by 03(lit)
"Now that," Spock said, "is a syllogism, and a sound one. Very well, Captain, I withdraw my objections."
When Kirk put down the communicator, he found Scott staring at him ruefully. "Your sense of humor," the engi-neer said ruefully, "comes out at the oddest times. Well, there is your detonator, Captain. When you pull the switch into the up position, it's armed. When you push it down into the other slot, you have thirty seconds until blooey!"
"Simple enough."
"Captain," Spock's voice came again. "The Constella-tion has just come within transporter range. However, when you are ready to have your party beam over, I sug-gest that you leave the bridge. We do not have fine enough control to pick four men out of five, and even if we did, we would not know which four of the five until it was too late."
"Very well, Mr. Spock. I will leave the bridge; make your pickup in sixty seconds."
He got up. As he was at the door, Scott said, "Take care, Jim."
"Scotty, I don't want to die, I assure you."
When he returned, the engineers' bridge was empty; but Scott's voice was still there. It was coming from the com-municator, and it was using some rather ungentlemanly language.
"Scotty, what's the matter? Are you all right?"
"Aye, I'm all right, skipper, and so are we all-but the transporter blew under the load. I dinna ken hae lang it'll take to fix it."
The return of Scott's brogue told Kirk how serious the situation actually was. Kirk did not even say, "Well, do your best." It was unnecessary.
The next few hours were an almost intolerable mixture of loneliness and tension, while the monstrous shape of the planet-killer and its mothlike captive grew slowly on the screen.
Yet not once in all this time did the robot again fire its anti-proton beam, which probably would have gone through the Enterprise like a knife through cheese; the ship was using almost all her power in fighting against the tractor ray. That, Kirk supposed, was a present given them by the nature of machine intelligence; the robot, having settled on the course of drawing the Enterprise into itself-and, probably, having estimated that in such a struggle it could not lose, eventually-saw no reason to take any other action.
"Mr. Spock?"
"Yes, Captain."
"Don't fire on that thing again. Don't do anything to alter present circumstances-not even sneeze."
"I follow you, Captain. If we do not change the parameters, the machine mindlessly maintains the equa-tion."
"Well, that's what I hope. How is the transporter com-ing?"
"Slowly. Mr. Scott says half its resistors are burned out. They are easy to replace individually, but so many is a time-consuming task."
"Computation?"
"We may have a most unreliable repair done when the Constellation is within a hundred miles of the robot. Sir, we also compute that one hundred miles is the limit of the robot's defensive envelope, inside which it takes offensive action against moving objects under power."
"Well, I can't very well shut off power. Let's just hope it's hungry."
The funnel swelled, much faster now. Kirk checked his watch, then poised his hand over the switch.
"Mr. Spock, I'm running out of time myself. Any luck now on the transporter?"
"It may work, Captain. I can predict no more."
"All right. Stand by."
The funnel now covered the entire star field; nothing else was to be seen but that metal throat. Still the robot had not fired.
"All right, Spock! Beam me aboard!"
He threw the switch. An instant later, the engineers' bridge of the doomed Constellation faded around him, and he found himself in the Transporter Room of the Enterprise. He raced to the nearest auxiliary viewscreen. Over the intercom, Spock's voice was counting: "Twenty-five seconds to detonation. Computer, mark at ten seconds and give us a fiftieth of a second warp drive at Warp One at second zero point five."
This order baffled Kirk for an instant; then he realized that he was still looking down the throat of the doomsday machine, and that Spock was hoping to make a short subspace jump away the instant the robot's tractor appara-tus was consumed-if it was.
"Fifteen seconds. Mark. Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One."
Flick!
Suddenly, on the auxiliary screen, the doomsday ma-chine was thousands of miles away. The screen zoomed up the magnification to restore the image.
As it did so, a spear of intolerable light grew out of the mouth of the funnel. Promptly, Kirk ran for the elevators and the control room.
A silent group was watching the main viewscreen, in-cluding Commodore Decker. The tongue of flame was still growing. It now looked to be at least two hundred miles long. It would have consumed the Enterprise like a midge.
Then, gradually, it faded. Spock checked his board.
"Did it work?" Kirk demanded.
"I cannot tell yet, Captain. The radiation from the blast itself is too intense. But the very fact that we broke away indicates at least some damage... Ah, the radiation is decaying. Now we shall see."
Kirk held his breath.
"Decay curve inflecting," Spock said. "The shape-yes, the curve is now exponential. All energy sources are deactivated. Captain, it is dead."
There was a pandemonium of cheering. Under cover of the noise, Decker moved over to Kirk.
"My last command," he said in a low voice. "But you were right, Captain Kirk. My apologies for usurping your command."
