by Gene DeWeese
With the alien fully restrained, the two orderlies lifted the stretcher easily, crossed the transporter platform and walked down the steps. Nurse Garcia stayed close to the stretcher on one side while Ensign Reems, the security man, stayed slightly to the rear on the other side. The rest of the security detail and McCoy's people parted to give them a clear path to the door to the corridor. Spock, his attention still on the tricorder, kept the instrument centered on the alien.
"Well, Jim, what about the next one?" McCoy prompted irritably.
"As soon as—" Kirk began, but he was cut off by an abrupt, wheezing sound from the stretcher.
The two orderlies came to a sudden stop, and Reems took a single step to one side, keeping his phaser trained directly on the alien. Nurse Garcia put a hand lightly on the alien's arm and looked down at him, hoping the touch and her expression would appear more reassuring than threatening.
For several seconds, the only sound was that of the alien breathing, now only a faint rasping, not the loud wheeze of the initial intake of breath. He was the focus of all eyes in the transporter room. Even Spock glanced up briefly from his tricorder.
Then the alien's eyes opened, suddenly, as if the lids were shutters of a pair of cameras. For the first fraction of a second, the eyes, an almost fluorescent green, stared straight up, unseeing, their huge pupils shrinking rapidly, but then, as they focussed on Garcia's dark features and glossy black hair, they widened in what, in a human, would have been sheer terror.
For another instant, the eyes darted in all directions, flickering across everyone in the room. The slitlike mouth opened a fraction of an inch, just enough to reveal almost human-looking teeth, and then it and the eyes clamped tightly shut, and the entire body stiffened so abruptly it shook the stretcher.
Instinctively, Garcia reached out again, and this time her hand came to rest on the alien's chest. "It's all right," she said softly, but the alien's body seemed sent into convulsions by her action. The stretcher was almost wrenched from the orderlies' hands.
Pulling back, Garcia turned to cast a helpless look at Dr. McCoy. In the same instant, the alien's convulsive motions stopped, and he became not just motionless but stiff, as if every muscle in his body was tensed and fighting every other muscle. Any tighter, and bone and tendon would begin to snap. The only sound, though, was the grinding of the alien's teeth and a brief sigh of relief from one of the orderlies as they recovered their grip on the stretcher and moved through the door to the corridor.
"I told you—" McCoy began, but the rest of his protest was cut off by an urgently barked order from Spock.
"Drop the stretcher! Everyone move back, immediately!"
Chapter Seven
STARTLED BY THE INTENSITY in the Vulcan's normally impassive voice, the orderlies responded instantly, though their training forced them to take a split second to lower the stretcher to the corridor floor rather than dropping it.
A moment later, as they and Ensign Reems were scrambling back into the transporter room, the corridor was filled with a blinding, almost silent flash and a wave of heat that scorched the walls.
Garcia, whose obvious concern for the alien had caused her to react more slowly than the orderlies, was still in the door, turning to follow them, when the flash came. Soundlessly, she completed the turn, but her right hand and arm, which had been extended into the corridor, were caught in the brief inferno.
As the glare faded and a hubbub of voices erupted around her, she stood motionless just inside the transporter room door. But then, as her effort to move the arm brought the momentarily deadened nerves back to screaming life, she gasped. Suddenly she was bathed in the cold sweat of shock, and the room began a dizzying whirl that ended only when she crumpled, unconscious, to the floor.
Dr. McCoy, seeing the arm discoloring and blistering even as he watched, spun on a second pair of orderlies. "Get her down to surgery, now!"
When the orderlies hesitated even a fraction of a second as they glanced toward the scorched corridor through which they would have to pass, McCoy snatched the stretcher from them and slammed it to the floor next to Garcia. Sliding his hands under her, he smoothly, swiftly slid her onto it. By that time, the orderlies had recovered, and they quickly snatched up the stretcher and raced into the corridor, past the virtually vaporized remains of the alien. With a wordless glance toward Kirk, McCoy followed at a run.
