trace of him, some
sign. But the Enterprise was large, and offered
infinite refuge. Perhaps for some other reason.
But in the deep night watch--the third watch,
when only a skeleton crew was awake and the
humming of the Enterprise's machines was virtually
the only sound in all those darkened halls--even the
impostor slept. Then, for a time, the ship was his
again, and he dared emerge from the cargo holds, the
storage bays, the vast, humming, automated
recycling plants, to do what he could to get his
kingdom back.
Ensign Giacomo was working the Central
Computer room on Deck 8 when Kirk got
there. She was a thin, pretty, dark-haired girl
in the short blue tunic of the Science section,
running routine input designed more to keep an
operator mildly busy than for any real use.
The experience of thousands of spacegoing vessels,
both in the early days of the Federation and handed on to it
by the Vulcans and other starfaring allies, had
taught that the central computer core of any ship
must never be left physically unattended, no
matter how boring and routine this baby-sitting
function might be. It was not something which could be done
by another machine. There is human error, but there
is also human instinct and human judgment.
Kirk crossed the room to the computer itself. The
"ship's computer," he well knew, existed in
actuality in three separate banks, here on
Deck 8 and in two other places in the
Engineering hull, all its essential systems
backed and double-backed, all linked to one another
by superconductor nerve bundles and
thence to monitors, readers, and visicoms in
nearly every room in the ship. But here was the
computer's heart, its brain, its central
plexus ... here in these curving banks of
featureless, pale blue metal, protected at
the very heart of the saucer, at the ship's innermost
core.
And, after the incident with Redjac on Argelius
II, well and truly shielded.
It was impossible to guard against the completely
unexpected--and Kirk was a firm believer that
somewhere in the galaxy lurked sentient life-forms
of configurations and capabilities absolutely
unimaginable, and therefore impossible to guard against.
But part of the Enterprise's mission--the
essential part--was to see what needed to be
made up as they went along. Thus Mr.
Spock had taken the Xeno/anthro/bio
records and devised a projection
probabilities program, and from it had jury-
rigged a faint electron-bombardment field
over each unit in the interlocking concentric rings
of the banks, which, he believed, would prevent the
entry into the computer of a sentient mind intent upon
using the computer as an electronic brain. The
ship was far too dependent upon the proper
functioning of the computer--and the computer itself too
interconnected in its various program paths--
to permit that kind of thing to happen again.
The irony of it was, thought Kirk, with a shadow
of his old humor, that in ordering Spock to do so,
he had very probably sealed his own death warrant.
And since he had no idea what that alien
intruder wanted with his body, and his ship--who
knew how many other death warrants besides?
He looked around him at the curving banks of
memory, of files, of thought units filling that
vast and brightly lit round room, the brain of his
ship through which every oxygen level and cabin
temperature passed, which controlled everything from the
conversion rate of the anti-matter pods to the sizes
of uniforms to be fabricated by LandRather--
analysis, documents, translation, records,
automatic logs and times--enough and more than enough
memory to house the synapses of a human brain.
Spock had told him--Sargon had told him
--that without some kind of physical structure, the
electron shadow of his mind--the katra--would
eventually disperse, dissolve. If it hadn't been
for the initial stabilizing matrix of the
transporter beams, it probably would have done so
already. How long it would take, Kirk did not
know, and Spock, as he was whenever the discussion
touched the dark and secret ways of Vulcan
spirituality, had been uninformative on the
subject. But Kirk knew, could feel in his
bones--except, he reflected dryly, that
I don't have bones--that it would be soon.
Giacomo looked up from her work at the
central of the three main terminals, her quick-moving
fingers stumbling to a halt as she scanned the
silent room. She shivered, rubbing her thin arms;
Kirk knew, seeing the expression of her eyes,
that if there'd been more lights to turn on, she'd have
done so. Her hand moved a little toward the comm-link
button and then pulled back as she told herself not
to be silly; but he could see her fingers shake.
Unconsciously echoing her friend Brunowski down
in his illegal recycling lab, she muttered
to herself, "I don't care what they say, I
swear to God this place is haunted." Kirk
moved quietly to the wall at the far end of the
room.
And began to knock.
He wasn't entirely sure how he
produced the knocking. He only knew that he
could, by a kind of controlled flailing with his mind.
The first time he had produced the sound, it had been
unconscious, the reaction of sheer, blind rage, of
helpless horror, when the intruder, the alien,
whoever and whatever it was and whatever it wanted, had
taken Helen in its arms, had hurt her ... had
hurt her, Kirk understood, in a way that might
never be healed.
And there had been nothing he could do.
It was that rage that kept him going now, putting
all his strength, all his concentration, into the effort
to communicate. It was desperately difficult
even to produce sounds, and Morse or any other
code was out of the question--he simply hadn't enough
control.
Giacomo flinched, dark eyes huge with
terror, but she didn't get up and leave her
post. Kirk, with what little of his mind he could
spare from the agony of his task, admired her
guts and wished he didn't have to frighten her. But
he had to get Spock back here to investigate
once more. He had done so once, and could have taken
the Vulcan by the shoulders and knocked his head against
the wall when Spock had spent his time
patiently and calmly searching for a reasonable
explanation.
But there was nothing he could do. He had
to communicate somehow, with someone. He had to have
help, before it was too late--too late for him,
and perhaps too late for them all.

"I dunno, Spock." Dr. McCoy
poured two centimeters of bourbon into a water
glass and relocked the security medical-stores
cabinet in which he kept his liquor--the cabinet
in which, Spock recalled, every bottle had been
found broken the night they'd put all the
liquids in the medical labs into unbreakable
containers. He returned to perch on the corner of
his desk. "There are more things in heaven and earth than
are dreamt of in your philosophy, or contained in
your computer either, and if it's an alien, it's the
damnedest one I've ever heard of."
Spock, seated primly on a lab stool,
pointed out, "There is no evidence that the
destruction is not being caused by some member of the
Enterprise crew. All the readings indicate
that there is no life-form unaccounted for on this
vessel."
""Readings" my grandmother's left hind leg.
Maybe the first time someone could have broken that door
code, but after we put the security locks on
them ..."
"I doubt that with the scientific and technical
resources available on the Enterprise there is
a room on board that could not be entered by someone
truly determined, and I fail to see what your
grandmother's anatomy has to do with the accuracy of the
in-ship scans." The Vulcan folded his long,
bony hands around his drawn-up knees. At this
late hour sickbay was quiet. When Spock
had left the rec room after his chess game with the
captain, Nurse Chapel had still been there,
engaged in the mystifying ritual of picture
reassembly even after Uhura had departed.
The chess game had been unsatisfactory,
the captain's mind still clearly preoccupied with
Dr. Gordon's irrational behavior, though the
captain had made no mention of it, and Spock's
Vulcan training made even the notion of asking
unthinkable. Spock had been interested, though
disquieted, to note how deeply the affair with
Dr. Gordon had affected his commanding officer.
Whatever turn had been taken upon
Midgwis, and subsequent to the
anthropologist's decision to remain on board the
Enterprise, its effects seemed to be adverse
upon both parties concerned--the captain's chess
playing, though it had not precisely
deteriorated, had certainly changed
qualitatively, and after a single game the
captain had excused himself and departed for bed. He
had looked exhausted, as he had since the
problems with Dr. Gordon had started; Spock
was ashamed to admit, even to himself, the concern he
felt for the captain.
Still wakeful, he had made his way down
to sickbay and had found McCoy still puzzling over
the latest manifestations of the putative intruder
which might or might not be aboard.
"It is not the "how,"" Spock went on,
"that interests me so much as the "why." The choice
of the medical labs as the target has, of course,
been obvious from the first ..."
McCoy's eyebrows scaled up. "I'm
glad you think so."
Spock tilted an eyebrow in return.
"Surely it is clear even to a human,
Doctor, that the medical labs are--or were--the
only place where free-standing containers of
liquids were to be found unguarded at least one
third of the time. Since very little else has been
damaged or even disturbed, it is clear that
liquids somehow have something to do with the disturbances
..."
"But it doesn't make any sense!"
McCoy leaned his back against the edge of the desk
behind him, looked up at the Vulcan in
frustration. "Certainly not for a human; not even for
an alien, really, since half those liquids were
inorganic and would have killed anything that tried
to drink them. No, Spock," he sighed, and
shook his head. "What this is starting to sound like
..."
He hesitated, turning the water glass in his
hands for a moment and regarding it as if momentarily
absorbed in contemplation of the reflected glow of the
overhead light in the complex carbohydrate
bonds of its amber depths. Then he looked up
at Spock again with his sharp blue eyes. "How
much have you read of the literature of poltergeist
manifestations, Spock?"
"Less than point-five percent of what was
available in the Academy library,"
Spock replied with his customary accuracy.
"Of the tapes available in the library section of the
Enterprise's computer--"
"And you haven't noticed a similarity?"
Spock was silent, instinctively unwilling
to open a subject that Vulcans seldom
discussed with other Vulcans.
"The knocking, the objects moved around without people
seeing them, the--"
"I am familiar with the poltergeist effect,"
the Science officer replied slowly. "The
Vulcan word for it is eschak."
McCoy blinked. "I didn't think
Vulcans had anything so irrational as ghosts."
"Eschak--poltergeists--random and
destructive psychokinetic effects--are, as you
quite well know, Doctor, unconnected with the chain-
jangling headless horsemen you humans take such
delight in frightening yourselves with. They are, as you
point out, irrational, perhaps one reason that they are
so much more common in your world than in mine ..."
"Don't tell me," McCoy moaned, "that
even your ghosts are too logical to haunt
houses."
"I would not tell you anything for which I have so little
data," Spock responded politely.
"Nevertheles s ..." He frowned, dark eyes
focusing upon some middle distance of contemplation.
Contrary to what most humans believed,
Vulcans were not entirely creatures of
rationality--their notorious logic was, in
fact, a necessary defense against the other side of the
Vulcan nature. Due to more widespread use
of meditation and other spiritual techniques, cases
of eschak were indeed few--no more than one or
two per century, and even fewer now--but those that
had been substantiated made human
poltergeist manifestations appear laughably
ineffectual.
"Nevertheless," Spock went on, "in most such
cases, both in your world and mine, the manifestations
are associated with a human focus, usually a
young boy or girl, or someone in a deeply
disturbed frame of mind."
Their eyes met.
After a long moment McCoy said, "What's
going on with her, Spock? And with Jim? Seeing the
two of them in the rec room tonight ..."
"It is certainly not my place," Spock
replied, "to investigate--or to discuss
--the captain's romantic entanglements."
"Dammit, Spock, you know as well as I do
that this isn't just a romantic entanglement! Jim
is damn serious about the woman ..."
Dryly, the Vulcan said, "You would know more about
such matters than I, Doctor. But it appears
that Dr. Gordon is in some state of strong
emotional turmoil, which seems to date from her
trip to the surface of Midgwis; and no
manifestations of the poltergeist effect were
reported before that time--certainly not before Dr.
Gordon's appearance on the ship. One could
theorize--"
With a sharp whistle, the intercom on the desk
came to life. McCoy reached out and slapped the
switch. "McCoy here ..."
Uhura's voice came on, breathless and
shaken. "Doctor, I'm down in Helen's
room--visiting officers' quarters. Can you get
here right away?"





Chapter Nine

She was walking in the observation lounge on
Deck 12 with Jim. It was very late in the
second watch; they had already been to his room,
and in the warm aftermath of loving, he had spoken
to her of his ship, and she had said, "Will you show it
to me?" He'd chuckled, "What, now?" and,
deep asleep now, Helen still felt in her dream
the touch of his lips on her bare shoulder, still
smiled at the way the hanging forelock of his
rumpled blond hair dangled in his eyes. But
she saw the delight in his face.
The observation lounge, like all the dorsal
lounges in the pylon, was a single long, narrow
room with an emergency gangway at one end and the
turbolift shaft at the other, a double line of
chairs running down its center and a food slot
programmed for the more popular combinations of starch and
grease. At this time of the shift the long room was
empty, and only dimly illuminated. The stars
outside seemed very close.
If she stood near the heavy, structural-
weight plex of the windows, Helen could see the
underside of the primary hull spreading like
a weightless parachute of pale gray rhodium
overhead, the long, sturdy pod of the Engineering
hull stretching beneath. But below that pod dropped
infinity, literally infinity, pitch-black and deep
beyond conceptions of deep. In it the stars,
hideously distant, did not twinkle or
sparkle, but burned with a chill skeletal light
that made the shadowy structure of the great
nacelles and their slender pylons seem
strangely fragile.
And over all that silver surface shone
pinpricks of light, tiny reminders of the warmth of
life which temporarily baffles even the entropy
of infinity, the individuated joy of humanity
capable of briefly conquering that all-encompassing
dark.
It was only her second time on a spacegoing
craft at all. The passenger liner that had taken
her from Mars, in whose colonial domes she had
grown up, out to Delta Cygnus to the
university, had not boasted observation ports.
She was interested to note that in spite of the life-
support systems, the pylon's observation
decks and lounges--and the Historical Section that
had been commandeered from one of them--were
noticeably colder than the inner areas of the ship.
The wall that separated them from eternity was icy to the
touch.
She looked over at Jim's face and saw the
dreams there, reflected by starlight in his eyes.
"It's the freedom out there that you want, isn't
it?" she said softly. "Not the ship itself, but where the
ship is going."
He thought about it a long time before replying. There
was something in the dim intimacy of the empty lounge
that, for all its echoing length, was like the warm confines
of the cabin they had just left. In a way, it was as
if they still lay twined together like animals in an
underground den. Helen could think of no man to whom
it would even occur to her to speak like this--to ask the
why, to inquire about the heart spring that few people even
like to admit that they have ...
But somehow, with Jim, it was easy.
Slowly, as if it were a matter difficult
to put into words, he said, "I--I don't really
know. It isn't freedom, really. If it was
freedom, I think I'd have become one of the
free-traders, the planet-hoppers--God
knows, if it's freedom you want, you don't go
through Starfleet to get it. And I don't
think it's power, exactly. I may have
absolute power over 430 people, but when you think about
it, that's not very much. It's--it's as if the words for
it have been forgotten. Longing ..." He shook his
head, fair brows descending over the bridge of
his straight, well-shaped nose.
"I used to think I was crazy," he went on
softly, speaking as if to himself. Speaking, Helen
thought, as he had spoken to no one for years--perhaps
never. "Just to go to these places, to see them ...
to be where no one has imagined being before, at least
no one I've ever known, have ever heard of." His
arm around her waist had tightened a little, iron-
strong, and yet there was no desire now in his grip
--for desire had been sated--but only a kind of
gratitude that someone was there. It occurred to her
that, like the aloof Mr. Spock, for all his
womanizing, this man had been essentially alone
much of his life.
"It sounds so silly when you pick it apart,"
he said after a time. "But when it's inside you,
calling you on ..."
"Yours goes out," Helen said softly, speaking
of whatever it was--that longing that had no name.
"Mine goes deep. To see how things fit together,
and what's going on underneath. It does sound
silly, to say I've spent my life studying
how things work, but ... I had to. I couldn't not.
But for the life of me, I can't explain why."
"If we could explain why," he'd said with a
rueful half grin, "we'd talk ourselves out of it,
and be the poorer."
He'd drawn her closer to him then, and they had
kissed, not in passion, but taking pleasure in the
affection; and from thinking that the captain of the
Enterprise would be a good man with whom to have a
teeth-rattling affair, Helen found herself thinking
that Jim Kirk was a man she would want to know for a
long, long time ...
She turned in her sleep, troubled, trying
to surface from the gluey darkness of her dreams.
There was something wrong.
Her flailing hand brushed the switch of the
bedside lamp--it was on, as was the small reader
by the bed on which page 215 of a murder mystery
called The Shirt Off His Back still glowed
with amber letters on darkness.
But she couldn't wake up.
She sank back down, this time to nightmare.
It was the nightmare that had become
terrifyingly familiar, the nightmare of Jim's
arms around her, of Jim's lips crushing hers,
rough and brutal and impersonal--the nightmare of
her own confusion and indecision. She had never felt
this frightening sense of being taken by an utter
stranger. But this is Jim! she kept saying,
desperately, to herself.
But looking up into his eyes, she had known it
wasn't Jim.
She didn't know who it was.
Or what.
Then she was lying asleep in her bed--or
maybe it was Jim's bed, for in her dream she
couldn't tell. In her dream she could see by the
faint glow of the nightlight that someone was lying beside
her, an indistinct mound beneath the rumpled sheets,
a faint sheen of light--maybe--on the blond
hair ...
Terrified, she tried to wake up before he
turned toward her with the face that wasn't Jim's
face. That wasn't human at all. She was
trying to wake up, trying to get enough air into her
lungs to scream and wake herself up, but there
wasn't any air ...
Let me out of this! Let me out before he
turns to me ...
The covers stirred, moved.
She managed to open her eyes.
She still couldn't breathe.
Her head was throbbing. The room--her own
room, and not Jim's quarters, in which she'd been
dreaming she'd lain--was nearly dark, but for the
glow of the night lamp and the orange reflection of the
reader. She tried to inhale but couldn't, her
lungs sucking, her sinuses full of some
strange, metallic smell. Panic flooded
her, panic that she might still be dreaming ...
She looked at the bed beside her and saw it
empty of the thing in her dreams. But the buzzing
cloudiness filled her head, like sleep or something
close to it, disorienting and terrifying. She fought
her way clear of the coverlet and rolled numbly
to the floor, dragged herself to her feet, fumbling,
clouded, not really sure whether she was still asleep
or not. But whatever was happening, she thought
numbly, there was something wrong, something very wrong, and
she had to get out of the room.
Reeling like a drunkard, she made it to the
door. Her fingers groped at the opener switch.
Nothing happened.
Panic flooded her, panic beside which the panic
terror of the dream vanished like a leaf whirled
away by a stream. There was something in the air of the
room, something that weighed and burned her lungs,
filled her head with dull humming and wrapped her
limbs in l ead. The ship! she thought,
terrified. The life-support systems have
gone--there's an emergency--the intruder--there is
an intruder--it's shut down the life-
support systems! She remembered someone had
shown her the emergency manual switch to the door,
but couldn't recall where it was or how to use it.
Her vision was graying out as she stumbled to the tiny
desk, pounded desperately on the comm switch.
But of course if all the life-support
systems were gone, everyone else would be dead too
...
Dead--she was dying ...
"Uhura ..." she gasped, her throat on
fire and the words a harsh guttural croak, not
knowing whether the intercom was working or not.
"Uhura!"

"Methoamyline gas." Mr. Spock held
up the long, narrow cylinder for the captain and
McCoy to see. The thumb-sized gauge at the
top read almost empty. "It had been placed in
the ventilation duct in Dr. Gordon's
quarters; the outflow duct had been closed and the
door pad disconnected."
Kirk held out his hand, his eyes blank and
hard.
"I could have told you it was methoamyline,"
McCoy growled, glancing back at the high
diagnostic bed where Helen lay, her dark,
level brows black and startling against the gray
waxiness of her face. "She's lucky she woke
up long enough to call for help ... and luckier still the
person she called was awake to do something about it."
"I--I don't quite know what woke me."
Lieutenant Uhura frowned, wrapped the heavy
black folds of her robe more closely about her.
"I just--I'd been worried about her." Her dark
eyes slipped sidelong at Captain Kirk,
but he stared straight before him, unresponsive.
"Then I--I thought I heard something falling.
That's what waked me." She shrugged. "And when
I opened my eyes and looked around, the comm light
was flashing ..."
"The methoamyline was one of the spare
breathing tanks left over from when we
transported the Denovian consular party
to Giermos, of course," Kirk said quietly.
"It wasn't being kept under any particular guard
..." He hesitated, and passed his hand suddenly
across his eyes. Behind the hardness of furious anger
in them Spock could see exhaustion, the ragged
look of a man living on his last reserves. He
was keeping it concealed, as a commander must, Spock
thought, but the harsh lights of sickbay showed up
cruelly the new lines on Kirk's face, the
hollows under the cheekbones where he had visibly
lost weight.
Slowly, he walked back to the bed, and stood
looking down at the woman there. The slow rhythm
of her breathing was soundless, echoed in the faint
pulsing of the diagnostic screen above her. Even
in unconsciousness so deep it bordered on coma,
there was a slight pucker to her brows, as if she still
struggled with some haunting, abyssal dream.
"I thought she--" Kirk began uncertainly,
and stopped. Then, "I wonder why she didn't
try to call me?"
Spock caught the slight compression of
Uhura's bronze lips, and the look of both
puzzlement and irony in her eyes, and remembered
how Helen had fled the rec room earlier that
evening upon Kirk's entrance. It was, of
course, absolutely none of his business what was
going on, and indeed, from a Vulcan standpoint, in
appallingly bad taste even to notice so
blatant a display of emotions. But had a
biochemical or technical problem presented this
many fascinating anomalies, he would have been
tinkering day and night with the follow-up of those
contradictory clues.
He wondered if there were a way of consulting
privately with Uhura on the subject, once
the present problem of the intruder, with its new and
alarming ramifications, was solved.
Since Uhura said nothing, Nurse Chapel,
who stood on the other side of the bed, replied
tactfully, "She was in a panic, Captain.
She'd often call up Uhura to talk during the
off-shifts, as she couldn't call you."
"Oh," Kirk said, a little blankly, his
brows pinching together as if with thought or pain. "I--
I see ..."
"Do you?" McCoy growled as he led the way
from the intensive care ward down the
corridor to his office, leaving Chapel and
Uhura by Helen's bed. The door slid
soundlessly shut behind them. "Well, what I
see, Jim, is that you look as bad as she
does. What the hell is the matter with you?
You've been avoiding this place like the plague
..."
"And I'll continue to avoid it as long as
there's a threat to my ship." Kirk paced a few
strides, then turned back with a fidgety
restlessness, like a caged tiger, to face them.
"And there is a threat, gentlemen," he went
on in a taut, quiet voice. "I've known
it--I've felt it--since we left
Midgwis. I've sensed it, hiding somewhere in the
corridors, somewhere in the walls. And now it's
turned lethal."
"And has attacked the only person on board
who has done any kind of extensive research
on the fauna and inhabitants of Midgwis
itself," Spock concluded thoughtfully. "Which
indicates that it is intelligent and, to some
degree, informed. And yet the lack of any kind
of physical readings ..."
"The galaxy is a big place, Mr.
Spock," Kirk replied softly. "None of
you--none of us--has any idea of the true
capabilities of the Midgwins."
"Then you don't consider it an accident," the
Vulcan said, "that we have had no reply to our
efforts at subspace contact with the researchers on
Midgwis itself?"
"No." The captain shook his head. "It's
becoming more and more obvious that communications were
deliberately cut--and that someone is trying
to keep us in the dark about something on Midgwis
itself. We're turning back, gentlemen."
Spock raised one eyebrow--Kirk walked
to the comm link on the wall of McCoy's office,
keyed the bridge. "Ms. Fontana ..."
"Yes, Captain," came the night
navigator's voice.
"Lay in a course for Midgwis.
Lieutenant Mahase, notify Starbase
Nine that we have changed our course and are
returning to Midgwis due to a potential threat
to vessel's safety, and possibly to Federation
security. That is all."
"You're making it sound like a conspiracy,"
McCoy said doubtfully.
"I agree with the captain," Spock put in,
walking to the table where McCoy had laid down the
empty methoamyline cylinder and examining the
gauges once again. "Indeed, it may explain in
part our extreme difficulty in locating the
intruder by conventional scans. However, it does not
necessarily have to be a conspiracy of the
Midgwins. The Klingons have every reason to wish
to sabotage the mission there, and have been known to buy
or extort the services of fleet personnel
before. The manifestations--"
"No," Kirk said sharply. "No, it is--
something from the planet. And it must be destroyed, as
quickly as possible now, since it will almost certainly
try to prevent us from returning to Midgwis."
Spock's left eyebrow tilted still farther at
this sudden dogmatic certainty; McCoy perched
on one corner of his desk and said, "Fine--but just
how do you go about destroying something that doesn't
leave physical readings on an in-ship scan?
Something that can go through walls, apparently at will?"
"There was research done at Columbia
University in the late twentieth century on the
effects of proton waves upon electronic
kyrillian fields," Kirk responded,
resuming his pacing. "You're the expert on
katra, Spock--you should be able to put together some
kind of disruptor that should disperse our little friend."
Spock was shocked silent for a moment, as if
Kirk had casually mentioned in company some
confidence about his sex life, and for just an instant he
was startled to find that the pang of that casual
betrayal of trust went so deep.
But the man was the captain, and, he reminded
himself, under considerable stress. Stiffly, he
replied, "Indeed, a kind of proton-acceleration
field can be devised. But I would be much more
inclined to attempt to communicate with the intruder before
destroying it out of hand."
"No!" Kirk insisted again. "That would be
dangerous--perhaps fatal." And, when Spock
looked at him blankly, he went on in a
calmer voice, "It's a disembodied
intelligence, Spock; a bioelectrical
shadow. It could ... possess anyone who came
near enough to let it. If you, or you, Doctor"--
he swung around, his eyes suddenly, burningly
intent--"or anyone, in fact, hears, or
sees, or ... or senses ... any kind of
manifestation, any appearance of this--this
poltergeist effect--flee it immediately. The
risk is too great, especially for you,
Spock."
"Indeed." Spock remained standing beside the
workbench, long fingers resting idly on the gauges
on the cylinder, his straight, dark lashes veiling
his eyes. On the wall behind him the lighted
readouts of the observation monitor showed Dr.
Gordon's bio readings inching slowly back
toward normal as the poisons were cleared from her
blood. Dimly, his Vulcan hearing picked up
the voices of Nurse Chapel and Lieutenant
Uhura in the corridor, exchanging low-voiced
words--then the retreating click of Chapel's
boot heels as she went into the lab, and the soft
pat of Uhura's Morocco leather slippers
vanishing down the corridor. He turned back
to the captain, troubled by his growing sense of
wrongness, of something amiss.
"I find it curious, however," he went on,
"that when Mr. DeSalle fingerprinted this
cylinder, it was found to have been wiped clean. This
argues for a degree of sophistication in our
intruder--if, in fact, the attempted murderer
and the intruder are one and the same."

As she approached the door of her cabin,
Lieutenant Uhura slowed her steps. Two
or three times, coming or going from Helen's
quarters or the rec room late in the second
watch, when the corridors were nearly deserted,
she had felt again that strange fear that had come over
her the night after they'd left Midgwis, the
eerie sense of being watched by something that knew her
name. She had mentioned this to no one, a ware that
rumors were already buzzing around the ship, but some of the
things she'd overheard in the rec room troubled her
more than she liked to admit.
And now this.
It was turning lethal, the captain had said.
She wondered if what she had felt that first night
had been only her imagination, or whether she'd
had a closer call than she cared to think about.
She had dreamed about it, she thought, hurrying her
steps toward her door; dreamed about it just before she
woke up, dreamed about cold, about someone calling
her ...
But why would it call her, if waking her up would
save Helen?
She shook her head. Probably
too many of Reilly's rec room ghost
stories, she thought. The thumping sound that she had the
dim impression had waked her had undoubtedly
been due to that.
But it hadn't. The door slid open, and though
a week ago she would simply have walked over
to her bed and gotten in, the uneasiness of the last
several days caused her to switch on the light
while still standing on the threshold.
And she saw immediately that the small Martian
bronze that usually stood on her tiny, metal,
Starfleet regulation dresser lay on the floor
in a corner. It must have been its fall that had
waked her in time to see the flashing light of
Helen's call.
Behind her in the corridor, the small amber
lights of a Yellow Alert began to flash. The
alert light over the comm link in her room was
flashing also, and though she was virtually certain she
knew what she was going to hear, she reached out and
touched the open-announce button. Yellows you
had to key in to find out what the trouble was--it
wasn't a roll-you-out-of-bed emergency, but
definitely something for everyone who was awake to know.
As she'd expected, the voice of
Lieutenant Mahase, her night replacement,
was speaking. "... on board. Exercise all
precaution; avoid being alone." In spite of
herself, she smiled at the recollection of
Mahase's outrageous rec room parodies of the
standard announcements about exercising precautions and
avoiding being alone under any circumstances.
"Intruder Alert--it has been confirmed that an
alien intruder is on board. Exercise ..."
She removed her fingers from the switch, then
looked back at the little bronze, lying on the
floor. Dubious, almost afraid to touch the thing,
she walked over and picked it up, then looked from
it to the dresser where it had stood. Uhura was
meticulously neat--living in a three-by-
five-meter stateroom for three years, you had
to be--but there were only so many places to put things,
and the top of the dresser was one of them. A few
perfume bottles, the tiny amber gleam of the
Alert lights flicking on and off in the depths
of the glass; her jewelry box; the small,
cased disk of a favorite movie; a note
tablet and stylus ... The place the Martian
bronze had occupied was clearly delineated by the
things that had stood around it. It was nearly
ten inches from the nearest edge.
There was no way it could have fallen by itself.

