SCOTTY COULD TELL that the Grand General was not happy to see them again. He was busy preparing for a major battle, and he made it clear that he only allowed them into the palace again because he needed their help in preventing it. Even then he insisted on accompanying the humans on their investigation.
"But you're wasting your time," he told them as they walked along the corridor from his temporary throne room toward the stairway. Blast scars pocked the surface at random all along its length, evidence of the fighting that had raged here only hours ago. "You won't find the Gods skulking around in the cellars. And they're most certainly not the mechanical mockery you suggest." He seemed personally offended at the very idea. Scotty wondered how much of that was righteous indignation, and how much was embarrassment over being fooled by the Stella android.
"Perhaps not," said Spock. "But there is the matter of the 'gods' eyes' that are installed in buildings throughout the planet. Those are mechanical, are they not?"
"Yes, but they're provided directly by the Gods. We certainly couldn't build something like that ourselves."
"No?" Scotty asked. "Then how do you get them? They don't just magically appear in the walls, do they?"
"No," the Grand General admitted. "They magically appear here in the palace, in the Gods' Eye Shrine."
That sounded promising. "Let's have a look at that first," Scotty said.
The Grand General sighed. "Very well." He turned left at the next cross-corridor and led them through a maze of hallways and rooms to a small but lavishly decorated shrine. It looked at first glance like an insignificant religious altar, but upon closer examination Scotty recognized the pedestal in the center of the room as a raised transporter pad. The Grand General stepped around it to a glowing panel on the wall and waved his hand in front of the light. "Arbiters of fate," he said, "watch over us and guide us."
There was a soft whir and rush of displaced air; then a cylinder about six inches thick and a foot long, rounded on one end, appeared on the pad. Scotty scanned it with his tricorder. It was a sensing device, all right, already activated and beaming a steady stream of data—where? Nowhere in particular, it seemed. It just sent it out in all directions. Apparently these things worked like a decentralized computer network, sending out information through whatever route was open until it reached its intended target. It was a good design for multiple redundancy, but it made tracing things difficult.
Spock had taken a different approach; he had monitored the pad at the moment of beam-in. "The matter stream came from beneath us," he said. "I believe Harry's guess was correct: the machinery—or whatever—we seek is in the catacombs." He nodded to the Grand General, removed the sensor from the pedestal, and backed away out the door and down the hallway a few yards, saying, "If you could activate it again, I will attempt to triangulate."
The Grand General scowled at the notion of "activating" the gods, but he turned back to the control panel and waved his hands in front of it and beseeched the arbiters of fate again, and another "gods' eye" appeared on the pedestal.
Spock consulted his tricorder. "The source lies five hundred feet below us, and twelve hundred fifty feet to the northwest."
Scotty had been monitoring it this time as well, and his reading backed up Spock's. "All right," he said. "Now we're getting somewhere. Let's go have a look."
It was a long descent. They could probably have used one of the palace transporters, but Scotty didn't trust the alien machinery through so much rock, especially now that some of that machinery was malfunctioning. If the transporter web was tied together like the sensor web, there was no telling what might go wrong.
But when they neared their destination, he wondered if they would have to use a transporter after all. A hundred feet short of their goal the stone-lined corridor they were in came to a halt against solid rock, and Scotty's tricorder showed no cavities within scanning range beyond it. That was only about fifty feet, but they couldn't cut through fifty feet of rock without special equipment. All of which would have to be carried down again after they climbed back up the stairs to get it.
This was the only corridor they had found that led even this close to the transmission source, and the tricorder revealed no more levels below them, either. "Looks like a dead end to me," Scotty said. His voice echoed in the long expanse of stone. They were well below the level that had been lit by overhead panels; they were proceeding by flashlight now. The dancing shadows and the echoes made Scotty's neck hairs stand out.
Mudd was panting from all the walking and descending of stairs. "Of course it looks…like a dead end," he said. "If I were trying to hide something I'd make it look like one too. That doesn't mean it is one."
