It hung there motionless for several long seconds, warp-engines fighting to drive her outward and back into normal space. Then the ship began to drift, slowly at first but with steadily increasing speed, down the rapidly narrowing funnel.
But that was all. The vibrating ceased; the smell of overloaded circuits and the sound of tortured metal stopped, and the crushing centrifugal force was instantly wiped out. Once more they had a recognizable up and down, as the ship's artificial gravity computer finally restored some order.
Back in engineering, Scott had to duck as one of his technicians fell slowly past him. Kirk's voice sounded over the intercom.
"Engineering . . . status report." By now Scott was on his feet again—though moving cautiously—and checking readouts. Several of the delicate instruments used to measure gravitation were completely gone, having been maltreated to the point of destruction. They no longer registered anything, since they had been overloaded even beyond emergency shutdown.
Scott whistled silently. Without the powerful gravity compensators, there would be nothing left of the crew of the Enterprise now but a multitude of brownish smears against floors, walls, and ceilings.
But the readings on the instruments that had survived intact were encouraging. Scott spoke toward the wide open pickup grid.
"There's some damage, Captain, but I think everything can be repaired." He groaned and reached for his lower back. "Includin' me."
"Okay, Scotty, do your best. We're running down the center of some kind of spiraling energy storm. I don't know how long we've got till we reach bottom, or what will happen when we get there. Be ready. Bridge out."
"Be ready, he says," Scott mumbled, "and for what?" Well, whatever it was, he would do his best to see that the Enterprise was ready for it.
"Gabler, Jacobs—there's nothin' wrong with you! Get off your duffs and break out a pair of micro-welders. Some honest work's required of you, for a change!"
On the bridge, everyone was slowly rearranging himself, uncurling from various contorted positions. Fortunately, few of the sudden changes in gravity had been full-G, and the falls hadn't been as serious as they might have been. Arex gave Uhura, who had probably received the worse banging around, a hand up.
"Would you like to report to Sick Bay, Lieutenant?" asked Kirk worriedly.
"No, I'm all right, Captain," She eased herself slowly back into her seat, wincing. "I don't think the parts of me that hurt would benefit by lying down. They shouldn't impair my efficiency, either—and no remarks, Mr. Spock!"
Spock looked bewildered, and Kirk's smile deepened at his first officer's obvious confusion.
Spock finally decided to ignore what was evidently another touch of inexplicable human humor—preferring that to the thought that Uhura might be more seriously injured than she admitted.
"An incredible experience, Captain."
"Ah, it got to you emotionally, did it, Spock?" pressed McCoy.
"As usual, an incorrect interpretation of a straightforward observation, Doctor. I found it scientifically fascinating, of course."
"I don't suppose you were scared, either?"
"Scared, Doctor? I fail to see why one should be frightened of understandable natural phenomena. I do confess that for several moments, estimates of the forces acting unfavorably on the ship did not induce in me optimism as to our overall chances for survival, however—"
"Oh, never mind, Spock," McCoy turned his attention to Kirk. "At least I had the good sense to be scared, Jim. What now?"
Kirk stared up at the screen, which now showed a seemingly endless series of concentric circles of flaring violet light. The smallest circles tended to be dark to the point of blackness.
"Mr. Sulu?"
"We're moving down the vortex, as assumed, Captain," the helmsman reported, studying his instruments. "And at a speed nothing short of astronomical. The cone itself seemed nowhere near this long at first examination. Normal space—time laws are badly distorted here. The sensors appear to be functioning properly."
"Any chance of breaking free and making our way back to the rim?" Kirk asked. The helmsman's reply was sobering.
"We've been running at full reverse drive for several minutes, Captain."
"Um." Kirk digested this information quietly. "Stop the drive down to warp-two." There was no point in continuing useless demands on the engines—they might need all the power they could muster, later.
He turned back to McCoy, remembering the doctor's question. "We'll ride it through, Bones. What else can we do?"
