Collision Course

by William Shatner

  Sarek’s eyes narrowed by a millimeter. “Your suggestion, Spock?”

  “Tell me why you allow illegal activities to occur in this embassy.”

  “I cannot.”

  Spock realized he had balled his hands into fists behind his back, and was glad neither of his parents could see his outrageous loss of control. “I can only arrive at one logical explanation for your position.”

  “Explain.”

  “You do not trust me for the same reason the embassy staff do not—you believe me to be less than Vulcan.”

  Amanda stood before Spock and spoke as if in great pain. “Spock, that’s not true. You know that’s not true.”

  “Your mother is correct,” Sarek said sternly.

  “If my logic is flawed, then correct me,” Spock challenged. “State another reason.”

  Sarek shook his head once, clearly in emotional distress. “I cannot.”

  “Vulcans do not accept me as Vulcan. The humans do not accept me as human. What would you have me be, Father?”

  Spock felt his mother put her arm through his. “Our son. Whom we love.” She looked at the viewscreen. “And trust.”

  “Is that true?” Spock asked his father, and he was so upset that he no longer cared that his words caught in his throat.

  “Your analysis of the situation is flawed,” Sarek replied, as if he were speaking to a child. “We will discuss this further when I return.” He leaned forward, and the viewscreen image switched from Sarek to a Vulcan desert scene.

  “Spock,” Amanda said, gently withdrawing her arm from his, “you know your father didn’t mean any of that.”

  Spock relaxed his hands. “Unlike me, Sarek is Vulcan. He is incapable of saying anything except what he means.” He gave his mother a small half bow. “If you will excuse me, Mother, I have my studies.”

  As Spock left Amanda speechless in the now silent room, he thought again of the human, Kirk, and envied him the closeness of his family.

  When he was alone, he examined the gray metal bracelet of the tracking module, idly twisted it around his wrist. Something, at least, could be done about that.

  18

  Fourteen-year-old Jimmy Kirk shivered in the corner of his cabin with the other kids. He had draped them all with the thin blankets from their bunks, tried to make them think it was a dress-up game. But the heat and power had gone off yesterday when the governor’s residence had been attacked, so Jimmy knew that whatever was happening out on the wide dirt streets of the colony, it was no game.

  Near dusk of the second day, when most of the kids were in fitful sleep, the cabin public-address speaker had crackled to life, waking everyone. At first the younger kids were scared, but then the older ones figured out that if the colony’s communications systems were back online, maybe that meant the power would be next, and then heat and running water—and food.

  But the cabin stayed dark as an unfamiliar voice began to speak. “People of Tarsus IV, our colony faces difficult times. Governor Myron could not lead, and so, by the will of the people, I have taken that office in her place. The struggle we must now embark upon is dire, but measures can and will be taken to ensure this colony’s survival. I ask all able-bodied adults to assemble at once at the storehouse complex. Ration cards are being prepared and will be allocated according to the group to which each individual is assigned. If you know of any elderly colonists, or others too ill or infirm to assemble, inform the guards at the storehouses so arrangements can be made for those people as well.”

  Whoever was speaking, the new governor Jimmy supposed, sounded so reasonable and authoritative that he began to believe that everything would work out. Maybe someone had found another storehouse of grain that hadn’t been spoiled by the fungus. And then a loud noise came over the speaker, like something heavy falling or a door slamming open. Another voice started shouting. “No! No! He’s going to kill us! That’s his—” There was another sound, then—a high-pitched hum that Jimmy knew well: laser rifle.

  The second voice stopped in mid-sentence, followed by another sound of something heavy falling.

  He heard a new voice call out, asking if the governor was all right. Someone else demanded to know who was responsible for guarding the door. Other voices, far away from the audio pickup, buzzed into incomprehensible growling.

  Donny Roy and another four-year-old huddled closer to Jimmy. All the kids were afraid now. When adults fight, no child feels safe.

  At last, the measured, reasonable voice of the new governor returned, as if nothing had happened to interrupt him.