"Obviously you saw it coming, Mr. Spock," Kirk said as he glanced at Spock's tricorder, "but do you have any suggestions for keeping it from happening again if we bring the others in?"
"Only to keep them unconscious, Captain, so they are unable to activate the devices. Then we can attempt to locate and disarm those devices."
"You know what happened, then?"
"I know only that there was a short pulse of electromagnetic energy, followed by a power buildup within a device buried somewhere in the being's body. In some ways, it was similar to the power buildup that precedes the firing of their ships' lasers."
"At least they're consistent," Kirk said, shaking his head grimly.
Minutes later, the next alien was brought in from the transporter matrix. He was as unconscious as the first, but even so, he was immediately subjected to a precautionary phaser burst that sent him even deeper into oblivion. Like the first, he was stocky and hairless and, except for the large-pupiled green eyes, could have passed for an odd-looking human.
"Monitor his vitals at all times," Kirk cautioned as the alien was placed on another stretcher. "And trust what the tricorder says, not how the alien looks or acts. If your readings give the slightest indication that he's waking up, stun him again. Now get him down to the medical section fast, and find out how to keep him from vaporizing himself—and us!"
The three-dimensional, computer-generated image on the diagnostic screen showed that the alien was indeed as close to human as the earlier tricorder scannings had indicated. The heart was oddly bell-shaped, and the rib cage extended over much of the solidly muscled abdomen, but there were no really fundamental anatomical differences. The blood, iron-based, was similar to human blood but not similar enough to allow transfusions. Body temperature was a cool ninety-one degrees, giving his skin an oddly snakelike feel which seemed to match his total hairlessness and slitlike mouth.
The major difference was not anatomical but, as expected, artificial. Buried deep in the chest cavity, directly beneath the heart, was a small but powerful omnidirectional laserlike device. Embedded in the center of the device was an almost invisible kernel that Spock's science tricorder identified as a radio receiver which, when activated, would trigger the surrounding device. Even with the knowledge the instruments gave of the alien's anatomy and metabolism, however, it would be virtually impossible to surgically remove the device, even without having to worry about how to keep from setting it off. Disabling it remotely without inadvertently triggering it seemed equally difficult.
In the end, however, Dr. Rajanih, in charge of the ship's dental unit, discovered what everyone else had overlooked. What had appeared at first to be one of a dozen similar fillings in the alien's teeth turned out instead to be a seed-sized transmitter operated in much the same way that long-ago Terran spies had operated the cyanide capsules that a few of the more fanatical had had installed in their teeth. Simply grinding the teeth in a particular way would break the seal over the transmitter, and the alien's saliva, even more acidic than a human's, would act as an electrolyte, instantly activating the minuscule battery that powered the transmitter, until then totally inert and undetectable. Within less than a second after the saliva touched the almost microscopic battery plates, the transmitter would receive a short spurt of power, enabling it to send out a short-range microwave pulse that triggered the receiver embedded beneath the alien's heart.
Once the transmitter had been removed from the tooth and transported to another part of the ship, well shielded from the receiver, the nature of the pulse it transmitted was analyzed. With that knowledge, then, the receive
r itself could be safely disabled so the device couldn't be triggered intentionally by more distant but more powerful transmitters or accidentally by any of the countless forms of energy that permeated virtually every cubic centimeter of the Enterprise and every other functional starship.
Once the living but still unconscious alien had been successfully disarmed, Kirk, on his way back to the transporter room, paused to glance into surgery. McCoy, he saw, was putting the finishing touches on Garcia's hand and arm.
"Will she be all right, Bones?" he asked as McCoy, pulling in a deep, relieved breath, extracted his hands from the surgical machinery, removed the vision helmet and stepped back.
"It looks good so far," he said. Pausing, he looked back at the operating table and the machine—largely an enclosed cluster of micro-manipulators and optics—that was only now being removed from the arm. "You know, Jim, I make a big deal now and then out of being just a country doctor who doesn't trust every new gadget that comes down the pike. But every now and then, I have to admit that I'm damned glad I've got a few of them."