"Ride it through to where?"
Spock replied with another of his overwhelming quiet pronouncements. "Perhaps to the center of All Things, Doctor."
McCoy was confused instead of awestruck. "But I thought we'd already passed by the center, Spock?"
"And so we did, Doctor. This vortex was completely unexpected. But to use both our worlds for a crude analogy—there is a fixed north pole on Earth and on Vulcan. Yet this is only a geographic convenience. There is also another 'north pole' that is the real center of natural forces."
"Magnetic north," added Kirk, "and it wanders around from year to year. I see your point, Spock. There may be two centers to the galaxy. A spatial one, from which all else can be measured—and another on which certain different forces converge."
"That is it, Captain," Spock admitted, "and it is that second convergence of forces that we appear to be traveling through to its end."
"Wherever that may be—and it looks like well be there soon." Kirk gestured, and all eyes returned to the main screen.
The violet light seemed to be blending, running together into a smooth maroon pool that glowed like a dim red giant. They struck it seconds later. But the Enterprise was moving so supremely fast by then that no matter what the malignant maroon eye was—red giant or otherwise—they were in and through it before any effect was noted.
A tremendous red flash did erupt around the ship. Crimson sparks and activated particles flew away from her hull, dissolving further into all the primary hues. At Spock's sensor station and the navigation consoles, every instrument went berserk.
There was a long silence.
"My, my," whispered McCoy, his the only voice on the bridge, as he and everyone else sat staring at the screen.
Space as they knew it was . . . gone.
In its place had been substituted the wild nightmare of a color-blind surrealist. Nothing seemed fixed or permanent. What at one moment appeared as the black of normal interstellar space, complete with distant stars, would suddenly fracture like a hemorrhaging amoeba into tiny patches of scattered darkness, still with stars, and turn unexpectedly magenta or maroon or red.
Now and then it appeared as if an ocean of white-hot magma was floating only a few hundred meters beneath the Enterprise. A moment later and it formed a glowing roof over their heads, then a wall to either side, continually throwing off bubbling blobs of itself which drifted off in all directions.
As the Enterprise moved through it, nonspace slowly started to coalesce, to take on a single form. It gradually became a kind of circular tunnel with unstable sides composed of a fluid yellow substance.
They existed in a yellow, cylindrical universe. As the Enterprise continued down the corridor the ship started to slow, its speed dropping from warp-impossible to warp-ten, to one and then sublight speed.
At first the flavescent corridor appeared to be at least a million meters in diameter. Now it had shrunk until the walls seemed ready to touch the hull itself. At the end of the corridor, rotating in its center and blocking further passage, was a spherical object that just might be a world.
"Is that a planet?" exclaimed Sulu, voicing the question in the mind of everyone. It was shockingly, paralyzingly stable-looking—the first truly stable-looking thing they had seen since entering the vortex.
Stable it might be, but normal it was not. It was striped in red and whites like a candy-cane Jupiter, though it was only slightly larger than Earth-size . . . if t
he sensors could be believed.
"What is it?" wondered Uhura aloud. "Where are we?"
Spock looked up from the hooded viewer at his station. "I am afraid that our normal navigational references mean very little here, Lieutenant. All readings indicate that we are not in time as we know it. That we are no longer in space as we know it has been self-evident for some time now." He looked at McCoy.
"Doctor, perhaps these readings may mean more to you," McCoy moved over and studied the information in the viewer.
Sulu had pushed away from the navigation console while Arex was idly running the fingers of three hands over various controls. He encountered switches and buttons with random nonchalance. It didn't matter what he hit, nothing produced the slightest reaction.
He looked back at Kirk. "The helm's dead, sir. Some of the instrumentation still registers information, but they don't make any sense. Most of the navigation readouts have simply fallen to zero."
Kirk make a noncommital noise, shifted his attention to communications. "Lieutenant Uhura, try to get a message through to Starfleet. They should at least know of our position here. Maybe someone can be reached at Science Center who has some helpful suggestions."