  “Make no mistake,” the governor said, “this colony is in the midst of a revolution. And if this colony is to survive, the revolution must succeed. Assemble at the storehouses. Go into your groups. Obey the guards. That is how we will survive. By my order, Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV.”

  The speaker clicked into silence.

  The only sound in the dark, cold cabin came from a handful of whimpering children.

  Then a fist pounded on the outside door. All the children gasped or cried out in surprise. And Jimmy heard the familiar voice of his best friend shout: “Jimmy! It’s Matt! The governor wants to see you!”

  The kids all looked at him through the gloom.

  “He’s got food! All we got to do is help him out! C’mon!”

  Jimmy went to the wooden door. It creaked on cold hinges as he opened it.

  Outside, lit by the hand torches they carried, exhaling clouds of frozen breath in the cold of growing night, Matthew Caul was waiting for him, grinning, accompanied by five other teenagers from nearby farms. They all wore red bandanas at their necks. “Tell the other kids to stay in the cabin for now. We’ll come back for ’em after the governor’s checked their records.”

  “Checked for what?” Jimmy asked.

  “It’ll be okay,” Matt said again. “The governor’s got food. All we got to do is help him.”

  Jimmy looked into his best friend’s eyes and saw hunger there. Then he saw that Matt and the other teenagers carried laser rifles, just like the one he’d heard over the speaker.

  “Why do you have guns?”

  Matt’s grin faded. “I told him you’d be okay. You want to eat, don’t you?” He fell back on the same old argument. “All we gotta do is help him.”

  “Help him do what?”

  “The right thing,” Matt answered.

  Then there was another loud explosion and—

  —Kirk woke with a start, gasping, still feeling the deathly cold wind of Tarsus IV blow into the cabin through the open door.

  He sat up, remembered he was in his brother’s bedroom. Then he heard another loud noise, just like the one that had wakened him.

  Joe Kirk was in the main room, snoring like artillery fire from the old holosimulations of the Romulan War.

  Kirk slowly opened the bedroom door, saw his father on the couch, one arm folded across his eyes, deep asleep, apparently immune to the volume of his exhalations.

  Kirk seized his opportunity. He walked quietly across the room, found his jacket where he had tossed it, checked the pocket for his communicator, then eased out the door into the hallway. He could hear his father all the way to the lift.

  By the time he was outside and on the street, Kirk felt awake and a plan fell into place. The first order of business was the tracking module on his wrist. Something had to be done about it.

  He pulled out his communicator, called the one person he knew he could always count on, despite what his father said.

  “This is close enough,” Kirk said. “Can you park?”

  Sam peered through the grimy windshield of the rental landcar. The towering, flashing holosigns of New Union Square lit the street ahead in a rainbow explosion of shifting colors, as if a deep-space nebula had been blown apart by a supernova. In the confusion of light, the milling crowds of pedestrians made it hard to tell where the sidewalks ended and the road began. He could hear the rumble of their passing conversations warring with the
come-ons from the holosigns and a dozen competing music broadcasts. There was no possible place to park. “Not a chance,” he told his brother. “I could let you off.”

  Sam had taken Jimmy’s call with reluctance. The only thing that was keeping him from doing what Griffyn wanted right away was the tracking module Starfleet had clamped on his brother. It was the perfect excuse for his not taking Jimmy to the docks. But with this new plan of his brother’s to get rid of it, Sam didn’t want to risk anyone from Griffyn’s organization seeing them together. If Jimmy wasn’t wearing the tracking module, then Sam had no excuse.

  “How ’bout it?” Sam asked.

  Kirk had a new plan. “Turn right up here. There’s an alley by that surplus shop.”

  Sam turned right when the crowd let him, slowly made his way along a narrower, less crowded street. The holosigns here were fixed within their generator frames, and none of them projected their illusory images down to the street level. He checked the mix of businesses: mostly small restaurants, the inexpensive kind where all food was extruded from a machine in the back.

  “There,” Sam’s brother said. He pointed to a small storefront where a crooked holosign showed the same loop of an antique starship stretching out as it went into warp drive, disappearing, then reappearing on the other side, nacelle lights growing brighter once again. As Kirk had said, there was a narrow opening between that shop and the next building on the street. “Turn in.”

