by KATHY OLTION
It didn’t make any sense, though. At the meager speed their chemical rockets could boost them to, the chunks of frozen carbon dioxide would be nowhere near Belle Terre in ten days. They would barely make it a few light-seconds away from the comet in that time. It would take decades for them to drift all the way insystem, and by the time they did, gravitational perturbation from the outer planets would bend their trajectories every which way.
There was no doubt, though: they were aimed at the planet. Deloric was willing to bet that the Federation colony there would be on the side facing them when it crossed through the spot they were pointing at, too. He just couldn’t figure out what difference it would make.
“Hey, are you coming or not?” Terwolan asked. She was standing in the hatchway of the shuttle, her helmet light making little zigzags on the ice as she shook her head.
“Yes, Mother.” He trudged toward the shuttle, thinking.
Chapter Four
CHIEF ENGINEER Montgomery Scott scowled at the toaster on the workbench before him. It was a simple, unassuming device designed to accept two slices of bread onto a spring-loaded pedestal that lowered them into a small chamber where they were exposed to radiant heat. The heaters performed the same job a conventional toaster would do with an infrared laser, giving the light, soft bread a smoothly browned surface perfect for holding melted butter and fresh preserves.
In theory, anyway. This one wouldn’t heat, wouldn’t raise or lower the bread platform, and wouldn’t respond to any of his diagnostic probes. If he had been on board the Enterprise he could have scanned it and had the computer analyze it and pinpoint the problem in seconds, but he wasn’t on board the ship. He was in the blacksmith’s shop, trying to prevent William Thorpe from destroying a family heirloom with his horseshoe tongs and ball-peen hammer.
Thorpe was gone for the moment, but Scotty had noticed the antique bread warmer on his workbench when he’d stopped in to say hello, and he knew that the blacksmith was over at the saloon working up his courage to tackle the delicate repair job. The only way to rescue the toaster was to fix it himself and then claim he’d just been killing time until Thorpe returned.
He couldn’t take it to the Enterprise now that he’d begun, either. Gamma Night was due any moment now, and if it caught him in midtransport, he’d be stuck in the pattern buffer until the particle storm’s disruptive influence was over. It was theoretically possible to survive a lengthy stay in the buffer, but he wasn’t willing to try it for anything less than a life-or-death emergency, which this was not.
Kaylene Brandon thought it was, but then it was her toaster. According to the kids who liked to gather around the blacksmith’s shop—and who now stood in a semicircle around him offering helpful suggestions as he worked—she had brought it with her to Belle Terre, figuring to add a little authentic nostalgia to her family’s homesteading days. Now it apparently symbolized everything about colony life for her. If it failed, so would her faith in the colony. Scotty understood how someone could develop an emotional attachment to a well-designed machine, but that seemed a bit over the top to him. If she had to fall for something, it ought to at least have an auxiliary power source.
The toaster didn’t use any of the standard power supplies that Scotty was used to, but the Brandons had brought along a converter that produced alternating current from a phaser battery. Scotty knew that was working; it had burned out his tricorder when he’d connected it up directly to check the voltage. He’d forgotten how unforgiving alternating current could be to delicate electronics.
Now he was on his own, man against machine, with no technological crutches to help him. He didn’t mind; he actually liked the challenge of it. This was even more fun than catching up on his technical manuals, and definitely better than helping build smelters and fabrication plants for the colony, which he had been doing earlier in the day. He had to get back to that eventually, but for now he was happy to take a little “engineers holiday” and tinker a bit.
He bent happily to the task. If the power supply worked, then the problem was probably something mechanical, a broken wire or a bent linkage. The device’s internal sensors apparently couldn’t detect that sort of damage, if indeed it had sensors. They were either more cleverly hidden than Scotty had ever seen before, or nonexistent.