Chapter Ten

Back in the chamber of the captain of the
Hungries, Yarblis Geshkerroth sank
slowly onto the bitter hardness of the bunk and
lowered his head to his hands. "His" head, he
thought ironically, "his" hands, and held the
hands out to look at them. Little and white and weak,
fragile enough to crush in his beak, had he still had a
beak.
Yet with finicking little stubs like these, the
Hungries had made machines, machines that
made machines, which in their turn had created this, this
monster thing, this half-living city, this iron
Bargump that carried them all in her sterile
belly through the screaming black void of nothingness
they called Space.
Loneliness ate him like a cancer. He wondered
how much longer he could last.
Longer than the captain of the Hungries, the
man Kirk, he thought, with sudden, vicious
desperation. At least longer than he.
Touching him in the village, he had felt the
alien captain's strength. But never had he
guessed the man would have such strength to hold his soul
together in this fashion. Not for so long. Only
barely could he remember how long it had been.
Dear Rhea, he thought desperately,
let me last ... let me last until it is
accomplished.
But Rhea--the sweet life that informed every
tree, every stream, every glade and covert in which he
had grown up, the breathing spirit whose name and nature
he knew deep within his heart--was far away.
Having all the brain of this James Kirk at his
disposal, being able to see the memories in his mind
as easily as he saw the memories of his
siblings in the Consciousness Web, he knew in a
sense how far away the world, the Mother Spirit that had
surrounded him, was, though he could barely grasp
it with his heart.
Farther than a Midgwin could walk, if he
had begun walking at the dawn of the world, through all
the years of ancestors, till now ... and he could
not even walk that, because there was no earth here, no
rock, no water. No Rhea, no family,
no Consciousness Web, no love.
Only nothingness, and the cold metal of the vessel,
and the hysterically precise measurements that the
Hungries occupied themselves with to the point that they
could not think without thinking centimeters,
microns, seconds, years ...
How easily they slipped in and took over,
first the language of the mind, then its perceptions,
then its inner heart.
No wonder they all became grabby, thinking that
because they knew how many of a thing existed, they could then
apportion it, so many to me, so many to my sibling
... only they did not think of others as their
siblings. Only as "them."
No wonder they became Hungries, hungry
with a hunger that could never be filled no matter how
much they had.
And all the evil, all the craziness, all the
tight greediness he had read in their dreams, in
their minds, in their memories--greediness that they
did not even recognize as wrong, which they seemed
to think the right and natural order of things--
greediness that would now spread among the Midgwins,
cause his people to seek it, because it masqueraded as good
--stemmed from that.
Counting Hunger-of-the-soul. Mine and yours.
If Arxoras could be deceived by them, Arxoras
who was wise and good with his many summers of
experience, how much more would others less experienced
be deceived?
Yarblis staggered to his feet, turned to the
mirror above the dressing table which held the things the
captain's memories marked as "his." He had
never occupied an alien body for this long. The
Hungries he had ousted from their bodies when they
materialized in a golden cloud of glitter--the
Hungries that Shorak and the others had called
Klingons, and claimed were not the same as themselves or
James Kirk and his party--he had taken when they
arrived in the world, and had kept only long enough
to kill the others of the party before returning to his own
body. He had never before realized the terrible
stresses of the alien flesh, and how those stresses
marked the body he occupied his inability
to sleep in this new body, his loathing distaste for the
slimy food that his mind told him he had to eat
to keep from being conspicuous ...
And like a darkness in which all things else must
grope, the hideous, devouring loneliness of
separation from the Consciousness Web.
That above all.
He stood now looking at the face of James
Kirk. It was more lined than it had been, grayer,
the discolored flesh around the eyes making them seem
pale and glittery. The physician had begun
to notice. The man Spock, the cold Counter of
Everything, had noticed more.
Like the woman Helen, he would have to be disposed
of before he, Yarblis, could accomplish his plan
with the ship, the plan that would save the world from the
Hungries forever.
He had not thought that--
Abruptly the door note sounded, its
mechanical quality unbearable for all its
softness. Yarblis swung around, fighting the
grate of irritation that these things caused, with all
their implications about the way these people lived; calling
back to his mind everything about James Kirk,
everything that was James Kirk. He was James
Kirk now ...
"Come," he said.
It was Spock.
"Captain ..." The Science officer--
Kirk's mind identified him as Science officer
and all that it meant--inclined his head. Spock was
like the researchers Shorak and L'jian, who would
never enter the Consciousness Web, whose souls were like
stone eggs and whose dreams he had never quite been able
to read. He would have liked to read Spock's
dreams, but the concentration required merely
to remain in Kirk's body precluded anything
else, and, robbed of the usual mental links, it was
difficult sometimes to read the verbal and physical
cues of a species alien to himself.
"What is it, Spock?"
Spock considered for a moment, an uncharacteristic
uncertainty in his hawk features. Then he said,
"Perhaps I should be asking that of you, Captain. I
did not wish to speak of it before Dr. McCoy, but
it is my impression that you know more about this intruder
than you have said. Certainly you seemed to be
expecting an intruder long before the manifestations
began to be reported by the crew."
He frowned, tilting his head a little and regarding
the captain with those dark, calm eyes. His
experiences with the Klingon-Hungries had given
Yarblis a little experience in reading these
elongated, oddly featureless faces, with their tiny
eyes and minimal folds--he had long since
grown used to having them around him.
"I did not speak of it, as I was not
entirely certain that it was that which was preying on your
mind." Spock spoke diffidently, as if
skirting another matter, and Yarblis
rememberedstknew from Kirk's memories that this
Vulcan, this stone-egg-soul, would have regarded
mention of the affair with Helen as bad tast e and none
of his business. Though Yarblis knew Kirk was
Spock's friend (though friendship could not truly exist
without the Consciousness Web), he himself disliked the
Vulcan and everything he stood for the cold
self-containment, the precision that negated all the
freedom of soul for which he, Yarblis, strove,
the obsession with counting things, with rules.
He shrugged--a gesture within Kirk's
repertoire--and said, "If I'd spoken of it,
would you--or anyone--have believed me? We went
over this ship top to bottom--your precious
readings didn't show us a thing. But I knew there
was something in that transporter room. And I think
you did too."
"Indeed, I had a momentary impression of there
being another life-form there," Spock said
doubtfully. Yarblis, his back to the dimness of the
room, his face to the lights in the hall, was aware
of how narrowly Spock was regarding him, aware
of the intonations of worry and uncertainty in the
deep, rough-textured voice.
But the Vulcan (another piece of knowledge from
Kirk, though Yarblis was not entirely certain
how to interpret all those things that went with that label
on these particular family of Hungry) merely
went on, "Did anything take place on the
planet that would have led you to your conclusions about the
intruder? I have been meaning to speak to Dr.
Gordon about it ..."
Yarblis realized he had put the metal
gourd of poisoned air in her room just in time.
And now he would have to make sure of her, before she
regained consciousness enough to speak.
"Only my impressions gained from encounters with the
Midgwins themselves." What Kirk knew, or
thought, of his people, Yarblis knew to be so
simplistic and distorted as to be almost
unrecognizable. What Helen knew, he could
only guess from memories of what she had told
her mate. The others would know nothing, but he
realized he had spoken from knowledge that there was no way
he could have had. There were so many things to know, so many
things to sort--it was not like the brief masquerades
before.
He went on, carefully, "Some of the things
Thetas and the others told me on the planet about the
abilities of these people ... Be careful, Spock.
I'm telling you again, this thing must be destroyed, and
as quickly as possible. Don't get near it.
Don't let it get near anyone."
"Indeed not, Captain," Spock replied
formally, though Yarblis could see he was not pleased
about that. There was an awkward silence, in which
Yarblis was aware that the Vulcan was watching him,
as if waiting for something. What it was, he could not
be sure, not knowing the physical cues of these people,
but whatever it was, he did not get it. In time,
walled behind his formal manner, Spock went on,
"I have double-checked the shielding on the computer, as
the poltergeist effect has been reported itself a
number of times in the Central Computer room or
its vicinity."
"Good," Yarblis agreed, though it was less
than completely clear to him why Spock seemed
to consider this important. This "central computer"
was vitally important in Kirk's mind--a
sort of giant machine that made the air go, the
lights shine, the ship itself move. But as with the
implications of Spock's Vulcanness, the
clusters of tiny facts surrounding the concept of
Central Computer were difficult for him
to interpret. He knew enough about the "computer" to use
it to implement his plan for the ship, his plan that would
save the world, that would keep the Hungries from
tempting his people into destroying the beauty and wholeness
of Rhea in which they lived, but there were other things which
he simply had not had the time nor energy to pick
apart.
"Good. See what you can get for me on a low-
wave proton accelerator. If we know that it
is manifesting itself near Central Computer, we
can start our hunt for it there."
"Very good, Captain."
Spock inclined his head again, a gesture of
respect. With the closing of the door, Yarblis
heard the slightly uneven tread of his boots
retreat down the hall; heard the boots pause,
as a man might pause when caught by some thought,
then start again and fade.
He had done something wrong.
Yarblis knew it, standing still in front of the
door. His heart--the alien heart--beat fast with the
rush of alien enzymes into his blood. He had
avoided them whenever he could--the man
Spock, the woman Helen, the physician
McCoy--the others whom Kirk's mind
identified as those who were most familiar with his
mannerisms, though since these people lacked anything
resembling a Consciousness Web, Yarblis could
not imagine how they could truly know one another at
all. He had hoped to be able to avoid them, or
at least put them off, until they returned
to his own world and he accomplished the plan that would
put his people beyond the temptation of dealing with the
Hungries forever.
O Rhea, Mother Spirit of streams and
grass, he whispered to himself, let me only
last that long ...
Yet whatever he had said in this conversation, or in
the one before, in the cold and sterile rooms that
passed among the Hungries for a Healing
Place, he had made some kind of mistake,
and the man Spock was more suspicious than ever.
He would have to act fast.

The crew of the Enterprise felt little
surprise when word came down that their course had
been reversed and that the starship was en route back
to Elcidar Beta III. In a number of
quarters there was even a certain amount of relief
that the ship remained on Standing Yellow Alert
confirmed reports of an intruder, precautions
to be taken. Those who worked Central Computer
late at night--Giacomo, Miller,
McDonough--had for several nights already been
doubling up on their shifts, those off duty, or
friends in other departments, like Gilden and
Brunowski, unobtrusively keeping those on
duty company. A few questioned the fact that scans
of the ship still revealed no evidence of an
intruder's physical presence, but most had been
in space long enough to realize the extreme narrowness
of human experience. There were only a few who
continued to claim that the intruder was, in fact, a
ghost.
In other quarters, however, uneasiness
remained.
"You can't deny there's something weird about the
whole business, Spock," McCoy grumbled,
perching on a lab stool and watching while Spock
made adjustments on what appeared to be--and was in
fact housed in the gutted casing of--a small
laser cannon, hooked up to a modified
nuclear accelerator and a proton
converter. "If it's an alien--if it's something
we picked up on the planet--what the hell is
its aim? I still find cups and feinbergers moved
around in the labs, and if there's any free
liquids there, they get tipped over, but what's
the point of that? And what the hell is that thing
supposed to do, anyway?"
"This, Doctor," Spock replied, looking
around the workbench behind him--they were in the small ion-
study lab on Deck 2--"is a low-level
proton wave-induction generator."
"Oh," McCoy said. "Silly me; should have
seen it in a minute." He crossed his knees and
watched with a certain amount of interest as Spock
turned around in what, had he been human, would have
been irritation, and started a concerted hunt through the
tools on the bench. "Lose something?"
"There was," Spock said, "a pin welder on
this bench 2.7 minutes ago exactly--I put
it there just before you came in." He straightened up,
dark brows forming an even sharper vee than usual
above the high bridge of his nose beneath the
protective goggles he'd pushed up onto his
forehead. "This is the fourth tool which has
inexplicably vanished in the last eighteen
hours. Yesterday a sonic wrench, a crystal-
optic transmitter, and twenty-four
centimeters of selenite wire all disappeared from
this bench where I clearly remembered laying them
down."
McCoy groaned. "Don't tell me it's
starting here!"
Spock eyebrowed for amplification.
"Nurse Chapel tells me things have been
disappearing out of the labs, and turning up in the
damnedest places, like that note pad of mine that
showed up in the decontamination room where
nobody'd been for days ..."
"Or a tube of methoamyline disappearing from the
xenoecology stores and turning up in the
ventilation ducts of Dr. Gordon's
quarters?"
McCoy looked uncomfortable. "Well, there
is that."
"How is she, Doctor?"
"Still pretty groggy. She says she has no
idea how the gas cylinder got there, but she'd
been asleep for a couple of hours when it was set
off. The gas is odorless. It's only chance she
woke up, only chance Uhura was
awake when she signaled her room. Since
there's no one else in sickbay at the moment,
Chris and Lieutenant Uhura take turns
staying with her. Considering she's our only source
of information about Midgwis now, I think it's a
safe assumption that our intruder's going to try
again."
"I agree," Spock said, picking up a
spot welder and squinting as he delicately
collimated the beam down to approximate the
vanished tool he actually needed. "Yet there
is in fact very little evidence connecting the intruder
--or the various poltergeist effects that have been
reported on the ship--with the attempted murder of
Dr. Gordon."
"Oh, come on, Spock," McCoy said.
"You're not still claiming there's a Klingon spy on
board, are you?"
"I would not be so rash as to theorize ahead of my
data," Spock replied austerely. "But
apports--objects appearing and disappearing--are
fairly commonly reported in cases of
poltergeist phenomena, and there has yet to be a
reported case of a poltergeist wiping
fingerprints from such an object." He pulled the
goggles down over his eyes and bent over the
induction generator; there was a sharp hissing as he
pin-welded the delicate wires into place.
"It is for that reason," he said a few
minutes later, straightening up again from h is work, "that
I wished to attempt contact of some kind with the
intruder. At the least, we might gain some
information about what it is and perhaps increase our knowledge of the
fauna of Midgwis--if Midgwis is where it
came on board, as seems to be the case.
Certainly it seems to possess as high or
higher levels of intelligence as the Midgwins
themselves, and its skills at concealment would go far in
explaining why it has not been mentioned in Dr.
Shorak's reports. At best, we might gain
a witness as to the real perpetrator of the
attempt, provided, as I say, that the intruder
and the perpetrator are not one and the same."
"And if they are one and the same," McCoy
replied, "you lay yourself open for God knows what.
Some kind of alien possession, if Jim's
right."
"If," Spock agreed carefully, "as you
say, the captain is right."
There was a long and rather uncomfortable
silence.
"Have you talked to him?"
Spock pushed his goggles up again, frowning a
little, as if trying to fit together pieces of some
complex puzzle which would not fit. "I have
attempted to," he replied after a moment's
consideration. "And indeed, it is difficult to find
fault with his reasoning. The records of contact with
alien species bear ample witness to the existence
of life-forms with whom even the most careful
attempts at contact prove quite rapidly
fatal, not only to the single individual
attempting contact, but to everyone in the contact
party. And beyond this certainty--which could only be an
exaggerated caution--he seems to be perfectly
in possession of his senses."
"I dragged him in for a physical today,
dammit," McCoy muttered, picking up a
stylus from the bench and turning it restlessly in his
hands. "His weight's down about five pounds, but
other than that he's fine--physically. And if he
didn't say two words to me ... Well, he
is dealing with an intruder, and one that can't be
detected. And it did come damn close
to killing the woman he loves. It's enough to make
any man a little irrational."
"For which reason," Spock replied dryly,
"I have always been profoundly grateful that I am
a Vulcan." He returned to contemplate the
awkward tangle of spare parts and wire on the
bench before him.
"And this'll kill it?"
"Theoretically." Spock checked a connection,
plugged in a gauge, and consulted the ruby
numbers that blinked to life in the dark of the tiny
screen. "It is difficult to tell in advance,
as the life-form--if it is a life-form--is
completely unknown to our records and does not
register on scans. In theory, if the intruder
is an independent neural-electronic
infrastructure, the proton-induction field should
disrupt its pattern long enough to neutralize it
permanently."
He turned back to his workbench and moved his
hand as if to lay it on something he knew
precisely the location of, then paused,
irritated, and began to hunt again. McCoy
hopped down from his stool and walked around the
induction generator, hands behind his back so Spock
couldn't accuse him of poking things--he'd
visited Spock while Spock was working before--
examining it with interest. "So what was that katra
thing Jim asked you about?"
Spock's back was to him, and he saw the
shoulders stiffen. The Science officer's voice was
arctic. "A theoretical concept in Vulcan
metaphysics the captain and I had once
discussed."
The intonation was as definite as the banging shut
of a door, but McCoy persisted anyway. "He
talked about it as if it were a type of life-form
analogous to the thing we're dealing with."
"The analogy was in error." Spock removed
his goggles, hung them neatly on the
appropriate hook and donned a magnification
headset, a pair of needle-fine
manipulators in his right hand. "Now if you will
excuse me, Doctor, the captain is very
anxious that the generator be finished and tested this
evening. Three more need to be produced tomorrow, so that
the entire ship can be swept in sections, and I do
need quiet to work."
"Well, excuse me," McCoy muttered,
and took his leave. Spock was poking around in the
innards of the induction generator before McCoy was out
the door.
Back in sickbay, McCoy glanced through the
door of the intensive care ward where Helen lay,
dozing fitfully under the faint lights of the
diagnostic bed. Beside her Uhura sat, the
computer reader angled around toward her, and the muted
amber lights of something on the screen turning her
broad cheekbones to faintly gilded bronze.
She looked tired. She'd had a full shift
on the bridge already, McCoy knew, though he
also knew the Communications officer did not
grudge the time spent watching at the bedside of
her friend. It was one of the worst and most annoying
things of a Standing Intruder Alert, this doubling-up
of watches. He couldn't ever recall one that had
gone on this long.
On the other hand, he thought wryly, passing
along the corridor to his office, he couldn't
ever recall dealing with an alien who was nothing more
than a pattern of neural impulses, if that.
No wonder the researchers on Midgwis had
never reported such a thing.
Or had they? Curious, he tapped a key
to activate the reader on his desk, and after a
moment's thought to remember some of the
codes, punched into the reference computer. Would
Input have gotten around to indexing Shorak's
reports yet? Probably--they were usually
pretty fast about things like that.
Letters swam onto the screen, amber in
darkness.
SECURITY CODE REQUIRED FOR
ACCESS.
Damn, he thought, cutting out; Spock must
have put a bee in Jim's bonnet about the
Klingon conspiracy theory after all. He
debated buzzing Jim and asking about the access
code, but glanced at the chronometer and decided
against it. If Jim wasn't asleep now he ought
to be.
He frowned, reflecting on that. Jim looked
terrible. Was it the pressure of knowing the intruder
was on his ship, somewhere, waiting to kill again? Or
was it whatever the hell was going on between him and
Helen? It sure as hell wasn't like Jim
to take on that way over an affair that had turned
sour, but then, Jim was generally careful to keep his
affairs too casual to turn sour in that fashion
... And in any case he, Leonard McCoy,
Boy Divorc`e, had no business setting himself
up as a consultant to other people's love lives when
he'd made such hash of his own.
Having him in for a physical had gotten him
exactly nowhere. There was nothing wrong with him,
except the lines of strain in his face, and that
haunted look in his eyes. He'd tried keeping
his friend off the bridge during emergencies before, when
he was severely wounded, it hadn't worked. When
he'd tried to talk to him he'd been met with
monosyllables I can't talk about it now,
Bones. Ask me about it later.
"Maybe when we get back to that godforsaken
planet," he muttered to himself, keying open his
security safe and taking out a small,
unbreakable container of bourbon to pour himself a
glass, "we'll get this straightened out."
But the memory of Midgwis troubled him. The
touch of the old patriarch's mind on his came
back to him, like the balm of warmed oil on a
half-healed wound--the sense of the burden of
loneliness lifted. He remembered the molten
amber moonlight, the smells of dust and whispering
grasses--the sense of all things being at rest,
being as they should be, without hurry and without stress,
from the beginning of time. Remembered, too,
the reflection of the firelight in Thetas's dark
eyes, and the little Argellian's soft voice in the
dancing shadows as he spoke of the strange
beauties of the Midgwins' simple life, their
elaborate structure of legends and faith, their
spiritual philosophies and intricate,
nonvisual arts, the deep calm of their
civilization that came from the sense of lying utterly
in the hands of Fate.
A structure fragile as glass, Thetas
had said, which even change for the good might shatter
irreparably.
He knew that none of the three researchers had
mentioned any kind of Midgwin belief in spirits or
invisible beings--which didn't mean there wasn't any
of course. It might be something the Midgwins
hadn't mentioned to the researchers, or that the
researchers wouldn't have thought to mention to the landing party
if they considered them simply creatures of the
imagination. Beings which moved and manipulated
artifacts would have damn little scope in Midgwin
society, which hadn't been able to come up with any
greater claim than a few sticks and a wreath of
flowers to the instrumentality necessary to class them as
officially a sentient civilization.
And yet, according to what Helen had told him in the
last few weeks about how cultural researchers
operated, it was not something they would disregard.
He got to his feet and walked back down the
short, brightly lighted stretch of corridor to the
doorway of the ICU. "Lieutenant Uhura?"
She looked up swiftly. Absorbed in her
reading she might be--novel, romance, fashion
magazine, whatever it was, piped up from the deep
reserves of the library computer's endless files--
but she still knew herself to be on guard. "Yes,
Doctor?" She reached out to touch the hand of the
woman who lay in the bed, then to straighten aside
the dark cloud of hair that lay on the flat
pillow. "She's resting easier."
"Good." He came into the shadowy room. The
air was stuffy--because of the alert, the ventilators were
double-shielded. "Do you know if Dr. Gordon
had any separate set of notes about
Midgwis? A separate wafer of her
researches, for instance? All the planet
reports in the main computer are under seal, and
I'm not going to wake Jim up to get them ..."
"He sure looks like he needs the sleep,"
she commented. "Yes, Helen had a
wafer. It'll be by the reader on her desk in her
room. It's got an orange label. It's
all the early reports on Midgwi s--it's
pretty complete. She was looking for some kind of
reference too, you know, about a creature that was
invisible, untouchable."
"She find anything?"
Uhura shook her head. "I don't know. But
I don't think she'd mind if you went into her
room and got it."
But when McCoy went down to the visiting
officers' quarters--still feeling a little silly about
going to all this trouble for something he could probably
get Jim to give him the access code to tomorrow,
always provided he could track Jim down--there was
no wafer with an orange label next to the
reader. There was no such wafer anywhere in the room
--in fact, there were no wafers of any kind in the
room at all.

Restless, Helen moved in her sleep.
Uhura looked up quickly and pushed aside the
reader on its movable arm. The novel she was
reading, about love amid the fall of ancient
civilizations, was only to occupy her time--anything
(except a ghost story, she thought wryly)
would have done. She glanced in surprise at the
chronometer in the upper corner of the diagnostic
screen. Nearly midnight. Chris should be coming
on duty here soon, and she could go to bed ... not that
it would be much of an improvement on sitting next
to Helen. Because of the alert, even the officers, who
had private staterooms, had doubled up
quarters, standard procedure in the rare cases of
an alien loose. She was sharing with Chris, and with
Organa from Security, a woman with whom they
both got along well. But one could have only so
much of the cozy atmosphere of a slumber party.
Here, at least, it was quiet. And, she admitted
to herself, a little uneasily, remembering the strange
feeling she'd had in the corridor, here things were very
well-monitored indeed.
She bent over the bed, feeling Helen's
face. Neither fevered nor cold, though her friend was
turning a little in her sleep, muttering restlessly.
She took the big, square hand in hers and said
softly, "Helen, I'm here. It's Uhura
... I'm here," not loud enough to wake, but enough, she
hoped, to reassure.
Helen opened her eyes and stared at
her in the dim glow of the diagnostic lights. Her
voice, eroded by the harshness of the gas she'd
inhaled, was almost unrecognizable as she whispered,
"It isn't him!" Her eyes were blank, still
dreaming--possibly even still asleep. She
closed them again and a great sob tore her; the
powerful fingers closed around Uhura's with a
desperate grip. "It isn't him!" she sobbed
again, and broke into a storm of weeping, turning her
face away when Uhura tried to comfort her.
From weeping, she slid back into sleep.


Chapter Eleven

After Dr. McCoy left, Mr. Spock
sat for some time at his workbench, magnification
headset pushed up on his forehead, staring at the
induction generator without really seeing it. His first
flash of annoyance at McCoy he had
repressed with reflex swiftness, and reproached
himself now at the childishness of feeling it at all.
What he felt about Kirk, he knew to be
equally childish, and only to be expected, as his
father would certainly have told him--and he could hear the
Vulcan ambassador's deep voice and
judicious phrasing in his mind--if one spoke
to humans regarding Vulcan things.
In speaking to the captain at all regarding
matters of his Vulcan heritage, he had
behaved like a sentimental fool.
That katra stuff ...
So that was all Kirk had gotten out of that
conversation, one evening months ago in the deserted
rec room when they'd finished a second game of
chess and the captain had asked him about meditation,
about the Vulcan philosophy. After several
hours' more discussion about life, and why humans
strive, they had reached--with the tentativeness of friends
who are not quite sure whether they wish to abandon the
safety of superficialities--the concept of the
soul.
It had been that hour of the night when the last of the
off-watch crew members had trailed away
to bed, when the lights had dimmed down to a few
pools of brightness around the piano, the chessboard,
the bank of food slots on the wall. A little
to Spock's surprise, since the captain
generally presented a facade of action and
boldness, Kirk had spoken of his own soul, his
own doubts. Spock had reciprocated with what
he had himself been taught, and what he in fact
believed ...
It had been a side of the captain that he had
rarely seen, and one which he had believed to be
genuine. The anomaly was disquieting, but based upon
matters notoriously open to misperception.
He went back to work.
The silence around him seemed suddenly profound.
Straightening up, he looked about the ion lab,
trying to analyze the source of his deep sense of
unease. A lab, like any of the other
small ones in the Science section, the bright
lumenpanels prosaically illuminating neatly
arranged tools on the workbench, the coils of
wires and superconductor, the gauges on their
shelf and, on the other side of the room, the
brushed-steel cyclors and the gleaming computer
terminal. Some imbalance of his circadian
rhythms, he thought. It was only 2300 hours but
it felt later, felt like the deeps of night ...
He had a flash of irrational dread that if he
opened the door through which McCoy had passed, he
would find only darkness there. And the room certainly
felt cold.
The dread he felt, the sense of the uncanny,
was certainly as irrational as his earlier annoyance
had been. He reached for the spot welder he had
collimated to replace the vanished pin welder--
the tool he had placed on the bench behind him
literally 8.3 minutes ago during his conversation with
Dr. McCoy--and found it, too, gone.
"Curious," he said quietly. Getting
to his feet, he made a slow circuit of the
lab, checking--as they had all fallen into the
habit of repeatedly checking--the ventilators
behind their emergency baffles, the small, round
electrical hatches, the corners that seemed
somehow to contain strange feelings of congealed
uneasiness. He found nothing. "Most curious."
He returned to work in a thoughtful frame of
mind.

Dammit, Spock! Kirk screamed at
him, voiceless, helpless, from the corner of the room
where he stood; and he was standing, he told himself--
feet on the floor, elbow a few centimeters
from the wall--he did have the shadow of a corporeal
body still ... Don't bend that fine Vulcan
mind of yours to finding a reasonable explanation!
You're the only one who might be able to hear me--
who might be able to save me, to save Helen!
He's going to try to kill her again ... And his
own time, he knew, in this strange, bodiless
state, was growing short.
But the sleek, dark head, bent over the innards
of the induction generator cum proton cannon,
did not lift again. And somewhere Kirk sensed the
nearness of that other captain, that terrible alter ego
who had done this to him ... who was seeking to kill the
woman he loved and use the ship that was his very life
now for purposes unknown ...
Somewhere that other self was walking, prowling the
half-lit corridors on whatever errands had
taken it nightly here and there about the ship, from the
upper decks of the Science section down to the very
bottommost of the cargo holds. Knowing he could not
face him, he faded into the wall and fled down,
following the computer lines toward the deserted lower
reaches of the Engineering hull, where, if
relatively unnoticed by any save
Brunowski and Miller in the pursuit of their
mysterious projects, at least for the time being he
could be safe.

"Two generators," Mr. Spock said, "should
adequately establish a disruption field on
one deck of the ship, allowing for both the
curvature of the primary hull and the length of the
Engineering hull. According to what little research has
been done in the field, my estimate is that ten
minutes should be sufficient time to disperse an
electrostatic life-form, though I have no data
on the possibility of such a life-form
reassembling itself. Perhaps you have an opinion on the
subject?" And he regarded the captain, left
eyebrow slightly raised, curious as to what his
reply would be.
Kirk passed a hand over the lower portion of his
face, a nervous gesture he had picked up in
the last twenty-four hours or so, as if to vent
some of the feverish restlessness which seemed, these days,
to be consuming him. "Ten minutes ..." he said
softly, and for an illogical moment Spock had
the impression that he was trying to call to mind
precisely how long ten minutes actually was.
"It can--it might be able to--re-form itself ..."
The blinking amber lights of the Yellow Alert, still
flickering on and off above the door of the small
ion-study lab, increased the illusion of a
strange animal heat in his eyes, as well as the
way he held himself, with his head drawn down a
little to his shoulders, as if for protection. "The
nialigs of Rigel Five could re-form ...
Twenty minutes, the reports said." Then, with a
visible effort, he drew a deep breath and made
his shoulders relax. "What ... what is your
opinion, Mr. Spock?"
"I think that thirty minutes would be a
guarantee of safety," he replied, a little
surprised that the captain would have dug out that
obscure report from the library section
of the computer and consulted it, even as he himself had.
"Thirty, then," the captain said, with a sharp little
nod that made him look again like himself. "We can't
take chances, Mr. Spock. You were able
to assemble two proton generators, then?"
"I was able, by cannibalizing the spare ion-
frequency accelerators, to assemble three,"
Spock replied, worriedly observing how
Kirk's hand stretched out to caress the gray housing
of the laser cannon in which one of the generators had
been constructed, and which now rested on the lab table
before him. The other two generators stood near the
door, clothed in the round, br ushed-steel casings
of the accelerators from which they had been constructed,
barnacled with sprawling incrustations of the equipment
welded to them to complete the transformation, the fruit
of a long night's labors which had left the ion
lab--and the physics workshops next door--
strewn with gutted transformers and opened
modulator housings like clamshells around a
village midden. Even after he had completed work
on them at close to 0400 hours, Spock had
neither left the lab nor gone to sleep, half
fearing they would play the same vanishing tricks as
his tools had in the earlier part of the evening, or
suffer the same inexplicable malfunctions that
recording machines seemed to in the presence of the
intruder's halo of poltergeist effect. When
he had reported to the bridge at 0800 hours,
he had left a security officer on guard over
them--the woman was still waiting discreetly outside
the door.
"Three?" Kirk's eyebrows pulled together
slightly, questioning--then he nodded, though Spock
had the momentary impression his agreement was pro
forma, not because he understood the strategy. "Of
course ..."
He is tired indeed, Spock thought, his
own eyes narrowing as he considered the strained
harshness of the captain's face. "Had sufficient
parts been available, or had Inorganic
Fabrication had time to create them, I should, in
fact, have built four," he said. "Naturally,
we will need to stairstep our way down from deck
to deck, disassembling the units on one deck
while the deck below is being swept. Sufficient
parts not being available, I was able to assemble two
slave-relayed signal modulators which should
extend the field to cover an entire deck and
thus do the work of an independent
generator, but it has left the physics
laboratory completely depleted ..."
"It doesn't matter," Kirk whispered in that
low, tense voice. He did not even walk over
to the two modulators that Spock had indicated
--lumpy, bizarre bastardizations of assorted
pieces of research equipment wired to the faceted
shallow screens of pickup dishes. "The sweep
has to be made soon, Spock. Soon--before
we reach ... Midgwis." He had been about
to call the planet something else, Spock thought.
"Captain," Spock said hesitantly, "I
am still of the opinion that some attempt should be made
to communicate with the intruder ..."
"No!" Kirk swung fiercely around on
him. With an effort, he got a grip on himself
again, straightened up, and said more temperately,
"You don't ... We don't know what we're
dealing with, Spock. I can't take any chances."
Again, the sureness in his voice troubled
Spock, the impression that his captain did,
indeed, know only too well what they were dealing
with. Had he seen something, Spock wondered, in
the half-hour or so that McCoy had mentioned
Kirk had spent walking alone with Dr.
Gordon along the periphery of the thorn jungle
that concealed and protected the Bindigo Warren?
Seen, or sensed, or heard something that told him
now what it was that had attempted to murder the only
other witness to ... whatever it had been?
But in that case, why keep its nature a
secret? If it were a hitherto unknown form of
life, to destroy it without even an attempt at
observation would be monstrous, given the nature of
their mission.
"Would it not be possible to use the generators
to fence the intruder into a small area of the
bottommost cargo hold until we reach
Midgwis?" Spock asked reasonably.
"That way, advice could be obtained, either from the
researchers on the planet or from the patriarch
Arxoras."
"No!" Kirk insisted again. "It's--it's
too dangerous." He passed his hand over his mouth
again, fingers pulling twitchily at his lips as he
thought. "Given time, it might be able to slip past
the fields somehow, and we can't risk that."
"Perhaps," Spock said. "On the other hand, the
intruder itself might be a creature known--and indeed
revered--by the Midgwins, and there might be
repercussions of some kind if we--"
Kirk laughed harshly, an abrupt bark
abruptly cut off, then shook his head. "No,"
he said simply. "No, Mr. Spock. In
fact, we have no way of knowing that Arxoras and the
other memmietieffs aren't behind this. They could have
been deluded into thinking ... into thinking that the
Federation means harm to the world ... to Midgwis
..." He shook his head again, the gesture of a
tethered animal trying in vain to drive clouds of
canker flies from its ears. The pain line between his
brows stood out very clearly. "No. We are
dealing with an Intruder Alert, Mr. Spock,
and an alien which has proven itself capable of
murder. For the safety of the ship we must do it this
way, and must do it soon. How soon can the sweep
begin?"
"The generators can be charged to full power
by 1800 hours." Spock nodded toward the thick
stringers of cable leading from the wall to the two
chunky, brushed-steel globes, the savage
triangular shape of the laser cannon. "Once
charged, they will be able to operate on ship's power,
though Mr. Scott is charging backup emergency
batteries." Slowly, as he spoke, he began
to collect the tools from the edge of the bench where they
had ranged--the tools that had appeared and
disappeared in so disturbing a fashion last night,
always just after his back was turned ...
Another manifestation of the poltergeist effect?
But would a creature intelligent enough to know that the
construction of the generators must be slowed down--
intelligent enough to identify the sole member of the
crew who might have information concerning it and attempt
to dispose of her--have contented itself with merely stealing
tools? For most of the night, in disregard of one
of the standard Alert rules, Spock had been working
alone ... and the creature had allegedly
attempted to kill once already.
He went on slowly, "Allowing ten minutes
for setup and breakdown time, on either side of a
thirty-minute run, I have estimated that the
sweep should be accomplished in 15.666--"
"All right," Kirk said abruptly. "Set
up your teams--have them in the main briefing room
at 1800 hours." And turning sharply, he
took his leave.
Thoughtfully, Spock summoned in the security
officer to keep watch over the equipment once
again, and descended to his quarters
to complete his notes for the briefing and the assembly
of the sweep teams. Allowing for the exigencies of
sweeping the dorsal decks separately from the
lower decks of the primary hull, for setup and
takedown time--two more modulators, he
realized, would have to be assembled in order to keep
a continuous sweep going on Deck 7--the deck
level at which the primary hull connected with the
dorsal--the sweep which would undoubtedly not begin
until 1900 hours or later, would last through the
night and well into the following morning. That meant
a relief shift was needed of two teams, perhaps
three when they reached Deck 7 ...
He paused in his note making and sat for a
moment, his note pad on the small surface of the
desk before him as he turned his stylus over in his
fingers. The bright lights of his work cubicle
gleamed off the faces of the three terminals on the
immaculate desktop before him. Beyond the little
doorway his sleeping cubicle was dim, warmly
red-lit in imitation of the world in which he had grown
to manhood; the room was comfortably warm, and
quiet, with a privacy which even in Standing Intruder
Alert conditions he treasured above his own
safety.
And in fact there had never been an occasion of the
poltergeist--or intruder--manifesting itself in the
primary hull during the first watch. Whatever it
was, it was a creature of nighttime, a creature
of darkness when no one was around. Like the eschak.
Like McCoy's plantation-haunting ghosts.
He frowned, knowing that he should be contacting Mr.
Scott and Mr. DeSalle to line up his
sweep teams, which he wished to be comprised of
Engineering and Security personnel--Scott in
charge of one, Miller in charge of another. His
mind roved over his own subordinates and
prot@eg`es in Science for other
possibilities ...
But his eyes returned to the computer terminal.
After a moment he unshipped the keyboard from its
recess and opened a screen. Clearing himself through
entry and security programs in a second or
two, he keyed through to the mainframe itself, using the
keys rather than voice commands for greater speed and
precision, as most of the Science personnel did.
Spock's interest in, and familiarity with, the
Enterprise computer was as much with how it worked as with
what it contained. He had found that by skipping the
transliteration into standard English--and in
fact skipping the voice programs alt--he
could access information far more quickly. Some of the
Loglan didn't even translate. Sheerly out
of curiosity, he punched through into the reference
exec programs for a runout on all articles
requested of the reference section in the past five
days since they had left orbit around
Midgwis. From there he narrowed to all articles
requested from terminal PTQ-7767--THE terminal
in the captain's quarters.
The captain had summoned up and read all
articles referring to the possibilities of
electron-state life-forms and how to combat them--
including the obscure report on the Rigel Very
nialigs--within twenty-four hours of returning
from the surface of Midgwis. A brief
consultation with the captain's log--which was double
security sealed, but Spock had long ago
learned to make short work of any form of security
seals--served to inform him that it had been nearly
thirty-six hours before the first reports of the
poltergeist effect had been turned in.
Rumor may have been going around before that time, of
course. Spock was always startled by the speed with which
information was disseminated in the rec room. But the
overheard conversations of Rei lly and Chekov
caused him to doubt whether it would have been taken
seriously at that point. And in that initial
twenty-four-hour period, the captain had placed
all reports regarding Midgwis under seal.
""Curiouser and curiouser,"" Spock
quoted from a piece of literature that nobody in
the crew had any idea that he'd ever read, let
alone liked. He keyed back through to the
captain's log, winkled his way past the access
codes, and studied the entries since the departure
from Midgwis.
They told him nothing except that there was something
that the captain was not writing about. Their terseness was
very unlike his concise but thorough style.
He keyed out. Then, though he knew he was
due back on the bridge, he turned his steps
toward sickbay.