"Then where is the passage?" Scotty asked him a bit testily. He was tired too.
"Back there somewhere," said Mudd, waving off down the corridor the way they had come. Doors opened off to the left and right every dozen feet for a hundred yards or more. "One of those rooms obviously has a hidden passageway that bypasses this false lead."
"That is entirely possible," Spock said. "It would be a simple but effective diversion."
Scotty sighed. "I guess there's an advantage to thinking like a crook," he muttered.
"I am not a crook!" Mudd spluttered, his jowls quivering as he shook his head in vehement denial.
Scotty and Spock both looked at him without speaking a word, and after a moment Mudd said a bit sheepishly, "All the charges have been dropped. Check and see."
"We already have," Spock said. "But at the moment your criminal record is irrelevant, except where it helps us find our objective." He moved back down the corridor, scanning each room as they passed it. Scotty followed along, checking for forcefields, trapdoors, or anything else Spock might have missed.
"Here," Spock said a moment later. He opened the door before him and entered the room. It looked like an empty stone cube, maybe a dungeon cell, but Spock walked confidently across to the far wall and pushed against a protruding rock, and a panel slid aside to reveal another even smaller chamber.
"Doesn't look like it goes very far," the Grand General observed.
"No, it doesn't." Spock stepped into the room. It was more of a closet, really, with just room enough for one person to stand in comfortably. Scotty shined his flashlight through the doorway to help Spock see, but there was little to examine. The wall opposite the door had been scribbled on by a child, or so it seemed, though someone would have had to hold him up to do it, since the scribbling was chest-high.
"This appears to be a map of the tunnel system," Spock said. Scotty looked at it again, and realized that Spock was right. "However," Spock went on, "it shows no passageway to the area we want to reach, which I estimate to be about here." He poked his finger at the wall to the left of the squiggles.
"No, wait!" Scotty shouted, but it was too late. There was a flash of light, and Spock disappeared.
"Now what?" groaned Scotty. He checked his tricorder, attempting to measure any residual radiation from the phased matter beam that might give him a clue where Spock had been taken, but he hadn't been looking for transporter traces. He already knew where Spock had gone anyway. This was the same kind of system that the Nevisians used in their public transporters. Just touch the map where you wanted to go, and they would send you there. Except this one would send you to places not on the map. Like into solid rock, if Spock had guessed wrong.
Cautiously, like a cat in a roomful of dogs, Scotty entered the transporter chamber and scanned the map for clues. Maybe there was a way to bring someone back from wherever it had sent them, or—
When his communicator beeped for attention, he nearly dropped his tricorder. He took a deep breath, unclipped the communicator from his belt, and flipped it open. "Scott here."
"This is Spock. I believe I have found what we are looking for."
Mudd hesitated at the edge of the transporter chamber. He didn't like this blind leap into nowhere. But Spock had assured him that it was all right, and Scotty wouldn't leave him behind, and the Grand General wouldn't go until he had seen a second person do it—which left Mudd to make the leap.
It seemed like it always came down to something like this. A life-or-death choice made at somebody else's urging, the real choice lying not in the act itself but in whether or not to trust people who openly disliked him. And of course if he declined, they would think him a coward. How did he keep winding up in situations like this? Really, he would have to put an end to it before it killed him.
This seemed as good a time as any. If he merely pointed to a spot at the top of the map, the transporter would take him upstairs again, where he could contact the Enterprise and have them beam him back to safety.
Whereupon he would still be at the mercy of these same people, who would dislike him even more for skipping out on them.
A bad choice was no choice at all. And Mudd was curious to see what was hidden behind all this subterfuge. He might even find the interstellar transporter he had been looking for, or something else equally valuable.
"Well, are you going or not?" Scotty asked impatiently from behind him.
"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," he muttered, and he reached out to the spot of bare rock that Spock had touched. It was cold and rough beneath his fingertip.