He had decided that maybe there had to be a piece of bread on the pedestal before it would operate, so he had sent one of the children over to the bakery for a loaf. When the boy returned with it, fresh out of the oven and smelling wonderful, it turned out to be much tougher than it looked to cut it into even slices that would fit in the toaster’s slots. Scotty had finally gotten two usable if a bit ragged slabs, and the children had happily eaten the evidence of his mistakes, so he made sure the power converter was switched on and set the two slices on the platforms.
“Stand back now,” he admonished the kids, but there was no need to worry. Nothing happened.
“All right then, we’ll try manual override,” he muttered, pushing down the plunger at the end of the toaster. The bread descended into the slots and a soft humming sound came from inside the silvery case, but when he held his hand over the slots he felt no heat.
He couldn’t see past the bread, so he took the knife that he had used to carve it and slid the blade in beside one of the slices, intending to peer in and see if the characteristic red glow of radiant heat was present, but the tip of the blade must have contacted the heating element instead.
There was a loud zzzztt! and he jerked backward, his whole body suddenly tingling as if he’d been hit with a phaser set on stun. The children’s mouths gaped open like singers in a choir, then a moment later they burst into laughter.
“Oh, so it’s funny, is it?” he said, his teeth still vibrating from the alternating current.
A little girl with blonde pigtails pointed upward. “It’s your hair!”
He reached up to feel the top of his head and found his hair standing on end.
“Do ye know what causes that?” he asked.
“Sticking a knife in the toaster!” the same girl said.
“Aye, that was how it happened,” he admitted, “but that’s not what happened. The electricity left a charge on the surface of my body, and some of the electrons went up to my hair where they make the strands repel each other.”
“Can I try it?” asked the boy beside her.
“Uhhh . . . that’s not a good idea,” Scotty said. “If the frequency was just a wee bit lower, it could cook you from the inside out.”
“Oh.” The children backed away a step.
Scotty slicked down his hair again and grounded himself on the workbench’s metal edge, then looked at the knife he still clutched in his hand. He had burned a small notch in the tip of the blade, but it could be repaired.
The toaster was another story. He lifted the manual override lever and removed the bread, then peered inside. The heating element he’d touched was missing a good centimeter of wire, completely vaporized by the short circuit. He would have to take the whole thing apart now and reroute the wire to get enough length to splice it back together again.
He turned it over, looking for helical tensors or magnaplane fasteners, but the case was held together with Phillips-head screws. “Well,” he muttered, “it looks like I’m in the right place after all,” for the walls of the smithy were festooned with screwdrivers, pliers, hammers, and tongs. Scotty had a wonderful collection of similar tools in his quarters on board the ship, but he would no more use them than the captain would use one of his precious paper books to prop up a gimpy table leg. Here, though, Thorpe used his all the time. They were scratched and pitted and in some cases bent from being pressed into service as pry bars. The blacksmith wouldn’t care a bit if Scotty did the same.
Whistling softly, he selected the appropriate-size screwdriver from the tool rack and set to work, but he had barely removed the first screw when Thorpe showed up, his massive shoulders, curly black hair, and thickly bearded face eclipsing t
he light coming in through the open doorway.
“Ah, good,” he said, hardly glancing at what Scotty was doing. “I was looking for you. Something funny fell into the lake, and Dr. Neville wants us to go investigate.”
“Something funny?” Scotty asked. “Funny how?”
“He didn’t say, but I’d guess funny strange. Neville doesn’t strike me as the kind who’s interested in funny ha-ha.”
That wasn’t what Scotty had meant by his question, but it looked like that was all the answer he was going to get. Thorpe snatched his tricorder off its peg by the door and stepped out into the street, followed by the kids who had been watching Scotty. They had the right idea; it was either tag along or hear the story secondhand, so Scotty shut off the toaster’s power supply and followed them down to the lake.
Reynold Coates and his mother were already there, standing on the end of the short pier that extended a few meters out over the water. The children all ran up to them, and Reynold pointed out over the water, then everyone shaded their eyes and looked. Scotty peered out into the lake as well, and after his eyes had adjusted to the glare of the afternoon sun on the rippling surface, he realized that a small patch of water about a stone’s throw out from the pier was bubbling. It looked like some kind of gas was being released from below.