"Nothing." Helen's voice sounded a little
better, though it would be weeks before the internal
scar tissue disappeared--her entire
respiratory system, Spock knew from
McCoy, was similarly damaged. She still
looked haggard, weak, and depleted, her
body not responding well to either regenerative
enzymes nor to the sonic rest treatments that
usually accelerated natural healing. Spock
wondered obliquely how a case like this one might
respond to the Midgwin Consciousness Web
McCoy had spoken about, then discarded the thought.
According to Shorak's reports, the Consciousness
Web itself was largely illusory and its effects
in all probability psychosomatic. Even
Vulcan holistic techniques did not excise
disruptive organisms--merely tapped into the
deep strengths of the patient's own immune
systems and the regenerative properties of the
mortal flesh. And it could well be, he thought,
looking down at the woman's drawn face and
bruise-circled eyes, that her lack of
response to any kind of treatment did indeed
stem from some private inner grief or confusion.
She cleared her throat a little, and as she
concentrated on thinking back, on re-creating the
events on the planet's surface, some of the pain
lessened in her face. "Thetas and the captain were
never alone together that I know about. Dr. McCoy
talked to Thetas for some time by the campfire, but the
captain and I were ... walking. Seeing some of the
planet."
A faint flush stained her cheekbones in the
cool dimness of the convalescent ward, a reflex
that Spock, standing with folded hands at the foot of
her bed, knew to be connected in the human
species with embarrassment. A little puzzled, he
said, "If, as I assume, you were at that time
attempting to make the decision whether to remain on
the planet or to enter Starfleet and join the
Enterprise as a permanent crew member, such
an investigation would have been only logical, as
would the desire to discuss the matter privately
with the ship's captain." From the tail of his eye he
saw Nurse Chapel, who had moved a portable
work station into a corner of the room so that there would never
be a time when Helen would be completely alone,
pause in her analysis of experimental
results. She half averted her face and brought
up one hand to cover whatever expression tugged at
her mouth, she and Helen carefully avoiding one
another's glance. A little stiffly, Spock went
on, "And during this time, neither you nor the captain
saw any ... untoward manifestations of a life-
form that might have been similar to the one with which we are
presumably dealing now?"
Helen pulled straight the sudden quirk at the
corner of her mouth--a quirk that had abruptly
lightened the weariness and strain on her face--and
said, "No. But it was fairly dark, and the thing
we're dealing with seems to be invisible, or at
least very good at hiding."
"Indeed," Spock averred. He thought for a
moment more, while Chapel made another data
entry, fingers flicking over the small keyboard
with barely a whisper of sound. At Helen's
bedside a small earphone hung over the little
reader screen--the convalescent ward was, like the
individual crew quarters, equipped with plug-
in ports for both readers and audiotapes, and the
Enterprise's library was fairly well
stocked with both.
"And you're certain that at no time did the
captain have any sort of private conference with
Dr. Thetas, or with any of the other researchers?"
Helen shook her head. "No. Shorak
introduced us to Arxoras, who ... I suppose
you could say he thought-scanned us. Not read our
minds, really, but I had the impression he could
have. More like taking a sample, testing the water
..." Her dark, straight brows pulled down
into a frown. "The other one, the Ghost Walker--
Yarblis Geshkerroth--did that to him too. That was
when he said that I should think about learning the same
kind of mind-shielding techniques Shorak and
L'jian use ..."
"The Ghost Walker?"
"Dr. McCoy mentioned him." Nurse
Chapel looked up from the tiny screen, crossed
her booted ankles over a rung of her chair.
"He's the leader of the conservative party in that
warren, a complete isolationist. I think he'd
been hurt by Klingon scouts, and wasn't making
any distinctions between them and us."
"Indeed," Spock said thoughtfully.
"But we were all there," Helen went on, "and
Jim didn't--didn't seem the worse for it
..."
"No," murmured Chapel. "But ... Mr.
Spock, I don't know nearly as much as I should
about telepathic technique, but is it possible the
captain could have seen into this Ghost Walker's mind
at the time of the contact, whether the Ghost Walker
wanted him to or not? Could have read malice there
... maybe even a plan?"
"In my experience," Spock said
slowly, "something as linear as a plan is not something
that transmits in chance telepathic contact,
particularly between beings of such widely incompatible
cultures and thought processes. But an
isolated image or series of images can be
picked up by a sensitive or skilled
receptor from someone not skilled in masking his or
her own mind."
"Not a description that fits the Ghost
Walker," Helen whispered, sinking back against the
pillow and frowning up at the tall Vulcan.
"One of the great savants of their planet, they
called him; one of the mightiest. And besides ..."
She hesitated, then stopped herself and shook her
head.
"What is it?" Chapel asked.
She managed a weak grin. "Just being catty.
Never mind." She thought about it for a moment, then
shrugged and said, "Well ... whatever else can be
said about him, I certainly wouldn't accuse Jim
Kirk of being psychically sensitive or
skilled."
"No," Spock agreed. "But I have found him
to be extraordinarily gifted in the interpretation
of subliminal clues." He frowned again,
folding his arms, wondering why the captain would have
lied to him. To back up a deduction based upon
unprovable hypotheses? Or to cement with fear an
order that he was not certain would be obeyed?
Spock glanced at the chronometer visible on
the wall beyond Nurse Chapel's shoulder. It was
1340. The sweep-team roster needed to be
compiled and its members contacted; a strategy
meeting with DeSalle of Security was necessary
to organize logistics, and he still needed to put
together those two additional modulators ... not
to mention getting some rest himself, for he knew already
he would be awake through the night again coordinating the
mechanics of the sweep and--the thought crossed his
mind like a stirring of wind--keeping an eye on
Captain Kirk.
He frowned, not sure why he had phrased it
that way to himself and not comfortable with his own distrust. And
yet ...
He shook his head, dismissing the other possible
course of action that had been slowly forming itself in his
mind. He said, "Thank you, Dr. Gordon, for
your help. Nurse Chapel, I will be
transmitting a memo concerning the precautions
to be taken to shield any scientific
experiments in progress from possible effects of the
sweep ..."
"I've talked to Dr. McCoy about the
possibility," she said, and added, with a rueful
smile, "not that any serious experimentation has
been going on with that--that thing--disrupting the labs."
"Indeed," Spock agreed quietly.
"However, extra shielding may be necessary in view
of the fact that, since the only communication between
primary hull and the Engineering hull and dorsal
decks is through Deck Seven, the proton-
acceleration field will be in place on this deck
while all decks of the primary hull below it are
being swept--a matter of some two to three
hours."
Chapel winced as she thought of what McCoy's
reaction to that would be, then she nodded and said,
"I'll tell him to take that into account."
"Thank you," Spock said formally. "The sweep
on this deck will most likely commence at 2300
hours--my memo, once I have consulted with
Security Chief DeSalle, will give a more
accurate indication of the precise time."
And turning, he started for the door. But before he
had gotten close enough for it to open, he stopped and
turned back. "Nurse Chapel ... as the
labs here have been one of the centers of the
manifestations, there may be a recurrence of them as
the sweep approaches. I realize you will be off
duty at that hour, but ..."
"I'll stay if you think it would help," she
said quietly.
"I do," Spock replied, a little stiffly, for
he knew of Chapel's affection for him and knew
that under the circumstances, asking her for a favor of
any kind was unfair.
"I'll get in touch with you if anything
happens," she promised, herself withdrawing a little,
growing more businesslike as she tried to answer his
own formality. But her long hands, plucking
nervously at the sides of the small keyboard on
its stand before her, gave her away.
"Thank you," Spock said, and then, in a lower
voice, added, "I appreciate it.
Moreover, as the sweep drives whatever this
creature is down through this deck to the ones below, I
believe that it would not be a good idea to leave Dr.
Gordon alone."


At 1800 hours the rostered crew members
assembled in the main briefing room on Deck
4, thirty-six, all told, from the various
watches. Fourteen were such members of Science and
Engineering as Spock deemed able to deal with the
proton-acceleration generators on both a
theoretical and mechanical level--not always
compatible, he reflected, considering the case of
Lieutenant Maynooth the head of the ion-study
lab and one of the most brilliant ab-atomic
particle physicists he had ever had the pleasure
to work with, who could not be trusted to survive an
encounter with a common stapler. The other twenty-two
were selected members of Security, and the briefing
included, as well as Mr. Scott and Captain
Kirk, Security Chief DeSalle, a
big-framed, craggy-faced man who remained
leaning quietly against the wall in the back of the
room, saying very little but watching everything. Above the
door the amber lights of the Alert still blinked, a
constant, silent reminder that somewhere on the vessel
an alien was hiding--invisible, silent, and
potentially lethal.
Spock explained briefly the setup and
takedown procedures of the three generators and
four signal modulators, then outlined the
leapfrogging strategy of the sweep, a pattern
complicated by the necessity of keeping Deck 7
under a constant sweep while the decks of the
primary hull beneath it were swept, then
backtracking and sweeping the dorsal decks before
moving on to the Engineering hull.
"What if it retreats upward from Engineering
through one of the Jeffries Tubes to the engine
nacelles?" asked Lieutenant Bistie, a
middle-aged Navajo who was head of the Special
Studies lab. "I mean, it can hang tight in
the tube until the coast is clear, and then come
down again."
"Insufflation tests with a number-seven neutral
powder have indicated that the standing wave set up by the
generators not only extends through walls, but is
in some degree influenced by resonation patterns
of the walls themselves," replied Spock, to whom
Mr. DeSalle had already mentioned this rather daunting
possibility earlier in the day. "We believe that
a resonance column will be established for a
considerable distance up the nacelle pylons, well
into the region of the proton-disruption field of the
engines themselves."
"But how do we know the disruption field of the
engines will affect it?" inquired Organa,
DeSalle's diminutive lieutenant.
Spock folded his hands on the top of the
generator's polished steel dome which sat on the
table before him. "We have no way of knowing that the
proton-acceleration fields of the generators will
affect it," he replied. "This equipment is, you
must realize, largely experimental, though it is
based upon all information available regarding
electrostasis life-forms."
"Well," Miller said hesitantly, "we
know it can kill recording devices, and cause
malfunctions in molecule-remix units ..."
"Molecule-remix units?" Spock
raised an eyebrow. "No report has been
filed concerning--"
"Er, maybe that was just rumor," said Miller
hastily. "But what if it can short out a phaser
the same way?"
"May I remind you, Ensign," Captain
Kirk snapped from the head of the briefing table, "that
the induction mechanism of a phaser works on an
entirely different principle from that of a recording
device?"
Spock paused for a moment, his eyes going
worriedly to the captain. Then he continued,
"Indeed, we have little evidence so far as to what our
quarry's capabilities may be, or as to what
its reaction will be to being cornered. I can only
recommend that all internal communications of the ship
remain open, and that all life-support,
engineering, and central computer functions remain
double-manned until the sweep is completed. This
may be particularly important the farther down the
ship we go, as the intruder is--if my
calculations are correct--driven into a smaller
and smaller area."
"Captain," said Dr. McCoy, who stood,
arms folded, in the doorway of the briefing room
next to Mr. DeSalle. "Just out of curiosity
... how are we going to know if we've gotten
rid of the thing? It doesn't show up on any
scans now. It isn't merely invisible, it's
apparently literally incorporeal--we have
virtually no proof that it exists at all. So
how will we know when it ceases to exist?"
The captain turned to look at him, and
Spock saw how yellow his eyes gleamed. "The
proof that it exists," he said slowly,
"is that it has tried to kill--and will try to kill
again." His hands tightened, twisting at the metal
stylus grasped between them so that the pale rod
flexed and gave. "I'll know, Doctor.
Believe me, I'll know."

Chapter Twelve

Spock, don't do this to me! Even in the
bowels of the Engineering hull James Kirk
felt the sweep start, a nerve-jarring vibration in
the molecules of air and metal that made up the
bones of his body now, and knew that it would be his
death. God damn you, Spock!
He wanted to rage, wanted to scream, as he
had wanted to scream at him all through last night,
while he'd patiently, fumblingly, moved and
hidden every tool and piece of equipment he could
manage to lift. He was close, he sensed,
to dissolution already, his consciousness straining under the
sheer weight of hours stacked onto hours, of
consciously re-creating the parameters of the body
he remembered hands, feet, ears, toenails,
the hair on his head ... the sheer grinding eternity
of keeping his mind alive. Now he felt in his
shadow bones the chill shudder of the standing wave as the
generators kicked in on the bridge and that first
deck of the Science labs immediately below it, and knew
there was no escape.
He had early found he could pass through walls
only by his consciousness of their composition and of
precisely what lay upon their other side--he
could, he supposed, have passed through the outer skin
of the ship itself. But beyond that skin lay the disorienting
blackness of space, and that would destroy him as
surely as the polarizing disorientation of the standing
wave would.
Can't you see what's happening? he
shrieked soundlessly, hopelessly, toward the groups
of men--his own men, his own crew, his own friends--
who would be milling around on the bridge and the
Science deck below. Haven't you caught on
yet?
And Laundryman Brunowski, checking the
remix settings of one of the particle shakers that
refabricated clean new uniforms out of the
recycled molecules of the old ones, swung
around sharply at the sudden drop in temperature
and shivered, hearing, from among the vast banks of
recyclers in the giant food-fab
chamber beyond, the pounding begin, desperate,
furious, and helpless.
Kirk fled upward, through the faint, shining pain
of the superconductor cables and the wires within the
walls, to sickbay on Deck 7. Being that
close to the decks where the field had been set
up terrified him--even with four decks between, he
could sense it, like a piercing scream that shatters
concentration and thought.
Frenzied, he called out to Helen, lying in her
fitful sleep. Helen, please ... Helen,
listen to me, can't you hear? She heard him, saw
him in her dreams, but he felt her mind flinch
away in repugnance and terror as his face loomed
mistily into her consciousness, felt her shoving him
from her thoughts.
No, he felt the slurred and sleepy
whisper of her dreams. Not him. Not him ...
And he felt, too, all the bitter and soul-
deep hurt of that monstrous betrayal, and with it,
her dark fear of madness, the horror she felt
at the thought of the horror she tried not to know was
true. Somewhere close by him Kirk heard the
pounding start, not in one place now but in half a
dozen, angry and uncontrollable; heard, too,
something go crashing to the floor in a nearby office
and knew that what psychokinetic powers he
possessed were slipping from his conscious command.
Nurse Chapel started up from her chair in
terror, staring wildly around the room as she
flattened back against the wall. She would listen--
he knew she would listen--but he knew of no way
to break the silence between them, no way to bridge the
gap between the material and the nonmaterial, between thought
and operationality.
And he felt him coming. That eerie alter ego,
that thing that had taken his body, felt him walking the
decks down below the shrieking hypersonic whistle
of the induction field. He had no fear. He
need not dread the shattering vibration of the invisible
air. The Midgwin patriarch had a house for his
spirit, a system of nerves and cells in which
to settle the electrical impulses of his being,
a structure around which to twine the incorporeal
vines of his personality--a material body
to act as armature to the transient glitter of his
soul.
And he was hunting him, tracking him, listening
for the hammering of his despair, feeling for the
telltale cold, the raging dread and
terror ... driving him into a corner until he
could destroy him, as a shadow is destroyed when the
lights switch on.
Despairing, Kirk fled.

Arms folded, Spock observed critically as
Miller, Organa, and Fphargn carried the
disassembled components of the proton generator to the
far end of the physics lab, located the power
source nearest the symmetry line of the ship, and
began to set up. Miller worked quickly and neatly,
his blocky, good-natured face set in lines of
concentration, double-checking every connector, reading every
gauge while the two security officers stood
at either side, watching and listening in the silence of the
enormous, dome-ceilinged room.
Spock cast a cursory glance around--all
long-term experiments had been shielded, but he
privately suspected that half of them would be
severely disrupted by the presence of the proton-
induction wave, and in any case all results
would probably be called into question. He had spoken
to the heads of all the labs in the Science section,
and while no one had questioned the necessity of the
sweep, he had seen a lot of gritted teeth.
What made it worse was that he did not agree
with the sweep in the first place.
But it was one thing to question the actions of a commander whose
obsession was putting the safety of ship, crew,
and civilians in danger--as he had in the
incident of the vampire creature of the Tycho
System--and quite another to argue for the continued
existence of a demonstrably deadly, unknown
intruder. It was his instinct against the captain's,
nothing more, and his instinct had been proven wrong
before.
And yet ...
He frowned, remembering unhealthy glitter in
the captain's eyes, remembering a hundred
indications of severe mental strain, of an almost
unbearable secret. The captain, he knew, had
gone on ahead of the sweep prowling the decks below,
looking for ... what?
Again, Spock did not know.
But Midgwis had been its starting point. Of
that he was now certain.
"Setup complete, Mr. Spock," Miller
reported, and Spock, checking the assembly,
nodded. The switches were thrown.
Spock's hyperacute hearing picked
up the faint, whining hum, but the others seemed
to notice nothing. Checking his chronometer and
noting disapprovingly that they were already 2.3 minutes
behind schedule, Spock crossed the enormous lab
to the door, stepping out into the corridors that led
around the turbolift banks to the small lounge in
the center of the deck. Pausing in the corridor,
he removed from the satchel that hung at his side
a bulb insufflator--a slender nozzle
attached to a round metal ampoule of number 7
grade neutral test powder. Holding the
insufflator out before him, he tapped the button
on its side to release a small, measured
puff of powder into the air.
As it had in his laboratory tests, the powder
--which would hang visibly in uncirculating air
for thirty minutes or more--separated into unsteady
bands, marking the frequency levels of the wave.
Spock nodded to himself, and as the incorporeal bands
broke, wavered, and began their slow drift toward
the vents, proceeded into the lounge, where, just beyond the
emergency gangway up to the smaller deck above,
Mr. Scott and his team had assembled the other
generator in front of the doors of the photon
torpedo banks.
That assembly also looked in order. "Any
significant problems, Mr. Scott?" he
inquired, and the chief engineer flashed him a grin.
"Simple as one, two, three."
Spock nodded. "Indeed it is, provided one
is not counting in binary. There are matters to which I
must attend for the next hour or two. I shall leave
you in charge until I return."
He returned, out of habit, to the ion-study
lab where he had been working last night, which he
knew would be vacant still; from the lab next door,
though it was well after the end of the main watch, he
could hear Lieutenant Bergdahl's voice
"Well, of course the experiments will all have to be
done again, Ensign Adams. No data can be
trusted after this kind of disruption ..."
"I'd have thought that the solid-state
crystallography wouldn't be affected by that kind of
wave action." A woman's voice, abashed.
"Well, naturally it probably is not, but
I want no chances taken." A heavy sigh.
"Why they have to disrupt things in this fashion--"
"It tried to kill someone," Adams pointed out
patiently.
"She was probably just careless--and do
not put that beaker on that counter. How many times do
I need to tell you that no organic experiments
are to be brought anywhere in the vicinity of
inorganic experiments?"
Spock sighed, remembering how whenever he
entered Bergdahl's laboratory, the man
unobtrusively followed him around, wiping
whatever he'd laid his hand upon, even though sterile
conditions were seldom required of geological
procedures. He wondered how a reasonably
young human male--Bergdahl was no older than
Captain Kirk, and of the same sturdy, fair-
haired stock--could so absolutely resemble the
fussy, two-century-old Vulcan house
steward whose constant, martyred criticism had
made his own childhood a burden.
He flicked on the terminal, which, being one of the
lab terminals, was capable of far greater access
than, for instance, a library terminal or a
simple reader. Since the information he wished
to consult was classified, the distinction was a mere
bagatelle, but a lab keyboard would be capable
of greater exactness, and exactness was as necessary in
breaking security codes as it was in programming
a decent cup of coffee.
For a long moment he sat there, debating the
ethics of the situation. It was a different matter from
reading the Captain's Log, a document to which, as
first officer, he himself would have access should
circumstances place him temporarily in command.
This was the captain's private realm, and
Spock's own deep sense of privacy felt
violated at the thought of entering it.
But matters had gone too far; his uneasiness
over the captain's behavior was passing over
into alarm. After a pause for thought, Spock
neatly rerouted the information system around its
guards, convinced the central security program
that he had given it a password of whose identity he
possessed no clue, reprogrammed a voice-
code identifier, and finally keyed through
into Captain Kirk's private, personal
log.
There had been no entry made since Stardate
5947.3, the day of the expedition to Midgwis.
Unlike the official Captain's Log,
Kirk did not make entries to his personal
log every day. Such entries as there were concerned
matters beyond the purlieus of official
Starfleet notice, but of possible
importance to the captain of a ship repeated
complaints about certain commodities in the galley
selections; the disappearance of chemical samples
from the Botany lab; the fifth request-for-
transfer in eighteen months by someone working under
Lieutenant Bergdahl; a quarrel that had
broken out in the rec room between Ensign
Phillips from Inorganic Fabrication and
Yeoman Mendez from the galley, which had
apparently been settled amicably but which,
considering the volatile personalities involved,
might flare up later. Kirk, Spock was
interested to note, kept a far closer ear to rec-
room gossip than he let on, which surprised
Spock a little.
In several places the captain spoke of
Helen Gordon

In fairness I cannot ask her to consider staying
onboard the Enterprise. She has her own
career to forward, her own advancement to consider. And
though long ago I consciously ruled out the
possibility of such involvement, I keep coming
back to the feeling that there is something important
here that I would be a fool to let go of ...

And, in another place

When I was twenty, I was happy. With Ruth I
had a sense of peace, a sense of belonging, that I
have not known since. I have known many other things in the
intervening years, happiness among them, but never that
quiet joy, that rest, that sureness. When I
left the Academy, she told me she would wait
for me ... maybe in my heart, even then, I
knew that she wouldn't, not past a certain point.
But I've always wondered what would have happened,
had I gone back.

Past Kirk's mellow tenor in the earphone,
Spock's quick hearing picked up Bergdahl's
thin, complaining voice in the Geo lab next
door "... ion-study lab, which he is
certainly entitled to do. I'm sure he realized
just how important Dr. Maynooth's
experiments are, and would be very careful not to disrupt
them any further ... Ensign Adams, you really
must fully index those notes! I'm sure that with
as little as you do around here, you can certainly find time
to input them properly so that they can be
retrieved at a moment's notice ...
Certainly, sir. If you care to wait for him
I'm sure he'll be out soon, he's been in
there for twenty minutes already ..."
Spock flipped to another entry, returned his
concentration to Kirk's voice, listening to the even,
relaxed tone of the voice itself

I have a sense of working one of Lieutenant
Uhura's jigsaw puzzles, trying piece after
piece, scenario after scenario, in my mind, knowing
that somewhere, somehow, there has to be one that fits ...