"They're no better than the person who operates them, Bones," Kirk said quietly. "That was good work, as usual."
A faint, crooked smile worked its way onto McCoy's still-haggard features. "Thanks, Jim. And thanks for not saying I told you so. You and the green-blooded goblin both."
"There are times when such things are neither appropriate nor logical, Bones, and this was one of those times. Meanwhile, if you're interested, we've discovered how to defang our friends."
"Those walking disintegrators, you mean?" McCoy's eyebrows twitched upward inquiringly, and some of the tiredness seemed to fade from his face.
"Exactly. We brought a second one back, and now that we've defused him, we're going to haul in the other two." As they made their way back to the transporter room, Kirk filled McCoy in on the last hour.
The doctor only shook his head. "What kind of people would do something like that?" he asked incredulously when Kirk finished.
"People who are desperate or fanatical or both," Kirk said. Then he added quietly, "Humans have been doing it for millennia in one form or another. Don't forget where the term 'kamikaze' originated."
McCoy sighed. "I know, Jim. Every now and then I try to forget that that kind of insanity was a part of our history, but it always comes back. And it's always just as hard to understand."
"Hard to accept, perhaps, Bones, but not always that hard to understand," Kirk said. And then he continued before McCoy could protest, "Now let's see if we can find out what drove these people to such measures. Now that we know how to keep them alive long enough to ask them some questions, maybe we've even got a chance of getting some answers."
It was fifteen hours and a fitful sleep later when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Nurse Chapel, Rajanih, and Dr. Crandall, along with Tomson, Reems, and Creighton from security, stood in the largest diagnostic room of the medical section waiting for the first of the three surviving aliens to awaken. Cushioned straps held him firmly to the similarly cushioned table, the upper half of which had been tilted upward so that the alien was half upright, facing his captors. A universal translator, linked directly to the main computer, would pick up every sound the alien made as well as monitor and map his neuronic activity. Under these conditions, with the translator augmented by the full capacity of the computer, communication would be possible in a matter of minutes.
Finally, after nearly ten minutes of silence except for the nervous shifting of Crandall's feet, the instruments monitoring the alien's condition indicated he was fully awake.
Yet he did not move.
"Playing possum, do you think, Bones?" Kirk asked softly.
His answer came not from McCoy but from the alien. At the sound of Kirk's voice, the alien stiffened, but his eyes did not open. Instead, after sucking in a single rasping breath, he clamped his teeth together, grinding them forcefully.
When the expected sudden death did not come, he ground his teeth together even more violently, until the grating sound was audible to everyone in the room.
"When he finally decides to open his eyes, Dr. Rajanih, show him what you took from his tooth," Kirk said, still purposely keeping his voice as calm and unthreatening as he could.
For nearly half a minute in all, the grinding continued, the alien's face becoming more contorted with each second, his entire body stiffening as every muscle tensed. There was, however, none of the convulsive jerking that the first alien had exhibited.
Suddenly, as if some mental switch had finally been turned off, the grinding stopped, and the alien seemed to collapse, every muscle going limp.
Then, slowly, the eyes still closed, one arm moved, coming to an abrupt stop as it pressed against the cushioned restraining strap. Then the other arm moved similarly, and finally the legs, but the motions remained slow and fluid and deliberate. Even so, after a few seconds it became apparent from the faint creaking sounds made by the straps that he was exerting a startling amount of pressure.
"What about the light level, Bones?" Kirk asked, frowning abruptly as he turned to McCoy. "We should have thought of it before, but their large pupils and extreme paleness probably mean they're accustomed to lower levels of light than we are."
"You don't worry about lighting when you're trying to keep your patient from exploding in your face!" McCoy flared, but a moment later he subsided.
"You're right, Jim," he said, a touch of apology in his voice. "Nurse Chapel, bring it down fifty percent. And we should probably lower the temperature, too. Remember that their body temperature is almost eight degrees below ours."
"Good idea," Kirk said. "Tell environment to lower the temperature—how much, Bones? Eight degrees?"
McCoy shook his head. "Five or six is enough for a start."