Four or five fish floated on their sides near the disturbed surface. Were they poisoned or cooked? If a hot reactor core had fallen into the water, that gas could be steam.
“What’s the radiation reading?” he asked Thorpe as he strode out onto the pier.
Thorpe lifted his tricorder and pushed the power button with a calloused thumb, then laboriously poked at the sensor controls until he got a radiation scan. “Just normal background,” he said. “Which is sky-high at the moment. Gamma Night’s starting.”
Scotty looked at the sky, but the bright blue atmosphere revealed no evidence of the energy sleeting into it from space. Not visually at least—but the effects were easy to detect in other ways. Communications would be down for the next ten hours, and the rising ionic imbalance would ultimately knock out even hand-held devices like Thorpe’s tricorder. They would have to take what readings they could within the next few minutes, or wait until tomorrow.
“Chemical reading?” he asked.
“Umm, just a minute.” The blacksmith prodded the controls again, then realized what the problem was and blew a thick layer of dust off the display. “Nothing unusual,” he reported. “Silica, but . . .” He waved his hand through the dust cloud.
Scotty resisted the urge to take the tricorder from him and try it himself. His own tricorder lay on Thorpe’s workbench, burned out through his own carelessness; he had no right to demand that someone else relinquish theirs.
He looked out at the bubbling water again. They needed to get out there and take a sample directly from the source. There was a flat-bottomed boat tied to the side of the pier; Scotty had no idea whose it was, but he didn’t think they’d begrudge him the use of it to investigate something like this.
“Into the boat,” he said to Thorpe.
“I want to go too!” one of the kids said, but Scotty shook his head.
“No, laddie. A great big bairn like you will swamp a wee boat like that one.”
Everyone laughed, then laughed even louder when Thorpe and Scotty both climbed in. There was only a hand’s width of freeboard left, and that varied considerably as the two men wobbled for balance while they unshipped the oars. They didn’t bother to put them in the locks; they just paddled toward the bubbling water, Thorpe holding his oar in one massive hand while he worked the tricorder with his other.
“I’m still picking up a silica compound,” he said as they drew closer. “Says here it’s heavily oxygenated, molecular weight up in the thousands. That can’t be right, can it?”
“It could if it were a polymer of some sort,” Scotty said. “Can you get a structural reading?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.” He held out the tricorder for Scotty to examine. The screen showed the schematic of a huge molecule composed of mostly silicon and oxygen atoms, but it wasn’t anything Scotty was familiar with either, and it changed even as he watched. Some of that was just interference from Gamma Night, but some of it was actual molecular activity. Then he noticed the warning line blinking in the corner of the screen. Explosive gas.
“Aha!” he said, watching the molecule grow. “Something’s reacting with the lakebed. It’s breaking down the sand, combining it with oxygen from the water, and bubbling off free hydrogen. Purely chemical reaction. Can you get a reading of the parent material?”
“I’ll try.” Thorpe leaned over the side of the boat and aimed the tricorder into the water. Scotty leaned the other way to keep them from capsizing while Thorpe waved the tricorder back and forth, but the blacksmith was unable to get a lock on anything through the meters of water. “Traces of tungsten, aluminum, magnesium, and so on,” he said, sitting upright again and nearly pitching Scotty out the other side before he could compensate, “but I can’t locate a parent mass. It looks like it’s completely dissolved.”
“Then why is the water still bubbling?” Scotty asked.
“You got me. Here, you’re better at this sort of thing. You try.” Thorpe handed Scotty the tricorder.
Scotty took it eagerly and began scanning for more clues. He had no more luck than Thorpe with chemical analysis or direct mass sensing, but there were a few unusual spikes in the high-frequency energy spectrum. Trouble was, they were so diffuse there was no way to tell whether they were coming from the lake or from space.