And after the visit to Midgwis, nothing.
He removed the receptor from his ear and sat
for a time, looking into the depthless darkness beyond the neat
amber letters of the screen.
The personal log revealed a good deal more about
the captain than he had thought to find, and it
articulated, in a curious fashion, the
qualities that Spock knew made the captain
an excellent leader, qualities he himself did
not possess, and in some cases did not completely
understand. Humans were, of course, irrational, the
captain as bad as the rest--Spock was aware that
in the earlier part of the mission his own logical
reactions had made him less than popular with the
crew. But in taking account of gossip that a
Vulcan would have automatically considered none of
his business and beneath his dignity, the captain was
clearly able to tap this irrationality to his own
advantage, to understand that strange, nebulous
quality called "morale" or, simply,
"feel" ... something it would never have occurred
to Spock to do. And part of that, Spock guessed,
had to do with the relaxed quality of his voice, the
easiness and openness with which he could pick up the
slightest changes of circumstance.
That quality of voice, he realized, had been
entirely missing from the later official log
entries he had heard.
That easiness of voice was characteristic even of those
entries in which he questioned his own goals and feelings,
as if they too were matters to be looked at, if
not with proper Vulcan dispassion, at least without
either frenzy or rigidness.
Spock found it very curious t hat the captain would
not have voiced his suspicions of the intruder--
suspicions that were clearly driving him to the brink
of physical breakdown--at any point
in his personal log. Or had he feared that the
intruder would break into it, and find them there?
A possibility, thought Spock, as he
carefully worked his way back out of the program,
remaking the security links around the captain's
personal files and reassuring the computer that it
must not, in fact, ever let anyone through without the
proper code words ... and that in fact it had not
done so now.
Yet it argued for an intruder far more
sophisticated than the precomputerized,
preindustrial, preagricultural Midgwins,
as well as for Kirk's inexplicable awareness that
the intruder was, in fact, so sophisticated.
And it did not explain why the captain had not
felt called upon to comment in any fashion upon
Dr. Gordon's decision to remain with the
Enterprise, nor upon their subsequent
quarrel, if quarrel there had been. Nor, for that
matter, upon her near death at the intruder's ...
hands? The phrase snagged his consciousness.
Hands, fingers ... fingerprints.
There were matters here that did not compute.
Bergdahl was fussily checking a series of
gauges set up along the back of a workbench in the
Geo lab when Spock passed its door, while
a thin, tiny woman with black Oriental eyes
stood, a little awkwardly, to one side. "I
don't care what they say, any kind of a field
being generated automatically nullifies all
experimental results. A duplicate set of
all experiments will have to be set up ..."
"Do we take down the tests in progress,
then?" She had the air of one who has long ago
learned to double-check everything out of sheer self-
defense. Spock remembered that she had put in
for a transfer to Input not long ago, at a
half-step reduction in rank.
"Certainly not! One can learn from everything,
including possible variations of results ... or
their absence. Please compile a list of all
materials to be duplicated once we reach
Starbase Nine--if we ever do reach Starbase
Nine, with all this turning around and turning back
... Oh, Mr. Spock!" He came hurrying
out of the lab to catch up with Spock in the
corridor. "Captain Kirk was here looking for
you. He did not say where he was going, but said it was
of no importance, and that he would find you later."
Natural enough, Spock supposed,
crossing thoughtfully to the turbolift and checking the
chronometer on the wall beside it. The captain would
be checking the decks below for any sign of the
intruder's continued presence ... whatever those
signs might be. He would not be difficult
to locate. On the other hand, if the matter were of
any importance at all, Kirk would have located
him by comm link. And Mr. Spock did not
particularly wish to encounter the captain just now.
The sweep team that had been stationed between the two
emergency gangways had already descended through to the
junior officers' quarters on Deck 4. If
his estimate of time was correct, they would have the
modulators in place and the generator going by this
time. After a moments further thought, Spock
turned back to the ion-study lab, opened a
locker there and took out a fresh bulb of number
7 neutral powder, and several plates for
wave-activated and electric-field
spectrography. These he snapped into a
shielded case, tucked it into his satchel with the
insufflator, and, emerging once more from the lab,
took the turbolift down to Deck 8.
It was now close to 2130 hours, a time when the
recreation areas of Deck 8 were normally at their
heaviest use. Now the vast rec room's tables
and couches were deserted, the room motionless save
for the random, soothing swirls of various pieces of
mobile art; the curved cavern of the gymnasium
echoed emptily, bereft of its usual
basketball game. In what was officially termed
the "Entertainment Center" and unofficially known as
"Central Park"--though the thirty-five-meter
curve of grass and ground cover was, in fact,
not central to Deck 8 or anything else--the
fountain splashed dimly in the silence. Spock
guessed that the converted cargo hold on Deck 7
that served as a cinema was vacant as well, a
symptom of the uneasiness that pervaded the ship, the
atmosphere of waiting to see how the intruder would
react.
Carrying his satchel, Spock walked
quietly past the shut doors of the main computer
chamber. The enormous room, with its banks of
information and terminals, would be not only manned, but
heavily guarded, and judging by the slender information
he possessed on the habits of the intruder, it was
unlikely that it would manifest itself in the presence
of so many onlookers. According to some of the information on
paranormal manifestations it might not
even be possible for it to do so.
But most of the manifestations reported had been
in or near the computer chamber, and there was a
sixty-eight percent probability that the intruder
was near that vicinity, at least for the next thirty
minutes or so.
Keying his way through a minimum-security
door, Spock entered the shadowy va/s of the
automated food-prep facility, where bank after
bank of molecular reconverters, like dim,
square sarcophagi in some unimaginable
necropolis, served the main banks of food
slots in the lounge above.
All was quiet here, the murmuring hum of the
raw-organics conveyor which, like a long, banded
metal serpent overhead, fed the reconverters,
sounding loud in the hush. Through the far wall
Spock's sensitive hearing could pick up the
modulated rattle of the laundry next door,
where a long row of particle shakers formulated new
uniforms to the indent specs punched in by those who'd
turned in their dirty ones, and where three more
conventional cleaning units meticulously
extracted unwanted molecules of dirt and
foodstuffs from the items of personal attire that
crew members did not wish to have recycled, for
reasons of sentiment which Spock presumed would be
comprehensible to the captain.
He made his way over to a corner of the room,
where the control terminal's green and amber lights
gleamed like stars in the dimness next to a long
worktable littered with hardcopy and velfoam
plates. Spock settled himself in one of the
chairs before it, uneasily aware that his actions were
in direct violation of the captain's orders and, as
such, qualified as mutiny. And it occurred to him
that in his present, apparently irrational state, the
captain might very well have him charged with it, if
he found him here.
Spock's whole soul might revolt at the
thought of destroying an unknown alien life-form that
had not yet been proven hostile--the attempt
on Dr. Gordon's life being, for a number of
reasons, suspect. But he had done such things
under orders before.
But something about the whole situation bothered him, as
even so prolonged and bizarre an intruder alert
did not. It was clear to him that the captain was somehow
linked with the intruder, if intruder it was. And at
the risk of his career in the fleet--and quite
possibly the risk of his own life--Spock had
to find out what the nature of that link was.
He cleared a place for himself, frowning with
distaste over the sloppiness of the chief cook and his
assistants as he set aside half-empty
cups of stone-cold coffee and data wafers whose
covers--if they were in covers--were daubed with
greasy fingerprints. It was already sufficiently
dim in the room to comply with conditions of both the
reported Enterprise manifestations and with
similar phenomena mentioned in the records. He
unshipped the protective case from his satchel,
removed a photographic plate and set it on
the table before him. Placing his hands outspread on
either side, he shut his eyes, shielded his mind with
every mental discipline he could muster, and waited,
listening, his senses extended to catch the slightest
shift of atmosphere in the room.
In the silence, he could hear quite clearly the
deep heartbeat of the engines, the thrumming of the
food conveyor that led down to the main recycling
plants in the Engineering hull, the faint tap of
two pairs of booted feet passing through the
corridor ...
"... perfect time to take it to the storage
compartment! The entire deck is deserted ..."
"Yeah, but if we meet any of those sweep
teams how're we going to explain full-size
sets from the Murlgau passion play?"
"We're not gonna meet a sweep team, and
besides, I've got a miniaturized remote
motion sensor hooked up at the lift."
"A motion sensor?"
"Miller made some up for me. For God's
sake, if you work for Birddog you've got to have
some way of knowing when he's coming so you can look
busy enough for him ..."
The voices died away into the silent distances
of the corridor.
Minutes passed.
Then somewhere quite close he heard a dim,
hesitant tapping, as if someone were knocking
faintly on one of the thick squares of the
reconverters with a hard piece of metal, a ring
or a coin or an old-fashioned metal key.
The room seemed cold to him, colder than
usual, though not the bitter, malevolent chill of
before. Attenuated, he thought, as if the center of the
chill were some distance away. Eyes still closed, he
sat listening, not daring to speak, trying
to analyze why he felt that the room was occupied
by someone other than himself, though he had heard no
footfall, no pressurized door hiss, no
breath. Keeping the inner fortress walls of his
mind still guarded, he opened out the channels of
telepathic communication that the Vulcan mental
techniques so stringently taught. He tried
to transmit openness, willingness, and hoped
obliquely that the intruder--if the intruder was in
fact near--was not one of those beings capable of coming
through such guarded channels into the mind of the listener
after all.
But ther e was nothing, only that vague sense that he
was not alone.
Then the chirp of the comm link broke into his
thoughts, and, immediately after, Captain Kirk's
voice. "Mr. Spock ..."
Spock opened his eyes. The room before him was
empty. The photographic plate on the table
before him was blank.
He flipped open his communicator. "Yes,
Captain?"
Kirk's voice was harsh but low, tense,
breathless. "It's here, Spock. The hangar.
It's trying to communicate ... get here, fast."
"I'm on my way, Captain." He
slipped the plate back into the case as he
strode from the room, directly across the
corridor into the turbolift. "Hangar deck."
The doors of the hangar deck slipped
soundlessly open before him, revealing a huge
expanse of empty darkness. Only the dimmest
of emergency lights glowed high overhead; under the
overhanging shadow of the observation gallery, all was
pitch-black. The Copernicus was a solid
rectangle of darkness directly before the vast
clamshell doors which were all that separated the
Enterprise's fragile atmosphere from the
black vacuum of space.
Spock took a few steps into the room,
listening, wondering if the captain had
deliberately reduced the light levels in
anticipation of his own encounter with the intruder. It was
logical, if in fact he was as familiar with its
nature as he appeared in fact to be ...
Then from the shadows of the shuttlecraft he thought
he heard Jim Kirk's voice call out
"Spock!" in a tone of unmistakable fear.
He slipped free of the satchel over his
shoulder and crossed the huge expanse of
floor at a run.
"Captain ..."
There was no one near the shuttlecraft, which was
docked and dogged firmly down, its doors sealed
shut. Spock slipped a handlight from his belt and
flashed it around him, but there was no sign of Kirk
--no sign of anyone. He called out again,
"Captain!" and heard the flat slap of echoes
ring back at him. Overhead, the bare rafters
made a harsh latticework of shadows, and his light
gleamed back off the tough plex windows of the dark
gallery, the round glint of the vent shields below
them.
A noise in the blackness under the gallery
made him turn--for a moment he saw a dark
shape outlined against the whiteness of the corridor
lights as the door opened, then shut again.
It did not open again when Spock approached.
Swiftly he pulled aside the cover panel
for the manual release, and discovered that the handle had
been removed.
As he started toward one of the other doors--though
he knew within a few percentage points of
certainty that it had been likewise sabotaged--
the soft whooshing of the vents began, a trickle of
sound that quickly swelled to a whispering, deadly
gale.
Someone outside had hit the controls to cycle
air out of the hangar, preparatory to opening the
clamshell doors and letting whatever was inside be
pulled out into the freezing black eternity of
space.

Chapter Thirteen

"Furniture started flying around the room
yet?"
Christine Chapel looked up, startled, from the
last of her data corrections to see
Lieutenant Uhura leaning in the doorway of the
convalescent ward. She laughed ruefully and
pushed the small roller table aside. "Believe
me, I've been listening for it."
Uhura nodded back down the corridor toward
the door of the O.r. and the various labs.
"Everything seems intact so far. They're just
setting up on the deck above this one--I think
everyone's a little nervous." She still wore her
duty uniform--she must have put in a considerable
amount of extra duty, Christine
reflected, trying in every way she could think of
to raise the silenced transmitter on
Midgwis.
"Not nearly as nervous as some of the lab chiefs.
Emiko Adams told me Bergdahl's putting
in for duplicate equipment ..."
"Oh, plague, plague!" Uhura widened
her great brown eyes in mock horror and made
ritual signs of aversion. She noticed that
Nurse Chapel, with her odd, old-fashioned
formality, was the only member of the junior crew
to refer to the unpopular Anthro/geo chief
by his right name when not on duty.
From her bed Helen asked, "Do you think it will
work?" Her coloring was a little better, but her
voice still sounded like it had been gone over with scour
solution.
"Mr. Spock seemed pretty sure of it
when I talked to him last night." Uhura
shrugged. "But you can't really know, can you? You just
take aim and hope."
"Besides," Chapel pointed out, rising from her
chair to help Helen sit up and pull a
garnet-red robe over the blue and black
medical smock, "you're the expert on the life-
forms of Midgwis."
Helen chuckled wryly. "So expert they try
to gas me in my room. Which is ironic, because
there's no mention of any intelligent creatures
on Midgwis that can do the things this one does. Or
at least," she added, thanking Chapel with a haggard
grin, "maybe there is and it just hasn't had things
like labs full of beakers, or walls to pound on,
or cylinders of toxic gas to demonstrate its
capabilities on before this." The dark level of
her brow twitched down. "Which is one of the
weirdest things about the whole business ..."
Down the hall, in one of the labs, the sudden
crash of equipment falling made all three
women swing around with a gasp. Helen, pallid
already, went white--Chapel thought she was going
to faint, and sprang back to her side, while
somewhere close by the lunatic, frenzied crashing
continued, as if a maniac were tearing McCoy's
personal lab to pieces. After a frozen instant
Uhura plunged for the door; Christine gasped
"No!" and the Communications officer snapped
back, "Stay with Helen!" The room had gone
deathly cold.
"Come on!" Helen rolled over and
scrambled out of bed, staggering and nearly falling, so
that Chapel had to catch her. The red flash of
Uhura's uniform had already vanished around the lab
door. "Dammit," Helen gasped, holding
herself upright against Chapel's strong shoulder,
"don't let her go alone!"
Chapel gripped the other woman tight around the
waist; the two of them nearly ran into Uhura in
the corridor.
"Come in here," the Communications officer said
softly. She looked shaken as she led the way
back to the Medical officer's private lab,
and for a moment Chapel's mind groped in panic for the
experiments she and McCoy had taken such care
to seal and batten and shield.
"Look at this," Uhura said.
In the doorway of the small lab they stopped.
Helen, holding unsteadily onto Chapel's
shoulder, asked in her raw voice, "Where did the
water come from?"
"It blew out a vent filter." Uhura nodded
upward to the vent, long since locked and fitted with
baffles and guards. All its complicated covering
had been ripped away, and the accumulated water
vapor that always collected under the dehumidifier
screens was spattered over the surrounding walls.
The vent cover itself, filmed with a delicate mist
of infinitely fine water droplets, lay
flung in a corner against the legs of the lab table.
Helen took a second look at the half-
meter square of reinforced duraplast and whispered,
"What the Sam Hill ...?"
Written in the vapor film, huge and ragged,
as if scrawled by a demented child, were the letters,
SPOK--HNGR DEK--HURRY--DEAD.
The three women were in the streaking turbolift
before Chapel said, "We--we should tell the
captain."
"No!" Helen's voice was a harsh gasp.
"It--it might be a trap ..." Chapel's
face was as white as Helen's had been earlier.
"Or it might have wanted to lure us away and
leave Helen alone ..." She had been first one
out of sickbay, literally dragging the others down the
corridor in her fright.
Floors flashed past them, blurred bars of
greenish-white in the dark of the lift shaft.
Uhura, her hand on the control, frowned,
struggling within herself with some thought. Then she said, "I
don't know. The thing is ... the night
Helen was poisoned I ... I was wakened
by something falling, something making a noise--if I
hadn't wakened, I wouldn't have seen her comm
light, and nobody would have gotten to her in time.
Chris, what woke me up was that bronze
calot of mine falling on the floor from the
middle of my dresser. The things around it weren't
tipped over or brushed aside or anything; it was
like the thing had been picked up and dropped."
Slowly, fumblingly, knowing what she was getting
at but unable to fit it with known facts, Chapel
said, "But it ... it tried to kill Helen ..."
"Something tried to kill Helen," Uhura
pointed out. "Something, as Mr. Spock pointed
out, that wiped its fingerprints--or wiped something--
off that cylinder."
"Then there might be--be two intruders?"
Chapel turned her head, hearing the thin sound that
came from Helen's throat; saw her friend pale
again, her face twisted with inner pain. "Are you
all right?" And Helen nodded, her black hair
hanging down to hide her face.
The red warning lights of the opening cycle were
flashing above the door of the hangar deck, visible
as the three women burst from the lift doors.
"Go!" Helen gasped, balking and struggling out of
their grip; they left her slumped against the wall
and ran for the doorway as the lights went solid
red.
Chapel whispered, "Dear God ..." and
heard Uhura say something considerably less
refined as she slammed over the Abort toggle;
for a horrified instant she stared up at the bar of
warning lights, her mind blanking on how long the
cycle lasted, on whether the lights going from
flashing to red meant that the outer clamshell doors
had already opened or were going to open in ... how many
seconds? "God, God ..." She seemed
to be hypnotized by a single, small yellow
light blinking in the panel next to the door.
Blinking amber meant a malfunction somewhere ...
Uhura was already hitting Re-Ox buttons,
then calling up the malfunction cues to the gauge
screen.
P ressure evacuation malfunction--the bay
had never completely lost pressure. The
oxygen-drain mechanisms had jammed.
And a slight mechanical glitch had prevented
the outer doors from cycling open.
In addition to which, Chapel read over
Uhura's shoulder on the amber screen of the
gauge readout, the internal comm link, abort
panel, and manual override systems
operative from within the hangar had all been
tampered with.
They had to use the manual release in the
corridor wall to get the bay open.
Mr. Spock was lying across the threshold as the
doors slid open. With the reoxygenation of the hangar
deck, he was already starting to come to. Chapel
dropped to her knees beside him, feeling for pulse
and cursing herself for not bringing a tricorder. His
skin felt cooler to the touch than she had ever known
it, almost human-cool ...
"It knew English," Helen said softly.
Chapel looked up. Helen, holding herself
upright against the corridor wall, had staggered after
them to the open doorway of the shuttlecraft
hangar. She stood leaning there in her crimson
robe and blue pajamas, her black hair
hanging down in an unruly cloud over her
shoulders, her eyebrows standing out like a scar above
her deep-sunk, tired eyes.
"The intruder," she explained, slipping down
to sit beside Uhura's booted feet. "It knew
English. It wrote, "Spock, Hangar
deck, Hurry ... Dead." Meaning, I
suppose, if we didn't get here, he would be
dead ..."
The three women looked at one another,
Uhura hunkering down beside the other two. "We have
to tell the captain," she said. "Call off the
sweep. Whatever is going on around here, it
isn't the intruder that's been attempting the
killings."
"I doubt that he would comply."
They all looked down. Mr. Spock rolled
up onto one elbow, wiped away the drying
trickle of green blood from his nose, and felt
at his head--Chapel knew he must have had a
terrific headache, if nothing worse. The
pressure drop had bruised the capillaries
around his eyes, smudging them with dark green shadow
as if he'd been struck. She tried to help him
sit up, but he politely but firmly drew
away and sat himself up, his back propped against the
doorjamb of the bay, the bay itself a chasm of
shadow behind him.
"The captain is obsessed," the Vulcan
went on clinically. "Though personally
I am still inclined toward the theory of a Klingon-paid
conspirator among the crew, the captain insists
upon blaming--and destroying--the intruder, and is
behaving with a degree of irrationality most
uncharacteristic. In fact I would almost say ..."
He paused. His dark brows slanted more
sharply down over the high bridge of his nose, and
from the sunken and discolored sockets, his troubled,
coffee-colored gaze met Helen's and held
it.
Softly, almost inaudibly, Helen said,
"It's because it's not really Jim ... isn't it?"
There was silence. Chapel looked, confused, from
Spock's face to Uhura's to Helen's, and
saw that it was an idea new to none of them--something
toyed with, discarded for the best of rational reasons,
yet never entirely dismissable from the dark at the
back of the mind. Far above them, though it was
impossible that she should either hear it or feel it,
Chapel was aware, as if by emanations through the
walls, of the steady downward working of the proton-
induction sweep, the shattering wave that was
designed to destroy whatever it was that had
apparently saved Helen's life by waking
Uhura, and which had certainly risked itself to save
Spock's.
The sweep had been only a deck or two
above them when the warning in the lab had taken place
--who knew how far through the floor the disruption
radiated?
At length Mr. Spock said, "It is a
difficult contention to prove."
Helen shook her head. "I knew it," she
said softly. "I knew it the first night after we
left Midgwis. It wasn't him."
Uhura swore, softly, horror and compassion
in her eyes.
"It would certainly explain his turning the ship
around, and returning to Midgwis," Spock went
on, getting slowly to his feet. Chapel rose
also, and went to pick up the equipment that lay on
the floor just within the doors of the bay, a carrier
satchel stuffed with an insufflator and a
protective case of the sort that
electrospectrographic plates were carried
in. "Though it leaves unanswered the question of why a
substitution--if substitution it is--was made
in the first place. Thank you, Nurse Chapel."
He slung the case straps over one shoulder,
and offered his arm to help Helen to her
feet. Though Chapel knew that Spock
preferred not to be touched, he put an arm around
Helen's waist and a shoulder under hers. Leading the
way across the hall, his strength made no more of her
solid weight than it would have of a child's.
Chapel, hurrying to keep up, asked, "Then
the intruder ... the ghost ... the poltergeist
..."
Spock's voice was matter-of-fact. "Is
in all probability Captain Kirk."

They opened a channel into the main computer from a
reader port in the tractor-beam machinery room
on Deck 23, a deck otherwise given over
to the dim-lit silence of cargo holds. The
terminal had probably never been used for anything
except replays of fastball games and the
perusal of sports magazines in the ship's
extensive library, but Spock deftly
disencoded all security and access-limitation
programs in it, and proceeded--with startling
skill, considering an extremely limited
keyboard--to open routes straight to the
mainframe, while Uhura dug in the wall
locker for a small kit of tools.
"What's that for?" asked Chapel, who had
posted herself unobtrusively in the doorway,
watching the empty hall. No one came here
except, now and then, a duty officer in charge of
repairing the tractor beam, and occasional
maintenance personnel. With the lights turned up
full power, the gray-walled room with its
bulbous wave generators looked sterile and
sordid; greasy napkins lay dispiritedly in one
corner, with several blue-gray velfoam cups
whose rims had been methodically picked to pieces
by someone's nervous fingernails. The place had a
smell of staleness and disuse. All around this deck
the unpressurized hull sections contained raw
materials for recycling, either organic or
inorganic, and the smells of them were a faint,
unpleasant backtaste in the air. Dark and
silent, the cargo holds kept their prosaic
secrets boxes of soil samples,
examples of alien machinery to be taken back for
analysis at Federation starbases and
universities and institutes, alien flora and
fauna cryofrozen wholesale. The deck below
contained nothing but cargo holds and storage. This was
the last corner of the ship where a terminal
of any kind could be plugged in virtually secure
against intrusion, at least until such time as the
sweep was almost at its end.
"We'll need an outpost guard," Uhura
said, removing the cover of her personal
communicator and, after a moment's thought, reaching
into its infinitesimal guts with a needle-fine
magnetic switcher. "I'm cutting out the ship's
pickup channels--I'll do the same for yours and
Mr. Spock's. That way nobody will be able
to hear us."
"I suggest, Nurse Chapel, that you return
to sickbay and bring Dr. McCoy here."
Spock, laboriously coaxing the limited-
capacity screen to cut in a second screenful
of notes to remind him of half a dozen
artificial-intelligence programs not committed
to his memory, spoke without looking up. "We
will need as much help as we can get in keeping
track not only of the sweep, but also of the
captain's movements. And I would be very much
surprised if the good doctor does not have
suspicions of his own."
He cut in a chronometer reading and tightened
his lips--the well-bred Vulcan equivalent of
sizzling oaths and hurling the keyboard against the
wall--when the overtaxed screen cleared itself of
everything save a small, blinking 110.
"He's known something was going on," Chapel said
slowly, keeping her voice soft--with the door
held open to facilitate reconnaissance,
voices would carry in these echoing halls.
"By this time the sweep should be finishing the primary
hull and beginning to clear the dorsal sections,"
Spock went on, touching his way neatly through the
computer language that was so much swifter than the
voice activation most people used, and far more
precise. Uhura, her lips taut, had gone
back to her tinkering with the communicators.
"It will take me approximately thirty-
two minutes to access and disconnect the slave
relays that control the electronic shielding of the
central computer; nearly three hours to tailor
and implement an artificial-intelligence
program theoretically capable of sustaining an
entire pattern of human thought. During that time it
is imperative that we be neither disturbed nor
suspected. And," he added, half turning
to look up at the three women behind him, "we will
need to find the captain, wherever his--
his consciousness, his awareness, the electron
shadow of his entity, is centering itself. Find him, and
bring him back here--if it is, in fact, the
captain, and not an intruder after all."
Chapel shivered as the full import of the
dangerous game they played came to her. Was it
the captain who had tried to kill Spock--
to kill Helen? Or was it an alien who had so
obsessed him that he had turned himself into a
stranger? She had known Jim Kirk for years--
he'd gotten her transferred to the Enterprise
when she'd decided to enter the space service
to look for her fianc`e, Roger. She trusted
him implicitly ... Only, which of them was really
Kirk?
Uneasily, she asked, "How ... What
happened to you?"
"The captain told me that he had cornered the
intruder in the shuttle bay," Spock replied,
as calmly as if he had not come within a few
microns of switch-gap of being dragged out into the
freezing vac uum of space. "I thought that I
heard him call out to me from the back of the bay; when
I entered, the door slammed behind me. Door
controls and communication had been cut--manually,
the wires disconnected and the cover plate
replaced ..."
"But the outer doors didn't open." Uhura
glanced up from her work, the sweat of concentration shining
on her face in the bleak glare of the lumenpanel
overhead. Though the Communications officer was
theoretically able to break down and repair any
piece of comm equipment in stock, few of them were
actually called upon to do so once they'd passed
their entry tests. "I didn't check on why
..."
"Another one of those inexplicable malfunctions
that seem to be part of the poltergeist effect,"
Spock replied evenly, turning back to his
screen. "Certainly at odds with the decidedly
manual efforts of the would-be assassin."
"What was the equipment for?" Helen asked,
nodding toward the insufflator and the case, which lay
on the floor at her side.
"I had gone down to the computer decks
to attempt contact with the intruder," Spock said,
"having for reasons of my own come to the conclusion that
the captain had been behaving in a fashion
aberrant enough to warrant investigation."
"Did you make contact?"
He did not reply for a moment, only continued
to check programs, moving files and
directories to other sections of the computer and
occasionally tapping in instructions of his own. At
length he said, "I don't know. I brought the
electrospectroplates along in the hopes that
the intruder--who had seemed all along to be
attempting to write something in the spilled
liquids in the sickbay labs--would be able
to write on the plate ..."
"He did write," Uhura said, looking up
again. "He wrote in the water vapor of the vent
filter. That's how we found you. And, as Helen
pointed out, he wrote in English."
"Fascinating," Spock murmured.
"Unfortunately, the plate was blank when
I--" He broke off, looking around at the
abrupt clatter as Helen dropped the case on
the floor.
"I knew it," she whispered, and turned her
face away, tears forcing themselves through the thick
black fringes of her shut eyelashes. "I
knew it, I knew it ..."
Uhura, looking down over her shoulder,
gasped.
While Spock had been speaking, Helen had
opened the case and taken out the single used plate.
In the center of it, shadowy black on the gray,
was the ghostly image of a man's face.
The face was Captain Kirk's.

Chapter Fourteen

They had swept the dorsal--running one
generator per deck, it had not taken long--and the
long, narrow hold full of air-circulation
machinery, visicoms, and pumps that ran along the
top of the Engineering hull. They were assembling the
generators on Deck 16 for the final phases
of the sweep.
In the darkness, Jim Kirk felt the thin
shivering vibration that shredded at his nerves and
consciousness, and knew he should move again, move
downward ... Downward to where? He could no longer
remember, nor recall where he was--a dark
place full of machines, he thought, that shivered
with the throbbing of the engines; but that told him little. He
was lost, and even if he moved on, it would only
be to wait for death.
He was tired, very tired. The screaming
haze of the proton-acceleration field extending through
the ceiling of Deck 7--extending down from the
generators on Deck 5--had battered him,
disoriented him; he had fled straight down the
nearest emergency gangway to avoid it, only
to realize that below Deck 7 there was no connection
between the primary hull and the dorsal that led down to the
deeper safety of the Engineering hull. He had
been trapped.
For a moment fear had seized him as he'd
realized there was little he could do except descend,
driven by the sweep, down through the recreation
decks, the fabrication rooms and cargo holds,
until they cornered him in the auxiliary fire-
control room of the phaser banks, down on
Deck 11 ...
Cornered him. Scotty, and DeSalle, and the
others he'd worked with, been friends with ... Using the
machines Spock had made for them ... Spock,
whom, at this point, he didn't even know whether
he'd been able to save.
But even as he thought it, he remembered the
cautiously prowling specters of Ensigns
Gilden and Adams, lugging the first of what he had
later seen was many loads of supernumerary
original hardcopy to his secret cargo rooms
in the outer skin of the ship ... remembered Gilden
saying, "And furthermore, I think it's
ridiculous that there's no corridor, or lift,
or anything between Deck Eight and the dorsal ...
What do they think we're going to do, raid the
food remixers?" And Adams replying,
"There's the food conveyor ..."
And through the food conveyor he had gone,
desperately holding the shadow shape of his body
around him, desperately remembering to create, in
his mind, the contact of his knees with the ridgy
rubberized floor of the repair duct that ran
along the top of the conveyor, the way his arms would
brush the metal sides.
He was safe, he thought now.
But in the darkness he knew he had only
purchased a handful of minutes for himself, and what
did it matter?
He wondered if the women had been in time
to save Spock, if the malfunction he had
caused in the bay-door mechanism had held
once he'd fled upward to the perilous brightness of
sickbay, where he knew at least Chapel and
Helen had to be. Wondered if the
malfunctions on the oxygen and pressure
systems had been sufficient to keep his friend from
perishing of hypoxia and cellular collapse.
He thought he had had some notion of returning
to the hangar deck to see. But all his thought, all
his perceptions, were darkening, collapsing in on
themselves with exhaustion after that final, desperate
effort of concentration required to blow the vent
covers in the lab, the excruciating exertion of
forming letters in the water-vapor mist. He had no
idea of where he was now, this place full of
whispering machinery, nor of how he'd gotten here.
He was only smoke and memory, and soon that,
too, would be gone.
"Jim?"
The voice was soft, somewhere outside the place
where he was. He recognized it from somewhere in his
past ... It was so difficult to remember who he
himself was now, so difficult to recollect, to re-
form, the parameters of his body, the dim clamor
of memories that made up his life. But he
recognized that it was someone he knew.
"Jim, I know you're here. Jim, come with me,
follow me. Spock's worked out a way to save
you."
Spock must have survived. Good.
And he sank a little more in on himself, like the
settling debris of a dying star after all its light
and heat are gone.
"Jim, follow me. We're down on Deck
Twenty, behind the shuttlecraft maintenance shop
..."
Shuttlecraft maintenance shop?
Recollection stirred, putting itself cloudily
back together--the shape of that giant chamber under the
hangar itself, the storage rooms behind it, the cargo
holds behind that ...
"We know what happened to you. We can help you
..." The voice was farther away. He heard the
hissing of a door. Kirk stirred, trying
to summon back the memory of his legs, his arms,
trying to collect a way to walk after that speaker.
He could have drifted, he thought, passing like a
cloud ... only once he forgot what it had
been like to walk, he knew he would never remember
again. And he hadn't the energy to do both.
Footsteps, walking away. The voice
whispered again, much farther off ... stealthy,
surreptitious, like the voices of Gilden and
Adams in the dark of the Deck 7 main
corridor; like the voices of Brunowski and
Miller as they tinkered with their vast bank of
computer controls, trying to get the recycler
machine to form individual coffee beans instead of the
"slab coffee" usually produced; like the voices
of the lovers who occasionally walked, in order not
to meet whoever it was they did not want to meet, in
the dark bottom corridors of the ship.
Of course, he thought. If the intruder, the
Ghost Walker, the creature who had raped him of
body and mind, were to learn of what they knew, it
would certainly find a way to kill them, as it had
tried to kill Spock and Helen. At the very
least, as captain, it could have them jailed until it
was too late ...
And it was very nearly too late now. He felt
the hurt in him grow sharper as the sweep moved
down a deck, as the reassembled induction
generators powered up again, as the standing wave came
closer. And in any case, where could he go? It was
only a matter of time ...
Time until what? They had turned back
toward Midgwis. Planetfall would be in three
days.
The Ghost Walker--the thief who had stolen his
body, who had taken his ship and his command, who had
raped the woman he loved and tried to murder his
friend--had something in mind.
The thought stirred anger in him, anger and the old
stubbornness, the old pride. I am James
Tiberius Kirk, he thought. I am
captain of the Enterprise. You may have taken
my ship, you may have turned my crew against me and
have them hunting me like dogs, but by God, I'll
destroy you if I can.
That had been McCoy calling him.
Bones.
Now he remembered.
He looked around him, turning the shadow shape
of his head. He saw he was in the machine room that
operated the clamshell doors of the hangar deck.
He must have come one deck farther down than he'd
intended, stumbling blindly, trying to see if
Spock had survived.
Slowly, atom by atom--had his body and flesh
still been composed of atoms, and not the electronic
shadows of memory--he drew himself together, clothing
himself again with the memories of his flesh, the
memories of his ship. The blinding scream of the
proton field on the decks above
made it difficult to concentrate, but he pulled
to mind the access doors connecting this room with the
cargo holds beyond and the deck hatches leading up
into the hangar deck above ...
He had hands again, he had feet. He dragged
them back into existence by an act of will. Slowly,
blind and hurting with fatigue, clinging to the bones of his
ship as he would have leaned upon the arm of a lover, he
began to make his way along the decks, following
the voice of his friend.