"You acted to save Federation lives and property, as I did. If you in turn are willing to drop your complaint against my overriding regulations-which you have every right to make-we'll say no more about it."
"Of course I'll drop it. But the Constellation is never-theless my last command. I cannot forget that my first attempt to attack that thing cost four hundred lives-men who trusted me-and that I had the bad judgment to try it again with your men's lives. When a man stops learning, he's no longer fit to command."
"That," Kirk said, "is a judgment upon yourself that only you can make. My opinion is that it is a wise and responsible judgment. But it is only an opinion. Mr. Sulu?"
"Sir?"
"Let's get the dancing in the streets over with, and lay a course for Star Base Seventeen."
"Yes, sir." But the helmsman could not quite stop grinning. Spock, of course, never grinned, but he was look-ing, if possible, even more serious than usual.
"Mr. Spock, you strike me as a man who still has some reservations."
"Only one, Captain; and it is pure speculation."
"Nevertheless, let's hear it."
"Well, Captain, when two powers prepare forces of such magnitude against each other, it almost always means that they are at a state of technological parity; otherwise they would not take such risks of self-destruction."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning, sir, that the existence of one such doomsday machine implies the existence of another."
"I suppose that's possible," Kirk said slowly, repressing a shudder. "Though the second one may not have been launched in time. Well, Mr. Spock, supposing we were to hear of another? What would you do?"
Spock's eyebrows went up. "That is no problem, sir. I would feed it a fusion bomb disguised as a ship, or better still, an asteroid; that is not what concerned me. The danger, as such, can now be regarded as minimal, even if there is another such machine."
"Then if you weren't thinking of the danger, what were you thinking of?"
"Of the nuisance," Spock said. "Having to deal with the same problem twice is untidy; it wastes time."
Kirk thought back to those hours aboard the haunted hulk of the Constellation-and of the four hundred dead men on the devoured planet.
"I," he said, "prefer my problems tidy. It saves lives."
ASSIGNMENT: EARTH
(Gene Roddenberry and Art Wallace)
Kirk viewed the conversion-however temporary and par-tial-of the Enterprise into a time machine with consider-able misgivings. He had to recognize, of course, that an occasional ass
ignment of this kind had become inevitable, the moment the laboratory types had had a chance to investigate the reports of the time-travel he, Spock and McCoy had been subjected to from the City on the edge of Forever, and the time-warp the whole ship had run into when it had hit the black star.
But these two experiences had only made him more acutely aware of the special danger of time-travel: the danger that the tiniest of false moves could change the fu-ture-or what was for Kirk the present-and in the process wipe out Kirk, the Enterprise, the Federation itself. Hovering in orbit above the Earth of 1969, even in hiding behind deflector screens, was a hair-trigger situa-tion.
For that matter, that was why they were here, for 1969 had been a hair-trigger year. In Kirk's time, nobody really understood how the Earth had survived it. In the terrible scramble with which the year had ended, crucial documents had been lost; still others, it was strongly sus-pected, had been falsified. And it was not just the histori-ans, but the Federation itself, that wanted to know the answers. They were possibly of military as well as political interest, and in a galaxy that contained the Klingon Empire as well as the Federation, they might be a good deal more than interesting.
Which explained the vast expense of sending a whole starship back in time to monitor Earth communications. Nevertheless...
His musings were interrupted by a faint but unmistaka-ble shuddering of the deck of the bridge beneath his feet. What on Earth...
"Alert status," he snapped. "Force shields maximum. Begin sensor scan. Any station with information, report."
Immediately the telltale light for the Transporter Room went on and Kirk flipped the intercom switch.
"Spock here, Captain. We are having transporter trou-ble; Mr. Scott just called me down to help."
"You shouldn't be using the transporter at all!"
"Nobody was, Captain. It went on by itself and we find we cannot shut it off. We seem accidentally to have inter-cepted someone else's transporter beam-and one a great deal more powerful than ours."
"Mr. Spock, you know as well as I do that the twentieth century had no such device-" Again he was interrupted by the faint shudder. Spock's voice came back urgently:
"Nevertheless, Captain, someone-or something-is beaming aboard this vessel."
"I'll be right down."
In the Transporter Room, Kirk found the situation as reported. All circuits were locked open; nothing Spock or Scott could do would close them. The familiar shimmering effect was already beginning in the transporter chamber.
"For all its power," Spock said, "that beam is originat-ing at least a thousand light years away."
"Which," Scott added, "is a good deal farther than any transporter beam of our own century could reach."
The ship shuddered again, more strongly than before. "Stop fighting it," Kirk said quietly. "Set up our own field for it and let it through. Obviously we'll have serious damage otherwise."
"Aye, sir," Scott said. He worked quickly.
The shimmering grew swiftly in brightness. A haze form appeared in it, and gradually took on solidity. Kirk stared, his jaw dropped.