  Sam stopped the car in the small blind alley. The headlights illuminated a lurid red sign that carried a warning in several languages and many different alien letter forms. The ones Sam could read stated that anyone who parked here would be eaten. “You’re sure this is okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, c’mon,” Kirk urged, and as quickly as that he was out of the car.

  Sam followed his brother to the surplus shop with the infinite starship sign. “Wait here,” Kirk said, then went in.

  Sam remained on the sidewalk, looking through the front window to see what appeared to be the aftermath of an explosion in a wrecking yard. Every square centimeter of the shop was covered in rickety-looking shelves holding bins of all sizes and colors, crammed full of memory modules, isobinary chips, quantum isolators…Sam couldn’t identify more than a tenth of what he saw.

  Jimmy, though, looked right at home in the middle of the mess. He had one baffling piece of something in his hand already, and was laughing about it with the shopkeeper—a massive, dark-skinned alien with a startlingly white beard, two stubby antennae coming straight out of his forehead, and wearing what looked to be a scarred old ’plaser’s apron. The shopkeeper laughed at whatever it was Jimmy said, then waved his three-fingered hand—or maybe, since the light was dim, Sam thought it might even be his tail—and nodded “of course” when Jimmy pointed at the wall behind him, obviously referring to the car.

  Sam’s brother came out of the shop a moment later. “No trouble. Joonie-Ben says we can leave the car there as long as we have to. Let’s go.”

  Sam marveled again at how easy everything seemed to be for Jimmy. “Joonie-Ben? That alien?”

  “Yeah,” Kirk said as they walked quickly toward the main street. “It’s his shop.” Reaching the street, they pushed their way through a river of shoppers and gawkers until they came to the stream of people walking in the direction Sam realized that his brother planned to go.

  “Get this, Sam: Joonie-Ben’s mother was Arcadian and one of his fathers was a Xiicalli.”

  Sam wondered if he had heard correctly. “One of his fathers?”

  His brother didn’t seem troubled by the concept. “That’s how Arcadians do it.” He gave Sam’s shoulder a punch. “You’re the guy who’s gonna be a biologist—you tell me.”

  Sam glanced back at the Arcadian’s shop with a be-mused half-smile as, for a moment, it all came back to him: his fascination with the processes by which chemistry became biology. He could remember reading something years ago about tri-sexual species, but…

  Sam shook his head. Those details were lost in a mental fog, like so many other things from his childhood. “Haven’t got a clue,” he told his brother. For some reason, the loss bothered him.

  Kirk nodded, accepting as always. “Anyway, the guy’s an old boomer engineer. Got his start when his captain mothballed their freighter and let him sell it for parts. Been selling surplus ever since.”

  Sam looked at his brother, whose ingenuity never failed to surprise him. “How’d you meet up with someone like that?”

  “It’s a good shop. I got some of the parts for the override from him. And if I listen to a few of his stories, he gives me a good price, too.” Kirk pointed across the street to a small, arched gateway. “Down there.”

  Traffic was stopped dead, and Sam had no difficulty following his brother as they threaded through the stop-and-go landcars and flyers in wheel mode. The arched gateway led to another alley, though this one was lined on both sides with even smaller shops than Joonie-Ben’s.

  After a few more minutes, his brother pointed to a door between two fast-food extruder stands. Sam couldn’t see any sign on it, and its dingy yellow paint was chipped and fading. But Jimmy walked up to it and knocked. Then he motioned for Sam to stand beside him. “They have to scan us.”

  Sam was familiar with a lot of places down by the docks that let in patrons only after they had been scanned. Such places mostly served offworlders, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t fun to be had for locals. “Jimmy…what kind of place is this?”

  The door clicked open.

  “My kind of place,” his brother said, and led Sam in.

  Sam took a quick look around, winced at the smell of some acrid mixture of old oil, citrus solvent, and burning insulation. The long, narrow room was even more of a mess than Joonie-Ben’s shop. And this time, Sam didn’t recognize any of the parts and pieces that were stuffed into every available space—even bins hanging from the ceiling.