It would end soon. It had to end.
Captain Kirk--No! he told himself,
shaking his head blindly. Yarblis--Yarblis
Geshkerroth ... I am Yarblis Geshkerroth
the Ghost Walker ... stared with glazed, aching
eyes at the red-shirted Hungries as they
dismantled, for the twentieth time, the unwieldy
proton cannon preparatory to carrying it down
the turbolift, down two more levels. At first
he had been revolted at the mere concept of
creating a machine that would mimic the vibrations of the
mind. Now he was fascinated. There was something
delicate, something hellishly precise, about that
kind of understanding of the way the universe worked; about
coming at it from the outside rather than from the inside.
He turned his eyes away, knowing that the
Hungries became uncomfortable if one stared
too long.
Around him his crew--Kirk's crew!
Hungries! Opaque and greedy and dull--
moved, male and female, their voices hushed as
they had been hushed since the sweep began. That,
too, he had only realized belatedly, had
made them nervous. They were not entirely comfortable
themselves with the world they had created, the capabilities
of the things they used. At the sight of one of the
security officers, a dark-haired female
leaning on the wall, speaking to one of the males, the
human body which he had taken for his own whispered
a greedy wish. Shocked, Yarblis thrust the
thought aside. Yet it returned, with the intrusive
memory of the woman Helen.
He shook his head and moved away, sickened
beyond reason both at the thing he had done and the way
he had enjoyed that dark violence. He had little
experience with controlling such wishes, little knowledge of what
he should and should not do. The memories of such
matters were clouded, jumbled, distasteful to him, for
they were memories of the body and not the
mind.
"Captain ..." It was Mr. Scott, the
engineer--Scott/scotty of Kirk's
memories, who looked at him with deep concern in
his coffee-black eyes--hoisting a piece of the
generator by a strap onto his arm. "I never
asked--did you manage to locate Mr.
Spock?"
Kirk--Yarblis! I am Yarblis ...
Who was Yarblis?--nodded. "He said he was
going to check a report of manifestation down on
the shuttle deck, but that was nearly two hours
ago." How perilously easy it was becoming,
to speak in hours and minutes ... how simple
to think in them, when there was no sun, no moon, no
wind to mark the turning of the day! He frowned, as
Kirk did, and after a moment said, "And that in itself
bothers me." When they found the bay doors open,
he thought, when they reached the shuttle deck, only
a few decks beneath them now, the sweep would be
simpler. They would ask no more questions, have no more
doubts. They would be avenging one of their own.
Kirk, the real Kirk, had saved Helen.
Since he had slipped out of the shuttle bay--and
causing Spock to think he had called him from the
shadows of the tiny ship had been a simple
illusion, of the type he had used to lure many of the
dark Klingon Hungries to their deaths--he had
been worried that, somehow, what was left of Kirk
had been able to save Spock as well. But there
had been no outcry, no summons for the bone
setter McCoy, so he did not think Spock
had survived.
Instinctively, he knew that Spock had been
a danger to him.
Like all the Hungries, he thought as he
walked down the corridor to the lift, Spock
worked from the outside rather than from the inside. But he
was aware now, as he had not been aware when he had
first conceived the idea of taking over Kirk's
body, of using the ship of the Hungries itself
to implement the terrible plan by which he would save the
world from the pernicious effects of their influence, that
his masquerade was not as thorough, as complete, as
he had thought it would be. Though they had no
Consciousness Web--something he still found hard
to picture, with the pain of separation from the web an
agony he lived with, as he would have lived with a gut
wound--they nevertheless knew one another better than
he had thought they could. He knew he had
made mistakes. And Spock, the Counter of
Everything, had counted those as well.
He paused, looking around him at the sterile
white walls, the flat floors, flat ceilings
... hating, with all the passion of his soul, this
flat place that stank everywhere of the Hungries.
They made their world into this, he thought. And they would
lure his people into making the true world, the real world, the
beautiful Rhea, the Mother Spirit place, into this as
well, this hateful place where everything was divided
into Mine and Not-Mine, into Me-Don't-Touch and
Others-Not-Me ... lure them with promises of
how easy life would be, how good.
Life was not supposed to be easy or good. It
was supposed to be beautiful, and beauty lay in
peril, in cold, in hunger as well as in rest and
comfort. It was something they clearly did not understand.
And in a generation, or two, there would be many in the
world who did not understand either. And in time they would all
become Hungry too.
And beauty would begin to disappear.
But he would keep that from happening.
He looked around, even reached out his hand--
Weak little hand with tiny fingers!--to touch the
flat, cold wall that had never been organic,
never been made from anything, and smiled a taut,
exhausted smile.
This place, this ship, was his now. If only he
weren't so tired, if only his bones did not
hurt with bitter, consuming loneliness, he would have
laughed his triumph. For when he was done, there would
be no question, then or ever again, of the Hungries being
able to violate the world and offer their dream of
satiation in trade for his people's souls.

"The sweep's down to Deck Nineteen,"
Lieutenant Uhura reported, from the doorway
of the half-deserted rec room, thumbing open a
channel on her communicator and hoping to hell
she'd disconnected the right switch and the conversation
wasn't being picked up on the bridge. "Any
word?"
Helen's voice, gritty with the aftereffects
of the gas even if there hadn't been a world of
static and the buzz of a loose connection, replied,
"Nothing yet. He's just sitting in the machine
room in the dark, waiting. It's so cold down
on this deck, it's hard to tell if ... if
anything's happening." She still couldn't bring herself,
Uhura observed compassionately,
to mention the captain's name.
"Keep me posted," she said, her voice
soft, and keyed out. At 0735 in the morning--and
Uhura groaned when she thought about having to be on
the bridge after a night like the one she'd just been
through--though the rec rooms of both primary and
Engineering hulls were usually vacant, the gyms and
exercise rooms invariably were in use by those who
either enjoyed getting their blood well and truly
circulating first thing in the morning, or by those who
wanted to "get it over with" before starting their day.
At this hour the pool deck--in whose doorway
Uhura was now standing--was generally stirring with men
and women, its ceiling echoing with the voices bounced
back off the water. The sharp slap of feet and
steady beat of music would be drifting in from the
gym, where the martial arts enthusiasts would be
striding through their before-breakfast katas, and the dance
room where Organa would be drilling her students
in pli`es and stretches.
But the uneasiness Uhura had noticed last
night on the crew deck--and in the rec rooms--
was still in force. A lone swimmer stroked his way
steadily through the pale aquamarine glimmer of the
pool; gym and dance room were swathed in hush like a
sheet-draped empty house. The crew members
who used the Engineering hull facilities might,
Uhura supposed, have gone up to the primary
hull this morning ... she didn't know. Tension
cannot be sustained over long periods of time--a good
deal of the air of nervous waiting had abated from
sheer exhaustion--but she deduced that the crew in
general were taking no chances until the intruder was
pronounced good and dead.
She sighed. It was as late as she could let it
get. She rubbed her face wearily and headed for the
nearest lift, her boot heels echoing in the
empty spaces of the rec room, in quest of a quick
cup of the strongest coffee she could get, a shower in
her room, and the hopes--probably vain--that it
would be a quiet day on the bridge.

"Nothing." Bones McCoy spoke barely
above a whisper, looking down at the woman who
sat on the floor just within the machine room door.
"I've been through every back corner and service
hallway of the ship--places I didn't even
know existed--and I haven't felt a thing. Not that
I'd really know it if I felt it ..." He
hesitated, thinking about that. Then,
slowly, he added, "But I think I would."
Helen nodded. "I think we'd all know,
now."
Oddly enough, McCoy saw that she looked far
better than she had even that afternoon. Still exhausted,
stretched to the limit of her physical endurance,
yes ... but that dead look, that hopeless weariness,
that glint of haunted fear in her hazel eyes, was
gone. She still had the look of a woman who had
been badly hurt, emotionally even more than
physically; but life was back in her face,
life that had been gone, buried under hopeless
confusion and the fear that she was insane, since they'd
beamed up from Midgwis that last time.
The communicator chirped softly. Helen
flipped it open.
"Sweep's down to Deck Twenty," said
Uhura's voice softly. It was past 0800
hours, and McCoy guessed she was monitoring
audio pickup from the comm links. "Anything
yet?"
"Not a thing."
McCoy sniffed, and looked away. "I always
knew there was something about that damned transporter
I didn't like," he grumbled. "Scrambling a
man's atoms like a bushel of rice ... it must
be how the Ghost Walker killed the Klingon
scouts, back on the planet."
Helen nodded. "All he'd have to do was wait
till they transported down and take one over
on arrival, then wait his chance."
"But on the other hand," McCoy went on,
"I suspect that it was only because of the kyrillian
stabilization effect of the transporter beams that
Jim was able to survive at all."
Helen's mouth quirked. "Which leads to some
pretty unpleasant speculations about why
Yarblis Geshkerroth decided to take over the
position as captain of a starship."
Then, from in the dark machine room behind them, they
heard Spock's voice whisper, "Captain?"
Helen and McCoy looked back. The little
room was nearly dark, illuminated by the faint
amber glow of the reader screen and the dim light of a
burning candle--begged from Gunner's Assistant
Barrows, who had a stock of them, though whether for
religious or erotic purposes, Helen
didn't know--which picked out the angles of
Spock's aquiline face and left the hollows
of his eyes in darkness. Spock had
read, conscientiously, the literature involving the
manifestations of nonphysical beings, and one thing
mentioned repeatedly was the necessity for low lighting
--possibly to give greater scope to charlatans,
he had remarked, though it was equally possible that
light waves themselves had the effect of confusing and
lessening the powers of a creature that existed as no
more than a collection of electrostatic
impulses itself.
The Vulcan sat like a strange, impassive
idol in the candlelight now, his bony hands
outspread, palms upward, on the grubby
drekplast of the tabletop, his eyes shut. The
room was chill--Helen could not tell, as she had
said to Uhura, from what cause.
Softly, the Vulcan spoke again.
"Captain, are you here?"
And from somewhere, dimly, there came a knock, like
the dropping of some hard object onto a concrete
floor.
"Come closer to me," said Spock softly.
"The katra ... the essence of the soul. The inner
being. It can be transmitted from body to body; it
can be held in the mind of another for a time, as
Sargon's katra, his personality, was held
within yours. My mind is open to you, Captain ...
Jim. Come closer to me--enter the part of my mind
that is open and ready. I have removed the
electronic guards around the central computer
... I have programmed a bank of artificial-
intelligence programs to store your self, your
knowledge, your being ... until we can restore you to what
you are. Do you understand?"
But there was no reply.
"We can save you," said Spock, his voice
barely above a whisper. "Programmed into the
computer, you can exist indefinitely ..."
The silence in the room continued, but Helen could
feel an emptiness, as if something that had hovered
there was beginning to depart. The sweep, she
remembered, was only a few decks above them
now; Jim would have existed without his body for over a
week. It might very well be that he had not the
strength to return, or had forgotten how.
Quietly, she reached up and took
McCoy's hand. It was something else she had
read, in the literature of s@eances; something
Spock had mentioned, but had not understood. Now,
suddenly, it made sense to her. With McCoy's
help, she rose to her feet and drew the
doctor farther into the darkened room. Without a sound
they took seats on the other chairs near the table.
Helen's hand closed gently around the Vulcan's
strong, slender fingers--startlingly warm with the higher
temperature of his blood--and after a moment
McCoy took Spock's other hand in his. As
he did so, completing the circle, Helen felt
immediately that Kirk was somewhere near.
Closing her eyes in the dark, she could feel
him as a living presence. Standing close
to Spock, she thought ... standing just behind his
shoulder. She didn't try to form any thoughts,
any images, in her mind; just sat in the hard-
backed plastic chair and relaxed, letting her
mind open, her thoughts reach out, to give him one more
thing to touch, one more thing that was familiar to him ...
one more thing to orient himself, to draw himself back. In
the deepening silence they sat, a ring of energy, of
friendship, of offered strength.
Then she heard Spock's breath catch and
felt the tightening of his fingers on hers. Gently
he disengaged his hand, and, as she opened her eyes,
he turned away to the reader once more, spreading his
palms over the housing he had opened above its
tangle of cable and superconductor, his eyes still
closed in meditation.
Across the table she met McCoy's eyes, but
he said nothing. She eyebrowed a question to him, and he
nodded.
At the reader's simple keyboard, Spock
began to type. For a long time there was no sound but the
deep, throbbing hum of the engines, a bone-shivering
tapestry of half-subconscious noise down
here, and like a dry counterpoint, the quick tapping of
Loglan keying through. In the gold candlelight
Spock's face had a blank look, though his
eyes were open now, he worked without hesitation,
sure and calm and detached, and behind him his shadow
wavered hugely on the blank, grease-stained
wall.
Quietly, McCoy and Helen rose from their
places and stood behind him, looking down over his
shoulders at the screen.
Beneath long columns of Loglan he had typed
a question in English ARE YOU THERE?
And after a long time, words formed themselves below.
YES. THANK Y. THANK YOU ALL.
CAN SLEEP NOW.
And the screen went dark.

Chapter Fifteen

"By the way, Spock ..." McCoy's
deep, slightly drawling voice broke the long
silence of the candlelit machine room. "Do you
remember you're dead?"
"Indeed, Doctor." Spock brought one hand
up and gingerly rubbed the back of his neck. Now that
he was no longer locked in the concentration necessary
to write and set up an artificial-intelligence
program--not to mention compacting every other program
in the computer to make space for something that
extensive, and programming the computer to lie about
how much space was in use--and no longer immersed
in the deep meditation needed to accomplish the state
of shared katra, no matter how briefly, he
realized his head still ached from the pressure drain in
the shuttle bay. Reaction, long delayed, was
setting in, reaction to those endless minutes of
near-panic as he'd tried to operate first the
manual overrides to get himself out of the bay, then
the alarms to summon help before the pressurization
cycle was complete and the outer bay doors opened.
He had blacked out, he recalled, in the midst
of it. Even at the time, he remembered thinking,
with a final flash of logic, that this was probably
preferable to being conscious when the blinking red lights
went solid and the slow, freezing drag of
space's utter vacuum began to pull him toward
the opening doors.
He shook the thoughts away, and the cold seed of
remembered fear they brought with them, as
irrelevant. McCoy's communicator
chirped; at a button's touch Chapel's
voice said, "Sweep down to Deck Twenty-one
--have you had any word? Anything at all?"
"We're safe," McCoy replied
shortly. "Rendezvous in sickbay ..."
The reader beeped softly. Though equipped, like
most readers, with a limited sound-effects
capability, there was no voder-vocoder attached
to this, primarily an entertainment and schematics
terminal. Turning, Spock saw written on the
screen

HE'LL LOOK THERE FOR YOU AS SOON
AS THE SWEEP IS DONE. A HULL
SECTION HAS BEEN PRESSURIZED 30
METERS DOWN THE STARBOARD CORRIDOR
ON THIS DECK--YOU CAN
RECOGNIZE THE BULKHEAD THAT CONCEALS
IT BY THE SCRATCHES ON THE
BOLTS. THE COMPUTER TERMINAL THERE
IS LAB-QUALITY. SPOCK CAN HIDE
OUT THERE. THE REST OF YOU RENDEZVOUS
THERE AT 1800.

They all stared blankly at the screen; then
McCoy blew out his breath in a sigh. "Well,
if I didn't believe it before," he said
wryly, "I do now. Nurse Chapel ..."
He spoke into the communicator. "I'll be up
to sickbay in a few minutes with Helen ..."
Helen's communicator beeped also; they heard
Uhura say, "He's in the lift with the first of the
generators, on his way down to you ..."
"We're clearing out," Helen responded
swiftly. "Jim's safe."

"He was murdered." James Kirk--Had
he another name? he wondered, with clouded and aching
mind ... Surely he had ... Gesh ...
Gesh ... Yarblis Geshkerroth ... He
shook his head, turned slowly to scan the faces
of his senior officers, grouped in the small
briefing room, trying to read them and failing. "This
... this creature, this intruder, that we destroyed
with the machinery Spock made, even as we were
hunting it, destroyed him." He rubbed his hand
across his face, the alien flesh aching. Yes, he
thought, he was Geshkerroth, Yarblis Geshkerroth
the Ghost Walker. He had slain Hungries,
defending his people, defending the world, defending Rhea.
He remembered that now. As he was defending her
again.
His body hurt with a dull, continuous pain, and
words were increasingly hard to find, but none of the men and
women gathered seemed to find that strange.
Scotty's dark brows were drawn together, forming a
small upright line between them, his black eyes
following Kirk's every movement. On the other
side of the table, Bones McCoy and
Lieutenant Uhura were alike wrapped in
silence, though he saw a glance flicker between them
--communicating ... but how could they truly
communicate without the Consciousness Web? Mr.
DeSalle, next to Scott, clenc hed his fist
convulsively and hissed beneath his breath.
"What--what happened, sir?" That was Sulu,
the navigator, the muscles of his face
pulling a little, as the faces of the Hungries had
when he had turned on them, slain them, in the
forest.
Memory of that grounded him a little more into himself, and
he was able to steady his voice and fish forth Kirk's
patterns of speech. "As far as I can tell,
Spock was lured into the shuttlecraft hangar--
we'll probably never know how. The lock was
depressurized, the doors were opened."
"But that's not possible!" protested Scott.
"Not while traveling at warp speed--every alarm in
the ship would have gone off!"
"All alarm systems connected with the bay were
disarmed," Uhura said, folding slender hands the
color of thorn tree stems. "It didn't
register anywhere, except as a note in the
systems computer."
"Dear God ..." Scott whispered,
appalled.
"He would have been unconscious," McCoy
said to him quietly, "by the time the doors opened
... There are worse ways to die than
anoxia."
"But the important thing is," Kirk--
Yarblis--continued, pacing restlessly across the
front of the room, "that the sweep was successful.
The intruder--the murderer--was destroyed, there
is no sign of it anywhere now on this vessel."
"There was no sign of it before," Sulu
muttered, sotto voce, to Uhura. But his
black eyes slid sidelong to his captain, the
look of pain and shock replaced by another which
Yarblis could not read.
Yarblis passed a hand across his face again, as
if touching the flesh, the skin, would make it hurt
less. "I'll make ... the announcement ...
to the crew ... Mr. Sulu, we're to make
all speed back to the world ... back to the planet
Midgwis. We're clearly dealing with
creatures who would stop at nothing, and I fear
what the silence of the research party may mean.
Gentlemen, dismissed."
They rose, casting quick, furtive looks at
him as they filed from the room. He waited while
they did, then stepped across to touch McCoy's
sleeve. He had debated, seeking in the
captain's memories for what the man would do in the
circumstances of his first officer's murder. The
reaction was different from those of the other Hungries,
the dark Klingon Hungries he had
taken over, and he was not certain whether this was an
individual difference or one common to their
family. It was harder for him to think now, harder for
him to remember, to sort through those murky areas of
emotion and instinct. The strange urges and fevers
of this human body were pulling stronger and stronger
on his mind, the alien food he ate clouding his
awareness, the killing need for sleep that he barely
dared take ... and above all, the overwhelming,
hurting loneliness, the isolation from the web. He
had not spoken to another true soul, had not shared his
self with any other, in day after endless day.
Only a little longer, he promised himself
quietly. Only a little longer, and I will be
back in the world again ... the world that will be safe, and
true, and whole.
"Bones ..."
McCoy halted, his head tilted slightly.
Yarblis was aware of the Speaker with Everyone, the
lady Uhura, pausing just outside the door as
if to listen.
"How's Helen?" he asked, catching
Kirk's softer inflections just so.
McCoy's thin mouth tightened. "I meant
to tell you when this was over, Jim," he said
quietly. "She's not well--she's taken a
turn for the worse."
He made his brows pull down and his breath
catch a little. "Can I see her?"
The doctor shook his head. "I'm afraid
I've had to put her back in ICU for continuous
monitoring. I don't think there's anything
to worry about, but ... she was badly hurt,
Jim. She's just not able to get over it."
"I see." He did his best to sound worried,
as indeed he was. She might yet die without
further help from him, but it was clear that under
continuous monitoring, it would be very difficult
to make sure that she did, in fact, die. He
shook his head again. In two days they would return
to the world. After that, whether the woman lived or died
would not matter. All that mattered was that she was not
able to be up and around, that she was not able to speak to the
others ... and that the others not believe her.
"Jim, I'm ... I'm sorry about
Spock."
Still not entirely clear as to what the man Kirk
would have responded, Yarblis spoke from what he
recalled of the other Hungries, and only said,
"He was revenged. Let us hope we will
not need to avenge those back on the ... the
planet."
And turning, he passed Uhura in the
doorway and walked away to Kirk's quarters.
Perhaps, now that he could discern no trace of his
ghostly alter ego anywhere upon the ship--now that
Kirk's lingering self had been at last dispersed
--he would be able to sleep.

"Surely there's something we can do!" Christine
Chapel looked anxiously from Spock's face,
austere in the dim glow from the computer screen and the
yellowish glare of a low-powered lumenpanel--the
only lighting wired into the dark cave of the hull
section--to McCoy's, then back to Helen herself,
who sat in one of the hard flexiplast chairs at
her side. The doctor was slouched in the other
chair, as befitted his rank as a senior officer;
his blue eyes looked hard but very tired. Helen
felt in complete sympathy with him--she herself was
exhausted almost beyond thought, hurting for sleep in
spite of the stimulants she'd bullied McCoy
into giving her to attend this conference. She could see
Chris glancing worriedly down at her from time
to time, clearly of the opinion that she should be in bed,
a judgment call with which Helen one hundred
percent concurred ... Except that nothing would
induce her to return to sickbay, even to the
Special Observation Ward, without one of the others
as a guard.
Politely, Spock inquired, "Such as?
Possession is at best a tricky legal
concept, and nearly impossible to prove ..."
"And considering how long it took to remove it from
standard jurisprudence," Kirk added, "I would
almost rather ... remain as I am ... than have it be
returned." The voice that issued from the voder-
vocoder was almost like his own had been, with only the
tinny flattening and expressionlessness to betray its
artificial nature. Uhura had smuggled the
voder down from Communications stores immediately after
Yarblis/kirk's post-sweep briefing, and
Spock had put in twenty minutes or so, in the
midst of his endless tinkering, in lowering its pitch from
the standard female register to a close
approximation of Kirk's steel-flexible tenor.
The remark itself, Helen thought, was so
absolutely typical of Jim that, like
McCoy, she thought, If I didn't
believe it before, I believe it now.
He's there. He's in the computer, alive
...
She didn't know why the knowledge brought a hot lump
of tears to her throat and a burning to the scorched-out
membranes of her eyes. She turned her face
away, so that the others would not observe ... and
wondered how much Kirk could see.
"Except that there's no question of you remaining as you
are." As always when he was tired, McCoy's
southern drawl had deepened. "He didn't steal
your body and your ship for a joyride. We're
heading back to Midgwis full-bore. He's
got to be doing it for a reason."
"I know," Kirk said. "Believe me, there were
times when I think it was only that thought that kept me
hanging on."
There was a moment's silence, save for the rattling
hum of the jury-rigged air circulator which kept
the aromatic smells of coffee and chocolate, with
which the room was replete, from drifting into the
corridor outside. Then McCoy chuckled
softly and said, "Give it up, Jim. You're not
going to convince anybody who knows you it wasn't
sheer stubbornness."
There was a faint noise, a sort of brittle
crackling, from the voder. Spock frowned sharply
and turned from the schematics he was calling up on
the screen of the portable terminal--which Chapel had
brought down from sickbay to hook into Miller's
existing tangle of components--to examine the
circuitry.
"Are you there, Captain?" he asked. "Are you
all right?"
"Fine, Mr. Spock. What's the problem?"
"A fault in the voder, I believe ..."
But Helen, smiling a little wearily to herself,
realized that the sound had been the closest
approximation the voder could summon up to Jim's
laughter.
"According to the computer's internal log," Spock
continued after a moment, "Yarblis has been
spending five to six hours a day studying every
operation of the ship, with special attention, it
appears, to the computer itself. Computer schematics
and manuals are among those programs which he has
caused to be printed out in his cabin ..."
"No wonder he looks like he hasn't
slept in a week," McCoy muttered.
"That," Kirk said, "and the fact that he's been
prowling the corridors, either looking for
something, or refamiliarizing himself with the layout of the
ship."
"That means potentially he could figure out that the
captain's hiding out there," Uhura pointed out from
her post by the door. At either end of the dark
corridor the miniature sensors borrowed from
Emiko Adams kept unseen watch. In the
hull section itself the food remixer that filled
two thirds of the space--and where Brunowski had
acquired it was a mystery, as no such equipment was
listed as missing from Stores--had fallen silent
after its last self-clean cycle had spun through,
the ends of its cable leads looped neatly out of the
way.
"Potentially," Spock agreed, returning his
attention to the portable terminal and keying in a long
sequence of commands. "However, I took the
precaution, when I allotted space for the
artificial-intelligence program that currently
serves the captain as a pseudobody, of
compacting all nonessential programs and
library reserves in the computer, so tha t the
additional usage would not be noticed, and of
programming the computer itself to report no change
in its spatial allotment."
"I always thought you'd make an efficient
criminal, Mr. Spock," said Kirk's
voice from the voder.
Spock stiffened. "Considering the trouble I have
gone to to save your life, Captain, there is no
need to insult me."
"Insult?" McCoy grinned. "That's a high
compliment."
"To a human, I have no doubt," Spock
replied blightingly. "Nevertheless, crime is the
refuge of the unresourceful; a retreat from
perfect logic."
The grin in Kirk's voice was almost palpable.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Spock--I only
meant that you would exercise your customary
efficiency in whatever field of endeavor you
undertook."
"Thank you, Captain." Spock bridled a
little, like a dandy who possesses fifteen
mirrors and claims to be above looking into any of
them--if he'd been a cat, reflected Helen,
he'd have washed his whiskers. "That is a compliment
indeed."
"But Bones is right," Kirk said quietly.
"I can't stay as I am. And certainly
none of us can afford to let him remain as he is.
Bones--Spock--Helen--is there any way,
anything you can think of ..."
"Short of murdering him," McCoy said,
"no. And I wouldn't even advise that, since I
have no idea how this mind swap works ..."
Spock looked up again from his primary
keyboard, which, as Kirk had promised, was of the
highest lab quality or better, thanks
to Miller's adept tinkering. "I estimate that
if Yarblis Geshkerroth can be induced to abandon
the captain's body and mind, we will have fifteen
or twenty minutes' leeway to return the
captain's consciousness to it without physical
deterioration of the brain tissue."
"You could stretch that out further with the stasis
chamber," McCoy added. "But how're you going
to induce him to leave? Serve him eviction
papers?"
"He may leave on his own," Chapel said,
shifting her shoulders uneasily against the wall.
"By the way he looks, I wouldn't be surprised
if Yarblis is having his own problems maintaining
his hold on your body."
"We must hope that he does, at least for the time
being," Spock responded. "For should Yarblis
abandon the captain's body at this point, and the
captain return to it, Yarblis will have no choice
but to take the captain's place in the computer--
something he could easily do, now that I have removed
the electromagnetic safeguards."
"That's all we'd need," Uhura muttered.
"He sure wouldn't have any problem protecting his
planet from us then."
"An unwarranted assumption, Lieutenant,
if you believe that from his position in the computer
Yarblis might destroy the ship. There are
extensive backup systems within the computer itself
to prevent a failure of that kind. Even with the
amount the Ghost Walker has learned about the
makeup of the ship, he would not be able to turn the
computer against us. On the whole, Captain, at the
moment I consider yours to be the superior
position."
"Unless there's a power cut," Helen pointed
out quietly.
Spock shook his head. "Power failure to the
computer itself is virtually impossible. The
backup batteries--"
"I didn't say "failure,""
she replied, her eyes somber in the grimy
shadows. "I said "cut," as in, "cut with a
sharp instrument through an access hatch.""
She looked inquiringly up at Uhura, who
nodded. "A few minutes of complete down-power
at most will crash the nonessential systems,"
said the Communications officer. "You don't
"hold" even the essential ones in a crash--
they're automatically replaced from a hard-wired
digital backup two nanoseconds later, and
nobody knows the difference."
"And that's fine," Helen said, "for a system.
But can you do that with a ... a living entity?"
There was a long and intensely uncomfortable
silence, which Spock eventually broke. "The power
core of the computer is extremely well-
protected ..."
"But the lines leading into it from the converters
aren't," Uhura said. "The wiring conduits run
straight up the back of the dorsal
infrastructure. You can get to any of them through those
doors beside the food slots in the observation
lounges--or, on Deck Eleven, through
Gilden's office. It would be fairly easy
to know exactly what to look for if you consulted the
engineering files, which you say is exactly what the
Ghost Walker has been doing."
Helen looked from Spock's troubled face to the
silent stack of components on the table, as if that,
too, had a face ... though it was a face her
mind shied from remembering. "Couldn't he have turned
back--couldn't he have made the attempt on my
life an excuse to turn back--because he wants
to be in orbit around his home planet again when he
destroys this vessel in order to keep his world
safe from Federation interference once and for all?"

Chapter Sixteen

But that wouldn't work, Chapel protested
faintly. "Destroying a ship would never keep the
whole Federation away. If anything, it would bring
them down on Midgwis full-force."
"Does he know that?"
"If he knows what the captain knew, he
does," Uhura pointed out.
"Maybe," Helen said, sinking back into her
chair. "If he's rational, and not a fanatic.
But the Federation's only detailed reports about
Midgwis at the moment are in the
Enterprise's logs. They wouldn't become
common knowledge until they were transshipped from Starbase
Nine. And if destroying the Enterprise wouldn't
buy complete noninterference in his planet's
affairs, at least it would buy him time."
"Time for what?" Uhura demanded. "Isn't it
obvious to him that unless they accept at least some
of the techniques the Federation is holding out to them,
they're going to starve? Or risk becoming
subject to Klingon protectorate?"
"And in fact there are a number of Midgwins
who are coming to just that conclusion ..."
"They've dealt with the Klingons before ..."
"Helen's right." It was Jim's voice,
quietly, from the computer. The anthropologist
shivered, hearing his voice in the dim-lit room,
more than ever like a haunting ... She found herself
looking around, expecting to see the traditional
pale ghost-shape of him, floating in a corner.
And dreading it. Dreading the memories--good and
bad--the sight of his face might bring. But there was
only the angular collection of spare scanner
drives and data cubes, cable and screens, that
Ensign Miller had borrowed from Stores, for
whatever Brunowski's secret purposes were,
green and amber lights on the remixer glinting like
spectral eyes.
"The population of the Midgwins is split,"
Kirk went on ... Helen could almost see the
gesture of his hands. "Geshkerroth's party--the
out-and-out isolationists--are in a minority now, or
were in a minority when we left, but we have no
idea what's been happening on the planet in the
past week, nor why communication was severed with the
research party."
"My guess is that Geshkerroth's
accomplices in the warren trashed the
transmitters as soon as we left orbit,"
Helen said.
"Did he have them?" Uhura asked.
"According to Thetas, there are about a dozen shades of
opinion over what should be done with the Federation's
offers of assistance," added McCoy, folding his
arms and leaning his flat, bony shoulders against the
wall at his back. "Most of them have to do with
acceptance on some kind of terms, but at heart
none of them are really willing to give up the old
way of life."
"Nor should they have to," Kirk said. It must
be driving him crazy not to be able
to pace, Helen thought, amused in spite of
weariness and strain. Or perhaps the kinetic portion
of his brain was pacing. "Nor will the Federation
require them to, if that's their choice.
Unfortunately," he continued, "their old way of
life is in danger whichever way they slice it,
now that the Klingons have put in for rights of
protectorate over the planet. My
impression is that very few of them realize that, or
want to realize it, but the Klingons may very well
make a case for the fact that having no
agricultural development, they should not be
considered a "culture." Given time, the Ghost
Walker might amass considerable support for
complete isolation. In any case it doesn't
matter whether he actually could or not, but only that
at the moment he thinks he can. And time may be
what he's playing for."
"Most illogical," Spock said
disapprovingly.
Abruptly, the red light on Uhura's
small hand-held scanning panel blinked on with a
soft chirp. "Someone coming," Uhura reported.
"They're past the sensor out in Corridor Six
..."
Spock cut to visual monitoring on the
portable screen. In the off-duty quarter-power
lighting of the corridor they could discern a short,
burly figure wearing the red coverall of
LandRather, striding along with, incongruously, a
dancer's lightness.
Uhura identified him. "It's Yeoman
Brunowski."
Spock switched off the screen, and Uhura
flicked the makeshift toggle controlling the
lumenpanel wired overhead, leaving the room in the
darkness in which they had originally found it.
"Stay where you are, everyone," came the
Vulcan's deep, slightly grainy tones out
of the blackness, and Helen heard the faint swish of
his clothing as he crossed the room to the hinged
bulkhead that had at one time--before Brunowski had
talked his friend into tinkering with it--formed a part of the
internal pressure skin of the ship.
The dim lights of the corridor seemed very bright
as the door swished open, outlining the blocky
silhouette. Like the jointed limb of a spider,
Spock's arm intruded into that rectangle of
light, resting lightly on Brunowski's
shoulder. The hapless laundryman's
knees buckled and he collapsed without a sound.
"I suggest he be given an injection of
trichemizone and be kept under sedation for forty-
eight hours, Doctor," Spock said as he
r eached up to turn on the lumenpanel again and
pulled the bulkhead shut. "No one must know of
our headquarters here ..."
"You'd better get Miller too, then,"
Kirk put in. "I see him rostered as off
duty tonight, since he was up all night running the
sweep, but I can hear his voice through the voder
circuits, down in Central Computer having a
cup of coffee with Ensign Giacomo."
"You don't think they've told her about this
place ...?" worried Chapel.
"Now, wait a minute," McCoy
protested, his grizzled brows descending sharply.
"Maybe this isn't the time to balk about ethics, but
I did take an oath once upon a time not
to use medicine as a means of imprisoning the
innocent."
"Perhaps," Spock agreed quietly, kneeling
once more at Brunowski's side. "But
logically, this man is scarcely to be described
as "innocent." Moreover, should he be
imprisoned in any other fashion, he and his
accomplice would both be in the severest danger from
an alien who has already attempted two
assassinations in order to preserve his secrets,
to say nothing of the danger thereby resulting for all
of us."
McCoy's mouth quirked dryly. "I should have
known you'd come up with a logical reason." He
fished a hypo from the case at his belt and fitted
an ampoule to the gun.
Spock regarded him in some puzzlement. "If
that is the case, Doctor, then why--"
The hypo hissed venomously; Brunowski
sighed and seemed to settle like a beached whale.
"We'd better get him out of here," McCoy
said, and between them, he and Chapel hauled their
patient to his feet. "I don't like it, but--"
"Take Service Lift Three," Kirk
advised. "It's never in use this time of night."
And, as they were manhandling Brunowski's not
insignificant bulk out the door, he added
quietly, "Helen?"
She paused, half turning back. In those
few minutes of complete darkness she had felt the
eeriest sensation, the impression that Jim
was in the room with them, was standing close beside her ...
though her common sense told her that Jim was, in
point of fact, really up in the Central
Computer room on Deck 8, only listening
to them, speaking to them, through the threads of the computer's
superconductive nerve endings which ran down the
dorsal wiring pipe to the redundant computer
chamber on Deck 19, and thence, through finer nerve
endings into which Miller had shamelessly tapped, to this
darkened hold.
But still, she felt that he was there.
His voice continued to issue, eerily, from the
tiny black box plugged into the terminal's side.
"Thank you," he said. "For helping me ... for
saving me ... for believing. And for choosing to be here
on the ship, for choosing to stay, for giving up what
you did. I'm sorry beyond words that it's cost you
what it has ..."
She shook her head quickly. "Jim, I ..."
How did you touch a computer? How did you put
into words what couldn't be said? She felt tears
burn at her again, and realized she was trembling with
sheer exhaustion, the efforts of the past twelve
hours falling on her in a single slamming
tsunami of fatigue. She wanted, more than
anything else, to lean on his shoulder, to feel his
arms around her, to feel the protection, the warmth,
of his caring, the way it had once been.
But it was something she had put away from her, in
those hellish days of knowing that Jim was not Jim, and
though she reached for it now, it still wasn't there.
Only an eerie proxy, a disembodied voice
--Eric in that ancient story singing to his beloved
Christine from behind a wall ...
But there was an analogy in that she didn't
want to pursue. She sighed, bracing herself against
disappointment and weariness, pushed back her black
hair from her face and straightened her back.
"I can't talk," she said simply. "I'm
tired ... But I'm glad, I'm so glad."
And turning, she stumbled after Chapel and McCoy
and their unconscious burden. Uhura was waiting
outside the nearly shut bulkhead, to put her arm
around her waist and take her weight on her
shoulder, helping her back down the corridor
toward the service lift that would carry them all
to sickbay's problematical refuge.
Spock rested his elbows on the table's edge and
folded his hands before his chin. "Most interesting."
"Dammit, Spock ..." The voder
was not capable of registering the complete vocal
inflections of irritation and fatigue, but it came
close.
"I refer to Dr. Gordon's capacity for
faith in an apparently illogical conclusion,
based upon subliminal cues. It is very similar
to your own."
Kirk's voice was weary. "If you knew
what I had to go through, trying to get your damned
attention, Spock ... trying to get you to listen in
spite of your logic ..."
"My apologies, Captain." The Science
officer inclined his sleek head. Then, after a long
moment, "And my ... gratitude. Both for your
efforts in saving my life in the shuttle bay
... and for the fact that you are still with us at all."
"Oh, go to sleep," said Kirk. "We all
need it. We'll figure out what Yarblis is
up to in the morning."