The figure they had pulled in. from incredibly deep space was that of a man impeccably dressed in a twentieth-century business suit. Nor was this all: in his arms he carried a sleek black cat, wearing a necklace collar of glittering white stones.
"Security detail," Kirk said. "On the double."
The stranger seemed as startled as Kirk was. He looked about the Transporter Room in baffled anger, rubbing the huge cat soothingly. The exotic element in no way detract-ed from his obvious personal force; he was tall, rugged, vital.
"Why have you intercepted me?" he said at once. "Please identify yourselves."
"You're aboard the United Spaceship Enterprise. I am Captain James Kirk, commanding."
The black cat made a strange sound, rather like one of the many odd noises a Siamese cat can make, and yet somehow also not catlike at all.
"I hear it, Isis," the stranger said. "A space vessel. But from what planet?"
"Earth."
"Impossible! At the present time Earth has no-" his voice trailed off as he became aware of Spock. Then, "Humans with a Vulcan! No wonder! You're from the future!"
He dropped the cat and reached for the control panel in the transporter chamber. "You must beam me down onto Earth immediately. There's not a moment to..."
The doors to the Transporter Room snapped open, ad-mitting the ship's security chief and a guard, phasers drawn. At the sight of the weapons the strange man froze. The cat crouched as if for a spring, but the man said instantly, "Careful, Isis. Please listen to me carefully, all of you. My name is Gary Seven. I am a human being of the Twentieth Century. I have been living on another planet, far more advanced than the Earth is. I was beam-ing from there when you intercepted me."
"Where is the planet?" Kirk said.
"They wish their existence kept secret. In fact, it will remain unknown even in your time."
"It's impossible to hide a whole planet," Scott said.
"Impossible to you; not to them. Captain Kirk, I am of this time period. You are not. Interfere with me, and with what I must do down there, and you will change history. I am sure you have been thoroughly briefed on the conse-quence of that."
"I have," Kirk said. "On the other hand, I know noth-ing about you-even about the truth of anything you've told me."
"We don't have time for that. Every second you delay me is dangerous-this is the most critical year in Earth's history. My planet wants to ensure that Earth survives- an aim which should be of no small interest to you."
Kirk shook his head. "The fact that you know the criti-cality of the year strongly suggests that you're from the future yourself. It's a risk I can't take until I have more information. I'm afraid I'm going to have to put you in security confinement for the time being."
"You'll regret it."
"Very possibly. Nevertheless, it's what I must do." He gestured to the security chief. The guard bent to pick up the cat, but Gary Seven stepped in his way.
"If you handle Isis," he said, "you will regret that even more." He scooped up the cat himself and went out with the security detail.
"I want a special eye kept on that man," Kirk said. "He went along far too docilely. Also, Mr. Spock, ask Dr. McCoy for a fast medical analysis of the prisoner. What I want to know is, is he human? And have the cat checked, too. It may tell us something further about Mr. Seven."
"It seems remarkably intelligent," Spock commented. "As well as strikingly beautiful. All the same, a strange companion to be carrying across a thousand light years on what is supposed to be an urgent mission."
"Exactly. Scotty, could that beam of his have carried him through time as well as space?"
"The theory has always indicated that it's possible," Scott said, "but we've never been able to manage it. On the other hand, we've never been able to put that much power into a transporter beam."
"In short, you don't know."
"That's right, sir."
"Very well. See if you can put the machinery back in order. Mr. Spock, please give the necessary orders and then join me on the bridge. We are going to need lots of computation."
The computer said: "Present Earth crises fill an entire tape bank, Captain Kirk. The being Gary Seven could be intervening for or against Earth in areas of overpopula-tion, bush wars, revolutions, critically dangerous bacteriological experiments, various emergent hate movements, rising air and water pollution..."
"All right, stop," Kirk said. "What specific events are going on today?"
"Excuse me, Captain," Spock said, "but that question will simply open another floodgate. There were half a hundred critical things going on almost every day during 1969. Library, give us the three most heavily weighted of today's events in the danger file."
"There will be an important assassination today," the computer said promptly in its pleasant feminine voice. "An equally dangerous government coup in Asia Minor; and the launching of a
n orbital nuclear warhead platform by the United States countering a similar launch by a consortium of other powers."
Kirk whistled. "Orbital nuclear devices were one of the greatest worries of this era, as I recall."
"They were," Spock agreed. "Once the sky was full of orbiting H-bombs, the slightest miscalculation could have brought one of them accidentally down and set off a holocaust."
"Sick bay to bridge," the intercom interrupted.
"Kirk here. What is it, Bones?"
"Jim, there isn't any prisoner in the brig. All I found there were the security chief and one guard, both of them acting as if they'd been hypnotized."