One of the dead fish floated past, so he scanned it, too. It was a rainbow trout, planted here from Earth stock. A medical tricorder would have given him more useful data, but even with Thorpe’s primitive scanner and Gamma Night interfering with its beam, it was obvious that the fish had been asphyxiated. The ongoing chemical reaction had apparently pulled all the dissolved oxygen from the water before it had set to work dissociating the water molecules themselves.
The bubbles were dying down. Scotty set the tricorder’s range to maximum and aimed it out over the lake. Through the rising static, he could detect low-level molecular activity all through the water. “Whatever it is, it’s dissipating,” he said.
“Good,” Thorpe replied. Without prompting, he started paddling for shore again, and Scotty had to set the tricorder down and help so they wouldn’t go around in circles. He looked back out at the lake, wishing he had better equipment, and wishing gamma night hadn’t cut short what readings he had been able to get.
If wishes were fishes, he thought, looking back over his shoulder at the dead trout, then he would be back on board the Enterprise, pushing the engines to maximum output while the great starship streaked from star to star on a mission of galactic importance, not stuck here on some backwater planet—literally!—repairing toasters and investigating swamp gas while the last years of his career ticked slowly by. This little oddity was mildly interesting, but he was sure it would ultimately turn out to be a simple natural phenomenon, of no great concern to anyone but a hydrologist.
Chapter Five
THE BRIDGE of the Enterprise was eerily silent. The steady ping of the subspace scanners had stopped. Missing also were the various hums, bleeps, and twitters from the communications, helm, and science stations. On all sides, snow-filled monitors hissed softly, awaiting reacquisition of signal. Gamma Night had shut them all down, its flood of charged particles reducing the ship’s sensing ability to the most basic system of all: the naked eye.
Captain Kirk leaned back in his command chair and stretched his arms over his head, feeling joints pop and muscles release all the way down into his rib cage. Gamma Night always affected him like this. Dr. McCoy swore that there were no physiological effects from it, but every time the radiation storm sprayed through the Belle Terre system and interrupted the ship’s sensors, Kirk felt as if his own body was under siege.
He ha
ted flying blind. That attitude had been drilled into him from his earliest days at the academy: they didn’t call it “dead reckoning” for nothing. At flight speed, any random piece of debris could punch right through a ship before they even knew what hit them. The only solution was to reduce your velocity as much as possible, just drift in space and hope that nothing else was moving relative to you. It was a frustrating choice, but it was the best they could do.
Spock was experimenting with olivium-powered sensors that could cut through the interference, but he was finding the unstable quasimatter much trickier to work with than he had anticipated. Instead of simply extending an instrument’s range, the new power source seemed to affect its very nature, giving the sensors new and unpredictable side effects. Kirk was confident that his science officer would eventually figure it out, but in the meantime, Gamma Night still shut them down for ten hours out of every thirty.
As a stopgap measure, Spock had rigged up a low-frequency radar unit using the forward deflector, but a wavelength long enough to penetrate the particle storm was practically useless for detecting anything smaller than a battle cruiser. Nonetheless, the Vulcan kept his eye on the fuzzy green monitor as its refresh line swept around and around in a slow circle. Sulu and Thomsen directed their attention to the main view-screen, while Jolley coordinated lookouts on observation decks throughout the ship. If anyone spotted anything moving against the stellar background, Jolley would put it on the main screen under high magnification, and Thomsen would calculate its course manually.
It was a hell of a way to run a starship, Kirk thought as he stood up and paced once around the bridge. He might as well paint concentric red rings around the top of the saucer section.
“Captain,” Spock said as he started a second lap, “may I remind you that your presence is required in—”
“I know.”
Spock turned back to his sensor screen, his already green face practically fluorescent in the monitor’s phosphor glow. Kirk knew he was stalling, but it was hard to leave the bridge when his ship was so exposed to danger.