Spock remained hidden in the hull section
until the Enterprise was in orbit around
Elcidar Beta III--MIDGWIS--ONCE again.
Deck 23 was a portion of the ship unfrequented
by anyone even during the main shift, only a
deck above the dark cargo holds of the hull
bottom. They were undisturbed.
Much to Mr. Scott's distress, Ensign
Miller fell victim to the same mysterious
virus that had incapacitated his disreputable friend
Yeoman Brunowski. Dr. McCoy tested a
dozen other crew members for signs of the virus
and published a list of twenty or so symptoms.
Lieutenant Bergdahl promptly appeared,
claiming fourteen of them, plus several which had not
been listed, but was released after examination, to the
considerable disappointment of his staff. Aside from the
fact that more uniforms had to be returned as
improperly fitting due to the usual slight
intolerances of the molecular remixer programming,
and a tendency of starch-based substances in the food
slots to be flaccid and rubbery, not a great deal
was affected, but among the junior members of the
crew there was whisper that a jinx had been put on
the ship.
Whether the captain knew of this or not was
unapparent. On the bridge he was silent and
withdrawn, but in that he was no different from the rest
of the bridge crew. Unemotional and precise,
the Vulcan had never been universally
popular with the crew, but among those who had worked with
him for three years, his absence--his murder--
was deeply felt. There was a fanatic glare in
the captain's fatigue-shadowed hazel eyes as
he stared at the fore viewscreen, or endlessly
studied ship reports and voyage logs on their
proximity to Midgwis. "And no surprise,"
said Mr. Sulu quietly, over an after-dinner
cup of coffee with Chekov in the main rec room.
"First Spock, and now Helen. Chris Chapel
says she's doing worse ..."
Chekov cursed in Russian. "I saw him
this way when he went after that thing that destroyed half
the Farragut's crew. If that's what the
Midgwins can do, no wonder he's worried about
that research party."
The object of these concerns himself passed his time,
in partnership with Jim Kirk, in communion with the
Enterprise's computer. Since the adjoining
bulkhead section contained the raw carbon-
hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen from which all food on
the Enterprise was formulated, it took only a
determined study of the remixer tech manuals in the
ship's library computer for Mr. Spock
to manufacture his own food, andwitha little
experimentation, he discovered that the breadboarded
dials permitted a far finer adjustment of
flavorings than the digitalized program
settings in the rec room, with the result that, for the
first time in three years, he was able to get really
edible Vulcan m'lu. Lieutenant Uhura and
Nurse Chapel smuggled him blankets, upon which
he slept in a corner of the room, when he
slept at all. Mostly he and Kirk scanned
through the files of the computer itself, investigating
anything that might assist them in second-guessing
Yarblis's intentions when they reached their destination.
With a little coaching from Spock, Kirk was able
to enter even the most highly classified of
files, to circumvent voice-code locks and
retina scans and display anything for perusal on
Miller's terminal screen. But nowhere did they
find any program, any file, any comment
regarding the intentions of the Ghost Walker, the
pseudo-Kirk who controlled the ship.
"And I doubt we will," Kirk commented, while
Spock tinkered with a third work terminal which
Uhura had smuggled down to him from Stores.
"He can use the computer, and understands how it works,
but he doesn't think in terms of it. It
doesn't come as second nature to him, to keep
a log, or make files of information, as it does
to you and me."
"No," the Vulcan observed, tapping his way
neatly through the more stringent of the computerized
safeguards set on the inner core of the ship's
utility programs. He was currently engaged
in finding and removing his own specific sensory
parameters from the computer's memory so that another
life scan of the ship would not register his presence,
even as a scan of the computer's directories would
not register Kirk's. "It was, in fact, one
of the things that served to confirm my impression that you
were--in the old Earth parlance--not yourself."
"Confirm," Kirk repeated thoughtfully.
"I'm curious, Spock. Did you suspect
before that time?"
Spock was silent, surveying the two screens
full of figures and directory paths glowing
before him. The room's original screen--the
terminal connected to the voder--was, as usual,
dark, save for a blinking cursor light and a few
cryptic symbols concerning the misleading
directory paths behind which the A.i. program
hid.
"I knew that all was not well," he said
slowly. "Thou gh I hesitated to ascribe such a
comprehensive dislocation of your customary reactions
to so illogical a cause as your involvement with
Dr. Gordon, I was also aware that I was dealing
with a matter which in my observation always causes
extreme irrationality in members of your
species. But I believe that my first definite
suspicions came from playing chess with your alter
ego. In spite of knowing everything about the game which
you knew, he did not have your ... adeptness."
Spock frowned, leaning forward a little on his
elbows, his hands framing the glowing screen before him
as he cast his mind back. "He was ... more
ruthless than you. And less careful to conserve his
pieces. His attack was more reckless, his guard
weaker. And he had no interest in the strategy of the
game, beyond winning it."
"I know," Kirk said softly. "And that's what
worries me about the fact that the ship is still under his
command."
Kirk was also, again with coaching from Spock, able
to cut himself into all the intership monitoring and
communications devices, permitting him to observe
what was going on in nearly any part of the
ship he chose, though only able to do so in one
location at a time, as he had been able to hear the
voices of the staff in the Central Computer
room. On the whole, this required such effort on
his part that they still relied on Emiko Adams's
miniature sensors for their first line of defense.
"He still walks the ship at night,"
Lieutenant Uhura said, perching on a corner
of the crowded computer bench, long legs crossed
gracefully while McCoy unwrapped the
assortment of small tools from the clean uniform
shirt he'd brought for Spock. "But whether he's
prowling, looking for something, the way he did before the
sweep convinced him you were no longer a threat to him,
or whether he's doing something--cutting wires,
planting charges, whatever, as Helen suggested--
there's no way of telling."
"Can you pick him up on a monitor?"
McCoy suggested, as Spock examined the shirt
--slightly too short, like so much of what was coming
out of LandRather these days. "Run a sensor sweep
and find him?"
"I'm afraid not, Bones." Even in
twenty-four hours Kirk had acquired more
control over the nuances of the voder--Uhura would have
sworn the captain was in the room with them. If she
closed her eyes, she could almost see him, sitting
on the other end of the table, just behind Spock's
shoulder, where the Vulcan sat in his hard
duraplast chair. "For one thing, something that large
would show up on the computer's internal log. For
another, Spock could be picked out on a scan
because of the specific differences in a
Vulcansthuman physiology, the same way
an alien intruder could be--because they're unique.
Physically, I'm standard-issue."
"And the damn thing is," Kirk went on after a
moment, "nobody thought to put video pickups
on the inside of walls or hatch covers the way
they did at all the intersections of the halls and in
most rooms." Spock, when he had gone
to reroute the visual pickups that covered the
starboard corridor of Deck 23 to simply
repeat the image of the portside corridor, had
discovered that Miller had already taken this
precaution. ("We ought to put that boy in
Security," Kirk had remarked, to which Spock
had replied austerely, "We ought to put that boy,
as you call him, in the brig.") "If anything
has been planted, we'll have to look
for it."
"Considering that there are 1,576 access hatches
and service ports on board the Enterprise,"
Spock said, "of which, at my best calculation,
342 could be deemed of critical importance for the
safety of the vessel, this could be an extensive
task."
"Can't we do this the easy way?" Uhura
asked, with a gesture of one slender hand. "Can't
Dr. McCoy here declare him unfit to continue his
duties, and put him away like we've done
to poor Danny and John? He's certainly
given us enough evidence of irrationality, you know."
"For one thing, sickbay is not an auxiliary
brig!" McCoy retorted--he still felt
vaguely uneasy about the Hippocratic oath.
"For another, since there is nothing physically
wrong with him, and since he's not in any way
endangering the ship or the crew, it would take a
couple of days of hearings, and we're now less
than twenty-four hours from planetfall on
Midgwis."
"Not to mention the fact that Yarblis appears
to be in sufficient command of himself to talk his way out
of such charges," Spock added. "Moreover, such
action would not put us any closer to reversing the
exchange of personalities between him and the
captain."
"That doesn't matter, if the ship and its
personnel can be kept out of danger ..."
"Permit me to disagree, Captain. No
proof exists that such an exchange took place.
He could, with very good reason, claim that you are
nothing but a highly sophisticated artificial-
intelligence program invented by me, with the aim of
usurping his authority. Such an action would only
result in tipping our hand. We would very likely
find ourselves in the brig for mutiny, he would still
remain captain of the Enterprise, and he would
assuredly attempt his scheme again. No."
Spock shook his head. "Our sole logical
recourse is to wait, and to thwart whatever scheme
he has as best we can."

I will destroy them, he thought, his boot
heels clicking on the hard slick surface of the
starship's deck, the cold white lighting that, on
these levels, never changed nor failed, glaring
hurtfully in his tired eyes. I will destroy
...
Long ago, he remembered being taught
by Arxoras that to destroy life, any life, was
bad. And something inside him hurt, for he had
loved Arxoras then, loved his old teacher
deeply. And he loved him still, for all that he had
given, for the wisdom he had shown him, and the never-
failing luminous serenity of his spirit. Looking back
on those days, the hurt returned, but like a wound
which, after a time, scars over--a profound loneliness
that had replaced his longing for the old comfort of the
Consciousness Web.
The hurt changes, he thought to himself,
remembering the hideous burns the weapons of the
Hungries had left upon him, the twisted faces
of his comrades when he had found their shredded
bodies in the woodland glens. But it never
ceases to hurt. Sometimes even now, in this new,
sleek, alien body, it seemed that the scars
left on his old body, his real body--asleep
deep in its cave beneath the canyon rocks, and
tended by Yngash and Ka'th Ka'who his
accomplices and nest siblings--still ached.
As he entered the Healing Place, a glass
observation window caught his reflection,
clumsily elongated and huge in his dull and
ugly wrappings of yellow and black, with its
featureless little bulb of a head, its pathetic rag
of hair, its tiny and feeble hands. Yet at the
same time he saw, beyond the window, the woman
Chapel, and beside her the bed where the woman Helen
lay, and the alien flesh he inhabited warmed with the
thought of them.
No! he thought, in sickened disgust.
To want such as they--smelly, vapid,
lifeless ... But he did want them, with a
hunger that was not unlike a pallid echo of his own
desperation to join with the minds of his friends, with the minds
of his people, the true submersion in the caring and concern of
others.
Soon, he thought. Rhea, Mother Spirit,
soon ...
In the Special Observation Ward he saw the
woman Helen reach up and clasp Chapel by the
hands. They were speaking together, Chapel and this woman
whom they had told him was so ill that she could not be
left unattended; Helen gestured with her hands as
she spoke, and shook back the dark torrent of
her hair. They seemed almost like two people of his own
warren, happy together in one another's company, and
he hated them for that, hated them for having,
somehow, what he was denied.
No, he corrected himself. They do not have
it--had never had it--do not even understand what it is,
without the Consciousness Web. Through the glass he
heard their voices, faintly, though the hearing of the
Hungries was so thick it had taken him days
to get used to it.
"... shuttlecraft down to the surface. You
can wear one of my uniforms and get on early;
we'll need someone down there who understands a little of
what's going on. Do you feel up to it?"
"Pretty much." (they had told him, he
thought, that Kirk's woman was too far gone
to speak.) "Has any contact, anything at all,
been established?"
Chapel shook her head. "Uhura's been
trying since we came down out of warp speed. The
planet's on the fore viewscreens now, we'll
be making orbit in twelve hours. Not a sound.
She thought she might have picked up traces of an
ion trail from some other ship, but can't be sure
..."
Helen's face tightened with pain. "Dammit
... Nomias was a pain in the neck sometimes, but
the thought that even he might have met with some harm
... And Chu was like a mother to me."
"We'll be taking two security guards ...
Dr. McCoy thinks it's best," she added as
Helen made a quick gesture--like a denial,
Yarblis thought. "Whatever's going on down there,
we don't want to take chances ..."
Take them or not, he thought, it will do you
no good.
Quietly, he slipped away. So they
suspected, he thought. They--or Chapel on her
own, though most likely the physician was in it
too--were lying to him to keep him away from
Helen, and would lie tomorrow, to get her down to the
surface of the world and supposedly out of his reach.
Well, let them, he thought, ticking over
in his mind all he had studied, all he had
learned, about the ins and outs of this queer floating
warren, this terrible thing like a giant flendag nest
of metal, floating, as Arxoras had said, upon the
waters of eternal night. Twelve hours
... The part of him that was Kirk knew how long that
was, and something in him flinched i n agony. Every
hour, every minute, was a trial of endurance to him
now, a race against the pain of holding to this flesh
until his goal was accomplished, until
the world was finally made safe.
Whether or not the woman Helen went down to the
world with McCoy, he thought, they would still be caught
in the destruction he would cause; they would still die
in the midst of the terrible thing he knew he had to do.

Chapter Seventeen

"Where are they?" Helen ducked under the lintel
of the deserted hut. Ms. Oyama--one of the three
security personnel who had, against Helen's
better judgment, accompanied the shuttle party--
followed close at her heels, phaser in hand.
Latticed peach-colored daylight filtering through the
round window showed them the two piles of flattened
grasses that made up Thetas's bed and that of
Shorak and his wife. A bag of plaited vines
hung from one of the bent saplings that supported the
low ceiling of mud-covered thatch and daub. When
Helen had last seen it, it had contained the few
research items the party had used--tricorders,
the first aid and medicines--keeping them off the ground
and safe from dust and the local dirt crawlers. It
was empty now, as were the shelves that had held
spare clothing, the mini-computer, and the repair
kit. Like the Midgwins, Shorak and his party had
dispensed with bowls, pots, or dishes, and had
eaten the slender yield of the grasslands as Rhea
chose to give it.
It still seemed to Helen a reasonable thing to do,
if one were to live among these people as closely as
possible, a necessary procedure for a contact team.
She thought, I'll have to ask Chu how it is,
getting used to it, and then her lips tightened hard
at the thought of the austere little Chinese.
Dammit, please don't tell me she's
dead ...
She ducked again, to leave the hut.
"Nobody in there either," McCoy informed her,
gesturing toward the squat shape of the newer hut that
had been erected for Chu, Nomias, and, she
knew, herself. The daubing of the roof thatch had not
even been completed, and inside, the dust glittered
in a hundred mottled slits of uneven light.
"The beds look like they've been slept on, but
there's no bedding--the whole place has been
stripped."
"How could you tell?" Security Chief
DeSalle muttered, looking around him at the
stillness of the clearing. His red shirt, and
those of Oyama and Gomez, made dark
scarlet splashes against the purple-brown stems
of the surrounding thorn trees, the pale rocks in
the soft amber haze of the light. The savannah
beyond them stretched away to shimmering distance, harsh and
almost white with summer, marked here and there with the low
spinneys of dark foliage, the lumpish red-
barked barrel trees and the occasional insect
hill. Seeing it for the first time in daylight, Helen
realized how naked the landscape looked, like an
overgrazed pasturage, every food-bearing stem
picked clean. The air felt hot and close,
weighted with a soft humming that at first she thought must
be insects. Nothing moved except, far out over
the veldt, the indistinct, loping shapes of a
small herd of pfugux, with the attendant gray
rustle of small predators--licats or
sheefla in this country--gliding in their wake.
Then she remembered that Midgwis had no
flying insects.
"Could the Midgwins have overpowered them?"
Chapel asked, shading her eyes as she looked
around at the sun-drenched stillness.
Security Officer Gomez raised one
black brow. "Those little things?"
DeSalle shook his head. "If they did,
they did it without shedding anybody's blood," he
pointed out, squatting to study the ground around the
burned-out firepit. "These ashes are four,
five days old ..."
"Over here," McCoy said, beckoning from the
rear of the original hut.
There was a sort of alcove there, like a little shed
built of thorn stems and roofed with mud-daubed
grass. Helen remembered Thetas telling her that
though it was no secret to the folk of the Bindigo
Warren that the researchers had a transmitter, they
generally kept it out of sight to lessen the sense of
their alienness. What was heaped on a torn
blanket on the floor of the shelter was clearly the
remains of both the Institute's old subspace
transmitter and the newer device Chu and her party
had brought with them. Most of the parts were jumbled together
in the center of the blanket, mixed with dirt and
pebbles and twigs, but some had been neatly sorted
into a pile on either side.
"Old transmitter and the new," DeSalle
remarked, turning a flattened microchip over in
his fingers. "They were trying to repair them."
"Here's where it was done, sir,"
Oyama called from a dozen feet away, among
the boulders at the head of a nearby gully.
"Scratched-up branches used to lever it
to pieces, a couple of big rocks and a boulder
they pounded it on ..."
DeSalle went to check, leaving McCoy,
Chapel, and Helen--their blue Med Section
uniforms dyed a dull olive by the brazen light
--under Gomez's watchful care at the shed. He
came back with Oyama a few moments later,
saying, "By the scratches on the boulder, it
looks like it was done a week ago." He
frowned, and pushed back his thick, brown hair from
his forehead. In general he remained on board the
Enterprise, Captain Kirk preferring to head
planetary details himself. But like most
Security chiefs, he was meticulous and
observant, and a childhood spent on various
Class-3 colonies had given him considerable
experience in rough country, as well as a rather
empirical outlook on life.
Helen found herself wondering what the interloper,
the pseudo-Kirk, had told him, to justify the
departure from the norm. Technically, of course,
any senior officer could head a landing party--some
ships in the fleet routinely assigned the job
to the Science officer (who might or might not be
second-in-command). It was, in fact,
largely a matter of temperament who headed landing
parties, and among the senior officers of any
starship, it was generally obvious who should be doing the
job. Kirk was one of the few captains who made
a habit of taking the position himself, because, as
he'd told her once, he wanted to have firsthand knowledge
of the situation if it turned ticklish. ("The
hell you do." Helen had grinned up at him,
lying against the hard muscles of his chest, and had
reached up to tweak a lock of his hair. "You just
can't stand to be left out of things." And he'd
grinned back, and confessed, "Well ... that
too.")
She looked at DeSalle now, over the
smashed remains of the transmitters, and his face
was grim. "By the tracks, there were two or three
of them ..."
"You said Geshkerroth had accomplices in the
warren," McCoy murmured to Helen, and she
nodded.
"Looks like they did it as soon as the
Enterprise was well away,"
DeSalle remarked, and cast another glance up
the narrow path through the thorn trees to the towering
rocks around the box canyon, his light eyes
narrowed. "I think it's time we went up to this
warren of theirs."
"No," Helen said quickly. She shuddered at the
thought of what Shorak would say to the armed invasion
of the warren whose trust he'd worked so desperately
to win. "I'll go ... alone. These people could barely
be talked into having researchers here at all;
they're very much of two minds about any kind of
contact with the Federation ..."
"Looks like they came to some kind of decision,"
McCoy remarked grimly.
Their eyes met, his wary, warning. Helen
remembered Yarblis, and the fanatic, haggard
gleam in the eyes of the man who had once been
Jim Kirk as his face bent over hers.
Remembered the shut door of the shuttle bay, the
red bar of lights over it; remembered the blinding
sense of total evil that had wakened her from her
dreams. Remembered, too, that Yarblis had
accomplices in the warren of whose capabilities
--and intentions--she was ignorant. But she
remembered also Shorak's reports, the
painstaking patience required to establish contact
with the Midgwins at all. It had been almost
axiomatic in every class she'd taken how
easily a careless word, an action wrongly
performed, could give everyone in the community under
study a contempt, or a fear, or a distrust of the
researchers, which would take months or years
to repair. Shorak had begged Kirk not to send
security down on the Enterprise's first
reconnaissance of the planet. We're having
enough problems getting them to distinguish between you and the
Klingons as it is, he had said.
"No," she said, shaking her head so that her
thick, dark braid slapped at her shoulders.
"I'll be careful--I won't approach the
place unless it looks safe. But I need
to talk to Arxoras, and I'm not going to undo
everything Shorak and his party worked for by walking into the
warren with a bunch of armed guards."
"Let me follow you, then," DeSalle said
reasonably. "I'll keep my distance in the
bush, if it looks like I won't be needed. There
may be a perfectly simple explanation for this.
But until I know what it is, I don't want
any of us going around alone."

"Spock!" The urgency in the captain's
voice broke him sharply from his meditations--
meditations he was certain he would need, as much as
he would need the information on Midgwis that he had
managed to dig out of the computer's backup
memory. Rising from his kneeling position on his
blankets, he crossed swiftly to the worktable,
the screens of all three terminals dimly glowing
in the low light.
"Yes, Captain?"
"Computer sensory cutoff on Deck Five.
The whole area's blacked out of communication."
"Officers' quarters," Spock said
automatically, cutting in the second screen.
"Also all emergency battery rooms for the pri-
mary hull, upper phaser banks, and air-cir-
culation systems for decks One through Seven ..."
It was odd, thought Spock, to hear a computer
swear.
"Where does the cut-through have to be, Spock? The
auxiliary lines have to have been severed as well
..."
"Once out of the dorsal column, access
tubes Four and Seven," the Vulcan said after
only a moment's hesitation--having logically
deduced the danger areas for sabotage, he had
taken the precaution of refreshing his own memory
of the schematics of the ship. "Though with a cutoff from
computer sensors, I doubt that Mr. Scott's
repair crew can find the breaks before Yarblis
makes his move."
"Particularly since we've taken the
precaution of keeping his best assistant under
sedation? You may be right ... I've patched through.
Mr. Scott?"
There was no hookup to hear the engineer's
reply, but a moment later Kirk said, "We've
got a report of computer blackout of Deck
Five, main system and auxiliary as well
..."
Spock, knowing the Scots engineer, could almost
hear his shocked protests of there being no way it
could happen short of--
"I thought that too. Get some personnel to find
the cut, but more important, get whoever you can to the
air-circ pumps and the battery rooms to check for
possible malfunctions there as well."
Aye, Captain, thought Spock, mentally
providing the other half of the conversation, and
nodded concise approval to himself for the captain's
deft manipulation of the voder mechanisms, which
permitted him to transmit his own voice over the
comm link. He had learned quickly.
"With the personnel at Mr. Scott's
disposal," he remarked, "the chances are at least
twelve to one against finding any act of sabotage
in so many areas before it happens--forty-three or more
to one against if Yarblis attempts something
outside the immediate area of the life-support
system."
"Greater than that," Kirk said grimly.
"What would you do if you were some Engineering ensign
checking around an emergency battery and you met the
captain of the vessel down there and he said,
"I've already checked this area, you go that way and
check out the latrines.""
Spock raised a brow. "I see,
Captain, that I am not the only senior officer
of this vessel who would make an efficient
criminal. Since the order of probability is
high that the threat will involve Life Support,
if you will excuse me, I will take the precaution
of securing an oxygen mask from the nearest
emergency station." He paused by the corner of the
worktable to check the small hand screen that was
currently monitoring the sensors at either end of the
corridor, then worked the lever to open the bulkhead
and slip out. Moving with quick stealth, he slipped
down the hallway to the emergency station at the foot
of the gangway by the doors of the deserted
cargotransporter room.
Even in the middle of the main shift, no one was
there--the room was seldom in use and Kirk, from his
position in the computer, would have picked up any
communication requesting bulk shipment from the
surface. Still, he listened carefully from the
shadows before moving into the open. It would scarcely
do, he thought, for reports of sightings of his own
ghost to follow so hard upon those of the ship
poltergeist.
The emergency station was recessed behind a panel
in the bulkhead beside the turbolift doors.
Spock glanced swiftly in one direction, then
the other, listening especially for the sound of the
turbolift descending. But all was still. With the
small sonic extractor he'd brought with him,
he unfastened the alarm panel that would have registered
breakage of the safety seals on the station itself, then
opened the panel and took a mask from the
neat row within.
The oxygen bottle attached was empty.
Frowning at the carelessness of the Security patrol
responsible for checking such things--though it was easy
enough to neglect, down at this untenanted level--
he replaced it, drew out another ...
And that bottle, too, was empty. All of the
eight in the station bore the small red gauge
light of critically low supply.
And all of them had been turned so that those
lights would not show through the clear plex inspection
port on the bulkhead.
He prowls the ship all night, Uhura
had said.
His heart cold within him, Spock strode
back to the concealed hull section. McCoy was on
the planet. So were Chapel and Helen. Uhura
would be on the bridge at this time, though it was a
safe guess that Yarblis would not ... not if he
was working his way systematically from air-circulation
pump to air-circulation pump, directing
ingenuous ensigns to investigate latrines while
he himself sabotaged the oxygen of the entire ship
...
"Lieutenant Uhura?"
"What is it, sir?" Her voice was normal
and absolutely calm, though she had to be aware
that he wouldn't contact her on the bridge, even
using the doctored communicators, without urgent
need.
"Is Yarblis on the bridge?"
"No, sir, he isn't."
"It appears likely that there is going to be an
attempt on the ship's oxygen systems within the
next fifteen minutes." That was the soonest,
Spock estimated, allowing for the minutes occupied
by his own check of the emergency station, that major
damage to the air-circulation pumps could be done,
even by someone who knew what he was doing, as
Yarblis by this time undoubtedly did. "It also
appears that some, if not all, of the oxygen masks
in the emergency stations have been tampered with. Bring
as many operative ones as you can locate down
to Deck Twenty-three immediately."
"Yes, sir. Right away, sir. Should I
contact Security, sir?"
"And tell them what, Lieutenant?" Spock
inquired a touch acidly. "That someone who has
been in clandestine hiding in an illegally
pressurized hull section containing
misappropriated Starfleet property
alleges that the captain of the vessel is about
to commit an act of sabotage? And in any
case, we have no proof of what is about to occur."
"Very well, sir," Uhura replied in her
most neutral tones. "I'll see to it at
once."
"And let's hope," the Kirk voice
remarked from the computer as Spock keyed off, "that
she doesn't meet me in the turbolift on the
way down."