She worked at her machinery for several minutes, then glanced helplessly back over her shoulder.
"Captain, the subspace radio is dead, too. So are all pickups. I should at least be registering static from any energy flowing around us, but there's nothing, nothing at all."
At that point McCoy happened to notice the chronometer over Spock's station. He checked his own against it, then made a fast check with the still operating library computer.
"Jim, not only is there no time here as we know it, there doesn't seem to be any time. All the ship's chronometers have stopped. Emergency backup power doesn't seem to make any difference."
"Engineering to bridge."
"Bridge here, Captain speaking." By now Kirk was so numbed that Scott's announcement seemed inevitable instead of frightening.
"There's no reason for it, Captain, no reason at all," complained the stunned, puzzled voice of the chief engineer, "but the antimatter and matter generators are going . . . fading out. Everything seems to be operating perfectly, the engines, converters, everything . . . but they're just fading. We're losing power. Emergency storage cells are dropping rapidly, and I canna tell you why. Everything’s coming . . . to a . . . stop." There was a sudden crackling, and they heard Scott's voice again, weaker now as the communicator power evaporated.
". . . a . . . top . . ." There was a final fizzle and the intercom died for good.
As it did, the lights on the bridge went out. As with the intercom, the automatic emergency backups failed to take over.
"It would appear that none of the natural laws of our universe operate here, Captain," Spock observed. For once, even his tone was muted.
"Natural laws," McCoy echoed. "The life-support systems . . . they're probably fading, too. Is everything just going to go . . . out? Hey, I'm floating."
"So am I," came Kirk's voice from somewhere in the darkness nearby.
"And I," reported Sulu. One by one, the rest of them confirmed the loss of gravity.
Without light and gravity the universe lost all sense. There was no true direction, no sense of up or down—or of right and wrong. Kirk found himself curling into a fetal position as his mind tried vainly to cope with the absence of reality.
No! He forced himself to stick out his arms and legs. He would die in the shape of a man.
McCoy coughed, found himself propelled by the slight action. Eventually he bumped into something hard—whether floor or ceiling he could not tell. Then he noticed something else.
"Jim . . . air's getting bad . . . needs circulation . . . cleaning."
Kirk tried to orient himself in the darkness as he spoke. It was hopeless. He could only pray that the open intercom would pick up his voice.
"Engineering!" he shouted, "we're getting stale air, Go to battery power on all circulation instrumentation. Primary alert, Scotty!"
Silence and soft darkness.
"Mr. Sulu."
"Here, Captain," came a reluctant, weak reply. The helmsman coughed slightly from somewhere nearby.
"Mr. Sulu," Kirk said slowly and distinctly, "there is an emergency. Go to battery power."
"I can't, Captain. I don't know where the console is."
"I am still holding my seat, Captain." Arex's voice! But Kirk's last hopes disappeared with the navigator's reply. "When the lights went I tried switching to reserves. There isn't any battery power on the bridge, either. Either they've been drained or they simply don't operate in this space-time continuum. I'm sure I tried the proper controls. Everything's gone dead." He coughed, and his voice faded to a thin wheeze.
". . . dead . . ."
"Arex?" Kirk inhaled and found himself choking. His hand went to his throat. Air . . . he was drowning, smothering, and the darkness was a blanket over him.
He heard a faint voice . . . McCoy. "Jim . . . Jim . . . we've got to do something . . . we've . . ." Then it, too, faded and was gone.
Gasping, Kirk tried to reach out to him, flailing in the emptiness, struggling to touch another human being a last time. He felt something, turned, straining. Another hand touched his and gripped tight.
"Captain?" Kirk couldn't see the figure next to him . . . yet in his mind he did.
"Good-bye, Mr. Spock."
"Good-bye, Captain . . ."
XI
Peace.
Night.