  “James T.!” an excited voice said loudly. It had to be loud to be heard over the unusual music that was playing. At least, Sam thought it was music. It might also have been a recording of cats yodeling, atonally and with no discernible rhythm.

  Sam watched an oddly thin alien in Earth jeans and a fresh white T-shirt step around a stack of what seemed to be empty computer cases. “Seemed to be,” because some of them had fur growing from their sides, and were breathing.

  “Torr!” Sam’s brother said in recognition.

  “It’s not Saturday,” the alien burbled. He sounded as if he was perpetually happy.

  Sam had seen several of Torr’s species in San Francisco before. Humanoid…segmented ridges framing his eyes and his high, lightly ridged forehead…Then the alien’s smile turned into something worthy of the Cheshire cat by stretching remarkably as if to bisect his entire head, and Sam had it. Denobulan.

  “Special project,” Kirk announced. He held up his hand to show Torr his tracking module.

  The Denobulan pursed his lips in admonishment. “A Starfleet 10-57 Mark B. Very sophisticated. James T., have you been naughty?”

  “I’m trying to be,” Sam heard his brother say. “That’s why I need to get this off.”

  Then Sam saw Torr look curiously at him. “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “It’s okay, this is Sam.”

  The Denobulan relaxed. “Ah, Kirk the elder. A pleasure to meet you after all your brother has told me.”

  “Yeah, same here,” Sam mumbled. He still couldn’t get over this new side of his brother he was seeing. Sure, New Union Square was where Jimmy spent most of his weekends, sometimes worked, but who knew how or why or that he hung out with so many aliens. And aliens liked him.

  Torr scratched at one of his extravagant peaked eyebrows, turned his attention back to Kirk. “I believe the law requires me to say that any attempt to block the signal of or to remove a certified law-enforcement tracking module is a violation of…I don’t know how many regulations.”

  “That’s pretty
much what Starfleet told me.”

  “Right. I’ve done my civic duty,” the Denobulan said happily. “What’s the plan?”

  “Earth’s not exactly like Denobula.”

  Torr laughed. “Tell me about it!”

  “Seriously, doing your civic duty isn’t enough to keep you out of trouble if they figure out you helped me.”

  The Denobulan looked hurt. “But I’ve never opened up a 10-57 Mark B before.”

  “But you know how to take one off, right?”

  “Taking it off is easy. Making Starfleet think that you haven’t, that’s hard.”

  “Not this time.”

  Sam watched as his brother held up the module again. “It has a subspace link to a second module—to let them know if the other guy and I try to meet.”

  The Denobulan brightened and gestured grandly to the back of the shop. “Use workshop number three. I’ll bring you my best cutter.”

  “Thanks, Torr. An hour should do it.”

  As his brother offered the Denobulan a credit wafer, Sam wished he had his brother’s easy confidence.

  But Torr waved the money aside. “No, no, no. This is too exciting. Let me look at the pieces?”

  “Just don’t keep ’em around too long,” Kirk warned. He motioned to Sam. “Let’s go.”

  Workshop three was basically a closet at the end of a creaking hallway, but it had a brightly lit workbench with immaculate tools for just about any kind of delicate transtator work. Sam spent most of the first hour watching in awe as his brother deftly assembled what appeared to be a fat cylinder of silver mesh which he lined with the innards of four old communicators connected by glowing optical circuits. A fifth communicator, bulkier than the others and which Sam recognized as a Starfleet model, was connected to the cylinder by a conductive ribbon. His brother placed that communicator to the side, and turned it on.

  When Kirk finally took a moment to lean back and stretch his arms, Sam had to ask: “Jimmy, I knew you were good at this kind of thing, but c’mon, you been going to night school or something?”

  Kirk slowly rocked his head back and forth, making his neck crack. “All the manuals are in the public computers. Especially the old stuff. I don’t know…once you figure out how the basic circuits work, everything else is just a combination of them. Put ’em all together the right way, and it makes sense, you know?”