The soft humming that filled the air grew
stronger as Helen climbed the path from the Research
Institute's little clearing among the thorn trees
to the tall rocks surrounding the Bindigo Warren
itself. She and DeSalle walked half bent
over, keeping to such cover as they could; the
Midgwins, of course, with their short stature and
tough hides, found in the shoulder-high thorn forest
more than adequate concealment from the airborne
Hootings, the long-necked and thoroughly
repulsive predators of this part of the world. The
Flaygrubs, the major predators of the planet
--for years regarded, along with the Bargumps, as
its predominant life-form--were seldom to be
found this far south in the relatively waterless
savannahs; the only real dangers to the
Midgwins in their clustering warrens of mud
shelters were the licats, shaggy and long-bodied and
hideously fast. Helen recalled in Shorak's
preliminary report an account of an attack
by a pack of them on the Bindigo Warren; how the
Midgwins had crawled to safety in the tall
rocks of the canyon and had huddled, jammed together
in their thousands, for most of the day in thirst and hunger
until the predators had gone away. He had
noted that Arxoras and the other patriarchs had
forbidden the researchers to defend the warren, and
Shorak, as any researcher would have, had agreed,
even at the risk of his own life.
Helen hoped no ill had now befallen them.
The hot gold sun beat upon her face, warming
her; she had forgotten how much she missed the touch
of air moving on her skin. Whatever was going on
here, whatever peril had cleared the research camp,
here on this planet she felt a curious sense of
release. Here, at least, she would be in no
danger of meeting that terrible pseudo-Kirk, the
very sight of whom made her flesh
crawl.
We have to find Arxoras, she thought, striding
up the dusty path. Patriarch and
memmietieff, he will know what to do, how
to return Jim to being who he was ...
The soft humming increased, a curious
sweetness in the dusty air. To her nostrils
came the musky pungency of the Midgwins themselves,
and another sound, the dry, scaly rubbing of their
hides that she associated with the whisper of the night
wind in the long white grasses, the deep scents
of evening on the veldt.
She realized then what the humming had to be.
The entire population of the warren, nearly ten
thousand of the pear-shaped, wrinkled little Midgwins,
were formed in the thick concentric rings of the
Consciousness Web, skeletal hands entwined,
round eyes closed, rocking gently from side
to side and humming in the thrall of their dreams. The
delicate folds of their faces, the wrinkles
of the skin around the little beaks of their mouths, were
utterly relaxed. Hot sun shone on the knobby
little purple-brown shoulders beneath the long cloaks
of spidery hair, and the golden air seemed
to pulse with some alien peace, some deep union
born of contentment and the acceptance of fate.
Helen signed to DeSalle to remain where he
was, and stepped clear of the shelter of the thorn
trees. None of the Midgwins opened its eyes,
or seemed to hear, despite the fact that she
knew that licats hunted during the day, and that the
Midgwins generally posted guards to flash
telepathic warning signals from the rocks above the
camps. But she saw no such guards. No sound
broke the amber brightness of the afternoon, save for the
deep, purring hum of the web.
As quietly as she could, Helen walked toward
the thick-braided lines of bodies and arms.
The patriarchs of the warren, she knew, started the
web, sitting in its center, near the rocks that
marked the village spring. She could get nowhere
near that point, so close were the Midgwins packed
around it, but she climb ed up on one of the immense,
bubble-shaped red boulders that littered the ground
all around the warren, and from that vantage point
scanned the purple-brown faces near the center
for the telltale white muzzles of the patriarchs,
and most particularly for Arxoras's milk-white
hair.
But nowhere did she see him, or any
other of the old ones of the group. And, if she
remembered Shorak's reports correctly, it
was most unusual for the warren to enter web in the
daytime, when the danger of predation was greater and the
sun shined so hotly down. Yet even the children of the
warren were there, rocking and swaying in the lines beside
their parents, infants rolled close in their fathers'
pouches--not an unusual circumstance for a web,
she thought, but the children, being without armor and unable
to run, generally stayed in shelter during the day.
Her sense of foreboding increased. She dropped
back off the rock and returned to where DeSalle
waited in the shadows of a barrel tree a dozen
yards beyond the warren's edge. "He isn't there,"
she said softly, wondering what the hell they were
going to do now. Surely Yarblis couldn't have
gotten rid of all the patriarchs ...
DeSalle frowned, recognizing the anomaly
even from the little he knew about Midgwin society.
"Is there any way we can wake one of them up
and ask?"
Helen shook her head. "They're not really
asleep ... and I doubt that we could bring one of
them out of it, or that doing so would be a good idea.
Thetas told me they stay in the web for three or
four hours at a time, sometimes longer ... I
don't know whether any of them ever tried to break
into the trance. It would be horribly bad manners
at the very least ... I'm not even sure whether it
might be dangerous."
DeSalle's mouth twitched. "Sounds counter-
evolutionary to me," he commented, scanning the harsh
thorn jungle around them as they turned back down
the trail. "As far as I can tell, there are no
guards posted, no lookouts ..."
Helen shook her head. "I didn't see
any, and Shorak said there usually are in the daytime.
It's odd ..." She looked back over her
shoulder at the tight-crowded bodies, rocking
gently like the lapping of a calm sea, her heart
sinking within her. Her boots scuffed the thin dust
of the trail, the scent of it mingling with the dry,
strange smells of the thorn jungle, of the spring
around which the warren was built. Curious, she thought,
how the village itself didn't stink, the way so many
tribal villages did--the Midgwins were
fanatically clean. With that heavy a population,
she thought, you'd have to be, if only to avoid disease
and drawing predators to the spot ...
"It's odd that they'd be holding web
in the daytime," she said after a moment, her
anthropological training puzzling over the
problem even in the face of what might mean
serious trouble--for Jim, for the ship, for them all.
"And odder still that the patriarchs would be gone."
DeSalle was scanning the low thickets around
them as they walked, his phaser held ready, his
eyes narrowed against the hazy golden light. "One
might have something to do with the other."
"Maybe," Helen agreed worriedly. "And
both might have to do with--"
They stepped into the clearing in front of the
Research Institute and stopped dead. Standing in
front of Shorak's hut, wearing the mottled
gray-and-bronze camouflage of a battlefield
unit, were two Klingons.

Chapter Eighteen

"Attention ... Intruder alert! Repeat,
intruder alert! Red Alert!" Pacing the narrow
confines of the hull compartment, Spock looked up
sharply at the sound of the captain's voice.
"All Security personnel report for search
of decks Fifteen, Sixteen, and Nineteen
immediately! Repeat, all Security personnel
report for search of--"
"Is that you, Captain?" He turned
swiftly back to the computer. "What proof have you
that--"
"It's not me," replied Kirk's voice from
the voder. "It's the false me--or the real me,
whichever way you want to look at it. The computer
wouldn't have accepted a voder voice for an Alert
command--that's one thing you can't tamper with either."
"Of course not ..." Spock frowned. "Nor
could it have been overridden. An attempt to throw
Mr. Scott off the track, and to divert
personnel from a search of Deck Five and the
air-circulation equipment on Eight ..."
The warning light Uhura had installed blinked
suddenly on. Spock crossed to the locked
bulkhead in a stride, listened, and recognized
Lieutenant Uhura's characteristic swift step,
but native caution made him wait until she
herself opened the panel.
"These were all I could find on Deck Four."
She held out three masks to him. "I couldn't
wait to search further, but everything on the bridge
level and the Science section has been
emptied." Her dark eyes were wide and grave in
the flashing red light of the hall outside. "I'm
going back up--if there's going to be a
pressure drop, some kind of alarm has to be
sounded, and I don't care how much trouble we get
inffbecause of it."
"I agree," the Science officer said, taking
the masks--triangular face shields of the
immemorial pattern equipped with small
bottles of highly reduced oxygen and a CO;
[This formula is written in Nemeth Code]
filter system--and hooking their straps to the
utility satchel he had had with him during the
sweep. "And I believe that it is now incumbent
upon me to come with you. There is little to be gained by my
further concealment, since I believe that,
logically, Yarblis has violated any further
possibility of retaining the illusion of
normalcy on this ship."
Uhura rolled her eyes. "Yes, I'd
say that when the entire life-support system
goes down, that does blow the illusion of
normalcy ..."
Spock paused in the act of gathering tools and
slipping them into the satchel at his side.
"Remember that even if there were a major
rupture in the pressure skin of the ship, or a
serious drop in pressure, the bulkhead seals
would activate automatically to contain the danger
areas. In the event of pump failure,
sufficient oxygen would remain in the ship to permit
evacuation to the planet long before the emergency
masks would be needed. The fact that the masks were
tampered with indicates--"
"Spock ..." Kirk's voice from the voder
cut into his. "We've got another blackout
... on the Auxiliary Phaser deck, this time.
All computer control to the main phaser banks
has been cut."
Dimly, from the corridor, a warning siren
hooted; Spock stepped to the bulkhead and put his
ear to the thick wall, listening through it--Uhura
shouldered him aside and opened the bulkhead a
slit so that she too could hear. Through the crack the
red flash of emergency lights spilled over their
faces like intermittent lightning.
"Pressure drop alert," the computer's
female voice intoned. "Pressure drop
alert on decks Nine and Ten ... Emergency
situation on decks Seven and Eight.
Immediate evacuation procedures on decks Seven
and Eight ..."
Uhura swore.
"Sickbay," Spock said. "Main
transporter room, galley facilities,
Security, all recreation areas--"
"Spock!" Kirk's voice called out of the
computer. "Get to the bridge! Internal sensors
are picking up coolant gas flooding those
decks!"
"I shall contact you from there, Captain." Spock
slung on the satchel and, with Uhura at his
heels, strode out of the bulkhead room, locking
its hidden panel behind them. As they hastened through the
flaring splash of emergency lights toward the forward
turbolift, Spock conducted a rapid mental
inventory of his tools and the time it would take him
to use them, to break through the sealed pressure
doors, to repair whatever had been Yarblis's
precise target. He wondered too, as he and
Uhura rounded the corner, whether the temperature
controls had been likewise sabotaged, and how
long the hulls would retain heat.
He stopped before the doors of the turbolift.
Nothing happened.
The turbolifts were dead.

"We arrived not more than forty-eight hours after
Dr. Chu's transport ship departed," Commander
Khoaltar said, shaking his head politely as
Dr. McCoy waved him toward a seat on one
of the log seats around the Research Institute's
long-cold fire. "No, thank you ... we have
better means of displaying our civilization than
by sitting in the mud with the ... I suppose they must
be called "natives" now, instead of "local
fauna," since the United Contact Council
seems disposed to vote with the Pan-Sentients."
He rubbed his slender hands--he was small, almost
delicate looking, and his bronze-and-black
field-combat uniform was foppishly neat. But
there was something in the dark eyes that told a different
story McCoy reflected that he wouldn't have
wanted to have to patch up what was left of anyone
foolish enough to pick a fight with this man. Among the
several combat badges on his sleeve was the
small gold insignia of a high-ranking scholar.
"Oddly enough," the Klingon added, looking around
him at the circle of Enterprise medical and
security personnel, "I'm beginning
to believe that such a designation might be
correct."
"Now, whatever led you to that conclusion?" McCoy
asked sarcastically.
"And what happened to Dr. Chu and the others?"
Helen put in, sitting on the log at the
doctor's side. She looked exhausted, even
from the short walk up the trail. Though she could not
have been left on the ship, McCoy thought, she
should have remained on the shuttlecraft to rest.
"Did you ..." She hesitated.
"... have anything to do with it?" Khoaltar raised
one carefully trimmed brow. "In a manner of
speaking, yes."
"We can surely find a more comfortable place
to discuss this than here," his companion added, a
taller and somewhat older man named Urak. He
was more obviously a scholar, despite the mottled
camouflage garb. Probably, thought McCoy,
a civilian who'd been pushed through the same kind
of remedial physical training he'd had to put
up with when he'd joined the fleet. "Our own
research station is just on the far side of the hill;
though it's not completely set up yet, we can at
least offer you chairs to sit in, and something
civilized to drink."
DeSalle shook his head. "I think we'll
stay here, thanks." Oyama and Gomez,
unobtrusively stationed a short distance away in
the brush, were visible from the camp but too far off
to be caught in any single line of fire. Though
DeSalle had appeared to accept completely the
Klingons' assurances of peaceful intent, he
wasn't a man to take chances.
"We'd need to in any case," Helen added
quietly, "as we need to speak with the patriarchs
of the warren as soon as they come out of their trance."
"Don't plan on it being soon," Khoaltar
warned, folding up his slender form to sit on the
logs at McCoy's side. "They've been in
that trance, on and off, for over a week now, ever
since news of the plague reached them."
McCoy and Chapel glanced at each other.
"Plague?"
"In, I believe it is called, the
Walpuk Warren," the Klingon said. "It lies
downriver not far from here--I suspect they will be
returning at any time now. We had been here, as
I said, less than twenty-four hours when word
first reached the patriarchs here of it. They
must have meditated, trying to heal from a distance, as it
is their belief that they can do ..."
"I think it's more than a belief," Helen
remarked softly.
"But less than a certainty," Khoaltar
replied, "as even they were willing to admit after a
day and a night. There is only so much one can do
against the effects of prolonged starvation and
undernourishment ..."
McCoy's fist clenched sharply on his knee.
"Dammit, I tried to tell Thetas that ..."
"He did not disbelieve you, Doctor," the
Klingon replied in his soft voice. The slim
brown hand picked up a twig from the ground,
scratched a random, shuffling pattern in the
sulfur-colored dust. A crimson lizard
skittered along the thorn stem behind him, regarding
the strangers with a bobbing blossom of stalked,
black, hysterical eyes. From the warren the soft
hum of the web continued, gentle and buzzing in the
heavy heat of the afternoon.
"And in time, even the Midgwins themselves
apparently believed. Because their patriarchs went
to Dr. Shorak asking for his assistance in the
matter--medical assistance, and technical knowledge,
for a matter which, for the first time, was beyond the limitations
of whatever psychic powers these creatures may
possess."
McCoy sighed bitterly. "I told him.
I told him it was only a matter of time ..."
Helen looked curiously across at the slender
form in its mottled black and bronze, sitting,
almost invisible, in the harsh patchwork of shadows at
Dr. McCoy's side. "But Shorak didn't
have anything in the way of medicines," she said.
"Medical knowledge, yes; L'jian is a doctor.
But not the medicines, the antibiotics necessary to stem
that kind of an outbreak. It was their commitment
to living truly among these people, to teaching them and working
with them. Even L'jian couldn't have done more than
advise."
"No," agreed Urak, from his standing position,
gently stroking his short, soft black beard, behind
his aristocratic colleague's shoulder. "He
couldn't. However, we had no such commitment ...
and we did happen to have a certain amount of pan-
biotic medicines, as well as concentrated
nutrients to temporarily combat the starvation in that
area of the planet that was one of the chief causes of the
plague."
"And you gave it to them?" McCoy asked,
deeply suspicious.
"We are not monsters, Doctor," Khoaltar
replied with a haughty inclination of his head. "As
well as researchers, we are in a way of being
diplomats. And, since the United Council
seems disposed to regard the Midgwins as
sentient, and will very likely so vote, it behooves
us to present our own case for the development of this
planet in the best possible light. Very likely
we will be censured by the eistry of Expansion for
wasteful expenditure but in ten years, or
twenty, it may be an investment that will pay
well."
"Then it wasn't you who wrecked the
transmitter?" Chapel asked doubtfully.
Khoaltar turned upon her a smile of
surprising sweetness. "My dear lady," he
said, "if a Klingon wishes to wreck a
transmitter, believe me, he will go about it with more
efficiency than a wooden lever and a rock. According
to Dr. Thetas--who for the first day of our stay here was
the only member of the Federation party who did not
avoid us with hostile glares--both
transmitters were found demolished the morning after
you left the planet. I suspect that after a
state of d@etente was reached, Dr. Shorak would
have unbent sufficiently to request the use of our
transmitter--he is shockingly prejudiced for a
Vulcan."
"That may have something to do with his wife's sister
having been taken prisoner at the battle of
Plethak," DeSalle remarked, and Khoaltar
made a deprecating gesture with the twig he still
held in one graceful hand.
"As I myself was only five years old at the
time of that battle, I would not know," he said.
"Urak, perhaps you would care to go back to the
encampment and bring us all something to drink? Mr.
DeSalle, if you find this activity
suspicious--as you very well may, this being a
disputed world--you may wish to send one of your
guards, either with him or behind him. But I assure
you that if we were to destroy your party--and if we had
destroyed Dr. Shorak's earlier--the
consequences to us would be ... unpleasant in the
extreme."
"From the Federation? Or the Organians?"
McCoy asked thoughtfully, as DeSalle nodded
to Oyama to follow the Klingon at a
careful distance, back through the hot, spiky fringes
of the bush, toward the site of their alleged research
camp. "Or from your own Emperor, for complicating
an already complicated situation?"
Khoaltar was silent for a few moments, dark
eyes returning to the patterns he sketched, with a
calligrapher's light hand, in the dust. Then he
said, "All three, certainly, but ..." He
glanced up, and there was worry in the onyx gaze.
"But mostly from the Midgwins themselves."

"Damn you, man, what d'you mean, the
programmin's been blanked?" Scotty shouted
into the intercom on the emergency bridge, his
accent, like McCoy's southern drawl, becoming
far more marked under stress. "It's a bluidy
utility program, man!" His blunt fingers
stabbed another toggle as lights on the small
unit on the arm of the chair in which he sat--the
captain's chair, smaller than the one on the
main bridge, but like it, equipped with full input
from every intercom on the ship--flared on again.
Sulu's voice was clipped and terse with
tension. "Mr. Scott? Any word from the
captain? We've got everything below Deck Six
evacuated--we're running an accountability
check ..."
"To hell with the accountability check, are you
gettin' the air-circ feeds straightened out?"
"As well as we can, sir. But they were booby-
trapped--as far as we can tell, they were set up
to reroute the xyrene gas until the doors of the
systems rooms were opened--then they blew.
We've got Bray on repair of one of them,
and he says the damage isn't too bad ...
Can you get up here?"
"And how am I to do that with the turbolifts shut
down and Deck Seven swamped in gas? You know
there isn't a--" He broke off and swung around
as there was a stir in the crowd around the emergency
doors into the bridge. The crowd of security
personnel, originally sent to chase the putative
intruder from decks 15, 16, and 19, had been
gathered on the auxiliary bridge--which was far too
small to hold that many people--ever since the start of the
alert, unable to make their way back to the primary
hull where the trouble now seemed to be. The harried
engineer opened his mouth to demand who the hell that
was, and left it open.
"Status report, Mr. Scott?"
It was the late Mr. Spock, looking very much
his usual calm Vulcan self, with a flustered and
rather rumpled Lieutenant Uhura in tow.
After one swift gulp of astonishment,
Scotty vacated the command chair, in which Mr.
Spock seated himself as if he had never been on
the shuttlecraft deck in his life. "All
turbolifts are out, sir," he reported,
making a heroic recovery. "The engineer in
Turbo Control reports the operations program
that guides them has been taken out of the computer--not
only the main computer, but the backups as well.
We've had power blackouts all over the ship--
all owin' to cuts in the communications lines ...
decks Seven and Eight are flooded with xyrene,
and there doesn't seem to be a full oxygen
mask on the ship ..."
"Leaving the auxiliary phaser controls
isolated at the bottom of the primary hull,"
Mr. Spock concluded. "Can the turbolifts be
operated manually?"
Scott shook his head. "Not a chance, Mr.
Spock. And the captain's gone missing ..."
"Mr. Spock ..." Kirk's voice cut
in from the intercom on the arm of the chair, and even with the
flattened quality of the speaker, Spock's
sensitive hearing identified the limited range
of a voder-manufactured artificial voice.
"Yes, Captain?"
"I've found it. Among the programs
Yarblis copied for his own reference onto wafer
was the entire inventory of all the main phaser-
bank programs. He can now upload them into a
590-capacity or higher portable computer--of which
the ship has two, and three 670's, counting the
one Miller borrowed to program Brunowski's
remixer ..."
"Captain," Mr. Scott broke in, "where
are you? They've been lookin' high and low for ye
..."
"I'm quite safe, Mr. Scott, but I'm
trapped where I am on Deck Eight," he
replied, quite truthfully. "You've done an
excellent job of coping with this--t hank you ..."
"And who's this Yarblis fellow?"
"The intruder," Kirk said quietly. "The
intruder who has been with us since Midgwis
... an intruder who may very well be capable of
mimicking my voice. He has, as I have said,
every ability to take over the main phaser
deck now. And by linking back the program into the
phaser controls at their source, he can either use
the phaser banks himself ... or override the
damper backups, and blow up the ship."

"Do you know, Doctor, what it was that disposed us
to take seriously the claims that the Midgwins were
sentient at all, and not the ... subsentient
primate species that everyone--including Federation
researchers--originally thought they were?"
McCoy glanced back up the path in the
direction of the towering rocks that marked the warren.
The soft, humming coo of the Consciousness Web could
still be heard, though it was growing softer now, sinking
into a whisper. He remembered the preliminary
reports which described it as herd behavior,
possibly having something to do with mating or the
protection of the old and the infants of the warrens, for
those were the ones closest to the centers of the webs.
Even after Dr. Shorak had discovered the largely
telepathic nature of Midgwin communication, the
Klingons had continued to claim that the Consciousness
Web was more analogous to the swarming instincts of
various forms of hymenoptera or espikotherae
than to anything relating to sentient beings.
"Because they were able to kill your scouts?" He had
begun to speak sarcastically, but didn't, for it
suddenly occurred to him that such might very well have
been the thing that had won the Klingons' respect.
"Not the fact in itself," Khoaltar said. "That
definition would qualify Denebian slime
devils for sentience--though I do not doubt that there
are some bleeding hearts in the Pan-Sentient
League who eventually will attempt to claim
exactly that, and file suit against everyone who
has mined the swamps of Deneb Cantios Four
for violation of the Prime Directive. But the
way in which that killing was done."
DeSalle, who had been leaning against the
trunk of one of the stunted trees and
unobtrusively watching the 360-range sensor
in his palm, frowned. "I thought they were just
reported as ... killed."
The Klingon shook his head. "There is evidence
that one or more Midgwins ... in effect, took
mental possession of the bodies of members of the
scouting parties. This we have deduced from analysis
of transmissions of the various parties' reports.
It appears that at least some of the Midgwins could--
possess--control--our men, knowing what
they knew, understanding what they would have understood. And
thus disguised, they bided their time, and waited for
unguarded moments."
"Yes," McCoy said softly. "Yes ...
I know."
DeSalle looked startled--Khoaltar
turned his head sharply, his dark eyes narrowing.
"Do you?"
But McCoy made no further reply. After
a moment Khoaltar continued, "But you see,
to understand, and to use, the information they found within their
victims' minds, they had to be ... sentient,
surely. And almost certainly intelligent. And
to tell you the truth, Doctor ... in spite of the
fact that it is our mission to learn as much about them
as possible, to establish communication and trade with
them if we can, I am just as glad that they have kept
their distance from us."

Chapter Nineteen

"You're sure this is how you want to do this,
Mr. Spock?" Scotty's voice echoed
strangely in the long, narrow hull of the machinery
room which ran the length of the Engineering hull's
uppermost level--Deck 15, whose dim shadows
pulsed with the faint throb of the air-circulation
machinery for all the decks below, and whose curving
walls seemed to reverberate with the power of the twin
engine nacelles on their pylons far above. "I
mean, I could handle the repair of those air
pumps mesel' and let you take a security
guard with you instead of me bringin' along Bistie
to make my job quicker."
Spock shook his head, and slipped the oxygen
mask down over his eyes and nose, transforming his
head, in the uncertain light, into a strange
insectoid shape of straps and bulbs and
monstrous, crystalline eyes. "Repair of the
air-circulation system is of the first priority,"
he said, "followed, as quickly as possible, with the
reprogramming of the turbolifts. From there help
can be gotten to us."
"But if the captain's trapped on Deck
Eight--that area of the ship's flooded with gas."
His dark eyes were filled with concern.
"The captain is quite safe where he is,"
Spock replied evenly, and turning from the
still-baffled chief engineer and his assistant--one of the
few who could repair one air system
unaided while Scott worked on the other--he
opened the repair hatch that let into the food
conveyor which ran all the way up from the main
recycling plant on Deck 21 up to Deck
8. He switched on the sharp white beam of his
mask light, contemplated the narrow, pitch-dark,
and rather slimy tube with its linked ladder of
bucketlike carriers, and with stoic distaste
climbed in.
In any environment but that of a starship, he
thought, rapidly ascending the steep-slanted
tunnel by means of the stilled conveyor chains, such
a place would invariably have been the haunt of
both vermin and molds of every description.
Despite meticulous sealing and sterilization
procedures, the place seemed to be faintly
coated with a thin organic residue, the dark
semiliquid of pure CHON that could be
theoretically recombined to form anything from the most
delicate of blancmanges to Romulan chili,
though in practice the results were frequently
less than inspired. Spock was well aware that
the stuff was perfectly clean, and that neither rats,
nor insects, nor Antraean garbage
worms, nor molds of any kind, existed on the
ship ... nevertheless, the long, dripping passage
stretching away into the darkness above him looked like the
sort of place that might contain all of them. He
was glad he was wearing his oxygen mask. Pure
CHON might be absolutely clean and
healthful, but its odor was scarcely aesthetic.
Moreover, there was no telling how far the
coolant gas had leaked down the tube from Deck
8.
Xyrene gas was heavy and tended to flow
downward; the first drifts and filaments of it were
detectable in the glow of his mask light and the
crisscrossed, swaying beams of Scott's and
Bistie's, four or five meters below the place
where the tunnel itself leveled out to pass above the
remixer room in the primary hull. By the time they
reached the level stretch, the concentration was high
enough, according to the gauge of Spock's tricorder,
to have caused unconsciousness and rapid death in
anyone breathing it. The deck below them must be
heavily flooded.
"There should be another repair hatch about five
meters ahead," came Scott's voice in his
earphone.
Spock moved his head; the beam of his
mask light flashed across the access port, through
whose unsealed edges the pink gas was leaking in a
wavering veil. "I see it," he replied.
"Mr. Scott, I believe matters would
proceed most expeditiously if you and Ms.
Bistie both proceeded up the gangways
to Deck Five and effected repairs on the
pumps controlling Deck Seven, rather than
attempting to repair those on this level that control
the decks below."
"I'm not sure I've got enough oxygen in this
little bottle to do a major repair anyway,"
came Bistie's voice through Spock's
earphone.
"Indeed. I shall proceed downward to the main
phaser deck ..." He opened the hatchway and
put his head cautiously through. With the failure of the
pumps, the lights had cut out too. Only the
ghastly reddish glare of the emergency systems
glowed, intermittently illuminating a hellish
swamp of shifting pink mists drifting between the dark
islands of the remixers below. Spock reached up
to adjust the beam of his mask lamp to widest
scan. It showed him no danger, and his sensitive
hearing picked up no sound of footfall or
breath. Sitting up cautiously in the narrow
space, he dangled his legs through the aperture,
let himself carefully down by his hands, and
dropped.
"You be careful, Mr. Spock." Scotty
dropped down after him, his red uniform shirt, his
trousers, his hands and face--where his face could be
seen through the strapwork of the mask that covered it--all
smeared with a brownish film of CHON in the
bloody glare. "I don't want to be losin'
you again before I hear how you got out of that hangar
deck in the first place."
"It was elementary, my dear Mr. Scott
..." They halted before the emergency gangways that
ran up either side of the silent turbolift shaft
--massive pressure doors had slipped from the
walls to seal them off. "The pressure drop, of
course," Scott muttered, unshipping the pin
laser from the utility satchel he wore and going
to one knee to begin cutting at the locks. "And good
odds the one above this'll be the same ..."
"As indeed it should," Spock replied
austerely. "They are designed to prevent loss
of atmosphere, or, conversely, the sort of
contamination that would occur were the deck above
us not already thoroughly flooded."
"But it means the deck bel'll be sealed too.
Shall I come down with you to cut that?"
There was a swift crackle of the intercom near
the turbolift door--Kirk's voice came
on, the voder voice, the computer voice, as far
as Spock could tell. Of course, he thought. From
the safety of the computer, the captain was perfectly
capable of tracking them through the in-ship comm link.
"It'll take too long," Kirk cut in
crisply. "The hull storage compartment behind the
forward emergency transporter room has been
pressurized, and there's a trap down into a hull
section below that--also pressurized--and one below that.
They're a littl e cold, but they're livable. That'll
put you on Deck Ten, below the level of the
pressure drop ..."
"Pressurized a hull section?" Scott
demanded, shocked that anyone would take such
liberties with his beloved ship. "Now who the
divil ...?"
"Just don't trip over Mr. Gilden's
collection of magazines--we owe him that at
least."
"Very good, Captain." Spock switched off the
comm link and turned to Scott. "Get Deck
Seven cleared and bring Security through to the phaser
deck as quickly as you can," he said, his deep
voice quiet. "If you have any communication from the
captain while you are repairing the pumps ..."
He hesitated, wondering what he would do if the
pseudo-Kirk started giving orders again.
Wondering what he would do if it was not the real
Kirk, the computer Kirk, who had just guided him
by that perilous route ... it was very difficult
to identify a voder voice as such on the tinny
comm link. He knew too that Yarblis had been
prowling the ship, seeking out its secret ways, for
nights. If Yarblis had guessed that someone was
using a voder to replicate Kirk's voice
... "Ask him which side of the ship Yeoman
Brunowski's chocolate factory is on, and
upon what deck. He should tell you Deck
Twenty-three, starboard. If he does not,
distrust whatever he says."
And with that Spock turned and strode off down the
circular corridor toward the emergency
transporter room, his angular figure quickly
swallowed up in darkness and bloody murk.