An instant later, light flooded his eyes. He blinked and waited for them to adjust to the brightness, and slowly the scene around him resolved. He was in a long, high-ceilinged corridor that seemed to stretch on toward infinity. Unlike the hallways he had just been in, this one was brightly lit from overhead, though Mudd noticed that at least a third of the panels were flickering as if about to burn out, and maybe one in ten had already done so. This place hadn't seen maintenance in a long time.
Nor ventilation. The air smelled stale, and there was an unpleasant tinge of burned electronics just at the edge of detectability.
Machinery lined the walls on both sides of the corridor. Unlike the lights, most of the tall, rectangular racks of components still seemed functional. A few banks were dark, but most of them hummed softly, and activity lights glowed on front panels that were labeled in Nevisian script. Mudd didn't need labels to recognize what he saw, though. This was a computer system. A big computer system. Just the part that he could see from where he stood made it easily the biggest Mudd had ever seen, and he had the feeling that this corridor went on for miles.
And now that he looked, he could see side passages leading away, probably to still more corridors like this one. And stairways at the junctions led downward again to even more.
Big didn't always mean sophisticated, he reminded himself, but even if these things used vacuum tubes and relays, there was a lot of computing power here.
"Impressive, isn't it?"
He flinched at the voice, then turned and saw Spock standing a few feet away. The Vulcan was as pokerfaced as ever, but Mudd thought he could see a gleam in his eye that betrayed his excitement. He was a technophile, and this sort of thing was techie heaven.
The corridor ended a few dozen yards beyond him, and occupying most of that space were pedestals and low platforms bearing various pieces of hardware. It looked like a shopping display, only none of the goods were familiar. No, Mudd recognized one item: a gods' eye just like the one that had materialized upstairs in the altar.
"Mudd has arrived successfully," Spock said into his communicator, and a moment later the Grand General blinked into existence next to him. And a moment after that, Scotty showed up.
He whistled softly when he saw what they had discovered. "Well now, would you look at that," he said.
Spock was already examining the artifacts at the end of the corridor with his tricorder. "This gods' eye is identical to the one we saw upstairs," he said. "Down to the molecular level. I suspect it is the template from which all gods' eyes are created." He moved over to another device, a mushroom-shaped business with a stem about the size of a man's chest and a flat-topped cap twice that diameter. "This appears to be a modular transporter platform. Also a template, I suspect. Grand General, am I correct in surmising that the 'gods' provide you with your transporter technology as well?"
"What?" he asked. He had been staring in rapt fascination at the endless rows of humming machinery. "Oh, yes." He turned around to see what Spock was looking at. "Yes, that's a transporter module. And that"—he pointed at a rectangular box with a glass screen on one end—"is a communicator, and you of course recognize a disruptor."
Indeed, there on a pedestal of its own was the same hand weapon that Mudd had seen in the hands of so many armed fanatics, including the ones who had fired on him upstairs in this very palace. The very same weapon, apparently, duplicated over and over again each time someone asked the "gods" for a gun.
Now he began to recognize some of the other items. Shield generators, laser cutting tools, microfusion power packs…in fact, nearly every technical gadget he had seen during his entire stay on Distrel. All ready to be reproduced over and over again, as often as a person could push the button.
"Do you actually manufacture anything on your own?" he asked.
"Of course we do," said the Grand General, but he didn't elaborate. He had gone back to staring wide-eyed at his surroundings, still unable to quite believe what he saw. He looked, Mudd thought, a bit like an old-world Catholic suddenly discovering a mechanical Jesus.
Spock moved back down the corridor to the first of the rack-mounted computer elements and examined it with his tricorder. "Molecular circuitry," he said, obviously impressed. "And holographic memory. There is considerable computing and storage capacity here." He looked off into the distance and said, "Enough, I believe, to direct the affairs of an entire civilized race."
Calling the Nevisians "civilized" might be pushing the definition, Mudd thought, but he couldn't deny there was a lot of computer power here. One might even say an almighty lot.
And there was enough profit potential to tempt a saint.