With the light level reduced, Chapel spoke into the nurse's station intercom, passing on the instructions.
The temperature dropped, though not as quickly as the light level had. Dr. Crandall, who was wearing a short-sleeved blue tunic, folded his arms, chafing his hands along his upper arms.
Finally, the alien's limbs relaxed once again, his arms falling back against the surface of the table. For more than a minute, then, the only motion was that of his chest as it moved in a rapid, shallow breathing pattern.
Then, at last, the eyes opened, but just a slit. The motion would have been missed entirely had everyone not been watching so closely. Underneath the lids, the eyes moved surreptitiously from side to side. Other than that, the alien was now totally motionless.
"The implant, Dr. Rajanih," Kirk prompted.
Rajanih, who had been watching the alien raptly, cast a quick, apologetic glance toward Kirk as he raised the small transparent container that held the device. Shaking it gently, he moved closer to the alien and held it directly in front of his slitted eyes.
For another long moment, the alien was totally motionless, including his eyes. Even his breathing once again halted, and his heartbeat, after a momentary spurt, slowed as well.
McCoy, startled by the suddenly reduced heart rate, started to approach the alien but stopped after only a couple of steps. "If we missed something else," he said, shaking his head, "some kind of organic backup system that allows him to simply stop his heart, it's too late to do anything about it now."
"I would say he simply has excellent mental discipline," Rajanih said. "Many races have similar abilities."
Spock nodded his agreement. "If he is determined to die and is able to induce death through mental control of normally automatic functions such as heartbeat, there is little we can do."
"Except keep him unconscious while we try to figure out what we can do," Kirk said, nodding to the security team. "Be ready if I give the word."
But even as Kirk spoke, the heart rate leveled off. A moment later, the alien's eyes opened, not as widely as those of the first alien, but in what looked like a partial squint, as if the light were still slightly too bright for comfort. They were fastened on the implant in
Rajanih's hand, and as the alien looked at it, his almost nonexistent lips parted slightly, and his jaw and cheek moved in a very humanlike pattern that indicated he was probing the formerly deadly tooth with his tongue.
Apparently feeling the smooth solidity that had replaced the transmitter and its comparatively uneven and fragile seal, the alien abandoned the probing and began looking at his watchers more directly, his eyes meeting and briefly holding first Rajanih's, then Kirk's, then those of each of the others who stood watching him. The alien's eyes held not so much a challenge as an acknowledgment of his situation, yet by no means a surrender. There was nothing submissive in those eyes.
"Lower the light another twenty percent, Bones," Kirk said quietly, and McCoy complied.
As the light lowered, the alien's lids raised until, when another five percent of the light was removed, his eyes were fully open.
They were also fastened on Kirk, as if the alien had deduced that he was the one in charge simply from the fact that when he had spoken, someone else had immediately responded.
"Now if we can just get him to talk, at least enough to give the computer a start on figuring out his language," McCoy said.
"Based on his behavior so far," Kirk said, "that doesn't seem all that likely. And even if we do get his language sorted out, I suspect we will get little more than his equivalent of name, rank, and serial number, if that much."
And they didn't. After nearly half an hour of trying, during which everyone, even Dr. Crandall, took turns trying to elicit some speech from the alien, he remained silent. He was obviously listening very closely, but, equally obviously, he had no intention of making a single sound.
Nor did they do any better when, over the next two hours, they allowed the other two aliens, held in separate facilities, to awaken. Both went through variations on the same routine as they awakened, both attempting to activate the missing transmitter and both feigning unconsciousness as soon as they realized death was not forthcoming. One of them, according to the monitors, actually did lose consciousness for a brief period, growing even paler as he slumped against the padded straps, while the other, the tallest of the three by inches, broke into uncontrollable convulsions even more violent than those of the first one beamed aboard. Briefly, a series of sounds, more like keening wails than screams or shouts, poured from the taller one's barely opened mouth, but even the most complete computer analysis of the sounds couldn't extract any meaning or even any patterns, and once the outburst was over he remained utterly, rigidly silent.