The time was at hand.
Yarblis Geshkerroth the Ghost Walker sat
in the deepest chamber of the floating warren of the
Hungries, staring into the screen of the Arkresh-
670, the auxiliary portable into which he had
downloaded all the killing-ray programming ...
the terms for these things, even, were beginning to cross and
meld in his mind. The Hungries, who counted
everything, measured everything, had made machines
to ape the powers of the mind and the body, had more words
than his own people did, and those words were easier to say
with the mind than to use the longer, slower terms that
forced the mind to consider what it was that was actually being
done.
It would be so easy, it would be so pleasant, not
to consider what it was that he was about to do.
Around him the red lights flared on and off, like the
rising and dying of hideously shortened days, and with every
glaring blink of red, there followed a swoop back
into eternal night. Beyond the wired plex interior
windows, the machinery of the phaser banks themselves was
dyed a gory crimson, from which lines of scarlet
eyes stared at him with the single-minded intensity of
madness. There had been sirens hooting a warning like
the mating cry of a Bargump, but he had, at
least, found the tannoy speaker for that--his hand still
bled a little from the rage-induced strength with which he'd
ripped it out of the wall.
The silence was balm to his soul as he worked,
programming in those things that he had written down,
studied, memorized all these endless, hellish
days and nights--plans assembled from all the
schematics he could find in the computer, all the
data and skill he could glean out of the memory of
James T. Kirk.
Soon he would be free.
And Rhea would be safe.
Rhea.
He could see her in the forward viewscreen, as
he had seen her yesterday from the bridge--as he
had seen her for one blinding, heart-breaking moment
that first day of his masquerade, as the Enterprise
left orbit. He had barely been able to force
himself to tear his eyes away from her--barely been
able to act as he knew the captain would. And that,
too, had angered him ... that they had become
casual about the soul-hurting beauty and wonder of
seeing a world.
But she filled the viewscreen now, and he was
free to look his fill. She was so dark,
so golden, with her silken oceans and the soft
chevelure of saffron clouds. The infinite
beauty of her mottled colors, amber, smoke,
the chocolate-brown of bare rock and the purpled
hues of the seas; snowfields like the bloom of
frost upon a ripe and delicate fruit. Had it
been possible, he would have broken out the windows of
every observation port on the ship, so that he could lean
out and hear her sing.
He worked deftly, the small, soft little hands
that it still amazed him to see, adept on these
keypads of letters, forming concepts precise enough in
their detail for these hateful counting machines
to comprehend. He had cut through the leads from the main
computer, the open access port gaping like a wound in
the wall behind him, just beneath where the tannoy speaker
dangled on its faintly sparking wires. He
had plugged in the secondary computer and used his
voice--the voice of the bright warrior Kirk--
to route his way through the guard on the program. It
would be, he estimated, a long while before the
evil air could be coaxed away from the decks that
separated him from the redshirt guards, as long perhaps
as it took to gather a double handful of edible seeds in
a dry summer. They would come as swiftly as they
could, knowing their computer had lost touch with the killing-
ray place, but the gangway doors were sealed, and
it would take them time to cut through.
More than enough time.
Then Rhea would be safe, and he could go home.
Home to the Consciousness Web. Home to those
who loved him, and whom he loved. For one instant
at the thought of it, though he clamped the disciplines
of his soul down upon it immediately after, something inside
him cried like a child.
Later, he thought, later there will be time for
relief ...
He had explored this vessel thoroughly enough that
he knew that, even when he abandoned this abominable
alien body--consumed now with fever and exhaustion
as it was--he could find his way to the transporter
room and operate its controls. It was harder
to think than it had been, harder to remember
everything. Perhaps it would be easier, better, when he
was clear of this poisoned, exhausted body, this
sink of instincts and memories and lusts that were not his
own.
Now he concentrated his mind on the task
ahead, referring at times to the notes he had
made and brought with him, programming in the
proper commands, the proper numbers, the grid
sequences having to do with things that as Kirk he
understood but that as the Ghost Walker he did not
... orbital shift and firing order, power
levels and primary ignition. So intent was he
on this that he did not hear the stealthy creak of
boot leather in the corridor outside until it
was almost upon him; it was in fact the faint,
preliminary grind of the manual door control that
made him swing around in his chair and duck behind the
console even as the doors slammed open and the white
beam of a phaser stabbed into the alternate glare and
darkness of the room.
Furious and shocked as he was that any could have
avoided his precautions--he had not fought the
Hungries for years for nothing--his mind, the
trained psychic skill of a memmietieff;
slashed out in defense, slamming the doors like
pinching jaws at the intruder's arm and body. As
the intruder sprang and rolled free of them--into the
room--in the bleeding glare of the lights he saw
that, impossibly, it was the Vulcan Spock, the
Counter of Everything, and at once many things became
suddenly clear.
He had not died in the hangar deck, and the
attempt had crystallized his suspicions of his
captain. He knew what his captain had become
--he had used his logic to discover the nature of the
threat.
Rage exploded in Yarblis, rage fed
by loneliness, by grief, by all that he had done--
rage and fear that at this late moment his plan for the
saving of Rhea would yet be crossed. This rage
gave strength to the psychokinetic abilities
latent in the brains of all these alien beings. As
Spock flung himself along the wall to get a
clear shot at him where he crouched behind the console,
Yarblis reached out again with his mind and ripped the
dangling tannoy speaker away from its wires,
sent it hurtling through the half-dark air at the
back of the Vulcan's head.
Spock tried too late to duck, the corner
of the speaker gouging into his shoulder, tearing the blue
shirt he wore and bringing blood green as keval
sap welling from the flesh beneath. The room was almost
bare, containing little beyond the phaser control console,
the two chairs before it, and the small computer that
Yarblis had used to bypass the ship's main
controls; they could hide from one another on
opposite sides of the console, but
Spock was armed. Staggering with shock, the Vulcan
rose to fire straight down across the console at
him, but Yarblis reached out with his mind again, this time
catching him in the same whirlwind of angry force
that he had used to hurl the speaker, flinging him
back against the far wall of the room with bone-
cracking force. The phaser fell from his hand,
clattering on the floor. Even so, Spock
tried to get up again, groggily fighting
unconsciousness, and Yarblis flung at him
all the smashing impact of his mind.
Spock's body hit the wall with the hard
crack of a skull striking metal. He slid
to the floor.
Yarblis picked up the phaser, set it
to kill, and walked around the console to where the
Vulcan lay, beneath the vast viewscreen filled
with Rhea's gold and damson face.
The grinding whir of the doors alerted him again.
He swung around, leveling the weapon ...
But there was no one framed in the hard, open
rectangle of flashing crimson light. He
took two steps toward it across the round chamber,
moving cautiously, listening for the whisper of breath,
the rustle of clothing ...
And then he saw it. Stepping forth from the wall that
held the open access port he'd used to cut
into the computer leads, he saw him, as he'd seen
him for those few hours in the moonligh t down on the
world ... the ghost shape of James T. Kirk.
He saw the shape quite clearly, though he knew
it was not his eyes that beheld the strange, elongated
body, the tiny head with its fair hair, the
hazel eyes and decisive chin which stared back at
him unbelieving from the mirror every morning.
That Kirk's spirit, his mind, should have retained its
cohesiveness after this long away from his body was
impossible, unbelievable. A few days, a
week perhaps ... He had searched the ship, time and
time again, after the sweep, searching for the whisper, the
faintest clue, as to the presence he had felt in
its shadows every day, every hour before. And he had felt
nothing. Shock held him speechless.
"Don't do it, Yarblis," he heard
Kirk's voice in his mind. "Destroying this ship
will gain you nothing--nothing but the possibility of war
between the Federation and the Klingons, because neither side is
going to believe that the Midgwins were capable of
blowing up a starship. And your people are going to be
caught in the middle of any conflict."
He drew his head back into his shoulders,
an instinctive gesture of defense, and hissed,
"Destroy this ship? Do you think I am a fool?
No, they would never believe ... they think we
are fools, and children, who need only to be guided
into the right way, the way of Yours or Mine, the
way of first seducing the Earth Spirit Mother and then
raping her and making her their slave ... Your
way. The easy way of the Hungries, the way
of the full belly and the empty soul. It is not this
ship, this ... this metal driftwood floating
on a sea of nothing with its cargo of dirt
crawlers, that I will destroy."
The very gesture of his head was the same,
remembered, re-created, in the faintly glowing
shape that the mind can be trained to retain when it
leaves the body. "What then?"
"What do you think?" Yarblis demanded
savagely, his very soul hurting as he pronounced
the words. "The Bindigo Warren--the tumor where the
poison is growing--the place where your seducers
have started already on the souls of humankind. My people
have begun to listen to what yours have to say. You have
taken the soul of our greatest, of my friend, my father,
my brother, Arxoras the Wise ..." His
voice broke with the hurt of it, with the grief
at killing his friend, the greater grief of seeing
what he would become. He shook his head
violently, tears of that grief, that fury,
filling his eyes.
"And when they see the warren destroyed by the
bolts from out of the heavens, never will they trust you
anymore. And that is as it should be, for you will turn
our people into what you are."
And he saw Kirk's face first stunned, then
slowly change with shock. "They're down there,"
he whispered.
"A mother can transmit disease unto her child with a
kiss, golden captain," Yarblis said, his
borrowed voice cracking under the strain. "It is
better thus."
"And you would murder your friends ..."
"My friends in the warren who are helping me with
this, who concealed my body and cared for it ... they
would rather die in Rhea's defense than live
to see what would become of her, when the beauty of
living dies. And those others ... If they knew
what they would become in time, after your ways have
taught them to say Mine and Yours, after your ways
have killed the warmth of the web that binds us
all each to each, they would thank me, and welcome
the fire. If Arxoras could see what he will
become, as I can see it--"
The red lights flashed, on and off, on and off.
Kirk was silent with horror, and Yarblis
remembered, dimly and belatedly, that the woman
Helen had gone down to the planet, and also the
healer McCoy, whom Kirk cared for ... But that
was impossible, he thought in the next second,
impossible to truly care without the Consciousness
Web ...
"You don't know the future, Yarblis."
"I know what you are!" Yarblis screamed
back at him, at that impossible, glowing shape in
the scarlet-drenched darkness, at that alien mind that
should have dissolved shrieking as the other Hungries
had dissolved into the soft golden air of the only world
worth having, the only world worth saving, the only
world worth living in. "I know what you have done
to yourselves, and what your people will do to mine! You will feed
them the food that makes them Hungry inside, that
makes them forget what Beauty is. You will deceive
them into asking for that death! And I know that my people would
rather die than become as you are!"
He felt Kirk's mind grope out, seizing
at the broken piece of the tannoy speaker to fling
at him, and with his own mind he hurled it aside.
Then like a splintering crash of light, he threw his
strength against the strength of Kirk's mind, tearing
at it, like the scream of the induction field from the
sweep, seeking to break it impulse from
impulse, spark from spark. The power and rage of
his mind were such that the wired plex of the internal
windows bulged and shattered, fragments of it showering
across the floor of the room and rattling like scarlet
hail upon the machinery beyond. He felt Kirk
cry out in pain and felt the wrenching twist of his
despairing strength, flinging the debris of the speaker
at him, trying to strike him with it, to break his
concentration ... to kill him perhaps. He struck the
speaker aside again, and Kirk retreated before him
into the hallway, trying to pull the doors shut,
to protect himself ...
The blast of Yarblis's mind wrenched the
doors from their sockets, sending them clattering on
the hard and flat and hateful floor, and over them
he strode into the hall in pursuit.
He caught a glimpse of Kirk's
glittering shape near the door of one of the storage
holds which were the only other rooms on this
level, fumbling with the limited strength of his mind
to open the door, to get at the objects inside--
alien weapons, stones for analysis by the Geo
lab, boxes of samples of earth. Yarblis had
seen the inventories, as he had seen the
inventories of every storeroom on the ship. Though
he had very little control over it, Kirk's
electrostatic spirit shadow had the random strength of
psychic energy--and obviously, thought Yarblis,
he had more power than he had given him credit for.
He must be destroyed, and destroyed quickly, before
he found another way to thwart the plan.
The door gave suddenly, crashing open;
Yarblis saw Kirk duck inside. He still
followed the routes of human form and flesh, as if
instinctively knowing they bound him together. Yarblis
strode after him, slamming the doors back with his
mind as Kirk tried to get them to remain shut
against him. The white blaze of his mental energy
he threw at that flickering ghost, shredding at it,
weakening it, distracting it, and somewhere in the darkness
of the hold he heard the violent, random knocking
of that embattled soul's terror and rage. A
heavy box of soil samples bounded down from a
shelf, missing him by yards, rolled like a leaf
across the floor of the hold.
He swung around again, sensing where Kirk had
to be hiding among the banks of shelves, the
stacks of boxes in the shadowy gloom.
Outside, Yarblis could hear the dim throb of the
warning sirens from elsewhere on the deck, reminding
him that time was short--that he must accomplish his deed
soon. He knew where Kirk was hiding, and his own
fury and desperation swept the shelves between them
aside as if they had been dry weed stems,
sending them crashing down in a shower of rocks and
dust and bursting crates. Kirk tried again
to hurl a massive sample of some kind of ore,
some rock that smelled of distant worlds and alien
seas, at his head, but his strength was lessening, his
control almost nonexistent. It was not a matter of
hiding, of dodging, as it had been with the Vulcan
Spock and his phaser--it was a matter only of
strength to strength, of will against will, and Yarblis
knew his will was stronger.
He smashed at Kirk's will with his blind brute
strength and felt him stagger, felt him founder and
slip. His will he sent forth like the blasting roar of a
battle cry, the battle cry of the will that had
shattered the dark-skinned Klingon
Hungries when they had materialized on his world
in a shower of sparkling bodiless fire. He felt
Kirk cry out in pain, and stones sprang from the
shelves that remained, whirled in the air like blown
leaves and then fell clattering on the floor.
Before him he could only see the glowing form of
Kirk, flung back against the wall as Spock
had been flung, arms raised as if they could
protect him ...
Spock, he thought. Spock was in the room
with the phaser. If he revived, he would come
seeking him again, seeking to kill this body, and he
could not stand against them both.
He flung one more blast of his mind against
Kirk, and saw the pale glow of him flicker and
fade. Turning, he fled from the storage hold
back toward the phaser control chamber,
remembering suddenly all the precepts of
gunnery ... Had Kirk been trying to delay
him, deceive him, trick him into abandoning his post
until the planet's orbit had taken the
Bindigo Warren out of his range?
He would do it, he thought, to save the woman
Helen, and his friend McCoy, down there in the warren
--down where the fire would fall.
But it would not save the warren from destruction.
He, Yarblis, would not allow this chance to be
wasted, this last chance to cut the cancer from the body of
Rhea, this last chance to awaken those he loved to the
danger in which they stood.
Spock still lay unconscious where he had
fallen, the broken crystal of the window glittering
all around him, green blood leaking from the cut in
his shoulder and the savage gash on the side of his
head.
Gasping with his exertions, barely able to walk,
Yarblis leaned his short human arms upon the
console and looked down at the re adings.
The Bindigo Warren was still within range.
He raised his head and looked up at the
viewscreen, where Rhea still hung against the
darkness, the face of beauty, of love, of song.
For a moment the thought of the Consciousness Web
overwhelmed him, and a despairing gladness that the
Bindigo Warren was still in daylight--that they would not
be in the web when they were destroyed. But the other
warrens would know. And he would spread the word, would
tell them what the Hungries' ship had done--
he would force them to turn aside from that soft,
sweet poison forever.
And he himself would have peace.
Behind him, dimly, Yarblis could hear the far-
off knocking of a poltergeist, like the last helpless
cries of the dying. His mind was James T.
Kirk's, clear and concise and knowing what he
did. He finished setting the coordinates
to take in the Bindigo Warren and an area ten
miles around it, flipped the primary ignition
switches, waited while the lights behind the
shattered spiderwebs of the internal windows blinked
from red to green.
He would go home. Back to the Consciousness
Web ... back to the love, the strength, the
sweetness of Rhea--Rhea as it should be, and now
always would. He could see his hands--Kirk's hands
--trembling, felt the sweat running down his
face, and recognized that the last effort of will, of
psychokinetic energy, had sapped the final
strength from this borrowed body. Good, he thought,
with a final burst of rage at the creature who had
so nearly thwarted all his plans. I have not
only defeated you, I have hurt you ...
He was thinking of James T. Kirk as the
last lights went from red to green and he hit the
firing switch.
On the forward screen he saw the red beams
lance out into darkness, and a moment later saw the
pinprick of fire blaze forth on the planet's
shadowy flank.
Then he sank his head down to the controls, and
closing his eyes, gratefully embraced the dark.

Chapter Twenty

"For the dear God's sake, would you mind
tellin' me what that was all about, Mr.
Spock?"
Spock looked up from the diagnostic gauges
on the outside of the stasis chamber, beyond whose thick
crystal portholes he could see the body of
James T. Kirk, sheet drawn up to his
naked chest and arms, face relaxed in sleep.
He had still been breathing when Spock had lifted
him off the control console of the phaser banks; it
had been only a matter of a minute or two before
Uhura had contacted him over the comm link to let
him know sickbay--and in fact most of Deck 7
--had been cleared of the contaminant gas. Spock
had carried him back up through the illegally
pressurized--and crazily junk-
filled--hull compartments, to the hole Scotty had
made in the floor of Deck 7 directly over
the uppermost of the three--a hole, coincidentally
enough, in the floor of Mr. Spock's own
office.
Though Spock was not a medical doctor, the
gauges on the stasis chamber all looked
normal.
He turned to Mr. Scott, who was leaning in
the doorway. The chief engineer was still smeared head
to foot with brown CHON residue, his hands
further blackened with oil, and his red sleeves
blotched with assorted other colors from pressure
fluids, lubricants, and burns.
"We got the turbolifts going again,"
Scotty added, brushing back his short black
hair and leaving a long greenish streak on his
forehead. "And Deck Eight is about cleared.
Lieutenant Uhura tells me there's a log
entry of Transporter Room Four operating,
though that was when that part of Deck Seven was still
flooded with gas ..."
"Indeed?" Spock said, raising an eyebrow,
and nodded to himself.
"You mean to say you expected that?"
"Of course. It was only logical." He
considered the captain's unconscious face once
more, hollow-cheeked and lined with exhaustion, then
stepped over to the comm link switch on the wall.
"Lieutenant Uhura, can you patch me through
to Dr. Gordon on the surface of the planet?"
"Dr. Gordon?" Scott whispered
unbelievingly. "Last I heard, the poor
lass was in intensive care and not expected to get
over it! You mean to say--"
"Yes, Mr. Spock?" came the scarred,
gritted voice over the comm link.
"Did you succeed in getting in touch with the
patriarch Arxoras?"
There was a long pause. Then Helen replied,
"Er, yes. Yes, I'm here with him now. The thing
is--"
"I think it is necessary that you convince him
to return to the ship with you as quickly as possible.
Please reassure him of the safety of the
shuttlecraft, and of our good intentions toward him and
his people ... but I have reason to believe that the Ghost
Walker has returned to the planet ..."
"Yes," Helen said. "Yes, I know he
has."
Spock paused, hearing the flat note in her
voice.
After a moment she went on, "How is the
captain?"
"I think that is the reason," Spock said, "that
Arxoras should be here."
There was another silence. Then she said, "I'll
see what I can do."
Spock sighed as the channel closed out, and
rubbed the bridge of his nose with tired fingers. His
head ached in spite of the pain suppressants in
the small medi-patch that the second-shift nurse
had placed over the gash in his temple--a patch
that stood out startlingly rosy against the greenish cast
of his skin--and he felt weary to his bones. Before
they had closed the captain in the stasis chamber,
he had entered, hesitantly and cautiously,
into a mind meld with him, and had been disturbed
by what he had sensed. Perhaps one of the great
Adepts, one of the ancient masters of the
kolihnar, could have understood that frantic
flickering of impulses, could have reordered it,
straightened it, eased it. But he was a scientist,
understanding only what every Vulcan schoolchild
learned of the spiritual disciplines--he did not know
if, as things now stood, his friend could even be saved.
The weight of that lay on him like a shroud of
lead.
He turned back, to see Mr. Scott
regarding him with worried eyes.
"An explanation of all things," Spock said
slowly, "will be ... forthcoming."
"I certainly hope so." Scott looked
relieved to see him emerge from whatever dark
reverie held him. "Including an explanation of
why--All right, all right!" he added, as the
second-shift nurse, a soft-footed young
black woman, disapprovingly held out to him a
handwipe. "I know this is a sterile environment
I'm muckin' up! Including an explanation,"
he went on, turning back to Spock, "of why this
alien intruder, after damn near drivin' the
captain out of his mind and doing his best to murder you
and Dr. Gordon, should have done all this just to blast
a forty-hectare hole in the middle of the most
uninhabited desert on the planet?"
Spock paused, considering how much of the events
of the past week should--or could--be reasonably
explained. At length he said, "That was ... an
error on his part."
"How could he make an error?" the chief
engineer asked curiously. "It's not like he was
shootin' off a hand phaser, you know. He had the
best guidance program in the galaxy to aim with."
Spock shook his head. "His error," he
said, "was to leave me alone with his targeting
computer."

Helen folded up her communicator and turned
back to the group assembled around the cold ashes
of the fire between the two huts of the Research
Institute, their faces grave and weary and, for a
large part, dust-covered in the tawny citrine
light. To Kailin Arxoras, squatting on one
of the log sections with his long white hair knotted
back and tangled with the grime of travel, she said
simply in the tongue of the Midgwins, "He
needs your help."
The patriarch, though he had been days upon the
road and had not yet even returned so far as the
main warren, nodded and said, "He shall have it."
And on the other side of the circle Yarblis
Geshkerroth the Ghost Walker, destroyer of the
Hungries and guard of his planet, hissed.
"It is a trap! They will ..."
"They will what, Yarblis?" asked Arxoras
softly, and those who could understand the speech of the
Midgwins--Helen, Thetas, Doctors Chu and
Nomias and the two Vulcans--felt beneath the
sweet, high chirping of the simple words all the
colorings of tone and pacing that made up the
language's delicate nuances, and sensed the
telepathic component of the language that flowed still
further beneath. "Will they destroy me who hold out
my hand to them as a friend, if it is friendship with us that
they seek?"
Yarblis hesitated, looking from face
to face, groping for what he would say next. When
he had entered the group around the Research
Institute--the group that had itself been a gabbling
reunion of Dr. McCoy's party and the small
caravan that had only minutes earlier come threading
its way out of the thorn jungle from the plague
warrens of the south--Helen had thought Yarblis
looked thoroughly taken aback, shocked and
disoriented, staring around him at the dark-stemmed
thickets, the wind-hissing gold sea of grass,
the tall, pale rocks of the warren beyond them, as if
he could not believe his senses. Helen had taken
Arxoras aside and had been in the midst
of explaining to him what she thought Yarblis had
done, while, in front of the huts, McCoy and
Nurse Chapel had listened to Dr. L'jian's
account of the battle against plague--and the famine that
had caused it--in the Walpuk country. Thetas,
Chu, Shorak, and Nomias, exhausted from days
and nights of travel, of inoculations, of tests and
nursing, had only slumped quietly against the
side of the Research Institute and numbly
accepted the fructose-dripping rations handed to them
by the two Klingons, while DeSalle and his
myrmidons had looked on.
Then, angry, the Ghost Walker burst out,
"They will twist you! As they have begun to twist you
already, Arxoras my father, my friend! They will make
you their friend with lies!"
"Is this w orse than making me their enemy with
lies?" the patriarch asked quietly, his wide
silver eyes fixing themselves on Yarblis's
immense yellow ones. Helen, seeing the small
uneasy shifts in the musculature of the Ghost
Walker's lined, sunken face, shivered,
recognizing every fleet, delicate expression,
every habitual twitch. For a moment she thought she was
going to throw up and turned away, cold and
sickened with the depth of the recognition.
"They are ... our enemies," Yarblis said.
"They are ... the enemies of life. They will
make us the enemies of life."
"What is life?" Arxoras asked slowly.
"And why is life? Will they be greater enemies of
life than one who would destroy life so that his
opinion might triumph?"
"Only ... only some life. Not all life
..." Yarblis whispered desperately. "It was
necessary ..."
"These aliens ..." The long, skeletal arm
gestured with a beautiful sweeping motion toward the
dust-coated forms of the two Vulcans, the
emaciated little Argellian, the tiny old
Chinese, and the Andorian half asleep with
exhaustion between the two Klingons who carried him
gently toward his hut. "These aliens have worked with us
in the saving of lives of our families at
Walpuk, searching far out into the distant ends of the
warren where the licats had begun to hunt when the
protection of the Consciousness Web failed,
risking the illness itself, which could have killed them as
surely as it was killing all those others."
"The Consciousness Web ..."
"The Consciousness Web was not strong enough to combat
this illness," Arxoras went on. "The
Consciousness Web had held for days, and yet they
died, and more and more died, and the vermin and the licats had
begun to hunt through the warrens and take the sick and the
dying." On the end of his round-sectioned neck, his
head was tilted to one side, his eyes compassionate
with pain as he looked upon the hunter, the friend, the
brotherstson he had loved. In the dusty stillness
of the late afternoon, only the skreeking of the scarlet
lizards could be heard in the thorn jungle around
them--the soft humming of the web that had filled the
air had ceased a short time before.
"Yarblis, what were you going to bring back to the
Consciousness Web with you? You are memmietieff
enough to have hidden the things you did, yes, so not to have
polluted the web ... so as not to have anyone know that
what you told them of the destruction of this warren was a
lie. But you would have brought lying into the web. And
what you would not have hidden, because it did not occur to you
that it was something that should be hidden, would have been your
conviction that it was right to lie to us all for what you
yourself considered good. That it was right to deceive us all, for
what you yourself considered good. That it was right to kill,
for what you yourself considered good. That it was right to make
your concept of good--which might indeed .be good, or
might not, but you cannot know that--the rule by which we must
all live, will we so or not.
"You did evil, that great good might come. And the
evil that you wanted to do among us, to us, was greater
still, and greater than you know, for these Hungries"--
he nodded toward the door of the hut through which the
Klingons had taken Nomias--"are dangerous,
and would have taken fearful steps against us ... Though
perhaps you would have come to want that too."
And Yarblis looked away.
"You thought you had the right," Arxoras went on
softly. "That is the seed of all evil. And so
it is ..." The deep folds of the patriarch's
face, each lined with pale dust, contracted, and his
great eyes filled with tears. "So it is,
Yarblis my son, that I cast you out of the
Consciousness Web. No one in the warren will turn
against you, you will never lack for food, nor for a
place to live, nor for a place of protection,
for that is not something that we can do. But you are dirty
with a dirtiness that would spread throughout the web, even
as you feared that the dirtiness of wanting the life of
one another more than the life of Rhea would spread
among us. And for that, no more will the web have
you. No more will you be our sibling. No more will any of
us speak to you, or let you touch our minds, or our
dreams, ever again."
For a moment Yarblis Geshkerroth stood in the
midst of them--the aliens, and the several other
patriarchs who had gone with the aliens down
to Walpuk when the strength of the web had proved
insufficient to the strength of the famine and the plague.
"I did it for you," he whispered.
And Helen, looking back at him, saw him
for the first time clearly in the sunlight, saw the
huge extent of the disruptor scars that covered his
chest and arms, that had blotched his scalp and caused
the long hair that lay braided down over his
ridgy back to be streaked with ashy gray; saw the
passion and the weariness in his yellow eyes, the
fierce strength of his lined face down which tears
tracked like a river, glinting in the molten light.
Arxoras held out a hand to touch him, but the Ghost
Walker stepped back and turned away, waddling
slowly past the tall aliens around him and out of the
clearing, passing without sound or stirring of
branches into the thorn forest beyond.
Kailin Arxoras turned back to Helen and,
reaching up, took her soft, baby hand in his strong
one. "Come," he said, and she saw that tears,
too, streaked the dust on all his many facefolds
as if he had stood in rain. "We must go now and
heal your friend."

Dr. McCoy grumbled surprisingly little about
shutting down the lights in the convalescent ward where
they took Kirk after removing him from the stasis
chamber--evidently, Helen thought, he had been
thinking over what had taken place in the machine
room and its relationship to the needs of the less-known
side of the human organism. Gunner's
Assistant Barrows's cache of candles was
raided again--their soft glow gently illuminated the
room where Kailin Arxoras, surprisingly
calm for one who had never seen so much as a wheel
before in his life, sat beside the bed, holding the
captain's icy hand and singing softly in his high-
pitched, birdlike voice. Now and then voices
would pass in the hall, the muted murmur of the ship
returning to normal.
"We can take him to a soundproof room,"
McCoy offered to the little alien, but Arxoras had
shaken his head.
"He needs to hear the sounds of his
beloved as she breathes in her sleep," the old
Midgwin replied, tilting his flat head a little
to peer up into the doctor's face. "Among my people
we would have flowers, and grasses, and grains in the
room to help with the healing, that the dreamer may
smell them and so be encouraged to return. But the
smells of such things are less to him than the
smells of ..." The brow ridges folded a little
deeper as he tried to identify what the ship
did smell like. Metal and thin green
vilfadge carpeting and recycled oxygen
McCoy picked out, when he thought about them ...
and, in this place, disinfectant and alcohol. But
at length the old Midgwin only shook his head
and concluded "... the smells of this place. But have
his friends here with him, that he may know them, and come
back."
And so it was that Helen, and Mr. Spock, and
Uhura, and Scotty were in the room when James
Kirk opened his eyes and blinked uncertainly up
at the ceiling in the semidark. For a moment he
only lay, a slight frown of puzzlement
creasing his brow, as if trying to remember. Then
he turned his head a little, first to one side, where
Arxoras sat on one of the tall-legged chairs
designed to bring short aliens up to the height of
things on a human-crewed starship, then to the other,
where McCoy sat, holding his other hand.
"Bones?" he said softly, wondering why the
physical touch, the warmth of flesh and the solidity
of bone, was so deeply reassuring. The
transporter ...
But the thought eluded him.
McCoy nodded. "You'll be all right,
Jim."
Carefully he disengaged his hand and reached out.
"Helen?"
She took his fingers, warm now and strong in
hers. Her face was expressionless and very white, but
in the dimness, in his exhaustion, he only saw that
she was with him. He smiled, profoundly
relieved. His memories of what had happened
to him were dim and chaotic, a confusion of images--
a blurred recollection that something had happened
to Helen, something terrible ... something from which he had
tried desperately to save her. An image,
fragmentary but very clear, of Spock lying
unconscious before the sealed doors of the
shuttlecraft deck with the red warning lights
blinking wildly across his body. A
vague curiosity about whether he really had
crawled through the food conveyor from Deck 8, and
if so, why in the galaxy he'd done it ... A
nagging sense of wondering something about a secret
room on Deck 23.
He had a dreamlike sense that reminded him of
his old Academy acquaintance Finnegan's
descriptions of having been extremely drunk
--only Kirk had never been so drunk in his
life that he couldn't remember what he'd done.
Already it was fading, losing its reality ...
"Spock?"
"Present, Captain," the Vulcan replied
formally. After a moment's hesitation, Spock
stepped forward and took his hand. "I am ..."
Spock hesitated again, not quite sure what it would
be proper form to say, then concluded, "I am
gratified to see you well."
Kirk's laugh was no more than a whisper and a
lightening of his eyes. "I am overwhelmed, Mr.
Spock." And then, as suddenly as the extinguishing
of a candle flame, he dropped into sleep again.
"He will sleep for a long time now," Arxoras
said, climbing carefully, with Chapel's help,
down from the chair. "Half a day, perhaps. Good
sleep. I feel within his mind that this body of his
has had little. It was cruelly used, and his spirit
also. You will fin d there are things he does not
remember from his time of wandering, for such memories will
have no place in the flesh to lodge, and will have been
lost. Some only may come back to him later.
Then you must help him deal with them as best you may.
You are his siblings, his nest brothers. His healing
is with you."
"You speak as if this were something you've dealt with
before," McCoy said doubtfully, and the Midgwin
cocked his head again, his long, dusty white
braids tangling across his shoulders, to look up
at him.
"I have," he said simply, and thereby opened a
new chapter to Federation studies, not only of the
Midgwins, but of the structure and composition of the
mind.
In the corner of the room Mr. Scott was questioning
Spock in a low voice about the ultimate fate
of his assistant Ensign Miller--now in the
next ward recovering, along with his opprobrious
partner, from the throes of their peculiar virus.
"Well, you've got to admit that when all's said,
all they were doin' was trying to make
decent chocolate--for which God knows there's enough people
on board who'd thank them."
"The fact remains that they appropriated
Starfleet property for their own use, for whatever
purpose. Neither of them was authorized to operate
an experimental laboratory, much less to--"
"And no worse than what Dr. McCoy
did, puttin' the pair of 'em under hatches
wi'out so much as a by-your-leave ... You're
no' going to clap that poor laddie Gilden in
irons, are you? You'd be dead yoursel' if it
wasn't for his book collection."
Silently, Lieutenant Uhura slipped out
the door into the bright lights of the corridor. None
saw her go, any more than they had seen Helen
leave a moment before.
"Helen?"
She was leaning against the wall of the main
corridor of sickbay. Her face was chalky and
she looked almost worse than she had after she'd
been gassed.
"What is it?" Uhura asked.
And Helen shook her head and smiled.
"Nothing," she said. She started to turn away,
then paused, and looked back at her friend--tall
and coffee-dark and beautiful in her crimson
uniform, one of the closest of the first group of close
friends she had made in her life. After a moment
she came back and took her hands.
"Uhura," she said softly, "will you tell
Jim something for me when he wakes up?"
Uhura was silent, looking into the other
woman's face. An older face than she'd
had when she came on board the Enterprise a
month ago; ravaged, as her voice had been
ravaged. According to McCoy, the scarring on the
vocal cords would heal in a few weeks. From
her own experience, Uhura guessed that the look
in the back of those hazel eyes never would.
"Anything you want," she replied.
"Tell him ..." Helen paused, and shook
her head, as if trying to clear away something--a
dream, maybe, or a nightmare. "Tell him
I understand that it ... it wasn't him. That it was an
alien that had taken over his body, that it wasn't
his fault ... that he has nothing to do with what
happened. And maybe in six months, when the
Enterprise is back--if it doesn't get
rerouted elsewhere--or maybe in a year, I'll
... my stomach, my guts, my skin will
believe it, if I should happen to see his face,
or hear his voice, or feel his hand touch me.
Tell him I know it wasn't him. But right now
..." She forced her voice steady. "I can't
look at him anymore."
"I'll tell him," Uhura said.
Helen embraced her quickly, then turned and
walked away, heading for the turbolift that would
take her down to the hangar deck to wait for
Arxoras, and thence, by shuttlecraft, back to the
world that would become her own. Uhura stood for a
long time beside the sickbay door, listening as the
click of boot heels died away along the
corridor.

After that the patriarchs of the many warrens united in
Web to speak among themselves of the question of healing that the
physicians of the Hungries had raised; and
whether they should be asked to go away and never
return. The Hungries themselves, both the dark-
bearded Hungries and the pale Hungries with
smooth faces, swore that if they were permitted
to remain, they would only live among themselves and
learn the stories of the Real People and talk to them about
the way of Rhea.
As for Yarblis Geshkerroth the Ghost
Walker, on the second night after the ending of the
plague, he went to the hut of the woman Helen and
asked her pardon for having hurt her, both in her
body, and in her voice, and in her mind. This
pardon being given, he went out of the Bindigo
Warren and away from the places where people dwelled, and
casting himself in the river, was drowned.

From Songs of the Midgwins, translated and
introduced by Dr. H. H. Gordon, Oxford
University Press.