Blindness . . . Kirk found himself blinded, dazzled, stunned by the unexpected flare that lit the bridge in scintillating geometric patterns. It fluoresced in the unnatural brilliance. The strange designs pulsed for a few seconds longer, then disappeared.
Kirk felt his vision returning as his outraged retinas began to cope with the new illumination. An artificial gravity seemed to be coming back on. A moment later he was back on the floor, right side up, and sitting next to the command chair.
There were moans and coughs from all around, but they had air again, though it was weak like the new gravity. And as he looked around he saw that the bridge complement was back to normal.
Almost to normal. There was one exception.
A new man.
No, not a man . . . an alien! Manlike, but still alien. Kirk stared at him in disbelief, and the wonder stemmed not from its alienness, but its familiarity.
Was it possible that this was all illusion? That before dying a man underwent a period of mirage-ridden temporary insanity?
The creature standing before him was half-goat, half-man. No bigger than Kirk or Spock. he was complete down to goat's horns, cloven hooves, and short, flicking tail—the compendium of all the goat-gods of the old terran myths. Wide-shouldered and smoothly muscular, he wore a short beard and nothing else, save the thick fleece that covered him from waist to toe.
In human terms the goat-man appeared to be about fifty years old. That probably meant nothing, of course. But exactly how far off in his age-estimate Kirk actually was, he would not have believed.
The apparition was surveying them all with a mild, slightly bemused grin. All his movements hinted at constant delight and endless energy. And there was a strange, dancing glint in his eyes.
"Ah, humans!" came an earthquake voice that thundered around the bridge. "Lovely, primitive humans. Can't you do anything right?"
Kirk was aware the goat-man was looking down at him. He started to try and stand, but the effort was too much in the still tenuous atmosphere. "Please . . ." The deck felt like a coffin-bottom. "We need better air than this, and normal gravity . . ." His plea trailed off in a racking cough.
"Of course, of course. I was so pleased to see you—thoughtless of me. A moment."
He raised both hands over his head and brought them together with a deafening slap. Lightning flashed between his palms and formed a crackling, floating ball in the air nearby, pulsing with internal energies.
Stroki
ng his beard with one hand, the goat-man studied the ball-lightning as it formed a complex diagram of pure energy. Then he nodded approvingly. Jabbing a finger into its center, he stirred the energy like paste. At the same time, the thundering voice sounded a single word.
"RADAMANTHUS!"
The energy diagram shattered, the flaring shards swirling around the tip of his moving finger. They collapsed to a pinpoint and vanished. A rising hum was interspersed with a series of loud clicks—something Kirk had heard few times before. Dead bridge relays snapping over as they were reactivated! The lights suddenly returned to normal, as did the gravity. And there was a sweetness in the air Kirk never thought to smell again.
Spock looked over to the library station. Computer lights once again flashed in ready patterns, indicating operational status. Arex stared in wonder at the navigation console. The instrumentation was registering again . . . though as yet their readings were still incomprehensible. No doubt they meant something, but Arex had no reference tables for this . . . place.
Even the viewscreen shone with its accustomed brilliance, once more displaying a panorama of the red-and-white world suspended below them.
Spock climbed to his feet. He took a deep, experimental breath, showing every sign of expecting his body to fly apart with the force of the inhalation.
When nothing so cataclysmic happened, he tried another, and another, then nodded in satisfaction. He was operational again, too.
Kirk also smiled in relief when, on climbing to his feet, he also found he was in good repair. Nothing seemed to be broken. And how marvelous it was just to be able to breathe. He walked to the command chair, resumed his seat.
McCoy, however, chose to remain seated on the deck. He was not going anywhere for several minutes.
Evidently quite pleased with himself, the goat-man remained standing in the middle of this renewed activity. Smiling, he began to walk around the bridge, staring curiously at this or that instrument, occasionally nodding sagely to himself or letting out a chuckle of amusement.
Star Trek - Log 3 Page 16